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Communism's first 50 years must be judged primarily by its effects on "the fatherland of socialism," by the way in which it has affected Russian life and Russia's attitudes toward the rest of the world. TIME here examines five im portant facets of that life: 1) whether the revolution has lived up to its own promise, 2) what effects Communism has had on the Russian character, 3) the quality of life in Russia today,
4) the effectiveness of the present leadership, and 5) the thrust, or lack of it, in Russia's foreign policy.
The Unfulfilled Promise of Communism The October Revolution promised far more than it was even remotely capable of producing: nothing less than the restructuring of man himself. Despite their adulation of materialism, the Bolsheviks naively dreamed of a society governed by goodness, set up to eliminate selfishness and devoted to build ing a paradise for the humble. "Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler," said Leon Trotsky. "His body will become more harmonized, his voice more musical. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx."
Today's Soviet citizen has not quite reached those heights, and does not breathe Trotsky's name. Nor does his society in any way conform to what Marx's followers set out to build.
Though the state was supposed to fade away in time, Russia has become the world's biggest bureaucratic nightmare; the state is omnipresent and oppressive, frustrating its citizens and slowing economic progress. Instead of a classless society devoted to the interests of the workers, Communism has spawned a new privileged caste of party members and bureaucrats whose style of life includes villas, limousines, maids and even special shops in which they can buy scarce Western luxuries. In Russia to day, the worker and peasant are still where they always were: at the bottom. When it comes to the economy, the regime is desperately struggling to free itself from the uncompromising bonds of its own doctrine. In Communist theory, man's ego was to be directed toward communal and other selfless pursuits in the workers' state. But Russia's rulers have found that without incentives people work as little as they can; farmers in their own small garden plots produce more potatoes each year than do all the collective farms together.
Marxism-Leninism has proved to be both a bar to an efficient economy and a drag on agriculture. Under reforms first proposed by Kharkov University Economist Evsei Liberman, the Russians have chucked much Marxist dogma; there are now incentive bonuses for workers and farmers and greater discretion for factory managers.
The Marxist belief in the solidarity of socialist states has been rudely shattered both by Russia's dispute with China and by the independent ways adopted by the countries of Eastern Europe. The Communist monolith has crumbled into testy denominationalism, and the Marxist mystique of Communism's historical inevitability has not fared much better. Revolution has not hit the Western countries, as Marx predicted, nor taken root in such misery-laden former colonial lands as India.