What Manner of Change in Russia?

COMMUNICATIONS

The intense interest which Isaac Deutscher’s recent writings on the Soviet Union have aroused reflects the fact that, adequately or inadequately, he has, almost alone, posed the critical questions which confront serious students of contemporary Soviet power.

A keen historian, he treats the Soviet Union as a changing social system, subject to significant alterations resulting from the forces which it has set in motion. The weakness of most of his critics is that they have attempted to repudiate his dynamic thesis with schematic and rigid definitions of a static social quantity known as “Stalinism” or “totalitarianism.” Lewis Coser’s reply to Deutscher, printed in the Summer 1954 issue of DISSENT, falls into this category of repeating the time-worn platitudes which grew out of earlier struggles to demonstrate the reactionary and class character of the Soviet system.

The time has come, it seems to me, to look beyond these early political manifestos. It is difficult, for example, to understand the widespread reluctance to accept Deutscher’s contention that the Stalinist social system, like any other, is subject to change, even within the framework of the existing dictatorship, and that many changes are taking place today which are only faintly reflected in the visible monolithic exterior. Also surprising is the expression of contempt which greeted Deutscher’s theory that the Stalinist system has unwittingly created many of the forces and conditions essential to its eventual destruction. I quite understand, too, Deutscher’s impatience with those who, because it seems to throw a temporary wrench into the machinery of the cold war, refuse to acknowledge the important changes which Stalin’s death brought to the Soviet Empire.

The future social forms of Russia must be sought in the “womb” of modern Russia-industrialized, urbanized, Stalinized, totalitarian-as different from the Russia of 1917 as the Russia of 1917 was from the Russia of the Decembrists. To say this is not to ascribe (as Deutscher would have us do) a “progressive role” to Stalinism, any more than it would be to ascribe a “progressive role” to Czarism of the 19th century. It is simply to state an indisputable historical fact.

Industrialization does not automatically produce democracy. This is undoubtedly true, and it is one 19th Century myth which any child can destroy. But it may still be said that it is one of the preconditions for functioning democracy; it does give people the tools with which, under given conditions, they can struggle for their lives and their fortunes. Mr. Coser’s contention that the industrialization of backward countries has not brought any “corresponding increase in self-awareness of the masses” is refuted by the entire history of the Far East since the end of World War II.

Increased literacy has provided the Kremlin with...