The Wounds of Glasnost

Although Mikhail Gorbachev’s campaign to influence the American public has produced impressive, even astonishing, results, the Soviet leader has failed to win over all the skeptics. All the skeptics on the radical Left, that is, many of whom have come to regard the General Secretary with apprehension or hostility, to view his domestic reforms as a betrayal of Marxist principles, and to judge his “new thinking” in foreign policy an abandonment of “proletarian internationalism.”

Michael Parenti, the author of various tracts on the evils of anti-Communism, sees glasnost as a form of ideological subversion. When, a few years back, Parenti was affiliated with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), he earned a reputation as an outspoken champion of what has since come to be known as the Brezhnevite “era of stagnation.” (It was Parenti who once explained that Soviet consumers spent hours in queues not because of shortages, but because of an abundance of “discretionary” income.) Last year, however, Parenti was so outraged by the excesses of openness that he addressed a public letter to Moscow News, a leading reform organ known for its sharply critical assessments of the Soviet past. Parenti’s objections ran the gamut from the paper’s favorable coverage of a beauty contest, to its “adulatory” treatment of Andrei Sakharov (“. . . why did you not mention that he supported the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam?”), to its overzealous reporting of Stalin’s crimes (“What source . . . allows you to conclude that Stalin’s victims number in the millions?”), to its positive commentaries on small capitalists and private farming. Finally, Parenti chastised the editors for publishing “unrelievedly negative” articles which convey “no recognition of the enormous accomplishments of socialism.”

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Arch Puddington

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Although Mikhail Gorbachev’s campaign to influence the American public has produced impressive, even astonishing, results, the Soviet leader has failed to win over all the skeptics. All the skeptics on the radical Left, that is, many of whom have come to regard the General Secretary with apprehension or hostility, to view his domestic reforms as a betrayal of Marxist principles, and to judge his “new thinking” in foreign policy an abandonment of “proletarian internationalism.”

Michael Parenti, the author of various tracts on the evils of anti-Communism, sees glasnost as a form of ideological subversion. When, a few years back, Parenti was affiliated with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), he earned a reputation as an outspoken champion of what has since come to be known as the Brezhnevite “era of stagnation.” (It was Parenti who once explained that Soviet consumers spent hours in queues not because of shortages, but because of an abundance of “discretionary” income.) Last year, however, Parenti was so outraged by the excesses of openness that he addressed a public letter to Moscow News, a leading reform organ known for its sharply critical assessments of the Soviet past. Parenti’s objections ran the gamut from the paper’s favorable coverage of a beauty contest, to its “adulatory” treatment of Andrei Sakharov (“. . . why did you not mention that he supported the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam?”), to its overzealous reporting of Stalin’s crimes (“What source . . . allows you to conclude that Stalin’s victims number in the millions?”), to its positive commentaries on small capitalists and private farming. Finally, Parenti chastised the editors for publishing “unrelievedly negative” articles which convey “no recognition of the enormous accomplishments of socialism.”