Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

The first sign of the approaching calamity came at the end of the seventies, when planners warned Brezhnev that the Soviet Union was living beyond its means. In October 1981 the Kremlin finally decided to cut oil deliveries to Eastern Europe by 10 percent, provoking protests from its clients. The East German leader Erich Honecker was particularly vehement, arguing that he would not be able to explain the sudden rise in energy costs to his “working class.” 58Anxious to keep everyone happy, the indecisive Brezhnev scaled back the proposed cutbacks. The savings turned out to be marginal.

By the time Gorbachev came to power, the signs of crisis were so obvious that they could no longer be ignored. Addressing a Politburo session a month after his election, the new gensek ticked off examples of the Soviet Union’s economic backwardness one by one. He concentrated on the dismal state of agriculture, the field in which he had most experience. In the food industry, he told his colleagues, manual labor still accounted for nearly two-thirds of total output. Labor productivity was 60 percent below Western levels. Every year a third of the harvest was lost because of waste and inefficiency. More than three hundred Soviet towns were without water supplies and sewers. Half the streets in urban areas were unpaved. 59

“If we don’t break this trend, then by the end of the century we will be transformed into a Third World country,” Gorbachev told his colleagues, a candid assessment censored from the official transcript released to the Soviet press. 60

The scale of the new leader’s ambitions had made the problem of resource allocation even more acute. In his first few months in office Gorbachev ripped through the country like a tornado, exposing structural defects in Soviet society that went back many decades. There was so much that needed fixing. The goal was clear: to get the nation moving again by replacing plant and equipment and increasing the productivity level of ordinary workers. What was unclear was where the money to pay for such a gigantic modernization program was going to come from.

It was a classic guns-versus-butter dilemma. One option was to cut military spending. But that was impossible at a time when relations with the United States were still contentious. Shortly after his election the defense chiefs persuaded Gorbachev to increase the military budget. A secret Politburo resolution pledged that defense spending would rise by an annual rate of 4.5 percent a year throughout the 1986–90 plan period, outpacing the planned growth in national income. 61A second option was to cut consumption. But that was unacceptable in view of the popular expectations released by Gorbachev’s election. If people were to be persuaded to work harder, they needed more incentives, not fewer.

In the middle of this debate, news from western Siberia caused Gorbachev to revise both his travel plans and his economic calculations. The oil boom of the Brezhnev years was running dry. Unless urgent measures were taken, the Kremlin would lose its most reliable source of hard currency.

As HIS TUPOLEV 134 AIRCRAFT skirted the fringe of the Arctic Circle, thirty-five thousand feet above the world’s largest oil field, Gorbachev had a bird’s-eye view of the economic foundations of Soviet power. The pristine taiga—wave after wave of undulating forest—gave way to a nightmarish industrial wasteland. It looked as if someone had taken a knife to a vast green canvas and slashed wildly from side to side. A great tangle of roads, pipelines, and oil derricks stretched for hundreds of miles on either side of the Ob River. Every so often the slashes coalesced into an ugly blotch of unpaved streets, apartment blocks slapped together from concrete slabs, and factories belching fire and smoke into a perpetually gloomy sky.

For generations of Russians, Siberia was not only a place but also an idea. Traditionally the name had conjured up two conflicting images in the Russian mind: the idea of freedom and the idea of tyranny. The vast unexplored spaces made Siberia the Russian equivalent of the American West, a land of promise and opportunity that attracted pioneers who wanted to escape the ubiquitous bureaucracy. But Siberia was also a place of banishment for the political opponents of tsars and general secretaries, associated in many people’s minds with the repression of millions of people and uniquely harsh climatic conditions.

During the Communist period Siberia became synonymous with yet another idea, the notion that the Soviet Union was a land of “limitless” resources. Exploiting these resources, the Bolsheviks believed, was purely a matter of political will. The ends always justified the means. If the leadership decided that a project was of overriding national importance, the human and environmental costs became irrelevant. Any sacrifice was justified in the name of the ultimate goal, the construction of a Communist society. In pursuit of this utopia, Stalin launched an heroic onslaught against nature and turned Siberia into a vast prison camp. He mobilized millions of slave laborers to build canals and railways across its frozen wastes, scour its mountains for uranium, and construct munitions factories around its shores.

The Siberian treasure trove sustained Soviet-style communism long after it had reached the point of natural exhaustion. It was to Siberia that the Brezhnev generation of leaders looked for salvation from the economic crises affecting the rest of their empire. When the centralized economy experienced serious bottlenecks in the early seventies, the Politburo ordered construction of a two-thousand-mile railway line, known as the BAM, to tap the fabulous mineral wealth of northern Siberia. When the cotton-growing regions of Central Asia began to run dry because of overexploitation, the planners had a simple solution: Divert Siberian rivers from north to south. When the Kremlin’s superpower burden started to become intolerable in the late seventies, Siberian oilmen were instructed to redouble their efforts. Siberia fulfilled the function of a raw materials appendage to the Communist empire, a colonial outpost that could be mercilessly exploited. For Brezhnev and his colleagues, any attempt to question the myth of Siberia’s “inexhaustible” wealth was ideologically unacceptable.

From an economic point of view, Siberia made Soviet-style communism possible. It was also where its death throes would be most visible. Eventually even nature rebelled against its rapacious masters.

The city to which Gorbachev was now headed, Nizhnevartovsk, was a typical example of the Stalinist approach to economic development. A quarter of a century earlier all that had stood on this desolate spot were several hundred wooden huts belonging to the native Khant population. The nomadic Khants lived off the reindeer in the surrounding forests and the abundance of fish in the Ob River. Geologists had identified a nearby swamp—known to the natives as Samotlor (Dead Lake)—as a probable oil deposit. In early 1965 several drilling teams set out to explore the site. The working conditions were appalling. There were no roads, and temperatures were forty to fifty degrees below zero. It took the drilling teams more than a month to hack their way through the marshes. But when they sank their drills into the frozen earth, they found more oil than they had even dreamed about. The oil began to come on stream in significant amounts at the beginning of the seventies.

Over the course of the next decade the Samotlor field produced more oil than Kuwait. Every fourth barrel of Soviet oil—the equivalent of the country’s entire export surplus—came from this remote corner of western Siberia. The pioneers who discovered the field were showered with medals. Desperate for anything that could be turned into hard currency, Soviet leaders repeatedly raised production targets. In order to keep pace with the demands from Moscow, the oilmen began cutting corners. In their haste to get the oil out of the ground, they skimped on infrastructure and paid no attention to the surrounding environment. They used crude extraction techniques that caused the fields to become waterlogged and lose their natural pressure. They left valuable timber to rot in the swamp, rather than take the trouble of processing it. Instead of building pipelines to remove the excess natural gas, they simply torched it. Every day enough gas was burned off from the oil fields around Nizhnevartovsk to heat several European cities. 62