The wounds of glasnost: some on the American left find glasnost a profound relief; no longer do they have to choose between intellectual integrity and support for Moscow - includes related article

National Review, Nov 24, 1989 by Arch Puddington

The Wounds of Glasnost

ALTHOUGH Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign to influence the American public has produced impressive, even astonishing, results, the Soviet leader has failed to win over all the skeptics. All the skeptics on the radical Left, that is, many of whom have come to regard the General Secretary with apprehension or hostility, to view his domestic reforms as a betrayal of Marxist principles, and to judge his "new thinking" in foreign policy an abandonment of "proletarian internationalism."

Michael Parenti, the author of various tracts on the evils of anti-Communism, sees glasnost as a form of ideological subversion. When, a few years back, Parenti was affiliated with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), he earned a reputation as an outspoken champion of what has since come to be known as the Brezhnevite "era of stagnation." (It was Parenti who once explained that Soviet consumers spent hours in queues not because of shortages, but because of an abundance of "discretionary" income.) Last year, however, Parenti was so outraged by the excesses of openness that he addressed a public letter to Moscow News, a leading reform organ known for its sharply critical assessments of the Soviet past. Parenti's objections ran the gamut from the paper's favorable coverage of a beauty contest, to its "adulatory" treatment of Andrei Sakharov ("... why did you not mention that he supported the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam?"), to its overzealous reporting of Stalin's crimes ("What source ... allows you to conclude that Stalin's victims number in the millions?"), to its positive commentaries on small capitalists and private farming. Finally, Parenti chastised the editors for publishing "unrelievedly negative" articles which convey "no recognition of the enormous accomplishments of socialism."

Moscow News has also incurred the wrath of Gus Hall, the longtime leader of the American Communist Party. At a Party gathering in Cleveland, Hall reported that he had urged "leading comrades" in Moscow to either remove the paper's editor or, failing that, "burn down the goddamn building. I mean get rid of it." Hall was also nonplussed by the declaration of Soviet journalist Aleksandr Bovin that, "Politically, capitalism has a full right to exist. And we recognize this right." To Hall, this bordered on blasphemy; he retorted that "history, justice, all-human interests, and the class struggle do not recognize [capitalism's right to exist]." Hall, please note, is nothing if not consistent, having denounced the rebellious Chinese students for their reversion to "Maoism," their pro-Americanism, and their demands for "abstract" freedoms.

Alexander Cockburn, whose columns grace the pages of The Nation and the Wall Street Journal, also yearns for the good old Brezhnev days, a period he describes as, "relatively speaking, a golden age for the Soviet working class." Cockburn's bill of indictment includes the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the allegedly exaggerated estimates of Stalin's victims [see box], and Gorbachev's introduction of the "political economy of the BMW." (Unlike Gus Hall, Cockburn was favorably disposed toward the Chinese students, but on the same grounds: that their demands reflected Maoist values.)

ONE MIGHT well wonder what's going on here. The American Left, after all, has for years insisted that a winding down of the cold war was a precondition for a "meaningful" reordering of society. The Port Huron statement, the New Left's founding document, spoke of "the enclosing fact of the cold war," while Tom Hayden complained of a "generation stultified and frustrated by intense cold-war pressures." Americans, the Left feared, could be counted on to reject radical experimentation as long as socialism was equated with Communism and Communism with evil.

In the past, this logic contributed to an atmosphere of intellectual mendacity on the Left. Communist atrocities were downplayed, explained away, or simply denied, and anti-Communists were accused of acting from political opportunism; that they might be genuinely moved by tyranny and murder was denied.

Today, even the most ardent anti-anti-Communist can speak of conditions in the Soviet Union without maneuvering the facts or denying the obvious. And indeed, many leftists honestly welcome Gorbachev's policies. But here an important distinction is necessary. Those most favorably disposed toward glasnost and perestroika have, while retaining many radical principles, abandoned the idea of a socialist transformation of American society. Furthermore, while they may remain firm critics of American "interventionism," they have lost their former enthusiasm for the promise of Third World revolution, having been thoroughly disillusioned by the killing fields and politically engineered famines.

But for those radicals who are increasingly critical of Gorbachev, socialism and Third World revolution are precisely the issues that count the most. For these unhappy "dissidents," the end of the cold war is to be welcomed only if it coincides with an America enfeebled by the "contradictions" of late capitalism, and thus ripe for socialist transformation: an America unable to hinder "social experiments" in the developing world.