The Dourness of Communality
LEITER, ROBERT
The Dourness of Communality The Reality of Communism By Alexander Zinoviev Translated by Charles Janson Schocken. 259 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by Robert Leiter Contributor, New York "Times," "New...
...Zinoviev explains: "Civilization is effort...
...Yet in true Soviet fashion, these problems are "enveloped in official bravura, festivities and celebration...
...But The Reality of Communism is neither fictional nor comic...
...In such circumstances hypocrisy flourishes—along with corruption, bad management, poor workmanship, cheating, boorishness, idleness, violence, deceit, drabness...
...Communism is the unruly conduct of nature's elemental forces...
...Higher productivity which could lead to unemployment is therefore made difficult...
...Without expansion, says Zinoviev, without pursuing world hegemony, the Soviet Union cannot survive...
...Underpinning the entire structure is the heart of communal life: Since the Soviet Union is a land of guaranteed employment, it is difficult to fire anyone who avoids direct conflict with the government...
...No less thorough a determinist than Marx, he also believes that nothing can change the fundamental nature of Soviet society...
...The collective will dominates the masses in this way and ensures that individuality never triumphs...
...Satire, however firmly grounded in reality, has failed to do the job...
...Very substantial wage differentials divide the USSR into quite unequal levels of consumption...
...communality is taking the line of least resistance...
...For him, neither the unexpected nor human passions are factors in history...
...Moreover, he argues, it is not an aberration: "A Communist country in which dissidents are persecuted, where people are tied to their dwelling places and their work, and in which there are no civil freedoms is a normal Communist society...
...As the author sees it, the most loathsome aspect of communism is the suffocating intimacy of ordinary living...
...To each according to his work" means, in reality, "to each according to his social position...
...What the author tells us is not new...
...Reviewed by Robert Leiter Contributor, New York "Times," "New Republic," "American Scholar" The drawing on the dust jacket of this book shows two rats united in a handshake...
...and provide the means of subsistence for many citizens...
...He therefore wants no taint of fantasy clinging to this text...
...In either case, you can disregard the theory and still be persuaded by the book's portrayal of Soviet life...
...As a theorist, Zinoviev is uncompromising: He insists, for example, that "The laws of the Communist type of life are the same for all times and all people...
...Zinoviev is least effective as a writer when he is most theoretical...
...The most sobering, most distressing aspect of this important work is the fact that our continuing naivete about the Soviets has moved a man of Zinoviev's intellect to restate truths that should by now be common knowledge...
...Mediocrity successfully impersonates talent, vice is received as virtue, and slander is taken as sacred verity...
...Communism springs from communality, uses it, unleashes it, creates favorable conditions for it, organizes and enforces it as a special type of society, as a special form of life for the many millions of the popular masses...
...This system is not a reaction to capitalism...
...It is for this reason," saysZi-noviev, "that Communist society may contain numerous unprofitable enterprises which cannot be abolished because they provide work...
...Eating, recreation, entertainment, speaking, and all other daily pursuits are full of difficulty...
...His prose becomes turgid, his thoughts abstruse —although I cannot say if these infelicities are his own or those of his translator, Charles Janson...
...Zinoviev finds it absurd that Westerners speak of Soviet intellectuals, scientists, military planners, and so forth, as though each of these was a coherent group...
...Done by the author, the drawing is an effective bit of caricature, yet in one sense it may be misleading...
...produced the vilest results...
...Nothing in The Reality of Communism should surprise any thinking person...
...Normal communal life is life lived in the quagmire of trivia," where the strong succeed by practicing mutual coercion, humiliation and surveillance...
...The book ends on an even more dour and ominous note...
...Thus open unemployment is impossible...
...Zinoviev, a former research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences who emigrated in 1978 and now teaches at the University of Munich, seeks to dispel the West's lingering illusions about communism...
...and low productivity has to be paid for by everyone taking what in practice amounts to a decrease in their wages...
...But in fact millions of people lead a normal life there, never even think about the West, and are not planning to change their way of life...
...Exploitation of the many by the few has been replaced by a far more insidious condition, with the agents of injustice constituting a whole social stratum...
...The result is what Zinoviev mockingly terms the "democracy of communism, " with the benefits accruing to those able to manipulate the system—the intriguers, careerists, crooks, and informers—rather than the talented...
...Zinoviev holds out little hope for change...
...it is too easily dismissed as exaggeration...
...civilization sets them rational bounds...
...it arises from "communality," from large numbers of people living together in social groups whose essence is "dog eat dog...
...Certain essential needs—medical assistance, education, professional training —may be satisfied, but this has not eradicated inequality or alienation...
...Anybody familiar with Alexander Zinoviev's novels, The Yawning Heights and The Radiant Future, might expect to find another satire here...
...Members of the ruling elite enj oy more and better goods than their subordinates do, and as lucky apparatchiks move up the social ladder their material rewards increase...
...The economic and social gulf among scientists, for instance, "is sometimes so great that to put them in one category is like placing peasant serfs and landowners into a category called' farmer.' The ruling scientific stratum merely makes use of its scientific endeavors for its own social advantage...
...The example of the dissidents leads many in the free world to suppose that Soviet citizens do little "but fight for civil rights, organize religious sects, resurrect Orthodoxy, get drunk and dream about the monarchy, wait for the collapse of the Soviet regime, and of course dream about going to the West...
...It has nothing to do with the function of learning or the discovery of truth...
...Life is "a seething cauldron of unbridled passion, but always about trifles...
...the burden is shared out among all those who work...
...Zinoviev's Russia is a country where "the noblest intentions have...
...A second glance, though, reveals that with their free hands the scruffy vermin are choking each other mercilessly: Their eyes are bulging, their mouths gasping for air and, in a final ironic touch, their tails are knotted together...
...He sticks to the facts, meticulously devising what he calls a "scientific model" of life under communism...
Vol. 67 • July 1984 • No. 13
