New Thinking

By Bruce W. Nelan

THE NEW RUSSIANS

by Hedrick Smith

Random House; 621 pages; $24.95

When Hedrick Smith finished a three-year reporting stint in the Soviet Union in 1974, he did not even dream of writing this book. In fact, he wrote a very different one: The Russians, a best seller that depicted a Soviet society mired in lies, corruption and fear. He was convinced, he recalls in The New Russians, that "fundamental change was impossible."

His miscalculation, like that of so many other Western correspondents, was to focus on the dissidents who protested in public and largely to ignore the disaffected millions of Soviet citizens who went through the motions of their jobs while seething with resentment. That "hidden constituency" for reform even included young Communist Party officials who saw that the society was as decrepit as its bemedaled leader, Leonid Brezhnev.

At the center of The New Russians is the story of one Russian in particular, Mikhail Gorbachev. Smith deftly presents a biography of Gorbachev that puts him into the context of national malaise: clever enough to advance through the mediocrities of the party, honest enough to recognize the need for change. He believes Gorbachev has already achieved greatness by creating a civil society in a country where political passivity and dictatorship had always been the norm. Informal organizations at the grass roots and the emerging institutions of parliament, independent courts and a free press will eventually lead to a multiparty system. "I cannot imagine a new Stalinist dictatorship," Smith says. He can imagine, with equanimity, a Soviet Union that reorganizes itself after spinning off the Baltic states, Georgia, Moldavia and other bits.

Smith drives the potentially confusing narrative with such clarity that it all reads like an eyewitness account. Despite his optimism, he identifies obstacles to progress: an economy nearing collapse, violent nationalism and separatism, an obstructionist bureaucracy, a lackadaisical Russian attitude toward work, a "culture of envy." In spite of all that, he expects the patient, durable Russians to muddle through, with some setbacks, toward a democratic future 20 or 30 years away. What we have already seen he counts as nothing less than the second Russian Revolution.