Change under Communism

AFTER THE 1956 UPHEAVALS in the Communist world, and with the open outbreak of conflict between the Soviet and Chinese regimes, it became difficult to maintain the old belief that Communism was unvaried and unchanging. Yet, no matter how much things Communist change, much remains the same. Quite apart from fundamental matters such as dictatorship, you still can’t seem to buy fresh vegetables and fruit during the long Russian winter—unless you are part of a very small privileged group. One recalls, years back, the special delight of a diplomatic reception in Moscow where you got fresh oranges and hid them in your pockets to bring home to the kids. There was some trepidation about how the secret police might view those bulging pockets, but it was worth the embarrassment. Today, 17 years later, one talks with correspondents fresh from the Russian steppes, and they still get their oranges at diplomatic parties. As a Western correspondent completes a tour of duty in Moscow and returns to sum up his impressions, there’s a depressing similarity between his story and those written during the years of the transition from “socialism” to “communism.”

Here’s a volume of essays by various scholars that analyzes changes in the Communist countries since the death of Stalin. Chalmers Johnson develops the thesis of a “built-in boomerang” in Communist economic modernization. Communist regimes are usually devoted to industrialization since they have been established mainly in backward, agrarian countries. But once the regime has progressed to jet aircraft, computers, and nuclear reactors, the old controls are no longer adequate. It is forced, Johnson notes, to relax the terror that forms the major control of totalitarianism. And the reasons flow from the modernization process itself. Among those cited by Johnson are: efficient manufacture of advanced technical products requiring a long developmental period, which in turn requires tranquility; the need for foreign trade dictates some accommodation to the international system; there is a need to compete in innovation and “innovators may not be ideologically pure. . . .” Such reasons impel Communist regimes seeking modernization toward a market system. But Johnson is not a dogmatist, and he recognizes that “neither the market system nor Communist command economies have proved particularly efficient in managing today’s unprecedentedly complex economies.”