Gorbachev wants economic change

On a night to remember, in October 1964 – indeed, it was the night of the British General Election that brought Mr Harold Wilson to power – there was a big party for bigwigs of all political stripes at the Savoy hotel. Sitting at one table was the American ambassador and an Englishman who'd been in on the founding of the United Nations. There was also what we then called a Kremlinologist, an expert on the Soviet Union. The table was completed by assorted friends.

We were far along in the evening and Mr Wilson's victory was assured, to big jolly cheers from the Labour MPs and their cronies present and to jolly little groans from the Conservatives and their flock who like to show on all such occasions that they are sporting types who can keep their chin up with a smile.

We had, of course, been popping champagne corks for several hours by then so the acceptance of defeat, like the celebration of victory, was all very festive and civilised. At this point, a young man, an attaché at the American embassy, sidled around the cheerful tables and bent over the ambassador's shoulder and whispered something in his ear. The ambassador, a veteran diplomat who'd served as ambassador in Paris and Bonn, raised an eyebrow and nodded. He leaned over to his closest companion and said, 'Khrushchev is out.'

The wilder reaction of this man had the UN wallah and the Kremlinologist bending over the table and asking, 'What's up? Something wrong?' The ambassador told them. The UN man said, 'Well, I'm damned!' All eyes, as they used to say in novels, turned on the Soviet expert. His mouth fell open, his grey face flushed. He was, to put it mildly, staggered.

As well he might be. He'd been writing for years learned and very persuasive articles explaining to us the naive and uninstructed laymen that Khrushchev's secret speech to Communist party leaders in 1956 exposing the horrid mechanisms of the long terror under Stalin was an historic turn in the Russians' understanding of themselves, that the speech put an official, permanent Soviet seal on Joseph Stalin as a monster and that this act set Khrushchev free to attack the established bureaucracy, to campaign for better food and housing, and, best news of all for us, to open up friendly relations with the West.

In this view, Khrushchev's frightening defiance of Kennedy in 1962 on the matter of installing missile bases in Cuba did not contradict his policy of détente, it was a necessary concession to the Soviet military elite who were making alarming noises in Moscow, suggesting that Khrushchev was going soft on capitalism. An interesting argument, but then the Kremlinologist was a lifelong expert on the turns and twists of Soviet policy and we were not. I never ran into him again and I understand that his reputation as an authority on Russian policy and Russian thinking was from then on a little dimmed.

I thought of that evening when we woke up last Tuesday morning to read, in four pages and 21 columns of the New York Times, the nearly three-hour speech of Mr Gorbachev and two long dispatches from Moscow on what it signified. A little blurry-eyed and coming up for air, I will tell you now what it signified and if it signifies something quite different six months from now, don't blame me, I am not a Kremlinologist.

It signified one of the periodic rewritings of history by a confident man in the Kremlin. It told us that yes, Stalin was responsible for enormous and unforgivable wholesale repressive measures and acts of lawlessness. So far as I can see, crimes was the word used only by Western headline writers. These lawless acts were committed against thousands of Soviet citizens. Every foreign source and innumerable sources inside the Soviet Union have been long agreed that many millions is a truer count of Stalin's executed victims.

But, said Mr Gorbachev, we should not forget Stalin's incontestable contribution to the struggle for socialism. Poor old Trotsky got no credit from Mr Gorbachev, not even for building up the Red Army and since Khrushchev had been the first Soviet leader to preach détente with the West and to denounce Stalin as a monstrous criminal, Khrushchev came in for rehabilitation, though his old, until now, secret admirers say he will not be restored to full favour until his body is taken from the cemetery where it was given a private burial and interred with other party leaders in the Kremlin Wall.

To the present generation of Kremlinologists, it seems that the most significant bit of revision Mr Gorbachev attempted was his rescuing from long obscurity the figure of Nikolai Bukharin, the first advocate of a mixed market economy under Lenin and the man who was the only member of the Politburo who vigorously opposed, and in print, Stalin's policy of forcing the peasantry into collective farming. He was expelled from the Politburo and confessed his political sins, but in 1938 was put on trial, a show trial, as a counter-revolutionary, condemned to death and shot. He was 49.

So now, almost 50 years later, Mr Gorbachev is seen to be discovering an historical model for his own sweeping ideas of economic change. In a review of world history through 40 years or so that was almost Churchillian in scope, Mr Gorbachev didn't sidestep such awkward events as the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact that shocked the world in August 1939 and gave the cue for Hitler's entry into Poland. It was, said Mr Gorbachev, the best defence at the moment against the backdrop of Western political leaders' scheming how best to involve socialism in the flames of war and bring about its head-on collision with fascism.

I don't suppose the world will long remember a speech lasting two hours and 41 minutes but so far as the West is concerned, Mr Gorbachev has once again performed a remarkable feat of propaganda along the lines that most of his public utterances have moved. By denouncing terrorism, even in his own country, by urging a mixed economy beyond early Communist doctrine, by stressing the aim to develop the human individual, he has massaged the yearning which Western socialists and old liberals have barely held on to through the Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev years – the yearning for a humane Communism.

Most of all, at least most necessary for his present political approaches to the United States, he opened up all the stops on his organ voluntary in honour of peace, to make the Russian and American military doctrines exclusively defensive, to use the coming treaty on medium- and short-range missiles as the first step along the path of scrapping the nuclear arsenals, to work unremittingly for reducing strategic defensive armaments and barring weapons from outer space.

To me, the most successful stroke that Mr Gorbachev has delivered in all his speeches is his constant harping on the theme, his regretful harping, that the American strategic defence initiative, the Star Wars programme, is the painful main obstacle to a second, third, fourth summit and a world free from the threat of nuclear war. All the polls that I've seen on public opinion in Europe report a majority that echoes this lament, that sees Mr Reagan's Star Wars as the so far immovable hurdle.

Now what is successful about this constant lamentation is not what Mr Gorbachev says, but what he doesn't say and what, puzzlingly, neither President Reagan nor his secretaries of state and defence ever seem to pound away at in public speeches. It's the fact, attested by strategic studies institutes and groups in Europe, as well as here, that the Soviet Union is not only well launched on its own Star Wars programme, but has been at it, researching and testing and doing everything short of deploying, for years. Some experts say nine years, some say seven. None I've read or talked to think less than five years.

In no reports of Reykjavik or other Reagan-Gorbachev exchanges have I ever seen it mentioned as an issue that's put on the table, protested against, argued about. Some of us would like to know why this administration does not steadily challenge Mr Gorbachev and publicise him on this issue as the pot calling the kettle black.

For the time being, it's almost a matter of principle, a pledge not to rock the boat, that nothing is being said inside the administration to question the wisdom of the December summit in Washington or to suggest that the banning of medium-range missiles is not a good thing. Plenty's being said outside and will be said when the Senate and the House come to hold hearings on ratifying the treaty which Mr Reagan and Mr Gorbachev are expected to sign. It'll be time when that ceremony is over to rehearse the arguments against the treaty which has already mobilised 20-odd senators against it.

For the moment, it's enough to say that strangely, for once, the president's main supporters are in the Democratic party. They are, more than most, I believe, thinking about next year's election and how they cannot afford to be seen to be against a treaty which public opinion in America and Europe is convinced is a move towards peace.

The main opponents, who see Western Europe still vulnerable to Soviet missiles, but now unable to penetrate the Russian heartland with our surrendered missiles, comes from conservatives in Mr Reagan's own party, from neo-conservatives, relapsed Democrats, and from some Democrats, including Senator Sam Nunn, who's generally conceded to be the impartial congressional expert on space and on weapons' control.

In the meantime, we warm our toes at Mr Gorbachev's fiery speech, reflect that for much discussed reasons he may need a summit as much as, if not more than, Mr Reagan, and wonder idly if and when the day will come when some current Kremlinologist will be staggered by the whispered words, 'Gorbachev is out!'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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