Not even Brezhnev entirely stopped calling for higher levels of participation by ordinary members of society in public life or talking about a future communist society. But his statements on such topics were ritualistic verbiage. He was much more serious when he stressed the need for hierarchy and planning. The party, under the Politburo’s leadership, would formulate the policies and give the guidance. Society’s main duty was to supply the orderly obedience.
A ‘scientific-technical revolution’ would be accomplished, and central state planning would prove its superior rationality. Official theorists stressed that already the USSR outmatched capitalism in bettering the human condition. The Soviet state guaranteed employment, health care, shelter, clothing and pensions; and citizens were brought up to respect the general interests of society and to avoid selfish individualism. Not that the USSR’s leaders wanted to be seen as complacent. There was a recognition that the Soviet economy had fallen behind the advanced capitalist countries in civilian technology. It was also admitted that much needed to be done to meet the material aspirations of ordinary consumers and that the political organs of the Soviet state, including the party, had to become more responsive to the people’s wishes. Indeed there had to be a perfecting of all mechanisms of governance and welfare. ‘Developed socialism’ had to be brought to its triumphant maturity.
No basic novelty in industrial and agricultural measures was contemplated. The options were limited by the Politburo’s diversion of massive resources to the state food-subsidy and to the nuclear arms race. But the very word reform caused most Soviet leaders to shudder. After the defeat of Kosygin’s endeavour to widen managerial freedom in 1965, no one tried to pick up his banner.
Although the 1970s were a lost decade for potential reformers, however, not everything was static. Not quite. The Ninth Five-Year Plan was the first to project a slightly higher rate of increase in the output of industrial consumer products than of industrial capital goods. Watches, furniture and radios were at last meant to be manufactured in abundance. Yet the Plan still left the predominant bulk of investment at the disposal of capital-goods production. And in practice the economic ministries and the rest of the party-police-military-industrial complex managed to prevent the Plan’s consumer-oriented investment projects from being fully realized.13 By 1975, for example, consumer goods had expanded at a rate nine per cent slower than capital goods.14 This thwarting of the Politburo’s policy continued throughout the decade despite Brezhnev’s reaffirmation of his commitment to the rapid shift of investment towards satisfying the needs of Soviet consumers at both the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress in February 1976 and the Twenty-Sixth Congress in February 1981.
And so only the most minuscule steps were taken in the modification of policy. In 1973 a decree was issued to draw factories with complementary activities into ‘associations’ (ob"edineniya). The idea was that enterprises would be enabled to serve each other’s needs without resort to permission from Gosplan and the ministries in Moscow. Associations were also expected to operate on a self-financing basis and recurrent deficits in their accounts were no longer to be tolerated. By 1980 there were 4,083 associations in the USSR, producing slightly over a half of total industrial output. Yet self-financing was never fully realized. An experiment along these lines had been started at the Shchëkino Chemical Association as early as 1967; yet the reluctance of the central authorities to abandon control over decisions on investment, prices, wages and hiring and firing had condemned it to a fitful performance.
In 1979 another general decree on industry was issued which emphasized the need for scientific planning and for the avoidance of deficits in annual factory accounts. But this yielded miserable results. Soviet economic trends became ever more depressing. The contemporary official statistics gave a different impression: industrial output was still said to have risen by 4.4 per cent per annum in 1976–80. Yet even these statistics indicated a steady decrease in the rate of expansion. The supposed annual rise in 1966–70 had been 8.5 per cent.
In fact the official statistics took no account of the inflation disguised by the trick of slightly altering products and then selling them at higher prices. The statistics also hid the plight of manufacturing industry in comparison with extractive industry. Unwittingly the oil-producing Arab states had rescued the Soviet budget in 1973 by increasing the world-market prices for oil. The USSR was a large exporter of oil, petrol and gas. The reality was that the country, so far from catching up with the advanced capitalist West, was as reliant upon the sales abroad of its natural resources as it had been before 1917; and, in contrast with the tsarist period, it could no longer find a grain surplus for shipment to the rest of Europe. There can as yet be no exact statement of the percentage of industrial growth achieved. The sceptics suggest that no growth at all occurred. Be that as it may, nobody denies that by the end of the 1970s chronic absolute decline was in prospect.
The Politburo’s modifications were still more pathetic in other sectors of the economy. No fresh thinking was applied to banking, insurance, transport, personal services, construction or foreign trade. Policy was so motionless that it was rarely a topic for glancing comment in Pravda or even in the scholarly economic journals. The claims that, by avoiding Khrushchëv’s utopianism, the USSR could make steady economic advance were being tested and found wanting.
Only very dimly were Brezhnev and his colleagues aware that doing nothing was a recipe for political disaster. If they needed proof of the regime’s vulnerability, they had only to look to the country adjacent to the Soviet western border. Poland was seething with working-class opposition. Strikes and demonstrations occurred in the Gdansk shipyards in 1970 under the leadership of Lech Wałesa. Repression worked only briefly: by 1976 the authority of the Polish government was again being challenged. Other countries in Eastern Europe were also restless. Yugoslavia and Romania recurrently criticized the Soviet communist leadership. Albania did the same and reaffirmed her support for the People’s Republic of China. But what could Brezhnev and his colleagues do about anti-Soviet developments in Eastern Europe? The Politburo had no principled objection to the project of a Warsaw Pact invasion, but the experience of Czechoslovakia since 1968 showed that military occupation was not a solution in itself.
Problems also persisted about the potential for working-class unrest in the USSR. Since the Novocherkassk rebellion of 1962 the Politburo had feared lest the ‘party of the workers’ should be challenged by the Russian working class. Central party leaders concluded that timely concessions, if necessary, should always be made; and Brezhnev, while not espousing egalitarianism in wages policy, sanctioned a narrowing of formal differentials. He also ensured that blue-collar workers were paid better than several professional groups. For example, a bus driver in the 1970s earned 230 rubles, a secondary schoolteacher 150 rubles.15
Brezhnev wanted workers to be materially comfortable; and although the investment in the industrial consumer-goods sector fell behind projections, the expansion in output was enough to improve the conditions of ordinary people. Refrigerators were owned by thirty-two per cent of households in 1970 and by eighty-six per cent in 1980. Ownership of televisions rose from fifty-one to seventy-four per cent in the same decade.16 Trade unions opened further holiday centres for their members on the Baltic and Black Sea coasts. Trusted workers could travel on officially-organized trips to Eastern Europe and, if they were extremely lucky, to the West. Prices in the shops for staple products such as bread, potatoes, meat and clothing, as well as apartment rents and gas were held low, indeed barely higher than they had been during the First Five-Year Plan. Workers had never known it so good. Nor had the kolkhozniks; for the state pension system had been extended to them in 1964 and they were given internal passports from 1975.17
The Politburo also had to appeal to the middling groups in society. A persistent source of their dissatisfaction were those remaining aspects of official educational policy which provided sons and daughters of workers with preferential
access to university education. The Politburo abolished all such discrimination. In the same spirit, measures were introduced to move away from Khrushchëv’s highly vocational orientation in the schools. The economic ministries and even many factory directors came to feel that the pendulum was swinging too far in the opposite direction; but, after a spirited debate, only a halfway return towards vocational training in schools was sanctioned in 1977.18
Yet the Politburo was failing to maintain active support in society even at previous levels. It therefore sought to intensify the recruitment of communist party members. In 1966 there had been 12.4 million rank-and-filers; by 1981 this had risen to 17.4 million.19 Thus nearly one in ten Soviet adults were party members. Their assigned duty was to inspire and mobilize the rest of society. The idea was that the more members, the better the chance to secure universal acquiescence in the status quo. As ever, the result was not a compact political vanguard but a party which reflected the diverse problems of broad social groups. Politburo leaders contrived to overlook the problem. For them, the dangers of further change outweighed the risks of keeping things as they were. Indeed the contemplation of change would have required a concentration of intellectual faculties that hardly any of them any longer possessed. And those few, such as Andropov, who had even mildly unorthodox ideas kept quiet about them.
Despite being inclined towards caution in domestic affairs, they were still tempted to undertake risky operations abroad. In 1978–9 they had been disconcerted by the course of a civil war in Afghanistan across the USSR’s southern frontier. Afghan communists repeatedly asked the Soviet leadership to intervene militarily; but Brezhnev and his associates, sobered by the knowledge of the mauling meted out to the USA in Vietnam, rejected their pleas;20 and Jimmy Carter, who had assumed office as American President in 1977, saw this as evidence that détente was a force for good throughout the world.
In December 1979, however, the Politburo’s inner core decided that failure to support Afghan communist forces would leave the way open for the USA to strengthen the military position of their Islamist adversaries. Soviet Army contingents were sent from Tajikistan to support the communist-led Afghan regime. President Carter felt deceived by the USSR, and ordered a substantial rise in the USA’s military expenditure. The policy of détente collapsed. In 1980, Moscow’s troubles increased when the Polish independent trade union Solidarity led strikes against the government in Warsaw. Poland was becoming virtually ungovernable, and in December 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who was already the Party First Secretary and Prime Minister, obtained the USSR’s sanction to mount a coup d’état to restore order. The eventual alternative, as Jaruzelski understood, would be that Warsaw Pact forces would invade Poland. But Solidarity, though damaged, did not crumble. Deep fissures were beginning to open in the communist order of Eastern Europe.
The Soviet Union’s international position was shaken further when Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party’s right-wing candidate, defeated Carter in the American presidential elections in 1980. The Politburo was put on notice to expect a more challenging attitude on the part of the USA. Domestic and foreign policies which had seemed adequate in the 1970s were about to be put to their stiffest test.
21
Privilege and Alienation
The Soviet political leaders did not feel insecure in power. There were occasional acts of subversion, such as the detonation of a bomb in the Moscow Metro by Armenian nationalists in 1977. But such terrorism was not only rare; it was also usually carried out by nationalists on the territory of their own republics. Russians, however hostile they were to the Politburo, had an abiding horror of political upheaval. Civil war, inter-ethnic struggles and terror were the stuff not of medieval folklore but of stories told by grandparents and even fathers and mothers.
The KGB’s repressive skills remained at the ready. In 1970 the biologist and dissenter Zhores Medvedev was locked up in a psychiatric asylum. Only the timely intervention of his twin brother Roy and others, including Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, secured his release.1 Human-rights activist Viktor Krasin and the Georgian nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia were arrested, and they cracked under the KGB’s pressure on them to renounce their dissenting opinions. Another method was employed against the young poet Iosif Brodski. Since his works were banned from publication and he had no paid occupation, the KGB took him into custody and in 1964 he was tried on a charge of ‘parasitism’. In 1972, after being vilified in the press, he was deported. Solzhenitsyn, too, was subjected to involuntary emigration in 1974. Vladimir Bukovski suffered the same fate a year later in exchange for imprisoned Chilean communist leader Luis Corvalan. In 1980 Sakharov was subjected to an order confining him to residence in Gorki, a city which it was illegal for foreigners to visit.
Yet the members of the various clandestine groups appreciated the uses of publicity. Within a year of the signature of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, informal ‘Helsinki groups’ in the USSR were drawing the world’s attention to the Soviet government’s infringements of its undertakings. Western politicians and diplomats picked up the cause of the dissenters at summit meetings; Western journalists interviewed leading critics of the Politburo – and, to the KGB’s annoyance, several writers let their works appear abroad. The Soviet government did not dare to stop either Solzhenitsyn in 1970 or Sakharov in 1975 from accepting their Nobel Prizes.
Three figures stood out among the dissenters in Russia: Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and Roy Medvedev. Each had achieved prominence after Stalin’s death and had tried to persuade Khrushchëv that basic reforms were essential. Initially they were not recalcitrant rebels; on the contrary, they were persons promoted by the political establishment: they did not seek confrontation. But all eventually concluded that compromise with the Politburo would not work. They were unique and outstanding individuals who could not be broken by the weight of material and psychological pressures that were brought to bear upon them. But they were also typical dissenters of the 1970s. In particular, they shared the characteristic of deriving a spiritual forcefulness from their acceptance of their precarious living and working conditions; they had the advantage of truly believing what they said or wrote, and were willing to endure the punishments inflicted by the state.
They gained also from the country’s traditions of respect for relatives, friends and colleagues. Before 1917, peasants, workers and intellectuals kept a wall of confidentiality between a group’s members and the ‘powers’, as they referred to anyone in official authority over them. Russians were not unique in this. All the peoples of the Russian Empire had coped with oppressive administrators in this way. The informal ties of the group were reinforced in the Soviet period as a defence against the state’s intrusiveness, and the dissenters latched on to the traditions.
What Sakharov, Medvedev and Solzhenitsyn had in common was that they detested Stalin’s legacy and knew that Brezhnev’s Politburo had not entirely abandoned it. But on other matters their ideas diverged. Sakharov had contended in the late 1960s that the world’s communist and capitalist systems were converging into a hybrid of both. But steadily he moved towards a sterner assessment of the USSR and, being committed to the rights of the individual, he saw democracy as the first means to this end.2 This attitude was uncongenial to Medvedev, a radical communist reformer who argued that there was nothing inherently wrong with the Leninism enunciated by Lenin himself.3 By contrast, Solzhenitsyn put his faith in specifically Christian values and Russian national customs. Solzhenitsyn’s nuanced anti-Leninism gave way to strident attacks not only on communism but also on virtually every variety of socialism and liberalism. He even rehabilitated the record of the last tsars.4 Thus he infuriated Sakharov and Medvedev in equal measure.
By 1973 these disputes were ruining their fellowship, and the situation was not improved by the differential treatment of dissenters by the authorities. Sakharov had once received privileges as a nuclear scientist. The fact that he and his wife had an austere life-style did not save th
em from Solzhenitsyn’s carping comments, at least until Sakharov and his wife were dispatched into exile to the city of Gorki. Of the three leading dissenters, it was Medvedev who received the lightest persecution. His detractors claimed that although the security police pilfered his manuscripts, he had defenders in the central party leadership who felt that the time might come when his brand of reformist communism would serve the state’s interests.
Yet the efforts of the dissenters at co-ordination were insubstantial. The Moscow-based groups had some contact with the Jewish refuseniks in the capital; but they had little connection with the clandestine national organizations in Ukraine, the Transcaucasus or the Baltic region. And when in 1977 Vladimir Klebanov founded a Free Trade Union Association, he and his fellow unionists conducted their activities almost entirely in isolation from the intellectual dissenters. Few ordinary citizens had copies of their samizdat works. Occasionally it looked as if the KGB, by focusing efforts upon them, unnecessarily increased their significance. This was true to some extent. But the USSR was an authoritarian ideocracy; any failure to extirpate heterodoxy would be taken as a sign of weakness. The snag was that Brezhnev was not Stalin, and understood that persuasion to support the regime would not be effective if persecution were to be increased.
Key ideas of the dissenters continue to leech into the minds of many thousands of citizens. Some heard the ideas on Radio Liberty, the BBC World Service or the Voice of America in the periods when foreign radio stations ceased to be jammed. Others in Estonia could pick up and understand Finnish television. Still others knew people who knew people who had read the original works in samizdat. Having refrained from killing the leaders of dissent, the Politburo had to live with the consequence that their ideas could not be kept wholly in quarantine.
The dissenters probably had less impact on opinion in society than critics of the regime who stayed on the right side of the KGB. In the literary journals a host of writers appeared. In Russia, Vladimir Soloukhin and Valentin Rasputin wrote about the ruination of agriculture and village life. Vasil Bykaw did the same in Belorussia. Despite recurrent disagreements with the party, all of them successfully demanded respect for the pre-revolutionary customs and beliefs. Such writers were known as the ‘ruralists’ (derevenshchiki).5 Some of them involved themselves in public debates on ecology. They were joined by the Kyrgyz novelist Chingiz Aitmatov, who described the ravaging of nature and traditional culture in central Asia. Nor was it only living writers whose arguments against the designs of communism had an influence. Classics of Russian literature, such as Fëdor Dostoevski’s novels, continued to provide material for a strong critique of Marxism-Leninism.6
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 48