Original thought 'stifled’ by Soviet Union

Press, 26 June 1987, Page 19

Original thought 'stifled’ by Soviet Union

NZPA-Reuter Moscow A senior political scientist, frankly assessing the strength of Soviet Union bureaucracy, said it had for decades suppressed original thought and indicated it was now bitterly fighting reform of the system.

A Moscow University Professor, Anatoly Butenko, in terms reminiscent of views expressed by Bolshevik leaders exiled or executed in the 1920 s and 19305, suggested the bureaucracy usurped power when Josef Stalin became Kremlin leader in 1924.

Writing in the Culture Ministry newspaper “Sovietskaya Kultura,” Professor Butenko said that the heyday of the bureaucracy had been “the years of the Stalin personality cult” and also the 1970 s and early 1980 s — when Leonid Brezhnev ruled in the Kremlin. .

In a clear warning of its tactics towards Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s current reform drive, Professor Butenko recounted how earlier efforts to shape a new system under Nikita Khrushchev in the mid-1950s were wrecked.

Bureaucrats flourishing under Stalin, who died in 1953, were terrified by Khrushchev’s assault on the old dictator’s rule at the Communist Party’s twentieth congress in 1956, fearing that the attack would turn on them, he wrote.

“But could they give in without resistance? Such an idea would be illusory. Bureaucracy is capable of withstanding . a : ‘ long siege,” said Professor Butenko, a department head at the prestige Institute of the Economy of the World. Socialist System.

He also said that one of the methods used to blunt reforms under Khrushchev was the argument that the Soviet past should not be "blackened” — a theme taken up by some senior officials in Moscow over the past few months. Professor Butenko’s article was seen by analysts as of special im-

portance on the eve of a plenary session of . the Communist Party’s policysetting Central Committee at which decisions are expected to be taken reducing the power of central ministries. Soviet Union sources say resistance to decentralisation and extension of the powers of industrial managers and local gov-, ernment bodies has been strong, bringing a softening of earlier proposals from Gorbachev and his aides.

But the analysts were especially struck by parallels in Professor Butenko’s portrayal of the rise of the bureaucracy after the death of Soviet State founder, Vladimir Lenin, in 1924 with writings by Nikolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky.

Both warned that bureaucracy could destroy socialism in the Soviet Union .. although they took differing views on how to fight it. Trotsky was exiled in 1929 and murdered in Mexico in 1939. Bukharin was executed in 1937. Professor Butenko said

Stalin broke away from Lenin’s preference for developing local self-man-agement, declaring it a revisionist concept, and himself introduced the theory that the State apparatus must < grow stronger as it moved towards communism.

“It was precisely at that time, in the years of the Stalin personality cult, that the bureaucratic approach* to people as levers and screws in a faceless state machine took hold and spread among a part of the administrative apparatus,” he said.

Under Stalin and in the 19705, he said, bureaucrats sought “to root out everything that was living, out of the ordinary and unsanctioned,” and in cultural life strove to cut down anything that rose above mediocrity. Among workers and ordinary people, Professor Butenko said, the bureaucracy “suppressed the capacity for independent thinking, for any social initiative and political activity that was not planned or sanctioned from on high.” ■