Hard Times for Ivan
With their customary dazzling display of stagecraft, the Russians opened the Kremlin gates this week for the 25th performance of the classic miracle play of Communism: the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The onion domes and crosses atop the Kremlin's cathedrals and churches coruscated in the winter sunlight, while the renovated brick battlements of the ancient fortress loomed over the elegant imperial palaces, freshly painted in pastels. Outside the walls of the ancient fortress, huge posters dominated Red Square, proclaiming the principal theme of this year's political extravaganza: SUCh as GLORY TO THE GREAT SOVIET PEOPLE, THE BUILDERS OF COMMUNISM. More than 5,000 party delegates from every corner of the world's largest country will attend the 11-day congress. Also present will be delegates from other Communist parties (notably missing: representatives of China and Albania), who will attend in apparent recognition of Moscow as Marxism's shrine of orthodoxy and its seat of power.
The real business of the 25th congress* will take place not before a backdrop reminiscent of Boris Godunov but in the 6,000-seat auditorium of the Palace of Congresses, a hulking multimillion dollar marble-and-glass edifice that exemplifies the Soviets' conspicuous striving for modernity. Western Kremlinologists expect few surprises from this congress. According to one feeble joke current in Moscow last week, the delegates will in fact be treated to a performance of Mnogo Shuma iz Nichego, otherwise known as Much Ado About Nothing.
The Soviet press, as usual, has given the congress an extraordinary advance buildup. According to newspapers, radio and television reports, the entire nation is engaged in an orgy of self-congratulations for past achievements and eagerly waiting to learn about future goals to be elaborated at the congress. The official news agency Tass reported that "virtually the entire adult population of the Soviet Union" was discussing the 21,000-word five-year plan for 1976-80, which was published in December and will be the subject of most of the major addresses. The plan is officially described as "a new, important stage in creating the material and technical basis of Communism, in improving social relations and molding a new man, in enhancing the socialist way of life." At the same tune, the Soviet press has noticeably intensified its coverage of strikes, bankruptcies, unemployment, inflation and crime in the capitalist West, while maintaining that Communism has triumphantly resolved all of these burdensome problems.
To judge from the banners and slogans that garlanded every major Moscow thoroughfare, all 15 members of the Politburo are joined in "monolithic unity" with the people. Reinforcing this impression was the announcement that Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, 69, would deliver the Soviet equivalent of a "state of the union" address. This traditionally lasts from five to six hours--scarcely an undertaking for a man long rumored to be suffering from a fatal physical or political illness. Premier Aleksei Kosygin, 71, whose survival in power is often linked to Brezhnev's, is scheduled to deliver the crucial report on the economy.
Behind the facade of socialist pageantry and the rhetoric of fraternal solidarity lies another, incomparably more complex reality. Clearly, the congress marks a time for national stocktaking. New crises, problems and opportunities are at hand for the U.S.S.R. Leonid Brezhnev's decade-long rule is inexorably coming to its natural end, even though Kremlinologists no longer believe he will use the congress podium to announce his retirement. Whatever the state of his health, this is surely the last Party congress over which he will preside as General Secretary. Several others in the gerontocratic Politburo (average age: 66) will also not survive for another performance in the Palace of Congresses. Among the first to retire will probably be Arvid Pelshe, 77. Agriculture Minister Dmitri Polyansky, only 58, may be on the way out if a scapegoat is needed for farm failures.
Since there exists no formalized mechanism for a transfer of power in the U.S.S.R., a crisis inevitably occurs when a leader dies or is ousted. Many Kremlinologists believe that Brezhnev would prefer an orderly transition and a new regime that will continue his policies. Nonetheless, they predict a possibly lengthy power struggle under cover of a caretaker "collective leadership." If Brezhnev were to retire in the near future, his titular successor would probably be Politburo Member Andrei Kirilenko, 69, an old Brezhnev crony, who has acted for Brezhnev during his recent illnesses. Kiril Mazurov, 61, at present Kosygin's standin, is expected to inherit the premiership. Potential second-stage succes sors to Brezhnev's job include such relative youngsters as Fyodor Kulakov, 58, who supervises agriculture for the par ty, and Konstantin Katushev, 48, the Party Secretary in charge of keeping East European parties in line.
Speeches at the congress will un questionably herald Moscow's continuing triumphant leadership of the Communist world. In fact, ideological and tactical differences have sent at least a dozen Asian and European parties out of the Soviet orbit, and the Kremlin to day probably has less influence over the destiny of the international Communist movement than at any tune in history.
The Chinese party, now in the throes of its own policy and power struggle (TIME, Feb. 23) is still an implacable enemy; last month the Peking press denounced the Kremlin for "restoring capitalism and impoverishing the people." In Yugoslavia, President Josip Broz Tito has ordered mass arrests of people suspected of conspiring with Soviet agents to sub vert his government. The Kremlin has lately been embarrassed by the politi cal misjudgments of Portugal's aggressive Stalinist party. The huge 1,730,000member Italian party has now been joined by the 275,000-member French party in rejecting the Marxist model for Communism in their countries and in proclaiming (convincingly or not) their adherence to Western democratic principles. So troubled are relations of the foreign parties with Moscow on these and other issues that Brezhnev failed to convene a meeting of the European parties late last year.
Lost Soviet citizens will not take alarm at or even perceive the strains in the Kremlin leadership. Nor will they be much concerned about upheavals in the world Communist movement. But like Western Sovietologists, Russia's wage earners will be greatly interested in what party leaders have to say about the state of the economy. Reason: there can scarcely be anyone in the Soviet Union who has not been made aware by shortages of everything from sausages to auto tires that something has gone gravely awry.
The leadership is unlikely to be candid about the extent of the emergency. Says Glasgow University's Alec Nove, one of the West's ranking experts on Soviet economic affairs: "If they were prepared to come clean, they would say, 'Look, brothers and sisters, we're in a mess this year. We have a belt-tightening plan. Let's all pull together.' Instead they will talk mainly about achievements." Despite the brave talk, statistics released last December on the 1971-75 and the 1976-80 five-year plans indicate that there are genuine hardships ahead for many Soviet consumers.
The most notable troubles are in agriculture. Drought contributed to a disastrous harvest in 1975; because of an 83-million-ton grain shortage, the Soviets were obliged to buy 35 million tons from the U.S. and other foreign countries. The winter-wheat crop this year has already proved disappointing. Some Washington experts predict that shortages of bread and especially meat and dairy products will become so acute by next spring that strikes and even riots could break out. These disorders are most likely to occur in provincial towns, but not in Moscow and other big cities that hold high priorities for food distribution. The distress slaughter of cattle last autumn for lack of fodder will inevitably make meat scarce until at least 1980. The government apparently decided to sacrifice animal feed for the sake of bread, the staple of the Russian diet. But farmers, who are allowed to keep livestock on their small private plots, are buying bread and illegally feeding it to their cows, pigs and chickens. Thus it seems probable that most Soviet consumers will be busy combing the markets for food until the next harvest. By the law of averages, it ought to be better than last year's, which was the worst in a decade.
While there is hope that the food situation will improve, the present scarcity of quality consumer goods is built into the new five-year plan. According to Soviet statistics published last month, Brezhnev's promise in 1971 that production of consumer goods would be raised by at least 44% during the five-year plan fell 11% short of its goal. In the next five years, the plan allows for a rise of only 30%. In general, it calls for a much slower rate of improvement in living standards than did its predecessor, as well as reduced rates of growth in virtually every sector of the economy. The Soviets do not plan to increase significantly the manufacture of trucks, tractors and passenger cars. Economist Nove thinks that this may be because the Soviets anticipate a fuel shortage, even though the U.S.S.R. leads the world in oil production (491 million tons in 1975) and since 1971 has invested more than $13 billion in developing its northwest Siberian oilfields. Nonetheless the rate of increase in oil production will drop during the next five years because huge, older oilfields in the Urals-Bashkir region are being exhausted. Also, the Soviets are being forced to export more and more oil to the West to help balance debts caused by their massive foreign grain purchases.
As Western experts pondered the 1976 Soviet balance sheet, some long-term achievements seemed all but lost in the welter of present economic woes. The inflation that has plagued the U.S. and other industrialized nations has thus far been contained in the U.S.S.R. Under Brezhnev, there has been an average annual increase of 5% in per capita consumption--a very creditable advance even by Western standards, which have suffered somewhat because of the recent recession. The Kremlin's greatest accomplishment, however, has bypassed the Soviet consumer. According to the master plan pioneered by Stalin, the U.S.S.R.'s prime resources have been concentrated in the military-industrial sector. Physicist Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and Russia's leading dissident, recently commented that the U.S.S.R. has created "a permanent militarization of the economy to an unprecedented degree in peacetime--something that is burdensome for the population and dangerous for the whole world." It has also been spectacularly effective. The buildup of Soviet forces and weaponry in recent years has been so great that defense analysts around the world are virtually unanimous in concluding that the U.S. is losing its quantitative edge.
Considering the successes of Soviet centralized planning in arms production, why has Moscow been unable to offer its people a standard of living commensurate with the country's great natural and human resources? The Soviet Union produces more steel, cement and fertilizers than the U.S.; it is second only to the U.S. in coal and South Africa in gold. Yet little of this wealth filters down to the Soviet consumer. Roughly 30% of the Soviet population is engaged in farming, compared with 5% in the U.S., and millions more are recruited from the cities each year to help with the harvest. No less than 31% of all investment under the new five-year plan has been allocated to agriculture. Yet by the standards of other industrial nations, the U.S.S.R. has been incapable of properly feeding its people, even in good harvest times. Most Western economists believe that the basic problem lies in the Communist system of centralized planning. In the high-priority armaments sector, this can be made to work well, although with much waste and inefficiency. But planners at the top in other areas have been unable to make effective decisions regarding capital investment and the right use of resources and manpower for a multitude of enterprises scattered across an immense nation.
Beyond the inefficiency of centralized planning, the deadening impact of a system that places everything from housing to travel to the press under rigid state supervision kills individual initiative and breeds apathy. The Soviet man in the street is indifferent not just to the country's leaders, who appear on television or in the newspapers as depersonalized titans, but also to his job. The most obvious symptom of this malaise is the extraordinarily low productivity of labor in the U.S.S.R. as compared with that in every other developed country. Many people are unwilling to put in a day's work for the state if they can help it. Says a Western businessman who is a longtime resident of Moscow. "The real problem with this place is that the average worker doesn't give a damn." A recent study, based on Soviet statistics, showed that each day about 1 million people out of an industrial work force of 84 million do not turn up for work in the U.S.S.R.
One cause is epidemic alcoholism.
The Soviet humor magazine Krokodil recently ran a cartoon that pictured a puzzled bureaucrat asking a plant manager: "How did your factory succeed in fulfilling its plan?" The answer: "The liquor store was closed for repairs." The average Russian over 15 consumes 8.5 qt. of liquor a year, twice as much as the world's next biggest consumers, Americans and Frenchmen. The main tipple is vodka, at $5.22 a pt. for the cheapest brand. Authorities regularly denounce alcoholism but do little to limit liquor sales. Reason: the state derives 12% of its revenues from the sale of liquor. Drunkenness is involved in 90% of all murders, at least half of Russia's traffic accidents and 40% of divorces. In some provincial hamlets, weekends are devoted to monumental collective binges, and there are growing complaints about drunken gangs of youths roaming some city streets at night and mugging passersby.
Goofing off on the job is a way of life for an incalculable number of people, who are not impressed with being called the owners of the means of production. That is notably true of peasants, who still resent the imposed system of collectivized agriculture. The peasants concentrate their energies on their acre-size private plots, which constitute only 3% of the total farm acreage but produce 25% of the total agricultural output. Their productivity per acre is as much as eight times that of the government land. Farmers and industrial workers are notoriously careless of their machinery. Their indifference, combined with a chronic shortage of spare parts, has created what Kosygin has euphemistically called an "immobilization of equipment." Thus, despite the billions of rubles that have been poured into new agricultural machinery, the majority of Soviet peasants still work the land by hand.
The working man and particularly the working woman (85% of all working-age women have jobs) spend an inordinate amount of time tracking down scarce consumer goods. The ubiquitous mesh shopping bag is familiarly called an avoska, (perhaps) bag, meaning "Perhaps I'll find something to buy today, perhaps not." Although Moscow is by far the best-supplied city in the Soviet Union, TIME Correspondent Marsh Clark last week reported that "soap, toothpaste, perfumes, detergents, toilet paper, hairpins and matches were either of inferior quality or not available at all. The soaps don't clean, the mint-flavored toothpaste is harsh and repugnant, and the perfumes smell like overripe raspberries." The shortages are so commonplace that people will join any queue they see, then ask what it is for. Near Red Square recently, Clark spotted a crowd jostling about a man selling something at a table. As the eager buyers got nearer, they saw that the choice item on sale was an English-language textbook entitled Animal Physiology.
Items imported from East bloc countries, which are nearly always made better than their Soviet counterparts, can cause near riots when placed on sale in department stores. Even foreknowledge of their availability is worth money. Clark tells about a Muscovite who recently visited the flea market in the Ukrainian city of Odessa. Hearing a man calling, "I'll sell one sentence for a ruble," the intrigued Muscovite inquired what the sentence could be. "For a ruble, I'll give you some valuable information," replied the hawker, who got his ruble and then whispered, "Imported panty hose will be sold at 10 a.m. tomorrow on the second floor of the Central Department Store."
Along with shortages, there are bizarre examples of superabundance. Because of poorly coordinated planning and lack of inventory control, goods may suddenly appear in inappropriate profusion. Tiny commissaries on collective farms that carry only the barest necessities of life may suddenly receive shipments of silk neckties or Italian vermouth. A decade ago there was a glut of condoms, which Russians casually used as bottle caps and garters. Because of a current rubber shortage, prophylactics can scarcely be found in Moscow today. Consumer demand for goods may be met too enthusiastically or too late. State-run factories are producing millions of women's platform shoes and stretch boots, which were in demand three years ago.
Now hardly any buyers can be found.
Letters and editorials in the Soviet press often complain about the inferior quality of Soviet-made merchandise. The worst are footwear and clothing. According to Moscow's Literary Gazette, the seal of quality, which indicates that an item conforms to international standards, was awarded to only 0.6% of all Soviet footwear and less than 1% of clothes in 1974. Krokodil recently published a satirical sketch about a couple seeking to buy furniture. The sofas were all big, clumsy and "of a shade combining the colors of a country backroad in autumn and of a World War I dreadnought destroyer." The author recommended against buying these dreadnought sofas because "one mustn't scare the children with furniture."
City dwellers constitute about 60% of the population, and housing construction scarcely keeps pace with continuing migration from the countryside. The shoddy quality of the new buildings is the butt of considerable ridicule. As one Krokodil cartoon says: "It's good luck to let your cat go into a new apartment first." The drawing captures the startled expression of a family on the threshold of their new home as the weight of their cat walking into the living room causes the floor to give way.
Self-service stores are gradually appearing in major Soviet cities, and are considerably easing the problem of shopping. Yet even in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, thousands of Russians must still go to one store for meat (if any is available), another for bread, yet another for vegetables. In each shop, they are likely to find limited supplies, long queues and bored, surly sales help whose apparent goal is to impede the customer. A classic Soviet cartoon shows a frazzled would-be purchaser simultaneously blowing a noisemaker, shaking a baby rattle and waving his hat, all in a vain effort to attract the attention of saleswomen chattering behind the counter. A survey, by the magazine Soviet Culture, of 1,700 customers in the records section of a Moscow department store showed that "the majority complained they could not find the records they wanted. The problem is with salespeople who consider selling records a big nuisance." Besides that, the desired records may not be in stock, since the store comes under the jurisdiction of one state ministry and the record-making plants are run by another.
The frustrations of trying to cope with an unresponsive system have led to widespread corruption, ranging from petty pilfering to gigantic rip-offs of state property. Stealing is so common that plainclothesmen from O.B.K.h.S.S. (Department for Combatting Theft of Socialist Property and Speculation) are almost as ubiquitous as agents of the secret police.
In Odessa, a street vendor has been doing a brisk business in used light bulbs at 20 kopeks (26.50) each.
When asked what purpose these might serve, he replied, "Take them to your office, screw them into the light sockets and take home the better ones." Moscow taxi drivers, instead of cruising for passengers, sometimes stash their vehicles in courtyards and let the motor run, while the back wheels, held up by a jack, spin away for hours. Keeping the wheels off the ground burns up gasoline very efficiently, while the odometer goes up. The drivers, who are state employees, are thus able to claim miles of fareless cruising and get reimbursement for gasoline on the basis of phony mileage.
The black market in goods and services has become so large that Sovietologists now call it a "parallel market," in a "second economy." According to Political Scientist Dimitri Simes of Georgetown University, "the ordinary Soviet citizen uses the parallel market on an almost daily basis."
The only ones who do not need it are high-ranking party officials and top armed forces and police officers. They have access to special stores that sell luxury foreign goods and high-quality foodstuffs to Russia's privileged elite at extremely low, state-subsidized prices.
Virtually every kind of stolen merchandise is available on the parallel market.
The second economy also provides a veritable army of shabashniki, or moonlighters, who will replace floorboards, mend roofs, fix plumbing and do any numher of services that would take months to obtain from state-managed building repair crews. Some of these repairmen are highly skilled engineers who quadruple their salaries, tax free, by after-hours work. Simes observes that everyone who owns an auto--and there are now 15 million passenger cars on Soviet roads--is a permanent user of the parallel market. While it could take weeks to have a car repaired and months to obtain spare parts, affluent drivers can quickly get what they need by bribing mechanics and service-station attendants. A bottle of vodka is the minimum and usually compulsory bribe.
Even private education is available on the parallel market. Coaching of backward students and conducting cram courses for admission to universities have become big business for moonlighting teachers; their wages normally range from 100 to 145 rubles a month--lower than the 153-ruble wage of the industrial worker. A poll conducted at Moscow University has shown that 85% of freshmen in the math department had used private tutors to prepare for admission.
Although every Soviet citizen is in principle entitled to free medical care, hospitals are jammed and nursing care is inadequate. As a result, patients who can afford it, or who are desperate enough, make private financial arrangements with doctors and bribe hospital administrators for admission and special services. In small towns, doctors are frequently inundated with gifts of eggs, chickens and other produce brought them by peasants from nearby collective farms.
The necessity of the parallel market is a corrupting influence in Soviet society; it weighs heavily on people who would normally be unwilling to engage in a squalid and illegal traffic. Says one young Russian Jewish scientist who recently emigrated to the U.S.: "It disturbs one's sense of human dignity and fair play. It is repugnant to take part in all these machinations, but you can't exist apart from the system." At the same time, theft and bribery often function as lubricants that make the cumbersome machinery of the official economy run more smoothly--which explains why the government reluctantly tolerates some aspects of the parallel market.
Despite the corruption, the frustrations and the shortages, the average Soviet citizen is, in most respects, better off than he was two decades ago. At the end of the Stalin era, collective farmers, when they were paid at all, earned 24 kopeks (about 60 at the time) for a day's work--enough to buy one pair of trousers in the course of a year. Now the average peasant makes about 98 rubles ($129) a month. Salaries for workers and professionals have also risen, while prices of basic commodities, even though they are not always available when wanted, have remained relatively stable. Ivan Ivanovich may not have everything he wants, but at least he can now dream of trading in his old black-and-white TV for a color set, of riding to work in a four-passenger Zhiguli instead of on the bus, of having enough rubles to buy nice toys for his son's birthday.
Life in the Soviet Union also has some agreeable surprises for outsiders. "There is little violent crime compared with the U.S.," reports TIME Moscow Bureau Chief Marsh Clark. "It is safe to walk the streets at night in Moscow.
Heavy steel locks are not needed on apartment doors. Kidnapings, which have become epidemic in Europe, are not known. There is almost no jaywalking. The cities are immaculate. People do not throw cigarette butts on the ground; receptacles are provided for such things and are expected to be used. When it snows, it seems as if every citizen comes out to clean off his little patch of sidewalk. Graffiti, that Western abomination, are unknown here. For one thing, anyone defacing a statue of Lenin or a public building would be running a very serious risk indeed.
"There is genuine, if belated, concern about the environment. Every city has large green areas and parks. Industrial polluters now receive stiff penalties if they persist. Moscow, which has banished over 300 factories in the past ten years, has remarkably clean air for a big city, and is now experimenting with a fleet of trucks powered by natural gas as a possible way of cutting down on automotive pollution. There is no pornography in public circulation in the Soviet Union. Foreign tourists carrying even such relatively innocent publications as Playboy may expect to have them confiscated by customs officers upon entry. The Soviet Union has gun laws that make the purchase of handguns very difficult. There are only occasional reports of armed robberies.
"One particularly endearing feature of Russian society is the way that children are loved and pampered. The best way to get a taxi in any big city--a considerable undertaking--is to stand on the street with a child. Cabs that ordinarily rush by even when they are empty will always stop for a child. In general, Russians remain an emotional, demonstrative and generous people who are a pleasure to live among."
Perhaps the most significant improvement in the quality of Soviet life is scarcely ever mentioned, least of all by top party officials. Exactly 20 years ago this month, at the 20th Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his celebrated de-Stalinization speech that heralded the end of the vast "Gulag Archipelago" of concentration camps in which Stalin imprisoned at least 12 million people every year. Today, perhaps 10,000 people are still being held in Soviet prisons, camps or police-run psychiatric hospitals because their political or religious views are regarded as dangerous to the state. But notable dissidents are now more likely to be exiled than jailed. Some, like Sakharov, survive within the Soviet Union, openly challenging and embarrassing the Kremlin inquisitors.
Ivan Ivanovich may be indifferent to Sakharov's insistent calls for greater freedom in the Soviet Union. He does care, however, that his material well-being is improving, however erratically, and that he has far less to fear from the arbitrary midnight knock on the door And that is no small blessing.
* In Soviet hagiography the First Party Congress is reckoned to be an abortive 1898 meeting in Minsk of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which later split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.