The Poverty of Communism, by Nick Eberstadt
Young, Cathy
D uring the Reagan-Gorbachev summit of December 1987, a gentleman with a Manhattan address straight out of Tom Wolfe took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for better mutual...
...propaganda...
...Nor do the less developed Soviet republics of Central Asia account for these startling statistics...
...Unfortunately, the book promises more than it delivers, and too many relevant stones are left unturned...
...Measured by the health of its people," Eberstadt states flatly, "the Soviet Union is no longer a developed nation...
...If alternative estimates are accurate, then "the revolutionary Cuban experience would represent not the most rapid, but instead virtually the slowest measured rate of progress against infant mortality in Latin America and the Caribbean...
...Since the Revolution, its per capita income has fallen from third to fifteenth place in Latin America...
...A prominent Soviet sociologist has estimated the figure at a staggering 40 percent...
...Eberstadt's devastating study of the Soviet Union's health crisis, based on life expectancy and infant mortality statistics, originally appeared in 1981, and was blasted by some as "Cold War Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up In Moscow, published in May by Ticknor & Fields...
...Eberstadt sensibly suggests that inequality of class should be measured not only by income differentiation but also by social mobility—in other words, "the degree to which a person can rise or fall in society according to his own actions and efforts...
...In life expectancy and child mortality, it ranks close to Panama, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and other Third World countries—which, moreover, "are moving up, while the Soviet Union is moving down...
...Come to think of it, even the incomplete story Eberstadt has given us should be enough to lay to rest the notion that Marxism-Leninism can be beneficial to the poor...
...These suspicions are shared by a number of Western demographers...
...His focus is not so much on the virtues of free markets as on the vices of Communist governments...
...Eberstadt notes that even some harsh critics of Cuba's human rights violations have paid homage to its "model progress against disease and ignorance...
...The author is on much firmer ground with less metaphysical explanations: alcoholism (plus alcohol-related accidents), rampant air and water pollution, low health and safety standards in the workplace, contaminated infant formula...
...Finally, there is Soviet socialized medicine, with numerous but low-paid and frequently underqualified doctors, stone-age equipment, scarce medicines—and a declining share of the national budget (from 6.5 percent in the mid-1960s to about five percent in the mid-1970s...
...Eberstadt theorizes that worsening Soviet health conditions may have something to do with the Russian national character and cultural values that glorify passive endurance in the face of suffering...
...Eberstadt goes on to compare health, nutrition, and literacy data from Communist and non-Communist less developed countries...
...Increasingly, it is governments rather than markets which take the lead in shaping economic life...
...In Hungary—regarded as a paragon of wealth throughout the Eastern bloc—about a quarter of citizens are reported to be living in poverty...
...Far from being a mere eccentricity of an idealistic millionaire, the old fellow's expression was merely what has long been the conventional wisdom among academics, journalists, and assorted progressives: Yes, Communism may deprive people of liberty, but at least it meets their basic material needs, such as food and housing and medical care...
...Illiteracy in Cuba may be undercounted as well...
...The complete story of the poverty of Communism, then, remains to be written...
...He takes on the prevalent misconceptions about prerevolutionary Cuba, which, whatever one may say of Battista's rule, was one of the healthiest and best-educated nations in the region...
...The book is a collection of previously published essays written between 1981 and 1987, and since they have not been updated, Eberstadt's study sometimes fails to catch up with current developments—which, however, fully corroborate his essential thesis...
...Thus he repeats, without challenge, the Soviet claim that "a monotonous but ample diet" is ensured to all...
...However, Eberstadt is no laissez-faire dogmatist...
...Masterful statistical analysis is interspersed with enough anecdotal evidence to make it quite readable, even lively (though one still wishes Eberstadt had mixed his sociology with more journalism to give the reader a real sense of daily life and daily hardships in Communist societies...
...However, it is only fair to say that whoever writes it will be greatly indebted to Nick Eberstadt for his careful and thoughtful scholarship, a vital contribution to the field...
...T n the mythology of Marxist-Leninist 1 victories over poverty, the story of Cuba under Fidel Castro has been perhaps the biggest hoax of all...
...Again, Marxism-Leninism repeatedly comes up short, even in improving the status of women...
...Now, in his new book, The Poverty of Communism, Nick Eberstadt, a scholar at the Harvard University Center for Population Studies and at the American Enterprise Institute, finally takes aim at the myth of Marxist-Leninist regimes' superior performance in the arena of "economic rights...
...yet elsewhere in the book, he notes that the startling rate of malnutrition-related diseases such as rickets among Soviet children suggests the existence of hunger...
...Moreover, the author's own analysis indicates that the Europeanized Baltic republics of the USSR and many East European countries, which are not populated by long-suffering Russians, are experiencing the same problems...
...7-The Poverty of Communism is an informative, intelligent, well-written work...
...The Soviets now admit that at least one-fifth of the population lives below the officially defined "subsistence level...
...One might retort that governments best succeed in this task by leaving it to the markets—though Eberstadt does produce somesurprising evidence of a substantial government role in the economies of some Third World countries, mostly Asian, that are commonly viewed as capitalist successes...
...The real shocker is that, even according to probably skewed official statistics, improvements in health and education on "the Isle of Liberty" have been matched or surpassed by many of its non-Communist neighbors, such as Costa Rica, Panama, and Chile under Pinochet...
...His polemic against eminent Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer on the nature of the modern Soviet state and on Western policies toward the USSR is well argued if rather loosely connected to the subject of this volume...
...Eberstadt deals briefly with nutrition but fails to follow up on some tantalizing questions raised by his own data...
...Indeed, he sometimes seems a bit too readily accepting of non-Communist statism: "It has become not just accepted, but expected, that governments will protect their citizens against untoward results of 'normal' market behavior and preempt market decisions in the name of the greater national good...
...by 1988, high-ranking Soviet officials were openly saying that about one-third of the population is not getting adequate medical care...
...Health and education are virtually the only indicators he uses to measure progress against material deprivation...
...Other chapters include an excellent essay on the cost to the Soviet Union of maintaining its empire, which provides a useful context for the drop in health expenditures...
...He argues persuasively, on the basis of strange discrepancies in official Cuban data—such as a marked drop in child mortality and, simultaneously, a rise in the diseases likely to cause it—that the Castro regime has been engaging in some statistical hanky-panky...
...And while Eberstadt devotes some attention to Eastern Europe, he says little about Rumania...
...19.95 Cathy Young THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 53 that could help "Finlandize" Eastern Europe (Finlandization, for once, representing progress...
...The Soviet Union may be the only advanced society to allocate progressively more modest proportions of its output to maintaining the health of its people," Eberstadt comments wryly...
...but about one-sixth of the population still lives in apartments shared with unrelated families, and many more are lodged in dormitories that rival New York's infamous homeless shelters...
...Glasnost-era disclosures in the Soviet press have painted a grim picture of squalor, complete with hunger and homelessness...
...And what of the liberals' great sacred cow of "equitable" distribution of wealth...
...Even in relatively prosperous Leningrad, recent data show, more than a quarter of the citizens have less space than the minimum required under state sanitary norms...
...D uring the Reagan-Gorbachev summit of December 1987, a gentleman with a Manhattan address straight out of Tom Wolfe took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for better mutual understanding, which opened thus: "The major difference in the ideologies of the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union is that America represents freedom, while the Soviet Union espouses freedom from poverty...
...Eberstadt adds some prescriptions for Western action THE POVERTY OF COMMUNISM Nick Eberstadt/Transaction Books/317 pp...
...Yet one could hardly wish for a better illustration of the book's title, where heat and electricity are being rationed and desperate crowds line up for potatoes while an intransigent despot haughtily declines offers of foreign aid...
...This may be true...
...Housing is omitted from the discussion except for a reference to "a slow but steady improvement of housing" in the Soviet Union...
...Using statistical tables, Eberstadt scrutinizes the Cuban Revolution's much-touted accomplishments in health and literacy...
...Such gratuitous speculation seems out of place in a serious study...
...It is not, he argues, the degree of a government's economic intervention that matters most, but the ideology of that government...
Vol. 22 • June 1989 • No. 6
