Go Faster! No! Go Slower! Holding Back

By John Elson

There is a sharp ideological battle taking place in our society today. There are no indifferent people because the direction of perestroika will determine the fates of our children and grandchildren." So argues Nina Andreeva, 51, who only a year ago was an obscure teacher of chemistry at a Leningrad technical institute. Today she is famous -- notorious, some would say -- as a symbol of opposition to Mikhail Gorbachev's reform program. His opponents are unorganized, and their criticism takes different forms, but they nonetheless represent a potential threat to his leadership.

Andreeva's challenge first came in a letter to the conservative daily Sovetskaya Rossiya, attacking "left-wing intellectual socialism," a reference to the flirtation with democracy and glasnost practiced by such journals as Ogonyok and Moscow News. The current debate, she wrote, focused on "whether or not to recognize the leading role of the party and the working class in socialist construction and in perestroika." The intelligentsia, she claimed, "almost as a force is hostile to socialism."

Harsh words, and not just the views of a lone woman. Sovetskaya Rossiya's editors gave her letter (some Soviets believe it was actually written by Andreeva's husband, a fellow teacher) the prominence of an editorial. After it appeared, orders were issued, supposedly by Yegor Ligachev, then the party's leading ideologue, that the letter should be studied by military units and other party cadres. Significantly, publication took place the day Gorbachev departed on a visit to Yugoslavia. After his return, Pravda counterattacked, labeling the letter "an attempt to reverse party policy on the sly."

But Andreeva remains unchastened. In response to questions from TIME, she repeated the most frequently heard popular criticism of perestroika -- namely, that it is responsible for "a deterioration in food and other supplies, inflation ((and)) disruption of the financial system." She openly questioned whether Gorbachev's metaphorical proposal to "shake down the old trees" is compatible with true socialism.

Some of Gorbachev's most hostile critics are among those whose help he needs to make perestroika work: the 18 million members of the nomenklatura, or ruling class. Says Eldar Shakhbazov, deputy minister of finance in Azerbaijan: "The first layer of opponents of perestroika are people who would lose their economic privileges." Not only might they be shifted to less desirable jobs, but the nomenklatura fears that reform may also eliminate the perks -- special stores, food sources, even schools -- that make them the Soviet Union's pampered elite. Those privileges are a touchy matter. When Pravda published a letter from a reader complaining about nomenklatura perks, Ligachev chided the paper for admitting that the privileges even existed.

, At a more theoretical level, perestroika has been attacked by conservative intellectuals who improbably combine a nationalist nostalgia for Russian Orthodoxy and the Stalin era with a xenophobic hatred of corrupt Western influences on Soviet life. Many of these critics belong to the Writers' Union of the Russian Federal Republic, the largest of the U.S.S.R.'s 15 constituent republics. The literary monthly Nash Sovremennik has denounced rock music and beauty pageants as demeaning influences on Russian culture. Such writers as Yuri Bondarev and Vasily Belov have attacked the de-Stalinization process for defaming a period when, despite Stalin's tyranny, the Soviet Union became a world power.

Many of the Russian writers are openly sympathetic to the ugliest manifestation of Soviet neoconservatism. Founded in 1979 as a cultural and historical group attached to the Ministry of Aviation Industry, Pamyat (memory) has grown into a violence-tinged social movement that blends ardent nationalism with virulent anti-Semitism. To Pamyat's conspiracy theorists, an evil alliance of Zionists and Freemasons is responsible for most of the world's woes; Jews who were at the heart of the Bolshevik Revolution are blamed for the failures of Communism.

"It's important to remember that the Great Russian Revolution was not great, and it was not Russian," says Dmitri Vasiliev, the group's principal theoretician. "It was organized by Jews." Vasiliev is mildly contemptuous of Gorbachev ("He has no clear thoughts and no perseverance") and calls Lenin a "merciless Bolshevik." At the movement's noisy rallies, hecklers are often attacked by Pamyat toughs who are the Soviet version of skinheads. Soviet Jews are concerned that Pamyat's modest membership of several thousand is an inadequate index of its power. Says Boris Kelman, a Leningrad refusenik: "Pamyat is not only protected but controlled by people at a high level in the party. It gets support from the KGB."

So far, Gorbachev has outmaneuvered his critics within the party hierarchy. His control of the media means that, even under glasnost, opposition to perestroika gets limited voice. Yet by now it is clear that unless Gorbachev can inspire widespread public support for the reform process -- no sure thing -- his attempt to shake down the old trees will be truncated before it has a chance to grow.

With reporting by David Aikman/Moscow