Children of Communism : On Georgi Arbatov’s ‘The System’

Long the leading Soviet and now Russian expert on the United States, Georgi Arbatov, as his insightful insider’s memoir attests, has dined at some elaborately spread tables with the likes of George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev and David Rockefeller. Oysters were shucked, caviar spread and arms-control deals cut at a dizzying pace. But a couple of weeks ago when I popped in at his Moscow-based Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada for an impromptu lunch, all I could get was cabbage cooked three different ways.

The Institute, formerly a unit of the once elite and well-funded Soviet Academy of Sciences, is financed, barely, by the cash-starved Russian government which it strongly supported during its time of troubles. The world-renowned Institute is no longer a bustling center of energy; indeed, like much of Russia these days, it seems to be functioning on auto-pilot. Here, like everywhere in the remnants of the empire, well-educated and ambitious people show up for their duties, only to stare at the walls of institutes and ministries bereft of purpose.

It is not that they are behind the curve of change in their own considerably reduced country. Far from it. I can recall Arbatov in an interview for The Times, back when Soviet President Yuri Andropov was dying, predicting the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet system as we knew it. His new memoir--”The System” (Times Books: $25; 400 pp.)--provides a detailed, believable, almost diary-like insight into the striving of an inside reformer working to change a system he knew to be disastrously untenable.

Arbatov was one of those who lured Leonid Brezhnev to the arms-control table and fought mightily with the military-industrial complex of both countries in an effort to keep him there. I suppose it is safe to say now that he was a good source of information--when that took considerable risk--on the larger idiocies of the Soviet military program.

An early and enthusiastic supporter of Gorbachev, Arbatov first broke ranks during that fateful night at the Central Committee when Boris Yeltsin resigned and was roundly denounced by the party faithful. The transcript does show that Arbatov was alone in rising to blunt the attacks, comparing them with the “old ways.” He hesitated to break fully with Gorbachev, sending him a number of prescient letters, portions of which are reprinted in his book, warning of the danger of a right-wing coup. And in the closing months of the Gorbachev era, Arbatov made the break and became a Yeltsin adviser. It was in that capacity that he was in Helsinki during the coup.

His institute, however, was in the forefront of the struggle to protect the Russian White House during the days of the coup, and it has a certificate of commendation from the Russian Parliament to prove it. So yes, they have been on the right side of dismantling the old. But where they and other experts on the West may have fallen down is in educating the new leadership and public on the difficulty of becoming like the rest of the industrialized world.

Arbatov understood all too well the failings of Soviet totalitarianism in comparison to the economy and politics of the West. It is clear from this candid and nuanced memoir that the movement for change had been developing steadily inside the highest corridors of power ever since the death of Stalin. Arbatov not only provides considerable evidence for the controversial notion that this change would have come about without foreign pressure, he insists that the U.S. military buildup during the Reagan years actually impeded this development.

Ever since the first years of Leonid Brezhnev, Arbatov has served as a Marco Polo figure for the Soviet political Establishment, journeying to the West and returning with glowing reports about its achievements, from well-stocked Radio Shack stores to the workings of the Bill of Rights. The consummate insider, he was nonetheless an advocate of profound reform, and in the post-Stalin decades found many powerful sponsors, including Brezhnev, Andropov (to whom he was close) and Gorbachev. Although he defended his government’s line, sometimes ad nauseam, at innumerable international conferences and to the Western media, I for one never had any doubt that this was one Marxist who remembered the sage’s words that bourgeois capitalism was a necessary stage in the transition to socialism.

Arbatov and his colleagues were painfully aware that pre-communist Russian capitalism had not yet provided the economic base that made the welfare state of the West possible. They well understood the need for the risks, uncertainty and indeed relative deprivation needed to feed the rapacious engine of the capitalist market.

But they grossly underestimated, indeed simply ignored, the difficulty of reversing history and moving from the command society to a deliberately fragmented and competitive one. They did not prepare their countrymen adequately for the shock in the shock-therapy move to capitalism still being pursued by the Yeltsin government, albeit with considerable hesitation. A legitimate fear of the return of the party hack right led the reformers to play down the complexities in the new order they were promoting. A fascination with the mechanism of the laissez-faire market ignored the blunt truth that modern successful economies evolved in a third way: with critical government involvement. Now, and maybe too late, Yeltsin seems to be attempting to rescusitate the baby that was thrown out with the bathwater.

What remains of their country is fast becoming an ungovernable place where life for the ordinary citizen is both economically harsher and, with crime on the rise, socially more dangerous than it has been since the aftermath of the Great War. Billions in Western loans and aid have simply disappeared without noticeable impact on the economy.

So how is an Americanist like Arbatov, who has spent a lifetime understanding and even, albeit in subtle ways, promoting the ways of the West to his countrymen, to explain this turn of events? Although that is not the task of this book, which deals primarily with the pre-Gorbachev history, “The System” provides a clue to the current haplessness of Soviet intellectuals and indeed of their entire society.

It is a society that, while no longer functional, is still governed by people who once knew how to do something very well. They were experts on survival and personal growth, but the system they served, as Arbatov’s family history indicates, promoted and then abruptly and relentlessly undermined both. His father, a Jew, was a decorated fighter in the revolution, only to find himself in a remote prison camp under Stalin. Nonetheless, the younger Arbatov still attempted to vainly play the game, was wounded and decorated in World War II, and raced through the party schools and bureaucracy only to find himself continuously the object of suspicion.

So we know, as “The System” reminds us, what he and many other Establishment reformers were against in the old system. But we do not know what they are now for.

Arbatov bitterly faults Gorbachev for not having moved more quickly and decisively to attack the military-industrial elite, holding him responsible for their continued dominance, to this day, of the Russian and other republic economies. Yet Arbatov has condemned as simplistic and unrealistic the monetarism of Yegor Gaidar, the acting Russian premier. What is the middle ground?

The basic problem is that Russia is a country with first-world expectations, fed these days incessantly by exposure to Western media, but with what is fast becoming a third-world economy. Industrial production is shriveling, and many of the key productive assets are being dismantled, sold off or are simply falling into disuse. Add to that a massive hemorrhaging of that remarkable pool of well-educated and talented people who are cutting whatever deals they can in the West. The whole mess is being floated on an enormous debt piling up with the West that must eventually be met or you can forget a bright future of investment and trade.

Need it, or can it, continue this way? The free market purists seem discredited. But will the pendulum inevitably swing to a totalitarian model this time, as the putchists of last year seemed to have in mind, following the model of Pinochet’s Chile? Or is there a third way?

“The System” is an important read for an American audience wanting to understand just how far this generation of Russians must now travel. But perhaps in his next book, aimed at a Russian audience, Arbatov should introduce his countrymen to the thoughts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.