Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------
Q: It has been suggested that the existence of the Soviet Union in its time forced the West to pay more attention to the wellbeing and social guarantees for the people, in other words, to build a socially-oriented society. And in this connection I would like to ask you, what is the relevance of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and what lessons can the world community draw from it?
Gorbachev: Did you buy my book Reflections on the Past and the Future? There is an entire chapter devoted to the October Revolution and its impact on all our affairs and world processes. And it contains the whole debate on the fate of our Revolution and its influence. The debate at the beginning of the Revolution, the debate in the mid-30s and on the eve of the 1940s and the debate after the war.
Q: That book contains some of the discussion. And there is another book, but still --
Gorbachev: Yes. It's also contained in the other book. I am not one of those people who anathemize the Russian Revolution. It is an objective phenomenon that arose from a concrete historical situation and was called upon to solve the problems that confronted society. And we can and must analyze them -- by the way, in my report to the congress, I tried to say in very few words that the mistake of the Bolsheviks was that they failed to respond to the democratic impulse of the February Revolution. They did not follow the path of promoting democratic processes in the country. They had their own Bolshevik approach. They set about razing everything to the ground and they put the stake on dictatorship, they cast aside all the theses they had put forward before, namely, that the proletariat wins power through democracy and runs the country through democracy. These are Lenin's words.
In the event, the opposite happened. But Lenin was the first to burn his fingers on all these things when the majority of the country revolted against the way the Bolsheviks ran the country and then the New Economic Policy was introduced. I think it was the first attempt -- perhaps, my opinion is crude and primitive -- but it was an attempt at convergence when there were simultaneously the socialist goals, power was in the hands of those who preached socialism, but at the same time there was private property, private trade, there were concessions, cooperatives, trusts and so on. It was an interesting experiment and it was successful. The country was restored quickly to the pre-revolutionary level. But thereafter things followed a different course.
Even so, in the Soviet Union, under a totalitarian regime and for all the price we had to pay for industrialization and everything else, and let us face it, we made unacceptable sacrifices and in that sense Stalinism and totalitarianism are absolutely unacceptable to us. But the slogans of the revolution and what happened in this country, even though we were in the difficult situation and in conditions of totalitarianism, all this exerted far-reaching influence. It influenced the whole world really. And the social problems, and simply replication of our experience became the rule there. By the way, Japan -- it's good that you represent Japan -- Japan studied kindergartens and the social infrastructure in industry and socialist emulation.
Recently a huge American company with a capital of 22 billion invited me to address its annual meeting. And before I spoke, they asked me to sit in on what they were doing. And they were reviewing the results of what was in effect socialist emulation. If you remove the word socialist, it was an exact replica of what we had here -- the award of diplomas, taking pictures in front of a banner. And I thought, but they are copying what we were doing. Because one has to provide incentives for people to work, not only financial, but also moral stimuli. When a person is well-off and he has money to buy clothes and a place to live in, that's when he develops human interests and a sense of dignity, a feeling that he matters and can do something. That's interesting.
So, we exerted a tremendous influence. And whatever the theoreticians may write. Theoreticians are often highly politicized, so what Sovietologists wrote doesn't matter very much because their works were commissioned. They think that Gorbachev has dealt a blow at Sovietology and created problems for it. Well, they should have some problems to contend with.