INTERPRETING THE GORBACHEV PHENOMENON 73 people have grown apart; in a single-party arrangement, this can have catastrophic consequences. These are the challenges Comrade Gorbachev and his colleagues are facing. They are going about it in a manner which has particularly dazzled the capitalist world. But it will be foolish to get carried away. Gorbachev'^ role is not to undo an historical wrong; rather, it is to respond to a situation which has ripened in response to historical circumstances. The current convulsions in the Soviet Union, in other words, are the outcome of the dialectical process itself. Lewin's main contention has an ^unadorned elegance. The Bolshevik revolution seven decades ago, once successful, set for its heroes an awesome task. Apart from blotches of urban concentration here and there, the country was under-developed and overwhelmingly agricultural; the population, in its outlook and attitude, was near-primitive. The handful of capitalists that were there escaped abroad; foreign capital dried up for obvious reasons; the erstwhile trade and mercantile arrangements collapsed. The NEP was a stop gap. The economy needed to be hurriedly assembled together in some sort of working shape so as to forestall the counter-revolution. But it had then to be constructed anew, building block by building block. It was not a problem of run-of-the-mill masonry, but of total restructuring. What implements and tools would they choose to effect thi$ vast transformation? The Bolshevik leadership, Lewin hypothesises, could not hope to leam much from Marxist texts, especially where economics was concerned. Apart from the Critique of the Gotha Programme, there was really little to go by. They ^fell back on their wits. They opted for the system they, and the Russian people, were most familiar with. The czar was shot, and the rural potentates were liquidated. But the model to follow was the only one the people^ including the functionaries of the party, had available immediately for themselves. It was a feudal-autocratic model. Orders were given at the top and lower echelons were expected only to carry them out. Because it was authoritarian and absolutist, and because the prevailing ethos was of the Middle Ages, in the. beginning the model yielded significant results. However, soon flaws developed. The lower echelons learnt to emulate the habits and reflexes of those above them; the autocratic model of behavior percolated all the way down, and a deadly hierarchical system emerged. The Soviet leaders adopted the agrarian-authoritarian model lock, stock and barrel; the cultural milieu then obtaining made this the most natural of arrangements in the twenties and thirties. The trappings of absolute authority ensured ready compliance, as they do during the halcyon days of any reigning autocracy. But the defects of absolutism also became the features of the Soviet system. The party potentates, Lewin suggests, ceased, after an interval of time, to be unerring judges of overall national priorities. Lower-level bureaucrats abused their offices, fouled up communications and indulged in large-scale corruption. In emergencies, the system still