Shipler - Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams; Revised Edition

Soviet customs officials have confiscated many copies of this book since it was first published in 1983. Readers have written to tell me the gruesome details: the menacingly polite request, Do you have any books? May I see them? followed by a glance at the cover and a flip through the pages and the judgment that the book is anti-Soviet and may not be carried into the Soviet Union.

Occasionally, travelers have been told that the volume will be held and then returned when they leave the country. One mans copy was seized when he arrived in Moscow and was returned to him when he left from Leningrad; anothers was taken at Leningrad and given back upon his departure from Moscow.

Such reports grew less frequent after Mikhail S. Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Partys Central Committee in March 1985. As he gradually opened the range of permissible debate and criticism, the Soviet borders became more permeable to ideas from the outside world. Therefore, I was curious to see what would happen when I took the book along on a visit to the Soviet Union in April 1988.

Do you have any books? May I see them? They were still checking, and thoroughly. As I pulled out books, magazines, and newspaper clippings, the customs officer behind the counter summoned two young plainclothesmen, smooth-faced English speakers. They looked through all the printed material with a chilling calm, spending more time with unfamiliar items than with my Russia; one of the men picked it up, read the title, flipped it open to make sure that the inside corresponded to the cover, and gave it back to me.

Indeed, everything was returned. Nothing was confiscated. And as I spent the next three weeks exploring the altered political landscape of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, I kept thinking of this first encounter as a telling introduction to what I was finding there: The rules had been relaxed considerably, but the machinery of state control remained firmly in place, to be activated with ease if desired.

The Gorbachev era will enter history as a bold effort to revise some of the deepest political and cultural reflexes in Soviet society, an effort led by a man who displays only a dim understanding of the principles of free speech and democracy toward which he struggles to pull his country. Since the old political reflexes form the central theme of this book, which was written before Gorbachev, my task here is to revisit the attitudes I observed, to test my earlier conclusions, and to measure the force of the societys conservative instincts against the power of liberalization set loose by Gorbachev.

This I do in an epilogue, which becomes the final chapter of this new edition. The rest of the book remains substantially unchanged, since it focuses on durable features of Soviet society that have proven resistant to reform. They are characteristics that must be understood to grasp what Gorbachev confronts as he tries to drag the Soviet Union away from many of its own political traditions. The epilogue, therefore, is designed to add depth to the original by throwing those durable attributes into relief and by imparting a sense of motion to the portrayal of the Russians search.

I am grateful to The New York Times for agreeing to my requests for a three-week working trip to the Soviet Union. It was the fourth and longest of six visits within two years, allowing me to contribute to a series of articles, from which some of the material in the epilogue is drawn.

D.K.S. Washington January 1989