Down with Big Brother (17 page)

The Brezhnev period was later dismissed by Soviet historians as the “era of stagnation.” It would be wrong to conclude, however, that nothing of significance happened in the Soviet Union during those years. The process of ideological disillusionment that took place under Brezhnev was an essential prelude to the Gorbachev revolution. During his eighteen years in power the regime gave up the battle to control the minds of its citizens, concentrating instead on their outward behavior. An all-embracing religion capable of mobilizing millions of people was transformed into an ideology for cynics. By the time Brezhnev died, the Soviet Union had lost its sense of mission. Even the general secretary no longer believed in the future socialist utopia.

“All that stuff about Communism is a tall tale for popular consumption,” he told his brother, Yakov. “After all, we can’t leave the people with no faith. The church was taken away, the tsar was shot, and something had to be substituted. So let the people build Communism.”
¹⁷⁶

Compared with the scenes that had accompanied Stalin’s death nearly thirty years earlier, Brezhnev’s funeral was a restrained and unemotional affair. Stalin was terrifying and awe-inspiring even in death. In March 1953 Politburo members had quaked before him as he lay on his deathbed in his dacha. When they heard that the “Great Leader of All Times and All Peoples” had passed away, millions of people all over the country broke down and wept. The crowds were so great for the lying in state that more than five hundred people were trampled to death on the streets of Moscow. When Brezhnev died, Soviet citizens merely shrugged their shoulders. The elaborate funeral rites in Red Square—the coffin borne aloft by the surviving members of the Politburo, the wailing of factory sirens and firing of guns, Chopin’s “Funeral March”—were practically identical. But there was no sense of real grief.

Curiously enough, the ideological crisis came at a time when ordinary Soviets were living better than ever before. The improvement in living standards fell far short of the regime’s own promises. Standards of health remained dismal, meat and butter were rarities, and wages were low. Even so, Brezhnev’s rule represented a respite from the terror and grinding poverty of the Stalinist period. Older people later looked back to the era of stagnation as a golden age, when bread cost sixteen kopecks a loaf, there was no unemployment, and every Soviet citizen was guaranteed five square meters of free housing. Russian families were beginning to acquire consumer luxuries like refrigerators and color television sets and could even dream of a tinny Soviet-made automobile.

Had Brezhnev’s successors been able to sustain this gradual increase in living standards, there might have been no perestroika and no Second Russian Revolution. But this proved impossible at a time when the Soviet Union was waging war in Afghanistan, pouring money into the arms race with the United States, and propping up a string of Third World clients. By the early eighties it was clear to the thinking section of the Soviet elite that such profligacy could not continue forever. In order to meet the evergrowing cost of empire, Russia had been forced to ransack its treasure trove of natural resources. In other words, the country was living off its own future.

When the planners attempted to point this out to the decrepit
gensek
, he
would wave them away impatiently. It was an article of faith with Brezhnev that Russia’s natural wealth was “inexhaustible.”

“To hell with you and your figures,” he once told Baibakov, the head of the state planning commission. “Let’s go hunting.”
¹⁷⁷

A
FEW MONTHS AFTER
Brezhnev’s death, in April 1983, a group of a hundred or so Soviet economists and sociologists met in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk to discuss the eternal Russian questions: Who is guilty? What is to be done? Emboldened by Andropov’s calls to get the world’s second superpower moving again, the participants in the seminar tried to analyze the causes of the country’s declining economic performance. They rejected the standard explanations—such as bad weather conditions, lack of skilled manpower, and low labor discipline—in favor of a much broader indictment of central planning. In the opinion of these scientists, the economy was trapped in a Stalinist rut of low productivity, shoddy output, and extravagant use of natural resources. The obsession with fulfilling targets established by supposedly omniscient planners was stifling individual initiative. The command-and-administer system, under which any economic decision of any significance was taken at the center, may have functioned reasonably well when the country’s industrial infrastructure was still being formed. But it was incapable of meeting the challenges of the modern economy.

To avoid problems with the censors, the organizers of the Novosibirsk conference took care to wrap their conclusions up in Marxist-Leninist jargon. They limited circulation of their findings to fifty-eight numbered copies. Each was stamped “Confidential—for official use only.” Despite these precautions, a copy of the report made its way to the West, where it caused an overnight sensation.
¹⁷⁸
The so-called Novosibirsk report provided an insight into a growing behind-the-scenes debate in the Soviet Union on how to meet the challenges posed by the technological revolution that was sweeping the rest of the industrialized world. Behind the monolithic and seemingly stagnant facade something was stirring.

Under Stalin the Soviet Union had adopted a simplistic formula for economic growth. Increases in output were believed to be directly proportional to greater inputs of the “factors of production”: manpower, raw materials, and land. If necessary, force would be used to achieve the desired result. In the 1930s, at the height of Stalin’s industrialization campaign, thirty million peasants were forcibly uprooted from the countryside to provide slave labor for socialist industry. Another fifteen to thirty million Soviet citizens fell
victim to terror or famine. The Bolshevik leaders were convinced that the goal of building a socialist utopia justified any sacrifice. Their hubris was breathtaking. “There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm,” one of Stalin’s collaborators boasted. “Our task is not to study the economy, but to change it. We are not bound by any law.”
¹⁷⁹

The extensive economic model was retained by Stalin’s successors, with only slight modifications. Both Khrushchev and Brezhnev had a weakness for huge projects that would exploit the country’s untapped resources. Khrushchev developed the virgin lands of northern Kazakhstan in a vain attempt to solve the food crisis. Brezhnev ordered a railway line to be built across the frozen tundra of northern Siberia to reach the copper reserves of Udokan and the gold mines of Yakutia. By the early eighties the Soviet Union led the world in such basic economic indices as the production of iron, coal, timber, and cement. It boasted the world’s biggest hydroelectric dam, largest steel factory, heaviest tractors, most powerful rockets. At the same time, industry was unable to produce a decent razor blade or meet the demand for toilet paper.

What the Novosibirsk reformers proposed was a switch from extensive to intensive growth. Quality, not quantity, would become the new buzzword. Western studies had shown that a Soviet factory consumed two to three times as much energy as a Western plant to produce an inferior product. The technological gap between the Soviet Union and the West was growing all the time. By 1982, the year of Brezhnev’s death, the Soviet Union trailed the United States in the number of computers per head by a factor of 1:400 and in the number of industrial robots by 1:15
¹⁸⁰

Compared with later critiques of the Soviet economy, the Novosibirsk report was fairly tame. By contemporary standards, however, it was revolutionary. It challenged the official Leninist dogma that the Soviet Union was already a “classless society” and predicted that economic reform would trigger a political struggle between different interest groups. It also called for a total “restructuring” of the system of economic management to encourage individual initiative.

Nobody realized it yet, but a new political slogan had just been launched, a slogan that would transform the Communist world: perestroika.

NOWA HUTA
June 22, 1983

W
HILE THE LEADERS
of world communism were bidding farewell to Brezhnev, a little drama was being played out on the periphery of the Soviet empire that captured the scale of the ideological challenge confronting his successors. The workers of Nowa Huta, a city of two hundred thousand people in southern Poland, had taken a passionate dislike to a statue to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin adorning their central square. They had marched on it, scrawled anti-Communist graffiti on it, and attempted to pull it down with picks and ropes. On one occasion they had even set the father of the international proletariat on fire, drenching his billowing overcoat in gasoline and blowing off one of his hands.

Determined to protect Vladimir Ilyich from his ungrateful offspring, the Communist authorities erected a corrugated iron fence around the charred two-story-high monument. Thousands of ZOMO riot police moved into Nowa Huta. Armed policemen patrolled the square day and night. At moments of tension a dozen police vehicles threw a defensive circle of steel around the statue. Water cannon were stationed nearby to repel a surprise attack.

For a nation still reeling from the psychological shock of martial law, there was a delicious irony to these events. Nowa Huta—Polish for “new
steelworks”—had been planned as a model socialist community. Poland’s rulers had wanted a socioeconomic laboratory where they could turn Godfearing Polish peasants into the new proletarian man described by Marx and Lenin. They saw the town as a political counterweight to the nearby city of Kraków, Poland’s ancient capital, which they regarded as a bastion of conservative reaction. The construction of Nowa Huta in the early 1950s was accompanied by a propaganda barrage about the incredible feats of “heroes of socialist labor,” which served as inspiration for Andrzej Wajda’s film
Man of Marble
. To celebrate its completion, the giant Nowa Huta steelworks received the hallowed name of Lenin.

There were hundreds of similar “model” towns all over the Soviet empire, from Karl-Marx-Stadt in East Germany to Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the Soviet Far East. They were uniform in their soul-destroying drabness, gridlike layouts, and pompous style of municipal architecture. Lenin Avenue always led to Lenin Square, dominated by a huge statue of Lenin, right arm thrust up in classic taxicab-hailing pose. The biggest building in each square was always the headquarters of the local Communist Party, and the party secretary always had his offices on the second floor. Faded propaganda banners—with slogans like “Glory to the Communist Party” and “We Promise to Fulfill the Goals of the Five-Year Plan”—adorned the potholed streets. The stores had names like Food Products No. 8, Bakery No. 12, and Hairdresser. The gray apartment buildings had a makeshift, slapped-together quality about them, as if nobody cared whether the walls were straight or the balconies fell into the street. There was even a distinctly socialist smell. The blend of odors varied slightly from country to country, but the basic ingredients were always the same: low-octane gasoline, body odor, unwashed frying pans, cheap perfume, brown coal, cabbage, dried urine, and musty newsprint.

Many of these towns were company towns, built around a single state-owned factory, such as a steelworks or a coal mine or a big defense plant, visible for miles around. The factory dominated the lives of the townspeople, just as it dominated the landscape. It provided them with jobs and poisoned the air they breathed and the water they drank. It organized day care centers and summer camps for their children and exposed them to an unending stream of Communist propaganda. It distributed housing and acted as an extension of the police state: If you misbehaved, you would be crossed off the ten-year waiting list for an apartment.

Nowa Huta differed from other model socialist towns in one very important respect. At the corner of Karl Marx Avenue and Great Proletarian
Avenue stood a soaring concrete structure that had not been part of the original plan. Topped by a huge steel cross, the Church of Our Lady, Queen of Poland was known to everyone in town as the Ark. The struggle to prove the planners wrong had infused the entire community with a sense of defiance.

The first cross had appeared on this site in 1957, in the wake of the popular upheavals that swept Gomułka to power. Over the next decade the cross was repeatedly torn down by police and stubbornly put up again by the local inhabitants. Finally, in 1967, seventeen years after the building of Nowa Huta, the archbishop of Kraków had dug a spade into the earth to break the ground for the town’s first church. It took another decade of bureaucratic obstruction and arbitrary shortages of building materials to complete the Ark. Much of the work, including carrying two million stones from mountain streams, was done by local inhabitants with their bare hands. Consecrating the completed church in 1977, the archbishop had declared: “Nowa Huta was built as a city without God, but the will of God and the people who worked here prevailed. Let this be a lesson.”
¹⁸¹

The archbishop had gone on to become Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. On his first pilgrimage back to his homeland, in 1979, Karol Wojtyła had been refused permission to visit the Ark. So he had said mass across the cornfields, in Kraków, against the backdrop of the dark, satanic steel mill. Now he was returning to Poland once again, and this time he would be visiting Nowa Huta. Frustrated in their attempts to pull down the local Lenin monument, the inhabitants of the “city without God” were determined to show the world where their loyalties really lay.