(10 of 10)
The Chinese never tire of pointing this out, and the Kremlin obviously considers them one of its enduring headaches. But here, too, it is divided between those who want a complete break and those who urge new explorations toward rapprochement. The result is that as in so many other fields, Russia does not really have a policy toward China. The immobility of so much Russian foreign policy, many Sovietologists believe, is largely a result of the fact that the Soviet leadership crisis has not yet been clearly solved and that the Kremlin can hardly tell what it wants to do abroad until it has decided where it wants to go at home.
Where does Russia go from here? One popular theory is that the Communist and capitalist systems are gradually converging, as the U.S. Government provides more social benefits and the Russians adopt more of the trappings of capitalism. That theory has several serious flaws. Evsei Liberman himself denies it, pointing out that such loosely used terms as profit have an entirely different meaning in the Soviet Union than in the West. Also, economics cannot exist in a political vacuum, and the two systems are light-years apart philosophically. The Soviet Union is a socialist state that still controls all the means of production—and it has no more intention of changing that situation than the U.S. has of embracing it. Moreover, the Soviet state holds virtually all the power in Russia and can bestow or withdraw freedoms at a whim, while protections against an arbitrary state are built deep into the law in the pluralistic society of the U.S.
The Soviet government has adopted a few capitalist devices like incentives simply because the needs of modern technology make them desirable. Pressures from the new class of technocrats are also largely responsible for the loosening up of Soviet society. If people express themselves more openly in the Soviet Union today, it is certainly not because the leadership is committed to eventual democracy, but because a more varied and complicated economy requires the men who run it to be in the habit of asking questions.
The men in the Kremlin possess power that is potentially limitless and unrestrained in its exercise; they could blow the whistle on reform any day and reimpose at least some of the tight discipline of the past. Once fully launched, however, liberalization may not be so easy to stop. The vast reorganization of the Soviet economy and the increasing force of technology are producing a second revolution in the habits and outlook of the people that the Kremlin will be hard-pressed to reverse. If that revolution continues to work its influence, arousing among Russians a longing to join the modern world and giving them a freer voice to articulate that longing, it could ultimately be of more significance than even the October Revolution.
*Russia celebrates the anniversary on Nov. 7 because in 1917 it kept time by the Julian calendar, which ran 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the West. It adopted the Gregorian in 1918.