TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081489/08148900.027

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                ╬╗                                                            WORLD, Page 34

Soviet Union

Chipping Away at an Icon


Even Lenin, long untouchable, is now coming in for some
debunking

By Bruce W. Nelan


    Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the one-party Soviet
dictatorship, believed that anyone who disagreed with him was
an enemy who had to be ruthlessly smashed. He would not have
hesitated a moment before arresting the members of the Congress
of People's Deputies who decided last week to form a legal
opposition calling itself the Interregional Group. At a
freewheeling conference in Moscow's House of Cinema, the new
faction elected a collective leadership and adopted a platform
that called for rewriting the Soviet Constitution to make the
system safe for pluralism and basic civil rights. In a direct
challenge to Leninism, the central dogma of the Soviet Union,
the organizers agreed that the power to rule should be taken
from the Communist Party and handed to an elected government.

    Such a profound alteration of the very foundations of the
Soviet system would have been unthinkable even a year ago. But
many Soviet citizens are thinking the unthinkable these days.
During his years of exile and his reign over the Soviet Union
from 1917 to 1924, Lenin formulated prescriptions for every
aspect of the nation's political, economic and social conduct.
Now even he, like so much else in this changing land, is being
questioned.

    That was brought to vivid life by the Interregional Group.
In the first issue of its new newspaper, Moscow Deputy Sergei
Stankevich assured his colleagues that they no longer had to
believe that organizing a political opposition was a crime
against the state. A struggle among dissenting factions, he
said, "is the only possible method of existence for a
legislative body." Counting absentees, 388 Deputies said they
were willing to associate themselves with this departure from
Communist rectitude. Though that is a distinct minority of the
2,250-member Congress, the surprising thing is that an
opposition faction exists at all.

    The Interregional Group is staking out a program that would
create something akin to social democracy. Perhaps most daring,
it proposes eliminating Article VI of the Constitution, which
entrenches the Communist Party as the "leading and guiding
force" in all aspects of the society. Dumping this provision
would effectively reverse Lenin's totalitarian doctrine that the
party must control the state.

    The group's members insist they are not so much an
opposition faction as ardent advocates of perestroika eager to
speed its implementation. Said Leningrad's representative
Anatoli Sobchak: "I am not a member of the opposition; I am a
supporter of the struggle for a normal economic and political
life in our country." But there is a hint of criticism of
current as well as past party leaders. President Mikhail
Gorbachev, said historian Yuri Afanasyev, an elected official
of the group, "is justifiably regarded as the man who launched
reform. But the time has passed when he can successfully remain
the leader of perestroika and the leader of the nomenklatura,"
the topmost ranks of the party. "He must make a choice."
Gorbachev responded at a Supreme Soviet session last week,
referring to "provocative appeals" from some of the group's
members and criticizing their description of themselves as "left
radicals." He was uncertain "what good this will bring to our
cause."

    Questioning Gorbachev has become commonplace. Doing the
same to Lenin, by far the more sacrosanct of the two, has not.
He was the intellectual father and revolutionary founder of the
secular religion that replaced the Russian Orthodoxy uprooted
by the militantly atheist Bolsheviks. His portrait, lighted by
a candle, replaced icons on the walls of urban apartments and
hung under the red bunting of the "Lenin corner" in schools and
offices. His statue stood in thousands of city squares
throughout the country, and toddlers went off to kindergarten
wearing lapel pins with a photo of curly-haired Baby Lenin, age
4.

    Even more important to the dictators who followed him,
Lenin was the man who gave legitimacy to their monopoly of
power. As the self-ordained interpreter of Marxism, Lenin
claimed that Communist rule in backward Russia was the result
of the iron laws of historical development, a scientific system
that offered an infallible method for solving problems and
planning the future. But with no formula for succession, each
new Soviet leader could seek legitimacy only by claiming to be
the closest follower of the founder, Lenin.

    For the Soviet establishment to question Lenin's authority
openly is as dramatic as it would be for the Roman Catholic
Church to question St. Peter's. Gorbachev tells the nation that
it is in appalling shape and must be rebuilt. Among the causes
of the crisis were the wholesale falsification of Soviet history
and slavish adherence to old slogans. Politburo member Alexander
Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev's closest supporters, warned that a
"new world requires a new philosophy" and that "subordination
to dogma" offers no freedom.

    The first historical attacks fell on Joseph Stalin, already
a fallen idol for his ruthless rule from 1924 to 1953, which
raised the system of militarized labor, centralized power and
secret-police terror to its highest form. But Stalin was
Lenin's successor, and Soviet scholars are now examining the
continuities between them.

    In the current issue of the academic journal Science and
Life, Gavril Popov, another leader of the new parliamentary
opposition, argues that Stalin was not a sudden short circuit
in Soviet Communism but the inheritor of Lenin's political
program. Lenin's attempt to abolish free markets made the use
of force inevitable, writes Popov, and to carry it out the
dictator created the Cheka, a secret-police force responsible
only to the party.

    Such rethinking began in earnest late last year with a
groundbreaking series of articles in Science and Life by
Alexander Tsipko, a scholar at a Moscow think tank. Tsipko saw
the crimes of Stalin as an outgrowth of Lenin's ready use of
guns and jails to enforce the party's sole right to rule. Had
he written such articles in pre-Gorbachev years, prison would
have been the next stop for Tsipko -- and for Science and Life
editor Igor Lagovsky as well. "We didn't think about the
problems we might face" by publishing, says Lagovsky. "We
thought about the interest this would generate."

    American experts find such revisionism a dramatic
development. With establishment journals publishing criticism
of Lenin, says Dimitri Simes of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington, "nothing about Communism is
sacred any longer in the Soviet Union." Robert Legvold, director
of Columbia University's Harriman Institute, does not expect
Lenin to go from icon to archvillain. "Lenin will be given an
honorary place in Soviet history as the founder of the country,"
says he. "Yet, just as U.S. historians can show the warts of
George Washington, Soviet historians will be able to do the same
with Lenin."

    The demythifying process, argues Nina Tumarkin, professor
of history at Wellesley College and author of The Cult of Lenin,
is necessary if the Soviet Union is to right itself. "Lenin is
being brought down to earth to make way for the new myths of
perestroika," she says. If Gorbachev's political reform is more
than a myth and the government is able to find its legitimacy
in increased democracy, it might not need Lenin anymore.


-- James Carney and Paul Hofheinz/Moscow