The Russian Revolution Turns 60

By LANCE MORROW

No project this side of the supernatural ever promised such metamorphoses. The great Communist engine that kicked when the Winter Palace fell would change human nature Man would, predicted Leon Trotsky, "become immeasurably stronger wiser and subtler. His body will become nore harmonized, his voice more musical. The average hu man type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe a Marx. Looking back over 60 years of the Russian Revolution, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev last week pronounced the stupendous enterprise a success: "Comrades, no event in world history has had such a profound and lasting effect on mankind as the great October Socialist Revolution."* Listening to Brezhnev's grandiloquence was an audience that included Socialist and Communist leaders from all over the world who had gathered in Moscow to do homage to the Revolution. The capital's streets were festooned with red banners-posters of the Politburo stared out at the public everywhere' 3 end the celebration, a Soviet armed-forces parade this week will bristle through Red Square, past the mausoleum where Lennon -- the now deified founder of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics -- rests in his glass case

"Most societies have revolutions -- or claim to," observes Historian S. Frederick Starr. "What made the Russian Revolution so important was that it made more extensive claims for itself than others had. It was the first to claim significance .aching into every corner of the globe, and that's where its mythology came from." How well does that mythology square with reality? Many different measures must be applied to judge the successes and failures of the immense, visionary and often brutal venture.

In material terms, the Revolution has succeeded fairly in many areas. Today Lenin's heirs preside over formidable superpower that after six decades lumbers about the world in all the panoply and menace of one of history's great empires. Some historians argue, plausibly enough, that Russia with its vast resources, would have developed just as impressively or better, under quite different management Nevertheless, the Russian Empire that the Bolsheviks inherited in 1917 was a fairly primitive vastness, although some industrialization had begun. Despite its bloody civil war (1918-22) Stalin's savage purges in the '30s and the devastations of World War II, the Soviet Union has risen to rival American influence around the world. Russia has become the planet's leading producer of crude oil, coal, steel, pig iron, locomotives mineral fertilizers and other products. Soviet scientific accomplishments -- from Sputnik to Soyuz to two-headed does -- are uneven but often dazzling.

The 259 million people who live in the U.S.S.R.'s 15 republics do enjoy certain material advantages. Officially, there is no unemployment. Because of artificial state controls there is little inflation, and the prices of simple foodstuffs are pleasantly low. (Chronic shortages, however, have created flourishing black markets.) Citizens are assured universal free education (the literacy rate is 98%), as well as health and retirement care. Cities are clean. Although they awoke belatedly to the problem, the Soviets apparently have a deep concern about the environment. Only a privileged handful of Soviet citizens are allowed to see other societies and compare Complacently, most Russians believe that on the whole their society is serving them reasonably well, especially when they contrast the present with the past -- the deprivations that their parents and grandparents suffered, the cruel, unpredictable terrors of Stalin s long reign and the agonies of the war.

From different angles of observation, however the Soviet venture seems terribly flawed, both materially and, well, spiritually. At the simplest level, everyday domestic life in the Soviet Union is mined with a million ordeals. The average Soviet woman spends two to three hours a day trying to find and purchase basic necessities like food and clothing. Both Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev before him have demonstrated some concern about such hardships; the Kremlin has sent out a river of decrees ordering better consumer products and services. But the country that harps on capitalist failures and boasts of its lunar landers cannot keep its citizens in items like hairpins and toilet paper. A lingering malaise underscores the drabness of Soviet society. Absenteeism, low productivity and haphazard workmanship are chronic problems. Alcoholism is virtually a national disease.

Earlier this year the Columbia University journal Global Political Assessment predicted that the Soviet Union would face not only years of a lagging economy but a youth revolution and a sexual revolution. The ranks of Soviet dissidents have been thinned by exile and imprisonment.

In his Moscow speech last week, Brezhnev insisted once again that the Soviet path to Communism remains the true one. More and more, Russia's leadership of the international Communist movement is acknowledged guardedly or given Up service only.

The East bloc is kept in line more or less by force; meanwhile, Poland and Hungary experiment heretically with capitalist-like incentives and Rumania bravely pursues an autonomous foreign policy. China has long regarded the Soviets as sellouts, killers of the dream. In total absence of fraternity, the two countries keep their divisions nervously bivouacked along the common border, and the rhetorical insults pass back and forth between Peking and Moscow.

Then there is Eurocommunism. With varying degrees of emphasis and sincerity, the Communist parties of Italy, France and Spain have denounced the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Soviet Union as the only true model of Marxism, and have sworn their willingness to co-exist with bourgeois freedoms in pluralistic societies. Skepticism about the depth of these commitments, which could readily be overturned by future leaders less moderate than Spain's Santiago Carrillo or Italy's Enrico Berlinguer, is warranted. Meanwhile, Moscow tries to cope with the reality of three heretical parties that, alas, simply cannot be excommunicated from the fold.

In its foreign affairs, the Soviet Union also has a flawed record. Since World War II, a dozen countries have come under Communist rule. The mystique of socialism -- the dominant ideology of the Third World -- has given the Russians close ties there. But somehow the Russians have trouble enlarging their footholds. They seem unpopular nearly everywhere they go. In the Middle East, where they once threatened to become the Big Brother of the Arab world, the Soviets have been kicked out of Egypt; relations with both Syria and Iraq have chilled. Despite ample military aid to leftists in Mozambique, Angola and elsewhere, they are not yet a viable power in Africa. Somalia, once Moscow's most compliant ally on the continent, is gradually rejecting Russia's influence; as the U.S. did in Viet Nam the Kremlin is learning that superpowers cannot always control or contain their client states.

It is still thought of as a paradox that the home of the Bolshevik Revolution is much more an empire now than it was under the Czars. The sun never sets upon it. Says Dimitri Simes, director of Soviet policy studies at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies: "A great diplomatic problem for the U.S. is that we often perceive Russia as an ideological, revolutionary state, which it is not." Beneath the vast surface of the Soviet Union, Simes argues, three elements have struggled:

revolution, bureaucracy and Russian tradition. Revolution, once but briefly, was everything; years ago tradition and bureaucracy defeated it. The Revolution has ended by instituting a new form of authoritarian state, quite reactionary, now ruled by a gerontocracy (average age of Politburo members: 68).

The state pursues the objectives of a great power -- objectives hardly different from : those of the czars.

A fundamental and perhaps unanswerable question is whether the Revolution yielded such a dictatorial result because it was socialistic or because it was Russian. It has in any case given a bad name to what I many find the ennobling idea of equalitarianism. Russia has a dark and painful history of authoritarianism -- a hatred of authority, but a need for it. Russians seem to fear disorder and mistrust foreigners. In fact, the young are now participating in a revival of nationalism.

Although it has become a mockery of its original promise, the Revolution is unlikely ever again to be as frightful as it was under Stalin, if only because the Russian people are so much better informed now and probably would not stand for such mass terror. Then, the poet Anna Akhmatova wrote: "The stars of death stood over us./ And Russia, guiltless, be loved, writhed/ under the crunch of bloodstained boots,/ under the wheels of Black Marias." Life under Lenin's current successor has relaxed, grown somewhat less bleak, but there still seems no prospect that the mythology will be fulfilled: that, in the fullness of time, the state will begin to wither away and leave only the classless, abundant workers' paradise. On the contrary, the stolid bureaucracy expands, reduplicating itself and its controls. The Revolution's promises seem doomed always to recede into the future.

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