Inside the 'Workers' Utopia'

...Through their connections, the elite can convert their sons' and daughters' flunking grades on university entrance exams to pass...

...Stubbornly silent in the face of such splendor, she is then flown in the General Secretary's personal helicopter to his princely hunting lodge...

...Russians spend 30 billion man-hours in line annually to make their purchases...

...this paradox is just as true of the Soviet Union...

...Dostoevsky described Tsarist Russia as a sublime, universal, ordered chaos...

...The pervasive importance of blat—influence, strings to pull—in Soviet society is especially insidious, for the ordinary consumer is forced to contend with chronic and unpredictable shortages of everything from toothpaste to spare auto parts...

...With his own children attending Russian schools, Smith discovered that in education, too, the official facade is a far cry from the unhappy reality...

...As Smith points out, the vast upper-class array of perks and privileges is not simply beyond the means of ordinary citizens, it is something money cannot buy...

...In addition to such predictable topics as the military and the KGB, the official censor's list prohibits the publication of any data on crime, vagrancy or drug-addiction, on industrial poisonings, on the number of human victims in accidents and earthquakes, and even on the financing of sports teams...

...Swaddled in obsessive secrecy and xenophobia, the Russian present, he feels, is tied to the Tsarist past, not to the Western future...

...Behind the punch line there lies a complex and deplorable reality that is scarcely unfamiliar to careful readers of the Times, but has rarely been reported with such compendious, achingly immediate human detail as Smith has poured into his fascinating volume...

...Paralleling the official, bureaucratically regulated system is a thriving shadow economy—a huge black market oiled by bribes, kickbacks, payoffs, and larceny both petty and grand—that runs na levo (literally "on the left...

...And the elite take these advantages for granted with an arrogant disdain for the common man that often surpasses the haughtiest rich of the West...

...Writers & Writing INSIDE THE "WORKERS' UTOPIA" BY PEARL K. BELL Among the dozens of bitter Soviet jokes that Hedrick Smith, chief of the New York Times' Moscow bureau from 1971-74, tells in his tough, thoughtful, profoundly depressing book, The Russians (Quadrangle, 527 pp., $12.50), one mocking story sticks in the mind like barbed wire...

...Indeed, Smith disagrees with the notion of convergence—that "they are becoming more like us," that with expanding trade between the Soviet Union and the United States, Russian society must inevitably grow increasingly open and tolerant...

...Together with the shabby drudgery of daily life, the unceasing erosion of the spirit under the unblinking eye of Big Brother, the desperate conformity to a brutal code, Smith observes (as did Henry Dicks and Nathan Leites 20 years ago in their studies of the Russian character), there is a latent anarchy that betrays itself in the staggering consumption of vodka, the stony public face that becomes wildly emotional in private, the sentimentality and superstition, the ardent patriotism, and the nostalgia for a "real boss" like Stalin despite the revelation of his crimes...

...Even the scientific darlings of the Soviet propaganda machine are subject to maddening restrictions on information they need in their work...

...Leonid I. Brezhnev, eager to impress his aged mother, brings her to Moscow from the Ukraine for a grand tour of his luxurious town apartment, replete with the latest Western gadgets, and for a trip in one of his many sleek limousines to his magnificently landscaped dacha, or country house, near Zhukovka...

...As one mother complained privately to Smith, "They are training little informers...

...Against this argument...

...It's not bad, Leonid," she admits, "but what if the Reds come back...

...Since he is plainly endowed with an open, warm and intelligently responsive nature, Smith came away from Russia with a priceless store of facts and disparate opinions gleaned from random conversations, covert friendships and the mundane business of everyday life in the Soviet Union...

...Finally her son implores, "Tell me, Mama, what do you think...

...But it has been argued by political scholars like Zbigniew Brzezinski that this view of Russian society is romantic, ignoring the dynamics of change and its effect on the structure of power...

...This also seems to leave her cold...

...Moreover, some of the devices that the American educator Urie Bronfenbrenner has recently praised for generating self-discipline in children—particularly zvenovoi, whereby one child reports to the teacher on the conduct of pupils in his row—are actually "institutionalized tattling...

...There is no visible reason,' he believes, "to expect that the ancient patterns of Russian life will be fundamentally altered...

...Smith terms such matters "innocent," but clearly any uncomfortable facts that might have the effect of blemishing the Politburo version of the perfect society are intolerable...

...In the area of information, the suppressive, suspicious overkill of the Soviet government at times exceeds the logic of a police state so irrationally that it seems demented...

...Everywhere, one finds "a double standard in life-styles for the elite and for the masses...

...First and last, what struck him about the Workers' Utopia is the extent to which it is rank-, class-, and status-conscious—incredibly more so than any Western country...

...Yet what it amounts to is something unimaginable in the legal world of petty regulations, a real service market where you pay extra to get what you want, from plumbing repairs to hockey tickets...

...People queue for interminable hours to purchase things they don't need now but may want—to use or to barter—after the supplies run out...

...Nevertheless, the plebeian human face that he has drawn in The Russians compels our belief, and our dismay...

...Smith closes The Russians on a deeply pessimistic note, essaying some historical and prophetic conclusions that venture onto less certain and convincing ground...

...Soviet women, no matter how demanding their jobs, usually spend at least two hours in line, seven days a week, to buy food and other necessities, because the economy "operates by Plan from above rather than in response to consumer demand from below...

...A long-time foreign correspondent for his paper before receiving his Moscow assignment, Smith went to the USSR equipped with "good basic Russian...

...Smith s reflection about "the accumulated weight of Russian history" may finally seem dubious...

...Shopping in the Soviet Union is an exhausting nightmare of long lines, surly clerks, bureaucratic idiocy, and habitual frustration...

...There is a closed network of stores for each level of the Soviet "nobility"—from the supreme leaders of the Politburo to front-rank scientists, cosmonauts, writers, and ballerinas—where, without waiting and at cut rates (or for nothing at all), the chosen can obtain food of a quality the hoi polloi is never offered, and foreign luxuries that most Russians don't even know enough to covet...

...The Lenin Library—the Soviet equivalent of the Library of Congress—has two catalogues, a censored one for general readers, and a restricted one that includes the so-called "secret stacks,' open only to staff members with security clearance...

...Less obviously sensitive material is kept under paranoid wraps as well...

...As an economic and technological society, the USSR is not in the least like Tsarist Russia, and if the Soviet rulers continue to resist every challenge to their monopoly of power, they will be threatened with economic—and thus political?failure...

...Besides enabling some canny Russians to acquire enormous extra incomes, it fulfills a genuine need and is as much a basic fact of Soviet life as Lenin-worship and winter...

...In Moscow it is almost impossible to find a street map or a telephone book, and the weather forecast is as jealously guarded as the sacred tomb of Lenin...

...Detente, he argues, will not encourage dissidence among the Soviet intelligentsia, for the Kremlin has developed sophisticated methods of suppressing intellectual discontent, and will continue to expel those, like Solzhenitsyn, who refuse to give in...

...Apart from the language, however—and a year of Slavic studies at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow—he had the curiosity, energy and courage it takes for a foreigner to stray from the officially segregated rounds and meet ordinary citizens from Tadzhikistan to the Arctic...

...Authoritarian teaching methods stifle independent thought by an inflexible reliance on drill, rote learning and technical skills...

...Only the wand of patronage can open the magic doors to the finest apartments, cars, clothing, services, even medical treatment...