Moscow: A View From Below
Bonnell, Victoria E.
Visiting Moscow after an eleven-year absence I was struck first by the freshness in the political atmosphere. The impact of glasnost is palpable: People talk in new ways, no longer tremulously,...
...The problem is not merely that basic items are in short supply (meat, sugar, milk products, fruits, vegetables, and so on) but that many items have disappeared entirely...
...Nascent Cooperative Movement Another important type of voluntary association that has appeared during the Gorbachev era is the cooperative, formed for the purpose of carrying on economic activity outside party and state auspices...
...The fundamental concern is one of destabilization...
...Mass mobilization, together with mass terror, reshaped the politics of millions of Soviet citizens...
...Boris Yeltsin put the matter clearly at the Nineteenth Party Conference in July 1988: "As a result of restructuring, in three years we have not solved any of the problems that are tangible and real for people, let alone achieved any revolutionary transformations...
...There can be no doubt that what we see here, still in embryonic form, is the emergence of a civil society in the Soviet Union...
...349-352...
...More than thirty thousand grassroots organizations had come into existence in the Soviet Union by December 1987...
...Gorbachev's conception of popular participation places a high premium on the very autonomy of word and deed that the Stalinist system managed to crush for nearly sixty years...
...Glasnost is nurturing a mentality of cynicism at the very time when Gorbachev is attempting to create a new kind of idealism aimed at expunging the remnants of Stalinism and bringing the coun* In Moskovskie novosti (September 11, 1988), the historian Roy Medvedev gave this characterization of popular attitudes under Brezhnev: "Reluctance and inability to do a good job, political passivity and apathy, indifference toward the moral and political values of socialism, the moral degradation of tens of millions of people, a universal reign of mediocrity, a gulf between words and deeds, the encouragement of all sorts of lies—all this crippled the consciousness of an entire generation, which we call—sometimes not without reason— the 'lost generation.' " SUMMER • 1989 311 Inmost Watch try—materially and spiritually—fully into the modern age...
...3 Agnes Heller, Everyday Life, trans...
...For more than fifty years, an event of this kind could not take place in the Soviet Union...
...Judging by appearances, the country lags behind the West even more than in 1970 when I made my first trip there...
...The food situation, in particular, has grown steadily worse...
...Equally threatening is the complex set of popular attitudes—civic cynicism, inertia, and outright resistance—that are reinforced by the experience of everyday life...
...What we are witnessing in the Soviet Union today are the first decisive steps in this direction...
...Far less obvious, though, is the popular reaction to all this—the ways people assess what they read or see on television...
...And now men and women of all ages openly demonstrated in the capital...
...Consumer, producer, credit, and agricultural cooperatives enjoyed a brief efflorescence in the 1920s and figured prominently in the debate over the future direction of the country's economic development...
...Cooperatives must contend with a deeply rooted tradition of aversion toward private enterprise, even in its collectivist forms, and toward personal enrichment through such enterprises...
...Taken together, these experiences reinforce a profound feeling of powerlessness...
...These clubs, which were permitted to exist without much opposition from the authorities, focused on leisure-time activities and had a rather limited membership...
...Just as it has been said of early modern Europe: "No bourgeoisie, no democracy," so today we may say of communist societies: "No voluntary associations, no perestroika...
...Like Stalin, Gorbachev needs mass mobilization to carry out a vast restructuring of Soviet institutions...
...in many parts of the country, local authorities place obstacles in the path of these fledgling businesses...
...When the ability of the regime to deliver fell far short both of these expectations and of extravagant official pronouncements, people became more and more skeptical about the promises and performance of the party-state.* In the intervening eleven years, the mood of civic cynicism has deepened...
...his goal is mobilization without regimentation...
...The overcrowding, filth, long lines (averaging two to three hours each day for Muscovites), pushing and shoving, and sheer physical exertion required to get through an ordinary day in the capital can scarcely be comprehended by those of us who live in the Western industrialized societies...
...The system is so hierarchical and decision-making processes are often so obscure that even when fear plays no role, ordinary citizens believe that the process of redress is fundamentally hopeless, a waste of time...
...Only toward the end of the Brezhnev era did 314 • DISSENT Glasnost Watch voluntary associations begin to reappear...
...Nor are the reasons difficult to detect...
...And this is precisely the area where Gorbachev's perestroika, with reliance on initiative from below to complement changes inaugurated from above, has run into serious obstacles...
...Stalin's solution was to create a new kind of politics based on a combination of dictatorship, terror, and mass mobilization...
...Campell (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London and Boston, 1984), p. 52...
...This incongruity produces painful contradictions...
...expectations for an improved standard of living rose sharply...
...More significant, and entirely unprecedented, both the people and the mass media have begun to perceive this as a systemic problem...
...According to Boris Kagarlitsky, a leader of unofficial socialist clubs in Moscow, political groups have made substantial progress...
...But the possibilities for grass-roots politics vary tremendously from one city and region to another...
...These have proved particularly resistant to reform...
...those who tried to engage in public action were severely punished...
...ecology and preservation groups have won important victories against local authorities...
...During my visit, cooperative businesses, especially in the retail sector, were springing up in all parts of the city...
...These hardships, imposed by the scarcity and low quality of food and other basic consumer goods and services, provide the number one topic of conversation among Muscovites...
...In the summer of 1987 a number of these groups formed the Federation of Socialist Clubs...
...The mass media have become so racy that few still listen to "the voices," as foreign Russianlanguage broadcasts are known in the USSR...
...All of this takes a tremendous toll on people and, in combination with substandard medical care and alcoholism, results in a low life expectancy (the Soviet Union ranks thirty-second in life expectancy out of 126 countries) and a high level of infant mortality (fiftieth in the world, after Mauritius and Barbados...
...In June 1988, the Moscow cooperative, Fakt, was formed to serve as an information clearinghouse for other cooperatives...
...During my recent visit I did not see a single computer...
...Yet there are indications, even in the capital, that voluntary associations are little by little moving into the interstices of public life...
...Law enforcement officials as well as some citizens have strong reservations about such activity, but the sanctions for such gatherings remain in force despite a recent law placing new restrictions on the demonstrators...
...SUMMER • 1989 • 317...
...I refer to it as civic cynicism: a profound mistrust of political authority and official declarations...
...The situation changed dramatically after Gorbachev came to power...
...Higher quality butter, sour cream, cheese, tea, and many other staples of the Russian diet have been replaced by poor substitutes...
...These attitudes—participation without power, enthusiasm without initiative, authority without responsibility —ssuurrvviivveedd well into the post-Stalin era...
...others, such as the highly successful Popular Front groups in the Baltic states, extend to an entire national republic...
...Influenced, most likely, by the model of interestgroup politics advocated by the prominent sociologist Tatiana Zaslayskaia, he has promoted various reforms designed to democratize party and state institutions and, concomitantly, to encourage the formation of voluntary associations...
...price reforms involve the abandonment of subsidies for basic food items and the likelihood of serious inflation...
...Gorbachev makes appeals for "civic selfaffirmation," an "active civic stance," "selfregulation and self-management," and, most often, the exercise of initiative...
...Dwelling, moving about, speaking, reading, shopping, and cooking are activities that seem to correspond to the characteristics of tactical ruses and surprises: clever tricks of the 'weak' against the `strong', an art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf, hunter's tricks, maneuverable, polymorph mobilities, jubilant, poetic, and warlike discoveries...
...In short, it is the opposite of Stalin's recipe...
...Two lobbying groups—Rossiia and the Moscow Association of Cooperatives—have recently been created to defend the interests of cooperative businesses against the government, racketeers, and negative public opinion...
...by G.I...
...Several people stood with a large placard announcing the formation of a fund to build such a memorial, including a museum and library...
...Voluntary associations are still circumscribed and dependent upon official policy...
...In exchange, Gorbachev is offering the possibility of genuine political participation through elections and workplace democracy...
...The impact of glasnost is palpable: People talk in new ways, no longer tremulously, about the deplorable conditions in their country...
...The public response to cooperatives has been mixed...
...Significantly, the symbols and rituals of authority are in very low profile, while political posters, once ubiquitous, have now virtually disappeared...
...Craft guilds and mutual aid societies, so widespread in premodern Europe, appeared late in Russia's history and then only under government tutelage...
...Membership in these groups ranges from a few dozen to several thousand...
...the telephone system is inadequate even for voice, let alone electronic data transmission...
...By January 1989, there were more than 48,000 cooperatives in the country as a whole...
...To be sure, the media have focused public scrutiny and even public abuse on heads of ministries, store managers, and others...
...The culture of deception and fear, lies and whispers, has given way to openness in public and private discourse...
...Recent press reports indicate that some local authorities are harshly vindictive toward these groups, while others tolerate and even support them...
...Cooperatives and other kinds of voluntary associations have begun to function as interest groups seeking to influence the direction of public policy and the allocation of resources...
...Time and again I asked people why they did not protest certain injustices, why they tolerated misconduct, violations of rules, and preposterous regulations...
...Though there are notable exceptions to this pattern of resignation, such attitudes are widespread among Muscovites...
...Cooperatives played an important part in achieving the withdrawal of a new tax law on private businesses in 1988...
...Public demonstrations are still far from routine in the Soviet Union, but their number has been increasing in the past several years...
...Moreover, not all groups have been accorded the same opportunities for public action...
...High prices and lavish profits generate resentment...
...Gorbachev wants to arouse the population from the paralysis induced by long years of civic cynicism, fear, and general powerlessness...
...Everyone can see the deterioration in the quantity and quality of food products...
...An "invisible" human agency presents a serious obstacle to autonomous political and social action...
...It is by no means certain that most people consider this an attractive trade-off...
...cooperatively owned fast-food vans can be seen in the Kremlin park and other recreational spots...
...I was told protest had no effect, that it was impossible to prosecute the guilty party, or to identify the decisionmaker...
...Following the October Revolution, voluntary associations were gradually absorbed into the one-party system...
...4 Ferment at the Base In contrast to the beginning of the century, Moscow and Leningrad are no longer the centers where dissident activity originates...
...With Stalin's ascendancy in the late 1920s and the introduction of a centralized economy, the independent cooperative movement was extinguished...
...Unofficial groups provide an especially important indicator of changes at the grassroots level...
...His hope is that cooperative forms of private enterprise will bring about a swift improvement in the quantity and quality of goods and services...
...I say "modern age" because in the Soviet Union premodern features persist within the frame of a modern industrial society...
...Authoritarian and populist elements were intertwined in the Stalinist system, with participation in mass organizations a critical factor in carrying out the perestroika of the 1930s...
...Stalin utilized popular participation to generate support for the party program while at the same time confining "all forms of public association, discourse, and public action within structures established by the regime...
...the organization seeking a memorial to Stalin's victims has garnered support from several major artistic unions and appears to be succeeding in its aims...
...2 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans...
...Rules, both formal and informal, must be outwitted and circumvented...
...Resolutions adopted by the Nineteenth Party Conference in early July 1988 lent official support to the establishment of voluntary associations "expressing the interests and aspirations of various strata of Soviet society...
...There is also a new weekly newspaper for coop members, Vestnik kooperatora...
...the Popular Fronts in the Baltic states are emerging as key players in national politics...
...Nor is it just a tactical move or a grudging concession to some indigenous or foreign constituency...
...Although nearly everyone welcomes glasnost to some degree, the reactions to it and to perestroika are more varied, complex, and problematic than a Western observer might expect...
...The Democratic Union continues to function despite severe restrictions on its public activity, but such incidents bring to the surface the deep-seated ambivalence toward autonomous social action on the part of local authorities as well as some citizens...
...Political parties and trade unions did not come to Russia until the 1905 revolution...
...by Steven F. Rendall (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), p. 40...
...How has Gorbachev attempted to surmount popular attitudes and practices that stand in the way of implementing perestroika...
...I first saw this in 1976 and 1977, when the regime's monopoly on information was beginning to break down...
...The liberalization in social policy cannot be explained merely as an instrumental aspect of Gorbachev's program for achieving economic reform...
...It was a moving occasion...
...Many decades of prevarication and hyperbole have left their mark...
...Tsarist Russia, as Tocqueville's theory would have predicted, had an exceedingly weak tradition of voluntary association...
...In the postStalin era there has been an unwritten social contract between the party-state and the population: The regime provides job security, a modest but steady improvement in the material standard of living, and opportunities for social mobility, and in exchange citizens cooperate at the workplace and accept a political system that rules in their name but without their effective participation...
...This is a dilemma explicitly recognized by Gorbachev and some of his major policies can best be understood in this light...
...Like Stalin before him, Gorbachev has to find means to change deeply rooted ways of thinking about the world...
...Whereas only a few dozen cooperative enterprises existed in Moscow in September 1987, one year later there were more than three thousand...
...Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that independent voluntary associations were a critical element in democratic societies...
...Though Gorbachev was sharply critical of this statement, the press is filled with detailed reports of the appalling difficulties that people encounter as they 312 • DISSENT Glasnost Watch attempt to feed and clothe themselves and send their children off to school...
...These privately owned stores, restaurants, and even public toilets were generally cleaner, more hospitable, and more expensive than their counterparts in the state sector...
...Fear of Change One other circumstance must be overcome by Gorbachev if he is to achieve mobilization on behalf of perestroika: the apprehension about, even resistance to, his reforms...
...Dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1987), p. 12...
...And each day it is reinforced by the mass media, which now present scathing indictments of the Soviet system in virtually all its aspects...
...Three voluntary associations (devoted to a memorial for Stalin's victims, charity, and cultural preservation) currently have a national constituency...
...Bureaucratic intransigence is only one aspect of a monumental problem...
...But these incidents are still episodic and there is an overwhelming impression that even highly placed officials are themselves cogs in a big impersonal bureaucratic machine...
...some groups aiming at political reform have become vociferous participants in the ongoing debate about restructuring party and governmental institutions...
...Manifestations of autonomous social action betoken a fundamental shift in the orientation of some citizens, away from civic cynicism and toward engagement in civic affairs...
...The experiences of everyday life in the Soviet Union reinforce attitudes of dependency (it's difficult to feel in control of one's life), degradation (the conditions of daily struggle are exceedingly demeaning), and desperation (no matter how hard one tries, it's difficult to cope with the most basic tasks of daily existence...
...But it remains to be seen what practical effect these provisions will have...
...Today, as in the past, major structural changes have been initiated from above by a single formidable leader...
...The information and communications revolutions have yet to make an appearance in the Soviet Union outside of the space and military sectors...
...An animated group of about one hundred people, some of them passersby, gathered around the organizers...
...Coping mechanisms, enabling ordinary citizens to "make do," have important social-psychological consequences as well as implications for conduct in the economic and political spheres...
...The extraordinary crisis in the material sphere, in combination with the general harshness of the urban environment, makes everyday life in Moscow very Hobbesian — nasty, brutish, and short...
...Gorbachev now wants to rewrite the contract and many people fear that they will be victimized by these changes, just as they have been victimized in the past by grand schemes of social engineering...
...This is the legacy with which Gorbachev must contend...
...It is hard to give a name to this set of attitudes...
...According to V. Kravtsov, the USSR minister of justice, there were more than two hundred and fifty sizable "unauthorized" rallies, processions, and demonstrations in Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, and several other cities between 1986 and 1988...
...By the early 1930s, all of them, including the trade unions, had become subordinated to the party-state...
...The Stalinist system, even in its post-Stalin manifestations, has never adequately institutionalized methods for obtaining redress of grievances—any kind of grievances...
...Certain organizations, such as the nonsocialist Democratic Union, have been sharply criticized in the press and severely treated by the authorities...
...The author offers a compelling analysis of the way mass participation was engineered in the 1930s...
...q Notes Michael Gelb, "Mass Politics under Stalin: Party Purges and Industrial Productivity Campaigns in Leningrad, 1928-1941" (Ph.D...
...To appreciate the significance of such practices we must bear in mind that "the structure of everyday life . . . encourages us to see the whole world as an analogy of our own everyday life...
...Though initially centered around leisure-time and cultural activities, voluntary associations have rapidly expanded to focus on a wide range of issues that include ecology and political reform...
...A steep increase in subscriptions to newspapers and journals and the long lines at kiosks indicate that people take a lively interest in the printed word...
...Like other voluntary associations, cooperatives (involving both consumers and producers) got off to a late start in Tsarist Russia, making rapid strides only after the 1905 revolution...
...As an Izvestia correspondent put it recently: "Is it possible to rear a law-abiding citizen when everyday experience persuades him that he has no rights...
...In the 1980s, it is the periphery that has become the center of autonomous grass-roots movements for political and social change...
...This policy has begun to yield results, particularly since the enactment of a new Law on Cooperatives in July 1988...
...What is remarkable is that despite immense legal, fiscal, organizational, and ideological problems, not to speak of the Soviet 316 • DISSENT Glasnost Watch Mafia (yes, Mafia...
...parties and unions operated in a very circumscribed environment for only a dozen years, until the February Revolution brought down the autocracy...
...While I was in Moscow a demonstration by this group was brutally dispersed on one occasion and entirely suppressed on another...
...The late seventies and early eighties witnessed the formation of unofficial clubs among young sports fans, rock music enthusiasts, and others...
...cooperatives selling clothing and secondhand goods are visible in many neighborhoods...
...Cooperatives gained major importance following the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, when Lenin and Bukharin advocated them as a transitional economic form between capitalism and socialism...
...The Declaration of the Federation of Socialist Clubs drawn up at the First Meeting of Informal Associations in Moscow is reprinted in Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State 1917 to the Present (Verso: London and New York, 1988), pp...
...The brutishness of public life has intensified in proportion to the conditions of scarcity and the general deterioration of public facilities...
...Gorbachev has once again restored legitimacy to the idea of self-managed cooperatives, in fact making them a key element in his strategy for economic revival...
...For the first time since the 1920s, and on a radically new scale, people began to learn about life outside Soviet borders by means of shortwave radio broadcasts, foreign travel, and communication with recent Soviet émigrés...
...Gorbachev has chosen a different path, one without precedent in Soviet experience...
...More concretely, the new cost accounting system (khozrashchet) means that job security is no longer part of the basic social contract...
...I saw stores that had row upon row of empty shelves...
...In the Soviet Union today the system operates in such a way that it is difficult, in fact often impossible, to identify who is responsible for a given problem...
...But change from above cannot succeed without mobilizing change from below...
...Like unofficial political groups, cooperatives have developed more slowly in Moscow than in some other areas, such as the Baltics...
...Soon after my arrival in Moscow I witnessed a public demonstration in Pushkin Square, organized in behalf of a memorial to the victims of Stalinism...
...His approach, however, calls for a mass mobilization stimulated by policies initiated from above but sustained over the long term by institutional structures that permit autonomous political and social action...
...The advent of a coordinating center, lobbying organizations, and a newspaper indicates that coops, like unofficial political groups, are beginning to achieve significant coordination outside official channels...
...The Popular Front—a movement on behalf of perestroika that includes both party and nonparty elements—has achieved its greatest success not in Moscow, where its goals remain nebulous and its popular base is minuscule, but in the Baltic Republics...
...that preys on them, the number of cooperatives has been increasing and these businesses are currently taking the first steps toward collective organization...
...National republics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia) are generating social movements far in advance—numerically, organizationally, programatically — of those in the RSFSR...
...In the fall of 1988 about five hundred unofficial groups were functioning in Moscow and several hundred in Leningrad...
...The appearance of politically oriented voluntary associations is certainly one of the most astonishing and potentially significant developments of the past three and a half years...
...Daily life resembles a kind of warfare, pitting citizen against citizen in a never-ending series of cruel encounters...
...The movement has proceeded slowly in Moscow but in provincial cities, such as Sverdlovsk and elsewhere, grass-roots political organizations have achieved a considerable following and currently occupy an important position in local politics...
...Police circulated in the area but did not interSUMMER • 1989 • 315 glasnost Watch fere...
...The Voice of America, once an object of official vilification, has been invited to open an office in Moscow...
...2 These words of Michel de Certeau possess a special poignancy, because everyday life has engendered an intricate pattern of "tricks" that include conniving, hoarding and weaseling, and a generally predatory disposition...
...But the situation in the capital is changing rapidly...
...Most voluntary associations operate on the local level...
...Many signed the petition, a housewife laden with groceries and a young man in a military uniform among them...
...The problem he faces has certain similarities to that which confronted Stalin during the first Five Year Plan: how to transform the attitudes and behavior of the Soviet people in behalf of perestroika (the term was first used extensively during the first Five Year Plan...
...His options are far more limited than those of the Great Helmsman...
...The people I encountered had a worried and skeptical attitude toward perestroika—views that were not confined to intellectuals but appeared to prevail among broad strata of the population...
...Another member of the group collected signatures on a petition in support of the project...
...An indispensable feature of successful social movements is the identification of "the enemy" in human form...
...One discovery I made is that the optimism in the West about Gorbachev's recent reforms is not quite shared in Moscow...
...These reforms recognize that, as Zaslayskaia said in a 1987 interview: "The structure of our society is made up of a great many groups whose statuses differ and which have different (sometimes opposing) interests and goals for which they struggle...
...This loss of innocence profoundly altered popular standards for comparison...
...Their activities are wide-ranging: restaurants, cafes, retail sales of clothing, food, and other items, plumbing and other skilled crafts concerned with household repair, typewriter repair, construction, manufacturing, tailoring, credit, car insurance, and rock music...
...SUMMER • 1989 • 313 glasnost Watch Gorbachev has taken steps to promote legal reforms that provide procedures for appealing unlawful actions of officials and establish criminal liability for persecuting people for criticism...
...The existence of vast urban centers, a superior space program, and military high-tech go hand in hand with preindustrial time-use (appointments are nearly impossible to schedule), consumption patterns (close to half the family budget goes for food), woefully inadequate health care (only 35 percent of rural district hospitals have hot running water...
...Civic cynicism thrives on these contradictions, undermining the logic of Gorbachev's strategy for reform...
...17 percent have no running water), and an abysmally low standard of living (per capita individual consumption is about a third what it is in the United States...
...4 Conversation with Kagarlitsky, September 13, 1988...
...A colorful cooperative cafe is strategically placed in front of the Intourist Hotel and a posh cooperative restaurant has opened several doors down...
...He cannot resort to terror, exhortatory propaganda, or mass spectacles...
...not even the banks have them...
...Photocopying machines are almost as scarce today as a decade ago...
...As a means of self-defense, people have developed coping mechanisms that allow them to maneuver within established structures...
...But paradoxically, the state itself must create a new civil society by opening up a broad sphere for independent organizations and providing the legal and institutional support for these activities...
...Finally, they are not operating within a market economy, which means that they have to wheel and deal in their relations with state suppliers, bureaucrats, and others...
...Struggles of Everyday Life To date perestroika has had little impact on the daily ordeals of ordinary citizens...
...The tolerance and encouragement for autonomous organizations and for new forms of public action generated by these organizations is an intrinsic aspect of Gorbachev's strategy for change in the Soviet Union—a sine qua non of its progress...
...They operate under such colorful names as "Community," "Salvation," "Epicenter," "Candle," and "Laboratory of Public Self-Management...
Vol. 36 • July 1989 • No. 3
