DAVE REITER
New U.S.S.R. needs new values
Recent events in the Soviet Union
raise important political and
economic questions about who
will gain control over what.
Although such questions are cer
tainly important, another is worthy of
discussion. Whatever the new Soviet
Union turns out to be, what will re
place Communist ideology and pro
vide the core values of the new Soviet
Union?
In a sense, this question does not
have the same urgency as the eco
nomic and political questions, which
may determine whether people sur
vive the winter. Questions of eco
nomics and politics also are particu
larly timely because the collapse is
brand new, while the moral or value
structure of the Soviet Union seem
ingly collapsed a long time ago.
In a 1978 address at Harvard Uni
versity, author Alexander Solzhenitsyn
said, “In our Eastern countries, com
munism has suffered a complete ideo
logical defeat; it is zero and less than
zero.”
Although the moral question re
mains unariswered, it is important.
Someone might respond to ques
tions of future morality by saying we
should not assume a society must
have a set of core values. It might be
suggested that if a society is demo
cratic — surely desirable for the new
Soviet Union — it doesn’t need such
values. In fact, some may insist that
in a democracy a set of shared values
is undesirable.
But democracy itself requires cer
tain minimal core values. In “Dicta
torships and Double Standards,” Jcanc
Kirkpatrick points out that democratic
elections can occur only if all parties
agree “to settle the contest with bal
lots rather than bullets.”
A democratic form of government
I' _I
If democracy jj not
disciplined by care.
values, nothing pre
vents it from degen
erating iota iust q
neat my far the, nu
merical majority to
oppress the, minority.
may be desirable, but it is not at all
clear that a "mere democracy” is
desirable. If democracy is not disci
plined by core values, nothing pre
vents it from degenerating into just a
neat way for rhe majority to oppress
the minority.
Americans should not be too sur
prised if religious values play a sig
nificant role in the new Soviet Ufcion^
Some Soviets already have explored'
religious values under President
Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of in
creased religious freedom.
In 1990, sociologist Mikhail Mal
skovsky invited four U.S. scholars to
Moscow to help develop a two-year
study to test 10,000 Soviets about
their understanding of the 10 Com
mandments.
This summer, the International
Center for All-Human Values in
Moscow sponsored a conference,
“Religion and Values in the Develop
ment of Law, Democracy, and Hu
man Rights.” It drew U.S. and Soviet
scholars.
Gennady Denisovsky, department
chief of the U.S.S.R. Academy of
Sciences Institute of Sociology, re
ported that polls from the past three
years indicate that the church is one
of the two most trusted institutions in
the country. The Mmy is the other.
Solzhenitsyn argued in his Har
vard address that both the East and
West are suffering from a lack of
spiritual sustenance. Both worlds are
committed to human autonomy, he
said, defining it as “the proclaimed
and practiced autonomy of man from
any higher force above him.”
Solzhenitsyn said the main differ
ence between the two worlds is that in
the West, the commitment to human
ism is a kind of intellectual heritage,
while in the East it comes in the form
of Communist indoctrination.
But Solzhenitsyn also said that,
from a spiritual standpoint, his people
were better off than we were in the
West.
#
“Through deep suffering, people
in our country have now achieved a
spiritual development of such inten
sity that the Western system in its
/present slate of spiritual exhaustion
docs not look attractive,” he said.
If Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of the
world is correct, the events of the past
two weeks raise another interesting
question: If the people in the Eastern
countries were belter off spiritually
than we, even while under the iron
rule of Communism, how much bet
ter off can they become now?
Reiter is a graduate student in philosophy
and a Daily Nebraskan columnist.
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