(5 of 6)
The verbal tempest testifies, among other things, to the steadfast conservatism of this society, which wrings its hands and craves its perestroika but simply doesn't budge. It has turned out to be a lot easier to print Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago than to produce salami. And if there's no salami, little by little glasnost will die away as well. Besides the bureaucracy, the huge army, the KGB, the necessity of holding on to the republics and other countries in "socialist cooperation," the inertia of the masses, who have forgotten how to display individual initiative after being deprived of it for so many years -- all hang like weights on the legs of the country . . .
I am far from saying that glasnost and perestroika are nothing but a smoke screen released by a clever hand to deceive the population of Russia and the West about impending "liberating reforms." I rejoice in glasnost, proclaimed by "General Dissident" Gorbachev, who has translated some of Sakharov's ideas into the language of the party. Still, it's hard to shake off the expectation, born of experience, that one fine day all this perestroika will turn back on itself along the tried-and-true path to new "stagnations" and "freezes," as has happened so many times before. In the Soviet Union it is easier to forbid fragile "freedoms" than to grant them and inculcate them.
We find that attempts at democratization are possible only with the collusion of a leadership that has the courage to introduce freedom in carefully prescribed doses. Democracy is being introduced by order of the authorities, who at any moment can expand it or restrict it at will. Coercion is a condition of "freedom." Hence the inconsistency and timidity of perestroika, which seems to be afraid of its own shadow, constantly glancing back over its shoulder at its own "stagnant" past.
We have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Gorbachev's good beginnings and intentions. All the same, the final foothold of Soviet liberalism and of Russian sovereignty remains the goodwill of the Little Father Czar and his faithful courtiers. We are experiencing a period of enlightened absolutism, and God grant that it continue. As always, tyranny serves as the only guarantor of progress and enlightenment in Russia.
Having called Gorbachev, according to the standards of the Brezhnev era, "Dissident No. 1" (for which I've already been harshly criticized in the ever vigilant emigre press), I am not at all inclined to idealize him. Gorbachev, like many in the Soviet leadership, passed through long bureaucratic training before he became a leader. The burden of those same traditions with which he is struggling so selflessly lies on him as well. He is not, I think, by nature a liberal but a pragmatist.
All the same, the only alternative to Gorbachev's perestroika remains war. The Pamyat society, with its anti-Semitic, pogrom-promoting sentiments, is the alternative to glasnost.
We felt the slanting, deadly shadow of the KGB, which falls over Moscow, for the last time at the border and in customs when we were leaving for Paris. I've never seen such a crowd of border guards, nor have I ever seen such a surplus of personnel work so slowly and take so long, examining our passports and luggage. What were they guarding? Our despoiled homeland?