Utopia in Power

By the end of the war the military tribunals were no longer trying soldiers for self-mutilation or desertion but for making indiscreet comments com­paring life in the Soviet Union with life in other countries the soldiers had seen, for expressing cautious hopes for improvements in Soviet life (a view equated with anti-Soviet propaganda), and for attempting to defect to the West. A new, large-scale purge that Stalin had planned right before he died was intended to "pull up the last roots," that is, to get rid of members of the generations of the 1920s and 1930s who had accidentally survived and still carried fragments of the banned historical memory and who were therefore potentially dangerous to the regime. The purge had already started with the Leningrad affair, the Mingrelian affair, and the Doctor's plot. The only reason it did not turn into a nationwide bloodbath was that Stalin died.

Stalin's death, the ouster of Beria, the reorganization of the state security agencies, the first releases of political prisoners, and the amnesties for certain categories of prisoners created a favorable atmosphere for the res­toration of a more or less accurate picture of the past. The desire to reinterpret the history of the Soviet Union led as early as one year after Stalin's death to the publication of such works as Vladimir Pomerantsev's essay "On Sincerity in Literature,"²²⁵ Ilya Ehrenburg's novel The Thaw,²²⁶ Vladimir Dudintsev's novel Not by Bread Alone,²²¹ the play Did Ivan Ivan- ovich Ever Exist? by the Turkish poet and revolutionary Nazym Khikmet²²⁸ and essays on the February and October revolutions by Eduard Burdzhalov in the journal Problems of History.²²⁹

The Stalinists, who held posts at every level of the party and government apparatus, had grown quiet after the Twentieth Party Congress. They again took heart after the suppression of the Hungarian revolution and began to use any pretext to hinder the development of more humane and liberal ideas in Soviet society.

In 1958 the entire world witnessed the hounding and humiliation of the poet and writer Boris Pasternak. During his life Pasternak had been the object of fierce criticism and slander campaigns on several occasions. In 1955 he had completed Doctor Zhivago, a novel about the fate of the Russian intelligentsia and the revolution in Russia. In the summer of 1956 he submitted the manuscript to the editorial boards of several Moscow magazines and publishing houses. One copy was also sent to Feltrinelli, an Italian publisher with strong procommunist sympathies. After the Hun­garian events, as the political climate in the USSR became much more wintry, the leaders of the Soviet Writers' Union saw to it that the novel would not be published in the USSR. Pasternak was forced to send a wire to the Italian publisher asking him to send the novel back for rewriting. Nevertheless Doctor Zhivago was published in November 1957 in Italy in two languages, Italian and Russian. Over the next two years it was translated into twenty-four languages.²³⁰ Although the publication of the novel outside the Soviet Union was not officially a crime, it was viewed as a challenge to an unwritten canon of Soviet life. A new campaign against the writer began. All the celebrities of Soviet literature—Konstantin Fedin, Kon- stantin Simonov, Sergei Smirnov, Aleksei Surkov, Valentin Kataev, and many others—took part in it.

On October 23, 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Lit­erature. Atter that the campaign against Pasternak became totally un­restrained. The Writers' Union, the Komsomol, and party officials of various ranks proceeded against him in unison. At the Gorky Institute of Literature students began to organize a demonstration—on orders from above, of course—demanding that Pasternak be expelled from the country.²³¹ Despite heavy pressure, however, only a few dozen of the 300 students at the institute took part. The demonstrators marched to the House of Writers carrying slogans saying, 'Throw the Judas out of the USSR" and a caricature of Pasternak reaching out with crooked, grasping fingers for a sack of dollars. But the students were only puppets, manipulated by the authorities.

The entire Soviet press immediately joined in on the campaign. The secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee, Semichastny (later the head of the KGB, who was to betray Khrushchev in 1964), gave a speech to a crowd of 14,000 at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. He tore into the poet, using gutter language and demanding Pasternak's expulsion from the coun­try. Among those present were Khrushchev and the other party bosses.

On October 27 the writers gathered to condemn Pasternak. The person who chaired the meeting and set the tone was Sergei Smirnov, known to Soviet readers for his book The Brest Fortress. The writers conducted them­selves in an unbelievably vile manner.²³² They asked the government to deprive Pasternak of Soviet citizenship.²³³

Hounded unmercifully, Pasternak feared he would be exiled from the country. First he declined the Nobel Prize, and then, in a letter to Khru­shchev, asked not to be deported.²³⁴ But the campaign continued. The "wrath of the people" that the party had organized ended up looking infantile and feeble. After all, none of the irate letter writers had read Doctor Zhivago, but that did not stop them. Some things had changed since Stalin's death, however. While the Soviet press and fellow writers slung mud at the poet, Pasternak received quite a few letters of sympathy and encour­agement. Something like public opinion was coming into existence in the Soviet Union.

Finally Pasternak was forced to write a letter of recantation to Pravda. This letter contained some rather curious but revealing lines: "It does indeed appear," wrote Pasternak, "as if I maintain the following erroneous prop­ositions [in the novel]. I seem to be saying that every revolution is a historically illegitimate occurrence, of which the October revolution is an example, and that it has brought misfortunes on Russia, and led to the demise of the traditional Russian intelligentsia."²³⁵ Although Pasternak called these propositions "erroneous," these lines surely must have made some Pravda readers think.

Later on Pasternak wrote a poem about the awarding of the Nobel Prize, which included the following lines: "I am caught like a beast at bay./

Somewhere are people, freedom, light,/ But all I hear is the baying of the pack./ There is no way out for me./... /How dare I write such stuff/—I, scoundrel and evildoer,/ Who made the whole world weep/ At the beauty of my native land."²³⁶

Pasternak died shortly afterward. If it is true that cancer is an affliction of sorrow, then that is what caused the poet's death. He passed away on May 30, 1960. Hundreds of people gathered for his funeral in Peredelkino, near Moscow. They had come to bid farewell to a writer who had been hounded to death by the state.²³⁷

The Pasternak affair showed that the Soviet regime, after having returned to "Leninist norms," could be just as cruel and unfeeling as it had been under Stalin. But now its fits of anger were directed at more specific targets. It no longer struck indiscriminately.

This affair roused indignation in liberal circles in the Soviet Union and the West, as the many sympathetic letters the writer received show. For the first time after long years of dictatorship in the Soviet Union a kind of public opinion began to awaken. The political prisoners who had returned from the camps played a not insignificant role in this awakening. Some of them took an active part in the struggle for the democratization of society, for example, Aleksei V. Snegov, a former party functionary who had served seventeen years in the camps. Snegov, whose survival was almost a miracle, was released soon after Stalin's death and was named deputy chief of the political department of the Culag thanks to Mikoyan's influence. It was to a great degree because of Snegov's energetic efforts that the release of political prisoners, their rehabilitation, and their return to normal life went relatively quickly. Snegov also took an active part in the discussions on party history which occurred in those years. After Khrushchev's resignation Snegov continued the struggle for the restoration of the historical truth. His speech during the discussion of the book June 22, 1941 by the historian Aleksandr Nekrich at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in February of 1967 was used as a pretext to charge Snegov officially with antiparty activity, which led to Snegov's expulsion from the CPSU.

Snegov was a Communist and a follower of Lenin. He believed that the return to "Leninist norms" would bring about the regeneration of the CPSU. This misconception was typical of many Communists of the older generation. Some of them honestly believed in such a possibility; others tried to talk themselves into believing it, for otherwise their entire life in the service of the Communist party would have seemed a senseless sacrifice. Still others thought that everything was in order, including the arrests of the "enemies of the people," the purpose of which was theoretically to purge the country of its "fifth column." Only one mistake had been made in this process—their own arrest. Their understanding of events had not advanced one bit since the day of that arrest. The CPSU made skillful use of some of those who had been rehabilitated, placing them in various advisory boards of district party committees or charging them with leading salutary talks with the generation that was coming of age.

Some old Communists, who had devoted their entire life to building communism, developed a certain guilt complex. They decided to dedicate their remaining days to the struggle against lawlessness and against any revival of Stalinism. But this was a thorny path. Symptomatic was the story of Fedor Shults, a party member since 1919 who had been arrested in 1937 for criticizing the cult of personality and who spent a total of nineteen years in the camps and in penal exile. Fully rehabilitated in 1956, he was again arrested in December of the same year because of a letter he sent to Pravda. In this letter Shults cited specific cases to refute Khrushchev's statement that there were no more political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Among other things he pointed out that a 106-year-old Socialist Revolutionary named Preobrazhenskaya was still in prison in Mariinsk. The court com­mitted Shults to a special psychiatric hospital in Leningrad for compulsory treatment. He remained there until April 1958, and it was not until June 1964 that the case against him was finally dismissed for lack of evidence.²³⁸

The writer Aleksei Y. Kosterin (1896—1968) became well known as a defender of the Chechens, the Ingush, and the Crimean Tatars, who had been unjustly deported from their native lands. Kosterin was an Old Bol­shevik from the Northern Caucasus who had spent seventeen years in Stalin's prisons. His forthright and uncompromising position regarding the crimes committed by the Soviet government finally led to his expulsion from the party and the Writers' Union. His funeral on November 14, 1968, turned into a public act of condemnation of the totalitarian Soviet regime.

There were other honest and fearless members of the older generation who considered themselves Marxist-Leninists, such as S. P. Pisarev.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Petr Yakir, son of the Red Army commander Iona Yakir, who had been executed in 1937, did much to publicize the truth about the crimes of the Stalin regime. He had spent his childhood and youth in prisons and camps of the Gulag and in exile. A historian by education, Petr Yakir lectured before large audiences at en­terprises and institutions until the authorities prohibited his appearances. A group of young intellectuals who advocated the defense of constitutional rights gathered around Yakir. He and his friends Ilya Gabay, Yuli Kim, and others for many years supported the struggle of the Crimean Tatars for full rehabilitation and the right to their historical homeland.

Major General Petr Grigorenko, a department head at the Frunze Military Academy, dared to express his opinions on September 7, 1961, at a party conference of Moscow's Lenin District during a discussion on the new party program, which was to be approved by the Twenty-second Party Congress. In his speech Grigorenko warned of the danger of the emergence of a new cult of personality and suggested a series of measures as safeguards, such as the abolition of high salaries for functionaries in the party and state apparatus as well as the possibility of their removal by vote. The conference participants applauded Grigorenko. They rejected the demand of the shocked party apparatchiks that his mandate as a delegate be withdrawn. During a break in the proceedings, however, the delegates were subjected to some "brainwashing" and subsequently, with the same unanimity, voted to de­nounce Grigorenko's speech as "politically immature."²³⁹ Grigorenko was removed from his post at the academy and transferred to the Far East.

There he founded the League of Struggle for the Revival of Leninism on November 7, 1963, the anniversary of the October revolution. Its aim was "to do away with all distortions of Lenin's doctrine, to restore Leninist norms in party life, and to give real power back to the Soviets of toilers' deputies." Grigorenko also sought curbs on the power of the bureaucracy and police, free elections, popular control over the authorities, and the possibility of replacing government officials and functionaries. Grigorenko wrote leaflets describing the suppression of the mass movements which had erupted and been suppressed between 1958 and 1963 at Temir-Tau, Nov­ocherkassk, and other places. One of the leaflets was entitled, "Why Is There No Bread?" The members of the organization were arrested. After four months of "psychiatric treatment," they recanted and were released.²⁴⁰ On the basis of a statement made by a group of medical experts at the Serbsky Psychiatric Institute in Moscow, Grigorenko was sent to a special psychiatric hospital—a prison hospital.²⁴¹ Before that he was stripped of his general's rank and discharged from the army without the right to a pension. So began Grigorenko's sufferings.

Some young people reacted with particular anger to the disclosure of Stalin's crimes because they felt deceived and cheated. They responded by forming societies and clandestine youth circles, organizations where heated discussions about the past took place and naive plans were devised for changing Soviet society.²⁴² Many dissidents who later took part in the Soviet democratic and human rights movement came from these groups.

For young people this was a time of fearless search for truth, of growing maturity and disillusionment, of rejection and of reconciliation with reality. In the late 1950s and early 1960s many young people joined expeditions and went to the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East. They often expressed their emotion and unconscious drive to break away from the usual truisms and attain freedom of self-expression in verses and songs, in which lyricism and politics, protest and hopes, were combined often in the most curious way.

There have always been youth circles. Those which came into existence right after Stalin's death were most interested in reexamining recent history. One such group, which called itself the Union of Patriots of Russia, ap­peared in 1958 at Moscow University. It was led by L. N. Krasnopevtsev, a graduate student in the Department of the History of the CPSU who had previously majored in history at Moscow University. The nine members of the group were graduate students and young scholars from Moscow Uni­versity and the USSR Academy of Sciences. They wanted to work out a new ideology, distinct from the official party ideology. They also sought to spread their views among other illegal youth circles. A significant impetus was given to this group and to other future dissidents by the International Youth Festival held in Moscow in 1957. There contacts were made and discussions held; Krasnopevtsev, for example, chaired a discussion club at Moscow University. The group established contacts with the Polish mag­azine Po prostu, the chief editor of which was Liasota, a member of the Polish parliament. The group wrote and distributed a number of leaflets. According to unconfirmed reports, the members of the organization wrote a new history of the CPSU or at least planned to do so, but no manuscript has ever been found. The group's participants were soon arrested, put on trial, and sentenced to camp and prison terms of varying lengths. Three members—Krasnopevtsev himself, Vladimir Menshikov, a junior re­searcher at the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences, and Leonid Rendel—were sentenced to ten years.²⁴³

In 1956 an illegal student group calling itself Freedom of Speech was founded in Siberia; all its members were arrested the very same year. Among them was Leonid Borodin (see Chapter 11). In November 1958 another group of Moscow University students was arrested and charged with forming an anti-Soviet organization and attempting to establish an underground printshop. In Leningrad some Social Democrats (Trofimov, Golikov, and others) formed a group. They were also arrested and sen­tenced.²⁴⁴

At Mayakovsky Square in Moscow a monument to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was set up in the summer of 1958. Soon lovers of poetry began to gather there regularly to recite Mayakovsky's verses, their own works, or other poets' writings. The Komsomol leadership, instructed to keep a watchful eye on the gatherings at the Mayakovsky monument, at first was pleased by the opportunity to direct the youths' endeavors along the usual channel of Communist "romanticism." In those years the party and Kom­somol leaderships expended tremendous effort to make the Komsomol more attractive. Poetry readings at Mayakovsky Square, youth clubs, and amateur theatrical and musical groups, all were to serve the same basic purpose: to maintain the party's influence over the young generation, which was restless and rebellious. But soon the recitation of poems was joined by heated disputes and discussions. And the content of the poetry began to differ completely from that stipulated in the plans of the Komsomol lead­ership.

At the end of 1958 the KGB was headed by Aleksandr Shelepin, former chief of the Komsomol. Many Komsomol leaders were advanced at that time into the agencies of state security. Shelepin had graduated from the Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History (IFLI), a famous university which had produced many poets, writers, philosophers, and historians. He knew quite well what the events at Mayakovsky Square meant. Police raids began. The young people who gathered at the monument on Saturdays and Sundays were subjected to provocations, and beatings, along with searches of their homes and confiscation of their books and manuscripts. In some cases students were expelled from universities. The press joined the cru­sade, calling the young people at Mayakovsky Square "sluggards" and "idlers," stirring up the hatred of narrow-minded Soviet citizens. In May 1961, during the reading of a poem dedicated to the thirtieth anniversary of Mayakovsky's suicide, the KGB provoked a fight during which a number of young people were beaten up.²⁴⁵ On the eve of the Twenty-second Party Congress, the most active participants in the readings were arrested: Vla­dimir Bukovsky, Eduard Kuznetsov, Ilya Bakshtein, and Vladimir Osipov. All were put on trial for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda," and con­victed.

Between 1959 and 1961 the first uncensored magazines were circulated in manuscript form. One of them was the Moscow magazine Syntax, which contained writings by such already established authors as Bella Akhma- dulina, N. Glazkov, N. Nekrasov, Bulat Okudzhava, and Boris Slutsky.²⁴⁶ One of the magazine's editors was future dissident Aleksandr Ginzburg, at that time still a student at Moscow University. In all, three issues of Syntax were produced. In 1960 Ginzburg was expelled from the university and then sentenced to two years in a camp. In 1961 Yuri Galanskov, a former student at the Historical Archive Institute, published the typewritten mag­azine Phoenix ⁹61. The non-Russian republics also had their share of circles and organizations.

In 1961 there was a series of arrests in the Ukraine after an allegedly underground organization, the Ukrainian Workers' and Peasants' Union, was discovered in Lvov. The members of the group, Lev Lukyanenko, Ivan Kandyba, Stepan Virun, and others, denied that their organization was illegal. In a programmatic document the group had criticized the Soviet government's policy toward the Ukraine from an orthodox Leninist point of view. The members of the organization intended to separate the Ukraine from the USSR as an independent socialist state, applying the constitutional right to self-determination. The group's leader, Lukyanenko, asserted that his group represented Ukrainian public opinion and was in accordance with the constitution. All members of the group were convicted of anti- Soviet activity in May 1961. Lukyanenko and Kandyba were sentenced to death, but this penalty was later reduced to fifteen years' imprisonment.²⁴⁷

Lukyanenko's trial showed that the Soviet leaders feared nothing so much as the peoples' struggle for self-determination and that they did not hesitate to suppress such tendencies most ruthlessly. The members of a similar group, the Baltic Federation—an "illegal, anti-Soviet, nationalist organi­zation," as it was termed in the indictment—were arrested in 1962. Among them was the journalist Viktor Kalnish, who had graduated from the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. His sentence was ten years in the camps.

In 1963 two Leningrad engineers, Valery Ronkin and Sergei Khakhaev, wrote a book entitled From the Dictatorship of the Bureaucracy to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which they wrote from the perspective of "true Marxism." They and several others (among them S. Mashkov) pub­lished two issues of a typewritten magazine Kolokol (The Bell). In June 1965 the members of the group were arrested and sentenced to varying terms of confinement in labor camps. In 1964 a similar organization was discovered in Moldavia. It called itself the Democratic League of Socialists. Among those arrested were the teacher Nikolai Tarnavsky and Ivan Cherdyntsev. They were sentenced to six years in the camps. Another member of the League, Nikolai Dragosh, author of the pamphlet "The Truth for the People," was sentenced to seven years in a strict regime labor camp.

The authorities reacted very nervously to any manifestation of nationalist feelings in the republics. This was true first of all in regard to the western Ukraine, where popular resistance to Soviet rule had been suppressed only in the early 1950s. One method used to combat "nationalism" was to destroy national cultural treasures and archives. On May 24, 1964, a fire broke out at the library of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. The cause, ac­cording to the official report, was arson committed by a library employee named Pogruzhalsky for personal motives, but an unofficial investigation showed that the arson was arranged by the KGB and was aimed at destroying Ukrainian cultural treasures: among the items destroyed in the fire were the archives of the Ukrainian Central Rada and a number of works of native folklore, literature, and history. Two months earlier a stained glass window placed in the entrance hall of Kiev University to mark the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Taras Shevchenko's birth had been removed and destroyed. In May of the same year unauthorized celebrations in honor of Shevchenko, the Ukrainian national poet, were officially prohibited.²⁴⁸

Topics such as the search for freedom, love of the Ukraine, and justice found their way into the writings of the Ukrainian poets Lina Kostenko, Ivan Drach, Mykola Vinhranovsky, and Vitali Korotych. The poet Vasyl Symonenko, who died of cancer in 1963 at the age of twenty-eight, became a hero of Ukrainian youth. In a certain sense Symonenko had carried on the tradition of Shevchenko.²⁴⁹

Pasternak, by sending his manuscript outside of the Soviet Union, had broken a taboo and set a precedent. Other authors followed in his footsteps, for example, Valery Tarsis, who had a number of writings printed in the West, in particular Ward Number Seven, in which he criticized and ridiculed the Soviet way of life. The young poet Evgeny Evtushenko likewise pub­lished his Precocious Autobiography in the French magazine LExpress. Finally, an entire pleiad of authors who lived in the Soviet Union began to publish their writings under their own names in the West. Publishing in foreign countries gradually became more or less permissible legally in spite of all the obstacles, reprisals, and persecution.

For Soviet literature the first decade after Stalin's death was a time when lost values were revived. The liberation from Stalin's legacy, the attempts to uncover the roots of the unhappy past, and the desire to arrive at a clear understanding of present-day Soviet society created an entirely new kind of literature. Khrushchev was anxious to use the anti-Stalinist attitudes held by the most talented writers in the struggle against his enemies on the Presidium of the Central Committee. That was why it was possible for Evtushenko's famous poem, "The Heirs of Stalin," which warned against the danger of a revival of Stalinism, to be printed in Pravda.²⁵⁰ During those same years Evtushenko composed the poem "Babi Yar," in which he fiercely attacked anti-Semitism. The writer Aleksandr Tvardovsky, author of the narrative poem "Vasily Terkin," popular during the war, returned to the editorial board of the magazine Novy mir. In 1963 Izvestia published Tvardovsky's poem 'Terkin in the Other World," a blatant satire of con­temporary Soviet society.²⁵¹ Under Tvardovsky, Novy mir became a center for nonconformist writers. The magazine kept publishing novels and stories through which criticism of Soviet reality ran like an unbroken thread. In 1962 Novy mir published Silence, a novel by Yuri Bondarev about the fate of a war veteran who has an encounter with the Soviet machinery of terror.²⁵²

In the same periodical Ilya Ehrenburg's memoirs were printed, in which he tried to reconstruct the real history of Russian literature. Yet he too sought to justify Stalin's misdeeds and the path the Soviet Union had taken.

But Novy Mir*s greatest accomplishment of those years was the 1962 publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Sol- zhenitsyn.²⁵³ This book about one typical day of a Soviet prisoner, written by a former camp inmate, became a milestone not only in the history of Russian literature but in Russian history itself. The novel was printed as a result of Khrushchev's personal authorization and only after a heated struggle. It was Tvardovsky as chief editor of Novy mir who introduced Solzhenitsyn to Russian readers. The mere fact that a labor camp prisoner appeared as the main character in a work of official Soviet literature was indeed a revolutionary act. The publication of Ivan Denisovich aroused enthusiasm among the noncomformist sectors of society and hatred among the Stalinists. Thereafter several short works by Solzhenitsyn—"The In­cident at Krechetovka Station," "Matryona's Home," "For the Good of the Cause"—appeared in Novy mir.²⁵⁴ The nomination of Solzhenitsyn for the Lenin Prize for Literature in 1963 marked the turning point from official praise and recognition for Solzhenitsyn, the member of the Soviet Writers' Union, to official persecution of Solzhenitsyn, the symbol of reawakening Russian realism. His attempts to publish the novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle met with resistance from the "partocracy," which mobilized the concentrated power of the party and state, and all the reserves of narrow- minded Soviet philistinism, for the struggle against the great writer. Both novels were printed only outside the Soviet Union, as were all his subse­quent works.

The Stalinists and their enemies understood very well that literature had posed a central question: the question of spiritual values and especially freedom of expression in all its forms. Was a renewed commitment to human values possible in Soviet society? After all, each and every significant literary work of the post-Stalin era basically dealt with the ancient yearning for freedom, the hatred of violence and oppression. There was good reason for the authorities to meet with shock and fear, and later to sharply condemn, Vasily Grossman's novel For the Right Cause, because of its powerful denunciation of injustice.²⁵⁵ The KGB confiscated the manuscript of the second part.²⁵⁶

In this period some timid attempts were also made to vary the standard theatrical repertoire, which consisted of either ephemeral works echoing official propaganda or the same old classical Russian plays, which had been staged repeatedly, year after year, ever since the pogrom against "rootless cosmopolitanism." Now young actors formed new ensembles, and theater groups not burdened with a Stalinist history and tradition were founded, in particular the Sovremennik Theater in Moscow. Similarly in Leningrad the Theater of Drama and Comedy directed by N. Akimov at­tained great popularity. Other theaters offered a substantively different repertoire than before. Did Ivan Ivanovich Ever Exist? by Nazym Khikmet and Tvardovsky's Terkin in the Other World were presented, both biting satires of contemporary Soviet society.

There was also some movement in the pseudo-classical fine arts. At an exhibition at Moscow's Manege Hall, painting and sculpture by young artists appeared, in particular the sculptures of Ernst Neizvestny. These repre­sented a daring challenge to the pompous official school of Soviet classi­cism. During a tour of the exhibition Khrushchev and his staff were disgusted by the abstract works; they simply did not understand them. The prime minister and Neizvestny had a heated argument. The sculptor declared that being prime minister was not enough to understand art. Khrushchev left angrily, and the head of the KGB and former Komsomol leader Shelepin threatened Neizvestny in a whisper: "Someday you'll rot in a camp." But despite all obstacles, threats, persecution, and the banning of nonofficial exhibitions, new trends in the arts forced their way through.

By the end of the 1950s samizdat had developed. This was the term for literature circulated privately in handwritten copies or typewritten manu­scripts. The first works to be publicized through the samizdat network were Journey Into the Whirlwind by Evgeniya Ginzburg and Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov. These books were never printed in the Soviet Union, but they received wide recognition in the West, where they were also published in Russian. Ginzburg and Shalamov had gone the painful route of the Soviet concentration camps. They described the inhuman sufferings of millions of people, the victims of the terrorist Soviet regime.

To "rot" in the camps became slightly more difficult—but still possible— since the regime, though it had become less strict, had not changed its nature. The new penal code of the RSFSR, introduced in 1961, and later on some new statutes on the corrective labor camps despite their severity at least set certain limits to despotism. Khrushchev and Voroshilov an­nounced to the entire world that there were no more political prisoners in the Soviet Union. This was not surprising, for political prisoners had been reduced to the status of common criminals. Under article 190—1 of the Penal Code of the RSFSR, the "dissemination of fabrications discrediting the Soviet state and social system" is treated as a crime. It was not difficult to bring charges under this article against anyone who expressed dissent.

There was an even worse punishment for the most obstinate resisters: confinement in a mental hospital, either a "special," i.e., prison facility (psikhushka) or an ordinary psychiatric institution. This meant in reality that anyone could be institutionalized on the basis of a doctor's "expert testimony" for openly questioning the correctness of a political decision— let alone calling for the overthrow of Soviet power. Soviet psychiatrists, who are completely under state control, have even invented a special disease, the existence of which is hard to prove but just as hard to disprove: "creeping schizophrenia." In other cases the formula "reformist complex" is used. As time went on confinement to mental hospitals became one of the most widely used methods in the struggle against dissidents. Soviet power had always used this method—under Lenin as well as Stalin—but never to such an extent as in the post-Stalin era under Khrushchev and Brezhnev.²⁵⁷ For example, while Khrushchev was prime minister, Bukovsky, Grigorenko, Alexander Esenin-Volpin, and D. Ya. Boss were confined in mental hospitals for purely political reasons.

Despite such reprisals the movement for civil rights continued throughout the Soviet Union. Only a relatively small number were involved—dozens, perhaps hundreds—but the state itself continued to provoke dissent.

In 1958, in response to a reawakening of religious interest among the younger generation, an antireligious campaign was started by order of the CPSU Central Committee. The campaign was accompanied by scandalous "disclosures" about the secrets of Christian community life. But the atheist crusade had an unforeseen effect. The struggles within the churches es­calated and led to a split in the Baptist church in 1961, to the forming of a new community by the Evangelical Baptist Christians, and then to a nationwide mass persecution of these people, including trials, children being taken away from their parents, and so on.

In the same year the Russian Orthodox church was reorganized. Now it was no longer the general meeting of all members of the community that decided on issues of concern to the parish community but a "council of twenty"—twenty chosen representatives heading the church as "elders," but these elders had to be approved by the local government authorities. Thus the vast majority of church members were prevented from taking part in church affairs.

This reform went along with the state's drive to limit religious activities and to keep them under total control. The officially approved Russian Orthodox church also experienced protests and unrest. A number of clerics wrote open letters and appeals. The most famous were by Father Gleb Yakunin, Father Nikolai Eshliman, Anatoly Krasnov-Levitin, and Boris Talantov. By order of the patriarch the archbishop of Kaluga Germogen was removed from his post because in 1966—1967 he supported the rebellious priests in their protests against violations of the law of 1929, which said that the church affairs of a community were to be decided upon by the general meeting. In the mid-1960s religious dissidents drew increasingly closer to the democratic movement because of the struggle for democrati­zation and for civil rights.

By the beginning of the 1960s the civil rights movement was born. Its founder was Alexander Esenin-Volpin, a talented mathematician, a son of the famous Russian poet Sergei Esenin. Volpin put forth a very simple concept: in the Soviet state—no matter what kind of state it was—laws and a constitution did exist. The misfortune of the society was that the citizens did not believe in the laws, did not know the laws, and therefore could not defend their rights. Violations of rights and laws by party and state functionaries should necessarily be countered by a struggle for com­pliance with Soviet laws, for compliance with the constitution. This idea, which was the same advocated by Valery Chalidze, received more and more support from nonconformists and liberals, among whom the human rights movement developed in the mid-1960s. In this way, from the beginning most of these activists rejected conspiratorial activity and took the path of open struggle for official compliance with the Soviet constitution, which contained the basic civil rights. Their aim was to ensure that the rights guaranteed by the constitution would be put into effect in daily life.²⁵⁸

In this period a feeling of civic responsibility for the domestic and foreign policy of the Soviet regime reawakened. Scientists who took part in de­veloping atomic and thermonuclear weapons for the Soviet Union became aware of the catastrophic consequences of the use of such weapons. Their concern took various forms. In 1956 two physicists at the Thermotechnical Institute (now the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics)—Yuri Orlov and a man named Goldin—raised the demand that those guilty of crimes in the Stalin era should be held personally responsible. Both were expelled from the CPSU, and Orlov was dismissed from the institute.

In 1957, three years after the first testing of a hydrogen bomb, Aca­demician Andrei Sakharov, influenced by the writings of Albert Schweitzer, Linus Pauling, and others, joined the struggle to end the tests. In 1958 Sakharov pointed out in internal memoranda that if the testing of hydrogen bombs continued there would be a danger of radioactive contamination. He asked Academician Kurchatov, chief of the Soviet atomic project, to intervene. Kurchatov flew to the Crimea, where Khrushchev was vacation­ing. But nothing came of it. In October 1958 tests were conducted.²⁵⁹ In 1961, at a meeting between Khrushchev and some atomic scientists, it became known that the Soviet leadership had decided to underscore the pressure it was exerting on the German question with a new series of thermonuclear weapon tests. Sakharov wrote to Khrushchev to warn him against this step: 'To resume tests after a three-year moratorium would undermine the talks on banning tests and on disarmament and would lead to a new round in the arms race, especially in the sphere of intercontinental missiles and antimissile defense." Khrushchev's response, in an off-the- cuff speech at the same meeting, was frank and cynical. "We can't say aloud that we are carrying out our policy from a position of strength, but that's the way it must be," Khrushchev went on. "I would be a slob, and not chairman of the Council of Ministers, if I listened to the likes of Sakharov."²⁶⁰

The Ministry of Middle Machine Building, pursuing its own narrow interests, ordered another test in 1962 which was technically quite un­necessary. Sakharov reports: 'The explosion was to be powerful, so that the number of anticipated victims [of the fallout] was colossal."²⁶¹ Realizing the criminal nature of this plan, Sakharov tried to stop it by threatening to resign, but to no avail. Then he pleaded with Khrushchev in a phone conversation to stop the tests—in vain. Why would the Soviet leadership worry about the victims of radioactivity when the purpose was to intimidate the United States and the rest of the world with Soviet military strength? Sakharov writes: 'The feeling of impotence and fright that seized me on that day has remained in my memory ever since, and it has worked much change in me as I moved toward my present attitude."²⁶²

The search for freedom, the movement for a liberalization of society, and the revival of individual responsibility for the fate of the country and the people constituted the begining of a spiritual renewal.

This renewal developed in an atmosphere of growing dissatisfaction among the population because of food shortages and the low standard of living.

In Novocherkassk the workers finally exploded in anger.

THE SHOOTING AT NOVOCHERKASSK

The immediate reason for the disturbance at Novocherkassk was that on June 1, 1962, a decree was published raising prices 30 percent for meat and 25 percent for butter.²⁶³ As is customary in such cases, the Soviet newspapers reported that the people as a whole had approved the new "social advance" of the party and government.²⁶⁴

On the very same day—the authorities had overlooked this coinci­dence—the wages for workers at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive

Plant (NELP) were lowered as much as 30 percent. Early in the morning the workers at the foundry began a heated discussion of these developments.

The background to the Novocherkassk events is as follows. Because of the CPSU Central Committee was not able to raise labor productivity by normal means, by making the plan correspond to the productive capacity of the enterprises and real wages, it had decided to organize a new campaign to reduce production costs. Extraordinary efforts were made by the Rostov regional party committee, and not for the first time.

In 1960 a campaign for additional work on a voluntary basis had begun "on the initiative of doctors" in Rostov. This means in reality that the doctors pledged to work a few more hours voluntarily and without pay after an exhausting day. The "initiative" was approved by party organizations in other cities, who seized on it and developed it further. If we recall that at that time doctors (mostly women) belonged to one of the lowest wage groups in the Soviet Union, it is easy to imagine how desperate their situation was. After a while the doctors' "voluntary" work came to a halt and was forgotten, but the idea—which, by the way, was not at all new—of ov­ercoming the weaknesses in the Soviet economy at the expense of the working population received further development in Rostov.

In April 1962 the workers of the Rostov Agricultural Machinery Plant appealed to the workers of other enterprises to reduce costs of production.²⁶⁵ As is customary, the initiative immediately received a positive response. Among those who responded were enterprises in Novocherkassk. Besides the NELP, the Nikolsk Mining Equipment Plant, the Novocherkassk Elec­tric Power Plant, and a number of others joined the campaign to reduce costs of production. The Novocherkassk city party committee later sum­marized the commitment as follows: "to save 100 rubles per worker in one year."²⁶⁶ This meant in practice a wage cut of about 10 percent.²⁶⁷

The workers who gathered at the locomotive plant the morning of June 1 posed a question, "What are we going to live on now?" They were answered mockingly by plant director Kurochkin: "You're used to wolfing down meat pies—put jam in them instead." The infuriated workers chased Kurochkin out of the plant; a strike became inevitable, and at about noon 11,000 employees of the NELP stopped work.²⁶⁸ Although delegates of the plant were sent to other factories, workers there could not be persuaded to join the strike.

A group of workers began dismantling the rails on the nearby rail line to Moscow and building barriers. Women also sat down on the tracks to stop the trains. Slogans appeared on the walls at the factory buildings: "Down with Khrushchev" and "Use Khrushchev for sausage."²⁶⁹

On the evening of June 1, soldiers and militia were concentrated at the

NELP and its workers' settlement, which were located a few kilometers outside of Novocherkassk across the Tuzlov River. Tanks were stationed on the Tuzlov bridge. Traffic was stopped. At night about thirty workers were arrested as "ringleaders" of the strike.²⁷⁰

On the morning of June 2, the strikers at the NELP were joined by workers from other factories. Novocherkassk also had a rather large number of students—about 16,000 enrolled at the Polytechnical Institute. There had long been unrest among the students because of assignment to unde­sirable workplaces. It is hard to tell how many students were involved in the uprising. Solzhenitsyn, for example, claims that students were locked up in their dormitories and university buildings on the morning of June 2.²⁷¹ According to information published in the West, students did take part in the uprising.²⁷²

Workers from the NELP, numbering about 300, including women and children, crossed the Tuzlov bridge and headed toward the center of Novo­cherkassk. They were carrying portraits of Lenin. The demonstration was completely peaceful. Once in the city, the procession grew quickly. Spon­taneous mass meetings took place, with speeches given from the backs of trucks. On Moskovskaya Street the demonstrators tried to break down the doors of the municipal police station, hoping to free their imprisoned com­rades, but they were met with gunfire and withdrew. Thus the first shots fired in Novocherkassk were by the police. The demonstrators marched on to the building of the city party committee, but it had been vacated. From the balcony of this building the workers gave speeches. Meanwhile, soldiers had arrived and occupied the post office, the bank, and the radio station. Novocherkassk was sealed off by troops, all roads into the city being blocked. Soldiers entered the city party committee, while outside subma­chine gunners started to push the demonstrators back. Judging by some accounts, the first line of soldiers was soon replaced because the officer in charge committed suicide in front of the soldiers unit so as not to have to fire on the populace. When the soldiers opened fire, they first shot over the heads of the crowd, by accident killing some boys who had climbed into nearby trees. The crowd was enraged. Then the troops fired directly into the crowd—with dumdum bullets.

It was said that there were many soldiers of non-Russian nationality among the troops, who had been transferred to Novocherkassk especially for this mission by order of General Pliev, commander-in-chief of the North­ern Caucasus Military District.²⁷³

The crowd began to flee but the killing continued: the soldiers were shooting people in the back. The streets and squares emptied. The dead and wounded were loaded onto trucks.

According to Western sources, several hundred people lost their lives at Novocherkassk. Solzhenitsyn comes to the conclusion that about seventy or eighty were killed, forty-seven of them by dumdum bullets, a brutal weapon that had previously been used to suppress the prison revolt at Kengir.²⁷⁴

After a while the crowd poured into the city's central square once again, and again they were fired upon.

The soldiers who had fired on the crowd the first and second times had already been replaced by others, so when the returning people appealed to their consciences and cursed at them, they answered that they had just arrived. To remove the murderers immediately, to cover up the traces of the crime—such were the tactics of the military and political leadership. Basov, secretary of the Novocherkassk city party committee, had fled to Rostov as soon as the first news of disturbances came in. A CPSU Central Committee team headed by Mikoyan and Kozlov flew in to Novocherkassk to take charge. The crowd demanded that Mikoyan come to the scene of the shooting. After all, the blood of the people was still fresh on the trees and benches of the square and in pools on the pavement. "Let Mikoyan come down here! Let him see all this blood," the crowd demanded. Mikoyan and Kozlov promised a delegation of young workers that the affair would be thoroughly investigated and that those responsible would be severely punished. They insisted, however, that the demonstrators go home and put an end to the revolt. But the crowd would not disperse. By the evening of June 2 tanks with Tommy gunners had been brought in to disperse the crowd. As tracer bullets flew through the air, the crowd slowly dispersed.²⁷⁵

The next day, June 3, Mikoyan and Kozlov spoke on the local radio station. They went through the usual litany. The events had been provoked by "enemies" of Soviet power. These enemies would be punished. The army had not used dumdum bullets, they had been fired by "enemies." Actually, Mikoyan was not mistaken. The order to shoot at the people had been given by its enemy—by the top leadership of the party bureaucracy in Moscow. Whether Khrushchev was personally involved in the events or not, as the head of the party and government he was certainly responsible for the bloodbath in Novocherkassk. The people of Novocherkassk were punished. None of those who had been injured and taken to the hospitals returned to their homes; their families were banished to Siberia. Many participants in the events were arrested. (KGB agents had taken photos during the demonstration.) A series of closed trials was held, followed by two public show trials. Nine men were sentenced to death and two women to fifteen years in the labor camps.²⁷⁶ Not one of the murderers was pun­ished.

Nonetheless the price increases for food were postponed for a while in Novocherkassk. The previously empty shelves of the food stores were sud­denly filled with a variety of goods—a method commonly used by the Soviet authorities whenever dissatisfied citizens have had to be quieted for a while until all the troublemakers have been tracked down and arrested. In August 1962 Politburo member Kirilenko came to speak at a plenum of the Rostov regional party committee. The first and second secretaries of the Novo­cherkassk city party committee were not "reelected" to the new regional committee.²⁷⁷ This was the extent of the punishment of those responsible.

Novocherkassk was not the only city where disturbances occurred; there were also revolts in Kemerovo in the same summer, provoked by food shortages. Demonstrations and the looting of food stores also took place there.²⁷⁸

The leadership did not ignore these events by any means. A secret decree of the USSR Council of Ministers of August 10, 1962, demanded that more concern be shown for industrial workers and that they be treated more tactfully. The decree also referred to another reason for the dissatisfaction of the workers: the illegal refusal by enterprise administrations to hand out work books to workers who wanted to quit.²⁷⁹ Without a work book, it was impossible to start work anywhere at another factory. One of the usual press campaigns began, this one calling for more attention to the needs of the workers.

At the same time, further preventive measures were taken. In many republics the ministry of internal affairs was reorganized as the ministry of the defense of public order, and the militia (police) were armed. New punishments for political crimes, defined as "anti-Soviet propaganda," were introduced (in article 70 of the RSFSR penal code). Trials involving such charges were held in many cities, in 1963, in Minsk, Omsk, and Lenin­grad.²⁸⁰

In 1963 the food situation worsened due to a drought. Many cities experienced a shortage of bread, and people waited in lines in front of stores. In a number of cities there were strikes and disturbances.

As is often the case, a minor incident or chance occurrence would spark a major disturbance. One day in June 1963 a policeman and a soldier got into an argument in the town of Krivoi Rog, when the policeman ordered the soldier to stop smoking on the local bus. The argument ended with the policeman shooting the soldier to death. When the soldier's comrades found out about it they rushed into the city and killed seven policemen. The military authorities then assumed control, imposed martial law, and imposed a curfew.²⁸¹

In this period protest meetings and demonstrations took place in Grozny,

Krasnodar, Donetsk, Yaroslavl, Murom, Gorky, and even in Moscow at the Moskvich Auto Plant.²⁸²

THE FALL OF KHRUSHCHEV

The musical chairs of administrative reorganization, the crisis in agricul­ture, complications in Sino—Soviet relations and in those with the United States all fed the neo-Stalinist tendencies within the Soviet ruling circles. It was said almost openly that the leaders of the Malenkov—Molotov "anti- party group" were right when they warned against rash and impulsive actions.

The "Ryazan miracle" (described in a previous section) and the Cuban missile crisis dealt heavy blows to Khrushchev's reputation as a leader. It was under these conditions that he decided to resume the struggle against the consequences of the personality cult, because in this sphere he held the trump cards against Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich.

In October 1961 the Twenty-Second Party Congress called renewed at­tention not only to the crimes of Stalin but also to the complicity of Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, and Voroshilov. The newspapers published the texts of death penalties handed down not only against "enemies of the people" but against their wives as well, documents bearing the signatures of Molotov, Kaganovich, and the others. At the congress, itself, speeches denouncing Zhdanov were made. On a motion by the Moscow party organization, Stalin's body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum,²⁸³ to be buried in a separate grave at the base of the Kremlin wall. For most of the congress delegates this came as a complete surprise. Among those whose careers had been made in the 1930s, that is, who had benefited from Stalin's terror, dissat­isfaction was rampant and barely concealed. The party apparatchiks did not know what Khrushchev's intentions were, or how far he would go in this new phase of de-Stalinization. It was in the corridors of the Twenty- second Party Congress that the groundwork was laid for the conspiracy against Khrushchev, a plot involving a fairly influential segment of party officialdom. Its inspirer was Mikhail Suslov, the Central Committee sec­retary responsible for party ideology. De facto sabotage of de-Stalinization measures began.

At the Twenty-second Party Congress Khrushchev decided to institu­tionalize the "return to Leninst norms," obviously remembering what had happened after the Twentieth Congress. At his suggestion, the party rules and program were changed. Under the new rules, in all subsequent elections of leading party bodies, their composition had to be changed by one-third.

Thus Khrushchev acquired a weapon that allowed him to manipulate the party apparatus so as to remove undesirables in legal ways.

Generally speaking, Khrushchev, like the majority of Soviet leaders, overestimated his individual power to influence the course of events. While verbally recognizing the existence of objective processes in society, Soviet leaders in practice have constantly intervened in the natural course of events with crude attempts to gain quick successes. Such efforts only produce crises in one area after another, and these cannot be resolved by administrative reshufflings or the erection of new bureaucratic structures. However, such methods were the only ones Khrushchev knew. Seeing that the economy, after a slight upturn in 1958^1959 was running into problems again despite his reforms, he decreed that all party organizations be divided into two parts: one to direct agriculture, the other industry.²⁸⁴ In late 1962 the party organizations of all provinces (oblasts) and districts (raiony) were split up on this basis, as were government bodies on the province level.

On the district level the district party committees (raikomy) were abol­ished. Territorial kolkhoz-sovkhoz administrations were set up and each administration's party committee took up the functions of the old raikom.

On the republic and all-union levels separate Central Committee bureaus were established, one for industry, one for agriculture.

In effect Khrushchev divided the party in two.

The party apparatus at all levels was dissatisfied with this arrangement. In provinces rivalries sprang up between leaders of party organizations and those of government bodies, which threatened to cause a disintegration of all authority before long.

The secretaries of party provincial committees (obkomy), who were against reforms in general, were especially opposed to this reform. Khrushchev, with his restless temperament and mania for reform, would not leave them in peace; yet all they wanted was stability and calm.

The top party officials had reconciled themselves to the abolition of the system of special tax-free salary supplements (pakety), but they could not and would not accept instability.

It was not only the top party bureaucracy that was dissatisfied with Khrushchev's policies. He had aroused feelings of protest and resistance in the most varied strata of society, among all who had been pressured or hurt in any way by his mania for reform. This included the industrial workers, whose interests were affected by the school reform and by the moratorium or repayment to citizens for loans made to the government, as well as peasants, collective farmers, blue collar and white collar workers of small cities and towns, who were deprived of the right to cultivate a small plot of land around their homes. Officers in the armed forces were affected by substantial staff reductions and reductions in real earnings. The same was true for state security personnel when bonuses for rank (the number of "stars" on one's shoulders) were abolished.

In virtually every social stratum there was deep dissatisfaction over the unrestrained glorification of Khrushchev as government, military, and party leader.

A kind of court camarilla had taken shape around Khrushchev, headed by his son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei, who was made editor-in-chief of Iz­vestia and a member of the party's Central Committee. This group controlled the mass media. The Adzhubei clique tried to take over foreign affairs as well. These ambitions alarmed and alienated the minister of foreign affairs and the apparatus of the ministry as a whole. They too found themselves in the anti-Khrushchev camp.

The intelligentsia, Khrushchev's most reliable base of support in his de- Stalinization drive, were increasingly restricted and harassed. A major blow to them was Khrushchev's speech, timed to coincide with the tenth anni­versary of Stalin's death, lavishly praising the late dictator for his uncom­promising struggle against all opposition elements, explaining Stalin's mistakes to be the result of his overly suspicious nature and the persecution mania that afflicted him especially in his final years.²⁸⁵

This speech did not, however, result in a rehabilitation of Stalin. That was not what Khrushchev wanted. In all likelihood he was attempting to "clear himself" of accusations of revisionism brought against him by Mao Tse-tung and circulated by "pro-Chinese" (Stalinist) elements in the Soviet leadership.

Through his frequent public appearances, speeches, interviews with foreign correspondents (sometimes granted after a few drinks), and inap­propriate remarks, Khrushchev succeeded in undermining not only his own prestige but also the authority of the government in the eyes of the people, who began to snicker at Khrushchev's speeches. They stopped taking him seriously. All his errors of commission and omission, his antics and buf­foonery, were carefully noted by the Stalinists and magnified out of all proportion. It was as though his positive accomplishments, particularly during the war with Germany, were purposely inflated and exaggerated to make him more laughable in the public eye.

By the fall of 1964 the psychological groundwork had been laid for a move against Khrushchev. The party hierarchy, in the overwhelming ma­jority, had reached agreement on the necessity for his removal.

As at the time of Marshal Zhukov's removal, the Presidium of the Central Committee convened in Khrushchev's absence, while he was vacationing at the Black Sea. The support of army and state security leaders had been assured in advance. With everything in readiness, Khrushchev was sum­moned to Moscow for an expanded session of the Central Committee Pre­sidium. On October 13 the organizer of the conspiracy, Suslov, presented a report to the Presidium with a long list of accusations against Khrushchev. At first Khrushchev tried to put up a fight but finally realizing that he was isolated, was compelled to agree to resign "for reasons of health." The next day a Central Committee plenum convened. It passed a resolution removing Khrushchev from the position of first secretary of the Central Committee and chairman of the Council of Ministers and dropping him from mem­bership in the Central Committee.²⁸⁶ The resolution was approved without any discussion. No full or alternate member of the Central Committee who might have opposed Khrushchev's removal had been admitted to the session.

The plenum resolved that the posts of first secretary and chairman of the Council of Ministers no longer be held by one person. In light of the experience with Khrushchev, the Presidium decided to fill the post of first secretary with the most calm and even-tempered person possible, one who would not aspire to the role of Leader. That person was Leonid Brezhnev. Aleksei Kosygin became the new chairman of the Council of Ministers.

The years of hope for a democratization of Soviet society were over, and with them, the years of disarray and uncertainty on the part of the regime. The era of Soviet conformism was beginning.

Khrushchev's removal from power marked the end of a "glorious decade." Those years were like a bridge in time between the Stalin era of unlimited terror and the dictatorship of Soviet conformism.

It would be a mistake to call Khrushchev liberal or conservative, pro­gressive or reactionary. He contained hints of each of these. Sometimes these conflicting impulses were at war within him; sometimes they "peace­fully coexisted." Khrushchev was a contradictory figure, and the times during which he chanced to rule were contradictory. It is possible that Khrushchev sincerely wished to break with the Stalinist past, both his own and that of the Soviet system. By some miracle, purely human feelings and values survived in Khrushchev, feelings which for the overwhelming ma­jority of Stalin's comrades-in-arms had been completely cast aside or effaced by the passage of time. It cannot be ruled out that the tragic events of the terror in the 1930s and famine in the Ukraine in the 1940s (events in which he bore direct responsibility) played a considerable part in the fact that Khrushchev retained a "human face." During the war years while he was at the front he probably had occasion more than once to reflect on the course of human destiny.

Whatever the reason, it fell to Khrushchev's lot to carry out the truly great mission (it is no exaggeration to call it that) of exposing the crimes of the Stalin regime, that is, of the Soviet system, freeing millions of prisoners from the camps, and posthumously rehabilitating millions of oth­ers. The return of non-Russian populations of the Northern Caucasus who had been exiled to Siberia and Central Asia during the war is also to Khrushchev's credit. Under Khrushchev, antilabor legislation was abolished (although not entirely, since the work books were maintained), the tax burden was lightened, the social security system was improved, the con­struction of housing was expanded, and obligatory loans to the state were dropped.

It would be fair to say that the only reforms of Khrushchev that took hold were the ones that did not undermine the foundations of the regime, for the foundations remained unchanged. Among these were the retention of complete power by the party bureaucracy, preservation of the state se­curity apparatus (though with reduced powers), and the censorship (with the same "protective" functions it had been charged with under Lenin and Stalin). Reforms in the legal code carried out during the Khrushchev era kept alive the possibility that people could be prosecuted for political reasons and for dissent. Under Khrushchev the use of psychiatric measures against dissenters became more widespread.

Khrushchev's reforms aimed at improving the food situation in Soviet society as well as bettering conditions for the most deprived part of that society, the peasantry, were convulsive and inconsistent. They could not have been otherwise because the collective farm system was and remained an insuperable obstacle to economic recovery; yet it was one of the cor­nerstones of the regime. Khrushchev's attempts to decentralize control of the Soviet economy ran up against the existing practices of the centralized state and naturally failed.

Every time Khrushchev tried to put through a positive reform it proved to be in irreconcilable contradiction to the existing social order and a direct challenge to the interests of the elite, who had acquired a sense of security after Stalin's death. The upper echelons of Soviet society felt that govern­mental continuity and consistency were essential. Any threat to this was a dangerous challenge. With his reforming zeal, Khrushchev not only irritated the party bureaucracy; he frightened it, in particular by dividing the party administration into separate industrial and agricultural sections.

Khrushchev often frightened himself by what he did. He later admitted that he had feared the "thaw" in 1954 lest it become a flood that would sweep away the regime. This fear was manifested in the suppression of the Hungarian revolution and the bloody reprisals against protesters at Temir-

Tau, Karaganda, and Novocherkassk. Khrushchev underwent a consider­able evolution during his years in power. The removal of Stalin's embalmed remains from the Mausoleum on Red Square in 1961, unlike Khrushchev's secret speech of 1956, was not an act of supreme justice but a tactical move in Khrushchev's fight against a growing opposition.

He cut a hole in the iron curtain, but he also built the Berlin Wall. He proclaimed peaceful coexistence, but came very close to provoking nuclear war by placing Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Like every Soviet leader who held supreme power, Khrushchev consid­ered it his duty to exptess his opinion and pass judgment in all fields without exception, in all areas of social and cultural life. His opinions, especially on literature and art, were remarkably superficial. He accepted only that which in his opinion could be "useful to the people." Here he was the supreme judge. His social intuition warned him of danger in the spread of ideas outside the accustomed framework of party ideology. Any­thing that would not fit within this narrow framework or in the limits of his understanding of the world drove him to an emotional outburst. Only once did his keen social intuition fail him seriously, when he allowed publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Khrushchev was the only Soviet leader who tried to adjust to the times. But sometimes he was in a hurry and prodded others to hurry; at other times he would pull back. It was said of him that he tried to leap over an abyss by making two leaps in a row. Probably that is why he was not buried near the Kremlin wall, but in Novodevichy cemetery.

CHAPTER

—ii

"REAL SOCIALISM": THE BREZHNEV ERA,

1965-1982

COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIP

The ouster of Khrushchev brought the post-Stalin era to an end. The eleven years that had followed the death of Lenin's heir, Stalin, had been a time of struggle for his mantle, a time for the Soviet system to adapt to its new existence without Stalin and his dictatorship.

The system demonstrated its stability despite the struggle at the top and despite the often ruthless and bloody suppression of the centrifugal forces that emerged after the denunciation of the "personality cult"—both within the heart of the empire and, most significantly, at its outer reaches, in East Berlin, Hungary, and Poland. During this period the regime sought to counteract these centrifugal forces not solely by repression, but also by coopting the reformist tendencies that made their appearance during the era of confusion and uncertainty which is sometimes called The Thaw.

In the post-Stalin era, the main features of the interregnum of the 1920s reappeared under new conditions, more favorable for the Soviet system. These included the rise of a single figure within the collective leadership who gradually subordinated the others to himself, accompanied by an easing of repression in all areas—largely due to the absence of one central leader. Incidentally, all the ins and outs of the struggle in the Soviet Union for a "Stalinism without Stalin" were repeated in China after the death of Mao.

The fight to see who would don Stalin's uniform was a test of the stability of the Soviet system's foundation. It was at the same time a struggle of the party apparatus against all those who wished to enlarge their personal positions at its expense. The unique feature of the Soviet system is that the party controls and monitors everything but is responsible for nothing; it only provides its own "overall leadership." The party makes all the decisions and gives all the orders, including unwritten ones over the phone or in person, and keeps no records. When failures result, it is the govern­ment departments or heads of enterprises and institutions which are held responsible.

The party is always right. It corrects the errors of others; it punishes and pardons. Khrushchev had wanted to "bring the party closer to practice," to make it responsible for the day-to-day business of running the country. But the party was wedded to theory, not practice. It was the fountainhead of ideology, the guardian of truth. Khrushchev was challenging the essential feature of the Communist state—a structure unique in human history.

Khrushchev's twofold division of the party had frightened the party ap­paratus, although perhaps not everyone understood the revolutionary im­plications of that reform. It was his second reform, however, that frightened the apparatus and lost him its support. At the Twenty-second Party Con­gress, Khrushchev introduced into the party rules a provision for the oblig­atory rotation of offices. In all future party elections, one-third of each party committee, from the Presidium to the district committees, would have to be replaced. New people had to be nominated and elected. Exceptions were made only for the first secretary and a handful of "tried and tested officials with long experience." This introduced a principle of instability which would affect every officeholder in the party, something the apparatus would not and could not accept. The apparatchiks had submitted to Stalin's rotation-through-terror, a kind of lottery in which one could cling to the illusory hope of drawing a lucky number, but inevitable rotation "according to law" was more than they could stomach. After Khrushchev's removal the rotation rule was immediately revoked.

The revolt of the apparatchiks against the first secretary, who personified the party's power in general, was an act of self-defense aimed at protecting the power and privileges of each individual bureaucrat. According to one version of the events, given by Solzhenitsyn in The Oak and the Calf\ as well as by others, the party conspirators originally wanted to award the post of first secretary to Aleksandr Shelepin, the former secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee who had risen to the chairmanship of the KGB and to membership in the party Presidium.¹ But the apparatus was leery of Shelepin's pro-Stalin radicalism. It was said that he intended to seek reconciliation with China, to "tighten the screws" in the economy and public administration, and to strike out energetically at all deviations from orthodox ideology. The apparatus preferred a quieter man, a conser­vative to be sure, but not one given to extremes. There was something too oppressive about Shelepin the ascetic and purist. Moscow intellectuals jokingly nicknamed him "Iron Shurik" (Shurik being a diminutive of Alek­sandr), a play on the nickname of the first head of the Cheka, "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky.

The apparatus longed for tranquility. It chose Brezhnev to be its first secretary.

Brezhnev's biography was a model one for the apparatchik, a perfect example of a party functionary's quiet, steady rise through the apparatus to the heights of power. It was perfect especially for its dullness, the absence of any sudden "flights," the constancy with which he ascended step by step, accumulating both sponsors and proteg6s along the way.

Brezhnev was born in 1906 in the small factory town of Kamenskoe (later renamed Dneprodzerzhinsk), not far from Ekaterinoslav (now Dne­propetrovsk, the provincial capital). Although the son of a worker, he was accepted into the Kamenskoe classic gymnasium, which by the time he graduated had become a vocational school under the Soviet regime. The American journalist John Dornberg, author of the first more or less complete biography of the Soviet leader, was able to gather some information from Brezhnev's former schoolmates, but many details of the chief of state's life remain obscure and unexplained.² After secondary school, Brezhnev com­pleted a course of study at a land surveying college, then worked for several years at agricultural agencies in Byelorussia, Kursk, and Sverdlovsk. Sud­denly he returned to his home region and changed professions, entering a metallurgical institute, and at the age of twenty-five he joined the party. His career had begun.

A major turning point in Brezhnev's career coincided with one in the history of the Soviet Union itself: the great purges of 1936—1938. In May 1937 he was elected deputy chairman of the Dneprodzerzhinsk city soviet; in May 1938 he was transfered to Dnepropetrovsk to fill the slot of Agitprop head in the provincewide committee of the party. It was here that he truly joined the apparatus and here that he found the teammates who would accompany him to the Kremlin.

Brezhnev's rise began under the wing of Nikita Khrushchev, the new first secretary of the Ukrainian party's Central Committee who had been sent to the Ukraine in 1938 to "put things in order." Khrushchev ruthlessly purged the republic, starting with the party apparatus. Stalin insisted in all earnestness that every party leader train "two or three deputies"—that is, potential replacements. Brezhnev was one of those who were "third in line" and who came in after the first two rows had been eliminated by the purges. He displayed the ideal array of qualities necessary for deliberate and steady advancement without a snap. Completely colorless but reliable, he benefited from Khrushchev's favor both in the province committee and, during the war, in military service, first as head of the political section of one of the armies and then as deputy chief of the political directorate of an entire front. By the end of the war he was the chief of this directorate, and had advanced in rank from lieutenant colonel to major general. He even attracted the attention of Lev Mekhlis, one of Stalin's righthand men.

Brezhnev had the one talent indispensable for a party leader, the ability to lead: to issue orders on virtually every subject, without being a specialist in anything. As secretary of a province committee, first in Zaporozhye, then in Dnepropetrovsk, he oversaw the reconstruction of enterprises and urban areas destroyed during the war. In 1950 Khrushchev, having been made a secretary of the Central Committee by Stalin, brought Brezhnev to Moscow. In July of that year, Brezhnev was sent to Kishinev, capital of Moldavia, to be first secretary of the Moldavian Central Committee, thus becoming boss of one of the fifteen Soviet republics. He transferred a group of close friends from Dnepropetrovsk to Kishinev. Later they formed the core of his innermost circle, those who in the future would be known as the Dnepropetrovsk mafia. To this nucleus he added "reliable people" from Kishinev, for example, Konstantin Chernenko, then head of the propaganda and agitation department of the Moldavia Central Committee. (Chernenko later became head of Brezhnev's private cabinet and the closest adviser to the new first secretary of the party. He was made a Politburo member and in 1979 he assumed the role of "crown prince.")

In 1952, at the Nineteenth Party Congress, Brezhnev became a candidate (or alternate) member of the newly formed Central Committee Presidium. Stalin may well have intended, after the next purge, to fill the place of some full member with this young candidate from Kishinev. During the reorganization of the organs of power after Stalin's death, Brezhnev was put in charge of the political directorate of the Soviet navy, a second-rate post which nevertheless allowed him to establish solid friendships with marshals and admirals.

As Khrushchev rose, Brezhnev automatically rose with him. He held the successive posts of secretary of the Kazakhstan Central Committee, president of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and a secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. In October 1964 he turned against his benefactor and ascended to the highest rank. However, according to the usual practice, the new leadership was said to be collective. More than ten years would pass before it became clear that the "collective" leadership had been transformed into one-man rule, just as it had under Stalin and Khrushchev. Under Brezhnev this process was carried out more slowly and prudently, almost imperceptibly. He pursued a painstaking policy of quietly removing the supporters of others and replacing them with his own people. By the end of the 1970s they occupied all the key posts. The Dnepropetrovsk mafia controlled the Politburo and Secretariat and held positions at all lower levels of the hierarchy.

Thus, in the late 1970s, the process was once again complete. After Lenin, after Stalin, and after Khrushchev, each time the system moved inexorably from "collective" to individual leadership, following the most important law of socialist society which Lenin had noted in 1918, the need for "one-man leadership" (edinolichnoe rukovodstvo). An inseparable part of this process was the elaboration of a cult around the new leader. Just a year and a half after replacing Khrushchev, who was accused of promoting a "personality cult," Brezhnev took the first step toward creating his own cult. At the Twenty-third Party Congress he proposed that the Presidium resume the name it had had under Stalin (Politburo) and that the title of first secretary likewise be changed. From then on he would be called general secretary, the title Stalin had used.

It took Brezhnev about ten years to acquire all the attributes of the socialist leader, but he did not become a new Stalin. Nevertheless he occupied Stalin's position. "One-man leadership" means that all decisions are made by the narrow circle around the man at the top. So it had been under Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev. So it would be under Brezhnev. The leader is the incarnation of the party's power.

THE PARTY LONGS FOR TRANQUILITY

The removal of Khrushchev was a revolt of the priesthood against the high priest, who had threatened their caste.

Lenin was the first to raise the question of who really holds the power in the Soviet state. His formula, "a workers' state with bureaucratic de­formations," was carried further by Trotsky, who after losing power argued that a privileged bureaucratic caste had taken over in the Soviet Union. Milovan Djilas reworked Trotsky's theory and made the concept of "the new class" famous in his book of the same name. The importance of Djilas's book was that it demonstrated, by the example of Yugoslavia, that an identical process was occurring in all the countries where Communist par­ties had taken power.

The Soviet constitution refers to the Communist party as the "leading force" in Soviet society. At the Twenty-sixth Party Congress in 1981, the party had 17,480,000 members (full and provisional), slightly more than 9 percent of the population.³ However, it cannot be said that political power is held by the party as a whole.

George Orwell in 1984 spoke of the "outer party" and the "inner party." In 1969 two citizens of Leningrad, a teacher named S. Zorin and an engineer, N. Alekseev, wrote an essay which in samizdat came to be known as the Leningrad Program. Analyzing soviet society at the end of the 1960s, they argued as follows:

The party and the government apparatus constitute a genuine and decisive political force in our country. It is a pyramid whose upper part consists of the party officials belonging to the nomenklatura, with the CPSU Central Committee, its Politburo, Secretariat, and departments, at the peak. To this uppermost segment should be added the top military leaders, the apparatus of the KGB and that of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and all higher-ranking government officials.⁴

The authors of the Leningrad Program saw the nomenklatura as an authentic ruling class, what Orwell called the "inner party."

In the first half of the 1920s the term nomenklatura referred to a list of key positions that could be filled only by the Central Committee department in charge of personnel assignments and transfers. The list quickly grew to include all leading positions in the party and government and in the trade union, military, and cultural establishments. An elaborate hierarchical structure arose, with nomenklatura lists for the CPSU Central Committee, for the central committees of the union republics, and for provincial and district committees.

According to the 1970 census, the number of persons in "leading po­sitions" (i.e., the nomenklatura), including the secretaries of base-level party organizations and the chairmen and secretaries of village soviets, was 405,784, or 0.35 percent of the population.⁵

The nomenklatura officials, who possess power proportionate to the level on the list in which their office appears, constitute an oligarchy of a par­ticular type, a group defined by its role in the administration of the country.

Aristotle regarded oligarchy as one of the "bad" forms of government and defined it as power for its own sake. The nomenklatura is an oligarchy which conceals its power behind an ideological screen, claiming that what exists is "people's power." The nomenklatura reproduces itself by selecting people with the necessary attributes, inducting them into the oligarchy, and rewarding them generously. Andrei Sakharov has described the selec­tion process this way:

Recently a large group of students who had been graduated with honors from various colleges in the country were brought together for a month in Len­ingrad. ... (Naturally they were Komsomol members....) They were lav­ishly wined and dined at the best restaurants, and entertained in every way—all at no expense to themselves. In short, they lived off the fat of the land. Then they were asked: "Would you like to live like this the rest of your life? If so, go to the VPSh [the Higher Party School]" upon graduation, from which even a minimally gifted person can become at least second secretary of a regional committee.⁶

The nomenklatura is a composite of groups that, within the framework of mutual support, engage in shifting alliances and conflicts. It is com­parable to the lord and vassal system of feudal society. Each official be­longing to the nomenklatura has his own vassals and is in turn the vassal of a higher-ranking leader. The general secretary has the greatest number of vassals and there is no one above him; yet he cannot disregard the wishes and interests of his subordinates.

The program of the nomenklatura can be summed up in three points: to increase its power, to increase its privileges, and to enjoy both in tranquility. Khrushchev violated these rules.

The collective leadership elected by the October 1964 plenum set about reassuring and calming the nomenklatura. In the first major speech of his administration, Brezhnev talked incessantly about problems—"unsolved problems," "new problems," "countless problems," and "problems in need of resolution." He mentioned numerous "shortcomings," "inadequacies," "demands," and tasks that should be completed. Apparently forgetting that he had been second secretary under Khrushchev, he painted a somber picture of the recent past, when "subjectivism and voluntarism" had reigned. The prescription the new first secretary offered was this: "objective eval­uation," "proper utilization," the application of "scientific methods," the taking of "necessary measures," but above all, "harmonious development."⁷ The first action of the new leadership was to retract Khrushchev's re­forms. The industrial—agricultural division of the party was ended, along with the rotation rule. Khrushchev's economic councils (sovnarkhozy) were abolished, and the traditional ministries they had superseded were restored. Also restored was the traditional ten-year school curriculum, which Khru­shchev had tried to replace with an eleven-year program of "polytechnical" education. To reassure the population, the leadership restored the right of peasants to cultivate the areas around their homes as private plots whose produce they could sell on the market and halted religious persecution. Most of all, the leadership wished to show what it did not intend to do.

Its positive program was presented at the first post-Khrushchev plenum of the Central Committee, in May 1965, which was especially devoted to the question of agriculture. As Khrushchev had done after Stalin's death, Brezhnev laid the blame for the failures in agriculture on his predecessor, "Tsar Nikita." The new first secretary proposed certain measures that, he claimed, would at last solve the agricultural problem.

Since the first days of the revolution the Communist party had searched for the philosopher's stone that would enable it to perform the miracle of supplying the country with farm products. There had been Lenin's plan for cooperatives, then Stalin's collectivization. After collectivization, a vast array of magic tricks had been tried: Lysenko's charlatanry; fantastic for- estation and desert irrigation projects; innovations such as "deep plowing"; cultivating the "virgin lands"; and planting maize throughout the country. All these plans were based on extensive rather than intensive methods. Brezhnev's program was to free the farmers from their obligations to deliver fixed amounts of maize, and to shift the focus back from the virgin lands to the central agricultural regions. Compulsory deliveries of all kinds were reduced until by the end of 1970 quotas were quite low. In theory this meant that the government would buy more from the collective farmers at higher prices after paying low fixed prices for the compulsory deliveries. Brezhnev's program also stressed structural improvements, significant in­creases in land reclamation projects, the construction of more canals, and increased production of fertilizers and farm machinery and envisioned the allocation of large sums for capital investment to agriculture. Certain long- awaited social measures were included in the program: pensions for col­lective farmers, and the introduction of a minimum monthly salary, although it was still much lower than wages at factories or state farms.

This "new program" was not new at all. For the most part it continued policies Khrushchev had initiated in 1958.⁸ But now these policies were stripped of Khrushchev's promotional rhetoric, his unbelievable promises and unabashed bombast. They were presented as a "scientific plan," guar­anteeing "the ascent of agriculture."

Other reforms were announced to correct the "voluntarist errors" in industry. They were presented by Kosygin, approved by the Central Com­mittee plenum of September 1965, and confirmed by the Twenty-third Party Congress in March 1966. They too had been initiated by Khrushchev. The central conception behind the reforms was outlined in an article in Pravda on September 9, 1962, by Professor Evsei Liberman of the Kharkov En­gineering and Economics Institute. He proposed that profitability be made the central criterion for judging the economic performance of an enterprise. This implied recognition of a principle previously unknown to Soviet eco­nomics, the law of supply and demand, and the use of material incentives to raise the productivity of workers and enterprises. A necessary condition for the success of such a reform was the granting of broad autonomy to individual enterprises, freeing them from petty tutelage by the central planning bodies and the agencies of "state control."

Khrushchev, with his restless desire for change, had wished to make use of Liberman's proposals, which enjoyed the support of such prominent Soviet economists as Kantorovich, Nemchinov, and Novozhilov. In August 1964, shortly before his downfall, he allowed the Liberman system to be applied on a trial basis at two textile plants, the Bolshevichka in Moscow and the Mayak in Gorky. Two days after Khrushchev's ouster, Kosygin extended the experiment to several other plants and announced that a reform program for all of Soviet industry was in preparation.

The economic reform finally adopted by the Central Committee plenum and confirmed by the Twenty-third Party Congress was doomed before it began. It sought to reconcile the irreconcilable: to enlarge the rights of individual enterprises—and to restore the central economic ministries abol­ished under Khrushchev. The Russian historian Klyuchevsky, writing about the reforms of Peter the Great, described a similar attempt to square the circle centuries earlier: "He hoped to use the menace of his authority to instill initiative in an enslaved population. ... He wanted the slave to act consciously and freely while remaining a slave."⁹

DISTURBERS OF THE PEACE

During the 1960s stormy youth protests developed in the West. In France, the United States, and West Germany students were rebelling against their conditions of life and lack of prospects. They had grown up in a consumer society which has raised material prosperity to levels never before seen in history. Society, however, had suffered a loss of spirituality that could not be compensated for.

The Soviet press gave coverage to the student unrest in the capitalist world, enjoying it to the fullest and comparing it unfavorably to the calm among Soviet youth, who were sure of themselves and their future and were always willing to sacrifice for the Communist cause. Behind this facade of familiar boasting, however, hid a different reality. For Soviet youth, too, the 1960s were years of search, accompanied by controversy, overt displays of dissatisfaction with the regime, and active protests against it. In the summer of 1966 G. S. Pavlov, a secretary of the Komsomol Central Com­mittee, wrote somewhat nervously in the periodical Kommunist of the younger generation's heightened interest in the history and theory of the Communist movement. Like every new generation, the one born in the late 1940s wanted to learn the truth about its country. The party was confronting the same problem as in the past: it was necessary again to falsify the collective memory of the people and create a legend about the past. Pavlov proposed to bring young people together with Old Bolsheviks who had witnessed the past, to enable the young to hear the "truth" from the lips of those who had witnessed the past.¹⁰ Such meetings were organized everywhere— between young people and those who, by chance, had survived or had taken an active part in the terror. Either type was only too happy to tell the "truth."

But the youth, especially the students, derived no satisfaction from these meetings. They called for public discussions, debate, a free exchange of opinions. Within the student milieu, especially in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Gorky, the desire to put an end to the cynicism pervading society from top to bottom was increasing and gathering strength. The academic authorities, the Komsomol and party district committees, and local activists tried to limit the composition and number of participants in these public discussions, but to no avail. During a discussion organized by the students of the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University on the topic "Cynicism and Social Ideals" in March 1965, several speakers fiercely denounced the false information being carried by the official press and demanded the full truth about the crimes of the Stalin era. The party was blamed for the lack of faith, skepticism, and cynicism spreading among the youth, because the party had been hiding the truth. During the debate, one of the speakers proposed changing the name of Pravda ("Truth") to Lozh ("Lie"). Other students demanded that Stalin's accomplices be brought to justice, naming Shvernik, Suslov, and Mikoyan.¹¹ The alarm evoked in the authorities by the debate soon found its expression in a tightening of the screws at institutions of higher education: the teaching of Marxism- Leninism ("scientific communism") was reinforced, and it was decided that those students who did not pass this subject would not be allowed to take other exams.

Disenchantment began to spread from the universities to the high schools. Posters defending Sinyavsky and Daniel were pasted at night on the walls of Moscow's School No. 16. Members of the group that did it were dispersed

to various other schools. The school's principal and a teacher named Baral were reprimanded. Baral was accused of having organized two evening meetings in commemoration of Tukhachevsky and Yakir, two of the military leaders shot in 1937.¹² According to some sources, in 1967 the country had roughly 400 unofficial youth groups that in effect stood in opposition to the regime. The members of these groups held a wide range of opinions, from populism to fascism. "Prophylactic" measures were applied to them: individual talks with officials; lectures on morality; time spent in industrial production for "reeducation" purposes; reassignment to other schools; meet­ings with parents; and denunciation meetings. More vigorous measures were applied against the most active figures: arrests, trials, and impris­onment.

In September 1965 the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested. They were tried in February 1966 and sentenced—seven years for Sinyavsky, five for Daniel. The trial showed that the government wanted to get rid of its biggest headache: the hopes for liberalization that had arisen under Khrushchev.

The condemnation of the "personality cult" at the Twentieth Party Con­gress, the liberation of thousands of prisoners and the rehabilitation of some, the relaxation of censorship, which some writers had taken advantage of to raise questions about the terror, the military defeats at the beginning of the war with Germany, the structure of Soviet society, and above all, Khrushchev's behavior and policies which increasingly lurched from one extreme to the next—all these factors had given rise to hopes that the system might be able to reform itself, that a genuine public opinion could develop. Khrushchev had allowed publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and, in so doing, had allowed the birth of the Solzhenitsyn phenomenon. Even Solzhenitsyn's genius could not have given this work and his other works, especially The Gulag Archipelago, the power that shook the world's conscience if the authenticity of his narrative had not been confirmed by the "official" publication of his first book. In denouncing some of Stalin's crimes and authorizing publication of Solzhenitsyn's works, Khrushchev was not abandoning repression. In My Testimony, the first book about the camps to appear under Khrushchev, distributed of course in samizdat form, Anatoly Marchenko showed that while the number of inmates had decreased from the days of Stalin, the nature of the camps themselves remained unchanged.

Khrushchev's repressive policies could not stop the social ferment. In addition, this repression had a "confidential" character: trials were held behind closed doors. The crushing of the Novocherkassk revolt in 1962, as of other workers' demonstrations, was kept secret for a long time.

The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel was the first show trial of the post- Stalin era. Its importance lay in the fact that the defendants were writers, guilty of "agitation or propaganda seeking to undermine or weaken the Soviet power" and of "disseminating, for the same purpose, slanderous statements against the Soviet state and social system." Article 70 of the penal code, adopted under Khrushchev, was used against the defendants. "Agitation and propaganda" and "anti-Soviet slander" referred to the lit­erary work of the authors Sinyavsky and Daniel—their stories, poems, and literary criticism. Their literary works were used as evidence. The authors were tried for the characters they invented. This was perhaps an unprec­edented case in the annals of the world's legal practice. Up until then, no one could have envisioned that Dostoevsky might be charged because Raskolnikov committed an act of premeditated murder.

The Sinyavsky—Daniel trial marked the end of the era of "confusion and disarray." The "Thaw" was over. After Stalin's death, writers had been the first to ask questions. Pomerantsev's article "On Sincerity in Literature" had been the first public condemnation of the lies that had impregnated the social fabric and the first public expression of the need for honesty and truth.¹³ In various forms and with varying intensity writers were expressing ideas and feelings that had seemingly forever been eradicated in the years following the revolution. Unable to express themselves because of the censorship in literature, the writers found a vehicle in samizdat. As Anna Akhmatova put it, "a pre-Gutenberg period" had begun in Soviet literature. Poetry and later prose were being copied and circulated freely in uncensored form. Samizdat made possible the discovery of writers shunned by the official literary authorities: Bulgakov, Tsvetaeva, Platonov, Mandelstam, and new writers. The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Pasternak in 1958 spurred samizdat. Uncensored literature found its way to the West, where it was published; this written material was then returned to the Soviet Union and disseminated unofficially. Tamizdat (.samizdat published abroad) was born.

In the Sinyavsky—Daniel trial two forms of free literature were being attacked: on the one hand, the defendants had evaded the confines of the censorship, and, on the other, they had sent their manuscripts abroad to be published. Even worse was the fact that the authors had used pseud­onyms. The harsh verdicts against them were a warning to all other samizdat and tamizdat authors, as well as an indisputable victory for the pro-Stalinist wing of the party. In fact, here and there, voices praising Stalin could be heard.¹⁴

The Stalinists were actively preparing themselves for a battle at the Twenty-third Party Congress. For example, one week before the opening session four "seditious" plays being performed at Moscow theaters were banned. Also the name of Tvardovsky, the chief editor of the magazine Novy mir, was crossed off the list of candidates to be elected delegates from the Moscow party organization to the congress.¹⁵

The threat of official rehabilitation of Stalin briefly solidified the ranks of the incipient and still amorphous opposition among the intelligentsia. The sentencing of Daniel and Sinyavsky, while sowing confusion and dis­array among the "progressives," also sparked a resistance on their part. Sixty-three members of the Writers' Union, soon joined by an additional 200 intellectuals, addressed a letter to the Twenty-third Party Congress and the presidia of both the RSFSR and USSR supreme soviets (each of the latter two possessing the authority to grant a pardon). This letter re­quested the release of Sinyavsky and Daniel, with the intellectuals' guar­antee of their good behavior.¹⁶

Academician Aksel Berg, one of the foremost Soviet experts on cyber­netics, having learned of the plan for Stalin's rehabilitation, announced that if it were to happen, he would resign from the USSR Academy of Sciences in protest.¹⁷

This period witnessed the birth of a new Russian word, podpisant (signer), referring to those who agreed to express their opinions publicly on govern­ment actions. This neologism was subsequently followed by others: inakomy- slyashchy (one who thinks differently), and dissident. The "signers" operated within the strict limits of Soviet legality and demanded only that the laws be observed. In the letter by the sixty-three writers, the request for the release of the condemned writers was based on the following arguments: "Our country's interests demand it. The interests of peace demand it. The interests of the international Communist movement demand it."¹⁸

These protests brought on renewed repression. In 1966—1967 political trials were staged all over the country, in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Lvov, Gorky, Riga, Tashkent, and Omsk. The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel was met by protests in the West, where no one wanted to believe in the immutable nature of the Soviet system. Pravdds reply was clear and to the point:

The campaign of unprecedented scope orchestrated in the West in defense of the two literary saboteurs has misled some honest individuals. Evidently, lacking adequate information and taking the word of the bourgeois press, which shamelessly compares Sinyavsky and Daniel to Gogol and Dostoevsky and pretends that during the trial questions of literature and artistic freedom were discussed, some progressive people have expressed their concern.¹⁹

To the Soviet intelligentsia, the Sinyavsky—Daniel trial seemed to threaten a return to Stalinism. Their protests were explicitly nonoppositional in character; the "signers" did not want to be seen as an opposition faction and did not consider themselves as such. On December 5, 1965, on the anniversary of the Stalin constitution, nearly a hundred people demonstrated on Pushkin Square, asking that the constitution be respected. All these collective protests stressed the appeal to legality.

For the Soviet leaders this call to respect the law constituted open opposition and threatened the system. To demand that the law be placed between citizen and state and that it be made binding for both was viewed as a crime punishable with a term in labor camp. A spiral of chain reactions began. Trials sparked protests, which in turn led to more arrests and more protests. Aleksandr Ginzburg, who in 1960 had founded one of the first samizdat magazines (Syntax), was arrested in 1967. He had compiled a white paper on the Sinyavsky—Daniel trial. Pavel Litvinov, a grandson of Maxim Litvinov, for his part published The Trial of the Four, a compilation of all documents relating to the trial of Ginzburg and his friend Yuri Galanskov, founder of the samizdat magazine Phoenix. Both were sentenced to seven years in the camps; in 1968, Litvinov was sentenced to five years in internal exile.

The movement that formed after the fall of Khrushchev called itself democratic. Andrei Amalrik, one of its participants, and the first to analyze it, pointed out that the democratic movement consisted of representatives of three ideological currents that took shape in the post-Stalin period: "genuine Marxism-Leninism," "liberal ideology," and "Christian ideol- ogy."²⁰ The program of the first tendency started from the assumption that Stalin had deformed Marxist-Leninist ideology and that a return to orthodoxy would allow a thorough cleansing of society. The second tendency suggested that the gradual transition toward a Western-style democracy was possible, while still maintaining the principles of socialized state property. The third tendency advocated traditional Christian moral and spiritual values as the foundation of social life and, following the Slavophile tradition, stressed Russia's unique character. Each of these tendencies became identified with a prominent personality. Andrei Sakharov personified the democratic-minded liberal opposition; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn became the symbol of "Christian ideology"; and Roy and Zhores Medvedev became the best-known exponents of "authentic Marxism-Leninism."

In 1968 Amalrik noted, "The number of supporters of the movement is almost as indeterminable as its aim. They amount to several dozen active participants and several hundred who sympathize with the movement and are prepared to lend it their support."²¹ Given the impossibility of providing exact figures on the number of participants, Amalrik attempted to analyze the movement's social composition. Among the 738 signers of collective and individual letters protesting the trial of Galanskov and Ginzburg, 45 percent were scientists, 22 percent artists, 13 percent engineers and tech­nicians, 9 percent editors, doctors, or lawyers, 6 percent workers, and 5 percent students. Amalrik estimates that from 1966 to 1969 more than a thousand individuals signed various declarations and letters calling for observance of the law.²²

The protests against arbitrariness, against trials that violated the law and the defense of human rights, nurtured social consciousness and awakened civic sentiments that had been subject to ruthless eradication for long decades. The protests also undermined the state monopoly on secrecy and publicized its repressive activities. The Chronicle of Current Events, which began publication in 1968, played an important role in this. Remaining strictly within the limits of legality, it reported on all violations of the law carried out by the organs of the state. The influence of "genuine Marxist- Leninist" ideology showed in the proliferation of the conviction that the democratic movement's principal goal was to prevent the rehabilitation of Stalin and a return to Stalinism.

The absence of any profound theoretical study of Soviet society and the Soviet system led people to believe that the replacement of mass terror with selective terror was in itself an advance, one that had to be maintained and defended. The fear of a rebirth of Stalinism was so great that the existing regime seemed soft, liberal, and weak by comparison. In 1969 Amalrik reached the conclusion that the regime was "not on the attack but on the defensive. Its motto is, 'Don't touch us and we won't touch you.'" But Amalrik had been mistaken. This defensive posture was only tempo­rary.²³

During the second half of the 1950s and during the 1960s, for the first time in long decades, the Soviet system encountered the phenomenon of internal opposition. Yet this was no true opposition, but rather one still in its embryonic stages. The very appearance of Soviet citizens questioning the functioning of the regime, however, evoked fear in the authorities. The loyal request that the law be respected not only appeared to be an en­croachment on the foundations of the Soviet state; this is in fact what it was, for it revealed the law to be a fiction and exposed the reality hidden behind the illusion of words.

Repression did not stop after the death of Stalin; it merely assumed a different character and was reduced in scale. The "liberal" Khrushchev, who had emptied out Stalin's camps, very rapidly began to fill them up again, adding a new weapon to the repressive arsenal: the psychiatric hospital, as a place of confinement for those holding different views. The best illustration of Khrushchev's policies was the arrest of young people at

Mayakovsky Square (among them Calanskov, Bukovsky, and Eduard Kuz­netsov) in October 1961, three days before the Twenty-second Party Con­gress, where Stalin's crimes were openly denounced. The Congress voted to remove Stalin's body from the Mausoleum, but his spirit presided over the arrests conducted at the same time.

The monstrousness of Stalin's crimes went beyond anything one could imagine and gave birth to the idea that mass terror was the essential feature of the Stalinist system. The possibility of getting along without mass terror and without altering the foundations of the Stalinist socialist state was demonstrated during Khrushchev's years. Khrushchev also showed that terror could be focused. Through the force of inertia Stalinist terror had spread mercilessly to all segments of society, stopping only at the feet of the Great Helmsman; Khrushchev made it stop at the doors of the Central Committee.

As Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov has written,

From the moment when Khrushchev liquidated the "antiparty" grouping of Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich, he committed a fatal error in the system, an error that in the last analysis determined his own fall: he left at large the actors of the first plot against him. If he had physically liquidated the 1957 plotters, the 1964 coup would never have taken place. The October plotters knew very well that, if they failed, what awaited them was a pension, not a bullet.²⁴

The terror had not been given up; it merely became more selective. Its nature had not changed, though its appearance was transformed. The fact that terror could be applied selectively bore witness to the stability of the regime; it further evidenced that the mass terror of the Lenin and Stalin eras had been successful. Mass terror had permitted the destruction of the opposition, change in the composition of society, and the creation of a state—a state based on fear. Since Stalin's death, total, outright terror had become undesirable and dangerous for the nomenklatura. It is only in comparison with Stalinist repression that the terror in the Khrushchev era, and later in Brezhnev's, seemed mild, insignificant, liberal. The terms of five and seven years in the camps to which Daniel and Sinyavsky were sentenced for publishing literary works abroad would have evoked outrage had they been pronounced on writers of any capitalist country. In com­parison with Stalin's times, such terms seemed like an act of charity. At the Twenty-third Party Congress, Nobel laureate Mikhail Sholokhov re­membered with nostalgia the days when "people were tried without having to rely on particular articles in the penal code, but guided by the instinct of the revolutionary concept of justice," a time when the "werewolves"

Sinyavsky and Daniel would undoubtedly have been shot. Any sentence seemed milder than the death penalty. For this reason the Brezhnev era seems pale when compared to that of Stalin. This would be true as long as the Stalinist terror was used as a measure, as it continued to be by the Soviet leaders, who believed that in not executing people with dissenting views they were demonstrating their leniency. It was also the norm for participants in the democratic movement, who uneasily anticipated a re­habilitation of Stalin, followed in turn by the appearance of a new Stalin.

Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the most visible and representative activists, made a distinction between two currents within the growing movement: the "clandestine" and the "overt" oppositions. Bukovsky saw in the two forms an expression of two different psychologies, of "two different ways of life: one, secret, underground, and dichotomous; the other open, directed with regard to the law, and actively defending civil rights."²⁵ He recalled that "all through the 1950s and 1960s organizations, unions, groups, even parties of the most varied shades were growing like mushrooms in all walks of life."²⁶ Some of them, predominantly in Leningrad, were conspiratorial and attempted to operate clandestinely.

As Bukovsky aptly remarked, the "underground" organizations, many of which had only a handful of members, were attempting to "repeat the history of the CPSU." The history of the "underground movement" of the time is vivid proof of the force exerted by a myth invented by the CPSU, a force that still affected those who no longer believed in the myth. These "clandestine militants" were trying to create an organization which, by distributing literature, would win recruits of like views and then go on to achieve its objectives. The myth that the Bolshevik party had made the revolution through these methods had been believed even by the Bolsheviks themselves.

Clandestine organizations were persecuted with particular brutality, with­out regard to their programs, ranging from Kolokol, the organization of underground Marxists (tried in 1965) to the clandestine "social Christians" (tried in 1967—68). The latter group—the All-Russia Social Christian Union for the Liberation of the People (Russian initials, VSKhSON)—was founded in February 1964 by four graduates of Leningrad University. The organi­zation survived for three years. The VSKhSON had twenty-eight members (and thirty others who were ready to join).²⁷ Thus it was the largest of all the clandestine organizations discovered by the police. Based on Berdyaev's "Russian idea," its program rejected the Soviet regime, seeing it as a "variety of state monopoly capitalism," from an economic point of view, and "an extreme totalitarianism, degenerating into despotism," from a po­litical point of view. Rejecting the Communist system and criticizing all of the shortcomings of capitalism, it proposed a "theocratic, social, repre­sentative, and popular" state.²⁸

For members of the union, this program, which linked personalism, corporatism, and Christian socialism, was seen as a long-term objective. On the more immediate and practical level, its goals were self-education and the numerical growth of the organization. But the program contained one clause that allowed the KGB to cast the organization as a terrorist group. "The liberation of all peoples from the Communist yoke can only be achieved by armed struggle. To achieve total victory, it is essential that the people have their own clandestine liberation army, which will overthrow the dictatorship and smash the oligarchy's security detachments."²⁹

The history of the VSKhSON is a clear example of the thinking of the "underground" groups that were inspired by Bolshevik mythology. The organization had been structured like an actual Communist party, with a "leader," an "ideological section director," and an "archivist." Its leader, Igor Ogurtsov, was condemned to fifteen years, of which seven were in the notoriously harsh Vladimir prison. The government, frightened by this clandestine organization that had managed to survive unnoticed for three years, mercilessly repressed these "terrorists," whose sole weapon was a rusty old handgun.

The clandestine character of the VSKhSON, and the fact that its trial took place behind closed doors, meant that the organization's program and activity remained virtually unknown for years.

A particularly significant event in Soviet life was Solzhenitsyn's letter to the Fourth Congress of the Writer's Union in May 1967. None of the 300 delegates who received it read it from the podium. But eighty writers, later joined by nine others, demanded that the problems raised by Solzhenitsyn be discussed. The author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich spoke out against the censorship:

Under the obfuscating label of Glavlit, this censorship—which is not pro­vided for in the [Soviet] constitution and is therefore illegal, and which is nowhere publicly labeled as censorship—imposes a yoke on our literature and gives people unversed in literature arbitrary control over writers. A survival of the Middle Ages, the censorship has managed, Methuselah-like, to drag out its existence almost to the twenty-first century.³⁰

Cautiously, in a veiled manner, Solzhenitsyn suggested that censorship was fundamental to the Soviet system, which feeds on lies and forbids the truth. Three years later, in 1970, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he would express the same idea in a formula more like an epitaph. "One word of truth will outweigh the whole world."³¹

THE PRAGUE SPRING

Although not read at the writers' congress in Moscow in 1967, Solzhenitsyn's letter was read at the writers' congress in Prague the same year and approved by the overwhelming majority of the Czech and Slovak delegates.

The Prague Spring, as the events of 1967—68 in Czechoslovakia came to be known, has many features resembling those of the Hungarian events of 1956. A similar process had occurred in Poland in 1956 and 1968.³² The dissent which had grown throughout the population found its expression above all among the intellectuals: writers became the spokesmen for the feelings and demands of the population; the reform programs put forward found supporters among rank-and-file party members and even among the leaderships; leaders appeared, who promised to eliminate all defects in communism, retaining the system: they promised "socialism with a human face."

The events of 1956 and 1968 showed that latent discontent in the socialist countries could lead to mass rebellions at times when power was weakened in the central metropolis, the Soviet Union. Stalin's death and the Twentieth Party Congress were the signal for the Polish October and the Hungarian revolution. The removal of Khrushchev and the rise of oppositionist attitudes in the Soviet Union helped unleash the Prague Spring and the 1968 events in Poland.

The birth of an opposition movement in the Soviet Union in the years 1964—1968 and the emergence of an embryonic public opinion were ac­companied by rising nationalist feelings in the non-Russian Soviet repub­lics. The government's nationalities policy of the time was ambiguous. The year 1967 marks the high point in the struggles of the peoples deported during the war; they were rehabilitated and everything seemed to be re­turning to normal. The Crimean Tatars, however, were not allowed to return to their homeland, nor were the Georgian Muslims (the Meskhetians) or the Volga Germans.

In the middle of the 1960s nationalist movements reappeared in the Ukraine, Lithuania, and the Transcaucasus.

In 1965 the Ukraine suffered a wave of arrests. The main target was the intelligentsia, particularly those of the younger generation. Ivan Dzyuba, a literary critic, addressed a long memorandum entitled "Internationalism or Russification?" to Petr Shelest, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist party and Vladimir Shcherbitsky, the chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers. Dzyuba explained the reasons behind the unrest on the part of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and especially protested against "Russification," which he saw as a threat to the existence of the

Ukrainian people. He accused the Ukrainian government of violating "Len­inist principles of nationalities policy and nation-building."³³

In 1965 Vyacheslav Chornovil, a successful Ukrainian journalist of the younger generation, was summoned as a witness at the trial of another writer, Mikola Osadchy, arrested because of an uncensored book he had written; Belmo (Eyesore), describing life in the prison camps. Chornovil protested the violations of Soviet law at the trial and afterward addressed a complaint about the persecution of the Ukrainian intelligentsia to the prosecutor of the republic. He was arrested.³⁴ The history teacher Valentyn Moroz met a similar fate in 1965 because of his emphatic protests against Russiflcation. The fate of these engineers of the Ukrainian nationalist movement during the mid-1960s paralleled that of the movement as a whole. After their first arrests they were sentenced again to terms in the camps. In 1980 Chornovil and Osadchy were serving new sentences. In 1979, after thirteen years of imprisonment, Moroz was exchanged, along with Aleksandr Ginzburg, Eduard Kuznetsov, and Petr Vins, for two Soviet spies who had been arrested in the United States. Dzyuba, sentenced in 1973 to five years in the camps, recanted first in the newspaper Literaturna Ukraina, and then in the book Facets of the Crystal. He renounced his earlier views and expressed regret that they had been "seized upon by hostile, bourgeois nationalist propaganda abroad."³⁵

In Lithuania the opposition during the 1960s was inseparably linked to resistance to the persecution of the Catholic church. Even according to official figures, no less than half the population of the republic consists of Lithuanians who are practicing Catholics. During the second half of the 1960s, the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet issued several decrees seeking to prevent young people from going to church. Since 1968 dozens of petitions protesting religious persecution have been directed to government agencies. The trial of two priests accused of teaching the catechism to children sparked a street demonstration.

Following the example of the Russian-language Chronicle of Current Events, which began to circulate unofficially in 1968, a similar Ukrainian- language journal, the Ukrainian Herald, appeared in 1970, and in 1972 the Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church, in Lithuanian. Thus an uncensored press emerged in samizdat, with the sole aim of recording and making known all instances of repression. This tended to undermine one of the pillars of the Soviet system, the secrecy which allowed the government to commit its crimes with impunity. At the same time this type of information was essential for the existence of an independent public opinion.

In January 1968 a political crisis in Czechoslovakia, caused by a number of economic, social, and national factors, led to the replacement of the old

Stalinist Antonin Novotny by the forty-six-year-old Alexander Dub6ek as first secretary of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist party. A graduate of the Higher Party School in Moscow and son of a Communist who had gone to the Soviet Union before World War II to help "build socialism," Alexander Dub6ek seemed to the Soviet leaders, who were on familiar terms with him, a reliable guarantor of stability in Czech­oslovakia.

The activities of DubЈek and his followers between January and August 1968—following the pattern of Poland, Hungary, and Khrushchev's USSR— added up to one more attempt to improve and reform the system without touching its foundations. As in all other instances, the introduction of reforms began in the wake of personnel changes in the party leadership. By the mere force of inertia, the struggle for power, combined with obviously critical problems in the country and the opportunity on the part of the new leadership to blame all the failures on its predecessors, steadily escalated to the point where the reforms threatened the foundations of the regime. Nikita Khrushchev perfectly expressed the feelings of a Communist leader who is forced to grant some reforms: 'The leadership was consciously moving toward a relaxation, and just as consciously it feared a thaw. It could turn into a flood, which would threaten us and be difficult to surmount. At the time we feared that the leadership would not be able to meet its tasks, and keep all this within Soviet channels." As usual, Khrushchev concluded his thoughts with a popular saying: "You want it so badly, but Mama says no."³⁶

In each of the socialist countries undergoing crisis, the system set the limits at different points. In Hungary, the reasons for the invasion were the establishment of workers councils and the demands for withdrawal of Soviet troops. Khrushchev sealed his own fate by splitting the party in two. In Czechoslovakia, the limit of tolerable reforms was reached with the abolition of censorship. On July 14, 1968, at the meeting of Communist parties convened in Warsaw, Gomulka demanded an end to the "Czechoslovak experiment." His argument: 'The lifting of censorship means that the party is refusing to exert the slightest influence on the country's general evolu­tion."³⁷ For Gomulka, who was supported by all present at the meeting, the lifting of censorship was equivalent to an abdication of power. The Soviet press declared the abolition of censorship to be a counterrevolution which, after "seizing the mass media would demoralize the country's pop­ulation and poison the consciousness of the workers with the venom of antisocialist ideas."³⁸

Gomulka's interpreter, who had accompanied him at the Warsaw meeting, tells of the fear of "the venom of antisocialist ideas" which resounded in all the speeches of all the Communist leaders. "We are dealing with a counterrevolution, with an enemy who does not shoot," Gomulka explained to those present. "If they were shooting at us, things would be a lot simpler for us, because then we could react in a totally different manner."³⁹

Alexander Dub6ek and his supporters tried their best to convince the representatives of the "fraternal countries" of their ability to implement successfully all reforms, reforms which would bring the crisis to an end, leaving the foundations of socialism untouched. A series of meetings be­tween the Czechoslovak reformers and the leaders of their fraternal countries did not produce any results. Nevertheless, Joseph Smrkovsky, one of the people who had inspired the Prague Spring, an ardent supporter of "so­cialism with a human face," Politburo member, and president of the Czech­oslovak parliament in 1968, wrote a letter to Brezhnev in 1973 asserting that his "socialist ideas had not changed" and that he "would gladly follow the Soviet policy of detente."⁴⁰ Thus, five years after the intervention by Warsaw Pact troops in Prague, Smrkovsky still believed that Brezhnev might follow his advice and "begin talks between representatives of the USSR, the politicians of 1968 and the current political leaders," to make Czech­oslovakia "a reliable ally of the USSR."⁴¹ Until his death in February 1974, Smrkovsky believed that "in the coming months we can expect some sort of concrete measures."⁴² Thus, to the end of his life, Smrkovsky kept his illusions regarding Soviet intentions and the struggle between "hawks and doves" in the Soviet Politburo.

It was upon these same illusions that DubЈek and his supporters built their policies in the summer of 1968. Materials relating to the negotiations between Soviet and Czechoslovak leaders and to the conferences of the "fraternal countries" that have come to light indicate that the decision to intervene was made following the June publication of an appeal to the people known as the Two Thousand Words. The manifesto, signed by tens of thousands of Czechoslovaks, noted that "the apparatus of power has escaped from the hands of the people," that the Czechoslovak Communist party "from being a political party and an organization of ideas, has become an organ of power, and a magnet for the ambitious and the greedy, the lazy, and those whose consciences are not clear."⁴³

Following publication of the manifesto, the question of intervention was reduced to a question of tactics. Among the leaders of socialist countries were some who advocated an immediate intervention: Gomulka, Ulbricht, and Zhivkov. Kadar, on the other hand, preferred to wait. All, however, agreed to intervention in principle. Likewise, inside the Politburo of the CPSU, as far as can be established, only the timetable of the invasion was at issue. Czechoslovakia's neighbor, first secretary of the Ukrainian Com­munist party Shelest, demanded the immediate elimination of the "Prague Spring," which threatened to spread the "poison of antisocialist ideas" to the Ukrainians. Brezhnev, who was still consolidating his power at the time, was prepared to wait.

Having learned the lessons of the Hungarian experience, the Soviet leaders decided to intervene in Czechoslovakia using the forces of all Eastern European socialist states. Tito and Ceaussescu asserted their sup­port for DubЈek's policies, and Romania refused to join the expeditionary corps.

During the night of August 20—21, 1968, Soviet military aircraft dropped paratroopers on the Prague airport. Military forces from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria drove into Czechoslovak territory. Some troops were there already, taking part in "maneuvers." Czechoslovak Politburo members were seized and delivered to Moscow, in handcuffs. The Czechoslovak leaders could not withstand the pressure of the CPSU Politburo and with the exception of FrantiSek Kriegel, signed an agreement with the Soviet Union regarding the stationing of troops on Czechoslovakian territory. They also pledged to reimpose censorship and nullify all the reforms that were giving socialism a "human face."

Thirty years before, in 1938, the Czechoslovak president, democrat Gakha, in tears, had signed an accord forced on him by Hitler under which his country was annexed to the Third Reich. The Nazis had shattered his will. In 1968, the Soviet Communists shattered the will of the Czechoslovak Communists who, in trying to reform their socialist system, had breached the discipline required of all Communists.

"All we wish to do," Dub6ek once said, "is create a socialism that has not lost its human character."⁴⁴ This was the utmost in sedition, a direct accusation hurled in the face of real Soviet socialism. The new Czechoslovak leaders set to the task of "normalizing" the country: all expressions of discontent were suppressed with harsh repression.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia was not a fortuitous act by "hawks" imposed on "doves" in the Soviet Politburo. It was the expression of the principles of Soviet "proletarian internationalism" and of Soviet foreign policy, upon which Lenin had laid the foundations of the socialist state. The invasion of Poland in 1920 and the installation of Soviet governments in Transcaucasia in 1920—1921, all of which Lenin engineered, were the first applications of these principles. If the Soviet state did not always apply them, this was because it was too weak.

Leninist principles were recalled, after the intervention in Czechoslo­vakia, in a Pravda article which gave a clear and unambiguous theoretical justification for the invasion of Czechoslovakia: "Every Communist party is responsible not only to its people, but also to all socialist countries and to the world Communist movement. ... A socialist state forms part of the socialist community and cannot ignore the overall interests of this com­munity." Proceeding from general principles to the concrete example of Czechoslovakia, Pravda noted, "Communists in the fraternal countries could not allow themselves to remain inactive in the name of an abstract principle of sovereignty while watching one of their number fall into the process of antisocialist degeneration." Pravda concluded: "Those who speak of the action of the allied socialist nations in Czechoslovakia in terms of Violations of rights' forget that in class society there is not and there has never been a classless law. Laws and legal procedures obey the class struggle, the laws of social development. ... Formal legal considerations should not lose the class point of view."⁴⁵

Since the socialist countries are classless societies, such considerations as "class rights," "class morality," "formal rights," and "abstract sover­eignty" could only have relevance on the planetary scale. This "class struggle" was that of real socialism against capitalism. On the eve of the entry of armies from the fraternal countries into Czechoslovakia, Pravda solemnly declared: "Marxist-Leninists cannot be, and never will be, in­different to the fate of socialist construction in other nations, the common Communist cause on this earth." The article was entitled 'The Front of Uncompromising Struggle."⁴⁶

Western journalists termed the principles put forward in Pravda the "Brezhnev doctrine." This is one more example of their ignorance of Soviet history. On September 2, 1920, after the fall of Bukhara, the commander of the Red Army units that were implanting a Soviet government in Central Asia sent a telegram to Lenin with the following message, 'The last bastion of Bukharan obscurantism... has fallen. The red banner of world revolution flies victoriously over the Registan."⁴⁷ In 1948 the commander of the troops occupying Czechoslovakia could have written Lenin's heirs that the "red banner of world revolution" had advanced to the West.

The crushing of the Hungarian revolution by Soviet troops had shocked

many Soviet young people. Vladimir Bukovsky recalled in his memoirs the tragedy of his generation.

After the tanks with the red star, dream and pride of our childhood, had crushed our peers in the streets of Budapest, everything we saw was stained with blood. The entire world had betrayed us, and we no longer believed anyone. Our parents turned out to have been agents and informers, our military leaders were butchers, and even the games and fantasies of our childhood seemed to be tainted with fraud.⁴⁸

Twelve years later a significant part of the population accepted the invasion in Czechoslovakia as necessary and just. Soviet propaganda put forward as its main justification the alleged threat posed by West Germany to Czechoslovakia and consequently to all the socialist countries. The Soviet propaganda machine succeeded in executing a masterwork of disinforma­tion. The broad coalition government in West Germany, in which the Social Democrat Willy Brandt was foreign minister and vice-chancellor and which had just come to power in the FRG shortly before the events in Czecho­slovakia, was portrayed as a direct successor to Hitler. Bitter memories of the war were utilized to justify Soviet actions. The propaganda machine also availed itself of the feeling diligently nurtured in the Soviet people that the world should be grateful to the Soviet Union for the sacrifices it had suffered in the process of constructing socialism, during the war with Nazi Germany, and for the assistance it had rendered, was now providing, and would continue to give to the "fraternal countries." The press harped incessantly on the "ingratitude" of the Czechs and Slovaks, who had sup­posedly forgotten who had liberated them in 1945. And this argument struck a chord in many Soviet citizens.

But the Soviet government could not completely crush the element of independent public opinion that had emerged. Voices of protest made themselves heard at meetings and gatherings organized to gain approval for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Newspapers received letters along the same lines. On August 25, 1968, the student Tatyana Baeva, the linguist Konstantin Babitsky, the philologist Larisa Bogoraz, the poet Vadim Delone, the worker Vladimir Dremlyuga, the physicist Pavel Litvinov, the poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya, and the art critic Viktor Fainberg appeared at Red Square. Gorbanevskaya was carrying her three-month-old baby. The dem­onstrators unfurled banners with the inscriptions "Long live free and in­dependent Czechoslovakia," "Shame on occupiers," "Hands off the CSSR," and "For your freedom and for ours."⁴⁹ Immediately arrested by the KGB, the demonstrators were tried and sentenced to long terms. Ninety-five persons prominent in Soviet culture addressed a protest letter to the Su­preme Soviet of the USSR.

In the summer of 1968, at the time when the Soviet government was preparing to crush the Prague Spring, the voice of Andrei Sakharov rang out. His book, Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, appeared in samizdat. His program was based on the concept of conver­gence: socialism and capitalism would merge as each lost its negative aspects in the process. Very rapidly Sakharov reached the conclusion that the socialist system rejected the idea of convergence, which it viewed as a deadly peril to its existence. His main field of activity became the struggle in defense of human rights. In 1970, with two other physicists, Andrei Tverdokhlebov and Valery Chalidze, he founded the Human Rights Com­mittee. Despite the committee's overt character and its adherence to Soviet law, it was subjected to harsh persecution. The voice of Sakharov, however, could not be stilled.

Solzhenitsyn explained the importance of the "Sakharov phenomenon" this way:

When Lenin conceived and initiated, and Stalin developed and made safe, their brilliant scheme for a totalitarian state, they thought of everything, did everything to ensure that the system would stand firm to all eternity, changing only when the leader waved his wand. ... They foresaw all eventualities but one—a miracle, an irrational manifestation whose cause could not be an­ticipated, predicted, and thwarted.... Just such a miracle was the appear­ance of Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov in the Soviet state, amid the throngs of bribed, corrupt, unprincipled technical intelligentsia, and what is more, in one of their most important, most secret, and most lavishly favored nests— in the vicinity of the hydrogen bomb.⁵⁰

The appearance of Solzhenitsyn was a similar miracle. After fifty years of existence of the totalitarian Soviet state, where all efforts had been invested in the creation of a new man, Homo Sovieticus, the appearance of a Solzhenitsyn, of a Sakharov, and of the demonstrators at Red Square protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and of the "sign­ers" demanding freedom for Sinyavsky and Daniel, as well as the emergence of samizdat and the formation of semilegal and illegal groups, all bore witness to the extraordinary force of the human spirit.

With very few exceptions, these "dissidents" (as all those who questioned the divine wisdom of the state were soon labeled) did not constitute an organized opposition, armed with a program and a plan of action. They simply demanded that the state respect both its own laws and civil rights, including national and religious rights. The dissidents were few in number, an indication of the extreme difficulty of casting off the fear in which Soviet citizens had been steeped over the last half century. The appearance of dissidents showed that such actions were possible, that the state was not omnipotent. Attitudes toward the dissidents on the part of the general population varied. Some viewed them with hatred; others feared them; still others sympathized with them. Dissident activity made some educated people of liberal inclination uncomfortable. They themselves led a dual existence: on the one hand, Soviet reality oppressed them; on the other, their material circumstances were far from bad by Soviet standards: they had apartments, stable salaries, perhaps a car and a country house (dacha). They feared for their children's future and their own. They disagreed with the government on many issues but choose "not to get involved," well aware of what getting involved might cost them. What's more, their "opposition" was only skin deep. These liberals were ready to give financial aid to dissidents secretly or give clothing to the families of those who had been arrested, willing secretly to read samizdat writings and listen to foreign broadcasts in Russian. (They preferred the BBC to Radio Liberty; the former's moderation was to their liking.) Seeking to justify their position, which largely coincided with that of the government (they always voted "yes"), these liberals developed a justification, the "theory" of Galileo and Giordano Bruno. Galileo renounced his ideas under the threat of torture by the Inquisition and lived; Bruno defended his and died. Before his death, Galileo exclaimed, "Eppur, si muove" ("And still it moves"), thus showing that in publicly renouncing his views he was only submitting to violence. The liberals preferred Galileo's way, even though they were not being tortured, and they tried to inculate this, their own caution, into their children, turning them into cynics, conformists, and pragmatists.

DETENTE

The invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops was regarded in the West as a normal measure aimed at restoring order in this part of the Soviet bloc. President Johnson said on September 10, 1968, three weeks after the invasion "We hope—and we shall strive—to make this setback a temporary one."⁵¹ Echoing Johnson's tactfulness, the French foreign min­ister, Michel Debre, called the invasion an "unpleasant incident along the road." West German Foreign Minister Willy Brandt met with Gromyko in New York several weeks after the incident. Gromyko declared that the negotiations on an agreement to refrain from the use of force which had already been begun would be extended. "What could we do?" sighed Helmut Allard, the German ambassador to Moscow. "In the USA, Richard Nixon was in more of a hurry to forget the episode than Georges Pompi­dou."⁵² Henry Kissinger, who was in charge of U.S. foreign policy, cited in his memoirs a myriad of reasons for the haste with which the West, forgetting Czechoslovakia, returned to the policy of "international detente." He said that the Western European governments pressured the United States, insisting on an agreement with the Soviet Union. Among other reasons, Kissinger mentions the hope that the Soviet Union would help the

United States find a way out of the Vietnam war, and pressure from business circles, who had not ceased to hope for the magical "Soviet market," and from Soviet experts like Averell Harriman, Llewellyn Thompson, George Kennan, and Charles Bohlen, who wanted the Russian proposals for a "relaxation of tensions" accepted as quickly as possible "lest the balance of forces within the Kremlin shift again to a hard line."⁵³

The lack of understanding of Soviet policy on the part of Westerners is best seen in their definition of terms. "Detente," in the West, really means "a relaxation of tensions." However, the Soviet Short Political Dictionary, the party's propaganda encyclopedia, states that "detente" (razryadka, in Russian) is the "steady strengthening of the position of the countries of the socialist camp" and a defeat for the "imperialist forces."⁵⁴

Detente was thus another name for a policy whose basics had been envisioned in Lenin's time: "Once we are strong enough to defeat impe­rialism as a whole, we will immediately grab it by the scruff of its neck." Using that time a subjunctive mood, Lenin expressed his hope of grabbing imperialism by the neck, but at the same time stated that this objective was impossible at the moment. As long as it was impossible, Lenin thought temporary agreements must be sought, for an "agreement is a method for gathering forces."⁵⁵ At the birth of Soviet power, the Seventh (Extraordinary) Party Congress arrived at a decision that became a central principle of Soviet foreign policy. "The congress especially underscores that it empowers the Central Committee to break at any time peace agreements with impe­rialist and bourgeois states, and to declare war upon them if necessary."⁵⁶ The period of disarray following Stalin's death, which was aggravated by the deep economic crisis that arose in the midst of the struggle for power, forced the new leadership to abandon cold war policies. The resolution of the Twentieth Party Congress stated that the "general line of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union has been and remains the Leninist principle of peaceful coexistence with states of differing social systems."⁵⁷ Following Khrushchev's fall the foreign policy of the Soviet Union changed its name but not its substance. At the first post-Khrushchev assembly, in 1966, at the Twenty-third Party Congress, Brezhnev declared, "The Soviet Union considers the coexistence of states a form of the class struggle between socialism and capitalism."⁵⁸ At the Twenty-fourth Party Congress, in 1971, during the honeymoon of detente, Brezhnev praised the victories of the international Communist movement, spoke of the "unwaning ideological struggle," and stressed that "total victory for the socialist cause in the entire world is inevitable. And we will not spare efforts to achieve that triumph."⁵⁹ The Short Political Dictionary explains in language clear to every party member,

In the conditions of detente the ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism does not diminish but becomes more complex, taking on the most varied forms. Detente creates favorable conditions for the wide dissemination of the appeal of communist ideology and socialist values; it facilitates the development of an offensive ideological struggle within the framework of peaceful coexistence between states with differing social systems.⁶⁰

"Peaceful coexistence" or "detente" was, according to one of Lenin's favorite expressions (reversing the famous saying by Clausewitz), the con­tinuation of war by other means. The West considered detente as an op­portunity to obtain a "lasting peace [which] depended on the settlement of the political issues that were dividing the two nuclear superpowers."⁶¹ In Soviet political jargon, "lasting peace" only exists in the sense used by Stalin, when he named the journal of the postwar international Communist movement For Lasting Peace, for People's Democracy. Thus, "lasting peace" is conceived of merely as a step toward "people's democracy."

The West's strong desire for detente stemmed above all from its extraor­dinary economic growth. The "consumer society" wanted to consume more than ever and was afraid of losing its prosperity. Never before had such a high standard of living been accessible to such broad segments of a pop­ulation. The concessions indispensable for reaching an agreement with the Soviet Union seemed a small price to pay for detente and "lasting peace." Another cause for the West's aspiration for detente was the sharply weakened position of the United States in the world resulting from the catastrophic war in Vietnam. This war, the first in history to take place before television cameras, was at the same time a classic example of an attempt to win an ideological war by military means.

The Soviet policy of detente was mainly inspired by the need for a "breathing spell." In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Soviet Union was suffering another crisis, a political crisis. "In 1968," wrote Bukovsky, "[this crisis] reached its peak. Just a bit more, it seemed, and the authorities would be driven back, abandoning their self-destructive rigidity. Entire nationalities threatened to rise in revolt, challenging the very existence of the last colonial empire."⁶²

There was also an economic crisis: in the late 1960s economic growth had decreased sharply, even according to official figures. It became obvious that the extensive period of growth, made possible by major reserves of labor, had come to an end. The thoroughgoing economic reform solemnly proclaimed after the replacement of Khrushchev remained purely on paper. It was impossible to modify the Soviet economic system by firing part of the labor force and the broad introduction of new technology. Soviet citi­zens—workers, engineers, and technical managerial leaders—were told that economic reform would require independence, individual initiative, and brave decisions. Simultaneously it was underscored that all such ac­tivity could be undertaken only on the directions of the central agencies and under the control of the party.

Complaining about the economic problems, Brezhnev said at a plenum of the Central Committee, "Comrades, the question we face is, How will we explain this inability to rid ourselves of these bottlenecks that hinder us from advancing even faster?"⁶³ But Stalin had already found the formula to straighten out such problems. "Night was Stalin's most fruitful time. His mistrustful mind unwound slowly in the morning. With his gloomy morning mind he would remove people from their positions, cut back expenditures, order two or three ministries consolidated into one. With his sharp and supple nighttime mind he would decide how to dissolve ministries, divide them up, and what to call the new ones."⁶⁴ Brezhnev followed this pre­scription in his own way.

The cause of the Soviet economic crisis was not the bureaucratic ap­paratus but rather the party's ideological control. The party led and con­trolled everything; any manifestation of independent initiative was seen as a challenge to its authority, a blow against the official ideology.

In this chronic crisis, agriculture was the most backward sector. Aban­doning Khrushchev's proposed panaceas for agriculture (maize, expansion into arid zones), Brezhnev's administration found other magic formulas, mainly heavy investment and the use of chemicals. The bad harvest of 1963 blamed on Khrushchev was followed by those of 1965, 1967, and 1972, and the most serious, 1975. To prevent more failures, vast sums were channeled into agriculture: in 1973, 26.5 percent of all investments were allocated to agriculture, a sharp increase from the 23 percent at the beginning of the 1960s. By 1975 the percentage has risen to 27.⁶⁵ These investments were used mainly to build chemical enterprises, so that after 1970 Soviet fertilizer consumption exceeded that of the United States.

Nonetheless, the crisis in Soviet agriculture was not overcome. It re­mained the Achilles' heel of the Soviet Union, which everywhere was being called the second economic power in the world.

One of the most important arguments advanced under Stalin to justify collectivization had been the need to mechanize agriculture, since ma­chinery was more productive than manual labor. An individual farmer could not afford machinery, nor did he have enough land to use machinery ef­ficiently. In the Soviet Union in 1973 a seventy-horsepower tractor was plowing an average of 114 hectares of land, and a combine, harvesting an average of 185 hectares. In the United States, at the same time, these figures were 35 and 85 hectares, respectively. According to the Soviet economic plan, assuming it would be carried out, Soviet industry would need between ten and thirty years to supply an adequate amount of ma­chinery. Labor productivity is by far the best index of the efficiency of any economic system. In the period 1971—1973, grain yield in the USSR was 14.7 quintals per hectare, as it had been in Greece and Yugoslavia during the period 1956—1959. In 1970, a Soviet agricultural worker harvested 4.5 tones of grain per year; in the United States 54.7 tons. The figures for meat are, respectively, 320 and 4,570 kilos; for milk, 2.8 and 11.8 tons. A Soviet agricultural worker tilled an average of 5.4 hectares, a figure equal to that of the Russian peasant of 1913, when on the average a peasant family owned 15 hectares.⁶⁶

The Soviet rulers had long ago tacitly admitted that the collective farm system was not profitable. The consolidation of numerous "weak" kolkhozes into one large farm, a process which began soon after the war, gradually turned into the liquidation of the kolkhozes and their replacement with sovkhozes (state farms). The following figures speak for themselves: in 1965, kolkhozes worked 44.7 percent of all land under cultivation; in 1970, they worked only 34.7 percent, and in 1973, 24.2 percent. At the same time the percentage of sovkhoz land went up from 55.1 in 1956 to 65.6 in 1970 and 75.2 in 1978.⁶⁷ The work force employed by the kolkhoz declined by one-fourth, while that of the sovkhoz rose by 39 percent. All this points toward the disappearance of the kolkhoz system in the near future. It also means increased centralization of the administration of agriculture, with all the negative consequences that entails.

At the end of the 1960s it was difficult to hide the gap between the triumphant statistics and reality. 'The USSR over the past thirty years has grown faster than the United States," wrote British economist Alec Nove.⁶⁸ Statistics showed that between 1928 and 1969 the Soviet Union had grad­uated more engineers than the United States.⁶⁹ Such figures amazed Western statesmen and scholars. Nevertheless, official Soviet statistics were forced to recognize that in 1979 the Soviet economy was producing no more than 65 percent as much as the U.S. economy.⁷⁰

The history of Ivan Khudenko's "social and economic experiment" dem­onstrated the impossibility of any fundamental reforms in the Soviet Union. On November 12, 1960, the USSR Council of Ministers authorized Ivan Khudenko, a high official in an agency under the Council of Ministers, to carry out an experiment with a new system of labor and wages at a state farm. At that time Khrushchev was in power and seeking magical cure- alls for the ailing Soviet system. Khudenko suggested that all work be shared among small teams (zvenya) of workers, which would have full economic autonomy. Their main goal was to produce a certain quantity of goods within a certain time. The payment they would receive for the results of their work would not be restricted to any certain wage. The results were astounding. The cost of grain production fell to one-fourth of its former level and wages quadrupled, but profits per worker increased sevenfold. The workers had begun to produce as if they were working for themselves. Khudenko presented calculations which indicated that if his system were introduced throughout the country, grain production would rise by a factor of four, while the agricultural work force of 35 million could be reduced to a little over 5 million, i.e., by a factor of six.

The experiment was initially well received by the Soviet press. Even a movie (Man of the Soil) was dedicated to the experiment. But when it became obvious that if the use of Khudenko's "social and economic ex­periment" were spread it would result in a radical reform of the Soviet economy (increase local economic initiative and reduced central planning), the experiment was ended. Khudenko was arrested and sentenced to a long term in the camps on charges of "attempting to damage state property on an especially large scale." He died in prison on November 12, 1974.⁷¹

The Soviet Union's chronic inability to produce food supplies adequate for even its domestic needs is not only indicative of fundamental defects in the Soviet system; it further suggests the system's low level of social advancement. In the United States, which is endlessly attacked by Soviet propaganda, agriculture employs between 2.5 and 3 percent of the labor force. In the Soviet Union the figure is 25 percent.⁷² These are the facts, and as Stalin used to say, facts are stubborn things.

Nevertheless, in spite of its difficulties and erratic performance, the Soviet economy continues to function. And this for a variety of reasons. The natural wealth of the country is used to pay for huge losses, although this means that the inheritance of future generations is being used to pay today's food bill. Also, a "second economy" comes to the aid of the "first," the state economy. No law provides for this second economy, nor is it planned by anyone. It is an unofficial system governed by the laws of the market. In Moscow, Leningrad, the Baltic countries, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia, there are private factories and shops and clandestine restau­rants and taxis. There is a brisk business in hard foreign currencies and items produced in the West. This second economy provides the consumer with items the first cannot. Trials were held everywhere in the Soviet Union during the 1960s and 1970s on charges related to such underground busi­nesses and to illegal trafficking in diamonds and foreign currency. These trials revealed that the "second economy" was closely linked to the state distribution network, that the clandestine enterprises were receiving nec­essary equipment on the orders of high-ranking officials of different min­istries, and that they were often purchasing directly from state enterprises. But that was only one aspect of the matter. In many cases state enterprises were producing goods in quantities greater than provided for under the economic plan. This was because the enterprise had used raw materials other than those they usually used, or the quality of the goods had been lowered. These surpluses were then sold through state stores.

These were sizable financial and commercial operations, on the scale of hundreds of millions of rubles, with the full and profitable participation of the ministerial bureaucracy. These clever businessmen paid for the pro­tection of the police, the justice department, and district or provincial party leadership. Among those guilty were such highly placed people as Mzha- vanadze, first party secretary in Georgia and candidate member of the Politburo, and Nasreddinova, chairman of the Council of Nationalities of the USSR.⁷³ They were removed from their posts, but not one of them was tried or sentenced.

Bribery became one of the most widespread forms of corruption in the Soviet Union, reaching disastrous proportions. At institutions of higher learning bribes were taken during admissions and sometimes even during routine examinations; at medical facilities they were taken for operations and good nursing care in hospitals. In the trade and distribution network everyone was on the take. The spiral went all the way to the ministries of the republics and the central ministries. The trade was not only in mer­chandise; state and party posts could be bought, too, along with academic and honorific titles, and so on.

To reinforce the existing system, the party allowed the use, within fixed limits, of certain fashionable Western theories, such as management systems theory, marketing theory, and systems research. The Polish satirist Stanislaw Lec warned his readers, "Don't tell your dreams; Freudians may come to power." The writers of "socialist realism" have revealed the dreams of the Soviet leadership. A three-volume saga by Mikhail Kolesnikov about Sergei Altunin, a Siberian blacksmith and the exemplary Soviet man who becomes a deputy minister (because in the Soviet Union personal advancement is possible for everyone), provides an example of the decision-making mech­anism at the uppermost levels of Soviet leadership. Sergei Altunin, a cul­tured person ("I love Rembrandt," he tells his wife, "and I love Swan Lake, too") has the opportunity to go abroad: "I will have to visit the London and Manchester schools of business. ... Then I should go to the United States to take advantage of the management training at Harvard and Sloane. ... Then there is Sweden and the European management centers." Sergei Altunin succeeds in making a brilliant career, for he knows very well that all Western managerial training is merely for decoration. Real power is in the hands of the party committee. 'The party's committee was the active organ. It controlled the work of the apparatus (the ministry) all the time, and with extreme vigilance."⁷⁴ The party organizers had never studied at Harvard or London. They had studied at the party's higher school and they were more servile than anyone, but they had the weapon of Marxism- Leninism, the only victorious doctrine because it is real, and the only real doctrine because it is victorious.

Thus at the end of the 1960s the Brezhnev government decided to use the West in an attempt to eliminate the "bottlenecks" affecting the Soviet economy and to obtain a breathing spell.

In the West the Soviet initiatives were welcomed. "Detente" was seen as a true "relaxation of tensions." Joy was natural for Communist parties the world over and for left-leaning public opinion when, in 1967, at the Karlovy Vary conference of Communist parties, Brezhnev did not conceal that "these last years have clearly shown that, in the situation of interna­tional detente, the needle of the political barometer is moving to the left."⁷⁵

Further impetus toward detente was provided by the general public's fear of nuclear war. Problems of nuclear arms limitation and nonproliferation were at the center of international relations during the 1960s and 1970s. The Soviet Union set itself the goal of preventing the transfer of nuclear weapons to the Germans and succeeded in this aim to a large extent. Agreement was reached on a nonproliferation treaty. The United States was interested in maintaining a monopoly in this field. The danger posed by the possible spread of nuclear weapons to the "hot spots" (the Middle East and Southeast Asia) was quite obvious. The superpowers wanted to keep from being pushed directly into armed conflict and could not ignore the possibility of a nuclear weapon in the hands of a terrorist organization. In 1968, at the initiative of the Soviet Union and the United States, the nonproliferation treaty was signed.⁷⁶ In 1970 a new treaty was concluded, prohibiting the installation of any kind of weapons of mass destruction on the ocean floor.

In the 1970's the United States and the Soviet Union signed agreements on strategic arms limitation. The first strategic arms limitation agreement, SALT I (1973) confirmed the fact that the Soviet Union had already achieved parity with the United States in strategic weapons. SALT II, in 1979, suggested a certain Soviet superiority. Both were in effect accords on new stages of the arms race. The SALT II agreement was reached, after seven years of talks, at a time when both of the superpowers were facing the problem of developing a new kind of weapon—laser weapons.

Each of the superpowers had a nuclear stockpile large enough to reduce the planet to dust. The SALT agreements signified only an insignificant reduction iun the immediate threat; they could not alter the dangerous overall situation in which the world found itself.

Historians in the twenty-first century (if censorship allows them) will undoubtedly cite as the greatest paradox of the twentieth century the fact that the capitalist states showed a strong desire to help the Communist states, which made no secret of their desire to overthrow capitalism. In the sixty years that the Soviet Union has existed, the capitalists have constantly dreamed about the transformation of communism into a capitalist state of a higher order—one with a stable regime where there is no right to strike and thus profit-making possibilities are unlimited. As early as the beginning of the 1930s, the American historian Michael Florinsky was convinced that "the former crusaders of world revolution at any cost have exchanged their swords for machine tools, and now rely more on the results of their labor than on direct action to achieve the ultimate victory of the proletariat."⁷⁷ World War II had strengthened such hopes. After Yalta, Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's closest adviser and the most ardent admirer of Stalin in the American president's immediate entourage, expressed no doubts: "The Russians had proved that they could be reasonable and farseeing and there wasn't any doubt in the mind of the President or any of us that we could live with them and get along with them peacefully for as far into the future as any of us could imagine."⁷⁸ A poll by Fortune magazine in 1945 showed that of all segments of the U.S. population, it was businessmen who were most optimistic about the Soviet Union's postwar intentions. They believed that no less than one-third of American exports would go to the USSR.⁷⁹ The fact that at the end of the war exports to the USSR were no more than 1 percent of all U.S. exports did not lessen the hopes of Western busi­nessmen and politicians. The only thing that frightened them was the prospect that Stalin would die and be replaced by a "real Communist." Harry Hopkins warned that all such hopes for cooperation could be shattered if anything happened to Stalin. "We felt sure that we could count on him to be reasonable and sensible and understanding."⁸⁰

Charles Bohlen, the American ambassador in Moscow, reassured Wash­ington on the question of Malenkov as Stalin's likely successor. Malenkov, he said, "impressed me as a man with a more Western-oriented mind than other Soviet leaders. He at least seemed to perceive our position and, while he did not agree with it, I felt he understood it." Bohlen placed serious hopes in Malenkov for another reason: "He... stood out from other Soviet leaders of the period in that he did not drink."⁸¹ Bohlen's optimism still remained high when Malenkov was replaced by Khrushchev, who drank even during diplomatic meetings. Averell Harriman wrote in 1959: "I think that Mr. Khrushchev is keenly anxious to improve Soviet living standards. I believe that he looks upon the current Seven-Year Plan as the crowning success of the Communist revolution and a historic turning point in the lives of the Soviet people."⁸²

Khrushchev's exuberance, his tendency to say whatever he felt ("We will bury you," he said, and shocked the West), his eccentricity (pounding the table with his shoe at the UN General Assembly), explains to some degree the indifference shown in the West to his fate and their renewed hopes in Brezhnev and his "collective leadership." This time there were no doubts. After all, the new men in power were engineers. It was unimportant that the majority of the Politburo members with engineering degrees obtained in their distant youth had never worked in their fields: they had always worked for the party. The German ambassador could not find the words to express his delight at these "technocrats in the best sense of the word." He was referring to Kosygin and Gromyko.⁸³ Technocrats, managers, con­servatives—this was how the West saw the Brezhnev administration.

In the opinion of the West, the intentions of the Brezhnev administration were peaceful. Henry Kissinger, in guiding President Nixon's foreign policy, believed that Soviet foreign policy

was being pulled in two directions. There were pressures for conciliation with the West, coming from a rising desire for consumer goods [and] from the fear of war. ... At the same time there were pressures for continued confrontation with the United States arising our of Communist ideology, the suspiciousness of the leaders, the Party apparatus, and the military, and those who feared that any relaxation of tensions could only encourage the satellites to try once again to loosen Moscow's apron strings.⁸⁴

Kissinger was a political scientist who had taught at the university level for years before taking charge of U.S. foreign policy for the Nixon admin­istration. He was convinced, as were most heads of state, that the Soviet Union was torn between two directions in its foreign policy, one political, the other nonpolitical, and that there was a struggle between the supporters of these two lines. Consequently, it was important to support the "techn­ocrats" against the "ideologists." On the basis of this schematic conception, which is widely accepted in the West, Kissinger developed a plan to sign a multitude of agreements on cooperation in various fields with the Soviet Union. The aim was to weave a web of common interests to defuse expan­sionist impulses. In 1978 Kissenger, already removed from power, ac­knowledged that his policy had failed.⁸⁵ His explanation was that "in 1972 we were in the middle of Vietnam and in 1974 in the middle of Watergate."⁸⁶

The fundamental reason for the failure of detente, however, became evident to the West at the end of the 1970s: failure to understand the fact that chief characteristic of the Soviet state is that every act is a political one. On the eve of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, the opponents of the boycott argued that sports should not be mixed with politics. Likewise, Western business circles argued that commerce should not be mixed with politics and that all possible economic aid should be provided to the Soviet Union. Less than a year after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the New York Times warned: "Few cold war policies have proved more self-defeating than the imposition by the United States of curbs on trade with the Soviet Union and other Communist countries."⁸⁷

Samuel Pisar, an international lawyer and the most eloquent spokesman for pro-detente business circles, wrote: "If they are prepared to build au­tomobiles, highways, filling stations, parking lots, motels, and roadside restaurants, it is in our interest to help them along."⁸⁸ The American Soviet specialist Theodore Shabad said that Soviet Union should be helped to explore and develop its energy resources.⁸⁹ At the same time, "arms control has a value and urgency," according to the Washington Post, "entirely apart from the status of political issues."⁹⁰

One of the factors that led the Soviet rulers to propose "detente" to the West was their conflict with China. The break in relations between the two countries was blamed on Khrushchev, as were so many other problems. After his fall, the new leadership attempted to improve relations with China, at the very moment that Mao was directing a fierce struggle for power called the cultural revolution. He rebuffed all of Moscow's offers. The cultural revolution was strikingly similar to the Great Terror of the 1930s in the USSR, not only in its objectives (the transformation of the country according to the designs of the deified "Great Helmsman") but also in its methods— (total terror, sparing no one),⁹¹ and the need for a foreign enemy as a factor unifying the people. The "hate demonstrations" held in China, with many millions taking part, were similar to those organized periodically in the Soviet Union and to the "days of hate" described so eloquently by Orwell in 1984. The demonstrations in China were against the "revisionists," the "new tsars," and the like. Tensions also rose on the Sino-Soviet border.

On March 2, 1969, 300 Chinese troops fired on a Soviet border patrol that had landed on the uninhabited island of Damansky, in the Ussuri River. The Chinese call the Island Cherpad and consider it to be their territory. Soviet maps dispute this contention. The Soviet troops retreated after suffering twenty-three killed and fourteen wounded. On March 15, the two sides, after building up their forces, fought two major battles over the uninhabited island, one square kilometer in size. Artillery, rockets and

tanks were used in the 9-hour battle, and each side suffered heavy losses. For the first time since the Hungarian events of 1956 and armed clash had taken place between two Communist states.

The Soviet Union and China each used the conflict for its own political needs, domestic and foreign. For many weeks the Soviet embassy in Peking was besieged. At the Chinese embassy in Moscow thousands of demon­strators were authorized to smash all the windows and spill ink on the walls. The leaderships of both countries filled their propaganda with na­tionalist themes. The Chinese accused Moscow of a "tsarist foreign policy." Evtushenko epitomized the Soviet propaganda with his poem "Red Snow on the Ussuri." He called on the reader to fight "for Russia and for the faith" against the "new Batu Khan."⁹²

At the same time that armed clashes with China were occuring on the Sino-Soviet border (after the Ussuri there were clashes in Sinkiang and on the Amur), the Soviet leaders sought to reap the first dividends from the policy of "detente." Moscow's main argument was that the "yellow peril" was also a threat to the West. A commentator for the Soviet press agency Novosti used a page provided by Le Monde to warn the Europeans that the Chinese were a threat not only to Russia but to Europe as well. He argued that the territory Russia annexed in 1858-1860 did not belong to China any more than anyone else; thus Peking had no right to it. He also pointed out that the Great Wall of China was not located on the Ussuri, and not even in Manchuria.⁹³ The Soviet ambassador to Washington heatedly tried to convince Kissinger that "China was everybody's problem."⁹⁴

On August 18 a Soviet diplomat in Washington asked a State Department official he was having lunch with what the U.S. government's reaction would be if Soviet planes destroyed China's nuclear installations.⁹⁵ One month later, Victor Louis, the only "independent Soviet journalist," who fulfills various delicate missions for the Soviet security "organs," published an article on London claiming that "Marxist theoreticians" foresaw a "Sino- Soviet war," including an air strike against Chinese installations at Loo Nor and the appeal of "anti-Maoist forces" in China for "fraternal help" from the other socialist countries.⁹⁶

This scenario had already been tested—except for the destruction of nuclear installations—in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968— and would be used again twelve years later in Afghanistan. Its execution, however, always required the consent of the West. The green light for Soviet action had been given by the West in 1956 and again in 1968. Zdenek Mlynar, who in 1968 had been a member of the Czechoslovak Politburo, said that at the end of August 1968 Brezhnev told the leaders of the Prague

Spring that he had been assured by the United States that they would not intervene in Czechoslovak affairs.⁹⁷

In 1969 the United States refused to give its blessings to preventive war against China. To this day it is uncertain whether the Soviet Union would have carried out its plan of attack or was spreading these rumors only to exert pressure on China and the West.

The Chinese government took the Soviet threats seriously and in 1969 said it was willing to reopen talks with the USSR. In the fall of 1970 the Chinese and Soviet ambassadors, who had been recalled some years before, returned to their posts. The volume of trade between the two countries began to increase.⁹⁸ After Mao's death (1976) the Chinese government gradually abandoned its openly anti-Soviet tone, and in 1979 border talks were initiated. It is not to be excluded that in the future relations between China and the Soviet Union may gradually improve.

Also during the 1970s, China took steps to improve relations with the United States. During the 1970s a threeway Moscow-Peking-Washington axis emerged and began to play a determining role in international affairs. The fact that two points in this triangle were Communist powers showed the new configuration of forces in the world. The capitalist world, above all the United States, tried to take advantage of the Sino-soviet rivalry by supporting first one adversary, then the other. The result, however, was the strengthening of the ideology whose ultimate objective was to destroy all other systems and ideologies.

THE ROAD TO HELSINKI

The first half of the 1970s should be viewed as a self-contained period. The first decade of the Brezhnev era was coming to an end, as was the Ninth Five-Year Plan, which had been under heavy pressure due to the worldwide economic crisis. The final act of the European accord—the long- awaited fruit of detente—was signed in Helsinki.

An event which represents a turning point in world politics also took place in the first half of the 1970s. The Soviet Union reached military parity with the United States in the strict sense of numerical equality in strategic launchers. American superiority in the field of nuclear weapons, which had lasted throughout the entire postwar period, came to an end. In 1969 the number of Soviet missiles capable of reaching American territory equaled the number of American missiles and continued to increase stead­ily.⁹⁹ In an article on the world situation and the Soviet Union written on

May 4, 1980 in exile in Gorky, Andrei Sakharov cites as the most important fact that "in the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet Union... carried out a fundamental reequipping and expansion of its weaponry."¹⁰⁰ at the Twenty- fourth Party Congress, Marshal Grechko, the Soviet defense minister, an­nounced: "The Soviet Union is capable of responding to force with superior force."¹⁰¹

According to American and English sources (reliable Soviet data do not exist), the defense budget of the Soviet Union showed an annual increase of at least 4.5 percent between 1965 and 1977 and represented between 11 and 13 percent of the gross national product. During this same period the United States allocated 6 percent of its gross national product for military spending, although the GNP of the United States was twice that of the Soviet Union.¹⁰² Characteristically, the Soviet Union spent 16 percent of its defense budget on military personnel, and the United States 56 per­cent. ¹⁰³

Figures can provide eloquent testimony to the changed balance of power. In 1967 the United States had 1,054 intercontinental ballistic missiles at its disposal, and the Soviet Union no more than 570. In 1979 the number of American missiles remained unchanged, while the Soviets had increased theirs to 1,409.¹⁰⁴ The number of American servicemen was reduced from 3.5 million to 2.06 million in one decade, 1969—1979, while the Soviet forces grew from 3.68 million to 4.19 million.¹⁰⁵

Even more striking was the ratio of NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in the European theater: tanks 1:2; armored vehicles 1:2; antitank rockets 2:1, and cannons and mortars 1:2, respectively.¹⁰⁶

Contributing to the strategic advantage of the Soviet Union was the fact that the United States, Western Europe's ally, was located far across the ocean, whereas the main force of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet army, was within striking distance.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet navy was rapidly enlarged. One of the initiators of this development, Admiral Gorshkov, defined the naval force of the Soviet Union as "the real capability of the state to use the oceans effectively in the interest of Comminist construction.¹⁰⁷ Citing Lenin as a leader who "paid serious attention to... the problem of naval su­premacy," the commander-in-chief of the Soviet navy admitted that "the goal of achieving naval supremacy still remains in force."¹⁰⁸ He added, "The Soviet art of naval warfare flatly rejects any attempt to equate the term 'naval supremacy' with the term 'world supremacy.'"¹⁰⁹ The Soviet navy had become an important element in Soviet global strategy, an "im­portant instrument of policy in time of peace, because it serves to protect Soviet interests and to suppport friendly countries."¹¹⁰

The dream of Lenin, who believed that the Red Army would bring "happiness and peace" to Europe by invading Poland in 1920 under the command of Tukhachevsky, the caution of Stalin, who rejected the idea of building a "large navy" in the 1930s because "we will not fight near American shores," looked naive to the heirs of the Soviet state's founders. By the middle of the 1970s they finally had the means to realize their Utopia.

The U.S. secretary of defense, Harold Brown, admitted: "We don't under­stand why the Soviet Union seeks so persistently to increase its strategic nuclear potential."¹¹¹ The Soviet military theorist M. Skirdo gave an answer: "Most important today is not a country's economic potential, which could be used to tip the scales during a war, but the proportion of forces and resources available to each side in the case of an emergency even before military actions begin."¹¹²

The Soviet leadership was anxious to create a huge arms advantage before the beginning of military actions because it was very well aware of the economic weakness of the USSR. This weakness induces the Soviet lead­ership to expand the ever increasing amounts of the country's resources required to fulfill plans for armaments and the armed forces. These inor­dinate expenditures, in turn, continue to weaken the Soviet economy.

At the end of November 1961 the Twenty-second Party Congress en­dorsed a new program, which promised great things on the basis of the most advanced findings of "science." It predicted:

In the coming decade (1961—1970) the Soviet Union will create the material and technical basis for communism and will surpass the most powerful and richest capitalist country, the United States, in per capita production. The material well-being of the working people and their cultural and technical standards will increase substantially. Everyone will be assured material abundance, while all kolkhozes and sovkhozes will become highly productive and highly profitable enterprises. The basic needs of the population for housing will be satisfied; hard physical labor will disappear and the USSR will become the country with the shortest working day in the world.

In January 1970 an editorial in Pravda presented the main outlines of a report by Brezhnev to a Central Committee plenum held in December 1969. The general secretary explained that the promises of the 1961 pro­gram could not be kept, that the golden age had to be postponed: "In a number of republics and oblasts an unjustified reduction in the numbers of livestock and poultry and in the production of meat, milk, and eggs has been permitted, and as a result difficulties have begun to appear in the supply of animal products to the population, especially in the large in­dustrial centers." The article also noted a "drag in the rate of growth in a number of branches of industry" and only a "slow rise in the labor pro­ductivity and efficiency of social production."¹¹³

The Ninth Five-Year Plan (1971—1975) was supposed to be the first in Soviet history to bring faster growth in the production of consumer goods (group B) than the means of production (group A). The fantastic promises of Khrushchev now had given way to the unkept promises of Brezhnev. But more importantly, it was announced the the Soviet Union had entered the stage of "real socialism"—a new and higher stage in the direction of their ultimate Coal.

The choice of adjective was faultless. The word "real" effectively con­cealed the unreality of the economy, of Soviet society in its entirety, and of the Goal itself.

The plan was fulfilled, or overfulfilled, or slightly underfulfilled. The Central Statistical Bureau published the figures. At the same time it was necessary to stand in line for food. The incorrigible authors of Soviet political jokes suggested that the improvement in the standard of living of Soviet citizens could be seen by the fact that people waiting in lines were better dressed than before. For the great holiday, the hundredth anniversary of Lenin's birth, it was promised that supplies of thread would be rushed to the stores.

The paradoxes of the Soviet economy rendered it a unique phenomenon that is impossible to understand by traditional methods of economic anal­ysis. Summing up the results of the Ninth Five-Year Plan at the Twenty- fifth Party Congress in 1976, Brezhnev spoke of the remarkable success of industry and a growth in the output of goods. (He was to repeat these same things at the Twenty-sixth Congress in 1981.) But before the Twenty- fifth Congress, Shevarnadze, first secretary of the Georgian party, who was at that time restoring order (after a purge) in his republic, let the truth slip out: "One out of every four consumer goods articles is of unsatisfactory quality. ... For the first four years of the Ninth Five-Year Plan, an average of fifty apartments per 10,000 inhabitants were built in Georgia each year; for the whole of the USSR, this figures was ninety-one per 10,000." At the congress, Brezhnev said that in the new five-year plan 172 billion rubles would be allocated to agriculture.¹¹⁴ Shevarnadze admitted: "For every ruble invested in agriculture, we get back 39 kopeks."¹¹⁵

In Soviet industry, according to the economist Academician Khachaturov, labor producticity was 50 percent lower than in the United States, and in agriculture 75 — 80 percent lower.¹¹⁶ The Soviet planning and accounting system is set up in such a way that increasing productivity is extraordinarily disadvantageous to enterprises. The higher the productivity, the smaller the number of workers needed, resulting in increased plan targets and reduction in the wage fund allotted to that enterprise. 'There is a threshold in labor productivity," Khachaturov acknowledged. "The enterprise has no interest in exceeding planned growth, because that would result in an enormous increase in the targets (or quotas) assigned by the plan for the next year."¹¹⁷ Thus, "the majority of machine-building plants in the USSR have 1.3 or 1.4 times more workers than similar industries in other coun­tries."¹¹⁸ The utilization of unnecessary workers allows full employment; however, it is also one of the reasons for low wages.

The calculations of Soviets wages often made by Western economists provide a fine example of the unreality of the Soviet economy. Basile Kerblay, the best Soviet economic specialist in France, meticulously cal­culated the average wage received in the Soviet Union, the United States, and France in 1973, the third year of the Ninth Five-Year Plan, using both Soviet and Western sources. In the USSR, the average net salary was 121.90 rubles; in France, 1496.61 francs; in the United States, 606.51 dollars. Changing rubles and francs into dollars at the official rates, Kerblay found the average salaries to be $168.14, $361.61, and $606.51, respectively.¹¹⁹ At the same time, Academician Sakharov, basing his calculations on ob­servations inside the country, arrived at the conclusion that the average Soviet monthly wage was 110 rubles, which "in terms of purchasing power ... amounts to about $55 or 275 francs."¹²⁰ However, even this calculation does not reflect the entire reality. Sakharov took the dollar at 1 dollar to 2 rubles (slightly raising the dollar's value), on the assumption that this better corresponded to the real buying power of the ruble. Apparently, Sakharov did not want to complicate his analysis by trying to calculate the real value of the ruble, the most amazing money in the world.

The ruble's value is fixed by the party and the government. In the Soviet Union there are several varieties of exchange rates for the ruble, which allow goods to be purchased in special stores not accessible to ordinary people. In 1930 these stores had the stern and mysterious name Torgsin, meaning "commerce with foreigners." In the era of "real socialism" they are poetically called Beryozka (little birch tree) stores. In the Beryozka stores, the ruble has no value—a peculiar situation, when a country will not accept its own currency. Aside from the Beryozkas, there is a whole network of special stores reserved for the nomenklatura, where the price of merchandise varies in accordance wth the customer's position in the hierarchy. Lastly, in practice the chronic shortage of all goods made the ruble an illusory money, for it could not buy any merchandise.

The insubstantial character of workers' wages in the Soviet Union con­tributed to absenteeism, lower labor productivity, and poorer quality in the work performed. In August 19790, Pravda triumphantly reported on an "outstanding achievement of the space program, the longest manned space flight in history—175 days—has been successfully completed."¹²¹ At the same time, Komsomolskaya pravda published a selection of letters from readers who complained about the railroads: the Krasnoyarsk—Moscow train arrived fourteen hours late; the Novokuznetsk—Chelyabinsk, seventeen hours, 30 minutes late; the Voronezh—Moscow, four hours late.¹²²

Interplanetary (lights are part of the USSR's military sector; success in this domain is undeniable. Military industry occupies a special place in the Soviet ecomony, not only because it is the object of special attention but also because it is the only industrial branch that genuinely competes with the West. This does not mean that the military industry does not suffer from the general inadequacies plaguing the Soviet economy overall. It does mean, however, that in this industry these problems are given special attention.

The two-volume set of speeches and interviews with Brezhnev, prepared as a gift to the Twenty-fifth Party Congress, summed up the Brezhnev lead­ership's thinking after ten years in power and indicated how the country would be developed in the stage of "mature socialism." Brezhnev put it openly and clearly: no reforms, no scientific and technological revolution: "Only the party, armed with Marxist-Leninist doctrine and the experience of political organization of the masses, is capable of determining the main lines of social development." The chief qualities required of managers were "great ideological firmness and competence."¹²³ First ideology, then com­petence.

The failure of the Ninth Five-Year plan (Soviet statistics recognized it indirectly in declaring that contrary to the promise that had been made Group A, producer goods, had developed more rapidly than Group B, consumer goods) was explained officially by two bad harvests, in 1972 and 1975. The results could have been disastrous for the country as well as the government, especially after the poor harvest of 1975, had it not been for immediate aid from the West, in particular the United States.

The practice of buying foreign wheat was inaugurated by Khrushchev in 1962. Since then, the USSR has bought grain year in and year out from the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and Brazil. Political con­siderations played a major part in this. The shortages of foodstuffs led to the greatest worker unrest after the Novocherkassk revolt in 1962 and at the Togliatti automobile factory in 1980. Enterprises in Central Russia (Yaroslavl, Murom) were also affected by strikes. The reasons were always the same: food shortages and the low standard of living. Nor did agitation cease in the most vulnerable spot in the Soviet empire—Poland. In 1970, worker revolts led to the replacement of Gomulka by Gierek and ten years later, in 1980, the replacement of Gierek by Kanya and then Jaruzelski. The lesson was clear: economic difficulties are fraught with political com­plications. Moreover, purchases of meat and other foodstuffs have steadily increased. In 1972 the USSR brought 18 million metric tons of grain from the United States, but this record amount was exceeded in 1979, when 25 million metric tons of grain were bought, again from the United States.¹²⁴ Under an agreement concluded earier, the USSR could buy 15 million metric tons of grain annually for five years without having to get special authorization from the U.S. government.

The signing of this agreement, the first of its kind, was frank acknowl­edgment of the failure of the Soviet agricultural policy. One-fourth of the economically active population in the USSR was employed in agriculture in 1978. In the United States the figure was 2.5—3 percent.¹²⁵ Neither the size of the work force, nor the use of technology and chemical pesticides and fertilizers could help the situation. One fact speaks louder than words: the hourly wage of a Soviet agricultural worker was 44 kopeks (59 cents at the offical exchange rate), as opposed to $2.35 in the United Staes.¹²⁶ A ton of grain could be purchased from the United States at half the cost of a ton of grain produced in the USSR. For the USSR, it was cheaper to buy grain from other countries than to produce it at home. Under detente the credits necessary to make these purchases could also be found in the West.

This is what Senator Henry Jackson said on the subject: "A relaxation of controls on strategic trade with the Soviet Union has been a central principle of the policy of detente." He continued, "A purported benefit to be achieved was greater cooperation from the Soviets. But they have ex­ploited detente to acquire the West's latest technology to fortify their military industrial complex."¹²⁷

The difficult dilemma between guns and butter was resolved. Detente allowed the Soviet Union to dedicate itself to the production of "guns" while purchasing "butter" in case of extreme need under favorable con­ditions, from the West. And it was not only butter. The West also helped, as it has always done, in the production of "guns." It was during detente that the embargo on the sale of strategic materials to the Soviet Union was virtually abandoned. On February 25, 1976, the State Department admitted that since 1972 the USSR had produced, under American license, the miniature ball bearings absolutely necessary for the construction of guid­ance systems for long-range nuclear missiles with multiple warheads (MIRVs).¹²⁸ American computers are the basis for the air defense system of the Warsaw Pact countries.¹²⁹ After having given $500 million for the construction of a huge automobile factory on the Kama River, the Americans "discovered" that this factory was producing motors for military vehicles.¹³⁰ This kind of assistance and cooperation was developed in all domains. During the Vietnam war, the United States shared its experience with the Soviet Union, sending them manuals with such titles as Training for Op­erations in the Jungle, The Terrorist Tactics of the Vietcong in South Vietnam, Systems of Air-to-Surface Operations, and Use of Chemical and Biological Warfare.¹³¹

A Senate investigation during the summer of 1980 revealed that American and Western European firms were providing the USSR with chemical equip­ment and expertise that assisted the Soviet Union in developing chemical and biological weapons: 80 percent of the Soviet production of polyethlylene and 75 percent of the chemical fertilizers came from equipment provided by the West.¹³²

Western leaders have sufficient proof of concrete cooperation between the USSR and Western firms that manufacture materials and equipment that may be readily used for military purposes. It has also become known that the Soviet Union has obtained other equipment of strategic importance from the United States through third countries.

A comparison of scientific exchange programs between the United States and the Soviet Union leaves no doubt that the Soviets have used this exchange to improve their military technology and to expand their military potential. Soviet scientists who come to the United States study research in the fields of plasma, physics, metallurgy, computer-based control systems (for industry), ferroelectric ceramics, photoelectrics, and semiconductors. American scientists travels to the Soviet Union to do research in sociology, history, literature, Russian poetry, archaeology.¹³³

The provision of "butter" and assistance in producing "guns" are only elements of the system of economic linkages between the USSR, other socialist countries, and the West. During the years of detente, the nature of these interconnections assumed a new character. The cooperation without which the USSR could not have survived became a relation between "part­ners," as the director of a large London bank explained: "If you give someone a small loan he becomes your debtor. If you give him a large loan, you make him your partner. In spite of its ideology, the Soviet bloc is currently a very important partner for us."¹³⁴