Soviet bureaucracy immersed in turmoil

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" Let the administrators stand in line at the ordinary stores... that way we'd get rid of the long lines which people are fed up with."

N. Nicolaiev-a worker i from Kazan SPCI Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

A pledge to combat the inertia of the bureaucratic system is what brought Gorbachev to the top almost two years ago in the power struggle within the Soviet bureaucracy. He promised to drive out the bureaucratic drones and eliminate waste.

At a closed meeting of Soviet writers, on June 19 last year, Gorbachev exposed the crisis of the bureaucracy and the turmoil within it. What he said has not yet been published in the Soviet Union, but notes taken at the meeting have veen publishea in curope, first in Italy and later elsewhere. Excerpts first appeared in The New York Times on Dec. 22.

Even these snatches reveal the convulsive state of the bureaucratic regime.

Gorbachev told the writers that "a very profound and serious struggle lies ahead." Why?

"Take Gosplan [the government agency in charge of production plans]," Gorbachev said. "For Gosplan there exist no authorities, no general secretaries, no central committees. They do what they want. The situation they like best is for someone to come into their private office and ask for a million, for 20 tractors, for 40,000—to beg them."

Gorbachev said, "We have very many people who take advantage of their position. Nothing is exploited as much as official position."

He continued, "Our enemies...have begun a campaign against our leadership using all means, including terror. They write about the apparat that broke Khrushchev's neck, and about the apparat that will now break the neck of the new leadership."

"Disordered economy"

"The economy is very disordered," Gorbachev said to the writers. "We lag in all indices. In 1969 we had a problem in Stavropol-what to do with meat and milk. We were awash in butter. Today there is nothing. The relations between money and goods, income and goods have been lost.

"We have forgotten how to work. Not only that, we have forgotten how to work in democratic conditions. This is very difficult.

"Not a few people are drunks, profiteers, embezzlers, but mostly, of course, bureaucrats-those people who do not want to part with their rights."

What must be done?

"Those who think that we can restructure in a month or two are naïve!" he said. "This has taken shape over years and will demand massive efforts and titanic labors. If we don't involve the people, nothing will come of it.

All our plans depend on influencing the people."

Gorbachev invoked the Leninist tradition. "Why do I constantly sit with volumes of Lenin, looking through them, looking for approaches? Because it is never too late to consult with Lenin."

He talked about the meetings of the Politburo [of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]. "There are clashes, arguments," he said. "For two, three years we postponed things, but now we want to act."

Bureaucratic dilemma

These revelations of Gorbachev grasp at the problems facing the Soviet bureaucracy. Yet the bureaucracy is incapable of reconciling these problems. It doesn't know how or where to act.

"The restructuring is progressing with great difficulty," Gorbachev said. "We have no opposition party. How then can we control ourselves? Only through criticism and self-criticism. Most important-through glasnost (openness). We're learning here, too.

"We're restructuring everything, from the general secretary to the rank-and-file communist. Democratism without glasnost does not exist. At the same time, democracy without limits is anarchy. That's why it will be difficult."

This is the terrible dilemma of every bureaucrat. They call upon the masses for help to make their system work. They speak in the name of democracy. But they don't want to give up their privileges. Proletarian "democracy," if properly controlled, is alright. But too much decision-making by the mass of people becomes "anarchy."

Deep ferment

Since Gorbachev made his appeal to the Soviet writers, a series of important developments occurred as the old year closed out Un Dec. 20, Gorbachev phoned the exiled dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov to inform him that his cruel exile to the isolated city of Gorky, where he had been kept under virtual house arrest since 1980, was ended. Sakharov was invited back to Moscow to resume his work as a physicist. Also Sakharov's companion, Yelena G. Bonner, was released and invited back to Moscow...

Almost simultaneous with the announcement that Sakharov and Bonner were released, the Soviet press agency Tass reported riots in Alma-Ata, capital of the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan. Several hundred students were said to have been involved in anti-Russian rioting.

Roy Medvedev, the well-known author and critic of the bureaucracy, was reported from Moscow as having speculated that the unusually frank report of the rioting may have been an excuse by the bureaucracy to begin a more extensive crackdown on political cronyism among ethnic Kazhaks and send a warning to ethnic minorities in other republics.

Another example of the palsied hand of the bureaucracy and efforts by the Gorbachev faction to "restructure" is the open discussion of public issues in the Soviet press.

This centers upon disputes, wrangles, and delays in the construction of hydroelectric power plants and irrigation projects. Such projects involve adjoining republics in the USSR and are complicated by conflicting national interests and cultural heritage.

Trotsky's heritage

In his efforts to cut a path through the welter of bureaucratic confusion and sloth, Gorbachev said he consults the writings of Lenin. He should also spend some time with the writings of Leon Trotsky, where the problems and dangers created by the bureaucracy are dealt with more extensively.

Lenin was only beginning to devote full attention to the alarming growth of the bureaucracy in 1923. He formed a bloc with Trotsky at that time to curb the bureaucracy which had already found its representative in the person of Joseph Stalin, who as general secretary of the party was protecting bureaucratic privileges.

Lenin died in 1924, before the struggle against the Stalin degeneracy could be organized, and Trotsky was left almost alone in the top leadership of the Bolshevik Party to continue the tasks that he and Lenin had set for themselves.

For the next 16 years, until his assassination in Mexico by an agent of Stalin, Trotsky continued his unremitting struggle against the reactionary policies and political crimes of the Soviet bureaucracy. -Trotsky's collected writings, all of which are available to the Gorbachev faction in the bureaucracy but almost unknown to the Soviet public, trace the degeneration of the Soviet state under the impact of the rising bureaucracy from 1923 to the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact and the start of World War II.

In 1936 Trotsky, then in exile, wrote his most famous analysis and indictment of the Soviet bureaucracy, "The Revolution Betrayed." There he made a prediction:

"On the historic order of the day stands not the peaceful socialist development of 'one country,' but a series of world disturbances, wars, and revolutions. Disturbances are inevitable also in the domestic life of the Soviet Union. If the bureaucracy was compelled in its struggle for a planned economy to dekulakize the kulak, the working class will be compelled to debureaucratize the bureaucracy."

Much has happened in the last half century to confirm this...

Fissures in the bureaucracy When Stalin, the blood-thirsty tyrant in the Kremlin, died in 1953, his heirs divided in a fierce faction struggle in which Khrushchev emerged the victor. Some other contenders were shot or otherwise disappeared.

In 1956, Khrushchev exposed some of the crimes of Stalin, "rehabilitated" some of the most prominent victims who had been murdered, and released thousands of others from concentration camps. There were signs at that time of a new awakening of intellectuals, students, and workers in the Soviet Union.

This anti-bureaucracy sentiment and striving for greater individual freedom extended to the states of Eastern Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, where mass uprisings occurred during this period and were brutally suppressed...

This series of developments within the Soviet orbit strengthened the hand of a regrouped right-wing faction in Moscow, fearful that relaxation of bureaucratic controls would lead to a genuine working-class revolution against the bureaucracy.

Khrushchev was removed from office in 1964, replaced by Brezhnev, the cautious and conservative bureaucrat. For nearly 20 years, dissidents were hounded, initiative suppressed.

By 1980, with the rise of the magnificent Solidarnosc movement of the Polish working class, it was clear that a new resurgence was in the making and that important sectors of the new socially powerful Soviet working class would sooner or later become affected.

That time has now arrived... When Gorbachev says, "the society is ripe for change," he knows what he is