204
PARTISAN REVIEW
puts the American Kremlin observers in a somewhat nonsensical
position . Even if they do manage to discover Brezhnev's heir within the
Politburo, for example, he is hardly likely to outlive his predecessor for
long. With the possible exception of the Leningrad Party boss, Ro–
manov, that heir will probably be a mere fill-in. His behavior will
be
determined by external circumstances. The empire has its own defen–
sive tasks , due to the constant threat of its collapse, and any Soviet
leader is going to try to carry them out with a minimum of subjective
deviations. It seems to us , therefore, that to separate the study of the
Kremlin from the study of the Soviet Union as a whole is a methodo–
logical error.
If,
with respect to the future of Russia, we want to make use of
analysis rather than fortune-telling or prophecy, we must envisage
possible political changes in the light of ideological shifts. Since
political changes are preceded and determined by ideological trends,
we shall begin by examining the ideological trends of the seventies.
From these trends, the political complexion of Russia in the eighties
should emerge.
It
was in the seventies, after the pragmatic and (for Russia) liberal
Khrushchev era and during Brezhnev's bureaucratic and ideologically
neutral regime, that the doctrinal gap in the structure of the Russian
empire began once more to be fill ed in with a great-power ideology.
The gradual switchover from communist slogans to their national–
chauvinist counterparts can be discerned in the publications (some of
them astounding) of the official Soviet press-a press which , with a few
exceptions like
Pravda,
is almost totally ignored by American politi–
cians, scholars, and journalists.
It
is rather as if Theseus were flatly to
refuse the spool of thread proffered him by Ariadne before he entered
the labyrin th."
The decade of the seventies was one of political stability combined
with fast-breaking (by Russian standards) ideological change-from a
·Every month . the magazine
World Press Review
(formerly
Atlas)
carries a special page
devoted
to
the Soviet press, adapting articles from
Pravda, Izvestiya, Komsomolskaya
Pravda. Sovetskaya Rossiya.
and
Literaturnaya
Gazeta-precisely those Potemkinesque
periodicals which are intended for Western consumption and hence are strict and specific
in their choice of materials. The result is that the West receives on ly those signals
specifically directed toward it and does not take its bearings from other signals-more
typical and more important-beamed toward domestic readers. So it is that the only
peephole into the mysterious world of Soviet politics that might enable one to surmise
future political trends is being ignored.
