FEAR BUT NOT LOATHING

...In such circumstances, Ronald Reagan's image of a Soviet state collapsing under the weight of public opposition is a fantasy...

...Nowhere in the United States can one see so many people reading books as on the Moscow subway...

...The simplistic answer we hear so often, especially from the right-wing media and politicians in the United States, is that the Soviet Union is "a slave society," "an evil empire," "a totalitarian dictatorship...

...and Canadian Studies—and in some respects he is right...

...There is no unemployment—the government guarantees everyone a job...

...The workers supervise themselves, impose their own discipline, and maintain their own program of quality control...

...A huge share of the nation's resources—a much greater share, proportionally, than in our case because the Soviet gross national product remains smaller—is allocated to military production, making it necessary to postpone, time and again, the fulfillment of domestic needs...

...We won the war," they say...

...The nicest dresses you will see here are bought from foreigners...

...A top economist who has the ear of high-ranking Soviet officials told me frankly that the economy is on the wrong track: "We have been depending on an extensive form of economic development...

...rate, according to the Institute of World Economics, was 2.3 to 2.7 per cent...

...War demands sacrifice, and public disagreement with official doctrine comes to be viewed as an intolerable indulgence...

...Why, then, is the pace of change so slow...

...What makes the Soviet government so nervous, not only about its own citizens but also about visiting foreigners...

...His own explanation is that he is being used as "a deliberate warning to others who might want to emigrate...

...The vast majority of the people boast of their society's achievements and bask in their country's "greatness...

...they thought a ghastly mistake had been made, and their father would ultimately be returned to them...

...He himself was wounded fighting for the Soviet Union in World War II...

...Again, it seems to make no sense: Why keep this man and his family in the Soviet Union...

...The young man said he, too, had never been out of the country...

...A team system being introduced in some factories, for instance, permits groups of workers to "contract" with management to produce specified quantities of goods at an agreed-upon price...

...Many Soviet citizens have been abroad, within the East Bloc or outside it, but many more would like to travel if they could obtain permission...

...During my stay in Moscow, I repeatedly found myself wondering what the Soviet Union would be like if the threat of war were not constantly poised over it...

...The bureaucracy, presumably, hangs together, and can always invoke "national security" as a rationale for retaining the status quo...

...Sooner or later, something will have to be done...

...The average Soviet citizen is not waiting eagerly for a change of government— as people wait, for example, in South Africa, Chile, Pakistan, or Uruguay...

...We refuse to depreciate equipment rapidly enough to put in new and better equipment...

...Now there are two million...

...Education, including higher education, is free...

...Medical care in the Soviet Union may be poor, as resident Americans attest, but it is absolutely cost-free...

...In the United States, antiwar demonstrations are organized by groups and individuals who see themselves as hostile to the Government and its policies...

...Some years ago, the refusenik's sister was allowed to leave the country, and he himself had received official permission to emigrate to Israel with his Russian-born wife and son in 1975...

...European factory workers might be twice as productive as their Russian counterparts, but that made no difference so long as the Soviet Union could assign two laborers to the task performed by one in Paris or Turin...

...We have, after all, been at war or under threat of war for only sixteen years of the last seventy, and have suffered far fewer casualties than the Soviet Union's twenty million...

...The Soviet economist who explained all this to me was critical of his government's planning process: "Our mechanism for planning was made for the 1930s, not the 1980s...

...Why does the Soviet government still impose such severe restrictions on speech, on the press, on the arts, on travel...

...They were members of the Soviet Union's urban postwar generation—educated, sophisticated, stylish, and possessed of aspirations quite different from those of their parents and grandparents...

...Hungarians, for instance, are allowed to spend $300 a year for travel in Western Europe or the United States...

...It seems to make no sense: In this age of instantaneous worldwide communications, why should the Soviet government fear what its citizens might learn on a visit to London, Paris, or Milan...

...Whatever opposition exists is confined to small, clandestine groups committed to single issues, such as the independent peace movement that opposes Soviet as well as American militarism or the refuseniks who demand the right to emigrate...

...The effect of the military threat on economic planning is even more pernicious...

...We have a massive apparatus of party officials, trade union leaders, and an entrenched management that is hard to change," he said, choosing his words carefully...

...No one is punished for doing a bad job...

...This, he said, was the direction in which the entire communist world should be heading...

...As in Czechoslovakia's brief 1968 experiment with "socialism with a human face," two separate currents are beginning to flow together: on the one hand, the demands of dissidents for greater freedom and a better life, and on the other, the growing need to wring greater productivity from an economy stalled on dead center...

...But life is steadily improving, and there is obvious expectation that it will continue to do so...

...National security" serves as an excuse for stilling innovation and creativity...

...we should have gone over to an intensive form years ago...

...These totalitarian impulses were reinforced by the devastation wrought in World The Soviet bureaucracy can always invoke 'national security1 as a ready rationale for preserving the status quo War II and by the new tensions introduced as the Cold War took hold between the Soviet Union and the United States...

...Though members of his family were afraid to inquire about the father's whereabouts or even to discuss his disappearance with friends, they didn't lose their faith in communism...

...military might...

...her income, she assured us, was quite high by Soviet standards...

...In October 1983, for instance, Zhu-kov's peace committee called on people in thirty-five regions to rally for disarmament and detente...

...One of our major problems is psychological...

...Despite the shrill rhetoric employed by our Government and parroted by the mass media, most of us do not feel nearly as threatened as the Soviets do...

...We also need to decentralize decision-making, as in Hungary...

...But the Russians still impose rigid curbs on the right to travel...

...Now 80 per cent have their own apartments...

...The emphasis is on this sort of production, so that we tend to be careless about the quality and quantity of consumer goods...

...they impose a requirement of conformity so they will have an unchallenged mandate for military preparedness...

...But the American economy, relying on intensive technological advance, performed at a much higher level than the Soviet economists had anticipated, and the Soviet economy, unwilling or unable to change, saw its rate of growth fall steadily—to less than half of what it had been in 1961...

...They quit their jobs and shipped out all of their belongings...

...In agriculture, the trend toward decentralization is reflected in a system called RAPO—a regional agro-industrial complex encompassing collective farms, factories, and local government units...

...His parents died as a result of official actions that the present government admits were illegal...

...The economist spoke approvingly of Yugoslavia's system of self-management (which the Poles have tried, unsuccessfully so far, to emulate), but he was more impressed with the Hungarian model of decentralization...

...The Soviets have spent huge sums attempting to counterbalance U.S...

...officials as General Or-ville Anderson and Secretary of the Navy Francis Matthews spoke openly of waging "preventive war" and mounting a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union...

...The Russians know their economy is stultified and antiquated...

...11 Second, deepening apprehension about a stagnating Soviet economy...

...some 800,000 Soviet citizens participated...

...The capital's subway system is cleaner and more efficient than those of Paris, New York, or Chicago...

...I believe that those aspects of Soviet life that strike us—and the Russians—as most objectionable today are likely to improve within the next few years...

...Managers and workers would have to be given a greater role in the planning process, he understood, and once people are given a real voice in decision-making, they must be able to speak and move about more freely, so that they can exchange ideas and learn from other cultures...

...We tend to dismiss such reckless talk as empty jingoist rhetoric, but it is taken seriously in Moscow...

...But that sort of rhetoric merely begs the question of persistent Soviet insecurity and de-fensiveness...

...Shopping on Gorky Street is not like shopping on Fifth Avenue in New York or on Bahnhof-strasse in Zurich, but it isn't like shopping on Hester Street or Maxwell Street, either...

...That system worked so long as a surplus of labor existed in the villages-millions of marginal peasants who could easily be lured to the cities by the promise of a steady income...

...My generation of intellectuals," he said, "is now in its fifties...

...Furthermore, the Soviet regime finds it necessary to shield its citizens, to whatever extent possible, from knowledge of the "better life" available in the capitalist world, so that they will not raise demands that cannot be met without compromising "national security...

...Small reforms have already been instituted...

...His successor, Stalin, was determined to repel any "second intervention," and imposed such draconian measures as collectivization of farms, expansion of the secret police, liquidation of opponents within the Communist Party, purge trials, and forced labor camps—all of the repressive paraphernalia associated with Soviet communism...

...The U.S...

...My wife and I asked the couple to join us, and our magic card swept all four of us past the guard...

...Fear But Not Loathing The empire isn't evil, it's scared BY SIDNEY LENS The young man we met outside the Intourist Hotel one evening last summer was a specialist in Third World languages who also spoke English and French...

...But the question remains: Why does the Russian regime feel the need to impose authoritarian restraints on its citizens...

...To fulfill this fundamental commitment, the system inevitably permits and even encourages some make-work, but Russians regard this as a small price to pay for avoiding the kind of economic insecurity experienced by workers in our Pennsylvania steel towns...

...Such highly placed U.S...

...The morning after our encounter with the computer programmer and her linguist friend, we had a long talk with a refu-senik—a dissident who had been denied permission to emigrate...

...There are, it seems to me, two reasons: 1i First, an overriding fear of war...

...People gripe about the long lines for food and other necessities, about shortages, about shoddy goods, about many annoying and burdensome aspects of everyday life...

...Everyone," he said, "and they practically all agree...

...Each RAPO complex is responsible for deciding what to produce and has the right to retain a share of the profits...

...Of course," she replied, making it clear that cost was not a problem...

...Though the Soviets received neither loans nor massive aid from the West (except during World War II), their gross national product has increased at a phenomenal rate during most of the period since the Revolution...

...Sidney Lens is the Senior Editor of The Progressive...

...Each year, hundreds of thousands visit great war memorials like the one at Khatin in Byelorussia to recall the horrors of war and pledge themselves anew to the pursuit of peace...

...It produces about a million automobiles a year, and Moscow's wide boulevards are often jammed with traffic...

...Undoubtedly, these efforts have many covert sympathizers, but they have not coalesced into a significant opposition and they are not likely to do so soon...

...But now the surplus of labor is gone, and the nation suffers from a shortage of workers...

...It is easier to change equipment than people...

...he doesn't want to give up that power...

...He had come to Moscow from Kiev to spend a few days with the young woman at his side, a computer programmer...

...During the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, his father had disappeared "and we never heard from him again...

...Government officials claimed that the wife, a chemist, could not leave because she had been working on "secret" research, though her supervisor later acknowledged this was not the case...

...The leader of a collective farm, for instance, has become accustomed to giving orders...

...Without us, Hitler would have conquered the world, including the United States...

...Other socialist countries have a more liberal attitude...

...It seemed obvious to Khrushchev's economic theorists that the Soviet Union would forge ahead of its superpower rival within a single generation...

...They believe they are under siege, and must therefore preserve "national unity" at any cost...

...In 1961, when Premier Nikita Khrushchev predicted that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in economic development by 1980, his country's annual rate of growth was still remarkably high—8 or 9 per cent...

...The Soviet Union is no underdeveloped wasteland...

...An antiquated system of planning and an entrenched bureaucracy increasingly frustrate the rising expectations of the citizenry...

...No less than the political system, the economy is profoundly affected by the persistent foreign threat...

...Since the Civil War of 1918-1920, when the new Bolshevik government was compelled to deal with internal insurrection and a seventeen-nation Western invasion, the Soviet Union has relied on severe measures to preserve a measure of social cohesiveness...

...American foreign policy "has forced the Soviet Union to increase military expenditures...

...What he meant is that the Soviet economy has based its growth on added manpower rather than on improved technology...

...The standard of living is low, even in comparison to conditions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary...

...The two were standing on the sidewalk, trying to gain admission to the hotel so they could dance and have a few drinks, but a guard barred the door to anyone who could not produce a hotel card listing a room number...

...role in the arms race, not at the Soviet role...

...In the United States as in the Soviet Union, "national security" becomes the rationale for internal surveillance, for secrecy, for censorship, and for official deception...

...Why hold him...

...Pensions, available to workers at age sixty or thereabouts, amount to more than half their pre-retirement pay...

...I bought it from a tourist...

...I doubt that it would have had the same leaders or gone through the same evolution...

...Given the opportunity, he would bring back some of the private enterprise that existed under Lenin's New Economic Policy in the early 1920s...

...Vacation resorts, parks, and cultural events are abundant at little or no cost...

...We don't have a rat race like you do," says a senior researcher at the Institute of U.S...

...In our century, no other nation has been subjected to such pressure...

...At the airport, however, they were prevented from boarding the plane...

...My observation, shared by most foreigners residing in the Soviet Union, is that the government has overwhelming popular support...

...It is aware of the problems...

...That remark led to talk of travel...

...During the civil war, Lenin imposed "war communism"—rigidly centralized control—to save the state from disintegration...

...It has a university education and has traveled abroad...

...Though the economy is still improving, it is growing at an ever-slower pace...

...Would she like to travel abroad...

...She had been to many places in the Soviet Union but never out of the country, "not even to Bulgaria," she said...

...If the United States has any real interest in such change for the better, it can accelerate the process dramatically by calling a halt to the arms race...

...Future increases in the GNP will depend on technological innovation—computers, robots, better equipment, all of the components of intensive economic development...

...Before 1941, he added, "90 per cent of our city people lived in communal apartments [where five or six families shared one flat...

...At the downstairs bar (which requires payment in dollars, not rubles), I complimented the computer programmer on her striking dress and observed that women's apparel seemed much more attractive than on my last visit to Moscow several years ago...

...In our country, too, dissidents have been denied the right to travel abroad and have faced prosecution for their political views...

...He no longer calls himself a communist—"I became disillusioned slowly in the course of years, hardly realizing I was losing faith"—but he has long since paid his dues to the regime...

...The Soviet leadership, obsessed with the fear that an American President might press the button that brings on nuclear annihilation, believes that in this perpetual state of siege, dissent is a luxury a responsible government simply cannot tolerate...

...she died of cancer while in prison...

...Party leaders claim this structure gives the grass roots greater autonomy in production, storage, transport, and processing...

...For almost seventy years, with only two brief periods of detente in the 1930s and the 1970s, the Soviet state has been at war or under the threat of war...

...He harbored no illusion that such change would come easily...

...Maybe," she said, "but this dress is Italian...

...Sooner or later, my economist friend insisted, a wave of change would break down the dam of resistance...

...Our Government's attitude differs only in degree...

...The display of fashions in a department store window 100 yards from the Intourist Hotel was far more attractive than anything I had seen in previous visits...

...Everyone agrees with the principle of decentralization, but no one implements it...

...Eventually, the mother, too, was arrested...

...The authoritarian impulse is certainly more restrained here than in the Soviet Union, but I suspect that is the case primarily because our fears are less acute...

...I asked him...

...In the Soviet Union, the government encourages and sponsors antiwar demonstrations— thougih these are directed, of course, at the U.S...

...And then, he added, there was the "external factor...

...The school system is superior to ours and children are better educated, particularly in the sciences and mathematics...

...He is seventy-two years old, unlikely to pose any threat to the regime from abroad...

...a student admitted to college need not beg or borrow tuition or housing costs as in the United States...

...Born and raised in Chicago, he had come to the Soviet Union in 1932 with his parents and sister—all dedicated communists—to "help build socialism...

...Most governments take that stance toward dissent in time of war...

...That may not strike Americans as a great achievement, but for the Russians it is a long step forward...

...Like the Yugoslavs, Hungarians, Chinese, and others who are experimenting with forms of self-management and decentralization, the Soviets will eventually come under heavy pressure to relax their stringent controls on speech—even dissident speech—and travel...

...There were practically no private cars in Moscow before the war," Yuri Zhukov, columnist for Pravda and head of the Soviet Peace Committee, told me...

...My wife Shirley has been to the Soviet Union twice, and on each occasion she was detained by the police for half an hour or so—once because she was carrying, though not using, a camera in an old section of town, and a second time, this year, because she was walking with another American who snapped a photo of a poster...

...Does anyone listen to you...

...Such measures are the first small, inadequate attempts to address the Soviet Union's domestic impasse—the ultimately irreconcilable conflict between people's rising expectations and an inflexible, centralized system that cannot supply their needs...