In every branch of the arts it was the same. The film directors Andrei Tarkovski and Tengiz Abuladze; the science-fiction writers Arkadi and Boris Strugatski; the music composer Alfred Schnittke; the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny; the theatre director and performer Vladimir Vysotski: none of them belonged to the groups of overt dissent, but their works offered an alternative way of assessing Soviet reality. And they had a depth of analysis and emotion greater than most of the artists whom Khrushchëv had promoted to eminence.
There was resentment among natural scientists, too, about their working conditions. Distinguished physicists queued up in the Academy of Sciences Library in Leningrad to read copies of the London scientific weekly Nature with the advertisements cut out (which meant that crucial bits of articles on the other side of the excised pages were removed).7 Even more strictly supervised were historians, economists and political scientists. Politburo member Suslov kept a sharp eye on them and punished delinquents with demotion: his favourite sanction was to transfer them to a pedagogical institute and stop their books from being published. He also interviewed the novelist Vasili Grossman about the manuscript of his Life and Fate, which exposed both the dictatorial essence of Leninism as well as the anti-Semitism of Stalin’s policies. Suslov predicted that the novel would not be printed for 300 years. (As things turned out, his prophecy was wildly wrong because Life and Fate was published in 1989.)
Although professional people were fed up with the humiliating customs of subordination, they usually complied with the summons to cast their votes in favour of single candidates from a single party in Soviet elections: any failure to do this would attract unpleasant attention from the KGB. For similar reasons it was difficult to refuse to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union if invited. By the late 1970s approximately forty-four per cent of ‘the party’ was constituted by white-collar employees.8
Thus the state was regarded with suspicion by practically everybody and lying and cheating remained a popularly approved mode of behaviour. The fish rotted from the head. Brezhnev was a cynic and his family was corrupt. But even if he had been a communist idealist, he would have had no remedy. The old problems remained. In order to fulfil the quotas assigned by the Five-Year Plan, factories still needed to bend regulations. Skilled workers still had to be paid more than was centrally intended. Unskilled sections of the labour-force still had to be indulged in relation to punctuality, conscientiousness and sobriety. The flitting of workers from one job to another was an ineradicable feature in industry; the absence of unemployment meant that the state had no serious counter-measure. Factories, mines and offices were staffed by salaried and waged personnel who put greater effort into the protection of their indolence than into the discharge of their duties. A work-shy attitude was characteristic of both administrators and workers.
The Politburo was given no credit for the material improvements secured in the 1970s, and the cheap provision of food, shelter, clothing, sanitation, health care and transport was taken for granted. Brezhnev’s successes were noted more for their limitations than their progress beyond the performance before 1964. He earned neither affection nor respect.
Soviet citizens concentrated on getting what enjoyment they could out of their private lives. Families operated as collective foragers in an urban wilderness. Turning up at a restaurant was seldom enough unless a booking had been made or a bribe been offered. And so Granny was dispatched to queue for hours in the ill-stocked food shop; young Yevgeni missed a morning at the pedagogical institute to dig the potatoes at the family dacha; and Dad (or ‘Papa’) took a set of spanners he had acquired from the factory and swapped them for an acquaintance’s armchair. The people who carried the greatest burden were the women. Years of propaganda had not bettered their lot even though many had entered occupations once reserved for men. Wives were simply expected to do their new job while also fulfilling the traditional domestic duties. It was not a sexual liberation but a heavier form of patriarchy.
Consequently Soviet citizens, while remaining resolutely slack at work, had to be indefatigable in obtaining alleviation of their living conditions. They had no other option even if they aimed only to semi-prosper. They had to become very enterprising. Each looked after himself or herself and relatives and close friends. On the inside, this collectivistic society fostered extreme individualism.
When all was said and done, however, ordinary Russians could only make the best of a bad situation. They were powerless to effect a general change. Rates of alcoholism, mental illness, divorce and suicide went on rising inexorably. The deterioration of the physical environment continued; diseases were on the increase and hospital services worsened. The living space accorded to the normal urban family remained cramped: just 13.4 square metres per person in 1980.9 Thousands of Moscow inhabitants had no resident permits, and many of them inhabited shacks, doorways and parked trams. The diet of most citizens, furthermore, ceased to improve in the late 1970s. Rationing of staple food products returned to Sverdlovsk (which was then under the rule of local party secretary Boris Yeltsin) and several other large cities.10
Not surprisingly the society of the USSR turned a flinty eye upon the propagandists sent out by party organizations. Attitudes had changed a lot since Stalin had claimed that ‘life is getting gayer’. An anecdote illustrates the point neatly. A young woman was seized by the burly militiamen next to Lenin’s Mausoleum for distributing a pamphlet of protest. The pamphlet was discovered to be full of blank pages. Asked to explain herself, the woman replied: ‘Why bother writing? Everybody knows!’
Marxism-Leninism had never become the world-view of most citizens. The authorities knew this from the reportage on popular opinion delivered by the KGB. In the 1960s they were sufficiently worried that they allowed random-sample social surveys to be undertaken and published despite the ban on sociology as a subject in institutions of higher education. The results were troubling to the Ideological Department of the Party Central Committee Secretariat. In Moscow, according to the results of a questionnaire, only one in eleven propagandists believed that their audiences had absorbed the Marxist-Leninist content of lectures as their personal convictions. Nor did it help that many propagandists carried out their duties with obvious reluctance. For example, forty per cent of those polled in Belorussia gave talks or lectures only as a party obligation.11 This was a problem stretching back to the 1920s. Fifty years on, it had not been solved.
Politburo member Suslov had played a prominent part in the mummification of the notions of Marx, Engels and Lenin; but even Suslov did not stand in the way of Marxism-Leninism’s retreat from earlier standpoints. The natural sciences were freed to a somewhat greater extent from ideological interference. Researchers continued to suffer impediments and indignities since contacts with foreign colleagues remained difficult. Yet at least they were no longer compelled to accept a single official party-approved version of biology, chemistry and physics.
In the social sciences, which in Russia includes philosophy and literature as well as history, party control was tighter. Lenin’s interpretations of the literary classics were compulsory ingredients of scholarship; and, although historical accounts of the Assyrian Empire could be published with merely cursory mention of Marxism, the same was not true about the history of Russia – and especially the decades of Soviet rule. No subject was more jealously guarded from heterodoxy than the theory and practice of the communist party. From one end of the telescope it appeared that extraordinary concessions were being made to non-Marxist opinion. But from the other end things looked different: sceptics were less impressed by the licence gained by Assyriologists than by the unchallengeability of the official party historians who affirmed that, from 1917 to the present day, the party leadership had largely avoided error. Anything new written about Assurbanipal mattered a thousand times less than the fixed catechism about Lenin.
This was indeed a contradictory situation. On the one hand, Marxism-Leninism’s self-restrictions signalled a diminishing offic
ial confidence. On the other, Suslov and his subordinate ideologists were eradicating any surviving liveliness in interpretations of Lenin, the October Revolution, Soviet history and current official policies. The authorities had given up ground to its critics, but made a bitter defence of the remaining ideological terrain.
Even Lenin’s books were handled with caution. The fifty-five volumes of the fifth edition of his collected works had been brought to completion in 1965. But in the late 1970s an unpublicized official ban was placed on the sale of the edition in second-hand bookshops.12 Many of Lenin’s statements were at variance with many of the party’s contemporary doctrines. Consequently the authorities preferred to use excerpts from his writings, carefully chosen to fit in with Brezhnev’s policies. It was a funny old Leninist world where Lenin had become a suspect author. Yet only a few Russians bothered about this paradox since Lenin’s writings were abundantly available at least in some fashion or another. This was not true of thousands of authors who still attracted unconditional disapproval; and the regime had not abandoned its key dogmas on politics, economy and society.
The systematic curtailment of information affected even the pettiest aspects of daily life. KGB operatives were attached to harmless groups of tourists visiting the West, and the card-indexed files of the security organs bulged with reports by its unpaid informers as well as by its own officials. Not even telephone directories were on sale, but were held behind the counter of ‘information kiosks’ – and the employees in these kiosks were not permitted to tell the ordinary enquirer the phone number of foreign embassies. What is more, the Politburo dedicated large financial resources to the development of the technology of control. The KGB’s bugging devices were especially sophisticated. At the same time Soviet citizens were prevented from acquiring equipment that might enable them to pass information among themselves without official permission. Walkie-talkie radios, photocopiers and word-processing computers could not be bought in the shops.
These barriers to communication, however, were only partially effective. Citizens had their own direct experience of Soviet history and politics, and were in an excellent position to pass private judgement on the words of party propagandists. Hardly a family existed without relatives who had been killed in Stalin’s time. And everyone could remember the boasts made by successive rulers. After decades in power it was hard for the Politburo to claim that the country’s problems were not the party’s fault to a decisive extent.
And so this most politicizing of states had induced a pervasive political apathy. The messages and the methods of official ideology were deeply unappealing. On Soviet TV, the female continuity announcer’s rigid, bouffant hairdo and humourless mien set the tone; and there was a steam-rolling pomposity about series such as ‘For You, Parents’ and ‘For You, Veterans’. Most TV programmes were heavily didactic. But the public reacted unenthusiastically to them. Sport, crime thrillers, variety shows, science-fiction films and melodramas were much more popular: even Politburo members were scunnered by any media output that was intellectually demanding. Brezhnev liked ‘low-brow’ entertainment as much as did ordinary citizens. Ice-hockey games between the Soviet Union and Canada were much more to his liking than the theory of ‘developed socialism’.
Much leisure in any case was spent outside the home. The Soviet Union, like other communist states, linked its international prestige closely to the performance of its sports teams. The network of facilities was the envy of foreign countries. Soviet youngsters had access to well-funded premises, training and equipment; they knew that, if they had talent, they would be rewarded by privileges which would not fade when they retired: the typical ex-athlete would move into the profession of trainer. The football goalkeeper Lev Yashin and the weightlifter Alexei Vlasov remained large personalities in Soviet public life.
The state also provided several institutions for daily recreation and annual holidays. Trade unions provided beach vacations in Crimea and Georgia to members who showed a high level of activism and obedience (and children could be sent separately by their parents to summer camps). Workers achieving the monthly production quotas had their names placed on their factory’s Roll of Honour. The state continued to award badges for all manner of public services, and bemedalled war veterans were allowed to go to the head of queues in shops. Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences – who had their own special badge – were each provided with a chauffeur-driven car. The hierarchy of honour and privilege paralleled the hierarchy of job occupations. A large enough minority of citizens benefited sufficiently from these perks to give considerable solidity to the Soviet order.
Yet the long-term dissolvent tendencies in society were unmistakable. The villages went on losing their skilled males to the towns since the improvement in the conditions of kolkhozniks failed to stem the exodus from the countryside. Tractor drivers could nearly always better themselves in the urban work-force. The kolkhozniks, who were typically female and either late middle aged or elderly, had neither the morale nor the energy to organize harvests adequate to feed an industrial country. In the towns and cities a different set of problems prevailed. Workers entering employment in the 1930s and 1940s could reasonably expect promotion to white-collar jobs if they worked and studied hard and obeyed the political authorities. In the 1950s the number of posts in management was ceasing to expand; in the 1970s the holders of these posts hung on to them: mere incompetence was scarcely ever deemed due cause for an individual to be sacked. Social rigidification was setting in: once a worker, always a worker.13
Simultaneously the structure of families in many regions of the USSR was causing trepidation. Across Russia, as well as the other Slavic republics and the Baltic region, married couples increasingly limited themselves to having one child. The inadequate living-space and the financial pressure upon wives to stay in the labour-force were the causes. The main birth-control technique was itself a problem: abortion. It was far from unusual for a woman to endure a dozen aborted pregnancies before reaching the menopause. This was terrible enough; but the long-term prospect was equally dispiriting since the proportion of the population supporting their pensioner relatives in Russia and other such regions was going into decline.
In January 1981 Kosygin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Nikolai Tikhonov, acknowledged that ‘demographic policy’ was one of the weakest areas of his government’s activity. In reality he was referring to the ‘national question’; for Tikhonov’s unstated worry was that not enough Russians were being born. Many people, including non-communists, sympathized with him. If current trends continued, the Russian nation would soon constitute a minority in the Soviet Union. The evidence was provided by a census, which revealed that ethnic Russians had dropped from fifty-five per cent of the USSR’s population in 1959 to fifty-two per cent in 1979.14 For the attitude to family size in the Transcaucasus and central Asia had not followed the pattern of Russia. Tajiks and Uzbeks, who had gained better medical services from the hands of the Soviet state, produced more children than ever who survived to adulthood. The idea circulated among Russians that they would soon be outnumbered and politically downgraded by ‘orientals’.
Such language was racist; it was also rather laughable since several of the supposedly oriental cities, such as the Georgian capital Tbilisi, are located on a line of longitude to the west of cities in central Russia! Nevertheless the feeling behind the words was deep. Russians had for decades been treated as the primary nation of the USSR. Not only did they feel superior to the other peoples but also they considered that their contribution to the development and preservation of the USSR had been the greatest.
The Russian nation’s resentments could no longer be totally ignored, and the Politburo became increasingly frantic to assuage them. Anti-Semitism, which had been approved by Stalin not long before he died, was given semi-official respectability again. Already in 1963 the central party leadership had permitted the Ukrainian writer T. Kichko to publish Judaism without Veneer, an anti-
Jewish tract which provoked still more citizens of Jewish origin to apply for exit visas. Brezhnev had let hundreds of thousands leave the country, but solely in order to placate the American administration: on the whole he preferred to reassure Russians that he was on their side. Among the central party leaders in Moscow only Alexander Yakovlev, who served in the Central Committee apparatus, strenuously opposed the condoning of Russian nationalism and demanded a more resolutely internationalist official policy. His position was made so uncomfortable for him that an agreement was made that he should become Soviet ambassador to Canada.15
None the less there was a still higher standard of living in Georgia and Estonia than across the RSFSR. This naturally caused many Russians to believe that current policies were injurious to the Russian national interest. The policy of elevating personnel of the major local nationality to high office was maintained. Ukrainians administered Ukraine, Uzbeks Uzbekistan and Latvians Latvia. Certainly very severe controls remained: the Politburo continued to position ethnic Russians – or sometimes especially trusted Ukrainians or Belorussians – as deputy leaders in virtually every republican party, government and the KGB. Yet local ‘national’ functionaries were also prominent; and the policy of ‘stability of cadres’, which had been started in 1964, was prolonged through the 1970s.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 49