Perspective on Soviet Changes

The San Franscisco Metro Reporter, Sunday 9.9.90, p.3

{This is a local SF black newspaper}

By Shashi Dalal

The Soviet Union as viewed through one's own eyes is very different from that country as glimpsed through the commercial, big-business-owned media in the United States. This was the observation made by Carl Bloice, a Black journalist, at a wellattended forum at the North Berkeley Senior Center August 26. The event was sponsored by the People's Daily World. Pat Scott, first Black manager of the public - supported KPFA FM Radio station, presided at the event.

Bloice is the Moscow correspondent and associate editor of the People's Daily World, the Communist Party weekly newspaper. In fact, Bloice is the only nonwhite journalist among scores of U.S. print, radio and TV journalists assigned to the USSR, and also the only eyes and ears of the U.S. progressive and peace movements in Moscow. "Sensationalist, skewered and scandalous" was how Bloice described the reporting done by the U.S. press on the fast-changing Soviet Union - so much so that even people in the peace and progressive movements who read such newspapers as the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle get overwhelmed by their shifty reporting, and invariably ask Bloice, "What's going to happen now in the Soviet Union?" (A question to which Bloice admitted frankly, he had no ready answer.)

A case in point, Bloice pointed out, was the recent Soviet Communist Party Congress. Nothing of the dynamics of the Congress, the real issues, resolutions, or the direction taken by the Soviet Union with a long view past the year 2000 got reported, and all that people in the U.S. read and heard concerned personality clashes, or whether the Soviet Union was now going back to capitalism. "This distorted reporting is a great disservice to the U.S. because it smears their perceptions of the dynamic, volatile and unpredictable political process now going on there," Bloice said.

"There are mass demonstrations, there is violence and ethnic bloodshed, and there is antiSemitism, chauvanism {sic!} and racism, and all the negative aspects one sees in the economy and daily life," he noted, "No doubt about that. But that's over blown-up, one-sidedly." But the total context of the various social phenomena and their origins and expressions in that country are totally absent from the commercial press, with whose personnel Bloice works every day in Moscow.

An example is how the U.S media described the recent Party Congress as the "funeral of Communism," whereas, Bloice pointed out, it marked the beginning of consensus-building in solving the Soviet Union's varied but deep-seated socioeconomic-political problems. "Ideological confusion gave way to clarity of outlook, thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev's tactical brilliance," said Bloice.

As to whether or not the Soviet Union is going back to capitalism, Bloice said that some among the intelligentsia in Moscow and Leningrad may very well want such a solution to the problems of the USSR, but out in the vast county the people, especially the working class, women and youth, are coming alive to give a democratic, grass-roots approach to socialism-building.

The Soviet Union's problems, so visible today, are rooted in the 20-30 years of a "stagnation period" when the then leadership failed to take decisive action to make use of the great scientific-technological revolution sweeping the world.

Quoting Gorbachev, Bloice said, "The Soviet Union lost nearly three decades of meaningful, all-around socio-economic development." For example, Bloice said, "the Soviet Union has a record harvest this year (280 million tons of grain), but its system as structured today prevents getting the food to the market, leading to the long lines that all of you know about." However, "it is not lack of knowledge of how to make things work, but lack of technologgy that is the root of Soviet economic malfunction."

The Soviet Union, though tops in many areas of production: shoes, iron and steel, oil, etc., as well as in research in laser, computers, fiber optics, genetics, medicines and so on, has translated none of these into the daily life of the people; one center (Moscow) has been directing the totality of life in the whole country.

"Under perestroika and glasnost, people are becoming active in all spheres of Soviet life," Bloice remarked. "The rebirth of the working-class and the women's movement is just beginning," added Bloice.

The ethnic conflicts - a legacy of papering over real problems - are also giving way to a new multi-ethnic, healthy confederation. "Were it not for the economic mess-up, none of these problems would be so acute," BIoice noted.

"Commitment to social justice and equality is deeply rooted in the Soviet people over the last 70 years of building socialism, whatever the mistakes and shortcomings of the system. Socialism is getting a second wind," said Bloice.

Soviet foreign policy, Bloice noted, "has consistently been a policy of peaceful co-existence; but the Soviets were in their view, over-extended in terms of their political, military and economic commitment in the Third World, and they were badly hurt by the wasteful arms race," said Bloice.

"With the end of the Cold War, they are rethinking their approach to the world, but peaceful co-existence is still their linchpin. The U.S.-Iraq confrontation has not changed that, and issues of world resources, economic development, etc. are now requiring new approaches other than confrontation," Bloice concluded. But he did admit that with political upheaval in Eastern Europe, problems at home in the Soviet Union, socialism in the wider historical sense has suffered a setback, hopefully, temporarily.