IN George Orwell's chillingly prescient novel 1984, the totalitarian state is seen as a form of organization that is assured of complete, self-perpetuating supremacy. According to Andrei Amalric, a young (31) and as yet little-known Russian writer, Orwell was way off. In a controversial essay that only recently reached the West, Amalric observes that the once monolithic Soviet state is already "distending itself and disintegrating like sour dough." Between 1980 and 1985, he predicts, it will explode in "anarchy, violence and intense national hatred."
In the Soviet intellectual world, Amalric is considered a combative gadfly. He has done time in Siberia, charged with writing "patently anti-Soviet" literature. He has not hesitated to criticize other Russian writers, notably Defector Anatoly Kuznetsov (TIME, Dec. 5). His forte is a particularly acute and abrasive sort of political commentary, and it places him somewhat apart from the mainstream of Soviet dissent, which has always been long on anguish but short on social analysis. Amalric's piece appears this week in Survey, a London quarterly on Soviet affairs, and is to be published in the U.S. next March by Harper & Row. It is entitled "Will the U.S.S.R. Survive Until 1984?" Amalric's answer is no. In his view, a disastrous end, resulting from internal upheaval and war with China, is not very far off.
Amalric's thesis is so obviously heretical that the question legitimately arises: Why isn't he in prison? A few observers suggest that he is unwittingly being used by the KGB, but it is difficult to imagine why the secret police would want such critical articles to appear in the West. Most probably, he has been left free—so far—because to jail him would give undue publicity to his work.
Amalric dismisses as "naive" the popular U.S. notion that the Soviet regime is mellowing with age. He scoffs at the theory that "the spread of Western cultural ideas and ways of life would gradually transform Soviet society, that foreign tourists, jazz records, and miniskirts would help to create 'human socialism' "—a reference to Alexander Dubček's attempts to humanize Czechoslovakia's regime. "We may get socialism with bare knees," he concludes, "but certainly not with a human face."
As the old regime ages and stagnates, Amalric says, Soviet society is growing more unstable. Sullen class rivalry has already developed, particularly between the bureaucratic elite and a middle class of intellectuals, managers and professionals. Both, in turn, are distrusted by the great surly majority—he mass of peasants and former peasants. At present, says Amalric, the people and the state face each other like "one man with his hands raised above his head while another points a tommy gun at his stomach." Inevitably, he says, the state "will get tired and lower the tommy gun." The result will not really be "liberalization" but anarchy.