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nosay[f85,jmc]		Things that cannot be said in the Soviet Union

	It is difficult for people living in a society without political
censorship to understand the intellectual situation in a society
that has it.  Here are some conjectures about the Soviet Union.
They are consistent with the Khrushchev memoirs, with Trifunovich's
memoirs and with what emigres have told me.

	1. The Soviet public press including newspapers, magazines
and books is politically censored.  Many events, people and ideas
may not be mentioned.  Others may be mentioned only in quotations
from foreign sources so that the Soviet authors take no responsibility.
There is no controversy about this censorship of public material.

	2. Within the successively higher levels of the party,
censorship is greatly reduced.  However, this mainly takes the
form of increased access to foreign material and increased
access to secrets.  There are many sources of this fact and
no serious controversy.

	3. There are no newspapers, magazines or books produced
by Soviet authors, however restricted in circulation, in which
authors are fully free to criticize the current party line.  I am not
aware that this point is made explicitly anywhere, but it is
confirmed by the emigres with whom I have discussed it, and it
is a direct consequence of the doctrine of ``democratic
centralism'' and the prohibition of factions within the party.
We may also mention in support of it what Khrushchev said about
the fact that when Stalin died, the members of the Politburo
didn't know what the others thought about almost all important
issues.

	4. We don't know how open the discussion is among party
big shots.  Perhaps the CIA's records of the car radio conversations
of Politburo members would give some hints.  Given the ages
of recent members and the fact that each had an entourage, there
probably wasn't much discussion even of topics that aren't touchy.

	The consequences of this lack of open discussion anywhere
in the party suggests that the thinking of individuals is quite
shallow on the whole.  I cannot fully imagine what it is like,
but I'll bet it's like nothing Westerner's can readily imagine.

	Here are some matters that I suspect are taboo.

	1. No-one asserts that the Western Europe will not voluntarily
go communist in the forseeable future, i.e. in the next 50 years.

	2. The Polish working class hates the communist party.

	3. The United States would not attack the Soviet Union.