est-group structure have begun to emerge. The armed forces, the police, the managers of industry and agriculture, the scientific community, and the cultural intelligentsia all have their specialized in terests to defend, and since they cannot be promoted outside the party, the party has itself become an arena in which these competing interests must be adjusted and reconciled. One of the results has been to introduce a strong adaptive ingredient into the party leadership's mobilizing and coordinating role.

There are still other forces at work which contribute to limit, if not to undermine, the authority of the party functionaries and the party which they direct. As the custodians of a doctrine which claims to embody infallible truth, they find their credentials contemptuously rejected by their powerful Chinese neighbor, and they no longer speak for a united Communist world. As spokesmen for the "wave of the future," they see their revolutionary dynamism arrested, and their expansionist ambitious limited by the imperatives of survival in a thermonuclear age. As the putative possessors of an exclusive formula for rapid industrialization, they have watched their growth rate slacken as planning and management problems have become increasingly difficult and complex. Even where they have relaxed restrictions on the cultural intelligentsia and gone part way to satisfy popular expectations of higher living standards, they discover that the appetites which they have whetted demand still

more.

W

hat do these developments portend for the future of the Soviet one-party system? There are some who see these pressures as operating to transform what was once a monolithic party into a pluralistic party in which interest groups will be free to maneuver and legalized factions may emerge. There are others who foresee the eventual appearance of a two-party or multi-party system as the leadership finds it impossible to confine the plural energies of Soviet society within the bounds of a single party. There are still others who predict that a weakening of party leadership will set the stage for a military coup d'état and the emergence of a military dictatorship. There are yet others who visualize the gradual transformation of what was once a militant ideologically-inspired party into a technical and managerial elite, governing in authoritarian fashion, but presiding over an essentially nationalist

state.

Without undertaking to predict the shape of things to come, it is, nevertheless, possible to identify certain forces which are likely to influence the development of the Soviet one-party system in the years ahead.

First, it can safely be posited that a party leadership which has built up its power through the suppression of opposition outside the party and of organized factionalism within, will not willingly abdicate its supreme role short of a major catastrophe such as military defeat or an equivalent domestic disaster. Second, it can also be assumed that no party, whatever its pretensions to monolithism, can escape individual and group rivalries, and that these rivalries will inevitably reflect the changing configuration of interests inside the party as they are shaped by the tasks it assumes. Third, in ministering to the needs and directing the destinies of a highly industrialized country, the Soviet leadership must perforce accord greater weight and authority to those elements in the party who possess the knowledge and technical skills which make an industrial society work. Fourth, as the economy and the society become more complex and differentiated, the influence of professionalism will probably increase, and tendencies toward a dispersal of authority are likely to become more clearly manifest. Fifth, given the commitment of the Soviet regime to technical progress and scientific advance, the need for a social environment conducive to innovation and creativity is likely to intensify and to exert its effect outside scientific walls. Finally, the disillusionment bred by the Sino-Soviet dispute and the spread of polycentric tendencies in the Communist movment, with its self-evident lesson that there are not one, but many Communist truths, should contribute to undermine the dogmatic certainty on which party monolithism rests. If these propositions have any validity, they would point to the emergence over time of a looser, more pragmatic, and pluralistically-based party in which the differentiated interests of an industrial society find freer expression and where the party leadership acts as the manager of their inter-relationships and as the custodian of the national interests of the Soviet state.

There is, of course, no guaranty that future party leaders will respond to the changing social aspirations of an increasingly industrialized and professionalized society or that they will relate themselves creatively to the variety of interests which it has been spawning. They may choose to ignore them. Should they do so, they can only end by sowing the seeds of their own downfall.

By Arrigo Levi

t a September 1966 meeting of Western and East European economists on "Pricing and Planning in Eastern Europe," the discussions were so open and stimulating, the sense of communication so alive and sweeping, that one of the Western participants was heard to say: "The schism is over. All that remains to be done is to eliminate the consequences."

The impression that the "schism" between East and West is indeed over has gained ground in Europe. This ideological, historical and political schism has divided parties, peoples and states. Its resolution would constitute the prelude to a restoration of the geographic and moral unity of Europe, a reunification of the European left, the definitive end of the cold war, and possibly a new era of cooperation between the United States and the USSR. Is it to be wondered, then, that this prospect is seized upon with enthusiasm as much by

1 Meeting of the Center for Economic Studies and Research on Social Problems, held in Florence, Italy, September 1966.

Mr. Levi was Moscow correspondent for Il Corriere della Sera from 1960 to 1962. He is now a commentator for Italian Radio and Television (RAI), and author of Il Potere in Russia (Bologna, Società Editrice il Mulino, 1965).

the intellectual and the politician as by the man on the street?

Yet, if the enthusiasm of many is understandable, so surely are the caution and skepticism entertained by others. Is the schism really over? Has the historico-ideological challenge of the Communist world to the non-Communist world actually come to an end? Has the nature of the Communist regimes truly undergone such radical change? Many students and observers of communism incline toward a negative answer, claiming that nothing can change in the Communist world as long as the Communist parties in power remain monolithic and totalitarian. Undoubtedly, the "Leninist" party has changed very little, if at all. Even though the economic reforms have been vast, and obvious shifts in real power have resulted therefrom, political power remains firmly in the hands of the party.

The optimistic belief in the "end of the schism" and the pessimistic view of the "unchangeable nature of party rule" are reflected in the current debate over "evolution or revolution" of the Communist regimes. The optimists are proponents of the evolutionary theory who believe in the capacity of the parties to adapt themselves to new conditions; the pessimists feel that tensions will build up in Communist societies to such a point that the existing political order will explode.

Ten years ago Milovan Djilas raised the vital

question of how the totalitarian "new class" society would adapt itself to change. Recently another Yugoslav writer, Mihajlo Markovic, rephrased the question as follows:

An underdeveloped, preeminently rural society cannot avoid that phase of its development in which an elite, in the best of cases a genuinely revolutionary elite, will try to create, through maximum mobilization of the masses and the use of coercion, the conditions necessary [for socialist self-government ]—that is to say, an industry, a working class, an intelligentsia, a school system and a mass culture However, a question

arises: when those conditions have been attained, will this elite find the moral strength to decide voluntarily to go on to the essential part of the socialist revolution, namely, the establishment of self-government and, consequently, its own gradual elimination as a power elite? Or will a few decades of intense power concentration have changed its social structure to the point where it will want to be the personification of socialism, to preserve its political and material privileges forever, and to be not only the brain but also the iron fist of the historical process? 2

This is indeed the paramount question facing the Communist regimes of today. However, Markovic describes here only the most recent phase of the revisionist process, which has barely begun. Before engaging in any attempts to prognosticate the course of this process, we must first have a clearer understanding of the initial revisionist phase which made its appearance immediately upon Stalin's death.

Politics After Stalin

If Stalin's power machine-or political "superstructure," to use a Marxist term was admirably suited to the conditions of a largely agricultural and only incipiently industrial society, such as Russia was in the 1920's and early 1930's, it had become decidedly anachronistic by the time of its creator's demise, when Russia had already transformed itself into a powerful industrial as well as socially and culturally more sophisticated state. Indeed, March 5, 1953, witnessed not only the passing of an omnipotent dictator, but also the collapse of his political "superstructure." Revisionism thus began at Stalin's bier. Almost overnight, his successors were faced with the task of maintaining stability, which until then had depended on one man, his instruments of terror, and his myth. Not

2 Mihajlo Markovic, "Socialism and Self-government," in Critica Marxista, May-June 1966 (reproduced from Praxis of Zagreb).

surprisingly, they decided first to create a meaningful contract between the government and the party and to reassure, not the masses, but the ruling elite (which in a way had suffered more under Stalin's purges) that their "rights" would be respected. This was the fundamental but often disregarded meaning of Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Party Congress. The denunciation of Stalin's crimes represented a constitutional charter under which the new leader pledged himself not to use terror. As a guarantee of this pledge, he destroyed the myth of the Vozhd (leader). The masses, however, had to wait another five years, until the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, for the myth to be destroyed in public.

Within five or six years after Stalin's death, the new political system managed to achieve substantial stability. The sense of relief that swept over the Soviet Union in the early years of destalinization provoked the release of enormous amounts of creative energy, reflected to some degree in Khrushchev's optimistic vitality and zealous patriotism. Despite the occasional signs that destalinization was following a rather "pendular course"-representing a constant struggle between "liberals" and "conservatives" the Soviet leader's "Bureaucratic Revolution" produced welcome changes in the power system, some of the more significant being:

1) The disappearance of massive and arbitrary terror and the restoration of a certain amount of personal security and respect for law. The laws, to be sure, remained harsh, and were designed to guarantee the authority of the party and to prevent any manifestation of dissent, but at least laws and regulations took over where unchecked terror and personal vendetta had prevailed before.

2) A change in the ratio of investment for capital goods vs. consumption in favor of consumption, and a consequent improvement in living standards.

3) A rise in agricultural production and a concomitant rise in the living conditions of almost half of the Soviet Union's population-the peasants.

4) A steady improvement in the relations between the political elite and the intellectuals. For the first time in many years, the party found itself faced with the task of having to answer criticism, however cautiously expressed.

5) Freer debate in the highest party echelons, contributing to the development of an oligarchy. (It should be noted, however, that power within the party became concentrated in the Presidium and even more so in the hands of Khrushchev, who exercised absolute control over all information and propaganda, and who more than once appealed to

the masses over the heads of the party bureaucrats to maintain his leading position.)

The bureaucratic revolution thus produced a new situation, a kind of managerial state of the "new class" (as Djilas would later describe it) which was certainly preferable to the despotism of "the years of arbitrariness" (godi proizvolia)—as Russians referred to the years of Stalin's great purges. To speak of “socialism,” or of democracy, during this period would, in this writer's opinion, be manifestly absurd. Yet farfetched though it may sound, there are signs of precisely this phenomenon -a transformation to democratic socialism-manifesting themselves in the second phase of the revisionist process. Fifty years after the October revolution and 14 years after Stalin's death, one is finally justified in speaking of the halting beginnings of a system which the Revolution was designed to usher in half a century ago.

A Temporary Solution

Khrushchev, to his credit, did manage to assure a peaceful transition between Stalin's despotism and a new balance of power. Under his leadership, the party was able for a time to control the tensions and aspirations toward greater autonomy which appeared in Soviet society after the end of the terror. But just as Stalinism fell victim to its own limitations, so did Khrushchev's bureaucratic solution, with all its appalling shortcomings, generate its own downfall. Khrushchev himself was aware of these shortcomings and limitations-so much so that, in an effort to overcome them, he increasingly accentuated the personal character of his power, as if he alone could grasp, sum up, synthesize, and solve all the problems of Soviet society. "Who will speak out if I don't?" he asked at Minsk in January 1962 in one of his speeches on the state of Soviet agriculture.

The first and principal defect was that on the one hand the new system continually gave rise to aspirations for freedom and well-being on the part of the intellectuals, the technocrats, and ultimately the masses, while on the other it proved incapable of accommodating them in any meaningful, durable fashion. The citadel of power was thus constantly besieged by forces that sought to break in and share power. These forces had to be placated at first, but ultimately repulsed.

Secondly, the new political solution was extremely shortsighted. For example, the relationship between the party and the samoupravlenie

(self-government) organs was defined at the time of the 22nd Party Congress as follows:

The building of the Communist society does not occur spontaneously, although it is governed by objective laws. An ever-greater function to that end belongs to the conscious activity of the workers, oriented towards a precise goal and directed by a single will. . . . From it follows the need to broaden even more the task of the MarxistLeninist party, which is the leading and cognizant force in the construction of communism. It is precisely the party, armed with a scientific theory and attentive to what takes place, which learns . . . more thoroughly and completely the objective tendencies of life so as to direct the creative work of the popular masses. . . . As the state gradually transfers some of its functions to the social organizations, the party increasingly becomes the overall leader of society and the force that guides the social organizations. Thus, the party also directs the process of the extinction of the state, the activities of the labor unions and other social organizations, whose new tasks it helps to perform on the eve of the advent of communism. The task of the party becomes greater. as the party assumes more and more of the functions of organizer and leader of the masses.

3

In the face of these dicta, the more liberal forces in Soviet society could never make demands based on the principle of samoupravlenie. In fact, they opposed it on juridical grounds, holding that it was an instrument of illegality. Rather they seized on the principle of "socialist legality" in the hope of strengthening the state machinery by making it the natural vehicle for greater freedoms. As B. P. Kravtsov, a liberal Soviet jurist, wrote,

The full development and further improvement of Soviet democracy presupposes the explicit and full proclamation of the people's sovereignty, that is, its primacy and complete dominion. . . . In a state belonging to all the people, it is essential to establish new channels and new forms of participation by the working masses in the performance of state functions: participation in the legislative power, in administration, in enforcing the laws, in supervising their application and exercising control over the activities of the state organs. . .

However, as long as legality stopped at the doors of the party organization, as long as the party itself remained beyond the rule of law, it was obvious that any meaningful democratization could not take place. The system of power, therefore, was open to easy criticism. The struggle for autonomy on the part of intellectuals, workers and farmers met with only limited success. Toward the end of the Khrushchev era, in fact, open criticism of

3 Les principes du Marxisme-Leninisme (The principles of Marxism-Leninism), Moscow, pp. 691-2.

4 Quoted by U. Cerroni in "Constitutional issues in the Soviet Union," Problems of Socialism, July-August 1963, p. 872.