This was the Soviet moment. It lasted from the launch of Sputnik in 1957, through Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight in 1961, and dissipated, along with the fear, in the couple of years following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. (It was already going, in fact, at the time of the 1964 election; it was a piece of Wilson’s appeal that was premised on a fading public perception, and was dropped from Labour rhetoric shortly thereafter, leaving not much behind but a paranoid suspicion of Wilson among egg-stained old-school-tie spooks.) But while it lasted the USSR had a reputation that is now almost impossible to recapture. It was not the revolutionary country people were thinking of, all red flags and fiery speechmaking, pictured through the iconography of Eisenstein movies; not the Stalinesque Soviet Union of mass mobilisation and mass terror and austere totalitarian fervour. This was, all of a sudden, a frowning but managerial kind of a place, a civil and technological kind of a place, all labs and skyscrapers, which was doing the same kind of things as the West but threatened – while the moment lasted – to be doing them better. American colleges worried that they weren’t turning out engineers in the USSR’s amazing numbers. Bouts of anguished soul-searching filled the op-ed pages of European and American newspapers, as columnists asked how a free society could hope to match the steely strategic determination of the prospering, successful Soviet Union. President Kennedy’s aide Arthur Schlesinger wrote a White House memo sounding the alarm over ‘the all-out Soviet commitment to cybernetics’. While the Soviet moment lasted, it looked like somewhere which was incubating a rival version of modern life: one which had to be reckoned with, learned from, in case it really did outpace the West, and leave the lands of capitalism stumbling along behind.
Which didn’t happen. Which didn’t happen so thoroughly that the way the Soviet Union seemed to be between 1957 and 1964 or thereabouts has been more or less displaced from our collective memory. In the quick associative slideshow that assembles itself in our heads these days when the USSR (1917–91) is mentioned, the bits with the flags and with Stalin’s moustache now lead on directly to the images of the country’s dotage, when old men in ugly suits presided over an empire of antiquated tractor factories, before Gorbachev came along and accidentally put the whole thing out of its misery. The era when the place seemed to be in a state of confident, challenging, expansive maturity has fallen off our mental carousel. If in the 1970s the USSR turned out to be only ‘Upper Volta with rockets’ – in the words of an American diplomat unimpressed with the way that the metalled roads ran out only a few kilometres outside Moscow – then it must have always, and only, been Upper Volta with rockets. The idea of an enviable Soviet Union utterly fails to compute. We tend to assume, therefore, that the Soviet moment must have been pure illusion. Perhaps a projection of Western fears; perhaps a misunderstanding of what the headline feats like Sputnik implied about the rest of Soviet life. It had been a reasonable assumption, for nervous Western onlookers in the early 1960s, that a society which launched satellites must also have solved simple everyday problems like supplying lettuces and children’s shoes. When it turned out that it wasn’t so, that the Hemel Hempstead branch of Start-Rite would have represented unimaginable luxury in a Soviet city, the space rockets stopped signifying a general, enviable ‘high technology’. They started looking like some pharaoh’s pet project, a pyramid scraped together on the back of poverty, cruel and a bit ridiculous.
But the image of the USSR that the West briefly nurtured in the late 1950s and early 1960s was not a pure illusion. It was an exaggeration of something real; a report of a real confidence, a real feeling of success in Moscow which the West did a lot of the work of falsifying, by translating it into Western terms, and tricking it out with the West’s expectations. Something really did go right or go well, then, for the Soviet Union, which we’re in danger now of tidying away, like all episodes in history that point in a direction not taken, and which therefore refuse to fit into the hindsighted narrative we make out of the past for our convenience. The truths learned later about the Soviet economy were quite real, of course. It did indeed prove to be wasteful rather than efficient, cack-handed instead of strategic, alarmingly incoherent rather than terrifyingly rational. But if we tell ourselves only a case-closed story of communism as an inevitable disaster, we miss other parts of the past’s reality, and foreclose on the other stories it can tell us.
Give your imagination permission to engage with some unlikely facts: in the 1950s, the USSR was one of the growth stars of the planetary economy, second only to Japan in the speed with which it was hauling itself up from the wreckage of the war years. And this is on the basis not of the official Soviet figures of the time, or even of the CIA’s anxious recalculations of them, but of the figures arrived at after the Soviet Union’s fall by sceptical historians with access to the archives. The Soviet economy grew through the second half of the 1950s at 5, 6, 7 per cent a year. As Paul Krugman has mischievously pointed out, the USSR’s growth record in the 1950s elicited exactly the same awed commentary as Chinese and Indian growth does today. Admittedly, ‘growth’ did not mean exactly the same thing in the Soviet context that it did in, say, the American one (average for the period 3.3 per cent a year) or in the British one (average: 1.9 per cent; have a stale crumpet). Soviet growth was counted differently, was biased massively towards heavy industry, and did not necessarily imply a matching growth in living standards. Yet there had been a palpable transformation in the way Soviet citizens lived. In 1950, as in 1940 and 1930, they had been wearing hand-me-downs and living for the most part in squalid, crowded ‘communal flats’ carved out of antiquated pre-revolutionary buildings. In 1950, you could be director of a major Moscow hospital and live behind a curtain in one-seventeenth of a tsarist ballroom. Ten years later, Soviet citizens were wearing new clothes and moving in ever-increasing numbers into new apartments with private bathrooms; they owned radios and pianos, and were beginning to own fridges and televisions too. In 1960, the hospital director would be sitting pretty in a sunny new-build out in the Sparrow Hills, and driving to work in a well-waxed sedan with the leaping stag logo of the Gaz company gleaming on its bonnet. Going by the measure of the capitalism of the 1930s, which is what the Soviet Union had first set out to beat in terms of living standards, Soviet life was now spectacularly prosperous. The USSR could now feed, dress, house and educate its people better than Depression America or Nazi Germany. If capitalism had remained unchanged, the Soviet Union would at this point have looked like a reasonable, if tyrannous and polluted, version of the earthly paradise. Mission accomplished, materially speaking. Instead, of course, capitalism had unfairly shifted the target by doing some growing of its own. Which was why, even on a generous estimate, the average Soviet income still only amounted to 25 per cent or so of the average American one; not bad at all, compared with the recent Soviet past, and positively inspiring from the point of view of (to pick two Soviet allies) India and China, yet not really economic victory. But the Soviet march to wealth was not finished. This was only the halfway stage on the road to a far greater abundance.
According to Marxist theory, the USSR had been on a long strange detour ever since the October Revolution. Marx had predicted that communism would come in the most advanced of the capitalist countries, not in backward, roadless, shoeless, illiterate Russia. He had supposed that the plenty of the socialist future would be built on top of all of the cruel-but-necessary development work of capitalism – that socialists would inherit a machine they only had to perfect, and to direct towards the satisfaction of everybody’s needs, rather than the needs of a few top-hatted owners. The Russian situation was utterly different, and so the Bolsheviks had been obliged to operate a socialism which was doing capitalism’s job for it. They’d bootstrapped an industrial base out of virtually nothing to produce the steel and cement and machine tools on which any further advance depended. They’d trained a workforce and disciplined it in the rhythms of industrial life. They’d educated a peasant society till it was bristling w
ith science degrees. They’d also killed several million people, and massively out-brutalised the capitalist version of the Industrial Revolution, all in the name of humanity; but their information was limited, thanks to the paranoiacally limited bandwidth of the channel through which they viewed the outer world, and the vision of capitalism to which they compared their own record was Marx and Engels’ portrait of Manchester a century earlier as a laissez-faire heart of darkness. They could point out to themselves that, while they had the smokestacks and the squalor and the cruelty and the black grime on every surface, they also had Palaces of Culture offering ballroom-dancing lessons and opera at low, low prices.
In any case, the job was now done, and history could resume its rightful course. Atop the steel and cement, now that they existed, could grow the pastel pagoda of utopia; Marx’s utopia, that deliberately under-described idyll where wonderful machines purred away in the background, allowing the human beings in the foreground to ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind . . .’ So rich and comprehensive would be the flow from the mechanical horns of plenty that it wouldn’t even be necessary to measure out the goods in proportion to the work people did. Everyone could have anything, and be anything. If you’ve ever read one of Iain M. Banks’s ‘Culture’ novels you’ll recognise the setting, except that this post-scarcity paradise was to be run on the advanced technology of the mid-twentieth century, rather than the science of a galaxy far, far away; spun up from artificial fibres, and pneumatic mail, and computers made of glowing radio-valves.
The Soviet state did engage in a certain amount of expectation-management. An eminent Academician published a paper explaining that the happy citizens of the future would have all the shoes and socks and underwear they needed, ‘but this in no way presupposes superfluousness or extravagance’. And First Secretary Khrushchev himself reproved intellectuals who might think the future held limitless ‘freedom’ (which he clearly associated with sloppiness and disorder). ‘Communism is an orderly, organized society’, he said in March 1963. ‘In that society, production will be organised on the basis of automation, cybernetics and assembly lines. If a single screw is not working properly, the entire mechanism will grind to a halt.’
Yet the reason for insisting on the caveats was that the Soviet Union had gone ahead and promised Marx’s plenty anyhow. Not as a vague aspiration for the future, either – not as a conveniently floating goal designed to keep the present hopeful. Nope: as a timed, detailed schedule of events, with 1980 picked out as the date that the ‘material-technical’ basis for full communism would be complete, and the cornucopias would be switched on. The 1961 Party Congress adopted the imminent end of all scarcity as its official programme, thus making possibly the rashest and most falsifiable promise in the entire politics of the twentieth century. An act so foolish can only be explained through idealism: Khrushchev’s own, for he was a man whose troubled relationship with his conscience required a happy ending to give him retrospective absolution, but also the idealism coded, despite everything, into the structure of the regime. It was the same heedless true-belief at work which would manifest itself a generation later in Gorbachev. The historian Stephen Kotkin describes the USSR as an edifice ‘booby-trapped with idealism’, and that seems about right. The great grey tyranny ran on, in some sense depended on, hopes big enough to counterbalance the country’s defects. Khrushchev really meant the promises that were spelled out with such excruciating frankness in the programme. Dialectical materialism was to imply denial and self-sacrifice no longer. The philosophy was going to pay off in the most literal and direct way; it was going to do what it said on the tin, and bring the materialists their material reward. It was going to make first Russians, and then all their friends, the richest people in the world. Naturally this would involve zooming past the United States. ‘Today you are richer than us’, Khrushchev had told a bemused dinner party in the White House. ‘But tomorrow we will be as rich as you. The day after? Even richer!’ Now, in 1961, he laid it all out, hour after hour, to an auditorium stuffed with delegates from all over Moscow’s half of the Cold War globe. Soon, he told the assembled Cubans and Egyptians and East Germans and Mongolians and Vietnamese, Soviet citizens would enjoy products ‘considerably higher in quality than the best productions of capitalism’. Pause a moment, and consider the promise being made there. Not products that were adequate or sufficient or okay; not products a little bit better than capitalism’s. Better than the best. Considerably better. Ladas quieter than any Rolls-Royce. Zhigulis so creamily powerful they put Porsche to shame. Volgas whose doors clunked shut with a heavy perfection that made Mercedes engineers munch their moustaches in envy.
So the confidence that allowed Khrushchev to quip and hector and shoe-bang his way across the world stage was founded partly on a truth about the present, partly on a profound mistake about the future. That the Soviet dream didn’t work out, that in 1980 Soviet citizens were not going to be strolling in the pleasure garden of red plenty, we all know. (Khrushchev’s own colleagues worked it out very quickly. They ousted him from the Politburo in the autumn of 1964 and consigned the 1961 programme to unmentionable oblivion.) What we’ve forgotten is that anyone ever took such a thing seriously; that it was ever anyone’s sober expectation (or giddy expectation) that the grim, spartan one in the superpower duo was planning to win at hedonism.
Given that it was an error, a mirage, an astonishing mass delusion, what do we gain if we do remember it? Well, for a start, irony enough to glut even the greediest palate. Alongside our well-documented, well-founded knowledge that Soviet history was a tragedy ought to run a sense of it, too, as a comedy; a comedy of ideas and of things; a comedy in which material objects spin out of control, like the production line running awry in Chaplin’s Modern Times, and refuse more and more catastrophically to play the roles assigned to them by bossy human intentions. Think of Laurel and Hardy pushing the piano up flight after flight of stairs until, right at the top, it gets away from them and slides right back down. That’s the economic history of the Soviet Union in a nutshell: ascent, followed by pratfall. But this shouldn’t be the kind of comedy in which we laugh from a position of comfy security at the fools over there; and not just because the ascent of the Soviet piano was achieved at a monstrous price in human suffering. It should be the comedy of recognition we register, at this point in the early twenty-first century when we’re in mid-pratfall ourselves. Our own economic arrangements are currently generating not one but two complete sets of disastrous unintended consequences. Our failure to price the externalities of our energy use is baking the climate; our romantic indulgence of financiers has imploded our finances. We should be laughing at the Soviet disaster ruefully – with sympathy.
Don’t get me wrong, here. The Soviet Union was a horrible society. Even once it had stopped purposely killing its citizens in large numbers, it oppressed them, it poisoned them with a toxic environment, it stuffed their ears continually with nonsense, it demanded their absolute passivity. It wasted their time. This last item sounds trivial. It wasn’t. It had been one of the main points of the Marxist indictment of capitalism that it obliged people to bleed their labour-time into producing things they could feel no connection to, commodified things which had no real qualities except their price. Capitalism, Marx had argued, was a meaning-vampire, sucking away lives. Yet the Soviet attempt at an alternative came up with something worse: a form of work so divorced from usefulness that it condemned people to squander their finite store of weeks and months and years on churning out stuff you couldn’t even be sure people were willing to pay for. By trying to concentrate directly on the use of things instead of their prices, the Soviet system lost hold of the one guarantee that anyone needed what was being manufactured. Result: futility, on the grand scale.
And when Soviet citizens went home from their pointless toil, with their rubles in hand, they were then systematically disadvantaged as consumers
. Soviet planners had done this deliberately at first, as a matter of strategy, to maximise the resources available for future investment, but under Khrushchev they tried to stop, and found they couldn’t. The logic of the whole system compelled it. In a world where you’d get into trouble if you inconvenienced a factory waiting for its supply of widgets (so long as the factory had good enough connections), you could inconvenience a shopper looking for cheese with impunity, with no bad consequences at all. So the cheese, and the shopper, were always last on the list – an afterthought in an economy that was supposed to run entirely for human benefit. Contemporary joke: the phone rings at Yuri Gagarin’s apartment and his little daughter answers it. ‘I’m sorry’, she says, ‘Mummy and Daddy are out. Daddy’s orbiting the Earth, and he’ll be back at 19:00 hours. But Mummy’s gone shopping for groceries, so who knows when we’ll see her again.’
True Stories Page 10