Vladimir Yakunin - The Treacherous Path - An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

I never had any problems with the system myself – why would I, when it had given me and my family everything? I felt free; I did not need to pretend to be something I was not, or articulate opinions I did not share. It is too easy – too convenient – to say that in the Soviet Union we were automatons who ate, dressed, danced or thought in exactly the same way. Even within the KGB, where you might imagine people would be dogmatic ideologists determined to control your every move, there was space for pragmatic, humane behaviour. Early on in my career, my sister became engaged to an unsavoury character who, by any measure (political or moral), was profoundly unsuitable. Because I knew that my sister was desperate to start a family, I offered to resign from my post: I could not stand in the way of her happiness, but nor did I wish to risk compromising my work or that of my colleagues in any way. Rather than accepting, as I had expected, my director simply told me that since it was a personal issue, it did not concern him or the agency. And that, as far as he was concerned, was that.

This freedom, this generally positive attitude towards the system, was not incompatible with being aware of some of its faults. In the early 1970s, after having graduated from the Leningrad Mechanical Institute, I was a researcher at the State Institute of Applied Chemistry in Leningrad. I had been asked to speak at a big conference attended by all the local party and Komsomol bosses. The idea was that I would deliver a report eulogising the inevitable fulfilment of the country’s latest economic plan – which, it had just been announced, would be completed in just four years, rather than the initially proclaimed five – and condemning Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich .

It was fashionable then to compare the respective productivity of the USSR and the USA. Because it appeared from the calculations we were privy to that our country’s output per capita was about half of that achieved in America, the idea was that the gap would be made up by keeping the machinery on in factories right through the night, and scheduling three different working shifts per day. The other area in which it was felt that significant improvements could be made was in the countryside – would it not be better, the theory ran, if farms were organised to run more like factories?

I was not at all confident that simply having the machinery running almost permanently would lead to an increase in productivity – in fact, I feared the opposite. For one thing, I remember my mother telling me the reason why she had left her job as an accountant at a factory in Leningrad. At that time, the targets set by the Gosplan, the central planning agency, related not only to what you were expected to produce (it did not matter if your goods were shoddy, or that there was no demand from them, as long as you hit your goals everything was fine), but also how much material you were expected to use in order to do so. And the logic of this system dictated that if you built a house, and an inspector noticed that you had not employed your full allotted quantity of concrete to do so, you were liable to be punished.

This led to ludicrous activity: men deliberately wasting precious building materials, workers frantically trying to dispose of a lump of half-drying concrete in a field before anybody noticed. And in those cases where a breach of the rules was detected, it was invariably the accountant who was sent to jail. My mother did not believe she should be held responsible for the infractions of others. So I did not need to be told that a decision made in an office in Moscow did not always translate into effective action.

As strong as the party’s centralising impulse and calls for obedience were, they were never sufficient to overmaster the incompetence and dishonesty of some of its citizens. Especially since many of its officials deliberately supplied their superiors with misinformation, so that those charged with planning the country’s future were rarely if ever furnished with the facts they needed to build up a picture of the economic landscape. Official schemes always had to coexist with the illicit and disordered. And though I was no expert on agriculture, I knew enough to be aware that it was not like urban industrial processes, where the same work could be completed throughout the year. In the rural villages, life was still necessarily dictated by the changing seasons; no matter how sincere the party’s ambition to increase the yield was, it could not stop summer churning relentlessly into autumn and then winter.

So instead of the praise for our increased productivity that I might have been expected to deliver, I said, ‘Listen, in the Soviet Union we have a planned economy, but I cannot understand how we can fulfil the plan, not in five years, but in four years. What kind of planning do we have?’

‘As for Solzhenitsyn,’ I continued, ‘there is little I can say for I have not read the book in question. If what I have heard about the substance of the book is right, then, yes, I disagree with that. Yet I cannot condemn something that I have not seen with my own eyes.’

Nothing that came out of my mouth that day was in any way conventional. It was the kind of thing you might expect to hear from dissidents, but later on the most senior party representative in the room praised me. Indeed, when he returned to the local headquarters, he called his subordinates together to tell them that, even if they might not agree with the awkward direction my thoughts were heading in, it was important to listen to criticisms made by young men like me. Not long afterwards, I was elected head of the Institute’s Komsomol organisation. There may have been a script, but there was also far more room for improvisation than many people who grew up in the West would imagine. The state was a sprawling, multifarious beast that always struggled to accommodate demands made by numerous different interest groups. Totalitarianism was certainly at the heart of the regime’s ambitions, but in a country as large, complex and unruly as the Soviet Union, it was never possible to achieve complete, unmediated control.

The secret service gave me a panoramic, privileged view of Soviet society and I encountered everyone from academicians, the directors of factories and scientific institutes and artists and musicians, right through to prostitutes, the homeless and homosexuals. I travelled in Europe and was trusted with access to books, documents and ideas that were out of bounds to ordinary people, and I found out other, stranger, things too. How, for instance, the bosses of criminal societies and the top party leaders played cards and billiards together in the same closed clubs; that the party was honeycombed by careerists attracted by the prospects offered by the organisation that had the monopoly on power; or that, in order to meet their quotas, managers routinely provided their superiors with false reports.

But whatever else might be said about the Soviet Union, and however much damage had been wrought by the state’s jealously maintained position as the sole source of education, I believe that this much is true: socialism was a story that gave meaning to all of our lives. Even by the ’80s, when our grey cities were barely lit at night and it was almost impossible to get hold of coffee, even once we knew about the massacre at Novocherkassk, and the dead boys being brought back from Afghanistan in sealed zinc coffins, it told us where we were going, and why we were heading in that direction. It made us proud of our country and its achievements – whether that was universal education or the triumph in the Great Patriotic War. If I might borrow a phrase from an unexpected quarter, socialism was our own shining city on a hill.

I remember reading an account once about an interesting experiment. A dog was put in a room with two plates of food, one of which was attached to an electrical current. When the dog tried to eat from the electrified plate, it received a shock. After a couple of unpleasant encounters, it learned to leave that plate alone and focused its efforts on the safe plate on the other side of the room. But the scientists then wired up both plates. Once the dog discovered that he would be subjected to a nasty shock no matter which dish he chose to eat from, he simply laid down and went to sleep. The researchers concluded that the dog was so stunned and bewildered by the cruel circumstance he had found himself in that, unable to understand what was going on, he gave up and entered into a kind of hibernation.