Transformations like these would have brought about marked changes in the social situation, but it must be admitted that Soviet dissidents underestimated the importance of the struggle being waged, and often failed to understand it. Bukovsky, for example, admits: ‘we didn’t notice’ the polemics around the reforms, and writes with disdain of ‘the so-called economists’, adding that ‘they had no special theories.’28 The fighters for ‘intellectual independence’ did not appreciate the anti-bureaucratic implications of the idea of market socialism and did not realize that without economic reforms they would not ‘see the age of freedom’, for these reforms aimed at a democratic transformation of society. The new economic ideas won more and more supporters, but this happened more slowly than their authors would have wished. At the same time it became clear that apart from the idea of economic reforms, the oppositionists had no constructive social ideas. But it is impossible not only to build but also to destroy anything in society unless one has a positive programme. On the whole, the true significance of the new economic theory was understood only later. Meanwhile, the ruling statocracy very quickly understood how the proposed changes threatened it.
The statocracy was not, of course, united and there were groups in it which advocated reform. But these were mainly ‘underprivileged’ groups, with insufficient powers and rights. It was for this very reason that they supported reform, hoping thereby to win more power, but they could not get the better of their more conservative ‘class brothers’. Those who wanted changes lacked sufficient power (which was why they wanted them), while those who did not want changes had power (which was why they did not want them). Those with more power had more chances of success. This situation could change only in circumstances of crisis, when the usual bureaucratic game was no longer capable of settling anything. Such a crisis occurred in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, but not in the USSR.
The necessary changes were not made. Reform got bogged down in the initial phase, blocked by the bureaucratic apparatus. As the reforming tendencies failed, so the technocratic tendencies gained strength. The technocrats’ illusion that the existing system could be rationalized, without any changes in principle, was closely connected with hopes set upon cybernetic methods of management.
Cybernetics was rehabilitated at the end of the fifties, and very soon the ruling circles came to swear by it. Alongside the oppositionist idea of market socialism, elements of a new idea appeared — cybernetic socialism. ‘Cybernetics’, writes Graham,
revitalized, at least temporarily, the Soviet leaders’ confidence that the Soviet system could control the economy rationally. This renewal came exactly at the moment when the possibility seemed to be irretrievably vanishing. This rebirth of hope was the explanation of the intoxication with cybernetics in the Soviet Union in the late fifties; in the period after 1958 thousands of articles, pamphlets and books on cybernetics appeared in the Soviet press. In the more popular articles the full utilization of cybernetics was equated with the advent of Communism and the fulfilment of the Revolution. If the curious mixture of ideology and politics in the Soviet Union can upon occasion affect certain sciences adversely — as it did at one time with genetics — it can also catapult others to unusual prominence.29
The idea that the economy could be roused by adopting advanced methods of management, without changing the organization, was utopian and absurd. It failed at once when put into practice, because owing to the outdated relations of production the introduction of any new achievements of science and technology — in particular the use of computers — came up against many difficulties and proved ineffective. Soviet experience in the sixties and seventies brilliantly confirmed Šik’s conjecture: that unless organization was reformed,
the new computer technology not only will not secure ideal economic development, but may even serve to justify absolutely one-sided development, aimed at the solution of simplified tasks which do not correspond to the public interest.30
This became clear pretty soon. For this reason, evidently, technocratic tendencies (in the form of pan-cyberneticism or any other) turned out not to be so strong here as could have been expected at first. Nevertheless, they did affect the ideology of the government, the opposition’s ideas, and even — as we shall see — literature as well. Technocratic illusions can be perceived in the views of Khrushchev and Brezhnev no less than in the ideas of Sakharov and Turchin, and they are apparent in the plays of Dvoretsky and Shatrov. On the whole, though, no special ideology of ‘technocracy’ arose in the USSR as it did in the USA in the sixties. True, the incapacity of the statocratic system to 'get rationalized’, which dismayed experts of the Western type, gave rise at the end of the sixties and in the seventies to such strange phenomena as ‘the disappointed technocrat’ and even ‘the enraged technocrat’ — of whom more later.
As regards the years 1965 to 1968, when bureaucratic sabotage was obviously dooming to frustration all hopes for successful practical measures to introduce reforms, the struggle moved on to the theoretical plane. The left-wing economists continued to pay attention to the grave economic situation and to uphold their views, while hoping to find supporters in the future rather than counting on being able to influence the fate of reform in the present. Every serious statement on their part met a rowdy response in the official press, which began to ‘unmask’ the new theoreticians. In reply, the latter set out their views again and again in Novy Mir, deepening and sharpening the argument. In 1967 V. Kantorovich published an article, ‘Sociology and Literature’, in which he tried to break out of the limits of a purely economic discussion. The problems raised by reform on the economic plane were transferred to the social plane, and from there to the cultural plane. The discussion revealed the need for a new approach to Western sociology and philosophy, especially to the Frankfurt School, which had elaborated the scientific instrument so badly needed by the new economists. The reform also showed the bankruptcy of the existing organization of education and culture, the contradiction between the rising intellectual level of the working people and the prevailing forms of work organization. Art had already done quite a lot to concretize these problems and attract public interest to them. Another important point of contact between the new economists and the creative intelligentsia was that both swept aside all vulgar-sociological stereotypes and mechanical schemas and tried to see life in its many-sidedness, complexity and dynamism. It was not by chance that A. Birman advised those educated in the humanities to study economics, hoping that they would see reality ‘in a more three-dimensional way’. Kantorovich, too, summoned the creative intelligentsia to the aid of the ideologues of reform. In so doing he referred to the ‘Prague spring’ activist Z. Mlynář. Alas, this association was not accidental.
As fewer and fewer hopes survived in Soviet society for rapid changes for the better, attention became more and more focused on Prague. The hopes of the left-wing intelligentsia was concentrated on Czechoslovakia. Prague became the Mecca of the Soviet opposition. The Medvedevs’ Political Diary regularly published translations and abstracts of Czechoslovak writings from 1965 onwards. In 1966-68 much material came out in samizdat. A great deal arrived, too, through official channels.31 Despite the fact that the Soviet reader was allowed to see an abridged version of the action programme of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, adopted in April 1968, a complete translation of it was passed around in Moscow. The Political Diary recorded at the time that ‘some Muscovites who know Czech are translating… material from Rude Pravo and circulating it among their friends.’32 The official leadership in the Kremlin showed a certain tolerance at the beginning of the ‘Prague spring’, hoping that the process of change in Czechoslovakia would not go too far. Kalvoda writes that Dubcek even enjoyed at first the confidence of the Soviet leaders: ‘Brezhnev called him “our Sasha”.’33