The early Brezhnev years also saw a radical transformation of Soviet agriculture, at least of its technology. The same collective farms that had operated for decades without enough fertilizer and pesticides were using three to five times as much as American farms by the late 1970s. In 1966 the authorities abolished the labor-day system, and collective farmers received their share of the proceeds in money. Agricultural production expanded rapidly, freeing up millions of peasants for industrial work. The migration to the cities in the last thirty years of Soviet power was so great that large areas, especially in central and northern Russia, began to empty out, leaving thousands of abandoned villages dotting the landscape. For the first time in Russian history, the city population outnumbered the country residents, rising to more than two thirds of the total in the USSR by 1990.
These massive increases in production, the creation of a nuclear industry and a more or less modern chemical industry, also brought a wave of consumer goods for the first time in Soviet history. Food stores began to display some variety, both of Soviet products and canned goods imported from Bulgaria and elsewhere. Dairy products appeared in modest variety. To make up the needs in grain and fodder, the Soviet Union imported grain from Canada and the United States regularly. The result was a massive improvement, but not universal prosperity. Supplies were irregular, and one or another food item was in deficit every year. Carrots disappeared in one area for several months, and returned while beets disappeared from the stores. Workplace distribution continued, if on a lesser scale, to supply hard-to-find items like chickens. Consumer electronics became nearly universal in cities and television even appeared in the villages. At the same time actually buying a television set was a major operation. Telephones came mostly from Poland in exchange for cheap Soviet gas and were notoriously unreliable. The housing crisis eased as thick rings of pre-fabricated high-rise housing surrounded Soviet cities. Finally, most urban residents left the communal apartments for new apartments with their own kitchens and bathrooms. Unfortunately, the other necessary facilities, such as schools and stores, often failed to appear in the new neighborhoods for decades. Production boomed, but distribution remained in a state of permanent disorder. With all the problems, however, the first decade or so of the Brezhnev years was in many ways the high point of the Soviet Union. Not only had it achieved superpower status but the population also finally acquired the basic elements of a modern standard of living. There were two problems with that standard of living. One was the post-war boom in Europe and America that created a whole new world standard of living, and news about that seeped across the border. The USSR was chasing a moving target. The other problem was that the rise in Soviet living standards stalled after the middle of the 1970s. More housing appeared, but virtually all consumer goods gradually entered a permanent state of deficit, which meant that they were available but increasingly difficult to actually find. The struggle of daily life was the background to the malaise that settled over Soviet society.
This malaise was not explicitly political, outside of small dissident groups in the intelligentsia. The first dissidents had appeared in the 1960s, when it was finally clear that openly opposing the Soviet system would lead to harassment and even prison in some cases, but not death or long incarceration. The KGB under Yurii Andropov changed its mode of operation. It no longer looked for organized opposition groups tied to émigrés in the West and instead tried to police society with a combination of persuasion and selective force. For most people who fell afoul of the system, the KGB brought them in for a “conversation” and reminded them of the possible consequences of persistent action, and then left it at that. A very small minority of intellectuals continued to protest and went to prison or to psychiatric hospitals. The dissidents mostly came from highly privileged positions in Soviet society. Intellectuals continued to have apartments, privileged access to goods, and a select few maintained opportunities for foreign travel. Writers lived in dachas in the Peredelkino and other writers’ colonies, while ordinary citizens struggled with long lines and mass-construction housing. Scientists, especially those in strategic areas like physics, lived in similar places, and also had contact with power on the basis of their utility to the military and the civilian nuclear industry. Not surprisingly some began to chafe at this privileged but ultimately powerless role. In 1968 Andrei Sakharov moved from criticism of nuclear weapons testing and Lysenko’s biology to criticizing the whole system and formulating notions of convergence that would produce a society more like the West than the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn moved from fictional and non-fiction accounts of the Stalinist GULAG to a Russian nationalist position that criticized equally Western and Soviet society in favor of an authoritarian religious state based only on the Slavic peoples of the USSR. The phenomenon closest to widespread dissent was the emigration of almost a million Soviet Jews, some forty percent of the Jewish population, between 1970 and 1990. The first wave consisted of more or less committed Zionists who moved to Israel, but the by the 1980s that stream had dried to a trickle, and most Jewish emigrants had moved to the United States and Germany in search of better economic conditions.
The dissidents attracted enormous attention in the West during the Cold War, and their ideas and writings were well known in the Soviet intelligentsia. Some other intellectuals supported them but the dissidents had no popular following. Nevertheless the authorities saw them as a threat to their utopian conception of a unified society, exiling Solzhenitsyn to the West in 1974 and Sakharov eventually to Gorkii (Nizhnii Novgorod), east of Moscow. Needless to say their works were published only underground or in the West, and they were never mentioned in public. More serious was the general sense that the country was somehow on the wrong track, a feeling that crystallized with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. The most common reaction to the invasion was neither patriotism nor indignation, but the sense that the leadership had made a serious mistake. For most people the Soviet Union remained a legitimate state, but one that was most definitely in the hands of incompetent and short-sighted leaders.
In 1982 Leonid Brezhnev died. The generation that he represented, the young party leaders promoted in the late 1930s, was now a group of elderly men who simply could not understand why things had not come out as they had expected or even how bad the situation remained for the mass of the people. The world had also changed outside the USSR and they failed to grasp the challenge created by mass prosperity not only in the United States but also in post-war Europe and Japan. On Brezhnev’s death the Central Committee put in his place Yurii Andropov, the head of the KGB since 1967. Nearly seventy and in poor health, Andropov never had time to formulate a new policy, but he did bring to Moscow Alexander Iakovlev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and other future reformers. On Andropov’s death in 1984, the CC appointed the seventy-two year old Konstantin Chernenko to succeed him. Chernenko had been Brezhnev’s director of personnel for decades and the appointment allegedly came against Andropov’s wishes. If Andropov really did prefer Gorbachev, his wishes were fulfilled in 1985 when Chernenko died in turn, and Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party. He was to preside over its demise.
22 Soviet Culture
With the end of NEP and well before the war, the Soviet Union entered a new period of its history, with profound cultural implications. The first phase of that new period, from about 1928 to 1932, saw major upheavals in every area of culture, science, art, literature, and the humanistic disciplines. It was a “cultural revolution” in the phrase of the time, though one neither so deep or thorough as the much later Chinese events that borrowed the name. For the people involved, it was certainly traumatic, for it was not merely a new ideological campaign. In those years the party authorities carried out a systematic attack on the leaders of virtually every field of culture, accusing them of failure to live up to the demands of “socialist construction” and of harboring old-regime views and hostility to the new order. These attacks came in the press and in meetings held in var
ious institutions and workplaces, where mostly young and enthusiastic Communists were encouraged to attack their elders and teachers in the name of the revolution. In addition, the OGPU carried out systematic arrests of leading intellectuals – historians, engineers, writers, and some scientists. Most were accused of participation in various, presumably mythical, underground organizations aimed at undermining or overthrowing Soviet power. Compared to later times, the treatment was relatively mild: some were executed, more went to prison camps, but many were simply exiled to provincial towns to teach or work in local institutions. Some professions suffered more than others: the scientists were less commonly victims, but even for them there were consequences. At the same time as the old authorities were removed, all sorts of radical super-Marxist notions achieved brief fame and dominance, along with the ideas of various cranks who presented themselves as new proletarian voices.
For the writers this period meant the virtual monopoly of the Proletarians connected with the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP in Russian) and their leader, the critic Leopold Averbakh. The Proletarians assailed nearly all of the major writers of the 1920s as counter-revolutionary, particularly those from the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia and the “fellow travelers.” Many major writers, including Evgenii Zamiatin and Mikhail Bulgakov, were the objects of furious attacks. Zamiatin was allowed to leave the country, but Bulgakov was not and for a while had almost no possibility to work. Other writers like the poets Akhmatova and Pasternak, escaped attacks because they published little or nothing during those years. The Proletarians were almost as savage with Communist writers who did not toe Averbakh’s line. What the Proletarians wanted was a literature that engaged itself in the struggle for the building of socialism, and in this sense some of their productions were quite critical of bureaucratism and passivity in the party and the state. Their ideal novel featured heroic workers overcoming tremendous obstacles to construct a new town or collectivize a village, changing themselves in the process. In reality, these stories were rarely successful, and the only readable works to come out of the movement were about the Civil War and were mostly written before 1929. The best by far was Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Don, and the RAPP leaders were uncomfortable with this volume.
Music as well had its proletarian radicals, who attacked the young Shostakovich and virtually every other composer, whatever the aesthetic. For the Russian Association of Proletarian Music, the only “proletarian” musical culture had to be “mass songs,” performed by semi-amateur choruses, preferably made up of workers. The proletarian musicians relied on the network of factory clubs and other amateur organizations to spread their work and doctrines, but most of their songs found little favor with the workers, who preferred a more traditional repertory. The Proletarians were allowed briefly to rule the conservatories, but in 1932 the party ended their monopoly as it did for the proletarian writers.
Even in the sciences meetings took place in research institutes, meetings that would have ominous consequences later on. In Nikolai Vavilov’s botanical institute radical graduate students criticized his leadership, political views, and scientific work. In the sciences these attacks were not yet primarily ideological, the chief charge being that the scientists were “cut off from life” and paid insufficient attention to the implications of their work for technology and thus “socialist construction.” It was at this time that Trofim Lysenko, a Ukrainian plant breeder, first came to the attention of the public and the authorities with his theories about breeding strains of wheat that were resistant to cold. Lacking the proper scientific training needed to develop his occasional practical insights, Lysenko was more of a crank at first, but he quickly learned to drape his claims in references to his plebeian origins and assertions that his was “proletarian” biology. The party authorities listened to him because his discoveries, real and imagined, seemed to promise much greater harvests very quickly, something the Soviet Union desperately needed.
After several years of chaos in many fields, the campaign came to a swift end in 1932. The exiled scientists and historians returned to their jobs, some returned from the camps, and generalized public attacks on the intelligentsia gradually ended. Thus began a new phase, one in which the party leadership, which increasingly meant Stalin alone, constructed the framework for what they considered a Soviet culture. In literature the Proletarians had alienated the party leaders, and in 1932 all literary groups were banned, a move mainly directed at Averbakh and his Proletarians. The pressure on non-party writers like Bulgakov and Pasternak eased. Bulgakov went to work for the Moscow Art Theater, writing original plays and adaptations that provided him with a livelihood even though they were often banned. He continued working on his masterpiece The Master and Margarita in private. Pasternak published prose and poetry in those years, becoming one of the country’s best-known poets, in spite of being out of step with Soviet ideology. In the new situation Stalin set up a single Writers’ Union, which met for the first time in a Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. It was to include writers of all types, non-party member writers and Communists in one group, again a move in large part directed at taming the Proletarians. The Writers’ Union was the prototype for a series of unions of creative intellectuals, for composers, painters, architects, and others, that dominated the daily life of Soviet literary and artistic culture until the end, in many ways parallel to the structure for the natural and social sciences and the humanities found at the Academy of Sciences. The Writers’ Union had two functions. One was to provide ideological and artistic direction to the writers. At the head of the union was a committee whose membership was chosen by the Central Committee cultural apparatus and cleared with Stalin himself. These were the men who were to declare the party line in art and enforce it. The other function was to take care of the needs of writers in daily life. The Writers’ Union controlled apartments and dachas in the countryside, had a privileged distribution center for scarce consumer goods, and the best restaurant in Moscow. Its headquarters was a nineteenth century Moscow palace supposedly the prototype of the Rostov house in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Similar unions of artists and composers were formed and took on similar functions.
The party now intended to give literature and art firm direction. Stalin told the writers that they were the “engineers of human souls,” but he did not give them the blueprint. That was to come from the method of “socialist realism,” and at the first Writers’ Congress in 1934 A. A. Zhdanov and Maksim Gorkii, assisted by the former oppositionists Bukharin and Radek, tried to define what that was. The idea was to “reflect reality in its revolutionary development.” The implication was that the writer needed to show the great changes in Soviet life, but avoid concentrating on mistakes or shortcomings, and indicate how society was moving forward. The result was to demand a kind of official optimism that was very hard to provide in practice, as it would lead to flattened characters and unconvincing conflicts. The other side of socialist realism was that it was to become the art of the people and as such had to be accessible. This issue peaked in 1936, not over literature, but as a result of the staging of Dmitrii Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The composer thought that he had made a good Soviet opera, based on a story by Nikolai Leskov that showed the dark, oppressive world of pre-revolutionary Russia. Instead he met savage criticism for his adoption of modernist musical language similar to that found in Western music of the time. In the minds of his critics, the opera was cacophonic and incomprehensible. It was “formalist,” a term that immediately became one of the most serious charges an artist could face. The writers as well understood the implications of the attack on Shostakovich, and realized that their styles would have to change. Many of them, even the most loyal supporters of the revolution, had employed style and narrative techniques that were innovative and modern in the 1920s, but now they were supposed to construct a novel much as Turgenev had done in the nineteenth century.
Besides mandating the correct direction in the ar
ts, the party leadership in the later 1930s moved to expand and subsidize artistic institutions, and indeed the intelligentsia as a whole. The great theaters, the Bolshoi in Moscow and the Mariinskii (Kirov) in Leningrad, no longer scraped by on small budgets. The opera and ballet became central parts of Soviet culture, and although they were concentrated in the two main cities, they were not restricted to those places. Older cities such as Kiev and Tbilisi, now serving as republican capitals, also found their theaters with more solid budgets. In provincial cities and new republican capitals large theaters for musical performances and concerts sprang up. The great companies were encouraged to do provincial tours. Budgets for dramatic theaters also increased, as did the number of theaters in provincial and republican capitals. The theaters and orchestras supported a great many actors and musicians and in a style that became increasingly removed from that of the Soviet population. The Writers’ Union actually spent most of its effort in the 1930s not on ideological issues but on securing control of superior housing in the cities and the dacha districts, and even building them when it could. Pasternak was able to acquire a two-story house in Peredelkino – a dacha village for writers near Moscow – to use as his home for the rest of his life. Writers had access to the Union’s closed food and consumer goods distribution service. By the war, Shostakovich had a multi-room apartment, servants, and a car with driver. Thus the artistic elite came to match the scientists in standards of living, remaining only slightly less well off than the party elite itself.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 49