The System

THE COMMUNIST PARTY APPARATUS by Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov. 422 pages. Regnery. $10.

In 1961, the author of this book read an article in Kommunist, an official Communist Party periodical published in Moscow, deploring the fact that the party structure had never been thoroughly analyzed in print. Then and there, Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov decided to correct the oversight. The result will not reap any literary honors, for it is heavy-footed. And, as Avtorkhanov himself admits, the book will not win the Lenin Peace Prize either. Em bedded in its dense pages is the conviction that the free world can never get along with Communist Russia.

In the light of recent relaxations under Russia's new regime, not everyone will share Avtorkhanov's dark prospect. But whatever his conclusions, he is singularly qualified to examine the anatomy of Communist power. Avtorkhanov is a cured Communist, born 56 years ago in the Chechen region. He rose steadily through the party apparatus until a certain independence of thought --he opposed Stalin's plan to establish kolkhozes, or collective farms, in the non-Russian areas--nominated him for purging. After five years in Siberia, where he was sent without trial, he joined the abortive 1943 Chechen revolt against Communist rule and later escaped into Germany. Since then, as a founding member of Munich's Institute for the Study of the U.S.S.R. and a professor of political science at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Oberammergau, he has been pounding away at Communism with archangelic zeal.

Coexistence Myth. Avtorkhanov's insider's view of Communist Russia re lies heavily on his contention that the Communist Party is the state. Its 11.8 million members control a nation of 230 million people. The party membership is in turn controlled by the Party Central Committee in Moscow--195 members. And the committee is largely controlled by the first secretary himself.

To enforce discipline and assure permanent control, the party sows the land with 3,000,000 paid propagandists and 3,000,000 "inspectors." Even its spies have spies. Against this party apparatus, the government itself counts merely as a pro forma showcase structure existing only to do the party's bidding. As Avtorkhanov writes: "A modern Commu nist state can exist without its official state apparatus, but it cannot exist without its party apparatus."

In this dualistic state, the Foreign Minister, for example, is a figurehead. The true Foreign Minister is the party, whose foreign policy, insists Avtorkhanov, has not changed since Lenin's time. Coexistence, he adds, is no more than a tactical pause in the grand and unalterable plan to turn the world into a Communist state.

"Soviet foreign policy regards its obligations as conditional," Avtorkhanov writes. "The Communists themselves will decide when the time has come to put an end to 'coexistence.' " His main authority, among many others, is a pronouncement of the Seventh Party Congress in 1918, still in effect: "The Central Committee is given the authority to break at any time all peace treaties with imperialistic and bourgeois governments and declare war on them."

Perturbation-Proof. Avtorkhanov's book may tempt some readers to conclude that Communism carries the seeds of its own failure. The author acknowl edges that Russia has flopped as an industrialist (half the state enterprises are run at a loss), as. a farmer, even as a seminal example to other Communist states. Writes Avtorkhanov of the deepening schism between Moscow and Peking: "The contradictions are so deep that in perspective they make war between these two Communist states, if not unavoidable, at least fully possible."

Avtorkhanov concedes that Brezhnev and Kosygin have granted what amounts to unprecedented concessions to democracy. Russian industry has introduced the profit motive. The Red army, which played a hand in Khrushchev's fall, has been given political rights and powers that, for the first time, crack the monolithic power structure of the state. But Avtorkhanov warns that none of these alterations should give much comfort to the West. Russian Communism, he says, comes perilously near to being self-perpetuating, proof against every perturbation beneath it: "The party apparatus is superior not only to the state but to the party itself. Its solidarity and its stability do not depend upon an individual or upon a few individuals but on a structural system. Communist dictators come and go, but the Communist dictatorship remains."

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