Perestroika and the Soviet People: Rebirth of the Labour Movement

Peter Roberts is the former Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

This collection of seven essays is refreshing for anyone trying to make
sense of what is going on in Russia. We are not accustomed to reading
that “democracy and the market,” the objectives for which Russia is
supposed to strive in order to obtain Western aid, may be incompatible
in Russian conditions. We are usually told to look for present-day
Russian heroes among the “liberal” economists and politicians, whose
various strategies are designed to make Russia just like us. Mandel sees
these people as a small elite determined to force its prescriptions on a
skeptical working population. His heroes, members of that working class,
are beginning to understand that they must look out for themselves and
that a precipitous rush to a “full-blooded market” may not be in
their best interest. For the first time since 1917, this class has found
its voice and its muscle.

Mandel tells us frankly in his introduction that his prescription for
democracy in Russia is socialism. A market, to be sure—but a market
“without thorns,” where economic growth is subordinated to social
justice, and where the mass of people who must live under whatever
system emerges have some say in what shape it takes and how it is
managed. These are heady thoughts, but Mandel has not dreamed them up.
He has spent time in Russia, interviewed many people, assembled a mass
of data, and conveyed the whole in readable English. Of course there are
gaps. How do workers get their hands on political power, which has up to
now eluded them? What is the model for this socialist Russia?
Mitterand’s France? Bob Rae’s Ontario? We are not told, and it is
hard to think of one.

A book already out of date in many respects, with too many notes and no
index, this is nevertheless an iconoclastic, controversial, and welcome
work, which tells us that we had better take another look at our
assumptions about where Russia should be heading.