Mark Blair - Stroika

It is some twenty-seven years since the Berlin Wall fell. The millennial generation may have little to no knowledge of the Soviet Union. For others, perhaps those that are older, the world was a very different place when the Soviet Union challenged the West, seemingly everywhere, and battle tanks massed along the Iron Curtain that divided Western from Eastern Europe. The Cold War saw the world on a nuclear knife-edge balanced between two competing ideologies. It is strange today to think of a divided Germany, the Berlin Wall itself, and that people died trying to cross it to the West.

Stroika, a fiction that foreshadows the real events of August 1991, is set at a time of massive change, when the old Soviet Union was making way for the new and the Soviet Army was increasingly bogged down in an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan. After only one year in office, the ailing Konstantin Chernenko was succeeded in 1985 as general secretary by the Politburo’s youngest member. Mikhail Gorbachev had very different ideas to his predecessors. In 1986 he launched glasnost (openness) and in January of the following year his perestroika (restructuring) programme. Only by these means – open discussion and reform of the economic and political system – could, he argued, the communist system be saved. In the end, Gorbachev unwittingly set in motion a train of events that ultimately brought the Soviet Union to its knees and eventual collapse.

There are many competing articles and books on the subject of what actually did happen. Scouring second-hand bookshops for books written at the time and glued to my screen for many hours, I discovered that analysis is often contradictory and basic information sometimes hard to corroborate.

What is clear is the extent to which the Soviet people were deceived. Travel restrictions and little contact with the outside world shielded citizens from appreciating quite how far the Communist Soviet system had failed them; those that did challenge the status quo were silenced. In a mundane way, this was vividly brought home to me by the report of Yeltsin’s visit to a supermarket in Texas in September 1989. The pure abundance of goods on display shattered his view of communism.

When Gorbachev assumed power, there was little real understanding of how a market economy worked and even less of how to transition a command economy into a modern, competitive one where goods were made that people wanted. Prices remained, by and large, fixed centrally. But there were a group of people who did understand, and they saw the opportunity, often functioning on the fringes of society. In the black market economy, that in many respects was the real economy, these budding, talented and, one has to say, brave entrepreneurs arbitraged the system and made fortunes.

In 1989, the Soviet Union comprised fifteen federated republics and occupied one-sixth of the earth’s land surface, a staggering statistic. Its borders stretched for sixty thousand kilometres, the longest border of any country on the planet. Yet its economic plight was such that it could not feed itself and struggled even to distribute the food that it did have. In stark contrast, the Soviet Union’s military budget had mushroomed, by some estimates, to one-fifth of national income, employing directly or indirectly one in five of the working population. Gorbachev appreciated this was unsustainable and, in the same year, shocked the Congress of People’s Deputies by announcing that military expenditure was four times the published figure.

Glasnost and perestroika loosened the bonds that held both the Soviet Union and the communist bloc of Eastern Europe together. Increasingly, governments took an independent course as the central Soviet government began to buckle under the strain and dissent that emerged from within the ranks of the Politburo, the Soviet Union’s supreme executive body.

In 1956 and 1968, Soviet troops had bloodily repressed uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Thousands had died and thousands more had been arrested as political prisoners. Gorbachev recognised the time for change and began openly to encourage Eastern European governments to reform. The genie was out of the bottle. The year 1989 saw Eastern Europe consumed with civil unrest. In Leipzig, Monday demonstrations grew from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand. The question, of course, that hung in the air was whether the Soviet Union would respond in the same way it had done in 1956 and 1968.

The peoples of Eastern Europe and the world held their breath.

Stroika…

LENINGRAD

Miniature lakes form where the pavement has subsided. People hunch against the wet, making their way home, skirt familiar tarns, avoiding the kerb, wary of cars and trucks and soaking sheets. Grey turns to darker grey as the run-down façade of the Nevsky Prospect undergoes an unambiguous Soviet metamorphosis.

She rubs the wet off the dial. He is late, fifteen minutes. She takes cover under the overhang of a tall building, her eyes searching the crowd.

He is easy to spot. She can see him now, a hundred metres off, head up, running full tilt through the open spaces in the crowd. Two men some way behind are giving chase but the gap is widening.

A pedestrian inadvertently steps in his path. He slips, regains his balance. The gap between him and his pursuers closes momentarily. His hand moves inside his jacket, reaches for something. He is only metres from her now. She steps out into the pavement, directly in front of him, and braces herself for the impact. He sends her reeling.

Concerned passers-by help her up, ask if she’s all right. Does she need assistance home? She says no, brushing the water from her coat; her gaze fixed a hundred metres ahead.

A car blocks his path. The men following grab him from behind. He doesn’t struggle. He raises his hands, protesting.

They pull his jacket off, search him, find nothing, and drop it onto the wet pavement. A policeman arrives on the scene and quickly exits. A man climbs out of the back of the car and walks over to the small group. She can see him gesturing with his fist, a look of fury on his face. He lands a heavy blow to the man’s arm and they release him, pushing him roughly forward. He stumbles and nearly falls. Empty-handed, they move off, leaving him alone and rubbing his arm.

Passers-by pay him no attention. He retrieves his sodden jacket and looks back, finds her and smiles. She smiles back, turns and walks away.

LENINGRAD

Viktoriya made her way over to a small group of men seated at the far corner of the Muzey bar, their laughter and guffaws puncturing the general babble of the room.

‘Viktoriya!’ one of them shouted out, as hands reached for the beers she unloaded from the tray.

‘This is Pavel Pytorvich Antyuhin, from Khozraschet , visiting us from Moscow,’ said Roman, introducing the man seated next to him. He was dressed in an ill-fitting black suit, his hair plastered flat over his forehead.

‘Economics must be economical,’ Viktoriya quoted the general secretary.