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PARTISAN REVIEW
anarchy and have retained a good measure of common sense and
moral integrity .
Russia's worker-engineers and scientific-technical intelligentsia
are now involved in an irreversible process of integration with the
industrial civilization of the Western democracies . If they display a
certain political passivity , this is due to their particular situation: they
are cut off from the centers of information and are personally more
vulnerable . If they are fired and blacklisted as politically " un–
reliable ," their situation in a country where all industrial enterprises
are state -owned is catastrophic.
Certain humanitarians nowadays paint horrifying pictures of the
human condition in the Soviet Union . They find their models mainly
among the state's "servitors," the most enslaved and demoralized
social stratum, which is incapable of independent action. This group
can only become dangerous if it is mobilized by the government , and
even then only if it remains unopposed.
3
The Only Peace/ul Path
To be successful, I believe , the first and most difficult steps
towards serious political and economic change from above must be as
follows :
a) attract the immediate support of the worker-engineers and
scientific-technical intelligentsia and pur representatives of this class
at the source of power ;
b) inspire hope and spur the public at large to some positive
activity aimed at gradual change .
In their letter
A Very Important Question,
Sakharov , V. Turchin
and Roy Medvedev suggested that the first step should be "a
statement by the supreme organs of Party and Government about the
3The f<arof revolution in the USSR displayed by Solzhenitsyn and those who share his views derives, in
my opinio'., from a refusal to accept democracy, especially when it is based on socialist ideals.
~ehind
this
refusal
1.(',
a diStrust of the man from the masses, perhaps even fear of the people- genophobia. (Nationalist
tendenCIes mean the elimination of genophobia.) Solzhen itsyn apparently accepts the man of the people
only " in his place," and as a man who knows his place like the soldier Bogatyrev in
August 1914.
Solzhenitsyn evidently believes that democracy and revolution in the USSR will lead only to new forms of the
socialism he so hates. And when he speaks of the inevitabilityof bloodshed and ruin in the case of revolution,
or even democracy (see his article in
From beneath the Boulders) ,
he is, in my opinion, merely rationalizing
the fears I have mentioned above .
In the USSR today there is no indication that any social Stratum of sign ificant size could or would
artively support {he regime in the event of a revolution. However, every action entails an equal and opposite
reaction , and a large S('ction of the population has a vital interest in order and democracy .
