Vladimir Bukovsky: Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity. Alyona Kojevnikov translation. Middletown: Ninth of November Press, 2019 (1996).
Among the courageous dissidents who opposed the Soviet regime, the late Vladimir Bukovsky will remain among the most honorable. ‘Hospitalized’ by the Communists in the early 1960s (he had photocopied Milovan Djilas’ The New Class, a telltale act of insanity in the eyes of the comrades), he eventually earned a degree in neuropsychology in England, where he resided after his expulsion from his homeland in 1976. He was best known in the West for his campaign against the Soviet abuse of psychiatry for political purposes.
Bukovsky published the first edition of Judgment in Moscow in France in 1995; a Russian edition appeared the next year. He intended to expose the character of the Soviet regime and the geopolitical strategy which derived from that character by presenting and commenting on a substantial selection of the Kremlin documents he’d copied during the brief period when the regime’s archives were open to the public, beginning in 1991. These documents not only show the malice, duplicity, and self-delusion of Lenin’s heirs; they also show how Western politicians, journalists, and businessmen blundered repeatedly in formulating their own policies, primarily because they failed to understand the persistently Leninist mindset of their counterparts. That failure explains the long delay in publishing the English translation—its uncompromising denunciation of Mikhail Gorbachev being among its many offenses to genteel progressives in the United States and England. Revising it for this long-delayed edition, Bukovsky reports that he made no significant revisions. “Alas, my worst forecasts have come true: failure to finish off the Soviet system conclusively has led to its revival. Clearly Putin and his KGB cohorts would have never climbed to power if Russian society had the courage to launch what we advocated twenty-three years ago: a Nuremberg-style trial and lustrations. Without it, the country went full circle and reverted back to the USSR.”
“To bring to justice those who took part in Nazi atrocities is a sacred task, the duty of one and all. But God forbid that you should so much as point a finger at a communist (let alone his fellow traveler): that is improper, a witch hunt.” And yet the Soviet Union’s crimes were no less heinous than those of Nazi Germany; the Soviets murdered many more people than the Nazis did, admittedly with a much larger population under its tyranny. Why the double standard? On a less bloody but equally insidious matter, the roil over Russian interference, real and alleged, in the 2016 U.S. elections met with cries of outrage among progressives, the same progressives who were so conspicuously silent when Moscow funneled tens of millions of dollars to Communist parties not only in the United States but around the world. Nor was there much clamor on the American Left concerning the some 40,000 paid ‘agents of influence’ the Soviets bankrolled in their countries, perhaps because so many of these were, well, American leftists, organizers of ‘peace’ movements here and in Europe. In those days, merely to mention their existence was to invite charges of ‘McCarthyism.’
Bukovsky divides his book into two main parts: “In the East” and “In the West.” He begins his account of the Soviet empire with its end, “the euphoria of 1991,” when Boris Yeltsin began his presidential term as the first post-Soviet Russian president. “A shoddy tragicomedy” ensued, “in which former second-rate party bosses and KGB generals played the part of leading democrats and saviors of the country from communism.” Having returned to Moscow for research into the Soviet archives, Bukovsky saw that “the main thing was not to allow the party a respite for recovery. It is imperative, I said again and again, to create a commission to investigate all the crimes of communism, preferably an international commission, so there could be no accusations of political bias and cover-ups.” Russians had been told “that even though the communists were guilty of crimes against their own people, of repressions and destruction of the economy, in external matters they were just like everyone else, neither better nor worse.” This was “a dangerous delusion,” in light of the activities revealed in the files Bukovsky recovered. “The Soviet Union had no ‘normal’ foreign policy, and what it called foreign policy was nothing less than decades of criminal activity against humanity,” including narcotics trafficking, bribery, blackmail, and disinformation. The KGB itself was a powerful political organization, with substantial funds in foreign banks, front organizations, and businesses abroad—resources that will enable it continue “for at least another decade even if it is closed down in Moscow.”
This being so, the KGB archives were soon closed to the likes of Bukovsky. Only Yeltsin could have intervened effectively, but Yeltsin proved a caricature of a Russian, sunk in alcoholic distraction. He was not alone. “Nobody in our immense country, devastated by [the Cold War] was moved by a sense of duty—to history, to truth, to the memory of [the regime’s] victims.” This was the ethos of the regime, lingering in the years after its formal removal. “Born in falsehood, raised on deceit, Soviet man is firmly convinced that the world is created on the principle of a matrioshka doll: what is on the outside is just an illusion for fools, whereas what is inside, real, is completely different…. Therefore, even before you’ve opened your mouth, he is firmly convinced that you intend to cheat him, while his aim is to cheat you. What kind of a basis is this for any business?” Or any civil society at all? By 1993 the Central Committee of the Communist Party archives were shut, too, and Bukovsky had obtained all the information about the inner workings of the Soviet Union that he, or anyone else, would ever uncover for the next 25 years and counting.
The fall of the Communist regime had been predicted, first by Andrei Amalrik (Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?), by Solzhenitsyn (The Oak and the Calf), and by Bukovsky himself (To Build a Castle). Bukovsky expected it to survive about a decade longer than it did, but it would not have lasted even as long as Amalrik supposed, had the West “accepted our advice” in the 1970s “and taken the path of sharpening relations” with the regime instead of embarking on the policy of ‘détente.’ But to expect a revolution by the Russians themselves, absent outside pressure, was a chimerical hope. Bukovsky’s pessimism was well stated in a 1979 article, when he observed that “a person deprived of liberty knows nothing of his rights, and is, in any case, too debased to demand any rights at all,” living as he does among “a mass of disunited, embittered people.” The regime fell not because Soviet Man’s dead soul had revived but because the regime’s sclerosis and the West’s belated exertions of pressure beginning in the early 1980s, made it unsustainable.
In response to that pressure the regime elevated Gorbachev to his position of undeserved prominence. His reforms—glasnost or a cautious ‘opening’ of Soviet society to the West and perestroika or a cosmetic restructuring of Soviet ruling institutions—should have been instantly recognized by anyone with even passing acquaintance with the history of the regime as a replay of the policy Lenin concocted in the 1920s. Faced with the predictable ruin of the Russian economy under Marxist policy, Lenin imposed his ‘New Economic Policy,’ whereby he lured capitalist investment with token gestures toward capitalism. As soon as there was so much as a suggestion that the policy might spin out of Communist control, Stalin shut it down, with a vengeance. “Gorbachev’s ‘reforms’ were aimed at preventing, at all costs, the formation of those independent social forces that could ensure stability in the transitional period.” As Gorbachev himself explained in a March 1985 speech to his Kremlin colleagues, “our economy needs more dynamism,” and it can achieve it if we follow “the right, correct and genuine Leninist policy.” “Legalizing private property was never contemplated”; “Gorbachev’s favorite slogan, right up to his resignation was ‘give socialism a second wind.'” The problem, from the standpoint of the regime, was that it had no available Stalin to reverse course in time to prevent its collapse. The problem from the standpoint of Russia, however, was that the liberties Gorbachev permitted “had been gifted,” not won by the Russian people themselves. “What has been gifted and not earned makes it akin to something stolen: it can be taken back, accompanied by a slap on the head.” The Western fans of ‘Gorby’ at least had the excuse of having “never lived under this regime,” but that lack of experience, Bukovsky notices, hadn’t stopped the West from changing the regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan after the Second World War. Gorbachev’s shallow cunning, Russian inertia and Western ignorance caused the dissident movement itself to split, as the celebrated dissident Andrei Sakharov accepted the president’s invitation to share a podium with him in spring 1989.
At its height, under Stalin, the Soviet Union was “a conveyor belt of death, working nonstop and according to plan, just like Soviet industry in its entirety.” Death quotas were imposed as readily as work quotas, although the death quotas were more likely to be met. As Stalin followed Lenin, Khrushchev Stalin, Brezhnev Khrushchev, Andropov Brezhnev, and finally Gorbachev Andropov, the Western intelligentsia lauded each in turn as a liberalizer. Repeated disappointment never bridled their wishful thinking. Soviet rulers themselves indulged in the supreme form of wishful thinking, Marxism-Leninism, which called for heroism at one moment and humble obedience to regime commands the next. On occasion, reality broke through, as in the CCCP’s frightened response to the anti-communist Hungarian revolution in 1956: “the wave of uprisings in Eastern Europe, and especially the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, was definitely connected” with the “spirit of rebellion” which “wartime heroism” of the 1940s had stoked. This “electrified the atmosphere in the Soviet Union itself,” a Politburo-commissioned study explained. From then forward, Soviet leaders—”all of them from Khrushchev to Gorbachev”—”strove only to smother this spark of hope, justifiably seeing it as a threat to their power.” Even Khrushchev was too liberal for his successors. As veteran Bolshevik Andrei Gromyko put it in a 1984 meeting of the Politburo, Khrushchev “inflicted an irreparable blow on the positive image of the Soviet Union” when he ventured to criticize Stalin in a well-publicized “Secret Speech” before a Party Congress in 1956. The spirit of dissidence continued within the country, as well; “by the 1970s the regime had practically lost the young people, and our influence on them grew by leaps and bounds.”
From the start, the Soviet regime suffered from a fatal contradiction. Like all regimes, it needed a set of laws. To be effective, laws must be definable and stable. But the animating principle, dialectical materialism, posited endless conflict and change until ‘the end of history.’ That is, it enshrines contradiction as the engine of ‘history.’ The supposed ‘iron laws of history’ were made of anything but iron; they demanded infinite flexibility and defied codification. Under the Marxist ideology, rulers needed to rule not by law but “behind its back, as it were.” “The law transforms into a fiction, an offshoot of propaganda calculated to create an attractive image of ‘the world’s most democratic’ socialist state.” “The country was governed” not be law but “in accordance with an endless stream of departmental, state, and party instructions and resolutions,” a bubbling hash of incompatible ingredients. At times the discrepancy between the laws ‘on the books’ and regime policy could be worked by the dissidents to their advantage, as they could cite the law against the policy and demand exoneration in court. They seldom got it, but they did illustrate the illegitimacy of the regime to their fellow subjects and to the outside world—a counter-toxin to regime propaganda. Dissidents first deployed this tactic during the 1965 trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, when they demanded that their banned books be introduced as evidence in court, thus violating the ban.
Eventually, as in the celebrated case of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Politburo threw up its hands and expelled the malefactor. As Aleksei Kosygin exclaimed at one meeting, “For some years Solzhenitsyn has been attempting to take over people’s minds.” One may be excused for thinking that Comrade Kosygin somewhat lacking in a sense of irony, but this is why a handful of dissidents worried the rulers so much. “The system could survive only on the condition of the monopolistic rule of the party and the ideology over the country—above the law, logic, and common sense. The appearance of an opposition, no matter how insignificant in numbers, even one person, heralded its end.” And when dissidents were able to persuade the United States and other foreign governments to criticize violations of human rights within the Soviet empire—in accordance with a treaty the Soviets themselves had signed—the cracks in the monolith began to widen.
Himself expelled, Bukovsky met with U.S. president Jimmy Carter in February 1977 to discuss human rights. Or, as the Soviet Union reported in its inimitable prose, “Today, President of the USA J. Carter received criminal Bukovsky… who is well known as an active opponent of the development of Soviet-American relations.” International criticisms of human rights abuses violated the principles of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which call for non-interference in the domestic affairs of any country by any foreign power. The invocation of a treaty signed some three centuries earlier by the crowned heads of then-Christian Europe by Kremlin Leninists recalls Marx’s mot about how ‘history’ repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Détente must be saved! At least, it must be saved so long as (in the words of one set of instructions distributed to Party members) the Communists’ “ideological struggle, a struggle for social and political perceptions of the world… does not cease even in a period of international détente.” Ideological struggle is one thing, but “ideological sabotage” by foreigners who support “illicit organizations” in the Soviet empire—well, we can’t have that.
Besides, critics of Marxism-Leninism, the world’s one and only scientific socialism, must be irrational, indeed mad. “The number of those declared insane in our cases… increased significantly”; diagnoses such as ‘reformist delusion’ and ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ were invented for the occasion. “We were earmarked for psychiatric repression,” and although the outcry against such practices in the West delayed full implementation of the program to build “a psychiatric gulag,” it didn’t prevent such a thing. In the Soviet Union, “The misuse of psychiatry as an instrument in political repressions was the outstanding crime against humanity in the postwar epoch.”
Did Politburo members believe their own ideology? Bukovsky isn’t sure. While “it is undeniable that Khrushchev had a somewhat naive, genuine peasant’s belief in socialism,” what did his successors think of it? They were rather persons steeped in Marxism-Leninism, not so much followers of its “the philosophical tenets” as psychological mirrors of those tenets. In a witty reversal of Soviet psychiatry, Bukovsky suggests that “Communist ideology is definitely deeply paranoid,” attributing conspiracy to all who disagree with it. “As is habitual for dim-witted people who know little about life in the West,” Soviet communists “ascribed their own methods, intentions, and morality to their opponents, responding to imaginary ‘schemes’ with real ones, and with slander against ‘slander. Like a boxer sparring with his own shadow, they could never win.”
Because the regime’s subjects were familiar with Soviet lies, “Soviet propaganda and disinformation were much more effective in the West than in the USSR.” Typically, this propaganda would appeal to the decent impulse among Christians (and especially ‘christians’ or secularized post-Christians) to blame themselves before blaming others for the evils of the world. Worried about nuclear war, injustice, poverty, environmental destruction? Look to yourself, sinner, Soviet atheists would proclaim. More, “most Western specialists on Russia,” to whom the average citizen looked for policy guidance, “were dependent on the regime by virtue of the fact that they needed to travel to the USSR from time to time”; passports were easily denied to those who spoke out in ways the regime disapproved of. Similar techniques could be used against exiled dissidents. Bukovsky recounts Sinyavsky’s “complicated games with the KGB”; his wife engaged in the “endless squabbles” among the émigrés, taking the line that dissidents should shut up.
The supreme exploitation of Western naiveté came near the end of the regime, when Gorbachev sold ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ not only to “the Soviet intelligentsia, which was always up for grabs,” but to “the whole world.” Anyone who took a realistic look at the Soviet regime knew “it was impossible for a liberal reformer to climb to the top of the party ladder. Such miracles do not occur. But everyone yearned for a miracle!” No need for a Hitlerite triumph of the will when you can enjoy a Gorbastic triumph of the wish. Again parodying the pseudo-psychiatric language of his persecutors, Bukovsky calls this “a kind of mass psychosis.” It was at least a foolish illusion. While “the regime still continued to kill people, suppress the opposition, harass prisoners with impunity,” the world “worried that this might harm the main hangman.”
“These were the hardest, bitterest years of my life,” made worse by the sometimes well-intentioned liberal democrats among whom Bukovsky lived in his time of exile. He turns to the West in the second half of his book.
As a critic of détente and an arms-control skeptic, Bukovsky rapidly found himself labeled a ‘right-winger’. And indeed, “I reject ‘moderate’ improvements of the communist system; I do not even want socialism with a human face!” And as for nuclear weapons, he tried “to explain as politely as possible that the Soviet games of ‘arms limitation’ was not worth a brass farthing, it was deceit from start to finish.” No grant money from the Ford Foundation was forthcoming. But “imagine for a moment Nelson Mandela, released as the result of a lengthy public campaign, facing this question at his first press conference: ‘How do you feel about apartheid with a human face?'” “Yet what was apartheid by comparison with communism”—apartheid, which “pos[ed] no threat to anyone outside South Africa,” did “not try to impose on anyone its version of a bright future for all of humanity,” and (it might be added) hadn’t murdered tens of millions of people. The Soviet regime did resemble South Africa’s regime in one way, however: like the rulers of the apartheid system, it exploited those it didn’t kill.
The West’s treatment of Soviet dissidents registered its generally shallow knowledge of Soviet tyranny and the ideology that inspired it. The Soviet regime was qualitatively different from the czarism it replaced, latter-day czarism having been an increasingly sclerotic ‘Holy-Alliance’ sort of thing—oppressive and incompetent, to be sure, subject to the character of whomever sat on the imperial throne, as all hereditary monarchies are. Marxism-Leninism, however, held charms for leftist ideologues in the West, especially the social democrats who honored many of its claims. Sure enough, German social democrats had been conducting negotiations with Moscow “behind the backs of their allies” in NATO since 1969. “The German social democrats knew full well that the USSR had no intention of fulfilling its obligations regarding human right, and they were not inclined to protest against this,” and in the 1980s they marched in the vanguard of the mass disarmament campaigns that nearly neutralized the Western alliance. “Not even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan [in 1979], which exercised a sobering effect on Western public opinion, had much influence on the policy of the German social democrats,” whose “main aim remained saving détente,” imagining it to be the bridge toward the ‘convergence’ of democracy and communism in the persons of persons such as themselves. “Yet as we know from the history of their relations, the Mensheviks propose, and the Bolsheviks dispose.”
This gave Moscow an opening. The Kremlin “quickly turned human rights into an instrument for subverting European socialists, by selective rewards only for those who had moved closer to ‘rapprochement’ with them.” The only ‘progressive’ thing about that was the progressive infiltration of the European socialist parties by the KGB. By the end of the 1970s, European socialists quietly discarded their demand for human rights. “From now on, détente had only one meaning—disarmament.”
All this notwithstanding, Bukovsky reserves some of his most stinging criticisms for the United States and the American people. “I did not like America from the very first moment I found myself there. It was enough for me to see, at one of my first appearances in one of the universities in February 1977, all those eternally shining eyes, burning with enthusiasm, to realize that I would never be able to explain anything to these people.” Feeling “overqualified to live there,” Bukovsky likens the country to “an institution for mentally retarded adolescents,” a people “engaged in what their Declaration of Independence defines with the quaint expression the ‘pursuit of happiness,'” a people that never lives in the same place long enough to acquire a real culture, “moving forward in a state of permanent amnesia” in “a land of conformists, ruled by constantly arising epidemics of a feverish nature; all of a sudden, everyone starts jogging, because it is allegedly good for one’s health.” “It is hard to imagine a nation more enslaved by any craze, even the most idiotic ones, by any petty charlatans who thought it up”—”enslaved by the pursuit of happiness” in the alleged ‘land of the free,’ misinformed by a mass media that “creat[es] celebrities, blowing them up from nothing, and then just as artificially bringing them down by trumpeting a scandal—again out of nothing.” “At times it seems that Americans, unable to bear the burden of freedom, simply seek someone to enslave them.” In sum, Bukovsky is very much a European despiser of America and all he believes it embodies.
As for the American ‘intellectual’ class, it’s no better than its European counterpart, puffed up with “overweening narcissism, belief in their ‘enlightening’ mission, and the right to a privileged elite position,” albeit in the shaky ground of leftist egalitarianism. The only redeeming feature of such over-educated mindlessness is its feebleness. Communist ideology won’t “be able to conquer the USA—simply because this ideology is too complex, too conceptual, and presumes at least some knowledge of history.” (More recently, American intellectuals have overcome that problem by offering a cartoon version of American history, obviating the need for knowledge of it.) “The American elite still believes the myth of the ‘noble savage,’ the innate good nature of Man, ruined by bad institutions.” Knowing no history, they are oblivious to the failure of socialist ideas, continuing to entertain them long after they had led the nations on whom they were imposed to ruin. Hence the folly of American scientists in the 1940s who “willingly shared atomic secrets with Stalin”; hence “the ease with which Soviet intelligence was able to operate in American leftist circles.” It was “the bogey of McCarthyism, shamelessly exploited by American leftist intellectuals for a good fifty years,” that enabled them to become the establishment by making anticommunism “shameful and practically criminal.”
“Naturally, all this did not occur without Soviet help and would not have escaped their attention.” When Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev announced at the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in 1971 that “the balance of forces on the world arena has shifted to the side of socialism,” he could point toward what seemed to him the likelihood that the United States, riven by domestic conflict over the Vietnam War, student unrest, and race relations, would eventually be induced to leave Europe to Soviet domination. With access to European industry in hand, the Soviet Union would have the fulcrum with which to tip the geopolitical scales in its favor, once and for all. “The fall of the prestige of the political system of the USA,” as one Central Committee document put it in 1973, coupled with “the growing interest of capitalist business circles in establishing trade and economic relations with the Soviet Union,” would do America in, and with it the ‘bourgeois democratic’ regimes it supported. At the same time, “stringent measures were in force to prevent any Western influence on the Soviet population.” In short, Soviet policy of the 1970s presaged Chinese Communist policy in the following century, with the necessary difference that the Soviet strategy was Eurocentric at its core, Chinese policy centered on Asia.
U.S. president Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sensed America’s weakness but increased it by embracing détente, which they made the centerpiece of their policy toward the Soviet Union. Nixon later claimed that Americans had misunderstood the policy, taking it for the alternative to the Cold War, “but it was precisely Nixon and Kissinger who created that misunderstanding.” After leaving office, Nixon wrote, “Political differences, not arms, are the root causes of war, and until these are resolved, there will be enough arms for the most devastating war no matter how many arms control agreements are reached.” Bukovsky adds, “the main ‘political difference’ in this case is Marxist-Leninist ideology,” which Soviet rulers had “no intention of abandoning… in exchange for any benefits.” “America tried to buy off the Soviet aggressor,” but the Soviets were not so bourgeois. During the decade of détente, the Soviets gained an advantage in strategic nuclear weapons and aided the extension of Communist rule more than a dozen countries. “But the worst result of détente was the loss of the will to resist that afflicted the West.” As the Central Committee documents show, “the Kremlin leaders were sure that time was on their side.”
Their weakness was their Marxism, which dismissed public opinion as epiphenomenal. The human rights campaign dissidents spearheaded began to win converts. “The French leftist intelligentsia proved to be our closest ally,” having read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. In Italy, too, it was the Left that sided with the dissidents. In England and Germany, by contrast, the Right backed them, and in the United States an unusual combination of trade-union-oriented liberal democrats (most prominently Senator Henry Jackson) and reliably anti-communist conservatives (most prominently former California governor and 1976 presidential candidate Ronald Reagan) rejected détente and vindicated human rights against Marxist dialectic. None of this would have mattered politically except for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of the decade. This demonstrated that the appeasers were mistaken, that the dissidents had been right all along. Even President Carter, never a geopolitical wizard, admitted that he had “learned much more about the Soviet Union” in December 1979 than he had “over his entire life.” The path to Reagan’s election to the presidency was cleared, widened already by the economic stagnation and monetary inflation which had persisted throughout the decade. Impeded in their pursuit of happiness, disillusioned by their representatives’ assurances of peace through accommodation, Americans stood up—quite unaccountably, given Bukovksy’s acerbic description of them. It would be the English and German Left which would continue to agitate for arms control in the 1980s, although they eventually failed to make their case. It became obvious to less ideologically-charged elements in Europe that nuclear disarmament would result in Soviet domination of the continent, given the vast superiority of ‘conventional’ Soviet forces there.
“One should follow this simple rule: never be useful to the USSR or its policies.” But simplicity is never good enough for many people—”the intelligentsia in particular,” who “are extremely arrogant, egotistic animals, considering themselves smarter than anyone else in the world, and certainly smarter than their governments.” “A member of the intelligentsia cannot simply force himself to do his job without contrivances and pretensions. He cannot just teach children to read and write—not, he has to ‘raise future generations’; he cannot just prescribe pills for a patient and ease his suffering—no, he needs to concern himself with the health of all mankind. A priest, meanwhile, is convinced that God Himself has put him in the pulpit for the salvation of one and all.” None will admit “that the basic motive of his boisterous social activity is a desire for power.”
This being said, one can only feel gratitude for the proverbial stupidity of the Poles. They proved much too ‘simplistic’ to believe in the good faith of Russian Communists or their puppets in Warsaw. “The biggest setback to the peacemakers’ campaign was the events in Poland”—the government’s ham-handed declaration of martial law in response to protests launched by, well, the proletarians, men and women evidently too stupid to understand that the Polish Communists were their wise and just defenders. How inconvenient for social democrats in other parts of the continent, as they insisted that the imagined prospect of nuclear war was a bigger crisis than the reality of tyranny. “It is hard to say which aspect of the Polish crisis had the greatest effect on the peacemakers: the threat of a Soviet invasion, which hung over Poland for almost a year and a half, the crushing of a popular movement by the army, or that movement itself, which extended to practically the entire working population of the country.” As for Kremlin strategists, “even years later, Moscow could not understand the nationwide nature of the opposition movement” in Poland. In terms of the iron laws of Marxist history, it simply made no sense. Martial law restored ‘socialist order’ in Poland, without the need for Soviet military assistance, but that only drove the opposition movement underground while preventing the West from returning to the complaisant somnolence of its preferred attitude of wishful thinking.
“By 1984 even the most thick-skinned member of the Politburo realized that the situation was hopeless,” as the Party faced strengthened resistance in the United States and Europe, along with worsening economic problems at home, problems exacerbated by corruption of “epic proportions.” Whereas most revolutions in modern, centralized states result from the formation of alternative groups within civil society, what Tocqueville calls civic associations, Russian opposition to the central state came from uncivil associations—mafia-like local chieftains who ran local commerce beyond the reach of a fragmented bureaucracy of Party apparatchiks. “This explains why in 1992 all the break-away ‘independent’ republics ended up under the rule of the local party nomenklatura.” They had already set up their own networks of influence, years earlier. The Soviet state found it “easier… to occupy a neighboring country, suppress a full-fledged national rebellion in another, or, on the contrary, incite a revolution on the other side of the globe than to supply its own people with salt.” The stated objective of the socialist state for Marxists was to guide the way to communism by rearranging social and economic institutions so radically that the inequalities of society would not merely be erased but become permanently unthinkable by transformed human beings. Quite the contrary: actual socialist rule resulted in new forms of inequality, ineradicable ‘from above’ or ‘from below.’
“The Western leftist intellectual ‘elite’ did not want to accept that the crisis of the Soviet system in the 1980s was first of all a crisis of socialism.” They dismissed the Soviet ‘experiment’ as one based on a faulty ‘model’ of socialism. “But there are no ‘models’ of socialism, there are only various scenarios for the failure of the economy,” given socialism’s core aim of redistributing wealth instead of producing it. In Russia, the regime “lasted so long simply because Russia is a fabulously rich country,” with huge mineral resources. “The laziest ruler could rule over it without a care in the world and with no crises,” as indeed many of the czars did; “it required an ‘idea’ to bring about an economic collapse,” and the Marxists provided a very effective one. Socialism “did not so much drain as bankrupt the country, causing an incredible delay in development,” whereby Russians couldn’t exploit their “own natural resources effectively.” Costly imperial ambitions only added to the self-imposed burdens. The Reagan Administration’s arms buildup triggered collapse, a collapse hastened when the U.S. struck a deal with the Saudis to reduce the price of oil, thereby reducing one of oil-rich Russia’s few reliable sources of revenue. “The Soviet Union lost more than a third of its hard currency income in one year.”
With the peaceful anti-communist revolution in Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1980s, “the mighty Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe fell apart.” Bukovsky suspects that the revolution itself was surreptitiously backed by Moscow, which didn’t want to repeat the Polish debacle of a few years earlier. “According to the Gorbachev plan, the ‘popular revolution’ should have brought a new generation of manipulators to power in Eastern Europe, just like themselves.” But Gorbachev botched the job. Instead of some fake democrats, he got Vaclav Havel. Since no one saw Gorbachev’s fingerprints on the original scheme, Gorbachev went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize as a genial liberalizer. The same blundering led to reunification of Germany, again not on the Kremlin’s terms, and not on the terms of Western elites (including Kissinger, British Prime Minister John Major, and French president François Mitterrand), but according to the timetable of the simple-minded German common folk (acting rather like Poles) who wanted to get their country back in one piece. Across Central Europe, “what was planned as quite moderate, inter-system changes got out of control and grew into a revolution, exposing the fundamental and incompatible difference between the intentions of the leaders and the hopes of the people.”
Back in Russia, Gorbachev intended to ‘liberalize’ or ‘restructure’ the political system under the slogan of ‘socialist pluralism,’ whereby the KGB would infiltrate newly-allowed independent parties. “By that time most party leaders were mainly occupied by the problem of personal survival,” to be accomplished by pocketing Communist Party funds for themselves and transferring them to foreign bank accounts. When things began to spin out of control in Eastern Europe, as they had done in Central Europe, Gorbachev didn’t hesitate to send in the troops, which performed “mass killings” in Tbilisi (1989), Baku (1990), Vilnius (1991), as the Chinese comrades did at Tiananmen Square in 1989. When the disorders reached Moscow itself, Gorbachev’s days at the summit of Soviet power were just about finished.
But not for want of support from the West. Even such firm anti-communists as Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher lauded him to the end. “This was the tragedy of our time, that if one part of humanity had a perfect understanding of the essence of the communist idea (but sympathized with it), the other part, seemingly hostile to it, did not understand it, believing the symptoms of the disease to be the disease itself. People who understood that it was the communist idea that was the root of all evil, that the regime is not inhuman because it persecutes people for their convictions, but, on the contrary, does everything because it is inhuman—were few and far between,” and fewer still of those belonged to “the establishment” in the West. There were more “real anti-communists” in the Soviet Union than there were in the West. In the case of Thatcher, Bukovsky enjoyed the genuine if poignant pleasure of showing her, in 1992, documentary proof that Gorbachev had signed off on funneling a million dollars to striking British coal miners in 1984, a move Gorbachev had assured Thatcher he knew nothing about. “This was my long-awaited moment of triumph: ‘The difficulty of “doing business” with communists is that they have the disgusting habit of lying while looking you in the face,’ I said slowly and clearly, enjoying every word.” There are limitations to the capitalist mindset. “Alas, the conservatives proved totally incapable of grasping the principles of ideological warfare.” (Here, one might give a bit of credit to those frivolous Americans, who did in fact sponsor anti-communist radio broadcasts into the Soviet empire throughout the decades of the Cold War.)
“Despite all our efforts, even the more conservative Western circles did not want to understand that dozens and hundreds of millions behind the Iron Curtain were their natural and most powerful allies and not a ‘humanitarian problem.’ Communism could only really be defeated together with them.” But without a strategy based on building up civil, not uncivil, society in Soviet Russia there could be no well-organized struggle against the Communists there. “Weak and inexperienced opposition forces needed forging in the process of fighting the old regime in order to develop into a proper political structure, capable of sweeping the nomenklatura from all levels of state rule. Only a struggle like this could produce real leaders, popular organizers in every district, in every industrial plant, thereby creating a genuine political alternative” to the Communists. “Without this struggle there could be no system changes, and the new putative system would not have the necessary support.” Upon returning to Russia, Bukovsky advocated a general strike, which would have been a peaceful way of confronting a regime now in disarray but still capable of regrouping, while simultaneously setting up conditions in which anti-communists could organize themselves and begin to run the country. “This was the core of the problem: the country was ready to throw the regime out, but it was the new elite that was not ready, the new ‘democrats’ that grew up under perestroika,” under Gorbachev’s fake liberalization. The result was the rule of the hapless drunk, Boris Yeltsin, who blundered along long enough for the Communists to repackage themselves as Russian nationalists.
Enter Vladimir Putin.
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