Brezhnev's confession
Christopher Booker
Understandably perhaps, most British coverage of President Brezhnev's threehour, forty-minute speech opening the 26th Communist Party Congress in Moscow on Monday concentrated on its international aspects — conciliatory noises to the West, expressions of fraternal solidarity with Poland etc. Only the excellent Trevor Macdonald on ITN and an editorial in Tuesday's Times really picked .up the most Significant aspect of the speech, which was the quite unprecedentedly cautious, even gloomy survey Mr Brezhnev made of the Soviet leadership's domestic scene, confirming the extent to which even the Soviet Unionis now desperately concerned about the internal crisis of confidence which seems to be engulfing Soviet society on all fronts.
It is not, of course, new for Mr Brezhnev to level fairly trenchant criticism at the disastrous performance of the Soviet ecoPonly. In his remarks on Monday about industrial and agricultural mismanagement, corruption, inefficiency, shortages of food and consumer goods, he scarcely went any further than he did in his celebrated speech in November 1979. What was new, particularly in the setting of a Party Congress, was the extent to which he combined this with a much more general implied recognition of the profound spiritual malaise which is now reaching such crisis proportions in the Soviet Union. He spoke of the growing epidemic of drunkenness, the instability of 'Family life, the rise in crime and hooliganism. He referred more frankly than ever before to the all-pervading cynicism of Soviet life, the boredom, the disaffection (Particularly of the young) from the tired old slogans and propaganda on television, the collapse of idealism. In short, even if he was more guarded in his phraseology than a Sakharov, a Solzhenitsyn or an Alexander Zmoviev, it seems that Mr Brezhnev said a great many things out loud on Monday Which if spoken by any of his fellow-citizens cio a Moscow metro train would have been enough to get them carted off to a labour camp or a psychiatric hospital for (as he himself put it in another passage of his Speech) 'discrediting Soviet reality'. _ As The Times rightly observed, it is fascinating to compare the pessimistic tenor of Mr Brezhnev's remarks this week with the general ebullience of his last speech to Congress ongress five years ago. In 1976, he exuded uPirinisrn. He said that the Party could feel ,Profound satisfaction with the force of our ideas, the activity of OUT policy, the creative energy of our people', The Soviet Union I'as growing richer, stronger, more influential. Public life had become 'more full blooded, colourful'. 'What can give us more joy than to see how the energy of the people is being released, how its creative strength is growing?'.
The real significance of the change of mood which seems to have overtaken even the highest reaches of Soviet society in the past year or two can only be grasped when it is seen against the background of Soviet Communism's hitherto unshakeable public optimism about its athievements. Soviet Communism is a materialistic pseudoreligion, and the central article of belief of that 'religion' is that, through Socialist planning, the Party is bringing about a perfect society. That is the only real message which the Communist Party has been proclaiming to the Soviet people for 60 years, through every available medium — through press, television and radio, through posters and slogans on buildings, through every political speech, through education meetings in factories and offices, through lessons in school, through books, pamphlets, films, paintings, statues. Thanks to the Party, everything is fine — and getting better all the time. It is even inscribed in the Constitution of the USSR, the preamble to which states quite baldly 'the well-being of the people is constantly rising'. Of course most Soviet citizens have known for a very long time that there was, not to put too fine a point on it, some discrepancy between this ubiquitously reiterated message and 'Soviet reality'. But the importance of what has been happening in the Soviet Union in the past year or two is not just that for the first time everyone knows that the one-and-only universal message is a lie; but that for the first time there is not the slightest excuse for the fact, other than the inbuilt shortcomings of the Soviet system itself.
In the early post-revolutionary years, there was always the excuse for the miseries and shortages of Soviet life that the country had been brought to its knees by the old regime, by the first world war, by the reactionaries who had opposed the establishment of Bolshevism. It took time to build a communist society. In the Thirties, hope that better things were on the way could be kept alive by all the propaganda surrounding the collectivisation of agriculture, Stalin's vast heavy industrial programme, the huge hydro-electric schemes. In the years of what the Russians call 'the Great Patriotic War' against Hitler, Communism was given a tremendous unlooked-for shot in the arm by its identification with Russian patriotism and the universal expectation that, after all the externally imposed sufferings of the war years, things afterwards must be better. In the Fifties, there was the lightening of mood after Stalin's death, the release of millions from the labour camps, the Khrushchev 'thaw', the unmistakeable improvement in the supply of food and consumer goods — a general climate of improvement which continued under Brezhnev and Kosygin through the Sixties and well into the Seventies, But suddenly, in the past few years, everything has begun to get worse again — the stupendous inefficiencies of the economy, the appalling shortages of food and consumer goods, and all the rest — and no longer is there the slightest excuse for it. After 60 years, Socialist 'planning' simply has not worked. Large sections of the Soviet population are demoralised, sunk more than ever before in cynicism and despair. And the Soviet leaders are landed with the greatest combination of economic and ideological crises they have ever faced, simply because they no longer have any plausible source of hope left to fall back on.
They are stuck with an ideology which must promise that things are getting better all the time — because that is what Communism is all about. They are stuck with a system of political and economic management which cannot possibly deliver the goods. They know — even Mr Brezhnev knows— that they can only fulfil the peculiar promises of their ideology by changing the system. And yet they cannot change the system jvcause the ideology does not allow it. There, in a nutshell, is the remarkable impasse which Soviet socialism has at last reached — and therein lies the historical significance of the 26th Party Congress now unfolding in Moscow. It is the moment when the materialist religion of Communisim is at last brought face to face with one of its most fundamental contradictions. For that reason alone, this Congress deserves to rank even above those of 1956 and 1961, when Khrushchev denounced the horrors of 'Soviet reality' under Stalin, as the most important in all the years since the Revolution.
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