With all the news about proposed and actual changes in the Soviet Union, the realistic observer has some cause to be perplexed.
On the one hand, we have the record of seventy years of Soviet behavior. During this time, the regime has repeatedly demonstrated its basic nature and the limited degree to which it can accept change. On the other hand, we have been witnessing a dramatic thaw in Soviet political and literary discourse accompanied by a veritable cascade of economic and political reform proposals which have enjoyed enormous publicity.
President Reagan is assuredly impressed. When recently asked whether he still viewed the U.S.S.R. as an “evil empire,” he stated that that was “another time, another era.” When asked about continuing Soviet human rights violations, he blamed them not on the new leadership’s policies but rather on bureaucratic inertia.
When the President tells his people that the moral character of our country’s greatest adversary has changed so dramatically in such a short time, it is an event of enormous strategic consequence. The reason why the U.S.S.R. is an adversary in the first place has everything to do with its moral character. If that character has changed, then this might call for a wholesale restructuring of U.S. foreign and defense policies.
The moral differences between the American and Soviet political systems and the strategic objectives deriving from their respective moral visions constitute the fundamental source of tensions between them. However much one may point to Soviet nuclear weapons as a potential threat to U.S. security, it is the intentions underlying the use of those weapons which constitute the threat. If it were the weapons themselves, then we should long ago have wanted to seek arms control agreements with the British and the French, whose nuclear arsenals could inflict considerable destruction on our country.
Unfortunately, our society increasingly finds it difficult to grasp the moral differences between the two political systems. Several influences have contributed to this incapacity, including the rise of materialism, moral relativism, a decline in civic and moral courage, and a pattern of foreign policies which both reflects and nourishes moral confusion.
Marxism Lives
To make sense of the new developments in the Soviet Union, some perspective on the nature of the system is in order. It first must be understood that the entire system rests on Marxist-Leninist ideology. In spite of the media’s repeated assurances that this ideology is “dead,” the fact remains that people within the U.S.S.R.—and particularly those in the Communist Party—must behave as if they believed in the ideology. This is so because of the role ideology must play in the system: (1) as the only vehicle by which the Party can attempt to legitimize itself in power; (2) as the principal instrument to establish conformity, identify deviationists and therefore serve as the linchpin of the internal security system; and (3) as the sole foundation of ideals, morals, and therefore direction for society.
The ideology has been subject to manipulations and modifications over the years. But as a rule, these have been of a tactical nature and have never involved any change in the strategic direction of the regime’s policy. There have also been times when ideological conformity has been less rigorously enforced. Inevitably, however, conformity must be restored if the regime is to survive in power. The Party’s General Secretary, of all people, must be faithful to this standard. It was such faithfulness that elevated him to power in the first place. Any deviation would be regarded as such a threat to the cohesion of the Party that his peers would be constrained to remove him from power—as Khrushchev was removed twenty-four years ago.
Any moral judgment of the Soviet system must take into account whether the moral-ideological foundations of this system have changed. The most important of these is atheism: Marxism-Leninism holds that human reason is the only creative intelligence of this world. Another foundation concerns human nature—specifically, the rejection of original sin and the acceptance of the perfectibility of man on this earth through changes in man’s economic, social, and political environment. The communist thus diagnoses a severe illness within society, declares it must be changed, posits that it is within the power of man’s reason to change it, and concludes that whatever is necessary to prosecute this change, including murder and mass destruction, must be undertaken if there is to be any hope for the future at all.
Since revolution and the creation of a new society are the highest objectives, all moral standards and determinations of truth or falsehood must be constructed around them. Thus, as Lenin taught, anything which furthers revolutionary advance is good while anything which impedes it is evil. Since the Communist Party has appointed itself sole agent of this revolution, anything which challenges its power must be considered a retrograde and evil force. The Party, therefore, establishes all truth, all law, all morality, and grants all rights. There can be no restraint on its power to do these things.
The communist need not believe in all the rosy promises about a classless society and the perfection of man for the Marxist-Leninist ideology to be operational in the U.S.S.R. All that is necessary is for him to accept its basic premises. He must simply believe that man and no higher authority is the source of all laws and morals, and that the men who establish them in fact belong to the Communist Party. Thus, to accept these premises and the system based on them is to live not according to the objective truth, but by precepts declared to be true by the Party. As Whittaker Chambers explained, this is the communist vision: the vision which challenges man to prove that he is master of a world without God.
Has the reform process in Gorbachev’s U.S.S.R. changed these moral foundations? It is true that there has been a diminution of purely and overtly political prosecutions. Few new political dissidents have been jailed and there have been “show releases” of a few hundred prisoners of conscience and refuseniks. But independent political activity continues to be harassed and repressed. Editors of independent journals are consistently arrested, released, and rearrested. Four-and-one-half to five million people remain in the vast network of forced labor camps.
It is true that the Kremlin has sponsored an official celebration of the Millennium of Christianity of Kievan Rus’. It is also true that Gorbachev has made a pledge of non-interference in church affairs to the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church (himself a Kremlin appointee)—a pledge given global publicity by the Kremlin’s news management team.
Nonetheless, if a number of recent and, naturally, unpublicized events are any indication, these ostensibly favorable indicators of change will prove to be chimerical. For example, a few days before one of the new independent clubs called “Choice” had scheduled the first of a series of public lectures on historical and religious subjects relating to the Millennium, the KGB forbade the use of a legally rented hall for this purpose. The day before, the fire department arrived and shorted the fuses in the fuse box, depriving the hall of electricity. Then, due to the necessity of “electrical repairs,” the hall was closed. Three hundred people came anyway—only to be met by a phalanx of police.
Attempts to open a new church in Moscow have recently been refused. The “legal” reason: the church in question is located near schools and the Party declared that it was not about to open a church for students. Similarly, attempts to open a church in Ukraine in recent months have also been rebuffed. The leaders of these church movements have all declared that, in spite of glasnost, believers are being forced to go back underground.
It is true that among the various “theses” for political reform has been the proposal for multi-candidate elections at the local level. On the face of it, this looks to the Western eye like the possibility of real democracy. We have seen this “revolutionary” reform before: Khrushchev had such “elections” instituted under his regime. Now as then, only members of the Party can run for office.
Other new proposals call for greater rule of law, limitations on tenure in office, the rehabilitation of victims of Stalin and the strengthening of local “legislatures” (the “soviets”). In no case, however, has anything been done to diminish the “leading role of the Party.” In no case has anything been done to change the basis for the determination of law, morals, or rights. In no case has there been any repudiation of Marxism-Leninism or its atheistic foundation. Steps toward such a repudiation would be the only meaningful sign of genuine reform in the U.S.S.R. Instead of religious freedom, we see repression.
It is true that we have been witnessing elements of a “thaw” in Soviet society. But Soviet history has already seen several “freezes,” several “thaws.” The reason for these fluctuations lies in the fact that communist governance consists of the Party’s effort to force civil society into a mold into which it cannot fit. In its effort to remake human nature, the Party confronts the immutability of nature. Sometimes it appears to succeed, only to find human nature roaring back with a vengeance.
Remaking Human Nature
When the Party compels society to conform to its new and unnatural norms, when it forces everyone to mouth the nostrums and falsehoods of an ideology that increasingly demonstrates its failure to solve society’s problems, when this regimen destroys people’s incentives to work creatively and productively, human nature pays the Party its reward: public demoralization, slipshod service, mass alcoholism, corruption, sullen rebellion, economic collapse. As Soviet workers say: “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.” In a sense, the failure of elements of Soviet society is the triumph of human nature.
So the Party must undertake a tactical retreat. It must loosen the controls on civil society to restore the productive capacity of the economy. If production sinks too deeply, then even the highest of production priorities, the instruments of coercion, will suffer. Therefore, it institutes a policy of “perestroika” (restructuring) which consists mostly of cursory and tangential “reforms” more in the form of proposals than actual actions.
There are limits, of course, as to how much the Party can loosen up. A decentralization of economic decision making means a decentralization of political power. Supply and demand can never be ceded too much influence, lest the Party lose its ability to make military production the highest priority. Insofar as new reforms do give encouragement to the spiritually starving people of the U.S.S.R., they nevertheless must be understood as safety valves: i.e., measures designed to save the system. Lenin called this tactic “two steps forward, one step back.”
The economic situation, however, is not the only crisis faced by the Party. Simultaneously, it is facing a political crisis within its own ranks. For years, the Party has had to tolerate one element of civil society—the underground economy—since it is indispensable for the survival of the labor force. This private economy has coopted and therefore “corrupted” ever-larger numbers of Party members into its operation. The result has been an erosion of those qualities required of good communists: Leninist asceticism, self-discipline, ideological and behavioral conformity, and “party-mindedness.” Without these qualities, the Party risks losing its ability to maintain itself as a cohesive force, separate from society yet with a decisive influence over it. Once co-opted by civil society, the Party faces further degeneration, to the point of an inability to take those ruthless steps necessary to maintain a monopoly of power.
Gorbachev, like Andropov before him, has been as concerned with this political crisis as with the economic. As a consequence, the Party has taken major measures to reverse these trends: the reactivation of the courts, the arrest and prosecution of 200,000 members of the Party elite and a full-fledged attack on the private economy: 800,000 underground entrepreneurs have either been arrested or fled their jobs for fear of arrest in just the first two years of Gorbachev’s regime.
Three Reasons for Glasnost
The principal measure designed to address both the economic and political crises has been “glasnost” (publicity or controlled openness), a policy with several purposes. One is to give vent to a stream of criticisms of various villains in the system (except the Party as an institution). This is a typical Soviet method of searching for someone to blame and distracting public attention from the real culprit. Such criticism simultaneously serves to terrorize mid-level bureaucrats, whom the Party has identified as a major obstacle to efficiency, and to invigorate a demoralized workforce by locating the alleged source of their problems. It also assists the anti-corruption effort by subjecting bribery and other underground activities to public exposure and Party censure.
Another purpose of glasnost is to revive the vast but moribund domestic propaganda apparatus. Despite the billions of rubles and man-hours devoted to the various organs of ideological indoctrination, political socialization, and mass mobilization, few people pay attention. After years of droning repetition, the public reaction to domestic propaganda had become one of numb indifference and boredom. What better way to revive audiences and readership than to insert smidgens of truth into the grey texts?
Finally, glasnost and its accompanying incantation, “perestroika,” have their explicitly admitted foreign policy purposes. They are to erode the image of the enemy in the minds of the Western public for the purpose of disarming the United States and the NATO alliance. As Gorbachev stated last fall: “Our perestroika, with all its international consequences, is eliminating fear of the ‘Soviet threat’ with [U.S.] militarism losing its political justification.” In other words, if we no longer perceive the U.S.S.R. to be a threat, why do we need a strong national defense?
In light of all this, haven’t any of the reforms—especially in the realm of greater freedom to talk about previously forbidden subjects—had any beneficial moral components? Indeed some of the new discussion has involved iconoclastic elements which would seem to erode Party authority. Unfortunately, most of this discussion has been strictly controlled and limited to a few elite journals in Moscow. And as is the case with all the current Soviet reforms, nothing has been institutionalized or made irreversible.
The Party’s policy of glasnost, with its literary thaw and its torrent of criticism and finger-pointing, have no doubt unleashed and emboldened various forces of civil society—most notably nationalist elements—and these forces may develop a momentum difficult for the Party to control. But the instruments of control remain intact, ready when needed. With the Party purging some of its corrupt cadres and regaining control of the others, it will likely be better prepared than before to call those instruments into service.
Continuity in Foreign Policy
Meanwhile, the foreign policy of the U.S.S.R. has not changed its strategic direction either. The beginning of a pullout from Afghanistan has been accompanied by the laying of tens of thousands of land mines which will kill and maim people for years to come.
While the Soviets bask in the favorable publicity, they have been effectively annexing the Wakhan corridor of eastern Afghanistan and conducting an unprecedented wave of terrorist attacks on Pakistan.
In our hemisphere, Soviet military shipments to the communist regime in Nicaragua in just the first two months of this year were larger than the entire amount of military aid sent by the United States to the resistance in seven years. In spite of the warm glow of the INF Treaty, just the new Kremlin acquisitions of conventional arms in the three years since Gorbachev took office exceed the arsenals of France and West Germany combined. Meanwhile, the Kremlin continues to conduct a wide variety of virulent forms of political warfare against the United States around the globe: propaganda, disinformation, covert political influence operations, and support for terrorism. It is not clear that all this represents a moral departure from Moscow’s strategic purposes.
The Rise of Relativism
Our ability to judge the moral direction of Soviet policy depends on our general ability to make moral judgments. And this ability is very much a function of how committed we are to certain moral principles ourselves. A firm commitment to principles is almost always a prerequisite to understanding the importance of any principles. A moral relativist for whom there are no standards of right and wrong is likely to be a poor judge both of the importance of moral distinctions and of the distinctions themselves. Yet the public policy debates of late twentieth-century America seem to be dominated increasingly by relativism.
America was originally founded by people with strong moral and political convictions. After two centuries, our national character has grown increasingly pragmatic. We now consider ourselves to be a problem-solving people who are not easily biased by ideas and abstractions. People who stress the importance of ideas are pejoratively labeled “ideologues.” Yet ironically, those who fancy themselves as most immune from ideological influences are more likely than most to be unconsciously affected by ideas. Many of these self-styled pragmatists are thus unaware that their very pragmatism is itself an ideological predisposition.
Relativism suggests that the United States and the Soviet Union are morally equivalent. Both are “superpowers” that pursue global strategic interests in a spirit of realpolitik bereft of moral scruples. Both sides have spies who read other people’s mail. Both build enormous arsenals which can allegedly destroy the world many times over. If the Soviets use chemical weapons on Afghan villagers, don’t forget that the United States used agent orange as a defoliant in Vietnam. Both sides support their respective allies whether they are corrupt dictatorships or not. Both sides, in other words, soil their hands in the mire of international political manipulations. How then, can the United States sanctimoniously criticize the Soviet Union and its domestic and international behavior?
For all the transparent plausibility of this kind of “moral equivalence” thinking, it has major flaws. First of all, it equates all forms and uses of power in international politics and uniformly brands them as objectionable, without distinguishing between the purposes they are designed to serve. First of all, where the Soviet moral code has explicitly endorsed the doctrine of “the end justifies the means,” the American system rejects it. Whereas there are no restraints on the state authorities in the U.S.S.R., American authorities are restrained by an election system, a system of laws, a system of checks and balances and the Higher Law (or, as it says in the Declaration of Independence, “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”), without which minority rights would be insecure under majority rule.
One form of the logic of moral equivalence may concede that various uses of power may be naturally expected of the U.S.S.R., yet still hold the United States to a higher standard. In such cases, this logic damns the United States and nourishes the instinct of “blame America first.” In this case, ostensible moral equivalence is not moral equivalence at all. Its purpose is to damn the United States and thus to exonerate the U.S.S.R. “The U.S. is just as bad” means in practice: “The U.S.S.R. is okay.”
Advocates of moral equivalence fail to understand the nature of power in international politics and the moral difficulties involved in its use. The various instruments of state power may or may not be used scrupulously. How they are used depends not only on the moral character of those in power but on the nature of the political systems in question; that is, on whether or not such systems encourage better moral behavior or can even distinguish moral from immoral behavior in principle.
Moral equivalence thinking may also assume another form. Insofar as it does not focus principally on holding the United States to a higher standard of conduct, it will tolerate Soviet power and purposes and accord them legitimacy. Here, the Soviet system is just like any other. The Soviets are “just like us.” They love their children as much as we love ours. They long for peace just as we do. Didn’t they lose 20 million during World War II? (What is never said here is that war deaths were six to seven million while the other thirteen million were murdered by their own government. This particular communist regime was even then more deadly than war.)
Legitimizing the Evil Empire
Unfortunately, U.S. policy toward the U.S.S.R. has systematically encouraged moral equivalence thinking both before and during the Gorbachev period. However much the rhetoric of American administrations has condemned Soviet foreign and domestic depredations, numerous U.S. policy actions serve to legitimize this behavior and to minimize its moral significance.
Arms Control. The pursuit of arms control with the U.S.S.R. plays perhaps the most prominent role here. By focusing on arms as the principal cause of tension between the two sides, the arms control process precludes consideration of the disparate political purposes of armaments. No distinction is made between arms acquired exclusively for defensive and deterrent purposes versus those amassed for purposes of aggression and intimidation. With such logic, any attempt by the United States to acquire arms solely for defensive purposes must mean that we are equally responsible for creating tension.
Arms control theory, of course, stresses the importance of strategic parity. Arms control allegedly prevents destabilizing imbalances and blocks the temptation of preemptive strikes. Again, such theory takes no account of foreign policy purposes and gives no moral credit to powers who arm solely for defense. Instead, the theory presumes potential hostile intent on the part of defensive powers, thereby ascribing moral equivalence to both. In an analogous situation, such theory would stress the desirability of parity between the police, who are armed for defending society, and the mafia, who are armed for offending it: if both sides had equal levels of submachine guns, German shepherds, tear gas, and armored vehicles, then the community could enjoy “peace” resulting from the mutual deterrence afforded by the “strategic balance.” There would no longer be any need for shootouts in the streets.
The very talk of the desirability of balance or strategic parity between the United States and the U.S.S.R. is to make a moral concession to Soviet communism and to denigrate morally Western democracy.
Summitry. Diplomacy with other countries, whether friend or enemy, is a necessary and sometimes distasteful responsibility of statecraft. The approaches diplomacy takes, however, are many and are subject to the prudential choice of national authorities. There is no iron law that dictates that certain forms must be pursued. But for a variety of reasons, summitry has been chosen as one of those forms, in spite of the fact that, when conducted with leaders of totalitarian countries, it has rarely if ever served this country’s national interest.
Summitry encourages moral equivalence thinking by placing the democratically elected president on a symbolically equal plane with the chairman of a totalitarian party. When the two “leaders” (must one be reminded that the primus inter pares of a collective dictatorship is not a national leader?) talk, shake hands, smile, offer each other champagne toasts, and sing popular songs together, while their wives conduct a tea and crumpets “summette,” what is the Western public to conclude? That the party boss represents an aggressive and repressive empire which remains a threat to Western security? Or that he is an enlightened, moderate, and even liberal reformer who seeks nothing more than mutual understanding, a reduction of tensions, a new peaceful and cooperative relationship and perhaps nothing less than the wholesale transformation of relations between two traditionally adversarial powers? What are the citizens of the town to believe when they see the chief of police having lunch at city hall with Al Capone? Perhaps Capone is not the boss of organized crime after all! Perhaps he is what he has been saying all along: a legitimate businessman.
Exchanges. A major feature of the Reagan Administration’s policy toward the U.S.S.R. has been the promotion of educational, cultural, professional, and “people-to-people” exchanges with the U.S.S.R. This policy is a major contributor to moral equivalence thinking. When members of Congress have an “inter-parliamentary” exchange with members of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., we place genuine elected representatives alongside political propagandists parading as people’s representatives. When members of the American Bar Association sign an agreement of “mutual respect and cooperation” with the Association of Soviet Lawyers, we implicitly equate genuine, independent lawyers and judges with agents of a totalitarian party responsible for the prosecution of people considered threats to the Party’s power. Not only do these and a myriad similar examples serve to equate U.S. and Soviet organizations in the minds of Americans, but they bestow legitimacy on the latter, thus breaking faith with and demoralizing oppressed peoples within the U.S.S.R. who look to America as a beacon of hope.
Relations of Competition and Cooperation. It has been commonplace for recent U.S. administrations to describe U.S.-Soviet relations as a combination of “competition and cooperation.” Competition is admitted as one of the realities with which we must live. Cooperation and expanded involvement in fields of mutual benefit are said to be a requirement of the search for peace. Such descriptions serve to treat the United States and the U.S.S.R. as moral equals. Competition implies playing a game according to a shared set of rules. By describing the relationship as a “competition,” we convey the image of a Soviet Union that shares with us a commitment to traditional morality when the opposite is true. The Soviets, when talking among themselves rather than disseminating propaganda to the West, describe East-West relations as a “struggle” and stress their rejection of “bourgeois international law” and the necessity of replacing it with a “class-based” (i.e., communist) international law.
Self-Censorship
One of the key features of the Administration’s policy of detente has been self-censorship. In practice, this means withholding from the public or downplaying information of Soviet behavior threatening to national security interests. For example, when the Soviets shot a member of the U.S. military liaison mission to East Germany and let him bleed to death for several hours before permitting medical attention, the incident should have served to call attention to a consistent pattern of outrageous Soviet behavior toward members of that mission. Yet despite several media requests, representatives of the Department of State kept the record of these Soviet transgressions classified—not to keep a secret from the Soviets, but to keep Soviet behavior secret from the American public—all, of course, in the interest of seeking “better relations.” Such efforts to indulge the Soviets and downplay the gravity of their depredations only serves to elevate them morally.
Altogether, the moral-intellectual climate of America’s elite culture and the policy toward the U.S.S.R. which springs from it do not offer us encouraging signals that the moral defense of Western civilization is being undertaken with competence and commitment. Our media have consistently portrayed only one side of the Soviet “reform” process—the very side that Soviet propaganda would have us see. Our government conducts policies which blur the moral differences between the two sides in ways which have deleterious effects on our ability to conduct a consistent defense policy.
With all the hoopla surrounding the recent summit meetings and treaty signing ceremonies, our reduced ability to make clear moral and strategic judgments has resulted in four successive years of defense budget cuts and has helped permit the Soviets to develop monopolies in a wide variety of weapons systems. Currently they have the world’s only ABM system, anti-satellite system, mobile nuclear missiles and laser weapons. How all this can be helpful to our ability to achieve a just and stable peace is mysterious.
As things currently stand, our policy is to place greater emphasis on accommodations with the rulers of the Soviet empire than to keep faith with millions of enslaved peoples under their control. So long as this remains our policy, peace and our national security will rest on the backs of those millions. And this will hold true so long as we fail to understand that the Kremlin bosses will never make peace with us until they make peace with their own people. Yet all signs indicate that this policy will continue. Our persistent propensity to analyze the Soviet Union from a relativistic perspective and to behave in ways which erode our capacity to make moral distinctions virtually guarantees it. The only prospect of a change in this pattern, short of a cultural and spiritual seachange, is the possibility of strong moral leadership at the head of our government. We can only hope for such a gift, which we hardly deserve.