Soviet Protest and the Proletariat
HOPKINS, MARK
CONFRONTING A SILENT MAJORITY Soviet Protest and the Proletariat BY MARK HOPKINS Moscow Scene One: The office of G., a leading commentator for a major Soviet daily newspaper, stacked at either...
...He is always prepared to defend progress and failures in his district, and is jealous of any intrusions into his small kingdom...
...In gum, the major Moscow department store, 150 people can be seen waiting in line to buy $20 black vinyl suitcases...
...But, B. notes, it is still hard to know what is going on...
...But, you ask anyhow, what is the controversy over Solzhenitsyn...
...Two chairs in one corner overflow with forgotten, yellowed papers...
...The kgb (the security police) arrest some and let others go...
...Solzhenitsyn...
...Almost 40 years old, he grew up at a time, right after the War, when you got your education the best you could...
...Medvedev...
...That's a guess, though, B. admits...
...You know, he wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about the Stalin camps...
...Certainly, G. says, he has also read Sakharov's essays...
...China remains a long-term concern, but a border war was averted...
...The official budget says 16-17 billion rubles...
...To none of these or various other stereotypes making up the overwhelming majority of Soviets is a political upheaval in the name of civil rights very appealing...
...The "Chronicle of Current Events," a typewritten dossier of arrests and trials, is gotten up clandestinely and periodically by someone or some Soviet circle of informants...
...That has been the Yugoslav experience, as Soviet politicians know...
...Solzhenitsyn, he says, is Russia's greatest contemporary writer...
...American participation in the Vietnam war is diminishing, relieving pressure on the Soviets to respond...
...West Germany's Ostpolitik is yielding up what the Soviet leadership has for years sought...
...and under Khrushchev the USSR was losing power and purpose...
...Scene Five: No question about it, A., another American journalist, says...
...Some sharing of decisions takes place in the Party Politburo, it appears...
...The Soviet citizen feels the squeeze, and he has at least a vague sense of being bamboozled again...
...much of it was generated in Khrushchev's time...
...They subordinate that widely attractive purpose, though, to the loftier cause of political rights...
...Just off Leningrad's Nevsky Prospect, 50 people may line up to purchase small watermelons...
...R. responds...
...Except for the handful of famous critics, such as Solzhenitsyn, the names of the participants--Amalrik, Aleksandr Ginzburg, Pyotr Grigorenko, Natalia Gorbanyevskaya and many others--remain unfamiliar, even in the USSR...
...Yet, the producers of the "Chronicle" seem less a center of protest than a vehicle...
...Thus, while Sakharov and colleagues issue a manifesto proposing, among other things, a democratic political system, lesser Soviet citizens are arrested for simply signing petitions...
...The Communist party first secretary in the region covering Obninsk (a science town 60 miles south of Moscow where Medvedev worked) probably thought he had a green light...
...His hope is that whatever machinations go on at the top will not shake his nest...
...If this wasn't sufficient, civil disorders, the antiwar movement and talk in the United States of scaling down foreign commitments all fleshed out the hawk argument that expansion of Soviet power was vital...
...From the hawk vantage point in the political hierarchy, the times have been a gift...
...G. sips coffee served from a tray by a waitress-housekeeper...
...The statistics show greater shoe production, millions of television sets and overfulfilled steel output targets...
...They never intended to go as far as the Yugoslavs already have...
...And how much is spent on war materiel...
...The Soviet press either denies the dissidents a hearing, or condemns them...
...The other problem, A. adds, is professional...
...Agreed...
...Actually, A. observes, they are few in number, fewer all the time, and have no real political power...
...The time between the conception of a good idea and getting it into production is equal to the distance from a research institute to the top of a multilayer Moscow ministry...
...For the consensus seems to be that the civil rights "movement" in the Soviet Union--as dramatic and compelling as it might be--is being squeezed and driven further underground...
...Just why offers a case study of the role mass media play in energizing a nation...
...Maybe I am a conservative...
...However, from the point of view of many Soviets, dissident literature is being exploited by foreign enemies for anti-Soviet purposes...
...One has merely to see at close range the troop carriers, tanks or missile haulers (when the Soviet military masses equipment on side streets for parades through Red Square), and to compare them with civilian buses, apartment buildings and clothes to discover where the best technology and labor in the Soviet Union are concentrated...
...How many apartments or schools could be built with that money...
...In a soviet context, where "defense of the motherland" normally screens off doubts, these rumblings about large military and space expenditures convey a discontent with the standard of living (and thus the Soviet reports, chiefly for internal consumption, that the Luna 16 unmanned moon exploration was accomplished at far less cost than the American manned landing...
...Solzhenitsyn...
...and, chiefly, the Party apparatus, fearful of being promoted to irrelevance...
...For him the year's harvest is the focal point of a sparse life relieved by vodka, hunting, sometimes television, and an occasional bus trip to a big town...
...These are the people who say now that Khrushchev was a power-seeking fool and who, given the present available choice, admire Premier Aleksei Kosygin because he seems to them cultured, intelligent, rational, and moderate...
...Democracy is developing...
...and predicted it would not...
...Compared with five years ago, Soviet citizens have more cars and apartments today...
...There is the middle-aged factory worker, finally settled into his three-room apartment after a 10-year wait, saving a few rubles for a new suit, refrigerator or some furniture, and pressured constantly to be an activist for "Socialist construction...
...The small circles of dissidents may indeed prove to be the forerunners of a political evolution in the Soviet Union...
...But, A. confesses, who is he to judge what place in history the dissidents will occupy...
...The 1965 economic reform was heralded as the greatest event since Lenin's New Economic Policy in the 1920s...
...A young Russian, Amalrik wrote Wilt the USSR Survive Until 1984...
...But even that would build four cities the size of Leningrad...
...He knows of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, the two writers imprisoned in 1966 for anti-Soviet propaganda...
...Neither did they really foresee the impossibility of maintaining an authoritarian Party with a roughshod market Socialism...
...Perhaps some dissidents are allowed freedom in the hope that they will lead the kgb to sympathizers, B. continues, but no one really knows this with certainty...
...Scene Three: R., from the Soviet republic of Georgia, is on a business trip to Moscow and is spending his last night in a restaurant...
...He talks in slurred half-sentences, like a man whose thoughts race ahead of his speech, about the Soviet Union...
...there is, they insist, a limit to penitence...
...In a Gorky Street meat shop, the crowd at the meat counter buying ragged chunks of beef is usually so dense you can barely see the display case...
...To one degree or another, they are sympathetic to the cause of civil rights in the Soviet Union...
...That is why to an informed Soviet citizen "neo-Stalinism" seems more fictional than real...
...The internal dissent with which it has had to deal has not been all of its own making...
...You must have order to develop...
...They also reveal a latent admiration for Stalin that has survived the public anti-Stalinist campaign and is often wrongly interpreted as neo-Stalinism...
...In Nikita Khrushchev's days, the writers were the prime voice of liberalization and, as the last years have shown, they could be compromised or suppressed without damaging the important anatomy of the Soviet system...
...Western correspondents have good contacts with the dissidents, who feed reporters documents and information on arrests and trials...
...They tend to dismiss General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev as a heavy-handed, uninspired, if not slow thinking, politician...
...Our second is the military--heavy defense spending...
...Solzhenitsyn's writing, G. declares flatly, has no literary merit...
...Scene Four: M., a 21-year-old Soviet Army sergeant, strikes up a conversation in a small Moscow cafe...
...Then there was "Israeli aggression" in the Middle East, and the Chinese threat in the Far East...
...Of course, M. answers, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich...
...But it is probably more than that...
...But, M. smiles, they will never be published in the Soviet Union...
...The reaction to the relatively permissive Khrushchev years has yet to run its course...
...But their influence on the mass of more than 240 million citizens, let alone the Party machinery, is severely restricted...
...Yes, Cancer Ward and The First Circle...
...The 24th Party Congress, which Brezhnev evidently wanted to hold this fall in accordance with Party rules, was suddenly postponed until next March, probably because the next Five-Year Plan is still being debated...
...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...Yet somehow there has been little relief from the grinding, exhausting struggle of daily existence...
...The two hardly deserve the title of writers, he says...
...A Grigorenko has no connection with a Sakharov, a member of the scientific elite advocating gradualism in his program for democratization of Soviet society...
...Then came the protests from Solzhenitsyn and some important scientists, and the Party had to back off...
...There is the lower level Moscow official, a notch above the average in pay and privilege, secure in stable growth, slightly ambitious for a larger fiefdom, though reluctant to make decisions...
...Despite the impression from abroad, though, dissent remains isolated...
...Aleksandr who...
...It is simply out of tune with what grieves the rank and file...
...The civil rights cause lacks broad appeal for another reason...
...But unfortunately, when he turns from physics to politics Sakharov is naive...
...in the next block, shoppers snatch ordinary and obviously scarce red candles at a sidewalk kiosk...
...Add to this some gains in foreign policy...
...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...It would be wrong to credit Brezhnev personally with achievements or failures, in the same way that Khrushchev was...
...Isn't that right...
...He should confine himself to his own specialty, G. suggests...
...The scope of Stalinist repression and terror is popular knowledge...
...No," the Tashkent official objected...
...Yes, G. has read not only One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was published in the Soviet Union, but also Cancer Ward which was not...
...In Moscow's Leningrad railroad station, late at night, hundreds of men, women and children huddle on benches and the asphalt platform to compete for the too few seats on the too few trains...
...They document an array of activities that currently attract the kgb--petitions from national minorities, books or articles critical of the Soviet system, demonstrations against Soviet policies, requests by Soviet Jews for exit visas, even the mere possession of officially banned material...
...I have never been to your country, but as I understand it, your democracy is anarchy...
...And he has heard that two other Solzhenitsyn novels were published in the West--what were they...
...Or, as with the scientists, they already enjoy material comforts and conveniences and are more concerned with secrecy, censorship, foreign travel restrictions, Party dictates, and kgb surveillance...
...Although he has not gone beyond high school, he obviously is well read and comments knowingly on both Russian and American writers...
...Well whatever, if he wrote about the camps, it never would have been published in the Soviet Union...
...Food production, a Brezhnev satrapy since 1965 when he announced a new program of heavy investment in agriculture (repeated this past summer), has skimped along...
...It is even becoming known that as many as 20 million people died or were killed during Stalin's several purges...
...The Czechoslovak affair staked out the Soviet sphere in Europe again...
...as professional journalists, they feel added compulsion to cover the story...
...And Zhores Medvedev, the Soviet biologist who has urged a freer flow of information in the Soviet Union, and who was temporarily held in a psychiatric ward...
...In a Leningrad restaurant two Russians, strangers to one another and to me, underscored this point during a spontaneous conversation...
...Finally, there is the district Party secretary, ever watchful of the local popular mood, careful to form protective alliances with factory managers, the local kgb, and assorted other government officials, collective farm chairmen and Party apparatchiks...
...What does he think of the dissidents, the protesters, I ask...
...Has he read anything by Solzhenitsyn...
...Protesters consciously use the foreign press to publicize their grievances, which are then relayed by the Voice of America, bbc or Radio Liberty back into the Soviet Union...
...Between amiably terse calls ("Listen, I have to talk with you tomorrow about something, absolutely...
...CONFRONTING A SILENT MAJORITY Soviet Protest and the Proletariat BY MARK HOPKINS Moscow Scene One: The office of G., a leading commentator for a major Soviet daily newspaper, stacked at either end with books and tan cardboard files...
...At the moment, most of the dissidents are in camps, are under kgb surveillance, or are being driven into silence...
...At best, A. believes, the dissidents share a common interest in rule by law...
...As one Muscovite noted, accurately it seems: "Our chief problem is agriculture...
...Too many factory workers loaf on the job, or simply don't show up for work at all...
...There is the 35-year-old peasant, coarse, unread, absorbed with his quarter-acre private garden, living in the mud-road, log-cabin world of his collective farm...
...Or they may be the desperate voices of a system collapsing in on itself...
...We admire many things in America, but not that...
...Beyond that, the scientists probably have no contact, possibly no sympathy, with the more flamboyant protesters like Amalrik, or some of the literary circles...
...His natural interests, in any case, did not much run to literature...
...We want the same things for them...
...What is the imprisonment of a few hundred civil rights activists compared with the killing of 20 million people...
...All the best...
...Too bad...
...G. repeats...
...While protests fasten on political liberties, the bulk of the people are preoccupied with jobs, housing, food, and clothing...
...Understandably, most foreigners believe that the reaction has been engineered by a neo-Stalinist elite in the Communist party, the kgb and the military...
...The dissidents' cause is certainly just...
...The second Russian, a factory worker from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, broke in...
...Brezhnev has simply become the most visible member of the collective leadership, and conceivably then the most powerful...
...The dissidents could probably rally excitement for creating the good life...
...Medvedev, I answer...
...In trying to cope with the "liberalization," already tapering off in Khrushchev's last years, Brezhnev et al turned to such devices as the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial in 1966...
...Brezhnev, meanwhile, increasingly acts as spokesman for the whole country, although his record has hardly been outstanding...
...The easy mistake, though, is to lump them together...
...One space shot costs maybe 15 million rubles...
...The outcome of the battle between the economic reformists and traditionalists is becoming clearer...
...Expansion of the Soviet Navy in recent years, rapid stockpiling of missiles, and such individual events as the invasion of Czechoslovakia and reinforcement of the Soviet-Chinese frontier, have all been at the expense of the consumer economy...
...While the record of the Brezhnev collective leadership is spotty, it can be dressed up with "criticism and self-criticism" at the 24th Party Congress...
...The thoughts of an informed, traveled, middle echelon Moscow scientist, who is financially successful and politically anti-Stalinist, are germane...
...You spend billions in America, we spend 16-17 billion rubles a year...
...The dissidents are being methodically suppressed...
...Or a space shot...
...Not a chance...
...Moscow television produces no documentaries that would make celebrities of discontents and revolutionists...
...Soviet power is established in the Middle East (Kosygin, of course, was the ranking foreign dignitary at President Nasser's funeral...
...Brezhnev himself, at a Party Central Committee meeting last winter, laid out an agenda of economic flaws: inefficiency, low productivity, wasted investment, poor organization, and on and on...
...He cites the case of Andrei Amalrik...
...Official discussion remains fixed on future yields...
...A day's life even in Soviet cities is a battle with overloaded transportation, overstaffed government offices, overcrowded stores, restaurants, park benches, apartments and theaters, and overabundant inefficiency...
...The scientists, a group essential to Soviet national strength, must be treated more delicately...
...The persecution and repression of dissidents has been selective since then...
...Not the democracy you have...
...Medvedev...
...A Sunday Moscow television news broadcast gives harvest reports from three regions emphasis equal to the arrival of West Germany's Foreign Minister in Moscow...
...Current Kremlinology does not go much beyond that...
...He finally was arrested, so he must have been legitimate...
...Our third is industry...
...Some Western newspapers and magazines have, by sheer volume of reporting, distorted the place of dissidents in the country...
...Nor is there a single organization or cause to grasp...
...It looks now, B. thinks, that the Medvedev affair was a blunder at the lower level...
...As far as he knows, A. says, there is no organized protest movement in the Soviet Union...
...From the "Chronicle," supplied to foreign correspondents and smuggled beyond Soviet borders, come the reports of kgb harassment, psychiatric examinations and star chamber proceedings...
...If the military-industrial complex is alive and well anywhere, it is in the USSR...
...G. has really never heard of the man until this moment...
...His own desk holds loose, disorganized sheafs of documents, and within arms length crouch three black dial telephones, one equipped with two rows of thick, white buttons...
...For every aroused, discontent Leningrad University student, for every Novosibirsk scientist ready to petition against discrimination, for every Kiev writer willing to speak out against censorship, a hundred thousand Soviets present a different profile...
...What is significant is that since the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial in 1966, dissent has spread into ranks of scientists and other Establishment circles...
...Even more...
...Stalin, after all, saved the country from the fascists...
...The American assault in Vietnam helped conservatives assert that the United States was caught up in a militarist, imperialist rage...
...The budget is law, and if it says 16-17 billion, that's what it is...
...An Amalrik, forecasting the collapse of the Soviet system, has no intellectual ties with a General Grigorenko, committed to a mental institution while championing equality for Tartars...
...But we can look back and see that there has been progress in the economy and politics...
...What are his thoughts on Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist who has written two essays--published only in the West--appealing for democratization of Soviet society to stave off economic and political stagnation...
...The Soviets do not want their faces thrust toward the dark pages of Stalin's quarter century...
...Return on investment in agriculture is declining...
...Mark Hopkins, a frequent contributor, writes on the USSR and East Europe for the Milwaukee Journal...
...There's no pattern...
...We have condemned all that," is the standard comment...
...They find it hard to accept that suppression of dissidents, regilding of Stalin, and rhetoric about discipline and order all have an appeal to Soviet workers and peasants...
...the workers, some of whom could have lost their jobs...
...R. says again...
...He cultivated Western correspondents openly, until his arrest by the kgb last May...
...Some correspondents thought Amalrik was working for the kgb, says B., he got away with so much...
...Few recent aspects of Soviet society have been as difficult to transmit accurately to foreign readers as the saga of the dissidents...
...From afar, and from close up, too, the Soviet leadership remains dull and corporate looking...
...Think of the cost...
...Decent houses, clothes, education...
...Foreign correspondents are aware of their involvement with the dissidents, and are pulled in opposite directions...
...For the Soviet population at large they scarcely exist...
...Sprawled on a couch with a drink in one hand and an eye on the television, B. says that the "dissident" story is the only real story going in the country, the only one that can't be covered from outside the Soviet Union...
...The Soviet liberals would deplore this apology for authoritarian management...
...All the same, correspondents know that they are being used, and that given the besieged, powerless position of dissidents, there is a danger of distorting the news...
...Solzhenitsyn, huh...
...My personal philosophy is stability, order and well being," he said as we talked about the country and its future...
...That's the first time he's ever heard the name...
...From the look on his face, he seems genuinely confused...
...You could have free bread and transportation in Leningrad for 10 years for that...
...The economic reform has also been sabotaged by the central ministries, who stood to lose authority...
...This is the main reason they cultivate Western correspondents...
...Feeling himself incapable of influencing the vast government and Party bureaucracies, he takes care to avoid them...
...In less abstract terms, part of the problem is that through stupidity or incompetence some bureaucrats receive money for new buildings that stand half-finished for months or years...
...G. asks...
...Who...
...Five years later, all except a few branches of the economy have been "converted to the new system" and the benefits are virtually invisible...
...Unlike most Soviet citizens, G. has access to their publications and has read them...
...Offices, institutes and enterprises carry bloated work forces...
...Look," began one, a low level government official from Tashkent, "you have children and I have children...
...The cardinal fact is that in a centralized system like the Soviet Union's, the economy cannot be put partially into the hands of individual factory managers without the political establishment shedding some power...
...Let's say 11 o'clock...
...The military, heavy industry managers and the Party apparatus have resisted reform...
...It would take money, but opportunities were exceptional...
...The political fumbling of Czechoslovakia was saved only by the Army...
...Harvests fluctuate...
...It is the variety of dissent, not the volume, that prevents a neat cataloguing of a "movement...
...Sakharov is a great physicist, the "father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb" they call him...
...Scene Two: In the Moscow apartment of B., resident correspondent for a large American newspaper, the portable tv set is broadcasting the Soviet-American track meet from Leningrad...
...Who...
...Perhaps future historians will write of this period as the dawning of a civil rights movement in the Soviet Union...
Vol. 53 • November 1970 • No. 21
