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Financial Times, Monday, November 7, 1977

The Price of Soviet Achievements

It has been 60 years since the Bolshevik seizure of power created out of the old Tsarist Empire a new kind of society based on a vision of progress and social justice but sustained by force. The Soviets say the Revolution was “the greatest event of the twentieth century.” What has it meant?

On Kallinin Prospekt, Moscow’s answer to the Champs Elysées, shoppers stroll past a futuristic arcade of stores and cafes and rows of sweeping high rise apartment buildings. An outdoor screen flashes scenes from current Soviet films. The street is full of traffic, including many new Soviet “Zhiguli” automobiles, and the stores and cafes are crowded with patrons.

Kallinin Prospekt is a model of what the Soviet leaders would like their country to be. Modem and striking, it conveys a picture of progress and economic success.

In spite of this, the centrally located street feels utterly different from any Western grand avenue. The buildings are modem but uniform. The crowds are unfailingly orderly but lack spontaneity, for which something from above seems to have been substituted. Ubiquitous doormen enforce long waits in the cold while places go begging in restaurants upstairs. Newsstands are well stocked, but only with communist publications. Above the street, a Soviet model plane circles an illuminated globe advertising international air tickets that passers-by cannot buy.

The Soviet Union at 60, in many ways, bears comparison with its would-be representative street. It shows great achievement but also an atmosphere of unreality, as the society seeks to deny the coercion which helped to build it.

Without attempting to evaluate what it means in terms of efficiency or quality for Soviet industrial output to have increased 145 times since the Revolution, or for national income to have increased 68 times, there can be little doubt that the Soviet economic achievement was extraordinary. The 60th anniversary calls to mind that in the 12 years between 1928 and 1940 the Soviet Union, internationally isolated and operating on economic principles that were completely untested, transformed itself from a predominantly rural, peasant country into a formidable industrial power with the help of neither significant foreign investment nor sizeable external trade.

Terrible Cost

This Soviet achievement, however, came at a terrible cost. The new society was created by violence directed at existing classes and institutions. The effects of that violence, which reached its culmination during the Stalin period, are still perceptible in Soviet life today.

The Soviet Union now accounts for one-fifth of the world’s industrial output, boasts a vast, technologically sophisticated military, establishment which allows it to compete for power and influence in every corner of the globe, directs the world’s only ongoing manned space mission programme, and has successfully developed such modern forms of transport as the TU-144 supersonic airliner and the 125-mile-an-hour ER-200 high speed train.

The system capable of organising dramatic achievements, however, has such power over the individual that few persons dare do anything to challenge it directly. The Soviet citizen needs the approval of the Committee for State Security (KGB)—which supplements its information with the results of massive eavesdropping—and opening of mail—to travel abroad, to get a desirable job or to qualify for a promotion. At the same time, evidence of “negative political tendencies” can lead to immediate sacking or being hounded from job to job. It can prejudice attempts to get an apartment.

“Those who were frightened by Stalin,” said a Jewish activist whose parents were Stalinist purge victims, “have been frightened to the end of their lives.” The younger generation have less of this primordial fear but do not “tease the goose” lest they tip an invisible political balance and endlessly complicate their lives.

The Soviet Union was the first revolutionary Socialist state and the sight of red flags flying legally from the tops of official government buildings still lends to one’s impressions of Moscow a disquieting sense of having stepped into another world. The Revolution did not realise a philosophic ideal of justice and freedom and much of the unreal atmosphere in the Soviet Union lies in the fact that all Soviet propaganda is based on the notion that it did. In fact, the Politburo or Communist Party Central Committee, meeting in secret, set policies which the people as a whole, who have no voice in the matter, unanimously resolve to “carry into life.”

The eeriness of the situation is striking, but it must be balanced against the regime’s positive aspects. The economic and technical progress in the Soviet Union also brought the creation of a comprehensive welfare state. Since the 1930s, the Soviet Union has guaranteed full employment as well as paid holidays and an assured pension at 60 (55 for women). Housing is subsidised so rents are nominal, and education and medical care are free. There is claimed to be total literacy today in a country where 60 years ago only one in four could read, and the infant mortality rate has fallen from 269 deaths per thousand in 1913 to 26 deaths per thousand today. Average life expectancy has risen from 32 years to more than 70.

The Paradox

The Soviets set out to create both a new society and a “new man.” Although they created a new socialist society, the goal of the new man—strong, unselfish, and disdainful of personal power when confronted with the needs of the community—continues to elude them. Unfortunately in the Soviet case, the goals were complementary. Without the new man to oversee it, the purity of the new socialist society was itself in danger.

In the Soviet Union today, government control of the economy and the interpretation of a guaranteed job as the basis of social and political participation create a sense of security but also lend to political life much of the inherent authoritarianism and control of the work place. At political meetings and lectures in offices and factories, people learn to agree ritually to the party policy being explained, although they may not agree with a word of it. The economic consequences of objecting or even appearing indifferent are not worth the risk.

The system maintains itself by controlling the flow of information. Foreign radio broadcasts are no longer being jammed, but there are no foreign newspapers on sale in Moscow except in foreigners’ hotels and at the airport. In spite of the Soviet claim to be the best-read nation, works of serious literature, including the Russian classics, are in chronically short supply, as are valuable statistical yearbooks. The result of these restrictions and the omnipresence of deadening consistent official propaganda is mass confusion. There is widespread dissatisfaction in the Soviet Union, but few are able to articulate what is on their minds.

The 60th anniversary inevitably prompts comparisons, and in many ways the situation in the Soviet Union—economically, socially, politically—is better than it has ever been. The Stalinist Terror appears to be a thing of the past, and people’s standard of living improves year by year, but the cautious statement of Mr. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, in his report last week on the 60th anniversary, that “we have stood our ground and won” is indicative of the fact that the Soviet Union, which once saw itself as the embodiment of historical dynamism, is slowing down.

The Soviet leadership of the revolutionary State has become a gerontocracy, or rule by the elderly. The majority of the ruling Politburo are 70, or close to it, and they have passed up several opportunities to promote younger men. Only five Politburo members have been dropped since the Brezhnev-Kosygin leadership took over in 1964 and only one of these, former President Nikolai Podgorny, was a central figure. The stability of the Soviet leadership is reflected in the Communist Party Central Committee, where 90 per cent of the full Central Committee members elected at the 25th Party Congress in 1975 were re-elected to posts they held at the 24th Party Congress in 1971—a sharp contrast to the heavy turnover under Khrushchev and Stalin.

More Trade

At the same time, the years of spectacular economic growth appear to be over. In 1976, the growth of Soviet industrial output was less than a third of what it had been in 1951. The increase in productivity of labour, a crucial index for the Soviet Union’s future economic health, was also last year less than a third of the 1951 increase. Soviet foreign trade, however, has greatly expanded. Soviet trade with the West has more than doubled in the past six years, and Soviet foreign trade as a whole has increased almost tenfold in the past 20 years. The Soviet Union is no longer isolated from the world economy or insulated from its problems. The result is a relationship of interdependence with the capitalists which the early communists sought to minimise.

Under these circumstances, the Soviet Union does not have and apparently does not want the revolutionary’s disdain for convention and his relative freedom of action. The Soviet Union at 60 appears to prefer international respectability and recognition of its place as one of the world’s two great superpowers under circumstances in which neither the coercion of Communist Party rule, nor the post-millennial enthusiasm which conceals it, is called into question.

The two clearest threats to the Soviets in this regard are the Eurocommunists and the dissidents. At last week’s two day celebration meeting marking the 60th anniversary, the most important note of discord was heard over the issue of Eurocommunism, which promises Communism in a pluralist political society. The task of consolidating the Soviet regime and Soviet international influence among communists and non-communists alike will be greatly complicated by any successful Western European example of a Marxist government operating in conditions of political and intellectual freedom.

The Soviet international position, and particularly the relationship with the U.S., could be jeopardised by the dissidents. The West has shown a predilection to press the Soviet Union to adhere to its international and human rights commitments, and the dissidents, by basing their activities, as they have in recent years, on explicit Soviet undertakings, are always in the position of having a potential external ally.

The Soviets enjoy birthdays, and the prospectis of regular celebrations of the events of the October Revolution at least every decade. As the Revolution fades into history, the Soviet Union will remain a superpower on the basis of its formidable strength. It is hard to escape the impression, however, that the retelling of the events of October and the glorification of Lenin, such as have taken place in the week preceding today’s anniversary, will not of themselves continue to inspire other peoples to follow the Soviet example unless the Russians can reverse the trend towards rigidification and embourgeoisement and—politically, economically, and ideologically—begin to offer the world something new.