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Columbia's Bialer believes that for all their shortcomings and excesses, Lenin, Stalin and their successors have skillfully managed to create a new bourgeoisie that is the bulwark of Soviet society: "I see the greatest conservatism not in the party apparatchiks but in the factory managers, the middle-class careerists, who are absolutely loyal to the system because they know no other and can be sure of succeeding and surviving in no other."
AIso, whatever the differences in rank and privilege among the Soviet elite, the middle class and the average, apolitical Ivan, all share a deep patriotism of a distinctly muscle-flexing sort. That bond makes the society as a whole more tolerant of the priority given to power over prosperity and guns over butter. Says Leopold Labedz, editor of Survey, the London-based journal on Communist affairs: "From the Politburo on down, they all know they have not achieved a Western European standard of living or overtaken American industrial productivity, but they also know they have overtaken the West in defense and arms production."
To the peoples of Eastern Europe, of course, that is no consolation. All things considered, they would rather have the prosperity and the butter. Asking themselves the question that Ronald Reagan put to Americans in the presidential debates last year, "Are you better off?" the East Europeans look westward for comparison—and backward to the time, which many can still recall, when their countries were free. Soviet military might frustrates, rather than fulfills, their patriotic instincts. After all, that might is often garrisoned just outside their cities and is ready to suppress the restless in their midst.
In Eastern Europe, the Soviet mode of Communism is both deeply resented and deeply entrenched. The people there are stuck with it, but their leaders try to tinker anyway. Whether they do so subtly, as in Hungary, or would overhaul Communism drastically, as in Poland, reforms challenge the very essence of the system, which is totalitarianism.
Hungary's New Economic Mechanism, with its emphasis on the forces of the marketplace and the incentives of the profit motive has meant the partial dismantling of centralized state planning. The less control that central authorities have over the economy, the less they have over other aspects of life. Says Labedz: "The market mechanism is the reintroduction of something that Lenin hated—spontaneity. He hated it because it runs counter to the idea of managed history." That idea is crucial to Leninist dogma.
The Hungarians have so far been able to get away with their experiments by toeing the Soviet line in foreign policy, by carrying out their reforms gradually and quietly, and by disguising their practices in theoretical gobbledygook. As Deputy Premier József Marjai told TIME, "Our aim is to make our socialism here more rational, more efficient, more humane, so that it will not be something with which to scare American children." He also said with a wry smile, "If a certain measure looks like a return to capitalism, then it would of course not be reconcilable with Communist ideology, so we would call it something else."
The current Chinese leaders are also trying to modernize their economy