2....
PARTI ·SAN REVIEW
sionally calculated campaign. (Kravchenko shows how the injection of
Stakhanovites often only produces more confusion.) Second, the leaders
themselves, seldom wholly cynical-and who ever is?-need to believe
in the system, its fundamental rightness and power (though not, as
formerly, in Marxist-Leninist ideology), in order to justify the sacrifices
they make to it, sacrifices of self no less than of friends and colleagues.
1
Their self-engendered Puritanism is still at war with the older, less
compulsive character structure of the Great Russians, and they cannot
think of themselves as "saved" once for all. By the same token, Margaret
Mead suggests that many propaganda attacks against the Soviet Union
ineptly serve simply to intensify Puritan guilts and hence strenuous
counter-efforts to validate the threatened ideals.
The Mead group asks itself why the "system" runs at all; American
engineers in the Soviet Union in the '20's and '30's were equally per–
plexed. In the United States, such a question can often be turned around:
enterprises are set up and functioning, and it would take unwonted
effort to stop them-though new enterprises such as the expanded
armed forces may strike the observer often as hardly less chaotic than
the Machine Tractor Stations described in the Mead book. In Russia,
apparently, if a part is missing, the question becomes, not one of
procurement and production scheduling, but of politics and propaganda:
what is called planning is hardly more than a kind of statistical
exhortation. The missing part becomes a link in a great chain of non–
being, since the tractors requiring the part have already plowed non–
existent fields to deliver non-existent bread to non-existent commissaries.
The book and other sources indicate that the part is finally found by
scrounging and horse-trading among desperate managers. But this raises
a deeper problem: who are the people, in this or any culture, who
respond to "reality"-to the fact of the missing part, or the presence
of an actual enemy-and feel compelled to take active measures rather
than continuing the game of buck-passing and myth-making. There
must be some
non-careerists
who make it possible for others to
be
careerists: who are they, and why do they go on responding, especially
when expediting the appearance of the missing part or something like
it may save the jobs of whole cadres of careeristsin the several hierarchies
1.
I speak here of the intermediate leaders, mainly New Bolsheviks rather
than Old. The Politburo itself may still be guided by Marxism-Leninism, includ–
ing its interpretation of the history of Marxist parties; the Mead book should
be read in connection with its companion volume: Nathan Leites,
The Opera–
tional Code of the Politburo
(McGraw-Hill, 1951); compare also Barrington
Moore, Jr.,
Soviet Politics: The Dilemma of Power
(Harvard University Press,
1950).
