Monday, Jun. 23, 1980
A Fortress State in Transition
More powerful than it has ever been, a colossal empire now confronts a decade of decision, and its choices will change history
The spectacle reflects the power. Bathed in white light, Moscow's Red Square at night is one of the most impressive symbols of strength in the world--as large and brooding as the land itself. The flat, stark lines of the Kremlin's forbidding and protective wall dominate Lenin's tomb and the glorious domes of St. Basil's Cathedral. The Soviet Union, an empire whose expanse dwarfs the one ruled by ancient Rome, now confronts a pivotal decade in its history. Before long, an entirely new generation of leaders must replace that of President Leonid Brezhnev and his aging associates on the Politburo. There is, meanwhile, growing tension between East and West, with the world's two superpowers increasingly seen to be in confrontation. The military strength of the Soviet Union is clearly the equal of the U.S.'s; the Kremlin is seeking to project its influence in Africa, Asia and the Middle East; with rising anger and suspicion, the Soviet Union and the U.S. assail each other on a dozen geographic and economic fronts.
Never before has it been so important for Americans to be knowledgeable about the Soviet Union, to understand what it has become. In this special issue, TIME examines the "other" superpower, exploring the diversity of its society and the vigor of its peoples, the deep sources of its strength and the roots of its persistent weaknesses.
Brezhnev's legacy: stability, security and--perhaps--stagnation
Wretched and abundant, Oppressed and powerful, Weak and mighty, Mother Russia! --Nikolai Nekrasov, Who Can Be Happy in Russia?
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is not just a country, but an empire--the largest, and probably the last, in history.
Occupying 15% of the earth's land surface, the Soviet Union stretches from a cluster of virtual colonies in Eastern Europe to the Bering Strait off the top of Alaska, across two continents and eleven time zones; more than 3,000 miles-- roughly the distance from New York to San Francisco--separate the ice fields of the Arctic Ocean from the sun-parched Kara Kum Desert. The 262.4 million citizens of the U.S.S.R. belong to more than 100 ethnic groups and claim descent from Varangians, Turks, Mongols and countless Eurasian tribes. Their government preaches to them, in Russian, about the supreme wisdom of a 19th century German atheist. They, however, speak in more than 100 tongues and worship Jehovah, God, Buddha, Allah, or the animist spirits of nomadic hunters in the far north.
Nature and human enterprise have endowed the Soviet Union with wealth and power. The prodigious achievements of the U.S.S.R. in mining, agriculture and energy production still conjure up images of the infamous Siberian mines, collective farms and hydroelectric projects of the 1930s, where armies of political prisoners, conscript peasants and idealistic volunteers "built Communism" under the cruel supervision of Joseph Stalin's armed guards and commissars. Today's reality is less harsh, but the profile of the country still bulges with muscle; the recitation of its endowments and achievements is still redolent of brute force, monumentality and projects that dwarf and sometimes devour men.
The U.S.S.R. has moved ahead of the rest of the world in the production of steel, pig iron and cement. It ranks second in the manufacture of aluminum as well as the extraction of gold --the two metals that respectively symbolize the modern and the primitive strengths of an economy. The Soviet Union's farms produce more barley, cotton fiber, wheat, oats and rye than those of any other country and--an incongruous sweet touch --more sugar and honey. Huge petroleum reserves, second only to those of Saudi Arabia, have made the country self-sufficient in energy, although that could change by the middle of this decade because of the difficulty in finding and exploiting oil and gas in remote and inhospitable expanses. By numerous indexes --electrification, physicians and nurses per capita, teacher-to-pupil ratios, books published per annum--the U.S.S.R. is an advanced, and still advancing society. Despite censorship and an official ethos that discourages innovation, Russian culture of the Soviet era has produced masterpieces of Western civilization, especially in music, poetry and dance.
Militarily, the Soviet Union is a true superpower. It ranks first in annual defense expenditures (about $165 billion) and second (after China) in men under arms (3,658,000). Nearly one out of every six soldiers on earth serves in the Soviet armed forces. Over the past 30 years, its navy has evolved from little more than a well-armed coast guard to an armada of global reach; it challenges the U.S. Seventh Fleet for command of the Indian and western Pacific oceans, and the South China Sea. Technicians of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces man command-and-control silos that can launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, some of them with as many as ten independently targetable warheads, at the U.S. in 30 to 35 minutes. Soviet ICBMs are bigger, more numerous and more powerful than those of the U.S.
Yet for all its size and strength, its human and natural richness, the U.S.S.R. remains strangely impoverished, even cursed. While its gross national product is second only to that of the U.S. ($2.4 trillion vs. $1.4 trillion), it ranks 17th in The Book of World Rankings on a scale of combined social and economic indicators, after such countries as Sweden, Australia and Iceland.
The U.S.S.R. also gets poor marks for conservation. The Soviet constitution of 1977 promised "to preserve the purity of air and water, ensure reproduction of natural wealth and improve the human environment." That lofty goal is honored mostly in the breach. Pollution in most urban areas is getting worse every year--not yet as bad as Los Angeles' or Detroit's, but getting there. The campaign to clean up the industrial filth in Lake Baikal--which became an international cause celebre--has been the exception that proves the rule. Soviet environmentalists usually lose their battles against economic planners who are trying to meet short-term production quotas even if that means wasting resources or fouling the air, soil and water.
It is as though the Soviet Union were too sprawling for its own good, too diverse to take care of itself without hurting itself, or as though none of those gods or prophets in whom its people believe--particularly Marx--had intended for so heterogeneous and far-flung a swath of humanity and real estate to be one nation. The manifestations of the curse have been rough, often brutal, totalitarian rule and a populace that seems forever aggrieved, deprived, yet often submissive.
These twin misfortunes were not born with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. They were present when the Soviet Socialist Republics were known as "All Russia" and their ruler called himself Tsar (from Caesar). One major theme that resonates through writings from the golden age of Russian literature, the 19th century, is national self-pity. "Oh, God, how sad our Russia is!" sighed Alexander Pushkin on reading Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls.
Today's Soviet citizens are better off than the peasants and urban poor that Poet Nekrasov eulogized. Indeed, they are somewhat better off than they were ten years ago. But if not wretched, they are still oppressed and unhappy. Their state is mightier than ever, yet its ability to provide for their daily needs is inadequate.
The main reason is a system that will not, and perhaps cannot, work. The Soviet economy has always been stultified by too much central planning, too little entrepreneurial incentive. Factories, farms and individual workers are caught up in a machine that spews forth quotas and directives, sucks up output, inefficiently manufactures and distributes goods, and rarely rewards initiative. Those deficiencies, inefficiencies and inflexibilities are now catching up with the economy and slowing it down. During the 1980s, Western experts predict, the Soviet growth rate will drop even lower than last year's estimated 0.7%. Moscow's economists will also face a planning nightmare: trying to meet the needs of the military and heavy industry, and at the same time satisfying the expectations of consumers.
Those expectations are subjected to constant, ubiquitous frustrations. "The shopping lines almost define the society," reports TIME Moscow Bureau Chief Bruce Nelan. "The stores are always out of something, low on something else, sometimes rationing flour, meat or butter. As the lines grow longer, the mood grows sour. Someone tries to jump a place. 'Get back! Don't think you're special!' protests the chorus. At the meat counter, two women carry suitcases. They draw knowing, resentful glances. They are hoarders. But they will bribe the butcher, fill their suitcases and perhaps be back later in the morning.
"Cashiers overcharge routinely, often refuse to make change, or ignore customers while they chat on the phone. Muscovites complain about 'the cult of rudeness' of salespeople, who seem to take perverse satisfaction in disappointing, bullying or cheating customers, as though they were working off the frustration they have built up during their own hours in line shopping for their own families.
"The Soviet Union has one of the industrialized world's worst distribution and retail trade systems. Thus this spring there are no sheets, underwear or children's shirts. 'We have money but nothing to buy,' is a refrain of everyday Soviet life. Those who can make their own clothes find material scarce and expensive. For example, four yards of polyester fabric costs the equivalent of $30; the same in an American store costs $2.50. Needles, thread, thimbles and buttons are also defitsitny (the term for items in short supply, which often really means impossible to find). The clerks do not care, because they get paid whether or not they sell anything. When goods can be purchased, they are likely to selfdestruct. The lining might come out of a suit on the third or fourth use. Household appliances burn out. Furniture splinters and loses its veneer. But never mind. The plan is being fulfilled."
Leonid Brezhnev has complained in several recent speeches about factories, costing millions of rubles, that have remained unfinished for more than a decade. The skyline along the Moscow River has, for five years now, featured the new headquarters for the government of the Russian Federation, the largest of the 15 Soviet republics. It just stands there, unopened, its interior unfinished--a joke among many Muscovites, but an embarrassment to many others.
"I love my country," a Moscow economist says. "I certainly don't want to leave it. But I'm so frustrated by the conditions. Why does it have to be so hard? Everything in our history has always been a struggle. Everything is too centralized. There's no initiative. I feel so helpless. I can't change anything. I want the future to be better. But will it be? I know the statistics on output, but I don't see the results."
The daily grind and the seemingly ineradicable deficiencies of the system have had a corrosive effect on the morale of the society. Alcoholism is a growing problem. Demon vodka is a major cause of divorce and crime, as well as of absenteeism, accidents on the job and the poor productivity of Soviet workers. The capitalist world, of course, is in no position to preach temperance to Communists. But Soviet drinking--and drunkenness--differs qualitatively from the proverbial American three-martini lunch. When a Soviet opens a bottle of vodka, he frequently means to finish it. He is not just seeking relaxation or a release from anxiety into elation: he will often drink himself straight into oblivion.
The Moscow press has reported a disturbing increase in drunkenness and crime--or "hooliganism," as it is called--among youth. Soviet parents, in talks with Westerners, complain openly about the cynicism, acquisitiveness, materialism and "bourgeois values" of young people.
Writing in the Teachers Gazette, Secondary School Instructor A.I. Gusev voiced a common concern: "I was dismayed when I asked my pupils why they took summer jobs at a collective farm. Nearly all their answers began with the words 'to buy' and 'to get'--jeans, a watch, a motorcycle, a tape recorder. Why are so many of our youngsters becoming overwhelmed with the passion to make money?"
The answer, in part, is that other passions--to make a revolution, to establish justice, to build a truly egalitarian society--have long since dimmed in the U.S.S.R. Teen-agers and students have absorbed more completely than their parents the most discouraging and disillusioning facts of Soviet life. One fact is elitism. At universities and technical institutes, students see a few of their classmates granted special privileges, admitted to more desirable programs and eventually given better jobs, all because their parents are prominent or well-connected. Talent, brains and hard work do bring opportunities for upward mobility in the system. But so do status, pull, hustling and ruthlessness.
One of the lessons of a Soviet education is that while one must know the Marxist-Leninist catechism, and party membership is a great asset, being a true believer is not necessary; it may even be a disadvantage in a society where power enjoys more respect and earns more reward than ideological purity. A British Foreign Office expert on the U.S.S.R. sees the country as "running out of ideological elan with which to face the many challenges of the future." Ideology is still an important, indeed inescapable, aspect of Soviet life. Its trappings are everywhere. The country is plastered with huge billboards, on buildings and highway overpasses, proclaiming in white letters on red backgrounds, SLAVA TRUDU! (Glory to Labor!) and SLAVA KPSS! (Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!). But pedestrians and motorists ignore the slogans. Virtually no one ever uses the word slava in everyday conversation, except in the very common phrase, Slava Bogu, which means "Glory be to God." Yet the state goes right on repainting the billboards every year.
People do read newspapers, listen to the radio, watch television and go to the movies, where they are also barraged with propaganda.* But with a lifetime of constant practice, Soviet citizens develop a mental filter that allows them to block out the ideological exhortations and concentrate instead on entertainment or just-the-facts news--to the extent that facts are printed.
Most neighborhoods have a storefront agitpunkt (agitation and propaganda point), which is festooned with slogans and piled high with party literature. But when local residents stop in to study the bulletin board and ask questions of the official on duty, the chances are they are interested in new regulations that might affect their lives or gossip about apartments about to become available.
They have minimal interest in the proper Marxist interpretation of the latest event in international affairs or who is likely to win the upcoming election to the district council.
Since all elections are limited to a single slate of candidates, there is little suspense. Propaganda, in short, has become the background noise of Soviet society.
The leadership is aware that the people are tuning out. Brezhnev has complained that the state's "strong and qualified propaganda apparatus" is not doing a good job. "Not infrequently, newspaper material, television and radio broadcasts are not convincing enough, lack a serious overall view." He urged "ideological front workers" to improve their product, especially in the highly simplistic presentation of foreign news. Meanwhile, Pravda editorialized last year against "the fear of discussing the problems facing our society, the tendency to smooth over and avoid unresolved problems, to blur real shortcomings and difficulties."
As any responsible government would be, the regime is clearly worried about the catalogue of social ills --increasing alcoholism, crime, divorce and youth problems--not so much as a breakdown in ideology but as a breakdown in social discipline. It is also concerned that these problems are occurring just as the U.S.S.R. becomes more vulnerable to "contamination by agitation and propaganda" from the West. Shortwave broadcasts by the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, BBC and Deutsche Welle in Russian and other languages of the U.S.S.R. provide generally reliable reporting and less ideological filler about events inside the Soviet Union than The Beacon, the nationwide hourly news program beamed from Moscow. The Western radio stations also offer Soviet listeners tantalizing glimpses of capitalist life through feature stories and interviews, while playing the siren song of rock and folk music, which are immensely popular among Soviet youth.
Yet despite all of their hardships and disenchantments, despite their fascination with the world beyond their borders, most Soviets remain essentially apolitical and certainly patriotic --an ideal combination of attributes, from the standpoint of the state. Their principal concerns are fairly familiar among people the world around: making ends meet, getting ahead as much as possible, staying out of trouble. The West is much more enticing to them for its image of material abundance, physical comfort and sense of vitality than for its democratic values, intellectual freedoms and political institutions.
In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes from his exile in Vermont how a peasant family in the middle of Russia wants simply to be left alone: "If only the petty local Communist despot would somehow quit his uncontrolled tyranny, if only they could get enough to eat for once, and buy shoes for the children, and lay in enough fuel for the winter, if only they could have sufficient space to live even two to a room."
Few Soviets accept Solzhenitsyn's messianic vision of a Russia straining against its chains, yearning for some spiritual revolution that will throw off Communist rule and replace it at least temporarily with an ill-defined "authoritarian order founded on love of one's fellowman." The Soviet Union's other giant of opposition, Physicist Andrei Sakharov, has been promulgating a very different sort of dissent lately from his internal exile in the industrial city of Gorky. Sakharov is a liberal in the Western mold, a believer in pluralist democracy. But neither alternative seems to reflect the aspirations of the Soviet masses. For all their admirable courage, the few thousand Soviet dissidents still at large have their principal following in the West. They sometimes behave like high officials of a shadow government, hoping to get their manifestoes played back into the Soviet Union by Western radio, but the resonance of those messages among their countrymen seems to be very faint. To the extent that they have an impact, the dissidents are often dismissed by the general public as reckless dreamers or denounced as traitors, which is just the way the official press portrays them.
One reason for the man in the street's aversion to dissent is that political troublemakers historically have very often ended up in prison, or dead. Six decades of totalitarianism have made most Soviet citizens submissive. As a consequence of the U.S.S.R.'s current social and economic ills, there is even a certain amount of popular sentiment that the leadership is not cracking down hard enough.
At its most macabre, this law-and-order sentiment has crystallized as scattered nostalgia for Stalin. Postcard-size photographs of the dictator sometimes decorate the windshields of trucks and taxis. Seeing Stalin's picture in a book, over the shoulder of a Westerner, a Russian woman in her 50s sighed, "Ah, there was a real man, a real leader!"
Another reason for the Soviets' basic acceptance of their lot is that despite all the discontents and deprivations, their standard of living has unquestionably improved. Says a Moscow housewife: "You have to remember where we started. After the war, my mother had to get water from the courtyard, then heat it on a kerosene stove, shave the soap and do the washing on a washboard. Now we have hot running water."
She, like most of her compatriots, wants to be proud of her country. She clings to the notion--which official propaganda does everything it can to encourage--that the Soviet Union is as good as any other country, or at least if it lags behind in some ways, then that is because the world is a dangerous place and the U.S.S.R. must look first to its defenses.
Soviet love of country has an elemental quality that transcends politics and ideology. As patriots, Soviet citizens tend to be fundamentalists--and very forgiving ones where the sins of their father figures are concerned. Even after the horrors of Stalinism, they are much less inclined than other peoples --notably including Americans --to question the basic virtue of their nation or to question their rulers' commitment to peace. It is difficult to imagine the U.S.S.R. undergoing the sort of national paroxysm of self-doubt, self-criticism and self-flagellation that gripped the U.S. during the Viet Nam War.
Most Soviets instinctively share their leaders' professed nightmare of "encirclement by our enemies." Even without the reminders of official propaganda, many citizens vividly remember the devastating horror of World War II, in which 20 million Soviets died. "The Great Patriotic War" is a deep, painful wound that has yet to heal. In conversations with Westerners about current events and the danger of World War III, Soviets often run through an honor roll of long-dead relatives "who never returned from the front." At a concert in the theater of Moscow's Rossiya Hotel, Soviet Baritone Joseph Kobzon brought an audience of 3,000--many of them wearing campaign medals--to tears with patriotic ballads. Behind him, a giant screen showed scenes of starvation during the siege of Leningrad, the carnage of the Battle of Stalingrad, and the ecstatic trainside reunions of homecoming soldiers with their loved ones.
AImost every city and town has an exquisitely landscaped, monumentally columned shrine to local war dead. The eternal flame is sometimes guarded by smartly uniformed teenagers, frequently girls, who often carry Kalashnikov assault rifles. Memory of the war easily translates into public willingness to make economic sacrifices for the sake of military preparedness.
Soviet policy toward both the world outside and the U.S.S.R.'s own ethnic minorities is deeply rooted in long-standing Russian xenophobia. Over the centuries, the Russians beat back wave after wave of foreign invaders, absorbing some but seeking to ward off others by the continual concentric accretion of buffer territory around the core of Muscovy. At the center of Muscovy--Moscow. At the center of Moscow--the Kremlin. The very word means fortress.
This historical experience left the nation with a deep-seated sense of embattled vulnerability--insecurity in the face of Asiatic hordes to the east, inferiority in the face of more sophisticated, more cohesive European civilizations to the west. Other legacies are a faith in strong armed forces and weak neighbors, and a reliance on institutionalized distrust in the form of an all-powerful secret police.
Despite the fact that he was a Georgian who never learned to speak Russian without a heavy accent, Stalin succeeded in consolidating the most formidable tyranny of all time, partly because he made himself the guardian of Mother Russia in the face of real and perceived foreign enemies. Since then, the U.S.S.R. has made a fetish out of strengthening its military defenses against external challenges.
But Stalin's successors have yet to deal with a burgeoning internal threat to fortress-Moscow. This is the growth of national self-pride and self-assertion on the part of non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union. Their awakened nationalism now competes with the Russian nationalism that has underlain the country's highly defensive brand of patriotism for more than 60 years. Because of high birth rates in many of the non-Slavic regions of the U.S.S.R. and their own virtual zero population growth, Russians now constitute only 52.4% of the citizenry. By the end of the century they will themselves be a minority of the entire population.
This demographic time bomb is ticking away slowly inside the Soviet economy. Further industrialization is increasingly vital to Soviet economic progress; most factories, however, are in the western part of the country, while in largely undeveloped Central Asia overpopulation is accompanied by underemployment. So far, Soviet economic planners have not come up with a way of moving either the industrial base or the growing work force so as to bring them together.
The prospect of a Soviet Union in which non-Russians outnumber Russians has prompted some reactionary impulses among the old men of the Kremlin, who believe deeply in the fundamental Russianness of the country. The innocuous-sounding but powerful All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments has served increasingly as an outlet for an officially sanctioned resurgence of Slavophilism. Many top officers of the armed forces worry about non-Russians some day dominating the military. This fear has contributed to the growth of a mystery-shrouded fraternal society called Rodina (the Motherland), which has come perilously close to crossing the boundary from Soviet patriotism to Russian chauvinism.
Even among fellow Slavs there are sharp tensions. Russians tend to regard Ukrainians as ne'er-do-well country cousins, an attitude that Ukrainians, with their distinct cultural traditions and strong ethnic pride, resent and resist. Out of deference to their numbers--42 million, the second largest nationality--the Soviet leadership has sought to create a limited partnership with the Ukrainians. They are the only non-Russians to have significant representation in the central elite.
Meanwhile, in the urban areas of Transcaucasia and Central Asia, Russian is steadily encroaching on native languages among young people. They have the option of attending classes taught in local languages, but they know--and their parents know--that upward and outward mobility in Soviet society depends on being able to converse fluently with a Muscovite. In Frunze, capital of the Central Asian republic of Kirgizia, middle-aged government officials speak heavily accented Russian; occasionally they need help in translating expressions from their native language, which is related to Turkish.
In the provinces, visiting Russians are still toasted as "our respected elder brothers," but Soviet propaganda plays skillfully on the theme that the country as a whole--the entire brotherhood of nationalities--is doing spectacular things in the world, and that all ethnic groups are benefiting. Says Harvard Professor Adam Ulam: "There is a consciousness of national greatness, a sense that the Soviet Union is now one of the two superpowers, that its influence is rising while the West's is declining. Psychologically, that has been a very strong factor in the average Soviet's attitude toward the regime. He is conscious of his prestige in the world."
Will Moscow's two-track policy of Russification and Sovietization enable the U.S.S.R. to survive as the world's last multinational empire? Some Western experts, with more than a touch of wishful thinking in their speculation, predict that the U.S.S.R. will come apart along its Muslim seams in the south and east. Others, including National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, also look for trouble in Eastern Europe, particularly in Brzezinski's native Poland. Columbia University's Seweryn Bialer agrees. Until now, he says, the Soviets have been fortunate that uprisings have broken out in only one country at a time in Eastern Europe--East Germany, 1953; Hungary, 1956; Czechoslovakia, 1968. "They will not be so lucky in the '80s," he predicts.
At the moment, however, there are no signs that any unrest is getting out of control, nor would a fresh outbreak of trouble necessarily threaten to break up the empire. In Eastern Europe the presence of 31 divisions of Soviet troops discourages excessive independence or disorder, such as the food-price riots that rocked Poland in 1970. There are also garrisons outside the capitals of the Central Asian republics. The soldiers stationed there, in the main, are from other parts of the country rather than local boys; if they were ever ordered to quash an uprising, they would not be firing on their ethnic kinsmen.
There were scattered but serious anti-Russian riots by the Uzbeks of Tashkent in 1966 and 1969 and the Tadzhiks of Dushanbe in 1978. In those cases, the Soviet army garrisons outside those cities were put on alert and used for crowd control. A U.S. Government Kremlinologist has hypothesized that if it were not for the presence of Moscow's military and security forces, as many as seven of the 15 Soviet republics would exercise their constitutional right to secede from the U.S.S.R.
But it is not just force of arms that keeps the union whole. The central government has deliberately pursued a policy of relative permissiveness toward Islamic culture, which unites about 43 million Soviet citizens, nearly one-sixth of the total population. Since Lenin's time, the Kremlin has been sensitive to the danger that heavyhanded atheistic propaganda and cultural repression might trigger a replay of the 1916 Muslim revolts that broke out against the Tsar in Central Asia. With Islamic militancy embroiling the Soviet Union's southern neighbors, from Turkey to Pakistan, the Kremlin leadership is treading carefully lest it stir up restlessness among its own Muslims.
Officials insist that Marxism-Leninism respects the separation of mosque and state. Religion, they say, must be given a chance to die a natural death; they will do nothing to hurry it along. Nonetheless, Khelyam Khudaiberdiyev, an official of Uzbekistan's radio and television station in Tashkent, insists that "only one in 100 of us is a practicing believer.* In a big family, there might be an old aunt who will still pray. My mother prays, for instance. She's 80." Salyk Zimanov, a member of the Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan, sums up the official view, with its overtones of condescension: "Religion seems to exercise its strongest influence at funerals. That's when these people who call themselves mullahs turn out."
Zimanov may miss the point of his own observation: a cultural or spiritual force that is strongest in society when people deal with death is not necessarily a dying force. Perhaps the contrary. In Central Asia, local authorities have tried to give military funerals to soldiers killed in action against the Afghan rebels; on a few occasions, these attempts met with violent resistance by vila few occasions, these attempts met with violent resistance by villagers who wanted their sons buried according to Islamic custom, not the dictates of the state. The authorities moved quickly to hush up the incidents.
In addition to treading carefully in its policies toward Islam, the regime has also tried to neutralize anti-Russian sentiment by buying off the populations of Transcaucasia and Central Asia with material benefits and protection. The citizens of Soviet Azerbaijan live more prosperously, and certainly more calmly, than their ethnic cousins in the northwestern provinces of Iran. The Muslim groups that straddle the Sino-Soviet border, for example, have traditionally fared somewhat better under Moscow's tutelage than Peking's. The Russians' fast-approaching status as a minority in their own country forces them to be more compromising than the Han Chinese, who make up more than 90% of the 1 billion citizens of the People's Republic.
Largely because of its huge population--four times that of the U.S.S.R.--China remains an obsession with the Soviets. When Kremlin leaders look to the east, they see two nightmares coming together: their most numerous and implacable foreign enemies in China, and the demographic challenge of their fast-breeding, ethnically alien compatriots in Central Asia. It is for this reason that the most intense manifestation of Russian xenophobia is Sinophobia. On the streets of Moscow, for example, the occasional Chinese visitor inspires something palpably different from and deeper than the resentment that Muscovites display toward the thousands of Third World exchange students who attend Patrice Lumumba Friendship of Peoples University. Those foreigners are unpopular because they have access to hard-currency stores, and because of their comparatively generous government stipends and their notoriety as black marketeers. On a bus or a metro car, a dark-skinned foreigner will often hear someone behind him muttering "Chernomazy" (literally blackface, but every bit as insulting as "nigger").
Orientals, however, inspire a reaction that is tinged not just with racism but with fear. Vietnamese, Koreans, Mongolians, and even Soviet Central Asians often find that early in a conversation with Russians they have to establish clearly that they are not Chinese, or pro-Chinese, before their hosts lower their guard. Says a young Muscovite: "When we see yellow skin and slanted eyes, we automatically want to know, is this guy nash [one of ours]? Is he on our side?" If an American talks international politics with a Russian, the subject of China is sure to come up. Sooner or later, the Russian is likely to lean forward and say, almost in so many words, "We white folks have got to stick together."
Soviets of all nationalities seem more offended by Washington's increasing cooperation with China than by the Olympic boycott, the grain embargo, or any of the other post-Afghanistan anti-Soviet policies of the Carter Administration.
Yet for all their fear of the Chinese and their anger at the American tilt toward Peking, Soviets appear somewhat more sanguine about their ability to contain what some still call "the yellow peril" than they did a decade ago. Says Alexander Yakovlev, a leading Sinologist at Moscow's Institute for the Study of the Far East: "China does not have the military strength to threaten world peace on its own, and even the military and economic aid of the U.S. and other Western countries will not make a big difference."
No matter how self-serving and dubious, such predictions indicate a new confidence that has come with the U.S.S.R.'s recent attainment of superpower status. That accomplishment has been largely the work of Leonid Brezhnev and his comrades. When the present collective leadership took over from Khrushchev in 1964, the Soviet armed forces lagged behind the U.S. in every important category of strategic weaponry. Now they have caught up across the board and pulled ahead in some areas.
This fact reinforces the average Soviet citizen's patriotism, even if he is otherwise apolitical. Says Harvard's Ulam: "The Soviet patriot believes that the function of the state is to be as powerful as possible. He remembers that tsarist Russia was defeated in World War I; now his country is one of the two greatest influences in the entire world. This is a sort of surrogate for his sufferings. Whatever else it has done to him, Communism has made Russia a much more powerful country."
Brezhnev and his comrades, moreover, have accomplished the buildup without resorting to mass terror or wholesale purges. They have presided over 16 years of political stability--"the first such period since the revolution," says British Historian Leonard Schapiro. Nikita Khrushchev, while a much more sympathetic figure in many ways, ordered reforms one day, crackdowns the next, and engaged, as his comrades-turned-usurpers charged, in "harebrained schemes." His was a manic-depressive leadership. Before him were 25 years of Stalin's government by massacre. The toll: at least 20 million dead in camps, prisons and famines. Before that, the civil war, the revolution, and centuries of upheaval under the Tsars.
The Brezhnev leadership has, for a while at least, brought some order to the turmoil of Soviet history. For that it almost certainly gets credit with much of the populace. To be sure, the present leaders have not found a way to keep meat in the grocery stores or underwear in the department stores. Nor have they loosened the reins of repression during the past 16 years. At the same time, however, material conditions are easier, and life has settled into a consistent, predictable norm that avoids the extremes of Khrushchev's erratic liberalization and Stalin's relentless terror. For many Soviets, that is reassuring, especially against the backdrop of their country's new prestige and power abroad.
The Soviet leaders claim to be the custodians of a great revolutionary tradition. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are among the most conservative leaders on earth, and their conservatism is basically compatible with the aspirations of a people whose lives have been torn apart at regular intervals throughout their history. Soviet foreign policy, with all its unabashed sponsorship of radicals and "wars of national liberation," is essentially a means of keeping the U.S.S.R.'s enemies off balance if not under control and thus making the world safe for Soviet Communism. That same motive lay behind the invasion of Afghanistan in December.
The hallmark of the Brezhnev leadership has been to combine an expansive foreign policy, a formidable military buildup and a period of sustained domestic political stability. Says Columbia's Bialer: "I see the 1960s and '70s as a very benign period in Soviet history. It is quite possible that future historians will say this was the greatest, the best period in their history. It was a society that for the first time was able to provide both guns and butter, to raise the standard of living a bit, and to reach military equality with the West. They had many problems, but none that developed into a systemic crisis. Therefore it has been generally an extraordinarily successful period in their history. Nor has it been a short period. Brezhnev has been in office longer than Roosevelt was. It is a whole era."
Nonetheless, the Brezhnev leadership has not prepared well either for a transfer of power at the top or for the future of the society as a whole. Sensing that failing, many Soviets are fearful that there may be harder days ahead. Reports TIME Correspondent Nelan: "Government officials admit privately that the economy is a mess, that things are unquestionably going to get worse. There is an atmosphere of apprehension. Everyone is waiting to see what will come after the present aging, ill and inflexible oligarchy passes from the scene. The hope is for more dynamism--if not after Brezhnev himself, then after an interim, transitional successor. But that is only a hope."
The odds are against such hopes being realized. One reason is that the present leadership and the leadership system as a whole work against dynamism. A management team that cannot, or will not, transfer power to a younger generation of executives except by the attrition of mortality is by definition guilty of mismanagement. The Brezhnev Politburo is like an aging board of directors that has no compulsory retirement policy, no adequate pension plan and no tradition of honoring emeritus directors. So each board member hangs on and on, becoming increasingly shortsighted as he becomes increasingly sclerotic. Such a corporation, no matter how large and powerful, would not recommend itself as a long-term investment. There is no reason to expect that the members of the post-Brezhnev leadership, or the one after that, will reform the gerontocracy once they have risen to the top.
Whatever its other accomplishments, the Brezhnev leadership has done nothing to ameliorate the problems of excessive centralization in economic planning, of the stagnation and proliferation of bureaucracy and of political patronage that rewards sycophancy and caution while discouraging innovation. These facts of Soviet life, which have stifled dynamism for decades, are now more deeply embedded in the system than ever. Inefficiency and inflexibility have been institutionalized, not just in the economy but in the political system itself.
Curing that problem would almost certainly mean making drastic changes in the very structure of Soviet society, as well as in its ideological foundations. To do so would require a degree of foresight and boldness that, up until now, the system has suppressed, and it would risk unleashing sudden, unpredictable change and upheaval in a country where both are anathema.
Nevertheless, for all their hankering after order and continuity, the Russians have surprised the world, and themselves, before. They could do so again. It was in the context of an admission of his inability to "forecast to you the actions" of the U.S.S.R. that Winston Churchill made his famous statement in 1939: "Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Less well remembered but equally trenchant was what he said next: "But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." Four decades later, the U.S.S.R. is still enigmatic, even--perhaps especially--to itself; and it is still trying to unlock the enigma of its own future by figuring out where its interests lie.
* One awesome statistical distinction of the U.S.S.R. is the number of its movie theaters: there are 154,000 of them, which is 58% of all the cinemas in the world. The U.S. is second with only 16,000. One reason for this amazing proliferation is that Soviet doctrine--especially before the advent of television--emphasized film as a medium of propaganda and indoctrination. Another and perhaps more important reason is that the Soviets are eager for any entertainment as a relief from boredom.
* There are no reliable figures on religious observance in the U.S.S.R., but in their own propaganda pamphlets, printed in Arabic for distribution in Islamic countries of the Middle East, Soviet authorities claim that more than half of the country's Muslims are believers. That statistic may be an exaggeration, intended to enhance the Soviet claims of religious tolerance, but the percentage of practicing Muslims is certainly many times greater than 1%.
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