9 - Operative ideology, fundamental principles and social reality

Summary

People always were and always will be the stupid victims of deceit and selfdeceit in politics until they learn to discover the interests of some class behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.

V. I. Lenin, ‘The three sources and three component parts of Marxism’

Writing in 1977, Evans, a specialist in Soviet affairs, drew the following conclusion: ‘Recent changes in Soviet communist ideology have been ignored almost completely by Western scholars. The reason is evident: most observers assume that the Soviet ideology is not changing.’ According to Evans: ‘The ideology was forgotten by many outsiders, but not Soviet leaders.’ They instituted ‘explicit revisions in the framework of the official ideology’, the most important product being the concept of‘developed socialism’. This concept, designating a further stage along the road to the achievement of Communist society, was new. And although the central values it embodied were closely linked to past experience and long-standing norms (especially the maintenance of authoritative political institutions, the conscious organisation of society, the continuation of industrial growth), it could be generally said, in the view of this scholar, that ‘Contemporary Soviet ideology reflects the erosion of utopianism and the strength of “developmentalism” in the Soviet regime’, which, in turn, reflects the need ‘to identify the ideal with the features of existing institutions’.

A West German Sovietologist, Dahm, stressed the plurality of ideological approaches that had appeared in Soviet ideology in the 1970s.