56
PARTISAN REVIEW
In my more than ten-year-service as a correspondent reporting on
industry, I heard from almost all the managers of constructions and of
factories, "The country needs discipline!" They knew almost nothing
about the activities of the dissident intelligentsia or knew it only from
hearsay. Expressing their indignation that people had gotten out of
hand they would add, "And on top of it, all those rotten little intellec–
tuals in the big cities who do nothing but muddy the waters."
Attempts at the complete enslavement of the workers, as under Stalin,
did not cease either during the Khrushchev period nor in Brezhnev's
time. This is well known. One need merely recall the preparation of
"labor passports," and the campaign against "parasites" as well as
Brezhnev's proposed law against "drunkards and drifters," already
enforced to some extent.
We see, therefore, that the regime's hardening and re-Staliniza–
tion are far deeper than Medvedev indicates. The pressure of the dis–
sident intellectuals did intensify the panic of the authorities and their
consequent reaction. But it also served to trigger pressure from abroad,
without which our country would doubtless be going through full re–
Stalinization today (excluding, perhaps, mass terror on the 1937 scale,
disastrous and ruinous even for a totalitarian regime such as the USSR).
Nobody can predict how long this situation will last.
I remember that a certain left-wing activist from the West visited
Poland in 1970 and announced upon his return that Gomulka's
Socialist regime was stable and flourishing. Exactly ten days later blood
was flowing in Poland and Gomulka was swept out of power by an
"uncontrollable explosion of discontent." There is no doubt that the
regime itself would have been swept out with him if Gierek had not
been backed by those same Soviet tanks.
People in the West still err on this question, but it is clear to any
halfway intelligent and honest Soviet person that it is absurd to use the
phrase "apathy of the Russian people," given the utterly totalitarian
regime existing in the USSR.
It
is equally absurd to accuse the people of
having once allowed such a regime to come to power. The implemen–
tation ofMarxist-Leninist theory had never been tested before, and the
slogans of the Bolsheviks were irresistible to a people exhausted by an
interminable war. How can one demand of people perishing in the
trenches that they should have analyzed and understood the deep–
seated fallaciousness of Leninism when to this very day, after the
