THE REVISIONIST CZAR
Under these circumstances, the antinomies of the East European Marxist project were most obvious in the last decade of the Soviet Union, when the tribulations of the “Gorbachev phenomenon” were perfect examples of the failure of ideological reform. The fundamental question here, identical in its nature with the one that kick-started revisionist thinking, was, could the Soviet system reform itself into something really different without ceasing to be the Soviet system?'77 On the one hand, by the late 1980s, Gorbachev and his followers had a clear idea of what they were trying to reform: “a system that suffocated individuals, a totalitarian regime, a State monopoly over everything,” one not merely imposed by the Cold War, because “there was also, within it, a dominant group that sought embitterment, pursued utopia, yearned for War Communism, and thought it could govern with continued repressions.”78 However, the revitalization of the USSR's status on the world stage and the relegitimization of socialism (both domestically and internationally) were dependent, in Gorbachev's view, on a successful systemic transformation of the Soviet state. In other words, the Soviet leader rejected “the option of muddling through” characteristic of his predecessors.79 Ultimately, his staunch belief in the possibility of simultaneously dismantling “Stalinist socialism” (a formula used by the weekly Literaturnaya gazeta in May 1988) and refounding the Soviet polity lies at the heart of the paradoxes that brought about the collapse of the Moscow center. Retrospectively, this approach, which proved fatally contradictory, leaves us with a historical image of Gorbachev best described by political scientist Stephen Hanson in 1989: “A pure revolutionary romantic, believing absolutely in the creative power of the masses, unable to countenance in principle any concrete institutionalization of revolutionary politics that might stifle this creativity, and therefore doomed to be defeated by others who had no such scruples.”80
One can therefore safely say, as Archie Brown did throughout his work, that Gorbachev was in fact a genuine Marxist revisionist, who, while paying lip service to Lenin's iconic figure, moved away from Bolshevism as a political culture based on fanaticism, sectarianism, and voluntarism toward a self-styled version of Marxist revisionism. In the Russian tradition of reforms from above, Gorbachev's attempt to restore the moral impetus of Communism was based, however, on a miscalculation: the gradual elimination of the party's control over society opened the door to autonomous alternatives. The Russian literary critic Igor Dedkov spelled out in his diary the new horizons brought forth by Gorbachev's ascendance in the Kremlin: “A man of our generation has come to power. A new cycle of Russian illusions is about to begin.”81 The politics of glasnost unleashed pluralism, with its own dynamics that would transgress the focus of Gorbachev's reform project.
When trying to understand the complex picture of perestroika, its context and consequences, one must not overlook the role that ideas played in the course of events. In itself, the prehistory of East European revisionism was, along with the mythical “original Leninist moment” (the 1917 Soviets or the NEP period), a stepping stone for the Soviet 1980s. Moreover, the successes of the dissent movement in the region (greatly aided by Gorbachev's commitment to “non-intervention”) heightened the sense of revolutionary transformation among the actors involved in the process of change. I mentioned earlier in this chapter the three layers of the intellectual establishment in a Soviet-type system (ideological apparatchiks, party technocrats/intellectuals, and dissidents). In the 1980s, these three groups influenced each other to the extent of provoking a wholesale alteration of the discursive horizon, the conceptual pool employed, and the expectations both at the level of policy-making and of the public space. It could be argued that by the last decade of Leninism, there was a general consensus within Soviet intellectual milieus regarding the imperative of rethinking the possible solutions to the USSR's problems. Here lies the oddity of the situation: the Soviet polity was indeed on the decline (especially as a leader of the world Communist movement), but it was far from being in turmoil. According to Stephen Kotkin, “Nationalist separatism existed, but it did not remotely threaten the Soviet order. The KGB crushed the small dissident movement. The enormous intelligentsia griped incessantly, but it enjoyed massive state subsidies [that were] manipulated to promote overall loyalty.”82 Gorbachev's biographer, political scientist Archie Brown, formulated this argument in an even more straightforward fashion: “In the Soviet Union reform produced crisis more than crisis forced reform. The fate of the Soviet system and of the Soviet state did not hang in the balance in 1985. By 1989 the fate of both did.”83
The mixture of a fading and compromised international status (the U.S. challenge, the post-Helsinki embarrassments, the Third World adventures, the Afghan quagmire, or even Euro-Communism), the obvious lack of legitimacy of the East European Communist regimes (and their glaring inability to counter dissident movements without widespread violence), and the almost unanimous belief among large sections of the party elite in the necessity of proposing reform (in the aftermath of the Brezhnevite “stagnation” and of the Konstantin Chernenko debacle) produced an environment where Gorbachev and his followers' ideas could turn into a political program. In other words, it was time for revisionism to come to power at the very center of the empire. Herein lies the difference between the 1980s in the USSR and 1956 or 1968 in Central Europe. In 1968 Europe, critical Marxism officialized into policy was a response to chronic delegitimation of and turmoil within the respective regimes; in the former, it functioned rather as a preemptive measure and as a perceived need for systemic revival.84 In the Soviet Union, the “new thinking,” as the epitome of the leadership ranks' mindset, “did not merely signal a reconsideration of policy efficacy or recalculation of ends and means, but reflected instead a long-term and wholesale revision of beliefs, values, and identity.”85