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PARTISAN REVIEW
political policy of the Soviet Union would have been if the other
Stalinists had managed to keep their places in Kremlin's top echelon:
Afghanistan would have been invaded, not on the eve of the eighties,
but a decade earlier. The Politburo, as constituted in the seventies, was
a barrier to the Stalinists' drive toward power-a fragile barrier that
was shaken by many blows. Hence the regular, repeated attempts
to
dislodge the Brezhnev apparatus. Hence, also, the inevitable, steadily
progressing regeneration of that apparatus.
Victory is internal transformation. The centrists' victory over the
Stalinists was possible only because the centrists themselves were on an
unswerving course of Stalinization. Such is the paradoxical nature of
labile compromise in the Kremlin : the right-wing extremists are
removed from the top echelon, while the top echelon itself steadily
becomes more right-wing. The conqueror, once he has triumphed,
turns out to have been vanquished. And he who has been vanquished
triumphs.
The pallor of the Brezhnev era, then, is illusory. The changes
taking place in that era are latent, and will appear later on. By the late
seventies Brezhnev was scarcely capable of a struggle for power, and
certain backstage individuals desperately strove to keep a physically
and politically feeble leader in power, so as
to
bar "mysterious
newcomers" from access to the Kremlin. Judging from the stiffening of
Soviet foreign and domestic policy, by the late seventies those mysteri–
ous newcomers had nonetheless managed to achieve a decisive prepon–
derance, shifting the unstable equilibrium of power in their favor. The
transfer of power from the sclerotic hands of the Politburo members
into the strong hands of the newcomers has not yet been completed.
The Potemkinesque facade of the Brezhnev administration is still
useful both to the conservative apparatchiks who are clinging to
vestiges of power, and to the mysterious newcomers, who prefer a
gradual and steady regeneration of power to a coup d'etat, which
would still be a risky thing.
Hut are those mysterious newcomers all that mysterious, really?
In
Moscow they are called "the iron young men"; and we can get an idea
of what their political behavior in the eighties will be like by taking a
look at the ideological changes that preceded, and paved the way for ,
their advent
to
power.
"Scratch a Russian and you 'll find a Tatar." Lenin adapted this
French saying to his own times and his Party entourage: "Scratch a
Russian Communist- and you'll find a great-power chauvinist." But
Stalin didn't even have to be scratched: his communism faded away like
a suntan in winter. None of the other Russian leaders was such agung
