Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

“Dear comrades,” Kirillov announced, pausing for effect. “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the whole Soviet people [pause] have suffered a grave loss [pause]. Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev [reverential inflection, long pause], loyal perpetuator of the great cause of Lenin [pause], ardent patriot [pause], outstanding revolutionary and fighter for peace and communism [pause], an outstanding politician and statesman of our time [pause], has departed this life [long, mournful pause].”

But wait, comrades. All is not lost. “The people have learned from experience that whatever the turn of events and whatever the trials [pause], our party remains capable of carrying out its historic mission. [Voice assumes growing confidence.] The home and foreign policies of the CPSU elaborated under the leadership of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev [reverential pause] will continue to be applied consistently and purposefully [final note of triumph before funeral music surges in the background].”

Years later, after the collapse of communism, Kirillov explained that he had been trained in the famous Stanislavsky school of acting, the Method. 175In order to seem sincere, the actor must completely live the part. If he can convince himself that he is hopelessly in love, he can convince others. Like anyone else his age—he was born in 1932, at the height of Stalin’s great terror—Kirillov knew about the gulag and the man-made famine that killed millions of people, but he put them out of his mind. He convinced himself that the party was right. Eventually, as the personality cult surrounding Brezhnev reached absurdist proportions, even Kirillov began to have doubts. But he still behaved as if he believed. He was the epitome of the system of doublethink that held a nation of 287 million people in its grasp.

KIRILLOV’S SIMULATION of ideological conviction was an apt analogy for the Brezhnev era. By and large, ordinary Soviets had ceased to believe in socialist ideology, but they continued to go through the motions. The whole country was engaged in a mass deceit. In the privacy of their kitchens people laughed at their doddering leader. In public they kept straight faces.

The Brezhnev period was later dismissed by Soviet historians as the “era of stagnation.” It would be wrong to conclude, however, that nothing of significance happened in the Soviet Union during those years. The process of ideological disillusionment that took place under Brezhnev was an essential prelude to the Gorbachev revolution. During his eighteen years in power the regime gave up the battle to control the minds of its citizens, concentrating instead on their outward behavior. An all-embracing religion capable of mobilizing millions of people was transformed into an ideology for cynics. By the time Brezhnev died, the Soviet Union had lost its sense of mission. Even the general secretary no longer believed in the future socialist utopia.

“All that stuff about Communism is a tall tale for popular consumption,” he told his brother, Yakov. “After all, we can’t leave the people with no faith. The church was taken away, the tsar was shot, and something had to be substituted. So let the people build Communism.” 176

Compared with the scenes that had accompanied Stalin’s death nearly thirty years earlier, Brezhnev’s funeral was a restrained and unemotional affair. Stalin was terrifying and awe-inspiring even in death. In March 1953 Politburo members had quaked before him as he lay on his deathbed in his dacha. When they heard that the “Great Leader of All Times and All Peoples” had passed away, millions of people all over the country broke down and wept. The crowds were so great for the lying in state that more than five hundred people were trampled to death on the streets of Moscow. When Brezhnev died, Soviet citizens merely shrugged their shoulders. The elaborate funeral rites in Red Square—the coffin borne aloft by the surviving members of the Politburo, the wailing of factory sirens and firing of guns, Chopin’s “Funeral March”—were practically identical. But there was no sense of real grief.

Curiously enough, the ideological crisis came at a time when ordinary Soviets were living better than ever before. The improvement in living standards fell far short of the regime’s own promises. Standards of health remained dismal, meat and butter were rarities, and wages were low. Even so, Brezhnev’s rule represented a respite from the terror and grinding poverty of the Stalinist period. Older people later looked back to the era of stagnation as a golden age, when bread cost sixteen kopecks a loaf, there was no unemployment, and every Soviet citizen was guaranteed five square meters of free housing. Russian families were beginning to acquire consumer luxuries like refrigerators and color television sets and could even dream of a tinny Soviet-made automobile.

Had Brezhnev’s successors been able to sustain this gradual increase in living standards, there might have been no perestroika and no Second Russian Revolution. But this proved impossible at a time when the Soviet Union was waging war in Afghanistan, pouring money into the arms race with the United States, and propping up a string of Third World clients. By the early eighties it was clear to the thinking section of the Soviet elite that such profligacy could not continue forever. In order to meet the evergrowing cost of empire, Russia had been forced to ransack its treasure trove of natural resources. In other words, the country was living off its own future.

When the planners attempted to point this out to the decrepit gensek , he would wave them away impatiently. It was an article of faith with Brezhnev that Russia’s natural wealth was “inexhaustible.”

“To hell with you and your figures,” he once told Baibakov, the head of the state planning commission. “Let’s go hunting.” 177

A FEW MONTHS AFTER Brezhnev’s death, in April 1983, a group of a hundred or so Soviet economists and sociologists met in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk to discuss the eternal Russian questions: Who is guilty? What is to be done? Emboldened by Andropov’s calls to get the world’s second superpower moving again, the participants in the seminar tried to analyze the causes of the country’s declining economic performance. They rejected the standard explanations—such as bad weather conditions, lack of skilled manpower, and low labor discipline—in favor of a much broader indictment of central planning. In the opinion of these scientists, the economy was trapped in a Stalinist rut of low productivity, shoddy output, and extravagant use of natural resources. The obsession with fulfilling targets established by supposedly omniscient planners was stifling individual initiative. The command-and-administer system, under which any economic decision of any significance was taken at the center, may have functioned reasonably well when the country’s industrial infrastructure was still being formed. But it was incapable of meeting the challenges of the modern economy.

To avoid problems with the censors, the organizers of the Novosibirsk conference took care to wrap their conclusions up in Marxist-Leninist jargon. They limited circulation of their findings to fifty-eight numbered copies. Each was stamped “Confidential—for official use only.” Despite these precautions, a copy of the report made its way to the West, where it caused an overnight sensation. 178The so-called Novosibirsk report provided an insight into a growing behind-the-scenes debate in the Soviet Union on how to meet the challenges posed by the technological revolution that was sweeping the rest of the industrialized world. Behind the monolithic and seemingly stagnant facade something was stirring.

Under Stalin the Soviet Union had adopted a simplistic formula for economic growth. Increases in output were believed to be directly proportional to greater inputs of the “factors of production”: manpower, raw materials, and land. If necessary, force would be used to achieve the desired result. In the 1930s, at the height of Stalin’s industrialization campaign, thirty million peasants were forcibly uprooted from the countryside to provide slave labor for socialist industry. Another fifteen to thirty million Soviet citizens fell victim to terror or famine. The Bolshevik leaders were convinced that the goal of building a socialist utopia justified any sacrifice. Their hubris was breathtaking. “There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm,” one of Stalin’s collaborators boasted. “Our task is not to study the economy, but to change it. We are not bound by any law.” 179