% a "We are so critical of our own country that even the president's criticism seems weak. We know what our problems are." % a % a - Mikhail Gorbachev on Red Square, May 31, 1988 % a % a Moscow's suspicion grows closer to certainty that the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would not have been so indifferently friendly at every opportunity to take offense if he did not turn his back on disputes with the United States and look inward to grapple with the intractabilities of Russian history. % a He has, after all, inherited a governmental structure very much in the style of the iron regime of Czar Nicholas I. Stalin could only be more arbitrary than the Romanovs insofar as he increased their harshness into barbarism and shrunk the rich voice of pre-revolutionary Tsarist culture down to the dry croaks of distinctions becoming his slogan-maker. % a No successor, however determined on reform, has strayed far from a path conceived to preserve the form of Stalinism except in applications, breaking less sinister timberland women shoes than what was essentially Stalinist methods. There have been periods of frost and times of thaw, and each was the product of command decisions. % a % a We are ten years past the target date Nikita Khrushchev set for catching up with and surpassing the West, and the Soviet economy has fallen behind South Korea. Khrushchev ordered an industrial revolution and now Gorbachev has commissioned a democratic revolution, and as in all other returns to liberation from serfdom, the inspiration for useful change has no source other than one man who still serves the ordinary Russian and yet has never been satisfactorily digested. Khrushchev's failure was the latest in the Russian succession of tragicomedies, and it is devoutly hoped that Gorbachev's will not be the next. A Soviet political scientist, with the authority of the court undistracted by his enthusiastic approval of Gorbachev, recently said that his original expectation had been for the economy to follow progress and freedom in its wake. "But to my surprise," he said, "we have more freedoms than I imagined and the economy is pretty much where it was." Thin as it is, the air of Glasnost is wonderfully exhilarating, but it may be closed off by its current display, perhaps a bit too much of the headiness that strong drink can induce on an empty stomach. % a % a The invitation "back to Lenin" has made a loud noise these days, as it did when Khrushchev raised it in the fifties, and yet Gorbachev's Lenin is clearly enough True Religion, distinct from Khrushchev's, indicating that the Soviets are no more immune to the allure of periodic reinventions of the founders than we Americans are. % a As for Lenin, whose most essential contribution to socialist theory was to transform it into a police state, he has no place in the iconography of Glasnost enthusiasts. Instead, they burn incense before the image of ... % a % a Related Topics Articles: Counterrevolutions Auden Shakespeare Ill Fares The Land