John Lloyd

The Soviet Union might be represented in caricature as the Michelangelo Laocoon, hands clutching desperately at a future freedom while the serpents of the present twine around its trunk, and its feet remain embedded in the marble of the past. Such a state, where the imperatives of past, present and future are all equally powerful, is very hard to inhabit: which is why we should not dismiss the recent International Atomic Energy Agency report on Chernobyl when it says that stress caused by perestroika was responsible for more illness than the side-effects of the meltdown. Fear of living without an all-enveloping authority; fear that the Party, or forces acting in its name, will reassert just such an authority; fear on the part of the Party and the security forces that they will be the victims of a Jacquerie which will see Communists swinging from the lamp-posts – ‘We know perestroika was designed by a Communist,’ a Communist acquaintance said to me recently, ‘because it has ensured that there is a shortage of rope’ – these are all consequences of perestroika. The guarantee of work and subsistence has been broken: unemployment grows, as does relative poverty. Shortages, which were already acute, have become even more so. Where Western observers see the beginnings of free-market behaviour, ordinary people see only speculators and profiteers.’

This is written in Moscow as the Soviet Union trembles on the brink of its next period of trembling on the brink. Brink-trembling has been the Soviet leadership’s main stance over the issues on which its subjects judge it – supply, production, civil peace. It is commonly assumed that it cannot go on for ever, that the brink will finally collapse from the effect of all that trembling. But there is no good reason why it should not go on for some time yet.’

Most of the institutions of the Soviet state had their finest hour under Stalin. More than anyone else, Mikhail Gorbachev has made this clear: his efforts to force the Stalin period to act as a receptacle for much of the odium felt for Communist rule – with the Brezhnev ‘era of stagnation’ in support – have succeeded only in showing that effective Communism can have no dynamic outside of Stalinism. Communism is about the creation of utopia – otherwise defined as the end of history, or the full victory of the working class. If history does not know its script, it must be forced to act as if it did, dragged by the scruff of its neck towards an always glorious, but always receding climax. As W.H. Auden remarked in another context, those leaders who believe in the possibility of utopia would be shirking their civic duty if they did not terrorise their citizens into acceptance.’

A new plan for economic reform will shortly be decided on by the Soviet Government. It will be the fourth in less than a year: we cannot of course know whether it will last any longer than the previous three, which were withdrawn because of public criticism and divisions among the leadership. It is a common view among Soviet reformers that this is the last chance for perestroika – though there are many who believe that the last chance has gone, who no longer have any faith in perestroika, or in Mikhail Gorbachev, or indeed in the continuing existence of the Soviet Union.

It will prove very hard for Poland to find a way out of Communism, though not as painful, one hopes, as finding its way into it. But what we are now witnessing is the end: there is probably no way back, not even by armed force. This is a risky thing to write after the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981 and the recent brutalities of Tiananmen Square: total control both of the military and of all forms of political activity obviously makes possible an almost limitless exercise of power. But martial law, as Norman Davies has pointed out in The Heart of Europe, was introduced by the ‘core of the Communist establishment’, the Army leaders, because every other source of authority had been exhausted. They acted, as Warsaw Pact forces manoeuvred on Poland’s borders and off its coasts, to preserve Soviet power, secure in the knowledge that their action would be supported by that power. They could not be certain of that now. There is no longer a Communist backstop. If the Army is to be used again, it is unlikely to be by the present authorities.