1988 Reports

The Soviet Leadership and the Struggle for Political Reform

Brown, Archie

No one should be in any doubt that the present time in the Soviet Union is one of political struggle between proreform and conservative forces. Indeed, one of the more notable departures from past practice has been the abandonment, in effect, of the myth of the monolithic unity of the Communist party. Gorbachev himself, while observing at the February 1988 plenum of the Central Committee that the struggle “does not take the form of class antagonisms,” has described it, nonetheless, as “acute.”! Earlier this year, the prominent Soviet writer and economic reformer, Nikolai Shmelev, warned that “we are witnessing a stepping-up of resistance by conservative forces” and expressed concern that “the strength of that resistance, its actual effectiveness, is now underestimated.”