Читать онлайн "Soviet culture and foreign policy from the Cambridge history of Russia, volume 3" - Press Cambridge University - RuLit

Oleg Grinevskii, for example, recalls the 'false, at times even absurd, information the KGB and CCID fed the Politburo', representations that reinforced the Soviet identity of world revolutionary vanguard with regard to countries where a revolutionary situation hardly existed.[259] This discursive bias, the twin exaggerations of socialism's prospects and imperialism's hostility, manifested itself with especially baleful consequences in the decision-making on Afghanistan in 1978-9, but was commonplace.[260] The apocrypha about Soviet negotiators at arms control talks learning Soviet military secrets from their Western counterparts are true. Gorbachev himself noted that not even Politburo members could get basic information about the military-industrial complex, or even the economy.[261] In response to Andropov's conclusion as KGB chairman in May i98i that the US was preparing to launch a nuclear war, local KGB officers around the world, for the next three years, dutifully collected evidence to support the view held in Moscow.[262] Information contrary to Soviet policy, such as a memorandum recommending withdrawal from Afghanistan in early 1980 that went unread until 1986, was ignored, rarely contemplated, written up or submitted.[263] As Evgenii Primakov noted in his memoirs, 'we [journalists and scholars who opposed the decision to intervene in Afghanistan] were led mainly by the established custom of unreservedly supporting all decisions taken from above'.[264]

The General Secretary's position was an institution ofauthority and power. As Shakhnazarov, writing as a political scientist, concluded, the Soviet Union and its socialist allies had one 'basic principle in common, its functioning was one-third defined by institutions and two-thirds by the personality of the leader'. While 'no one would challenge the right of the General Secretary to have the last word in resolving any question, this right did not belong so much to the man as to the position'.[265] Shakhnazarov recounts Andropov receiving a phone call from Khrushchev: 'before my eyes this lively striking interesting man was transformed into a soldier ready to fulfil any order of the commander. Even his voice changed, with tones of obedience and submissiveness.'[266]

The norm of party elite unity reinforced this authority and helps explain how the General Secretary preserved the prevailing discourse. After the post- Stalinist discourse of difference was fixed after 1957, Khrushchev staved off attacks from more orthodox quarters. Only when there was an overwhelming consensus, as in October 1964, did other elites join the attacks.[267] Elite fear of difference helped preserve the norm of unity. The discursive power concentrated in a particular General Secretary also accounts for the possibility of a dramatic shift in discourse once a General Secretary dies, as in the case of Stalin in 1953 and Chernenko in 1985. The institution of the General Secretary, combined with the institutionalised bias for agreeable information, helps explains the staying power of the predominant discourse, as well as the structural disadvantages faced by challengers.[268]

The discourse of difference implied recognition of the decolonising world as a zone of peace, rather than as a zone of imperialist lackeys. This recognition was institutionalised within the CCID, which had responsibility for relations with these revolutionary nationalist movements. The CCID and MFA were competitors for the next thirty years. The MFA, especially after Shepilov's replacement by Gromyko in February 1957, became still more closely associated with the reproduction of a Great Power Soviet identity in competition with the US and Europe.[269] Within the MFA there emerged a privileged group around Gromyko in Moscow and Ambassador Anatolii Dobrynin in Washington closely associated with Europe and the US.[270] 'Only the US, big European countries and the UN interested Gromyko ... His heart did not lie in the Third World. He did not consider them to be serious partners. "He considered the Third World only to be a problem," writes Dobrynin. "He himself told me this".'[271]

At one of the meetings in the CC in late 1978 Rostislav Ul'ianovskii (Pono- marev's deputy) said:

'We need to bring things to the point that the NLM of Arabs becomes a socialist revolution. Agreements with American imperialism . . . will only . . . distract the Arab working class from its main political task.'

Ponomarev nodded his head in agreement.

'God!', lamented Robert Turdiev, an MFA expert, on leaving the CC building. 'Do these people understand what is happening on planet Earth? What Arab working class? What socialist revolution in the Middle East? Where do these senile old men live? On the moon, on Mars?'

'In an office on Staraya Ploshchad',' answered Anatolii Filev.

But Gromyko responded completely differently.

'Why have a conversation about a Middle East settlement in the CCID at all? This is not their business. Let them deal with Communist parties and NLMs.'[272]

The CCID preserved the orthodox Soviet identity of vanguard for socialist development in Central Asia. Ponomarev, who had been an aide to Georgii Dimitrov, head of the Comintern in the i940s, saw himself in that tradition. Shakhnazarov relates details of a meeting of the CC commission on Poland that took place in early 1981 under the chairmanship of Mikhail Suslov. The Soviet ambassador to Poland at the time, Boris Aristov, reported that the Polish peasantry, despite its traditional ideas, had turned out to be a far more reliable support for the regime than the working class, which had fallen under the influence of both Solidarity and the Catholic Church. This is heresy to the orthodox Soviet model of a working-class vanguard, and Ponomarev interrupted, saying that the Polish leadership needed to collectivise its private farms. Aristov demurred, repeating that Polish private farmers mostly supported the government. Ponomarev then reminisced about the 1920s and the great feat of collectivisation. Suslov, 'a reservoir of quotations from Lenin', cited an appropriate one on collectivisation. Suslov and Ponomarev then opined about Lenin and collectivisation. Finally, Ustinov said, 'Mikhail Andreevich, Boris Nikolaevich, why are we talking about communes when with each passing day Solidarity is threatening to remove the party from power!?'[273]

The institutionalisation of information, the authority ofthe General Secretary and the Great Power and vanguard identities of the MFA and CCID, respectively, help account forthe predominance ofthe orthodox official discourse; the emergence of research institutions, expert advice and the creative associations of the intelligentsia explain the development and deepening of its alternatives.

Shortly after the Twentieth Party Congress the Institute of World Economics and International Relations (IMEMO) was restored from Stalinist oblivion. Over the next ten years, regional institutes associated with the Soviet Academy of Sciences would be established for Latin America (1961), Africa (1962), Asia (1966) and the USA and Canada (ISKAN, 1967).[274] What these, and other research institutions such as the Novosibirsk Institute of Economics and Industrial Organisation and the Public Opinion Research Institute at Komso- mol'skaia Pravda, had in common was access to information about the outside world unavailable to average party or government officials, let alone the general public.[275] Another important site was in Prague, the editorial headquarters of Problems of Peace and Socialism, the journal of the world Communist movement.[276] Not only was there access to foreign publications, but daily discussions with socialists from all over the world, most significantly, Western Europe. The cadre of Soviets who worked in Prague in the 1950s and 1960s became important carriers of a Soviet identification with Europe as a Social Democratic alternative to the Soviet model.[277]