The XXVIII congress of the CPSU in perspective

Abstract

AN ASSESSMENT of the XXVIII Congress of the CPSU can best begin with the XXVII Congress, from which it was divided by little more than four years but by what seems an aeon of political development. That congress too, one has to remind oneself, occurred during the general secretaryship of Mikhail Gorbachev, and it too had a place in the history of perestroika. This, however, was still a high mass of the old communism, its rituals reflecting and sustaining an oligarchic absolutism that still seemed intact and very largely was intact. Despite the warning notes now being sounded, this congress had much of the complacency of its predecessors: here was the party which was proud to have built socialism, and for doubt to be cast on that achievement, as would happen at the next congress,1 would to most delegates have seemed inconceivable. Amidst these proceedings heavy with the weight of Soviet traditionalism, the Political Report delivered by the new General Secretary was, as had to be expected, greeted with 'applause', 'prolonged applause', 'stormy applause', and finally with the 'stormy and prolonged applause' of a standing ovation, and its closing words elicited, or so the communique put it, 'exceptional unanimity' from the delegates.2 Yet the report was out of keeping with almost all other speeches,3 with the revised but still highly traditionalist party programme and set of rules, and with the general tenor of the proceedings. For, while paying lip service to such pieties as the imperialist threat and developed socialism, this was a subtly and yet emphatically reformist statement, urging a comprehensive reform programme of which economic acceleration was the essence but which would have an important political dimension as well. Gorbachev's success in getting his highly conservative Central Committee to approve such a report was probably due to the fact that its members, while recognising the need for economic acceleration, saw no need whatever to take his political proposals seriously and no necessary connection between them and the hoped-for acceleration. Talk of'democratisation' and 'the perfecting of Soviet democracy' was, after all, the stock-in-trade of Soviet politicians, and despite it the political system had successfully resisted any democratisation.