Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (9 page)

Certainly, Soviet television was dominated by official views, and in general control over communications remained very tight. Private telephones were kept to a minimum—twenty-five million, fewer than one for every ten people—and typewriters had to be registered with the police. Access to photocopiers was tightly restricted.

But tape recorders, owned by about one-third of the population, as well as cheap X-ray plates (pressed as LPs), 42

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facilitated the circulation of forbidden Soviet popular bal-lads as well as smuggled rock and roll. In 1968, ostensibly to combat worrisome trends in youth culture, Komsomol officials gathered at a retreat to watch the officially banned film
Easy Rider
. Soon, almost every Soviet high school and factory acquired its own rock-and-roll band, which the Komsomol hired to perform at official events.

By the late Brezhnev era, Soviet public spaces were decor-ated not just with official slogans but also with graffiti about sports teams, rock music, sex, and the merits of punk music versus heavy metal. Schoolchildren ‘ranked’

each other by their jeans, with Western brands being the highest.

This infatuation with the Western consumer culture was a far cry from the heroic October revolution and Civil War, the 1930s building of socialism, or the Second World War, which had shaped earlier generations. Despite prominent post-war campaigns to settle ‘virgin lands’ and build a second railroad through Siberia, it was clear that the mobilizational style of political participation and socialization was losing much of its force. Equally important, the party’s grand historical teleology had to be abandoned. As the predicted date of 1980 for the transition to Communism passed, ideologues replaced Khrushchev’s utopian promise with the here and now of ‘developed’ socialism.
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Was life simply a question of washing machines, refrigerators, private cars, TVs, popular music, and jeans, and, if so, what did that portend for socialism’s struggle against capitalism?

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Abiding allegiance to socialism

Even as the Soviet population began to sense the prosperity gap with the US, Japan, and Western Europe, the overwhelming majority still responded to the incessant propaganda about the Soviet Union’s lack of unemployment, gulf between rich and poor, race riots, or Vietnam War. Mass construction of self-contained apartments had given rise to the celebrated urban ritual of the ‘kitchen table’, where Soviet families and trusted friends assembled out of earshot of nosy neighbours and the authorities to discuss the absurdities of their lives. Indeed, jokes about the Soviet system became something of a private and sometimes public activity, and very little love was lost on apparatchiks. But, beyond desiring a degree of liberalization, most people simply wanted the Soviet regime to live up to its promises of inexpensive housing, health care, paid maternity leave, public education, and consumer goods. A strong allegiance to socialism—understood as state responsibility for the general welfare and social justice—remained very much a part of ordinary people’s world view, confirmed by such facts as the near impossibility of being evicted from their state-provided apartments, whatever the circumstances.
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Substantial legitimacy for socialism was also derived from the commemoration of the Second World War in films, memoirs, veterans groups, and monuments, all of which, like military-patriotic education, were expanded in the 1960s. The main Soviet holiday, Revolution Day 44

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(7 November), became a showcase for Soviet military hardware, though for many it was noteworthy for the extra consumer goods and alcohol made available. But Victory Day (9 May) was a powerful collective ritual, involving family trips to the cemetery, whose meaning was shared by almost the entire country. Victory Day also underscored the attainment of superpower status and reinforced the respect for the Armed Forces. Of course, coercion remained an integral aspect of maintaining allegiance.

‘The KGB was a repressive, not an educational organ,’

wrote Filipp Bobkov, a veteran of forty-five years who rose to become first deputy chairman. ‘Nonetheless, we tried, when possible, to use prophylactic measures,’ meaning summoning individuals to local KGB headquarters, and blackmailing them to inform on their colleagues.
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Many people collaborated with the authorities’ requests without much pressure, and more than a few came forward on their own.

The KGB, like the Western media, was obsessed over manifestations of what it regarded as nonconformist behaviour. But of the several thousand individuals jailed or exiled for unorthodox views or actions during the Brezhnev years, only a small minority consisted of internationally recognized human-rights campaigners such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov, who won the Nobel Peace Prize (in 1975). A second category of dissenters comprised hard-core separatists, especially in western regions annexed during the 1940s. But seekers of religious freedom constituted the great majority of those who suffered 45

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at the hands of the regime; there were seventeen attempts at self-immolation on Red Square in 1981 alone, none of them known to the outside world, and more importantly, to the Soviet population.
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A leader of Moscow’s underground human-rights organization, summing up the situation in 1984, wrote, ‘the history of dissent in the USSR is a tragic one’, adding correctly that ‘the movement never became a mass movement and the immediate demands of the dissidents were almost wholly frustrated’.
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But the regime faced a threat considerably greater than ‘dissidents’: a several-million-strong army of scientists who were overwhelmingly not politically active yet still clashed with the authorities because they needed access to basic domestic data—let alone foreign publications—which were denied to them by their hack political supervisors.

This dilemma of needing and yet stifling scientific exchange became ever more acute, and a few top apparatchiks broached the possibility of relaxing censorship. But the party’s chief ideologue in the Brezhnev period, Mikhail Suslov—a CC secretary since 1949 (under Stalin), and a full politburo member since 1955—pointed out that it was only a matter of months after the removal of censorship in Czechoslovakia that the tanks had to roll in. Who, he asked, was going to send tanks to the Soviet Union?

Some restrictions were eased on a case-by-case basis, but for most scientists, just as for cultural intellectuals, Communist Party membership was a prerequisite for career advancement, and was used to enforce the basic chain of command.

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Outside Moscow, republic party machines, usually led by a Communist of the titular nation, with a Russian as number two, received substantial autonomy in exchange for maintaining loyalty to Moscow. National themes did become ever more prevalent in the non-Russian republics, paralleling the ‘national Communism’ of Eastern Europe, but nationalism was nowhere allowed to displace the official socialist ideology, and loyalty was nowhere in question. Only in the Russian republic—which alone lacked a separate republic party—were Russian nationalists permitted, occasionally, to criticize Marxist-Leninism and atheism publicly in the name of the preservation of pre-revolutionary monuments, the Russian soul, and the environment.
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But such cultural nationalism was never allowed to become an independent force. In both Russia and the non-Russian republics, separatist threats were weak, and multinational solidarity strong, reinforced by propaganda, Russification and its career advantages, the mutual dependencies of the planned economy, and the high incidence of ethnically mixed marriages. Russian dominated, and replete with injustices, the Union fostered many resentments, but, rather than a cauldron of mutually exclusive nationalisms, it was in many ways a polyglot, multicultural world.

In sum, the post-war Soviet Union tried to slake a thirst for self-contained apartments that gave people some private space, provided educational opportunities that made people both orthodox and critical, and expanded communications technologies, letting in more of the Western 47

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world. The authorities encountered a sharpening diver-gence between the aims of advancing science and maintaining secrecy for political reasons. They were also unable to energize society, especially youth, with the antiquated model of heroic mobilization, or to satisfy a growing rest-lessness, bordering on a sense of entitlement. But they drew upon pride in the Second World War victory, and expediently allowed nationalisms to mix with Communism, while retaining censorship. Overall, these post-war developments were not remarkable in themselves. They were, however, made
potentially
very dangerous by the economic boom, consumer revolution, mass cultural explosion, and embrace of democracy
outside
the USSR.

Direct access to life in the West was granted only to select members of the Soviet upper ranks. No less restricted was access to the lives of those higher strata.

Elite hospitals, resorts, supply networks, and schools were closed affairs; even the maids of the elite were usually KGB

employees who reported on their masters’ lives only for secret dossiers. Russia’s socialist revolution, having origin-ated in a radical quest for egalitarianism, produced an insulated privileged class increasingly preoccupied with the spoils of office for themselves and their children. The existence of a vast and self-indulgent elite was the greatest contradiction in the post-war Soviet Union, and the most volatile.

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Jockeying invalids

At the very top, where decisions were concentrated, the Soviet elite was growing old and infirm. Leonid Brezhnev first became ill in 1968 during the crisis over Czechoslovakia, when he took too many sleeping pills. He had worked tenaciously to obtain an about-face by the Czechoslovak leadership, but finally sent in the tanks.
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The Soviet leader developed insomnia, though otherwise he functioned normally. Those who met him in the late 1960s and early 1970s came away impressed with his political skills.

In November 1974, however, Brezhnev suffered a major stroke. A second stroke, which left him clinically dead for a time, followed in January 1976. Later that year, in the months leading up to his seventieth birthday, he had several heart attacks. Both at the end of 1974 and in 1976

there were hints of a possible retirement.
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Instead,
after
the onset of Brezhnev’s debilitating illness, supreme rule was consolidated by a tight-knit Brezhnevite clique.

Between 1977 and 1980, those whom Brezhnev considered rivals were removed. The general secretary added the title of Supreme Soviet chairman, while giving the government to a trusted apparatchik, Nikolai Tikhonov.

In two other moves, Dmitry Ustinov, the defence minister, and Konstantin Chernenko, a Brezhnev protégé over decades, became politburo members. This faction—Ustinov (defence), Chernenko (party apparat), and Tikhonov (economy), with the support of Andropov (KGB), the primordial Suslov (ideology), and the long-serving Andrei 49

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Gromyko (foreign minister)—exercised unlimited power in their domains by keeping the enfeebled Brezhnev in place. They were perpetually briefed on the country’s myriad problems, but remained unsympathetic to proposals for major reforms, especially after the distasteful experience of 1968 Czechoslovakia; anyway, oil money was flowing into Kremlin coffers.
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Just as the Brezhnevite faction was taking shape, the much younger Mikhail Gorbachev, having knocked himself out to reach the inner sanctum, achieved his ambition, only to come face to face with the system’s paralysis.

Brezhnev, incoherent from arteriosclerosis and tranquil-lizer overdoses, worked no more than two hours a day, and politburo meetings often lasted just twenty minutes. Even after the general secretary began drooling on himself in appearances on Soviet television, the clique around him took no action, other than to nominate him for still more medals. While Brezhnev acquired more state awards than all previous Soviet leaders
combined
, and more military awards than Marshal Zhukov, who had captured Berlin, the leadership’s average age surpassed 70. In late 1979 the narrow ruling group enmeshed the Soviet Union in a war in neighbouring Afghanistan (nominally to protect a client), without properly informing the rest of the elite, let alone the people. The Soviet political system had no mechanisms for self-correction.

In the wider world, computers were revolutionizing communications, services were forming an increasing share of economic activity, manufacturing was being 50

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transformed by flexible production, and cross-border capital flows were escalating, penetrating even Eastern Europe. Japan had become an economic colossus on the basis of high-value-added exports. East Asia also saw the emergence of the ‘Four Tigers’, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, whose GDP had been as low as Ghana’s as recently as the early 1960s. In China, the elderly Communist leadership, while maintaining a firm grip on central power, sanctioned a move to the market throughout the countryside and in urban areas of select coastal provinces. Denouncing China’s ‘capitalist road’

deviationism, Moscow fell into a recession in 1980. A decree announcing a Soviet economic reform was published the year before, but no concrete measures followed.

Finally, in January 1982, the 79-year-old Suslov—the party’s unofficial number two, but a man who had not aspired to the top job—triggered a succession struggle by dying. Brezhnev, himself on death’s door, moved the 68-year-old Andropov from the KGB to Suslov’s office in the CC Secretariat, but allowed his own main minder, the 70-year-old Chernenko, to perform Suslov’s duties of chairing the Secretariat. The two invalids jockeyed for power until November 1982, when Brezhnev died. Andropov, supported by Ustinov, became general secretary. Gromyko privately suggested himself as second secretary (and putative successor), but that honour fell on the wheezing Chernenko. It all was just intrigue. No Brezhnev succession had taken place. Nationally, much hope was placed in 51