REMAKING THE REVOLUTION : Barriers Fall : Glasnost--Soviets Try to Open Up

MOSCOW — A small sign on the gate of No. 3 Pavlenko St. in the nearby village of Peredelkino proclaims: “Here will be a museum.”

About 200 yards back from the narrow road, at the end of a wooded lane, stands the distinctive, half-century-old dacha, or country home, of the late Boris L. Pasternak, its wedge-shaped, two-story facade resembling the prow of a large ship.

“This is the room where he wrote ‘Dr. Zhivago,’ ” said Yuri V. Alyokhin as he guided visitors through the mostly empty house to a second-floor study looking out over an onion-domed Russian Orthodox church. Pasternak is buried near the church.

Published in the West after it was banned here, “Dr. Zhivago” helped Pasternak win the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature. It also brought him the unremitting hostility of the Soviet political and cultural Establishment, which labeled him “a literary Judas.”

Undermined His Health

Pasternak was forced to decline the Nobel, but the attacks on him continued, undermining his health and, some say, contributing to his death in 1960 in a small downstairs bedroom of his dacha .

Now, Pasternak has been officially rehabilitated under Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. Pasternak’s sweeping novel, set against the backdrop of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian civil war, is finally supposed to be published in its entirety in the literary monthly Novy Mir next year. His son, Yevgeny, is writing Pasternak’s biography with official blessing.

The Ministry of Culture named Alyokhin director of the Pasternak museum almost a year ago, but the project is still held up because of a rear-guard action by Stalinist-era Writers’ Union officials, one of whom has reportedly pledged that the museum will open only “over my dead body.”

So the Pasternak dacha --which is a museum but, at the same time, isn’t--stands as a fitting symbol of glasnost (usually, but inadequately, translated into English as “openness”).

Like the sign on Pasternak’s gate, glasnost is above all a statement of intent, a demonstration of new thinking at the top--and a promise of significant changes to come. But the still-closed museum is a reminder that the plan may not be as ambitious as some might wish and that, in any case, the work has barely begun and glasnost is vulnerable to counterattack by still-powerful forces with a stake in the old ways.

Still, to visitors returning to Moscow after less than a decade’s absence, the changes that Gorbachev has accomplished in less than three years in office--although sometimes tentative and incomplete--are stunning.

Moscow is a more relaxed city with fewer propaganda slogans than it was in the 1970s. Andrei D. Sakharov, formerly the dean of Soviet dissidents, is now quoted by the Soviet foreign minister in speeches before the United Nations. Nikita S. Khrushchev, officially a “non-person” for 20 years, turns out not to have been so bad after all--or so the Soviet media say now.

Films suppressed for up to a generation as anti-socialist now play at neighborhood theaters, and emigre authors once considered traitors are published in literary magazines.

There are still taboos, of course. No one is publishing exiled author Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn. The KGB, Soviet foreign policy and the true size of the Soviet defense budget are among aspects of life that still appear mostly immune from scrutiny. But the same brand of criticism that used to land people in prison appears daily in Soviet newspapers, which people now buy to read rather than simply to use as wrapping material.

Even the CIA, which generally takes a skeptical view of Soviet developments, concluded in a September report that the “policy of glasnost or openness has resulted in more candor and less ideological rigidity in the discussion of Soviet problems, history, international relations and culture than at any time since the 1920s.”

But, while it is clearly the most dramatic of the innovations introduced under Gorbachev, glasnost is at the same time the most reversible.

A standard Russian-English dictionary published here translates the word not as “openness” but as “publicity” or “public airing”--definitions that more accurately suggest the nature of glasnost as a policy controlled from the top rather than rising spontaneously from the bottom.

The authorities may be telling more, but they have not ceded their prerogative to decide what will be told, and to whom. Glasnost is a tool, not an end in itself, and therefore, not to be confused with Western-style freedom of speech.

Neither, however, is glasnost what some skeptical Western analysts first believed--simply good public relations, designed to lull the West into complacency. Its primary focus is internal, not external.

For decades, the Communist authorities have treated Soviet citizens like children who either would not understand or could not be trusted with the truth. Now, selectively at least, that is changing--in the belief that treating the people more like responsible adults is the only way to break through their apathy and enlist them in the enormous job of social and economic reconstruction. And there is evidence that this approach is already unleashing forces in Soviet society profound in their potential for change.

“We are at the first stage of forming a real public opinion as a factor in decision-making,” said Fyodor M. Burlatsky, a consultant to the policy-making Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.

Gorbachev has described glasnost as the principal guarantee that his program to restructure not only the economy but virtually all aspects of national life will not be sidetracked.

No Opposition Party

“We don’t have an opposition (party),” Gorbachev said during an informal meeting with about 30 writers last year. According to a partial transcript of the meeting circulated underground here, the Soviet leader added: “How, then, can we monitor ourselves? Only through criticism and self-criticism. And most of all through glasnost. “

While Gorbachev shows no inclination to give up the Communist Party’s political monopoly, glasnost does represent an attempt to improve feedback within the system and to at least make people feel like their opinions count.

States the latest CIA assessment: “Gorbachev evidently believes that increased personal freedoms and a freer flow and clash of ideas are necessary to revitalize the system and to overcome widespread apathy and alienation, particularly among the intelligentsia.”

While glasnost clearly has limits, it’s also true that the boundaries are still pushing outward.

“Nobody really knows where it is going to lead, including Soviet leaders,” maintained Heinrich Vogel, director of West Germany’s Federal Institute for East European and International Studies, at a recent seminar sponsored by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.

The latest and, in some ways, most far-reaching outgrowth of glasnost is the formation, mostly in the last six months, of literally thousands of so-called informal groups, unsanctioned by the authorities but now being tolerated and in some cases encouraged. Previously, any group that was not officially sanctioned was, by definition, dissident.

Some of the new organizations simply bring together small groups of people with a common interest in chess, rock music, soccer or some other activity. But others are the first genuinely independent political discussion and civic action groups to have emerged here since the earliest days of the Soviet state.

A Moscow group called Memorial, for example, is campaigning for a monument and information center to be built honoring the victims of Stalinist repressions. Another group, in Leningrad, opposes on environmental grounds a government project to dam a section of the Gulf of Finland in order to prevent flooding in the city.

Circulate Newsletters

Many of the groups circulate their own, uncensored newsletters, which extend the spirit of glasnost-- even if only tentatively--beyond the official media and cultural world into areas much more difficult to control.

Potentially even more significant is the impact of these groups on a Soviet social fabric shredded by years of fear and repression.

Josef Stalin turned the old military maxim of “divide and conquer” against his own nation and extended it into every Soviet neighborhood, apartment complex and even individual home. He made Pavel Morozov, a teen-ager who betrayed his father to the secret police, a national hero, the patron saint of the Young Communist League and a model for generations of Soviet youth.

“When ‘Pavlik’ Morozov was declared a hero, that was a violation of the moral atmosphere in the society,” commented Vitaly A. Korotich, editor in chief of the weekly magazine Ogonyok, which is one of glasnost’s leading practitioners. “Stalin is horrible precisely on this point.”

The informal groups have the potential of rebuilding the still badly damaged bridges between individuals here.

“For me, personally, one thing at least has changed,” said Yuri Samodurov, 36, a geologist and member of both Memorial and a political discussion group named Perestroika, after Gorbachev’s program of perestroika, or “restructuring” of Soviet society. “In the last six months, I’ve come into contact with so many people I never would have met in my life.

“Our most important target is restoring people to a feeling of self-respect,” Samodurov added in an interview.

Gorbachev is not the first Soviet leader to stress the need for glasnost.

V. I. Lenin wrote about it as “an instrument of economic re-education of the masses” just four months after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution brought the Communists to power.

But Gorbachev has made the word so much his own that, in the West, glasnost has come to symbolize the whole of his political program--the Soviet equivalent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

Glasnost is a style as much as a policy. It’s a style set, for example, when Gorbachev concedes: “I may make mistakes on some points, too; I lay no claim to absolute truth.” And it is reinforced when his statement, made during a July meeting with newspaper editors, is printed the next day on the front page of the government newspaper Izvestia.

The new Soviet dogma is that there is no dogma. Criticism is the order of the day. “We should seek the truth together, jointly,” Gorbachev said.

In the cultural field, the emergence of long-suppressed works now occurs with such regularity that it barely creates a stir anymore when some previously banned film is released for general audiences or another book is published about the horrors of Stalin’s terror.

Last month, Ogonyok published excerpts from the epic World War II novel “Life and Fate,” by the late Vasily Grossman. Completed in 1960, four years before the author’s death, the work--which is harshly critical of Stalin--was previously banned here as anti-Soviet.

Ogonyok reported that the entire novel, which Western critics have called a 20th-Century equivalent of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” will soon be published here for the first time by the literary monthly Oktyabr.

Another long-banned book expected to be published here soon is the late Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We,” an anti-totalitarian novel that has been called a prototype for George Orwell’s “1984.” Written in 1920, it, too, was previously considered anti-socialist, said Feliks Kuznetsov, a prominent contemporary writer who revealed at a Vienna news conference that Zamyatin’s work is to appear early next year.

Even the poetry of the newest Nobel literature laureate, Joseph Brodsky, who served 18 months in a Soviet labor camp for “social parasitism,” will be published soon in the magazine Novy Mir. The magazine had made its plans even before Brodsky, now a U.S. citizen, was awarded the Nobel last week, and it has stuck with them despite the pointed comment of a Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman that “the tastes of the Nobel committee are somewhat strange sometimes.”

Thirty feature films and another 70 documentaries that had been blocked by the censors for up to 20 years have all been cleared for at least limited showings, Igor N. Lusakovsky, deputy secretary of the Union of Cinematographers, said in an interview.

The one that caused the biggest stir was “Repentance,” probably the most revealing--albeit allegorical--treatment of Stalinism ever released for general audiences here.

“Commissar,” a film indictment of anti-Semitism banned shortly after its completion in 1967, was shown to small audiences at last summer’s Moscow Film Festival. Officials say the sympathetic account of a Jewish family in the Ukraine during the Russian civil war will eventually be released for general audiences, although cultural sources say there is still strong and politically powerful opposition to it.

Modern films are also plowing new ground. Lusakovsky said one now in production is about a prostitute--a theme “unthinkable” two years ago.

Among foreign films the government has recently bought for general release are “Platoon,” “Amadeus” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Impact on Media

Glasnost’s biggest impact, however, has been on the mass media--what Gorbachev has called “this powerful lever of restructuring.”

Old taboos seem to go by the boards almost daily. Recent articles in the Soviet press have discussed not only prostitution but also homosexuality and even the abuse of psychiatry to punish people who criticize officials.

The ruling Politburo reportedly decided in April, 1985, to permit reporting on drug addiction. Statistics on infant mortality and average life expectancy--withheld for years because they showed negative trends--have again been published. And earlier this month, the authorities released new--albeit still selective--national figures on crime.

Details on air, sea, rail and industrial accidents--previously suppressed--are now frequently reported. They show, for example, that nearly 40,000 Soviets died in traffic mishaps last year--about the same as in the United States, despite the fact that there are only about one-tenth as many vehicles on Soviet highways.

The press writes extensively, if selectively, about official corruption, privileges and abuse of power by ministers and party officials.

“You can read things in the official press today that three years ago would have meant a jail sentence,” commented Viktor Brailovsky, a prominent Jewish activist, just before leaving for Israel after a 15-year wait for permission to emigrate.

Names that had long ago disappeared from the Soviet press have re-emerged under glasnost-- political figures such as Khrushchev, Leon Trotsky and Nikolai I. Bukharin, who were previously relegated to official non-person status.

The weekly Moscow News stirred up a hornets’ nest when it published a tribute to emigre Soviet author Viktor Nekrasov shortly after his death in September.

Nekrasov was expelled from the Communist Party and the official Writers’ Union after criticizing the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and supporting Solzhenitsyn, the author of “The Gulag Archipelago.” Solzhenitsyn was forced to emigrate in 1974.

Yegor Yakovlev, editor of Moscow News, was personally reprimanded for publishing the Nekrasov tribute by the party’s second-ranking official, ideology chief Yegor K. Ligachev, according to a usually well-informed source here. But when Yakovlev offered to resign, Gorbachev reportedly telephoned him from the Crimea, where the Soviet leader was vacationing, and urged him not to.

“If someone working for restructuring gives up his position so easily, who will be left to carry out restructuring?” the source quoted Gorbachev as telling Yakovlev.

The media is changing so fast that Soviet historian Roy Medvedev says he is having a hard time completing a book he is writing on how information, ideology and power are intertwined here. “It’s like shooting at a moving target,” said Medvedev, whose works have been published in the West but are still banned in his homeland.

“The limits of glasnost haven’t been set,” Medvedev added. “Every month we see elements of glasnost growing. It happens in different ways--sometimes by decision of the Politburo, sometimes on the initiative of individual editors.”

“Neither Pravda nor the press as a whole has ever enjoyed such freedom,” Viktor G. Afanasyev, chief editor of the Communist Party’s official newspaper, said in an interview.

Afanasyev recalled approaching a higher Communist Party authority recently seeking pre-publication approval of a “very sensitive” article. “You print it, and tomorrow I’ll tell you what I think,” the Pravda editor quoted his superior as saying.

Ogonyok recently published an interview with the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Jack F. Matlock Jr. “I give you my word I never showed it to anyone,” Korotich, the editor, said. “I simply published it.”

Korotich claims that he would publish Solzhenitsyn, too--but only on the condition that he return to the Soviet Union. “I won’t listen to him from abroad.” Whether Solzhenitsyn, who now lives in Vermont, would be allowed to return--even if he wanted to--is uncertain.

Serves Political Purposes

Few here or in the West believe that Gorbachev, a survivor of one of the world’s most ruthless political systems, is pursuing glasnost out of some new-found sense of social justice.

The CIA calls him a “pragmatic visionary.” And glasnost clearly serves a number of useful political purposes.

Press attacks on inefficient, corrupt and self-satisfied bureaucrats--whether in the party or the government--help Gorbachev put more pressure on the very people who are most opposed to his political program.

“Who will break our managers, especially the high-level ones, of their feudal ideology, caste-like haughtiness, confidence in their own invulnerability and ‘God-given’ right to command?” wrote economist Nikolai P. Shmelev in a sweeping blast at the system’s shortcomings published in June by Novy Mir magazine. “Why should they think that they are above the law and immune to all criticism?” continued Shmelev, in an indictment later publicly endorsed by Gorbachev. “What we need here is glasnost and democracy.”

Similarly, by making the Soviet press more interesting and believable, glasnost at least partially restores its credibility for the day when the leadership will need it to win public support for the painful economic measures--like sharp food price increases--still ahead.

“We will have to talk to people honestly, as was done in Hungary, where a major public relations effort was launched in 1976 to help introduce new prices painlessly,” wrote Shmelev.

To some extent, glasnost is a consolation prize for the public--a substitute for material rewards which the government promises will result from economic restructuring but which it cannot yet deliver.

As Nikolai Shishlin, deputy director of the Communist Party’s information department, told a Hungarian television interviewer earlier this year when asked how Gorbachev’s program had changed everyday life: “We should speak not only about material things but also about intellectual things because, to put it mildly, our results in the material sphere are modest.”

Abroad, glasnost is intended to help Gorbachev capture the foreign policy initiative lost to the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is also meant to foster a more benign image of the Soviet Union, which will help relieve pressure on its defense budget while simultaneously making it easier for Moscow to import the necessary foreign equipment and technology to modernize its economy.

Shishlin said it was a surprise to many here that, when Moscow began admitting its mistakes and problems to the world, “a much more nuanced and favorable picture of the Soviet Union . . . developed. This proved to us that frankness and openness are worth much more than the most perfect but falsely colored picture.”

The change of style came so suddenly it has apparently caught not only Western leaders but some Soviet officials off guard. At a Moscow meeting earlier this month with journalists and delegates from 45 foreign countries, for example, Gen. Vladimir K. Pikalov, commander of Soviet chemical forces, first addressed his audience as “comrades.” He quickly added “and gentlemen,” explaining apologetically: “I very rarely meet such audiences. It’s a habit for me to say comrades.”

“We are saying things now that we could not say three months ago,” commented another Soviet official, who requested anonymity. He said he had called the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a mistake during a recent conference in a West European capital, for example. “Only members of the Soviet delegation gasped in surprise.”

Of course, pragmatism also means there are still many taboos. And there is also strong resistance to glasnost, which leads to its being applied unevenly.

“Openness and democracy . . . do not mean that everything is permitted,” Gorbachev told the editors in July. “Openness is called upon to strengthen socialism and the spirit of our people, to strengthen morality and a moral atmosphere in society. Openness also means criticism of shortcomings. But it does not mean the undermining of socialism and our socialist values.”

While Soviet officials can speak abroad about Afghanistan as a mistake, for example, such an opinion still doesn’t find its way into the domestic press. Neither has there ever been any comprehensive public accounting of casualties in that war.

The Committee for State Security--or KGB, as the secret police organization is known by its Russian initials--remains, with rare exceptions, above public criticism.

While there is less censorship, it still exists, said Ogonyok’s Korotich. And like censorship anywhere, it is abused, he added.

‘State Secrets’ Censored

“State secrets” can still be censored, for example. The problem is that individual government ministries and departments are the arbiters of what is a secret.

“Sometimes I want to criticize an agency, and I have to ask the permission of that agency to print it,” Korotich complained.

“Every publishing house has a political editor,” Anatoly I. Strelyanyi, a member of Novy Mir’s editorial board, told a meeting of the Young Communist League at Moscow State University earlier this year. “They are nice people and sympathize with us,” he added, according to a partial transcript of the session circulated underground here. “But every single one of them has an enormous book of ‘what-you-can’ts’ from the Council of Ministers, compiled on the basis of recommendations from ministries and departments,” the transcript quotes Strelyanyi as saying.

“These use the pretext of ‘security’ to cover up their slackness. . . . Grain purchases are a secret! From whom? From America? As if they don’t know how much they sell us? This is not patriotism. This is the desire to avoid the truth.”

The press can only go as far as the leadership allows, Strelyanyi said. “Seventy years of monstrous eyewash and it still hasn’t been put right,” he said.

“We need a press that is independent of the party bureaucracy and the state apparatus,” the Novy Mir editor said. “An independent press is a press that reports on killed and wounded in Afghanistan, gives daily information on radioactivity at Chernobyl, is present at sessions of the Politburo and reports on who said what.”

At a meeting between the editorial board of Moscow News and prominent Moscow intellectuals, Alexander Bovin, a senior Izvestia commentator, complained that “there are still too many forbidden topics” in press coverage of foreign affairs.

An account of the meeting quotes Bovin as saying: “You cannot do this. You cannot write about that. Once I wrote an article about Iran and told readers about (the Ayatollah Ruhollah) Khomeini’s anti-national position. They told me: ‘No, it won’t do. After such a pronouncement in the paper, Khomeini may fall into the American lap.’ This is how we exist professionally.”

Social Statistics Missing

Tatyana Zaslavskaya, one of the leading Soviet sociologists associated with Gorbachev’s reform program, complained in a Pravda article earlier this year about the lack of published “social statistics”--important not only as a demonstration of glasnost but also as input for decision-makers.

“Frankly, it is rather difficult to name a single administrative decision affecting the vital interests of many social strata and groups that has been based on a reliable sociological study carried out beforehand,” Zaslavskaya complained. “Yet examples of the reverse are not hard to find.”

She specifically mentioned a series of disastrous decisions, ranging from forced collectivization to the elimination of small rural schools, which have crippled Soviet agriculture.

“If you conceal from people . . . information about the conditions of their own life, you can’t expect them to become more active in either the production or the political sphere,” Zaslavskaya wrote. “People’s trust and support can be obtained only by response to trust placed in them.”

“We are still afraid; we try to do with half-truths, half-measures, half- glasnost, “ said Soviet actor Mikhail Ulyanov at the meeting with the Moscow News editorial board. “The prohibition of the truth, covering for each other among bureaucrats, persecutions of honest, brave fighters for reconstruction--all this is happening even now in many cities.”

Plays that are permitted in one city are still forbidden by local party officials in another, according to Ulyanov. And Korotich says a similar problem exists in the media.

“They only start to wake up,” the Ogonyok editor said of the provincial Soviet press. “For a year, they’ve been sitting and looking: ‘What will happen there (in Moscow)?’ If we (in Moscow) survive, they’ll be next.”

But, according to Alla Yaroshinskaya, correspondent of a local newspaper in Zhitomir province, any lack of glasnost in the regional press is more likely the fault of local party and government officials than of the journalists. “We are being overwhelmed, not by a new style of work but by a new style of speeches,” she wrote recently in an article for Izvestia, the government newspaper.

When she and a co-worker tried to expose an incompetent local factory manager, official harassment of a physician who had written a letter of complaint to the district party committee and irregularities in local housing allocations, the articles were quashed.

“What have I gained from such articles?” Yaroshinskaya asked rhetorically in the Izvestia article. “It’s becoming harder to work--sometimes impossible. Moral pressure, checkups every half-hour--’What are you writing?’--bans on ‘taking the initiative,’ and so on.”

Her collaborator was fired, she said.

It may be significant that Zhitomir province, where Yaroshinskaya and her colleague had so much trouble, is in the western Ukraine. That’s the territory of Vladimir V. Shcherbitsky, a Politburo holdover from the era of Leonid I. Brezhnev whom Gorbachev and the reformers would reportedly like to elbow aside.

Her article in Izvestia no doubt embarrassed the Ukrainian party boss and was seen by some analysts here as more of an effort to undermine him than as an example of glasnost. And what happens to glasnost , some of these analysts ask, if openness doesn’t happen to be convenient to some higher party authority?

It’s a question that underlines the great weakness of a policy without institutional roots. Efforts to give the policy more substance--by passing a new press law, for example--have so far been delayed.

That’s why the recent development of informal groups is potentially so significant.

“The stage has been reached when it’s not possible not to act any more,” said Samodurov, the member of two such informal groups. “If we don’t do it, restructuring will fail.”

Like many Russian intellectuals, Samodurov knows how resistant the Soviet system has been to change and, reflecting a cultural tendency to see the cup as half-empty rather than half-full, he worries that the Gorbachev revolution so far has consisted mostly of changes in style rather than substance.

“I’m rather afraid because there are no solid facts,” Samodurov explained. “There are many articles in the mass media, but I never come across any other manifestation of restructuring.”

The official attitude toward Memorial, the group pressing for a monument to Stalin’s victims, is particularly uncertain. That is why Samodurov described his new civic involvement as a gesture of faith.

“Not to believe the process will continue is impossible,” said Samodurov, a bespectacled scientist. “Otherwise, there would be no point in living.”

Faith is also at work at Pasternak’s former dacha in Peredelkino, where Alyokhin guides his visitors to a small room toward the back of the house that he uses as an office.

Rummaging around in a desk drawer, he finally pulls out an envelope, addressed in English to the “Pasternak Memorial Museum.”

“The post office delivered this letter to me,” he said with a hearty laugh. “So they must think that this is a museum.”

A team of Times reporters spent a month traveling throughout the Soviet Union, interviewing scores of Soviet citizens, for this portrait of the world’s other superpower on the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The reporters are William J. Eaton, The Times’ current Moscow bureau chief; Robert Gillette, Moscow bureau chief from 1980 to 1984; Dan Fisher, Moscow bureau chief from 1977 to 1980, and Stanley Meisler, The Times’ Paris bureau chief.