ponents had been employed much | earlier by Lenin and Trotsky, notably in attempting to link the leaders of the Kronstadt uprising with "foreign agents" and "white guard" elements. Part III (pp. 89-212) of the Jasny volume is devoted to accounts of the professional lives and contributions of Groman, Bazarov, Abram Ginzburg, and Kondratev, as well as of seventeen "other Mensheviks" and nine "other neo-narodniks and other names to be remembered." It is clear from these accounts that the economists tried in 1931 were victimized because they refused to bend their consciences and their high standards of professional competence and integrity to support the demands of Stalin, Kuibyshev, and other Stalin henchmen for fantastically unrealistic production targets. The adoption of these targets, Jasny shows, led not to increased but to diminished output, and entailed catastrophic costs in wasted talent and resources, including widespread death by starvation. For their honesty and devotion to high professional standards, Groman, who according to Jasny was the first economist ever to prepare a macro-economic balance sheet: Kondratev, whose genius was acclaimed by the famous AustroAmerican economist, Schumpeter; and others paid, in effect, with their lives. Some rotted in labor camps until their premature deaths; others were hastened out of this world by murder in prison. Their collective fate provides one of many impressive bodies of evidence on how circumscribed is the role in a hegemonic, ideologically rationalized system-of what Robert Dahl calls the "criterion of competence."1 The difficulties encountered in the contemporary USSR by critics of aspects of official Soviet policy that still make it difficult for highly trained specialists to function with maximum freedom and effectiveness indicate that this problem, though not as acute as in Stalin's time, has by no means been completely resolved. It cannot be resolved, all the books reviewed here indicate, in a system in which political loyalty and ideological conformity tend to be valued more than professional competence and autonomy. COHEN'S EXCELLENT biography of Bukharin deals with some of the issues raised, at least by implication, in the other works discussed here, but it vastly exceeds them in the scope and significance of its subject matter and in its depth and power of interpretation. Even a very long review could only suggest the extraordinary richness of the book's content. We shall be forced, in the relatively brief space at our disposal, to be selective and somewhat schematic.2 Perhaps Cohen's greatest achievement is his brilliant and skillful presentation of the thesis that Bukharin devised a viable alternative to his opponents' "voluntaristic" strategy for socialist development. To appreciate fully Bukharin's creativity and innovativeness, it is necessary to recall not only the difficult circumstances in which the internationally isolated, war-ravaged Soviet republic found itself in the early 1920's, but also the nature of the radical Trotsky-Preobrazhensky development strategy, which was the main available alternative to Bukharin's program. The isolation of the So 1 After the Revolution?, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1970. 2 For a more extended treatment, see this writer's review in The Washington Post Book World, Feb. 17, 1974. viet state, coupled with the exhausted condition of the world economy after World War I, meant that Soviet Russia could not obtain from abroad the substantial capital necessary for rapid economic reconstruction and development, and after the experience of civil war and foreign military intervention, it was quite plausible to think that one or more "capitalist" states might again attack the USSR. The Bolshevik "Left" argued that the appropriate development strategy in this dangerous situation was to industrialize rapidly at the expense of the peasantry, which-in Preobrazhensky's model-was in in effect, to be treated as a "colony." Of course, when Stalin later broke up the Stalin-Bukharin duumvirate of 1925-28, he was to adopt a program even more radical in concept and far more brutal in execution than the most extreme proponents of the Left's strategy could have imagined. In conflict first with the TrotskyPreobrazhensky school and then with Stalin's program for forceddraft collectivization and militaristic industrialization, Bukharin set forth his own model for a gradual, peaceful "growing into socialism." It featured cooperation between workers and peasants, extensive development of agricultural cooperatives and other "voluntary organizations," emphasis on economic incentives rather than coercion, and substantial use of market techniques and mechanisms. Bukharin built this program on the foundation of what he considered to be the spirit and implications of Lenin's NEP and of Lenin's last publications. His was not a "revisionist" program nor a "narodnik" one, as first some Left critics and later the Stalinists were to claim. However, it did bear sig nificant resemblances to nonLeninist social democratic thinking, and these became more apparent over time. Despite its claim to a good Leninist pedigree and its intellectual brilliance and coherence, the Bukharin model was politically vulnerable. For one thing, its complexity and sophistication rendered it unappealing, and even suspect, to many party cadres. Moreover, although it was compatible with the thinking of Lenin in his last years, it lacked the familiar militancy and dogmatism of the earlier Lenin. Finally, and above all, it was repugnant to Stalin's "warfare personality" and incompatible with the "heroic tradition" of Bolshevism to which Stalin appealed. In the "crunch," Stalin's appeal to the politically relevant elements of Soviet society was far greater than Bukharin's. In part, this was because Stalin, in his campaign to undermine Bukharin in 1928-29, cast himself in the role not of an "adventurer" but of a sober, centrist interpreter of NEP against "rightist pessimism." Along with his gradualist, evolutionary model for economic development, and indeed integrally associated with it, Bukharin articullated, albeit implicitly rather than explicitly, a critique of the dictatorial tendencies inherent in unchecked, uncontrolled state power, whether "capitalist" or socialist" -a critique that anticipated the "new class" formula of Milovan Djilas and much of the content of post-Stalin "socialist humanism." During the early 1930's, in his greatly reduced but still influential role as editor of Izvestia, Bukharin also displayed a much clearer understanding than Stalin of the menace posed by Nazi Germany to both Soviet socialism and Western democracy. In the new situation created by the Fascist threat, he stressed the common interests of Russia and the democracies. It may be one of modern history's major tragedies that Bukharin was reviled, rejected, and judicially murdered, while his ideas were neither given a fair trial nor, after farcical condemnation in 1938, made accessible to the Soviet public. They still remain inaccessible, though they were partially and indirectly aired while partially and indirectly aired while Khrushchev was in power. By his insightful, systematic, and lucid presentation of Bukharin's thought, set in a rich historical context, Cohen has performed a major service to the cause of historical truth. PERHAPS THE greatest value of these three studies lies in their relevance to what is certainly one of the most complex and difficult issues of our century-namely, the problematic relationship between socioeconomic development and intellectual and political freedom. The politically powerless Menshevik economists, of course, could not play any role in shaping the structure of the Soviet system. However, they were actuated by what Barrington Moore, Jr. has called "technical rationality" 3: they were committed to professional integrity and autonomy. Bukharin, as well as Trotsky, set much greater store by these values than did the ruthless pragmatist, Stalin. The same values were to be reaffirmed by European Communist reformers after Stalin's death. Presumably, if Bukharin and Trotsky had lived until the era of economic reforms in the Communist countries, they would have enthusiastically supported the reforms, 3 Terror and Progress USSR, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1954. although they probably would also have deplored their relative superficiality. This writer lacks the knowledge necessary to determine whether or not the economists of the 1920's influenced the economic reforms of the 1960's; however, economic reform is certainly one component of the loose aggregation of liberal ideas and proposals that contemporary Soviet and East European critical and dissenting thinkers include under the rubric of "democratization." In this sense, there is clearly an element of continuity between the Menshevik economists and today's dissent in Communist societies. As for Bukharin (and the same applies, at least to some extent, to the well-intentioned but confused Krupskaya), he offered a spirit and approach-more important, in retrospect, than the specifics of his program-that contrasted sharply with what Alexander Erlich has called the "unique blend of creeping fear, exhilaration of battle, and la patrie en danger psychosis" that took hold in 1929, held Russia in thrall for some 20 years, and still permeates the dominant political culture of the USSR today, even if considerably weakened. One measure of the continued high degree of unfreedom still prevalent in the Soviet Union may be seen in the fact that even the relatively liberal Khrushchev, though he absolved Bukharin of criminal charges, was unwilling or, more likely, as Cohen believes, unable-for political reasons to fully "rehabilitate" him. That would have involved implicitly challenging one of the pillars of Soviet political orthodoxy: namely, the methods and outcome 4 The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924-1928, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1960. p. 181. of Stalinist agricultural collectivi- | trating and disillusioning experi zation. Bukharin had denounced Stalin's policy in this field as the exaction of "tribute" from the peasantry and, in effect, as a revival of Tsarist "military-feudal" despotism. The present Soviet leadership has rejected even Khrushchev's partial rehabilitation of Bukharin and has revived, even if in less strident tone, the Stalinist interpretation of Bukharin's role in Soviet history. It is highly probable that if the limited and unsystematic "democratization" begun by Khrushchev had continued instead of being partially reversed by his successors, Bukharin would today be regarded as a continuator of the Marx and Lenin traditions, and Stalin would be looked upon as a "revisionist." Certainly, full freedom to discuss Bukharin's ideas and a thoroughgoing reexamination of the historical record would have figured prominently in such a process. Instead of liberalization and reform, however, the incumbent Soviet authorities have except in the scientific and technical spheres, where their record has been better in some respects than Khrushchev's-pursued increasingly repressive policies, especially since 1968. This backsliding from the limited progress made under Khrushchev toward freedom of expression and protection of individual civil rights indicates how difficult it is in a one-party dictatorship to follow through on a program of liberalization. To some Soviet citizens, especially liberal intellectuals, the failure of Khrushchev, and still more so of Brezhnev and his fellow oligarchs, to implement the freedoms set forth in the Soviet constitution has been a frus ence. There is no doubt that this experience has helped many who had already been deeply stirred by Khrushchev's revelations regarding Stalin's abuses of power to begin to shake off the effects of the political indoctrination to which they had been subjected throughout their lives. IT IS OF COURSE difficult to evaluate, let alone measure, the impact of this and other negative experiences, especially the postKhrushchev tightening of control over historical, literary, and other nontechnical modes of inquiry and expression. However, it seems clear that these developments, especialthat these developments, especially since the beginning of the police crackdown on dissent in 1965 and even more since the intensification of that crackdown in 1968, have contributed to an acceleration of ideological erosion. In any case, a striking feature of recent Soviet dissent has been the tendency among critical Soviet intellectuals to reject Marxism, or at least Leninism (as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn clearly does in his Gulag Archipelago), and also Soviet "socialism (Andrei Sakharov is a case in point) in favor of either a nondogmatic "scientific" approach to social problems or a universalistic social problems or a universalistic or "eternalist" ethic-or, more frequently, some combination of both. There are exceptions, of course, as witness Roy Medvedev's Leninist "socialist democracy." But even Medvedev, though he tries hard to reconcile Leninism and democracy, is probably more democratic than Leninist. 5 See Lewis Feuer, "The Intelligentsia in Opposition," Problems of Communism (Washington, DC), November-December 1970. It would be an exaggeration, at this stage, to conclude that the recent tendency of some of the USSR's best minds, including some important non-Russian intellectuals, to reject or revise official Soviet "Marxism-Leninism" is indicative of a trend toward general acceptance of the concept of polyarchy in the USSR. However, this tendency may well be connected in a very significant way with the events described in the books under review. For it would appear that the consistent failure of the Soviet regime as evidenced by the repudiation of Bukharin's relatively civilized version of Soviet Marxism and later by the rejection of Khrushchev's reformist course -to to achieve a satisfactory synthesis of development and democratization, of modernization and freedom, is becoming increasingly apparent to Soviet dissenters (this is crystal clear in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag) as well as to non-Soviet analysts of Soviet affairs. In conclusion, however, a word of caution is in order. Whatever their other messages may be, the books reviewed here provide abundant evidence of the depth and capacity to survive of Soviet authoritarianism. It would be fatuous indeed to ignore this phenomenon or the challenge it poses and can be expected to go on posing for the polyarchies of this world. Nor can we afford to overlook the fact that the fate of the Medvedev brothers, of Sakharov and Solzhenitsynnot to mention less well-known and less fortunate Soviet dissentersis tragically similar to that of Trotsky, Bukharin, Krupskaya, and other protestors of the 1920's and 1930's, at least in terms of the implications for the character of Soviet power. Through a Glass Sharply By Abraham Brumberg MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: IS THERE ANYONE who doesn't know that Malcolm Muggeridge writes with a flare and brilliance perhaps unequaled by any English language writer on either side of the Atlantic? If there is, let him read these first two of a threevolume series (Volume III is due off the press in 1975). No doubt he will come to the conclusion, as did this reviewer, that if half of our journalists and scholars and sundry permutations thereof could write half as well as Muggeridge, a reader's life would be a joy rather than the benumbing ordeal it so frequently is. To be sure, style without substance tends to become tiresome, and if Chronicles of Wasted Time rivets one's attention from the first page of Volume I to the last of Volume Il, it is because behind the wellturned phrases, the sparkling epigrams, the mordant wit and brittle humor, there lurk a sagacious mind, an infectious humanity, and an extraordinary ability to seize and retain the essence of any event, however trivial or horrendous. Chronicles of Wasted Time be- | ligatory and not too successful longs to the genre of biography Unlike his father, who held onto stay at Cambridge, he became a teacher in a small English college in India, then a budding editorialwriter for The Manchester Guardian. Next came brief terms as a newspaperman in Moscow, as a bureaucrat in the International Labor Office in Geneva, again as a journalist in India and London, and during World War II as a propagandist for the Ministry of Information, a volunteer in the Home Army, and finally a member of the British Secret Service (SIS)—first in Lourenço Marques (Portuguese Africa) and then, after the landing in Normandy, in Paris. The contacts he made during all these peregrinations produce a dazzling array of portraits: pompous politicians, hard-drinking newspapermen, impotent writers, eccentric generals, pimps, prostitutes, financial tycoons, police informants, intelligence agents, and government officials of one sort or another. There is a lethal description (or rather series of descriptions) of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, authors of that most dubious piece of scholarship, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?—a title from which, Muggeridge notes, the question mark was dropped "as Stalin got into his stride as the master-terrorist of his age." (Muggeridge married Beatrice Webb's niece, thus getting to know intimately the Webb household and the Fabian milieu in general.) tion, if not veneration, for his fa- There is also a fascinating self believed that he joined up though not unsympathetic-por- with the Soviet apparat at a much trait of Kim Philby, the famed later date, when it was clear that Soviet agent, who was Mugger- the USSR was to be in the victor's idge's chief in the SIS. Unlike camp." As in the case of so many Graham Green, another SIS col- profiles that appear in the book, league, Muggeridge is not one to this assessment is deft, penetrataccept Philby's claim that he was ing and probably correct.2 drawn to the Soviet Union out of an ideological commitment to Marxism-Leninism.' Rather, says Muggeridge, it was because Philby, like so many other "gilt-edge defectors" in the 1930's, concluded "that a new giant had arisen in the world with whom they wished to make their number in good time." Philby had ... a romantic veneration for buccaneers and buccaneering, whatever the ideological basis—if any -might be. Boozers, womanizers, violence in all its manifestations, recklessness however directed, he found irresistible. . . . On this showing, he would have been more at home among Nazi bully-boys than the pedantic terrorists of the USSR. He actually said to me once that Goebbels was someone he felt he could have worked with. In 1965, when Philby defected to Moscow, English newspapers published a photograph of him taken in the early 1930's, at a dinner given by a pro-Nazi organization. Philby has claimed that he was at the dinner posing as a Nazi sympathizer as part of his effort to build a cover. "But was he? I think it far more likely," says Muggeridge, "that he attended it as a genuine member. His admira 1 Kim Philby, My Silent War, New York, Grove Press, Inc., 1968; see Introduction. result of the presence of a group of fatuous fellow-travelers. What fervor remained soon evaporated as Muggeridge took up his job as correspondent and came into contact with the realities of Soviet life. He describes these realities with biting (yet never acrimonious) wit and still ardent indignation: the lies, the monumental deceptions, the appalling poverty, the pervasive fear, and above all the people -those who believed, those who rationalized, those who suffered, and those who profited from the sufferings of others. The profiles, as usual, are me WHILE Chronicles of Wasted Time 2 Philby's cautious phrasing tends to Jewish, yet strikingly dissimilar; of Radek, Borodin, Gorky; of that immensely gifted yet morally flawed literary critic, Prince N. M. Mirsky, who saw everything with remarkable clarity but dismissed the iniquities of the Soviet system on the ground "that what was happening in the USSR had to happen, that forces, interacting, produced a resultant force which was irresistible." There is a marvelous scene featuring Louis Aragon, who at a meeting held for him in Moscow "stood up and announced that he had just received a message from Paris that the members of the French Surrealist Movement had joined the Communist Party en bloc. At the news of this addition to the ranks of the World Proletariat there was a burst of cheering." Sketches of Louis Fischer, William Henry Chamberlin, Harold Laski and others are equally vivid. So is one of George Bernard Shaw, who, upon arriving in Moscow, declared "that he was delighted to find there was no food shortage in the USSR"-this in the midst of the most ghastly manmade famine the Russian people had ever experienced. Some of the lines have an un |