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Can Gorbachov Change this System?

Language & Power inSoviet Society

A Conversation between ALAINBESANgoN& GEORGE URBAN*

1. Make-Believe

URBAN: My theme is the

role of mendacity in

totalitarian thinking.Dr Goebbels boasted that thebigger the lie the more likely itis to be believed. . . . Solzh-enitsyn reminded us that theonly means of redeeming the

individual from the embrace o f the Soviet system is to ask himto stop lying . One of the slogans most prominently heard on23 October 1956 in the streets of Budapest was a protest againstthe mendacity of the official radio station: the Radio is tellinglies (hazudik a radio). One might, in a sense, describe theHungarian Revolution as a nationwide protest against the pros-titution of the meaning of w ords and the destruction of the m ental hygiene of an old European nation.

There are many examples in Hungarian life and letters o f thegood-natured liar lost in the mists of remembrance (JdnosHdry) and of the excusability of poetic licence as a trick nowriter dare miss (Arany's Ars Poetica ). But this roguishnessrunning through some celebrated pages in Hungarian literature

ALAIN BESANC,ON is the Director of L 'Ecole des hautesetudes in Paris, where he teaches Russian history. His pub-lications include The Confusion of Tongues (1 9 78), The Soviet Syndrome (19 78), T he Intellectual Originsof Leninism (1 9 81 ), The Falsification of the Good(1985) , and other w orks on Soviet culture an d society. Hewrites a regular column for L'Express . He is the authorof various articles in ENCOUNTER, including The Declineof the Sage (July-August 1 9 8 6 ), To the Left of Mitter-rand: The End of the Soviet M irage (July 1 9 8 1 ), and TheView from East of Eden (June 19 80).

G E O R G E U R B A N ' S contributions to ENCOUNTER includeconversations w ith Galina Vishnevskaya (December 1986,January 1987), Max M. Kampelman (February 1985),Alexander Zinoviev (April 19 84), Jeane Kirkpatrick(November 19 83), Eugene V. Rostow (April 19 83), DanielBell (February 1 9 83), W. Averell H arriman (November1 9 8 1 ) , Zbigniew Brzezinski (May 19 81), Leszek Kola-kow ski (January 1 9 81 ), and Milovan Djilas (December1 9 7 9 ) .

has never been the defining characteristic of the temper ofHungarian life. Rather have a search fo r truth and a consum-mate sense of honour. Stalinism and the institutionalised Liethat came w ith it it in 1947-48 h ad, therefore, a hard row to

hoe.The question that interests m e most apropos the recent 30th

anniversary o f the Hungarian Revolution has to do with decep-tion and self-deception in totalitarian societies. Is Soviet ide-olgy a falsification of the real world to fi t the pow er-holders'interests? Or is it another sort of reality w hich w e do not quiteunderstand, even after seven decades of Communism? And,whether it is one or the other, at what point is the official ide-ology most likely to come unstuck as it did, w ithin a singleweek, so spectacularly in Hungary?

BESANC.ON: T he lie as the essential element of totalitariancontrol has by now a formidable literature. Boris Souvarinemade a famous statement about it as early as 1937, insistingthat the lie was the very core of the Soviet system. In a worldin which lying is standard behaviour, he said, the lie itselfbecomes lied upon.

"The USSR is the country of the lie, the absolute lie, theintegral lie. Stalin and his subjects are always lying, atevery moment, under every circumstance, and by dint oflying they no longer even realise that they are lying. Whereeverything lies, nothing lies. The USSR is nothing but a liebased on fact. In the four words those initials stand for,there are no fewer than four lies. . . .

A nd so on, and so on.In the early 1920s, much before Souvarine, Eugene

Zamyatin, a former Bolshevik, depicted in his novel We ahorrendous U topia in which a cosmic W ell-D oer subordin-ates man kind, and society is run on the lines of a vast railwaytimetable. T hen we have B ulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, and A lex-ander Zinoviev in our own time. T hey have all exposed offi-cial mendacity as the heart of the system. So did, beforethem, the Croatian writer Anton Ciliga who wrote The Coun-try of th e Disconcerting Lie and The Country of the Great L ieboth were based on his experiences in the Soviet U nionbefore the Second W orld W ar. I need hardly mention G eorgeOrwell, who coined Dou blethink , N ewspea k , Old-


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Language & Pow er in Soviet Societythink , Crimethou ght , B ellyfeel , and so onwordswhich, as he explained, not only had in every case a politicalimplication, but were intended to impose a desirable mentalattitude upon the person using the m . We are walking onwell-trodden ground.

It is a nice question whether the Lie, or that intricate networkof lies that makes up Soviet ideology is sui generis, or whetherit has roots in the Russian past. I am struck by a passage inyour book The Intellectual Origins of Leninism in w hichyou show that 19th-century Slavo philism w as, in reality, anunacknow ledged import from Germany and France. The Sla-vophiles, you argue, imported the concept of Nationalism, removing any labels indicating country of origin . They thenproceeded to build a Slavophile ideology and turned itagainst Europe.

"They were thus led to construct a fictional reality, a fic-tional history, a fictional religion and fictional politics inevery field."

Wasn't this vast tampering-with-reality a precursor of w hatwould happen under the Bolsheviks a hundred years o n?

BESANQON: Certainly the element of make-believe was com-mon to both, and so was their broad public acceptance. Butthe Slavophiles were simple falsifiers and plagiarists. T heywould publish some theological document claiming that it wasan old unpublished O rthodox manuscript, whereas in fact thedocument would be copied from the work of some T ubingentheologian. T heir natura lisation of Germ an Idealism was amanifest travesty.

In talking about Soviet ideology, however, we face a verydifferent p henom enon. T he real question is whether the word li e is well chosen to identify what Souvarine , Solzhenitsyn,

Zinoviev and others describe as lies . Lie in its habitual meaning stands for conscious de-parture from a known reality; it means that the liar is familiarwith the truth, and when he departs from it to tell a lie heknows that he is rendering a distorted version of the truth. Inideology you have a different process. You no longer enter-tain reality against unreality, truth against untruth, but youwitness a curious splitting or decomposition of reality itself.You are dealing with two divergent realitiesa reality and apseudo-reality: a reality that you can see and hear and touch,and another that exists purely in your articulations, in lan-guage, in propaganda.

T o put it quite simply: socialism claims to be scientific .It claims to be able to predict and engineer the future. Withthe 1917 Revolution socialism was put in power; and it wasexpected by Lenin and his successors that the theory of social-ism would be translated into the reality of socialism preciselybecause socialism was scientific and all the right conditionshad been created for socialism to take off and fly. But social-ism refused to happen; it remained a theory in the minds ofthe Bolsheviks. So how were they to proceed, given the factthat their power was based on the scientific character ofsocialismon their alleged ability to monitor the design ofhistory and help it along by putting themselves in phase withits rhythm?

T hey could only proceed by acting as (/socialism had reallyhappen ed. T he whole unreality of Soviet ideology is based onthe rulers' need to pretend that things exist that do not. Sovietstatistics are a fake; the results of the Five-Year Plans are asham; a Soviet parliam ent never existed; election s havenever been elections; the spontaneity of the masses is the

result of meticulous organisation; the tractor girls' happylife is a mournful farce; the new Soviet m an is the oldA dam; and so on. Ideology put a smoothing cover over theseunpleasant facts. It demanded that people see what wasn'tther e, and speak as though it existed.

A FTER THE SUPPRESSION of the Hungarian Revolution Ig-/ \ nazio Silone noted how the Soviet ideological voca-

* - *- bulary had stood reality on its head. His argumentof December 1956 is germane to the point you are making.

"The worst tyranny of all is that of w ords. In order to startlearning to think honestly once again, we must first tidy up

our language. Believe me, that's not easy. For example,why the devil do we keep referring to the Russian army asthe 'Soviet' army? In reality, the Soviets disappeared fromRussia as early as 1920, nd the only Soviets that exist in theworld at present are precisely the Hungarian revolutionarycommittees And they are Soviets in the most genuine senseof the word, open, elementary and improvised forms of thepeople's power in country where autocracy has preventedthe organising of politic l parties. . . .

Nevertheless, in order to be understood by everybody,we too are forced to abide by the current and distortedmeaning of words; for example, we have to write: 'theSoviet troops against the Hungarian insurgents', whereasthe simplest respect for accuracy would oblige us to write,

'the Russian imperialist troops against the Soviets ofHungary'. That's how things stand: omina perdidimusrerum we have lost the names of things. . . .

BESANCJON: Yes, the best way to describe the u nreal languagegenerated by Soviet ideology might be to liken it to a spell orbewitchment. It is an aura and a state of mind as well as vocabulary. It envelops the whole being of those who arecaptured by it. It is something akin to what we read in medieval literature about Merlin the Sorcerer; or in the legend ofAriosto's Orlando Furioso about some dark forest fromwhich there is no exit; or some fair princess imprisoned in amagic castle. But then suddenly the spell is lifted and youTheroes emerge unscathed.

Comm unist ideology is like that. It is ephem eral. T hbewitchment dissolves; and he y presto] you are free, awak-ened to reality as though you were coming out of a coma orshedding a nightmare. A nd that is exactly what the p eople oHungary experienced in October 1956, the Czechoslovaks in1968, and the Poles in 1981. T hey dropped their chains, foundtheir sense of reality unimpaired, and filled the gap betweenreality and the unreal world in which they had been forced tolive without difficulty.

But if ideology is so fragile, w hy is it so robust? For ther


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Alain Besangon,

can be no doubt that w hile the bew itchment lasts it has an all-encompassing fascination even for those w ho resist it. I heard ablistering attack on Sovietism by a distinguished Germanprofessor a t a recent conference. The point that registered withme in his lecture w as the extraordinary gusto with which heoutlined the post-War successes of Soviet ideology and expan-

sionism before shooting them dow n as a menace to democracy.He depicted the advantages of having a simple political faithan d determined leadership with so much enjoyment that he wasin fact paying a backhand ed compliment to the ideology hewas repudiating.

: Ideology appeals to some of the ingrained, Man-ichean, black-and-white predilections of human nature.Soviet ideology shows the world split between good andevilbetween the virtues of the coming classless society andthe sins of the outgoing capitalist society. You had a paralleldichotomy in Nazism where the conflict was between Jewish guilt and A ryan virtu e . For Hitler, the Jew was the fountof all evil, while for the Marxist-Leninist it is bour geo is or

capitalist society. T he attribution of guilt for all the world'ssins to a single source is as old as the human race itself. Henceits easy penetration even of the m inds of men w ho ought to beimmune to it.

In a book I once wrote about this kind of problem {TheFalsification of the Go od) I make the point that all ideo-logical theory is about the identification of evil: what is theJew or what is capitalism , and how do you locate anderadicate either? Ideology offers a ready recipe. But then astrange thing happens. In trying to eradicate evil you discussand parade it on the stage of the world, and by so doing youmake it look immensely powerful and ubiquitous. Never hasevil looked so strong and even attractive as in the act of beingstruck down. T his may explain your professor's eloquence.

B ut, to come back to the credibility of ideology, so long asideology is not in power, it is only the ideological theoreti-cians who live under its spell. It is only they who have toaccept unreality as though it were real. But when Communistideology attains power, ideology has to be checked againstreality in very practical ways. At that point the challenge tothe Communist power-holders is not to persuade the peoplethat socia lism is a good thing, but that socialism exists. T hepeople must be able to digest the fact that they are prisonersin the sorcere r's castle from which there is no escape.

CAN YOU SEE A WAY in w hich the ordinary man a man

w ho neither has religion to back him nor wants to be ahero or a martyr can exempt himself from the impactof ideology? Can he w ithdraw into his inner shell and live aw ay from society? Can he construct for himself a world o freadings, friendships, art and life-styles that w ould protecthim? We have heard of such cases, but could w e offer some-thing like a practical formula for those w ho w ant to live atarm's length from official society but don't quite know how?

BESANQON: T hat is a difficult one. T he mom ent the individualaccepts the language of the ideology, he allows his mental

George Urban 5world and his sense of self-respect to be hijacked along withthe language. No matter how inadvertently he may havestumbled into the use of the official vocabulary, he is nowpart of the ideology and has , in a manne r of speaking, enteredinto a pact with the devil.

Why do I use such strong words? Because frequently the

individual stoops to using the hijacked language only for official purposes, the better (as he thinks) to be able tosafeguard his private integrity. But this does not work. Hesoon discovers that, having made one concession in public,he is filled with a sense of shame in private and develops agrowing interest in obliterating the duplicity and adoptingthe language of the ideology in all his articulations.

T he internal emigration that you have mentioned as analternative to all this is not easy to attain. I suppose it couldbe done if you stopped having any communication and trans-action with the State and official society; // you were un-married and had no children, and if you were strong enoughto live in poverty and become a hermit. And that is whatsome Soviet individuals have envisaged as an ideal, and have

from time to time been able to realise.But, on the whole, this can be a remedy only for the mostexceptional and heroic peoplethose of unbreakable convic-tions or a saintly natu re.

Doesn't religion help as a counter-force? We have much evi-dence to show that, fo r example, Baptists an d Pentecostalistssurvived the Gulag i n a much beter state of mind than the aver-age political convict. Also, I w ould have thought the force ofPolish Catholicism explains a great deal about the ordinaryPole's immunity to the ideology, even though the Church inPoland stands for a much wider area o f loyalties than those w econveniently list under religion .

BESAN


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Language & Pow er in Soviet Societyin ideologyyou accept it (if you do) with your rational selfas true. I would, therefore, not endorse your implication thatreligion is a counter-force to ideologya kind of thinking thatcould, shall we say, invalidate ideology.

T he morality that helps us to oppose Com munist ideologysprings from th e very nature of man. T he world did not waitfor religion to come along to equip us with a moral dimen-sion. It has always been there. Honesty, truthfulness, loyaltyare given us with human nature. What I'm saying is that youcan (if you can at all) protect your integrity in a Communistsystem by virtue of your strength of character and naturalmorality. You don't have to be a man of religion.

Let me, however, say in the same breath that a concernwith the life of the spirit is one way of building a wall ofdecency around you and detaching yourself from ideology.Some (a few, I should think) have managed it. For example: aFrench engineer friend of m ine was sent to the U rals to assistin the erection of some factory we had sold to the SovietU nionnaturally on Fren ch cre dit. He was forced to live in ahuman environment that he found so debased and debasingthat he could hardly find words to describe it. But one day hemet a couple of Jews in this incredible filthy small industrialtown in the U rals who observed the T orah , literally fromdawn-to-dusk every day of the weekand he found them tobe human beings who were untouched by the foulness, thesham, the poverty, and the hijacked language. He could talkto themthey understood each o ther. B ut, as I say, you don'thave to live the life of a hermit to be able to do that. It isenough to be a decent human being.

I

N A SEAMLESS Orwellian state, I rather suspect that decencyw ould not be eno ugh, because decency has to be sup-ported by some familiarity with the past, the assimilation of

certain books, music, and other components o f a received cul-ture. In an Orwellian state such a s the Chinese during Mao'sCultural Revolution or C ambodia under Pol Pot, the past isabolished and the books are destroyed. In a w orld of that sort,w ouldn't decency alone prove too weak a reed to uphold thevalues of a liberal civilisation? Fortunately, the perfect Orwel-lian society has so far failed to materialise on Western soil;bu t Stalin ha d a frighteningly effective shot at it and Hoxha'sAlbania went one better.

BESANQON: T he Soviet leaders have, as you say, never quitemanaged to create a perfect totalitarian society. T hey alwaysneeded some contact with the pastwhether because theyneeded educated people to carry on the business of govern-ment or because they were anxious to endorse their legiti-macy by allying themselves with national consciousness.

But of course the Soviets realised the dangers of not goingflat out for a totalitarian order, and were often torn betweenusing and obliterating the past. One day Dostoevsky wasavailable; then unobtainable; then again available on Sovietbookshelves. T he same was true for Pushkin and othe r clas-sics, both Russian and foreign.

In China under the Cultural Revolution and in Pol Pot'sCambodia such considerations were not allowed to interfere

with the serious business of true rev olution . M ao's youthugs and the Cambodian bully-boys put the destructioof private libraries high on their list of priorities. T hdemolished culture and all symbols and artefacts of th bourgeois past. The Soviets never quite managed to dthatmuch less, of course, the regimes in Eastern Europe.

There was in Eastern Europe a great deal of Russificatio nunder Stalin; but nowadays the East European regimes are justas keen on underpinning their legitimacy by reinterpreting thnational past and harnessing it to Co mmunist ends as is thSoviet government. In East Germany, Martin Luther, Fred-erick the Great, Bismarck, and now even German Expressioism of the early years of this century have been marshalleamong the natural forebears of M arxism-Leninism. It cannobe long before primitive Christianity and the egalitarianChrist are dep loyed to the same ends. Indeed, before the 1968Prague Spring, some Czech Marxist theologians began to pathe way for that kind of reinterpretation in their dialogue wiWestern Catholics.

: T he mom ent you suspend deletion of the paand begin building on it in the hope of imposing a forgeversion on the public, you are letting yourself in for troublBecause in so doing you have to preserve the books and looafter your churches and monasteries. No matter how heavifootnoted your T olstoy may then b e, the text is there tell its own story, and the deletion of culture just cannohappen. Rebuilding the royal castles in Warsaw and Buda a double-edged weapon for the regimes. It could easily boomerang on them ; and it most probably will.

2. Integ rity in a Corrupt Environment

LET ME TAKE YOU back tO

the question: how does' the ordinary man evad

the encroachments of ideologyif he has neither religion northe courage of heroism to support him? We have partly an-sw ered it by saying that hisaccess to the past, his readingand his inborn sense of decencmight help. These are no doub

some of the necessary conditions of his sanity but are thesufficient?

BESANQON: NO, they are not. You have to have contact witpeople in practical life where common sense prevailsentering into contractual obligations, talking, negotiatinbuying and selling, and so on. T he logic of these activitieswholesome because they are difficult to ideologise. T hen yshould have like-minded people around you, friends anacquaintances with whom you can discuss your family prolems, your housing, the difficulties of shopping and the likbecause in talking about these matters you cannot use t


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NEW PUBLIC TIONS on the Soviet UnionEuropean Security and Strategic Defense

Asymmetries in U.S.Q n d o yj e t S t r a t e g j CDefense Programs:Implications for Near-Term American Deploy-ment Options. ByWilliam A. Davis, Jr.1986. ix, 70pp. 9.95.ISBN 0-08-03 468 3-9.

Regional Security and Anti-Tactical BallisticMissiles: Political and Technical Issues. ByWilliam A. Davis, Jr. 1986. xii, 47pp. 9.9 5.ISBN 0-08-035175-1 .

The author of these studies, a former U.S.Army BMD program official, argues that thecurrent focus of SDI research must be modified,so as to place greater emphasis on the devel-opment of nearterm, rapid ly deployableoptions for the defense of American strategicassets. This effort, which should concentrateon the development of a layered defense at theterminal and late mid-course phases of bal-listic missile attack, is held to be a necessaryresponse to the vast scale of Soviet offensiveweapons development and to continuingSoviet research and development in the area ofstrategic defense. In the second volume, theauthor examines Soviet ATBM developmentsand the Soviet tactical missile threat, andassesses viable U.S. ATBM options in the nearterm, includin g nonnuclear air defense spinoffsfrom the current U.S. SDI program.

Strategic Defense andExtended Deterrence:

Strategic Defense andExtended Deterrence:A New TransatlanticDebate. By JacquelynK. Davis and Robert L.Pfaltzgraff, Jr. 1986.viii, 51pp. 8 .00 .ISBN 0 -8 9 5 4 9 -0 7 0 -6 .

In this study of Presi-dent Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, theauthors examine the relationship between SDIand air defense in the NATO-European securityenvironment; the potential inherent in SDI tech-nologies for conventional defense missions;the participation of allies in the American SDIprogram, the construction of alternative Euro-

pean frameworks within which to develop anti-tactical ballistic missile defenses; and theSoviet Union's own substantial research pro-gram in strategic defense.

The SovietPerspective on theStrategic DefenseInitiative. By DmitryMikheyev. 1987. xii,88p p. 9. 95 . ISBN0 - 0 8 - 0 3 5 7 4 8 - 2 .

This study of how theSoviet leadership views

the U.S. SDI program does not rest on thedeclarations of the Kremlin but on an analysisof the Soviet political mentality and its influenceon the Soviet worldview. The author assessesthe technological, economic, political, andideological implications of the SDI program,likely Soviet reactions to these challenges, andthe role SDI might play in the context of a largerU.S. strategy. Dr. Mikheyev, born in the SovietUnion in 1941, received his Ph.D. in Physicsfrom the Moscow State University, was arrestedby the KGB and formally ch arged with treason,served a six-year sentence in a labor ca mp forpolitical dissidents, was expelled in 1979, andhas become an American citizen.

Forthcoming:

SDI: Has America Told Her Story to theWorld? By Dean Godson. 1987. Apprx.75pp. 9 .95 .

A special IFPA Panel on Public Diplomacyanalyzes official and public reactions to theU.S. Strategic Defense Initiative in WesternEurope; examines the inadequate U.S. effortsto gain public acceptance for SDI abroad; andrecommends specific public diplomacy pro-grams to explain the nature and purpose of SDIin order to win public support in WesternEurope for this important Reagan Administra-tion policy.

Orders for these books may be addressed toPergamon-Brassey's, Headington Hill Hall,Oxford, 0X3 0BW, England; or to the Institutefor Fore ign Policy Analysis , 675 Mas-sachusetts Avenue, 10th Floor, Dept. E-l,Cambridge, MA 02139-3396. On orders toIFPA, please include payment, plus postageand handling charges (to addresses in U.S.and Canada, 1.0 0 per book; all other coun -tries, 2.0 0 per book).

Naval Forces andWestern Security

Naval Forces andWestern Security. ByFrancis J. West, Jr.,Jacquelyn K. Davis,James E. Dougherty,Robert J. Hanks, andCharles M. Perry. 1987.xi , 5 6 p p . 9 .9 5 .ISBN 0-08-035543-9 .

NATO s Ma ritime Strateg y: Issues an dDevelopments. By Norman Friedman, E. F.Gueritz, Clarence A. Robinson, and WilliamR. Van Cleave. 1987. xii, 79pp. 9.9 5.ISBN 0-08-035544-7 .

NATO s Flanks: Problems and Prospects. ByDonald C. Daniel, Marcel Duval, H.F. Zeiner-

Gundersen, Sergio A. Rossi, Gael D. Tarlefon,and Milan Vego. 1987. xii, 90p p. 9.9 5.ISBN 0-08-035545-5 .

Recent developments, both in Soviet navalcapabilities and Western force postures, havebrought renewed attention and analysis to themaritime aspects of NATO security. These vol-umes, com prised of papers authored by Ameri-can and European analysts, consider thes t r a teg ic , o p e ra t io n a l , an d t e ch n o lo g ica limpact of the resurgence of naval affairs inWestern defense planning.

The Crisis of

Communism: ItsMeaning, Origins, andPhases. By Rett R.Ludwikowski. 1986.xii, 7 9 p p . 9 .9 5 .ISBN 0 -0 8 -0 3 4 4 9 6 -8 .

P r o f e s s o r L u d w i -k o w s k i , f o r m e r l y

Professor of Law and Politics at the Jagiello-nian University in Cracow, Poland, who leftPoland in 1982, examines the economic stag-nation , moral decay, socia l unrest , andbureaucratic inefficiency of communist sys-tems, with special attention to the situation inPoland. He traces the crisis of communismback to the practices and institutions of theLenin and Stalin eras, and asserts that there is

a growing awareness within the communistbloc that the defects of the system are irre-mediable since they reside in the inherentnature of the communist system.


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Alain Besancon,considered eligible for Party mem bership. If you do decide tojoin, this is an expression of your free will. If you don 't, th at,too, is something you have freely chosen. No one forces youto become a Party member.

So not to become a Party member is a kind of automaticbarrier against the grosser forms of ideological pollution?

BESANC.ON: Yes, it is. You are in no way predestined to jointhe Party. If you do n't, you simply join that nine-tenths of theSoviet population who are not Party members. You don'thave to support dictatorship. But, as you rightly hinted, for aman with ambition in his belly it is not always easy to stick tohigh moral principles. What is it he should avoid doing, inaddition to not becoming a Party member?

He should avoid any form of social ambition, because thatwould attract the attention of the Party and his advancementwould become dependent on Party membership. He shouldavoid asking anything from the State ; he should not try to livein Moscow if he is not automatically entitled to it; he shouldavoid asking for a better apartment, a more interesting job,privileged holidays, a better deal for his children at school,and so on. It's a tall ordertoo tall for the majority of ordi-nary peop le. T he traps a re many; and I should not want tothrow stones at people who have fallen into some of them.You need extraordinary strength of character to avoid them,hence you cannot always criticise Soviet dissidents for notbeing completely clea n . You don't have to befriend themand you don't have to employ them, but you cannot condemnthem w ithout investigating the circumstances.

A principle w e would, no doubt, w ant to apply to the mem-bers of all totalitarian parties, whether of the Left or the Right?

BESANGON: Yes, I'm sure neither of us would want to sub-scribe to any notion of collective gu ilt ; but as in the Sovietcase Party membership is largely a matter of choice, formerParty members cannot ask us to extend to them the presump-tion of innocence without showing us why and how they cameto join the Partyif, that is, they want to have credibility inthe West.

What you are saying, and w hat many Soviet observers suchas Amalrik and Zinoviev have been saying for a long time, isthat all Soviet Men are to some degree infected.

BESANIJON: Y es, and I can give you a telling examp le. Jewishpeople in the Soviet U nion form something of an elite, andamong them there is an elite within the elite: Jewish scien-tists, doctors, writers, et al. Now , within this elite of the elitethere is a supe r-elite: people who are determined enough toface years of harassment, discrimination, and unemploymentin order to obtain their exit permits to emigrate to Israel. Butonce they have arrived the re, they frequently cannot find jobscommensurate with their qualifications. Doctors may have toserve as nurses or medical orderlies; physicists may have toteach mathematics in elementary school; and so on. This is,understandably, unpopular. But what my friends in Israel tellme is that this Soviet Jewish super-elite has brought with it all

George Urban 9the characteristics of Soviet Ma n : they are rude to thoseserving under them and servile to their superiors. T hey aredemanding and take their new lot without dignity. In brief,they are unable to deport themselves according to the stan-dards and mores of Occidental Man. Now, this is the creamof the elite of Soviet society. What can you expect from theordinary citizen?

The strange thing is that Czechs and Poles and the Chinesedo not behave like that in emigration. Soviet Man does. Are w eprejudiced in seeing him in this light?

: I don't think we are. T ake the most ideologisedand fanatical section of Chinese Communist societythe R ed G uards who wreaked such terrible havoc during theCultural Revolution. Many of these young brutes found theirway, for one reason or another, to Hong Kong. And how dowe find them occupying themselves there ? W ithin w eeks theytook jobs ; they married ; sent their wives to work in factories;adjusted to local capitalist conditions; and eventually be-came successful businessmen. Not for them the heritage ofideology, or brooding over the glory that was Mao's Ch ina.

Soviet emigres, by contrast, are mostly misfits throughouttheir emigra tion. T hey live in a state of self-imposed isolationand refuse to learn our language. They fret and storm aboutin the Western world, letting everyone know who is preparedto listen that Soviet society may be awful but the West ispretty hopeless, too , even though for a different set ofreasons.

Is this an entirely Soviet ph enomenon? Some of the 19 th-century Russian emigres behaved in a very similar manner.Herzen's strictures o n the inadequacies o f the West were no lesspointed than are those of Solzhenitsyn. A nd A lexander Herzenwas a Westerniser whereas Solzhenitsyn is not.

BESANCJON: Yes (pace Solzhenitsyn), there is a heavy admix-ture of the Russian heritage in the behaviour of Soviet Manas an emigre. He has brought with him the late 19th-centurytradition of duhovnost (spirituality), which in the particularcontext of Russian culture means a Salvationist feeling ofOrthodo xy, mixed with Russian nationalism. T his imbueshim with a sense of resignation because his spiritualitycould not and cannot be satisfied. It colours and deepensthe m alaise he carries with him as Soviet Man.

THE DIFFERENCES FROM the Chinese are truly astonish-

ing: like the dutiful children of Con fucius, the Chineseseek to make good in this w orld through application

and intelligence, while ex-Soviet Man burns the m idnight oil inhis Parisian attic thinking delightfully hopeless thoughts aboutthe deliverance o f his Nation an d the ingratitude of the World.I must confess to you that I have a good deal of (perhapsmisplaced) admiration for men so passionately given to lostcauses, and only one cheer for the practical Chinese.

BESANC;ON: I won't quarrel with you on that score; but let me


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Alain Besangon, George Urbanthere in the Soviet emigration as w ell as in the Soviet Unionitself a great many people w hom one could describe as out-casts by choice men w ho thrive on the freedoms of the in -tellectual franc tireur and think of themselves as saintlysinners?

BESANCJON: T here is in the R ussian philosophical tradition acertain disregard for law, jurisdiction, and even the com-monly accepted ethics of society. T he 19th-century R ussianintellectuals in particular assumed that there was somethingsublime about challenging and negating the moral code ofsociety. Dostoevsky put the malicious Stavrogin on the frin-ges of sainthood. T he R ussian revolutionary atheist was abeliever with his faith turned upside down. He belonged, bytemperament and language, to the m onastic orders.

Now, this was not a typically Russian attitude. It stemmed,like so much else in 19th-century R ussia, from Germ any, butwas turned into a provincial caricature under Russian skies.T he abstrac t reflections of Fichte and Schelling becam e fierydo-it-yourself tracts and pamphlets in the hands of Bakunin,Chernyshevsky, and Nechayev. T he R ussian Social Dem o-cracy and then Communism partook of this tradition. T heearly Bolsheviks did think of themselves (even if they did notoften say so) as a communion of saintly sinners. T oday, your

'So I got up from that table with Gorbachev an dw alked out. And you can imagine my surprise when

I ound out w hat we had been talking about.'

11displaced dissident, the Soviet intellectual hankering afterhis collective on the Left B ank of Paris, or the Sovietwriter living in a state of permanent ennui on the shoresof the S tarnbergersee does, in a sens e, inhabit a psychologicalworld close to the one that bred the B olsheviks.

BUT TO COME BACK TO the Hungarian Revolution can

w e identify the point in the life of the Soviet type ofideology where disenchantment sets in and the unreal-

ity of the w hole construct hits you in the eye? At w hat stagedoes it start dawning on the objects of ideology that the w holething is a sham?

BESANCON: Limiting ourselves to Soviet (as distinct fromsatellite) ideology, we must always bear in mind that, as injudo, our normal reflexes do not apply and we must re-educate them to get the hang of Soviet thinking. If your ques-tion means: do the Soviet people believe in ideology, or dothe Soviet leaders believe in ideology, or does even Gorba-chov himself believe in ideologythen I would have to saythis is not a meaningful question. T he question in the U SSR isnot belief but, rather: do they conform with the demands ofideology? do they speak within the framework of the officialvocabulary? And my answer to those questions is an unhesi-tating: Yes, they do, without excep tion.

T hat said, one has to ask what precisely is the meaningof that enormous energy expended every day in television,radio, the printed m edia, schools, factories, offices and so on,by millions of propagandists after almost seven decades of Socialism ? Why does the regime expect 250 million Sovietcitizens to listen to the Party line in which nobody believes? Isit a rational enterprise from the Communist point of view?What does it prove?

Soviet propaganda proves the presence of power. As longas the ordinary man and woman submit to this ritual, theyrecognise their slavish condition. As long as they do not cryout in anger, A ll this is nothing but a vast pack of lies , aslong as they obediently mouth the phrases read to them fromPravda, they render proof, not only to the regime but tothemselves too, that they have been subd ued.

Againisn't this a R ussian phenemenon? Wouldn't Com-munism of the Soviet inspiration take a d ifferent form inFrance, for example? When Eurocommunism had itsheyday in the mid-19 70s it w as w idely believed by Westernsocialists that in Italian or Spanish (or even French) hands,Marxism-Leninism would turn o ut to b e a more civilised, moredemocratic and pluralistic affair than it did under Russianauspices. The Italian Eurocommunists even began to talkabout a K factor , meaning the bad odour Italian Commun-ism had acqu ired from its Russian connection i n the perceptionof Italy's e lectorate.

BESANC,ON: I don't believe in this theory (and having seenyour book on Eurocommunism I know that you don't either ).Communism in France would be exactly the same as it is inthe Soviet U nion. A s long as there is a French Com munist


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12 Language & Pow er in Soviet SocietyParty w aiting to climb to pow er, all you can expect in Franceis Soviet-style Communism. Look at the objectives depictedin any local Communist bulletin in the provincesthey are inno way different from the objectives and the language usedin Communist bulletins in Kabul or Viet Nam. Basically,the same language and the same intellectual-political pro-

grammes prevail throughout the Communist world.You don't think French national traditions, history, and cul-ture w ould have a decisive impact?

BESAN


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besancon 1

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