The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979 produced a strong impression in the world. The impression was exacerbated by the fact that, although the so-called Afghan rebels could not match the Red Army in open fighting, they could not be entirely destroyed either. More than five years after the original invasion, when Gorbachev came to power, the Soviet Union was still employing perhaps 100,000 of its troops in the Moslem country, and it was not clear how much of that country, outside the main cities, was under Soviet control. Critics pointed out that the Afghan invasion represented the first direct Soviet use of military force outside 'its own' east European empire since the Second World War. The massive intervention was also interpreted as the first step in a bid for the oil of the Middle East and a general takeover of that region. It can well be argued, on the other hand, that the decisive Soviet move was essentially defensive: communism had actually come to Afghanistan some two years earlier in a peculiar internal struggle which pitted two communist factions against each other as well as against other groups; the Soviet choice in late 1979 was that between intervention and witnessing a neighboring communist state, which it had already welcomed and supported as part of the communist world, go down to popular opposition. But, defensive or not, the Soviet step was certainly a grave and disturbing one.
As of 1985, tension between the Soviet Union and the United States, the East and the West, was not confined to the crucial problems of Afghanistan and Poland. Rather, the two sides opposed each other all over the
world, from Central America to southern Africa, Lebanon, and Cambodia. To be sure, western European countries, in spite of strong United States objections and even sanctions against particular companies, continued to support the building of a natural-gas pipeline from western Siberia to western Europe. But they were also apparently prepared to proceed with the installation of United States middle-range missiles to counteract the already established Soviet ones, an installation most especially opposed for years by Brezhnev. The virtually all- important Soviet-American disarmament negotiations remained deadlocked. S.A.L.T. II was not ratified by the United States Senate, and its future chances appeared slim, especially after the departure of Carter from the Presidency. In fact, numerous critics accused the tougher anti-Soviet tone of the Reagan administration as largely precluding adjustment and agreement. Yet the administration itself and others claimed that it was precisely this firmer approach, and especially the concurrent building up of the United States nuclear and military might, that would force the U.S.S.R. to negotiate effectively for disarmament.
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The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism, in which: (a) the productive forces are still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist character; (b) the tendency toward primitive accumulation created by want breaks out through innumerable pores of the planned economy; (c) norms of distribution preserving a bourgeois character lie at the basis of a new differentiation of society; (d) the economic growth, while slowly bettering the situation of the toilers, promotes a swift formation of privileged strata; (e) exploiting the social antagonisms, a bureaucracy has converted itself into an uncontrolled caste alien to socialism; (f) the social revolution, betrayed by the ruling party, still exists in property relations and in the consciousness of the toiling masses; (g) a further development of the accumulating contradictions can as well lead to socialism as back to capitalism; (h) on the road to capitalism the counterrevolution would have to break the resistance of the workers; (i) on the road to socialism the workers would have to overthrow the bureaucracy. In the last analysis, the question will be decided by a struggle of living social forces, both on the national and the world arena.
The party leadership of literature must be thoroughly purged of all philis-tine influences. Party members active in literature must not only be the teachers of ideas which will muster the energy of the proletariat in all countries for the last battle for its freedom; the party leadership must, in all its conduct, show a morally authoritative force. This force must imbue literary workers first and foremost with a consciousness of their collective responsibility for all that happens in their midst. Soviet literature, with all its diversity of talents, and the steadily growing number of new and gifted writers, should be organized as an integral collective body, as a potent instrument of socialist culture.
The Bolsheviks' seizure of power in Russia in November 1917 meant a social as well as a political revolution. The decades that followed 'Great October' witnessed a transformation of Russian society into Soviet society. They also saw the emergence and development of an unmistakably Soviet style of culture. In spite of its enormous size, huge population, and tremendous variety of ethnic and cultural strains, the U.S.S.R. became a remarkably homogeneous land, for it reflected throughout its length and breadth - 'from Kronstadt and to Vladivostok,' to quote a Soviet song - some seventy-five years of Communist engineering, social and cultural as well as political and economic.
The Communist party played in fact, as well as in theory, the leading role in Soviet society. Its membership, estimated at the surprisingly low figure of less than twenty-five thousand in 1917, passed the half million mark in 1921 and the million mark in the late twenties. The number of Soviet Communists continued to rise, in spite of repeated purges which included the frightful great purge of the thirties, and reached the total of almost four million full members and candidates when Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. While many Communists perished in the war, numerous new members were admitted into the Party, especially from frontline units. Postwar recruitment drives further augmented Party membership to seven to nine million in the immediate postwar years, as much as thirteen million in 1967, 16,380,000 in 1978, and almost 20 million in the 1980s.
These figures, of course, by no means tell the entire story of Communist penetration into Soviet life. As already emphasized, the party, in the Leninist view which served to differentiate the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks, comprised a fully conscious and dedicated elite, exclusive by definition, but also educating and guiding other organizations and, indeed, the broad masses. In addition to the Party proper, there existed huge youth organizations: Little Octobrists for young children, Pioneers for those aged from nine to fifteen, and the Union of Communist Youth, or Komsomol, with members in the fourteen to twenty-six age range. The first two organizations, and eventually even the Komsomol, acted as Party agencies for the general education of the younger Soviet generations, opening their doors wide to members. The Party also worked with and directed uncounted institutions and groups: professional, social, cultural, athletic, and others. In fact, from the official standpoint, Soviet society had only one ideology and only one outlook, the Communist; citizens and groups of citizens differed solely in the degree to which they incarnated it. That sweeping assumption, it might be added, expresses especially well the monolithic and totalitarian nature of the Soviet system.
The Party demanded the entire man or woman. Lenin's example illustrated the ideal of absolute and constant dedication to Party purposes. The word
