TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/081489/08148900.027

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 8KB | 139 lines

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