TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041089/04108900.026

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6KB | 106 lines

                +⌐                                                            THE UNION, Page 66

GO FASTER! NO! GO SLOWER!

HOLDING BACK


In advancing his agenda, Gorbachev faces growing pressure from
two opposite camps: the liberals and the conservatives


    "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.