TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/052289/05228900.000

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 109 lines

ESSAY, Page 126

Communism Confronts Its Children

By Richard Hornik


    Attempts at economic and political reform in China, the Soviet
Union and other Communist countries often seem to consist of two
steps forward and one or even two steps back. In China the recent
rash of student-led mass demonstrations is just the latest
manifestation of deep public discontent over the price of economic
reform. In the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev's position has been
similarly threatened as the benefits of perestroika have thus far
failed to match the short-term costs.

    Although selfish resistance by entrenched bureaucrats is
usually cited by reformers as their biggest obstacle, the lack of
popular understanding of and support for the needed changes is
equally important. Contrary to what Westerners think, the majority
of citizens in these countries have found their lives tolerable,
at least until recently. While it is true that they grumble about
long lines and shortages, workers also appreciate guaranteed
employment and low prices for life's necessities -- housing,
medical care, basic foods. Their education and everything they have
heard from the media have led them to expect that they could enjoy
economic benefits equal to those of capitalism with none of the
risks or pain.

    The rulers of the Communist world are reaping the results of
decades of propaganda aimed at ensuring control in backward peasant
societies. During the early days of the cold war, when it seemed
that nothing could contain the virus of Communist expansion,
pundits attempted to assure the West that most Marxist regimes took
power only with the force of outside arms. On its own, Communism
took root only in benighted countries like czarist Russia and
feudal China. The more advanced countries of Eastern Europe --
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland -- had the Marxist-Leninist system
thrust upon them on the point of a Soviet Red Army bayonet.

    Although much was made by Western observers of the original
vulnerability of backward, predominantly peasant societies to a
Marxist takeover, little attention has been paid to the effect of
that characteristic on their subsequent development. The
Marxist-Leninist regimes of the Soviet Union and China, as well as
their variants in Cuba, Albania and North Korea, relied on the
peasant mentality of the majority of their populations. Beyond
making it possible for well-organized, small revolutionary groups
to take power, this attribute also enabled them to consolidate
power after the revolution and maintain control as the regime
matured.

    Unlike America's yeoman farmers, the East European, Russian
and Asian peasants were unlikely to own full title to their land
or to produce more than their family and feudal overlord consumed.
Their impoverished rural existence fostered these attributes of
peasant societies: a leveling egalitarianism that prefers to see
a neighbor fail in any efforts at improving his lot; envy that a
neighbor may be better off, coupled with a belief that he must have
cheated; suspicion of anything new, since most changes were for the
worst; rampant superstition; and, finally, an unquestioning
acceptance of a higher, distant authority, like the "Good Czar" in
Russia or his Chinese counterpart, the "Good Emperor."

    In the 1920s the Soviet leadership talked of engaging in social
engineering through education and propaganda to transform its
feudal subjects into enlightened socialists -- a "Homo sovieticus"
who would be compassionate and informed. Instead, these regimes
found it easier to control their citizens by reinforcing their
worst instincts, most of which derived from peasant attitudes.

    Citizens have been encouraged to report any suspicious behavior
by neighbors, particularly if it involved contact with foreigners.
Former Chinese Red Guards say most of the targets of the Cultural
Revolution were actually victims of petty local vendettas. In the
Soviet Union informing on one's fellow man was taken so far that
Pavlik Morozov became a national hero for ratting on his father.
And all across the socialist world workers were repeatedly assured
that they need not fear -- that no matter how little they worked,
no one would live better than they.

    These regimes have succeeded only in transplanting the peasant
mentality to an industrial economy, creating a retarded form of
industrial feudalism. It is that system that Gorbachev's
perestroika and Deng Xiaoping's "Four Modernizations" seek to
reform. But in China factory workers have shunned colleagues who
earned incentive bonuses, or gone on strike to prevent introduction
of such bonuses. Their proletarian comrades in the Soviet Union
have reportedly downed tools for higher pay, while others burned
a prosperous collective that raised pigs because it was too
successful. In Poland the economic program of Solidarity runs
directly counter to any efforts at reform. It demands higher wages,
stable prices and job security. In China efforts to decentralize
decision making have resulted in economic anarchy as local
authorities assumed the power to tax or even create money that
citizens had earlier unquestioningly granted to the Emperor or Mao.
And in all three countries housewives, unable to make the
connection between higher prices and availability, complain about
paying several times the old official prices for food that was
never available at the government-set level.

    The challenge is to change gradually the prejudices that these
regimes have cynically cultivated since taking power. Ways must be
found to teach people that a gain for one is not necessarily a loss
for another, that long-term improvements may require short-term
sacrifices, that some changes are for the good, that it is their
responsibility to keep local authorities in line. Only that
sociological change will make possible the economic and political
reforms that Gorbachev, Deng and other reformers insist are
necessary. Thus far, no Communist regime has found a way out of
this dilemma. Lenin once said, "Give me four years to teach the
children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." His
political heirs are finding that it is a difficult task indeed.