Communism: The Specter and the Struggle

• Share

(17 of 17)

necessary to the death. Whether they are within the Soviet orbit or outside it—and whether they are genuinely concerned about making Communist power more humane or efficient—their overriding preoccupation is with preserving that power.

That certainly goes for Deng & Co. as much as for any other Communists. Despite his reputation as a pragmatist and a reformer, Deng realizes as clearly as Grličkov that for a Communist, pragmatism and reform must end where genuine pluralism and power-sharing begin. On that point, Deng and Brezhnev are still comrades. Of all the buzz words in the Marxist lexicon, none is more telling than "struggle." It is Marxism, both the theory and the practice, stripped to its essence. What distinguishes the Soviet prototype of Communism is the ingenious and terrible way that the struggle to prevail against all challenges has been institutionalized throughout society.

The result is a tension and a paradox. On the one hand, inefficiency, stagnation and alienation are the inevitable accompaniments of the centralization, elitism and repression that are necessary to carry out the first order of business: the preservation of power. On the other hand, the political system is well designed to be impervious to the consequences of the economic failure and social demoralization that are built into it.

The Soviet Union seems peculiarly constituted to keep under control the tensions generated by the contradiction between the system's inherent strengths and weaknesses. It is where that system has been transplanted from its native soil that the contradiction will continue to yield crisis. Left on its own as an economic and social model, Communism would have long since been massively reformed if not discarded in Poland, as well as in many other countries where it prevails today. But the Soviet Union will not, if it can help it, let that happen. Wherever Communism is an emblem and instrument of Soviet power, even potentially, its preservation by force becomes an imperative of Soviet policy. So the struggle continues, both within the Communist world and between East and West, and it may escalate dangerously in the decades ahead. —By Strobe Talbott. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof Moscow and Richard Hornik, with other bureaus.