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The New Soviet Challenge
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13123 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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11 / 1987 |
3,310 Words |
| Author
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Dimitri K. Simes
Dimitri K. Simes is a senior associate at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace and a syndicated columnist. |
On November 7, the Soviet Union will celebrate the 70th anniversary of the communist revolution. There will be self-congratulatory speeches, an impressive display of military hardware during a Red Square parade, and all over the country millions of officially directed demonstrators will profusely thank the party for all the wonderful things it has done for the Soviet people.
Yet, while Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his colleagues will undoubtedly use the occasion to emphasize their communist heritage, Soviet subjects are under no illusion that the experiment Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik associates started in November 1917 was a success story. Gorbachev himself admitted as much when, in an address to the June 1987 Central Committee plenum, he stated that the political situation in the USSR had "acquired essentially pre-crisis forms." That was a striking admission on the part of the general secretary on the eve of his regime's 70th anniversary. And Gorbachev presumably takes his dramatic denunciation of Soviet shortcomings seriously. Why otherwise would he regularly stress on behalf of the ruling Politburo that only a genuine "revolutionary transformation" of Soviet society as a whole would be capable of saving the communist system from a major disaster? Moreover, Gorbachev admits that his reformist crusade may be the last chance to reverse the Soviet decline. "History did not leave us much time for solving this issue," he acknowledged at the June 1987 plenum.
The general secretary would like to give the impression that his regime is radically different from anything we have seen in the Soviet Union in the past. To some extent he has a point. In many important respects the Soviet Union today does not resemble the state
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