The New Gospel

In the early Moscow morning, long queues of Russians lined up at the city's newsstands to buy a copy of the big story spread over nine pages of Pravda. At home, millions huddled around TV and radio sets and presumably listened as long as their curiosity or patience lasted, as announcers droned out the news for five straight hours.

The object of all the dutiful interest was Nikita Khrushchev's new Communist Party program, hailed by the Kremlin as the hottest thing in Communist ideology in 40 years, designed to place Nikita right up there with Marx and Lenin among the philosophers of mankind. Not since 1919, when Lenin produced his own massive program, had a new draft of the party's dogma been put on paper.* Now, at vast length, all the distant promises and ambitious boasts were reaffirmed, in rhetoric that was at least somewhat more readable, if less dialectically skillful than Lenin's ( "A mighty unifying thunderstorm, marking the springtime of mankind, is raging over the earth"). Its one considerable achievement is its tone of total assurance: reading it. a dedicated Communist might easily convince himself that history was undeniably on his side, that all his sacrifices were worthwhile, all his masters humane and wise, all his enemies villainous. It was all there, from moral fervor to shrewd, selfish appeals, and there was a specious coherence to it all. But some might take a closer look at the fine print.

Brave Promises. To the Russians them selves, who already know too well the old dogmatic themes, the main eye-catcher was a gaudy catalogue of welfare benefits--free education, free school lunches, free rents, free transport, free electricity and water--that Soviet citizens are to have in 20 years. They were promised a Khrushchevian 1980, not an Orwellian 1984. Some of the promised benefits were already familiar to the West, but many a Russian family that now shares a congested small flat with one or two other families might take heart from the Kremlin's firm assurance that "during the 19705 every family, including newlyweds, will have comfortable apartments which will correspond to the demand for a hygienic and cultured life." But to reach even this minimum level, the current rate of Soviet construction would have to be trebled--an improbable feat.

There was a slice of pie in the sky for everybody. Workers, who now must moonlight on second jobs to get enough to live on, were promised a six-hour workday ("this will come within ten years"). But at the 21st Party Congress three years ago, this same starry goal was promised for 1961; it was even part of Lenin's grandiose scheme of 1919. The draft plan spoke of a "fourfold increase" in meat production during the next two decades, but discreetly did not quote Moscow's own published statistics showing the slaughter rate to be increasing at a mere 5% annually.

Decay Now, Collapse Later. Throughout rang the repeated cries that the "decayed capitalist shell" is about to break, that "socialism will inevitably succeed capitalism everywhere." Communism's more modest aim is still to catch up with its capitalist rival, the U.S. Curiously, Khrushchev's document has dropped the Soviet pretense that overall industrial output will soon match U.S. production. His target for 1970 is a 150% increase, which would hardly more than equal the U.S. 1960 level. And by 1970, the U.S. itself will have pushed production far above today's mark--barring, of course, the complete collapse of the capitalist system predicted so persistently by Communist dogma ever since Karl Marx emerged from the British Museum. "The inexorable process of decay has seized capitalism from top to bottom. It has entered the period of decline and collapse," said Khrushchev's new call to arms. But even Khrushchev felt it necessary to find some excuse for capitalism's continuing vitality: "This decay does not signify complete stagnation, and does not rule out growth of capitalist economies at particular times in particular countries."

The Four Words. Moscow's answer to such perplexing capitalist strength, which does not follow the "objective" Communist timetable for the locomotive of history, is fierce, unrelenting attack. The 47,000 words of the new document add up to four favorite words of Nikita Khrushchev: "We will bury you." No chapter of Hitler's Mein Kampf ever spelled out a dictator's goal more clearly: "The success of the struggle which the working class wages will depend on how well the party and the working class master all its forms--peaceful and nonpeaceful, parliamentary and extra-parliamentary--and how well they are prepared to replace one form of struggle by another as quickly and unexpectedly as possible."

Moscow's message was obviously intended to have a special evangelical appeal to the new nations of Africa and Asia still struggling for independence or economic success; paragraph after paragraph assured the "poor, struggling peoples" of Russia's support and socialism's sympathy. But along with the promise of friendship went a warning. The nationalism of emergent nations, said Khrushchev, may be "historically justified" as a reaction against "imperialist " oppression," but "national narrow-mindedness does not disappear automatically with the establishment of the socialist system." Translation: The kind of nationalism that opposes the U.N. in Africa is quite all right with Russia, but beware the stubborn nationalism of Hungarian patriots who opposed the Soviets in Europe.

Similarly, the document considered left-wingers and "welfare statists" hopelessly naive and the pawns of capitalists, but allowed for cooperation with such misguided liberals to serve Communist ends. In the colonialist struggles, even local business groups (in Marxist jargon, "the nationalist bourgeoisie") still have a "progressive role" that is "not yet spent." An orthodox, old-fashioned Marxist theoretician might find some of this ambivalence not very well thought out as doctrine, even while conceding its usefulness as propaganda.

Follow the Leader. In all of Khrushchev's 47,000 words, there was no mention whatsoever of Joseph Stalin, no mention of the U.N. in all the talk of peace and only three brief references to the Chinese Communists, whose possible "contributions to Marxist-Leninism" go completely ignored. Unlike the declaration put together at last fall's 81-nation Communist Party parley, where the Russians had to compromise with Red China, this time there was little mention of "separate roads to socialism." Says the Moscow program: "The main trail of socialism has been blazed . . . sooner or later all peoples will follow it."

And what is at the end? The organ notes swell up. There will arrive a day of "the noblest and most just morality" once "the magnificent and enduring edifice of socialism" is built. There will be love of the socialist motherhood, "conscientious labor for the good of society--he who does not work, neither shall he eat"; "one for all and all for one"; "man is to man a friend, comrade and brother," and there is "honesty and truthfulness, moral purity, modesty and guilelessness in social and private life," and intellectuals will not be a group apart because all the masses will have come up to their cultural standards.

Khrushchev's final promise was that "the present generation of Soviet people will live under Communism." On that day of the true "classless society," according to Marx, the state is supposed to wither away. Khrushchev makes no such promise. "The party holds," he says, "that the dictatorship of the working class [i.e., party] will cease to be necessary before the state withers away." But "to ensure that the state withers away" completely will require "the final settlement of the contradictions between capitalism and Communism in the world arena in favor of Communism." Shrimps will whistle first, comrades.

*Stalin planned a draft of his own in 1939, but most of the members of the committee that was to compose it were assassinated on Stalin's orders before they could get down to work.

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