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The Soviet Constitution: myth and reality - Richard Schifter's address before the American Bar Association in San Francisco, August 10, 1987 - transcript
US Department of State Bulletin, Oct, 1987
Gorbachev and Glasnost
In light of the news that has come out of the Soviet Union within the last 8 months or so, you might ask whether we cannot expect some fundamental changes in the roles of the party and the state under Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost. My answer to this question would be "no." Gorbachev is deeply committed to carry on in the spirit of Lenin and, as I noted at the outset, dominance of the state by a single party, control of the party by a self-perpetuating leadership group, and subordination of the individual to the interests of the state, as defined by the leadership, are the essential elements of the teachings of Lenin. In fact, Gorbachev made precisely that point in his statement to the Communist Party's Central Committee Plenum in January of this year when he emphasized that "the principle of the Party rules under which the decisions of higher bodies are binding on all lower Party committees . . . remains unshakeable."
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What Gorbachev and his friends are attempting to strip from the operations of the Soviet system, in the name of glasnost, are the features of oriental despotism initially imbedded in the Leninist construct by Joseph Stalin. These include severe punishment for the mere expression of dissenting opinions, rigid limitations upon allowed literary expression, state control over all other forms of artistic endeavor, punishment for criticism of any state official or any official action, etc. Under glasnost all of these Stalinist controls are to be relaxed. The petty tyrannies of local officials are to be ended, as efforts are made to have the lower levels of the bureaucracy operate under the rule of law. But, and this is a point that must be kept in mind, there are to be limits to the relaxation. Nothing is or will be allowed that might threaten the control of the state by the party, as guaranteed by Article 6 of the Constitution. Gorbachev and his colleagues reject, as did Lenin before them, "bourgeois democracy." Their goal is to return to the practices of the Soviet system in the early 1920s, in the time of Lenin and the years immediately after his death. Their notion is to live by Lenin's precepts, not to abandon them.
It is important to note in this context that Stalinism is now being stripped from the Soviet system for the second time. It was initially exorcised by Nikita Khrushchev, back in the 1950s. It evidently sprouted again after Khrushchev's removal, even though not driven by paranoia of the same intensity as under Stalin. What the Soviets really should ask themselves is whether a Leninist system, without any checks and balances, will inevitably, over time, develop Stalinist features and whether, therefore, in the absence of fundamental change, Gorbachev's glasnost is not likely to go the way of
Khrushchev's thaw, with the country returning to another form of despotic rule.
As I have noted, the Soviet governmental system is characterized by an absence of checks and balances, by an absence of a constitutional framework which guarantees individual rights against the highest state authority. It is for that reason that the operation of the entire system is so critically dependent on the outlook and attitude of the person or persons who at any one time control the principal levers of power in the Soviet Union. As Dr. Koryagin--the Soviet psychiatrist who has recently been released from prison--has had occasion to observe, the somewhat greater freedom of expression now allowed in the Soviet Union is not guaranteed, it is permitted, and permission can at any time be withdrawn.
