Gorbachev and His Enemies: The Struggle for Perestroika (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 163 that Iran's policies are not entirely novel in the context of world politics, and do not represent a break either with the Iranian past or with normal state behavior. The book provides an important new context in which to consider what is often misconstrued as the "Iranian phenomenon." Gorbachev and His Enemies: The Struggle for Perestroika. By Baruch A. Hazan. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1990. 335pp. Hardback. Reviewed by Sharon L. Werning, M.A. Candidate, SAIS. Mikhail Gorbachev, as Baruch Hazan paraphrases a poem in Gorbachev and His Enemies, seems to be wandering between two worlds—one dead, the other powerless to be born." Hazan's purpose is to analyze this transition period by focusing on the people and institutions born of the "dead" totalitarian Soviet system, which, in their opposition to Gorbachev, are stalling the birth of a new system. Herein lies the difficulty of Hazan's task. As the author explains in his introduction, the actual opponents of perestroika (restructuring) are hard to identify; this is because the actors in the Soviet Union's political sphere pay lipservice to the need for perestroika. Moreover, there is no single platform of opposition. As a result, the author must analyze the constituent institutions of the "opposition," which frequently have overlapping members, depending on the issue. While the author does an admirable job of chronicling in detail the actions and statements made by specific groups (the army, the KGB, the bureaucracy, and the political "right" and "left") to oppose perestroika his analysis and interpretation of those events is somewhat uneven in quality. For example, Hazan tends to use interchangeably the concepts of opposition to perestroika in general and opposition to Gorbachev in particular. This works well in his chapters on the military, the KGB, and the bureaucracy, where such a connection could (at the time of Hazan's writing) be made. It works less well, however, in his chapters on the opposition from the political right and left, represented by Yegor Ligachev and Boris Yeltsin, respectively. Hazan does qualify that both are not opposed to perestroika per se, but rather to its pace and scope: for Ligachev, it is too fast and all-encompassing; for Yeltsin, the reverse. However, since Hazan has framed the question of opposition to perestroika largely as a struggle for power, it would have been helpful if he had made clear the distinction he makes between the right and the left's political maneuvering and their attitudes toward specific aspects ??perestroika the program. In the chapters focusing on institutions within the Soviet Union, on the other hand, Hazan clearly discusses the implications of perestroika for each institution and its reactions to these implications. He examines what the term "reasonable sufficiency" means to the military, the effect that glasnost is having on the KGB, and how economic decentralization threatens the bureaucracy. In the chapter on the military, for example, Hazan traces the development of the meaning of Gorbachev's reforms for the armed services. He states that in 1985, the military nominally embraced perestroika as a means to obtain access to 164 SAISREVIEW sophisticated weaponry and thus more reliable security. In 1986, however, when Gorbachev began to allude to a "strict diet" of resources and manpower and followed through with changes in leadership, budget cuts, and the extension of glasnost to the military, the army predictably responded negatively. In what is perhaps the best chapter in the book, Hazan describes the Soviet bureaucracy, focusing on why its members oppose both Gorbachev and his program, and the tactics they use to do so. The "bureaucracy", as he defines it, includes the apparatus of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the "classic bureaucracy" or the state administrative apparatus, and the regional party apparatus that prospered during the Brezhnev era. These, Hazan states, are united in their opposition to perestroika not on ideological grounds, but rather because of the threat that it poses to them professionally. Unified in this way, the bureaucracy is able to thwart the reforms simply by its recalcitrance. In this same chapter, Hazan discusses an important part of the opposition—the conservative factions that resist change for ideological reasonsparticularly for fear that...