The Second Revolution

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When they came to power in October 1917, many of the Bolsheviks seriously doubted that they could govern the vast, chaotic land of Russia by themselves. "We can't hold out!" cried one of the prominent leaders. Lev Kamenev. Lenin himself hoped at first that the October Revolution would last as long as the Paris Commune of 1871 --71 days--to serve as a warning to capitalism. "It is most surprising," he later said, "that there was no one there to kick us out immediately." This week, to mark the 50 years that have passed since that shaky start,*the Soviet Union is holding the biggest birthday party in its history. Beneath all the fanfare, however, beneath the orgy of self-praise and the endless litanies of statistics, today's Russia and its leaders are also troubled by doubts and uncertainty about the future.

The indisputable achievements of Soviet Russia--in space, science, education, industrial growth--have been amply chronicled in an unprecedented anniversary outpouring. From feudal czarist Russia the heirs of Marx and Lenin have created a modern state that trails only the U.S. in power and production. Moreover, though no country has ever freely elected a Communist government, they have managed to impose their ideology on one-third of the earth's population, about one billion people.

The cost of it all has been huge. The vicious civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup decimated the Russian population and laid waste the land. The Stalinist reign of terror destroyed millions of Russians, among them many of the most intelligent and talented, and put a permanent scar of guilt on the nation's psyche. Industrialization was accomplished only by forced labor and the long and severe deprivation of the populace. The self-defeating collectivization of agriculture was squeezed from the blood and brows of the stolid and melancholy peasantry. Fear has been the single most dominant characteristic of 50 years of Communism.

Despite the burden of such a legacy, Russia is changing faster and in more ways than at any time in its history. Instead of the fiery prophet Lenin, the obsessed and brutal Stalin or the bub bly and unpredictable Khrushchev, it is led today by an oligarchy of sober, cautious bureaucrats who embody the country's new striving for respectability. Under the aegis of Premier Aleksei Nikolaevich Kosygin, 63, whose hound-dog countenance is better known in the West than the two or three others with whom he shares power, the government is experimenting with economic liberalization and cautiously widening the still narrow limits of individual freedom and expression. Ideology, long the great bugaboo of Soviet life, is being sacrificed to pragmatism in order to get things done. And the regime is facing a growing gap between Russia's government and its citizens, brought about by the onslaught of technology and the rise of new and striving classes in the "classless society."

Communism's first 50 years must be judged primarily by its effects on "the fatherland of socialism," by the way in which it has affected Russian life and Russia's attitudes toward the rest of the world. TIME here examines five im portant facets of that life: 1) whether the revolution has lived up to its own promise, 2) what effects Communism has had on the Russian character, 3) the quality of life in Russia today,

4) the effectiveness of the present leadership, and 5) the thrust, or lack of it, in Russia's foreign policy.

The Unfulfilled Promise of Communism The October Revolution promised far more than it was even remotely capable of producing: nothing less than the restructuring of man himself. Despite their adulation of materialism, the Bolsheviks naively dreamed of a society governed by goodness, set up to eliminate selfishness and devoted to build ing a paradise for the humble. "Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler," said Leon Trotsky. "His body will become more harmonized, his voice more musical. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx."

Today's Soviet citizen has not quite reached those heights, and does not breathe Trotsky's name. Nor does his society in any way conform to what Marx's followers set out to build.

Though the state was supposed to fade away in time, Russia has become the world's biggest bureaucratic nightmare; the state is omnipresent and oppressive, frustrating its citizens and slowing economic progress. Instead of a classless society devoted to the interests of the workers, Communism has spawned a new privileged caste of party members and bureaucrats whose style of life includes villas, limousines, maids and even special shops in which they can buy scarce Western luxuries. In Russia to day, the worker and peasant are still where they always were: at the bottom. When it comes to the economy, the regime is desperately struggling to free itself from the uncompromising bonds of its own doctrine. In Communist theory, man's ego was to be directed toward communal and other selfless pursuits in the workers' state. But Russia's rulers have found that without incentives people work as little as they can; farmers in their own small garden plots produce more potatoes each year than do all the collective farms together.

Marxism-Leninism has proved to be both a bar to an efficient economy and a drag on agriculture. Under reforms first proposed by Kharkov University Economist Evsei Liberman, the Russians have chucked much Marxist dogma; there are now incentive bonuses for workers and farmers and greater discretion for factory managers.

The Marxist belief in the solidarity of socialist states has been rudely shattered both by Russia's dispute with China and by the independent ways adopted by the countries of Eastern Europe. The Communist monolith has crumbled into testy denominationalism, and the Marxist mystique of Communism's historical inevitability has not fared much better. Revolution has not hit the Western countries, as Marx predicted, nor taken root in such misery-laden former colonial lands as India.

In such countries as East Germany and Hungary, Communist regimes are maintained only by the presence of Russian soldiers or the vigilance of local troops and state police. Many new or underdeveloped nations feel that, whatever lures it may possess, Communism comes with too high a price tag of coercion and terror.

Like a giant moth attempting to break out of a cocoon, Soviet Communism is trying to rid itself of a doctrine conceived a century ago in a far different world. Though Lenin had to revise Marx to fit the Russian pattern, it was Nikita Khrushchev who launched the official decline of the doctrine. Faced with the necessity of solving countless economic and social problems, today's Soviet planners find such Marxist theories as class revolution and "the dictatorship of the proletariat" just plain nuisances. The Chinese are right, of course: the Russians are revisionists. In a very real sense, Russia has survived Marxism more than it has been formed by it. "The revolution is over," says Glasgow University Sovietologist Alec Nove. "Its rationalities, its logic, have little further relevance so far as economic organization is concerned."

Communism & the Russian Character

A half century of constant exposure to propaganda and an enforced ignorance of the rest of the world have had their effect on Russia's citizens, but the Communists have succeeded neither in expunging nor in radically shifting their deep human character traits. The Communist regime has obviously convinced most Russians of the virtues of social ism and persuaded them to take a class-conscious view of history. By its achievement, it seems to have given them more self-esteem and pride in their country than the mass of Russians have ever had before. Gone is the obsequious muzhik whose manners were formed by centuries of serfdom. No longer pervasive is the type that Lenin belittled as "the exhausted, hysterical, misery-mongering intellectual who, publicly beating his breast, cries: 'I am bad, I am vile.' "

The Russian's outlook has perhaps been altered more by industrialization and urbanization than by any methodical attempt to reshape his consciousness. Nonetheless, he is basically what he has been for centuries. He retains much of his shirokaya dusha, or boundless generosity, his emotionalism, his stolid endurance, his hatred and distrust of authority and, at the same time, his deep need for it. Despite widespread atheism and official disapproval, religion is proving increasingly difficult to root out. The Baptists, who appeal to the Russian soul with their fundamentalism, are growing steadily, now have more than 3,000,000 members. Even if its inhabitants rarely attend a religious service, practically every Russian village still celebrates the name day of the local church's patron saint.

During the Stalin period, most Russians managed to acquire an official self that they presented to all but their closest friends: they were Bolshevized into becoming suspicious, stilted and somber in their dealings with others. Today's less cruel but still existing repression, says Princeton Historian James Billington, "breeds exasperation and contempt more than terror." But if the Russian is somewhat more open now, he is still burdened by what University of Toronto Sociologist Lewis Feuer calls "socialist pessimism": the feeling that frustration, pain and deprivation are in the nature of things and that nothing can be done about them. This attitude, conditioned by the endless bureaucracy and the regimentation of life, may be partly responsible for Russia's declining birth rate.

Still, Feuer, who recently spent half a year in Russia doing research, believes that another philosophy is struggling to emerge. Freed of the terror, encouraged by the thought that liberalization may continue, unburdened of at least some of the Marxist mythology, today's Russia is witnessing the gradual reassertion of "the values of individualism, of questioning, of the religious spirit, of the ethical personality, of human relations transcending party comradeship." It is difficult to guess just how far the Kremlin will allow this trend to go. But its existence nonetheless proves that the Russian character has survived Communism with a small corner still devoted to the independent perception of the truth.

The Quality of Russian Life It has become a Western cliche to say that the Russians are better off today than ever before. Yet, despite its industrial muscle, Russia generally lags behind not only the Western European countries but also behind most of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe in the quality and variety of the goods--and the divertissements--that it offers its people. Marx foresaw a turning point in the evolution of socialism when quantity of output would be transmuted into quality. Like so many other of his predictions, that has not come to pass.

For all its productive power, for all its feats in space, the Soviet economy seems unable to produce a doorknob that always turns, a door that closes properly, a light fixture that works on the first try, a toilet that flushes consistently. The average Russian's clothes are shabby, ill-fitting and expensive; it takes half a month's wages to buy a pair of shoes. His diet is dependent on the seasons and painfully monotonous. On the average, the Russian has only nine square yards of space in which to live, and young newlyweds normally stay with their parents for the first few years of their marriage. Only one Russian in 228 has a car, compared with one out of 2.5 people in the U.S. Even when the Soviet Union triples its output of autos to 600,000 in the early 1970s, when a new plant to be set up by Fiat in Russia will be running, it will make fewer cars than the U.S. produced in 1917.

The picture does have its lighter tones. Under the present government, wages are rising and the standard of living has improved everywhere--even deep in Siberia, where log cabins in the muddy villages now have TV aerials on their roofs. As a citizen of the Soviet Union, the Russian enjoys a large measure of security and many social benefits. Both husband and wife must normally take jobs to support a family, but the Russian gets high-quality medical and hospital care for nothing, pays practically no rent, can go to a university free--if he can pass the entrance exams--and is entitled to a pension at age 60 (55 for women) of between 50% and 100% of his former income. The entire country is gradually being put on a five-day work week.

Meantime, the vast reshuffling of the Soviet economy has proceeded at an almost break neck pace. Since Economist Liberman made his first proposals five years ago, more than 5,500 factories, accounting for one-third of the country's total industrial output, have been converted to a system that makes both managers' and workers' incomes heavily dependent upon profit and, in consequence, on the level of sales. This has spurred a flurry of interest in the consumer's tastes and purchasing power and even an official campaign to introduce radio commercials and improve product packaging, window displays, neon lighting, and other once-deprecated Western advertising techniques.

As the economic reforms move forward, Russian life is undergoing the greatest degree of liberalization since the revolution's early days. There is increasing freedom of speech and opinion--though in a much smaller amount than in the West.

After years of jamming, Russians are now allowed to hear the BBC, Radio Liberty and other Western radio stations without interference. The youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda has taken to giving teen-agers advice on such formerly taboo subjects as "How short should a miniskirt be?" The socialist answer: Every girl should decide for herself, depending upon the attractiveness of her legs and the chilliness of the weather. Public-opinion polls, which were long banned, have suddenly become a craze. One question not being asked: Do you approve of the job that Premier Kosygin and his colleagues are doing?

Despite the recent relaxation, life in the Soviet Union has a boring and sometimes even a brutish quality. Outside his home, the Russian cannot walk, sit clown or breathe without seeing a slogan, a flag, a statistic, a portrait of Lenin, a piece of heroic Soviet statuary. He is rarely allowed to tour outside the Soviet Union by himself, even in other socialist countries, and he must show an internal passport when he travels within his own country. A Russian spends much of his free time standing in queues, where he must push and heave to defend his place. Partly because of boredom, alcoholism is widespread; every park in Moscow has its nightly yield of inert bodies that are dragged off to sobering-up stations.

Russians remain at the mercy of the party's pervasive presence--and its caprices. The secret police are still a powerful institution, even if their more brutal techniques have been curbed. In the courts, the regime lately takes more care to keep an outward show of legality, but it easily ignores the law when convenient; the party, after all, is above the law. Some dissenters against the regime have been classed as "parasites" and sent to prison under broad vagrancy laws. Others have been diagnosed as mentally ill and ordered confined in psychiatric hospitals.

The most restive Russians are the intellectuals, who find increasingly unbearable a society in which creativity has been so consistently sacrificed to patriotic duty. For the most part, the regime continues to cosset compliant and unadventurous writers and artists, and to censor and chastise those whose work strays far from the official art form known as "socialist realism." For those who may ever have doubted it, Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furtseva recently gave assurances that the party is not about to reverse its literary policy and publish books that contain "unjust generalizations," such as Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Last week the regime amnestied tens of thousands of petty criminals, but it did not free Writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who are serving long sentences in hard-labor colonies for publishing abroad works critical of the government.

Few people are any longer executed for political crimes, but the legacy of Stalinism has made an enduring impression on the everyday lives of most Russians. In the fourth volume of his memoirs, entitled Post-War Years: 1945-54, Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote that "it is far easier to change policy and the economic system than to alter human consciousness." Russians, said Ehrenburg, who died in September, "have been unable to divest themselves of a sense of constriction, of fear, of casuistry, of survivals from the past." Today, most Russians long only for a quiet life, a little more freedom, a few more privileges, a bit more self-respect. Despite all the anniversary hoopla, the fund of enthusiasm produced by the revolution is almost bankrupt.

Effectiveness of the Present Leadership

"Even a cook can rule a state," Lenin once proclaimed in his dogmatic fashion. Today, Russia is ruled by committee rather than by a single man--and thus is afflicted with too many cooks in the kitchen. They are an elite of highly trained and sophisticated technical managers, who call themselves a kollektivnost rukovodstva, (collectivity of leadership). Though they continue to follow the general policies set down by Khrushchev, they have replaced the lush disorder and impulsiveness of his personalized government with more deliberate, rational procedures. They move only after elaborate consultations, try to be not only secretive but faceless as well, and generally appear cautious, bureaucratic and dull.

This collegial leadership is dominated by a troika made up of Premier Kosygin, Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, 60, and President Nikolai Podgorny, 64, the chief of state. A fourth man also regularly joins the decision-making executive committee of the eleven-man Politburo: Party Ideologist Mikhail Suslov, 65, whose position seems to have stayed almost the same through several changes in leadership. Of the top four, none was old enough to have had a major role in the revolution, and all but Suslov were trained as technocrats: Kosygin was a textile engineer and factory manager, Brezhnev a surveyor and metallurgical engineer.

The top men are well balanced against one another, and have divided up the job of ruling Russia. As party boss, Brezhnev controls vast patronage and for this reason is undoubtedly the most powerful member of the group. He also concentrates on the reform of Soviet agriculture and has overall responsibility for the increasingly delicate task of maintaining relations with the other Communist countries. Premier Kosygin is a sort of executive vice president who runs the regime's industrial liberalization, takes care of the Russian consumer--whose needs this year for the first time are given precedence over heavy industry--and handles the Kremlin's relations with the U.S. and other Western countries. Podgorny deals with the Arab countries and the underdeveloped nations.

The present regime overthrew Khrushchev not only because it found many of his actions boorish and his policies impetuous, but also because he had a way of forcing his will on the Politburo and the Central Committee.

Nowadays, the balance in the troika is such that no one man is likely to impose his will against the others. A majority vote in the Politburo decides policy on many issues. Even Brezhnev was dealt a setback recently when the Politburo cut back by 13% his fiveyear, $45 billion crash investment program in agriculture. Kosygin was reported to have opposed bringing Sinyavsky and Daniel to trial but to have been outvoted by his colleagues. The move toward high-level democratization has in no way been institutionalized, however, and it is still possible that one man could again gather all the power into his own hands.

Brezhnev and Kosygin are in agreement about liberalization in Russia, but Brezhnev takes ideology more into consideration and generally prefers a relatively tougher line. Kosygin is more practical and realistic and, though no liberal in the Western sense (both he and Brezhnev served time in Stalin's ca dres), is more or less looked to by the new intelligentsia as their best hope for further relaxation of party control. Suslov is more of a hardliner, while Podgorny has the strongest liberal tendencies of all. All four distrust the ambitious younger leaders, at whom they recently struck a blow by removing Aleksandr Shelepin, 49, an ex-head of the secret police, from his job as Deputy Premier and Party Secretary and demoting him to an obscure and less powerful post as head of the Russian trade unions. Shelepin had surrounded himself with a group of former Komsomol (youth league) officials who are hawkish in foreign policy, favor strict control of the intellectuals and are known as "metal eaters" because they stress heavy industry rather than consumer goods.

The Kremlin's rulers have not been able to keep up with the emergence of such new social classes as the industrial managers, the cultural and scientific intelligentsia and the new military elite. Because they seem uncertain about just how far they want reform to go--and how much freedom Russians can be trusted with--there is a growing gap between the regime and Russian society. "The current leaders have no moral authority," says William Griffith, professor of political science at M.I.T. "They are regarded by intellectuals as a combination of bureaucratic idiots and criminals. There is a terrible alienation from the government."

Finding men able to fill the top jobs may turn out to be the party's biggest problem. The system tends to elevate men of restricted vision, the technocrats and the apparatchik! (party career men), and to submerge and frustrate the more brilliant and innovative thinkers. "The dichotomy," says State Department Kremlinologist Zbigniew Brzezinski, "is between a mediocre public leadership and an increasingly talented society." Just as they have turned against ideology, the brighter young Russians are now reluctant to go in for a party career. In an otherwise routine and un interesting anniversary speech last week, Brezhnev went so far as to refer to his regime as Russia's "New Frontier." The use of the slogan of John F. Kennedy's Administration may have been more than a coincidence: many Russian youths are admirers of the late U.S. President.

If history moves at a pace that demands quick and imaginative solutions, the Soviet Union may be in for trouble. For one thing, committee rule rarely produces a set of clear principles. For another, the collegial leaders find it difficult to move forward resolutely when they must continually look over their shoulders. The regime seems to have postponed a lot of tough decisions until after the anniversary celebrations, including the promulgation of a new Soviet constitution (the third since the revolution) and the ratification of a new five-year economic plan. Some Sovietologists feel that the stresses and strains within the government have grown so strong that the present leadership cannot survive much longer.

Russia's Relations with the World

While Russia's internal policies have long served to create a cowed and dispirited people, its foreign policy over the years has been one of the world's greatest mischiefmakers. Since World War II, it has caused countless crises and acted as a continual threat to world peace. Today, it is much more inclined to caution than before, partly because collegial leadership breeds indecision and partly because Russian foreign policy has suffered some notable defeats in recent years. One of the reasons that Nikita Khrushchev was ousted was his foreign adventurism, which led to such Soviet setbacks as the forced withdraw all of its missiles from Cuba. Since then, Russia has had to pay the cost of backing the Arabs in their Middle East debacle and has seen its onetime chief ally, China, become a vituperative and potentially dangerous enemy right on its borders.

The men who rule Russia today make a much more realistic assessment of American power than their predecessors, but they are divided over just how to deal with it--Brezhnev and Suslov being more militant than Kosygin and Podgorny. The Viet Nam war, of course, poisons U.S.-Soviet relationships. The Russians were originally willing to consider South Viet Nam as more or less within the U.S. sphere of influence, even though they regularly aided Hanoi. When the U.S. began intensive bombing of North Viet Nam in 1965, the Kremlin's line on the war swerved noticeably; Russia had to get mad or suffer the disdain of the rest of the Communist world. It not only vastly increased aid to the North but stiffened its attitude toward contacts with the U.S.

Despite its menacing tone, the Kremlin seems anxious to avoid any serious confrontation with the U.S. Instead, it is working for the breakup of the Western Alliance and aiming at the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe. It finds Charles de Gaulle an invaluable if unintentional ally in its endeavor, and is striving to divide the U.S. from its European allies, particularly the Germans. The Russians are also thinking more and more of establishing themselves as a Mediterranean power, an old dream of the Czars that shows how firmly Communism in Russia has become wedded to traditional national interests. To furbish its image in the so-called "third world," Russia has floated nearly $6 billion in loans and credits to other countries since 1954, but it is learning, as the U.S. has, that these nations are usually greedy for more aid and ungrateful when they get it. As a result, a debate is going on in the Kremlin, as it is on Capitol Hill, about the value and aim of foreign aid.

One of the Kremlin's biggest worries is the disintegration of Communist unity. Of the 14 Communist states, five are not represented by their top leaders at this week's celebration. Albania rejected the invitation, and China did not stoop to reply, while Cuba's Fidel Castro, North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh and North Korea's Kim II Sung sent others in their place. The schisms are all the more serious because they come at a time when Russia's rulers lack the imagination and daring to formulate a policy to deal with them.

The Kremlin merely drifts and demurs, absorbing in stoic silence both the gibes of the Chinese and such steady irritants as Castro, whom it continues to give $1,000,000 a day in aid. Moreover, the world's revolutionaries no longer look to Russia or its leaders for inspiration or recall its once-stirring exhortation: "Workers of the World, Unite!" As Communism and advancing technology have learned to coexist, Russia has lost its role as a revolutionary beacon.

The Chinese never tire of pointing this out, and the Kremlin obviously considers them one of its enduring headaches. But here, too, it is divided between those who want a complete break and those who urge new explorations toward rapprochement. The result is that as in so many other fields, Russia does not really have a policy toward China. The immobility of so much Russian foreign policy, many Sovietologists believe, is largely a result of the fact that the Soviet leadership crisis has not yet been clearly solved and that the Kremlin can hardly tell what it wants to do abroad until it has decided where it wants to go at home.

Where does Russia go from here? One popular theory is that the Communist and capitalist systems are gradually converging, as the U.S. Government provides more social benefits and the Russians adopt more of the trappings of capitalism. That theory has several serious flaws. Evsei Liberman himself denies it, pointing out that such loosely used terms as profit have an entirely different meaning in the Soviet Union than in the West. Also, economics cannot exist in a political vacuum, and the two systems are light-years apart philosophically. The Soviet Union is a socialist state that still controls all the means of production--and it has no more intention of changing that situation than the U.S. has of embracing it. Moreover, the Soviet state holds virtually all the power in Russia and can bestow or withdraw freedoms at a whim, while protections against an arbitrary state are built deep into the law in the pluralistic society of the U.S.

The Soviet government has adopted a few capitalist devices like incentives simply because the needs of modern technology make them desirable. Pressures from the new class of technocrats are also largely responsible for the loosening up of Soviet society. If people express themselves more openly in the Soviet Union today, it is certainly not because the leadership is committed to eventual democracy, but because a more varied and complicated economy requires the men who run it to be in the habit of asking questions.

The men in the Kremlin possess power that is potentially limitless and unrestrained in its exercise; they could blow the whistle on reform any day and reimpose at least some of the tight discipline of the past. Once fully launched, however, liberalization may not be so easy to stop. The vast reorganization of the Soviet economy and the increasing force of technology are producing a second revolution in the habits and outlook of the people that the Kremlin will be hard-pressed to reverse. If that revolution continues to work its influence, arousing among Russians a longing to join the modern world and giving them a freer voice to articulate that longing, it could ultimately be of more significance than even the October Revolution.

*Russia celebrates the anniversary on Nov. 7 because in 1917 it kept time by the Julian calendar, which ran 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the West. It adopted the Gregorian in 1918.

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