Imagine the horror of a paleontologist confronted by a live dinosaur—grinning amicably and wagging its tail as a token of good intentions. In the era before the advent of glasnost and perestroika, people studying and writing about the Soviet Union practiced a paleontology of sorts. An odd bone thrown over the Iron Curtain or a chunk of petrified entrails surreptitiously pushed under it were analyzed meticulously and served as the basis for reconstructing the entire body of the beast. Now these same people find themselves inside a paleontologist’s nightmare, for the Soviet Union has arrived at our door—thanks to glasnost, an increased access to decision-makers in Moscow, and a veritable invasion of Soviet visitors, among them scholars, policy advisers, intellectuals, generals, ministers, and, of course, the dissidents whom we must now rechristen, to avoid anachronism, members of the opposition. Could this still be the old country?

True, the Soviet Union retains much of what has defined it for decades; yet the organs and various parts of this Hobbesian animal have turned out to be distributed differently from what was once imagined, and the whole thing does not appear as well put together as the old paleontological renditions seemed to suggest. Indeed, this commonwealth—uniting as it does a Northern European Estonia ripe for democracy and autonomy and an Oriental Uzbekistan choking on the Soviet imperial legacy—so much resembles a fanciful animal from a medieval bestiary that another question arises: are we dealing here with one beast or a multitude of them?

Eager to see it for myself, I went to the Soviet Union last fall for two months, an American intellectual with a professional interest in the country (I study Russian literature) and also one with a personal connection to it (I grew up in Moscow). This was the first time in seventeen years that I had visited the Soviet Union. Because of my research, having to do with Stalin and writers, and for family reasons, my horizons did not extend beyond Moscow, its professional middle class and intellectuals. Part of a small minority in a country of two hundred and eighty million, and traditionally very distant from power, these people have been drawn by Gorbachev into the political process and have come to play the role of the proverbial dog’s tail, wagging the world’s largest territorial giant out of its coma-like slumber. My frequent palavers with cab drivers, mostly of the “gypsy” variety (that is, just about anyone who drives an automobile), added some diversity to the otherwise highbrow fare served up by my Moscow contacts. The outer horizons of what I know about the Soviet Union are defined by the Soviet and émigré press, which I have been following assiduously since the beginning of perestroika. What follows, then, are a few informal impressions of my contact with the Soviet Union today. They are intentionally open-ended and blurred. After all, the entire country is on the move, radically reshaping itself even as I am putting my pen to paper.

To an old Russian hand like myself, the Soviet Union still looks familiar. The problem is that the parts no longer add up. The ease with which they used to add up to something coherent—with every protagonist and event occupying its appointed niche in the rigid Stalinist structure—had made the Soviet Union eminently calculable and describable. But that country exists no longer. Oh yes, it is still on the map, still equipped with ICBMs and all the other accoutrements of a superpower; it is still largely undemocratic and still intact as a de facto empire—that is, it is not yet facing a large-scale open revolt from a constituent republic. Perhaps most important, it is still run out of Communist Party headquarters and its analogues in the all-pervasive apparat. The truth of this was pointed out by speaker after speaker at the June 1989 Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow. Even so, every intelligent observer, including at long last the country’s top leadership, understands that the center no longer holds—whether one is referring to the nationalities, the economy, or the sciences, to education, health care, social organization, or, finally, to the Soviet Communist ideology itself. Indeed, the country now stands at the edge of a precipice and unless some drastic measures are taken in a matter of months—this note of urgency, made ominous by the recent miners’ strike, has been a leitmotif in the Soviet Press for at least a year—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics runs the risk of a mind-boggling internal convulsion.

None of this happened overnight.

None of this happened overnight. Gradually, one by one, the consistently incompetent Soviet government has run out the special dispensations that, until now, have been conveniently extended to it by nature, history, and chance. The realm of science and technology is a prime example. For a while the general technological backwardness of the Soviet Union was not felt too acutely because a certain level of development—in the space program and in ICBM production, for instance—could be insulated from the rest of the economy and still secure for the country a superpower status. But in the age of hi-tech such local achievements can no longer serve as convincing emblems of advancement. Failures are all too obvious. The Soviet Union is behind Mauritius in the area of infant mortality and stands unchallenged in the prevalence of alcoholism; its own officials acknowledge that twenty-five thousand people die each year from drinking improperly treated tap water. Even the country’s vast mineral deposits, a seemingly inexhaustible blessing, have been plundered with the predatory energy of a colonial power, as Gorbachev recently admitted. The Soviet Union has become an empire that has turned its imperial appetite upon itself. How else can one interpret the fact that it produces five times the number of tractors per capita than are produced in the United States but only half as much grain?

Even more important to Soviet life until now have been the special dispensations in the spiritual sphere that were once accorded to the government by Soviet history: for example, the people’s acceptance, however grudging, of the political status quo and of the legitimacy of the party-state. In part, such acceptance stemmed from an almost instinctive fear bred by the Stalinist terror; in part, from perceived gains in the social, cultural, and economic sphere; in part, from the people’s willingness to tolerate privation for the sake of national defense—an obsession enforced by the state and reinforced by memories of the war with Germany. What cemented these elements together, and in addition provided for continuity in political discourse, was the Soviet Communist ideology: its simple-minded commitment to the logic of history (which would supposedly culminate in a paradise on earth), its monopoly on representing that logic, and the feeling of superiority that the Communist ideology conferred on its adherents.

Until the late 1970s, many people accepted on faith at least some version of the official story of the creation of the party-state. This story, or master plot, supplied meaning for everything that followed, protecting the original objectifying event—the October Revolution—from many a tarnishing misfortune. “If it hadn’t been for the war, we could have been as well off as the Germans,” so went the customary refrain. In a similar way, there has been an attempt to absorb the crisis of the present into the mythology of the past. “Just as we have won the civil war and World War II against impossible odds,” the argument would run, “so we shall be able to overcome our present difficulties.”

All of these special dispensations, material as well as ideological, might have provided the state with the opportunity to accomplish reform while minimizing social and economic distress, but they were used only to buy time, to postpone the day of reckoning. And that day is today, indeed it is yesterday. The traditional ideology has been rendered obsolete and dysfunctional by changing demographics (as fewer people remember the Terror or World War II), the expanding horizons of the population and its increased ability to articulate its views, and the revolution in mass communication. There are very few people left today who find the old official story—or, for that matter, any story issuing from the state—a believable one. At the Congress of People’s Deputies in June, one listened in vain for any signs of Communist revivalism in the speeches of even the most conservative deputies. Suspended for what must have seemed an eternity, disbelief is back, fast evolving into impatience and outrage. At the Congress, Yuri Viasov’s tactfully worded call for the Communist Party to resign from power elicited applause. I can only imagine the glee with which Viasov’s words were greeted by the millions of viewers glued to their radios and televisions. (It has been estimated that labor productivity during the televised sessions fell by as much as twenty percent.)

Perhaps the most powerful example of the dissolution of the Soviet Communist ideology is to be seen in the debates surrounding the history of the collectivization of agriculture. This pillar of the Stalinist state is now variously qualified as the “unpeasanting” of the Soviet Union, the acme of totalitarian repression, mass murder, even genocide. There may not be general agreement on the causes of this national catastrophe—explanations range from peasant ignorance to a Jewish conspiracy—but the old master plot is decidedly dead. One no longer hears that collectivization was a necessary sacrifice in the face of the impending war with Germany. Rather, the war was won not because of but in spite of collectivization, or it was nearly lost because of it and because of Stalin’s other catastrophic blunders—so goes the dominant line today.

Now that they are no longer framed by the archetypal narrative of Soviet Marxism, the country’s past and present do not fall into an orderly arrangement of prefiguration and fulfillment; instead, they are allowed to accumulate in random and unruly piles. Indeed, what logic of history can account for the mass extermination of the peasantry and the virtual enslavement of the survivors? Or who would dare to explain away the murderous orgy of the late 1930s now that even the Marxist Roy Medvedev, a historian with impeccable dissident credentials, declares in print and without equivocation that by 1937 the “new orders from Moscow quickly transformed the ‘correctional labor’ camps into camps designed for extermination”? What did that prefigure or fulfill?

Demystified, the Soviet Communist ideology has lost its axiomatic transparency and become simply a botched story.

Demystified, the Soviet Communist ideology has lost its axiomatic transparency and become simply a botched story, a jumble of good intentions, murderous inhumanity, and lies. “We are sorry.” One can almost hear this unspoken refrain in the media dominated by Gorbachev’s generation. “We are sorry, comrades, but there has been a terrible mistake.”

Curiously, the people who had been most radically critical of the Soviet phenomenon, to the point of rejecting it altogether, find themselves as disoriented by recent events as the hitherto loyal Soviet man. Gone are the days when the unwieldy Brezhnevite state could guarantee its opponents the role of David taking on Goliath. Under Gorbachev, the slings of criticism have become so widely available, and the target so easy, that one would have to try very hard to miss the mark. It would seem, then, that the other master plot—the one involving a giant monster being challenged by a courageous man—has also become obsolete, no longer capable of sustaining an intellectual’s social identity. For it is one thing to defend the unqualified Good and purposefully fight the Evil Monster, or simply to withdraw from any contact with the state, as many intellectuals had done; it is quite another to realize that what appeared as Evil incarnate may have just been a product of delirious indiscretion, an accident, an unintended mutation, a mistake if you wish, however colossal and catastrophic its consequences.

What has replaced the old ideological totality are some scattered institutionalized religions and exotic cults, consumerism, a rich assortment of nationalisms, and, perhaps most oddly, the lusty, hedonistic vision of the urban youth culture, with its strong opinions, aerobic narcissism, and orgiastic rock 'n' roll. Moscow’s morning television news show, which lasts two hours and focuses on affairs of state, is liberally interlarded with rock videos ranging from Madonna’s Material Girl to Grebenshchikov’s Give Us Back Our Land, which flashes a low shot of peasant women crossing themselves before a wooden church to the throb of an invisible electric guitar. Cut to the Kuban region, with a scorching sun and phalanxes of combine harvesters—things are not so good there. Cut to a dozen leggy women in leotards tempting Soviet citizens to join them in aerobic euphoria—now, that is good. Who knows, perhaps some of their sex appeal will rub off on the affairs of state, lending a bit of excitement to the Sisyphean job of holding together a disintegrating country.

Pop sex aside, nationalism is the most readily available and flexible substitute for a rational ideology like Marxism, and it has long played a significant role in the Soviet Communist mentalité. But if for most major ethnic groups nationalism instantly fills the ideological vacuum, in Russia proper the question of national identity is one of loss, not gain, and poses a particularly vexing problem. For one thing, being Russian has never meant the same as being, say, Georgian or Polish, because the Russians view themselves and function as a sort of Olympian people, at once particular and invisible with regard to other national groups. It is a give-away that there exists neither a Communist Party nor a KGB of the Russian Republic, whereas all the other constituent republics have both a Party and a KGB of their own. This supremacist aspect of the Russian self-image belongs to the imperial legacy, and exchanging it for something smaller and local will be both painful and confusing. Curiously, the view that being Russian may simply refer to a geographical, linguistic, and broadly cultural identification, rather than to one’s biological roots, finds few advocates even in the most liberal milieu. Indeed, it took a Latvian writer, Jan Peters, to point out to his Russian counterparts at the June Congress (with considerable sarcasm) that the peoples of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania—“in whose veins there courses Russian, Bielorussian, Jewish, Polish, Swedish, Finnish blood”—do not define their national identity on the basis of biology.

In Gorbachev’s Moscow, one hears endless complaints that the Russians, unlike other national groups, have no place of their own and are therefore deprived of the opportunity to be Russian (the impersonal construction is so telling!) while safeguarding this right for others. But what the politics of Russian nationalism will look like after nationalist feelings coalesce into specific ideological positions and become part of a new institutional structure remains to be seen. For a while, the neo-Nazi group Pamiat, with its unabashedly fascist message, including its “news” of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, attracted considerable attention and some sympathy. But as a political organization whose platform consists of hate alone Pamiat has been losing popular support and now faces a dim political future. Still, even if its lunatic slogans have only a limited effect in highly concentrated doses, once they are dispersed and attached to some reasonable issues, such as the environment, they begin to acquire a respectability and potency that are good reason for concern and caution. A case in point is Victor Belov, a talented author who publishes in and serves on the editorial board of the liberal Novy Mir and who has recently been elected Chairman of the Writers’ Union of the Russian Republic. When he spoke at the Congress of People’s Deputies, he spent much of his time castigating the state for funding one ecological catastrophe after another, only to close his speech by linking the country’s crisis to the liberals’ alleged facility with Xerox machines and then connecting both to sundry dark and mysterious forces—an obvious allusion to Pamiat’s canard about a Judeo-Masonic plan for conquering the world. In all fairness, most of the press treats such conspiracy theories with a healthy disgust and ridicule and, at least in Moscow, candidates with links to Pamiat were soundly defeated in recent elections. But the nationalists of Belov’s ilk have made important strides. They have organized their own political association in Leningrad and are lending intellectual respectability to some of the most outré ideas by publishing them in such bastions of scholarly decorum as Moscow’s Problems of Literature. There is no doubt that the Russian Orthodox Church, both its hierarchy and laity, will play a decisive role in the formation of a new national identity in Russia proper. But it has still to play its hand in this game. What the outcome of the process will be is anybody’s guess.

An incident I witnessed on the Arbat mall, a civilized street of old Moscow that is closed to traffic, has become emblematic for me of the complexity and fluidity of the Soviet Union today. A policeman was trying to arrest a Hare Krishna for proselytizing in a public place. Immediately, the cop and his quarry—both undistinguished-looking young men—were surrounded by a crowd of people, a random crowd, who angrily but correctly challenged the policeman’s right to arrest the Russian follower of a distant Indian deity. Unexpectedly for me, the policeman felt obliged to enter into a legal argument with his challengers. “The Constitution,” he began, rattling off the well-known formula in a high-pitched Moscow voice, “guarantees Soviet citizens the freedom from religious propaganda.” “But the guy wasn’t forcing anybody to listen to him,” someone promptly responded. The tug-of-war went on for a while without, it seemed, any hope of resolution, until a young woman, with a finely chiseled face of great intensity, looked the policeman straight in the eye and said: “You are taking this guy in because you still have the power but we all know that you won’t have it for much longer and soon you’ll have to answer for it all.” She spoke firmly, with a well-controlled, focused anger and a matter-of-fact authority—a person articulating a shared belief without any fear of reprisal. In a minute or two the Hare Krishna was let go, and the crowd dispersed.

For this observer, who might well have been an involved participant, the incident was reminiscent of his own close brushes with the rough hide of the Soviet leviathan in the middle and late 1960s. But what a faltering, disoriented creature it has become—possessing little authority, unsure of its might, awesome only in the crushing magnitude of its aging and ungainly body!

“A state,” Nietzsche wrote somewhere, “has no aim; we alone give it this aim or that.” Any ideas, comrades, citizens, gentlemen, ladies?

A Message from the Editors

Your donation sustains our efforts to inspire joyous rediscoveries.

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 8 Number 1, on page 12
Copyright © 2024 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1989/9/the-soviet-dinosaur

Popular Right Now