Soviet Union: Crisis of Personality

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Speaking in New York last month, newly elected Russian Federation president Boris Yeltsin angrily cited an example of the kind of "exploitation" he would not allow: a middleman who bought meat in Moscow and sold it as shashlik in a city less than a hundred miles away for a big markup. Meeting Yeltsin immediately after, S. Frederick Starr, president of Oberlin College in Ohio and a Sovietologist, suggested that instead of putting the dealer out of action, the Russian leader ought to encourage five more hustlers to go into the business. That way more shashlik would be distributed while competition slashed the price. Yeltsin's face lit up. "Of course you're right," he replied, in a gee-I-should-have-thought-of-that tone.

That so forceful an advocate of private enterprise as Yeltsin should need instruction in so basic a point underscores the most troublesome question facing the Soviet Union today. It will hover in the background at next week's Group of Seven summit in London, when Mikhail Gorbachev asks leaders of the world's strongest industrial powers for economic help and submits to sharp questioning about what kind of reforms he plans to make any aid effective. But the problem goes much deeper than the details of this or that economic plan. It is nothing less than a question of national character: Can the Soviets create the political culture -- the atmosphere and habits of thought -- that would make it possible to convert their country into a free-market democracy?

The Soviet Union has virtually no experience with anything resembling such a society; at times the reformers trying to create one seem to have only a vague idea of what it would look and feel like. Worse still, their efforts run counter to many traditions inculcated by Russian history; not just the 70 years of communist attempts to create a New Soviet Man, but the centuries of czarist oppression and frequent isolation from outside thought before 1917. Even optimistic experts -- and there are some, both Western and Soviet ! -- think creation of the requisite political culture will take decades, perhaps generations, with innumerable opportunities for backsliding along the way.

But the process at least seems to be under way. Last week some of the country's most prominent advocates of change put together a Democratic Reform Movement, intended to become a unified and permanent opposition to the Communist Party, or at least its hard-line faction. Organizers include former Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze; Alexander Yakovlev, an adviser to President Mikhail Gorbachev who is sometimes called the "architect of perestroika"; and Mayors Gavril Popov of Moscow and Anatoli Sobchak of Leningrad.

The new movement is not yet a political party. Whether it becomes one will be determined by a founding congress in September. But Shevardnadze made it clear that the organization's purpose is to speed the conversion of the Soviet Union into a "normal society." He explained: "A normal society has an opposition as a natural feature of the political landscape." The reaction, however, indicated that anti-establishment politics in the U.S.S.R. is still an undeveloped art. The founders of the Reform Movement are oddly reluctant to break completely with the Communist Party. Shevardnadze resigned from the party, a few steps ahead of a move to drum him out. But he and other leaders made it clear that they want to attract reform-minded communists who, at least for the time being, need not quit the party to join.

That position repelled some of the small parties that have been springing up and split others. Nikolai Travkin, head of the Democratic Party of Russia, withdrew promised support; he is under fire from dissenters who accuse him of being -- to borrow an old American term -- soft on communism. They plan to hold a founding congress of yet another new party, an oddly named Liberal- Conservative Union, in late September. This autumn seems likely to witness the birth not of a unified but of a still further splintered opposition.

Inside the party, meanwhile, the newest trend is sternly anti-reform. Hard- liners calling themselves the Communist Initiative Movement met in Moscow at the end of June to demand that the "bourgeois leadership" -- meaning Gorbachev & Co. -- be expelled and even brought to trial on charges of "high treason."

While a trial seems unlikely, the Initiative is distressingly strong. It represents 3.5 million party members and has considerable support among the apparatchiks who sit on the Central Committee. Gorbachev could face serious trouble later this month, when the Central Committee meets in a plenum. Clearly worried, he published last week a speech warning that "if the party remains in its present state, it will lose all future political battles and elections."

Well, maybe. But to many experts it is hardly a surprise that dictatorial tendencies are still strong while reform movements are splintered. Given the tragic history of Russia, it could hardly be otherwise. The Czars retained absolutism as a quasi-religious principle long after most other European nations had either dethroned or put constitutional limitations on their Kings. Almost three centuries of the so-called Tatar Yoke, which ended around 1480, effectively walled off the country from foreign influences, an isolation continued as a matter of policy by the Czars and later the commissars. In the late 16th century, Giles Fletcher the Elder, English ambassador to the czarist court, wrote that Russians were "kept from traveling that they may learn nothing, nor see the fashions of other countries" -- an observation that would still have been accurate a few years ago. Even today a powerful Slavophile movement regards Western ways as incompatible with the Russian character. Some Sovietologists assert apprehensively that the Slavophiles are making common cause with hard-line communists to form a strong anti-democratic bloc.

Serfdom in Russia and slavery in the U.S. were both abolished in the 1860s, but the legacy of serfdom has been even more enduring. No wonder; only about 12% of the inhabitants of the U.S. were enslaved in 1860, but almost two- thirds of the Russian empire's people were serfs at the time of emancipation. In 1918 the Bolsheviks instituted a totalitarianism more complete than that of the Nazis, in the judgment of Soviet sociologist Boris Grushin. "Even under Adolf Hitler, German industry was relatively independent of the system," says Grushin, "but in the Soviet Union, everything was swallowed up by the state."

Two Russians who agree on almost nothing else give similar descriptions of the psychology bred by this history. Alexei Sergeyev, a political economics professor and a founder of the Communist Initiative Movement, believes that most of his countrymen "don't understand anything in politics." They tend to equate the noise and conflict of a multiparty system with anarchy, which arose whenever the iron fist was relaxed. Though they loathe bureaucrats, ordinary citizens have great faith in the idea of a "benevolent czar" who will keep order. First Gorbachev and then Yeltsin appeared to fill the bill, but Sergeyev believes that within 18 months economic chaos will force the masses to turn back to old-line Communists because they can impose order with a "strong hand."

Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a moderate reformer, agrees that many Soviet citizens have learned to survive by "being ready to adapt to any kind of order and to fulfill any instruction, to forget about the morality of state policy and to accept everything from above." Even those who have begun to shake off this passivity have had no chance to develop the initiative and self-reliance that democracy demands. "They are longing for freedom, but they don't know what to do with it," says Yevtushenko. "This is true even of some of our democrats. They are wonderful in meetings, but they are terrible managers, terrible decision makers."

Another problem is that Soviets lack what Oberlin President Starr terms "horizontal links among citizens," the clubs, professional societies and voluntary associations that in other countries foster the habits of political give-and-take. At the end of the 19th century, Danish historian Georg Brandes called czarist Russia "a bureaucratic state where official power has destroyed all spontaneous and natural growth in the relations of public life." His description would have fit the Communist state even better. Partly in consequence, aspiring leaders have had nowhere to learn the arts of compromise and coalition building indispensable to democratic politics.

Some American Sovietologists find it surprising and heartening that democracy has spread as far and as rapidly as it has in this unpromising soil. They point out that every time Soviet citizens have been given a choice they have voted for democratic change. One explanation, no doubt, is that the human instinct for freedom cannot be eradicated even by the most dismal history. A more concrete reason is the rise of an educated populace less submissive than older generations. In the 1920s, Russians averaged only four years of schooling each; today the average is 12 years. Says Blair Ruble, director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington: "There has been a general trend toward increasing education, urbanization and professionalization of the labor force. Those trends bring with them different attitudes toward authority and a greater desire to control one's destiny."

A free-market economy, many experts fear, may be even harder to build than a political democracy. The U.S.S.R. did take what looked like a giant step last week, when the Supreme Soviet passed a law to break the central government's stranglehold on industrial and commercial property by transferring most of it to other hands. But old-line Communists watered down the bill so that it was not quite the private-property legislation that had been advertised. Defense, energy and other "vital" industries were exempted; priority is to be given to transferring properties to collectives (presumably of workers and institutions of various kinds) rather than to private owners, and many properties will be leased by the state rather than sold outright.

The halfhearted legislation reflects the intense Soviet suspicion of private entrepreneurship, which is the main barrier to a free economy. Even in czarist times, the peasant masses cherished an egalitarianism described as an "equality of poverty." It was regularly violated, of course: nobles owned vast estates that in effect encompassed whole villages and thousands of serfs. Similarly, members of the Communist elite accumulated palatial dachas, shopped in special stores closed to the general public and enjoyed other privileges far out of reach of workers. That bred an us-against-them hatred among the masses and a bitter conviction that the only way for someone to accumulate worldly goods in excess of those enjoyed by his fellows was to be a crook and an exploiter. Communist dogma, if not Communist practice, reinforced the feeling; the conviction that hired labor is always and necessarily exploited labor sank in deep.

Today, sociologist Grushin reports, a majority of Soviet citizens in opinion polls consistently rank the owners of cooperative businesses as the "main enemy" of the people. Unfortunately, this prejudice is not totally unfounded. Many of the first millionaires to arise out of the limited private enterprise that now exists have been black marketeers or Communist bureaucrats using their connections. Even politicians like Yeltsin, who grasp intellectually the driving role of private ownership in producing Western prosperity, have trouble understanding that cracking down on the sharpers, like the shashlik dealer, risks strangling the initiative of legitimate entrepreneurs.

Under the best of circumstances, building a free-market democracy from - scratch, as the Soviets must, will take time. One State Department official guesses 25 to 30 years will be needed to finish the job. Grushin thinks it may take at least 70 years, "so that three generations will have passed and those who were spoiled by the old system will have died out." The big fear of both Western and Soviet experts is that reformers will not get the time. The wrenching transition to a free market, which will end artificially subsidized prices and close inefficient state businesses, is likely to cause both inflation and unemployment. After 60 years of Communist insistence that there was no such thing as joblessness in the Soviet Union, the government last week finally admitted that indeed there is and opened a string of unemployment- compensation offices. Pessimists fear that inflation and unemployment will combine to turn back the clock not only on economic reform but on the Soviet Union's nascent democracy as well.

Maybe, but maybe not. Democracy has such a strong tendency to nurture itself, and the superiority of free markets to centrally managed communist economies has become so glaringly obvious, that both might keep growing despite inevitable delays and even temporary reversals. The Soviet Union is a large country, and any two contradictory statements about it are always true. Including the statements that the history, traditions and ingrained ways of thought of many Soviet people could hardly be less favorable to free-market democracy -- and that somehow one is starting to take shape anyway.

With reporting by James Carney and John Kohan/Moscow and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington