Examining the Soviet System

...The regime did of course survive...

...346 pp...

...to move from the village to the city or from one city to another...

...The books under review bring to mind Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in which an inmate of a labor camp finds out that those who pushed him into Gulag were themselves shot or imprisoned...

...Given that not a single public prosecutor's office or court in the Soviet capital went untouched by the purge, it is easy to imagine the situation in the provinces...

...Those who would not steal a kopeck from a neighbor rob the state blind...

...is shown not only in the fact that they are obliged to abide by the Party's general policies...

...A fish starts to rot from the head," a Russian proverb has it...

...UBrezhneva vsiopo-prezh-nemu," the Soviet folk used to say: "Under Brezhnev, nothing changes...

...Having "confiscated" power and created, as d'Encausse puts it, "a perfectly coherent" system that " escaped" from society and totally dominated it, the Bolsheviks sowed the seeds of the current decay...

...Bribes are paid to enter institutions of higher education (from 3,000-5,000 rubles in Moscow, according to Simis, to 10,000-15,000 in the Transcaucasian and Central Asian Republics...

...The practice of nomenclature, whereby appointments to every position of importance in the country have to be approved by a corresponding Party organ, guarantees the leadership's immunity from the laws of the land...

...But Simis is hardly analytical and may not satisfy the inquisitive reader wanting to unearth the deeper causes of this pervasive fraudulence...

...We do not wish to commit suicide," was Lenin's reply...

...Confronted with the central Soviet dilemma-exercising control over local leaders without resorting either to violence or to a certain measure of effective popular supervision-the Politburo oligarchs simply closed their eyes...

...Bribery becomes epidemic when In Coming Issues Richard King on Bruno Bellelheim's "Freud and Man's Soul" David Oshinsky on William L. O'Neill's "A Better World" John P. Roche on Jimmy Carter's "Keeping Faith" we move from "big" industry to consumer goods and services...

...The Brezhnev era occupies a special place in the history of such graft...

...to get a driver's license or a cemetery plot...

...It also led to an open, often spectacularly insolent, crookedness of the upper echelons...

...Because of perennial, omnipresent shortages and low quality, one has to pay under the table for everything that is any good?from toilet paper and sausage to Italian raincoats and Finnish furniture, from having your clothes drycleaned to having your car fixed properly...

...He is long-suffering but when He hits...

...For all judges, prosecutors and investigators are "elected" upon a "recommendation" from their Party headquarters...

...Reviewed by Leon Bernstein "When we are reproached for the one-party dictatorship," Lenin wrote in 1919, "we say: Yes, one-party dictatorship...

...The USSR has become a land of "universal kleptomania," to use Simis' apt description...

...The overriding desire not to rock the boat, the single most characteristic feature of Brezhnev's rule, resulted in veritable life tenures for higher Party and state officials...

...The leader of the "democratic-centralists" among the Bolsheviks asked Lenin: Do you believe that the salvation of the Revolution lies in mechanical obedience...

...there is an unwritten but universally followed law in the Soviet Union: Judges, prosecutors...

...To pay for these "illegal" goods and services, one either does favors in return or, most commonly, steals from the workplace...

...May the God of History help me...

...Tell me where you work and I will tell you what you have in your bag," a Soviet saying goes...

...Their venality assumed such embarrassing proportions that, barely a month after Brezhnev's death, the new General Secretary, Yuri V. Andropov, presided over a special session of the Politburo dealing with embezzlement and violations of law and order...

...The clans of Soviet underground capitalists, whose activity is the subject of the longest, most mesmerizing chapter of Simis' book, do not make their profits on drugs, weapons, gambling and prostitution, but on sweaters, shoes, artificial leather coats, jackets and bags, shirts, underwear, plastic brooches, and meat...

...I cannot think of a better way to summarize the Soviet predicament today...

...Further, as Simis notes: "Any organ within the [judicial] system, from a People's Court to the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, ca-indeed, must-violate the law on orders from the Party apparat of the corresponding level...

...He crosses himself and says as if responding to Stalin's "God of History" theme, "There is a God in heaven, after all...

...Yet had these "routed oppositionists" not been shot in the basement of the Lubianka prison or starved to death in the Gulag, they would have found themselves vindicated in USSR: The Corrupt Society by Konstantin Simis, a former Moscow defense attorney and legal scholar now living in the United States...

...and investigators, whether Party members or not, must carry out the Party's instructions even in individual cases...

...It is a sad irony that the least malign of all Soviet regimes will probably enter history as the most corrupt one...

...Rarely, though, do we get to read a fascinating, minutely detailed account of how the underground economy functions, how the country's elite is bribed or bought wholesale, and how the decency of a great people is daily offended and undermined...

...Another old Bolshevik complained: We are surrounded by disgraces and abuses, should we not at least allow the freedom of the press...

...We stand on it and we cannot move off this ground...

...Most telling, perhaps, is the case of the judicial system itself, since, as Simis pointedly comments, "onecan never be certain of achieving legal results by legal means alone...

...These can be found in Confiscated Power: How Soviet Russia Really Works by Helene Carriere d'Encausse, a professor at the Sorbonne...

...Meanwhile, the Chairwoman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbekistan Union Republic traded in pardons: 100,000 rubles was the going rate for serious felonies...

...In an unprecedented move, he had an account of the proceedings published on Pravda's front page...

...By reading between the lines of the Soviet leaders' speeches and sifting through official statistics, we now can discern an increasing incongruence between civic and political society in the USSR, and sense the growing inability of the present rulers to run a modern economy...

...Still, d'Encausse and Simis do make an illuminating combination: He tells us what is going on in the dark corners of officialdom, and she explains why...

...The local Party boss thus becomes the absolute ruler of his area, be it an obscure district or a Union Republic...

...Simis mentions the President of Uzbekistan's Supreme Court, who charged from 25,000-100,000 rubles for a verdict of not guilty...

...Hermetically shielded from honest inquiry, the bosses are jealously protective of their handpicked coteries and afraid of no one, except a Party chieftain on the next rung up the ladder...

...Stalin's successors are discovering these days that "theGod of History" does not make exceptions for the proponents of "historical materialism...

...This, he added later, means "power unlimited, and backed not by law but by force...

...This subservience...

...It is practically impossible to fulfill planned quotas without cheating, bribing suppliers and inspectors, and creating "dead souls" to inflate the wage fund...

...Six and a half decades of terror, of a servile press and twisted legality, of propaganda, lies and suppression of the slightest initiative are now coming home to roost...

...In 1920, at the celebration of the third anniversary of the Bolshevik regime, Stalin said of Soviet Russia, paraphrasing Martin Luther, "Here I stand...

...De-pendingon thesizeof his fiefdom, a district secretary can use this unrestricted clout to supplement his modest allowance with homages in kind and services, or to sell republican ministries to swindlers for 300,000 rubles in precious stones, paintings and antiques (as did the former Georgian First Secretary Vasily Mzhavanadze...

...Confiscated Power: How Soviet Russia Really Works By Helene Carriere d'Encausse Translated by George Holoch Harper & Row...

...Encouraged by the example of their superiors and protectors, lesser Soviet officials zealously cultivate their own gardens...

...Her book, an ambitious attempt to describe the evolution of Soviet political institutions and structures (a la Merle Fainsod, Leonard Schapiro, Seweryn Bialer, or Jerry Hough), is ultimately a dry, often boring, popularized compilation of themes developed by prominent Sovietologists...

...to obtain adequate medical care and/or a bed in a good hospital...

...The economy, subordinated to politics (Marx has been stood on his head since the inception of the Soviet Union) and run by Party and state bureaucrats, is no less fertile territory for corruption...

...He hits hard...

...In the early '60s, for instance, about 300 Moscow investigators, prosecutors and judges were tried for taking bribes...

...19.95...