The Atlantic and Its Enemies (56 page)

19

The Kremlin Consolations

The troubles of the Atlantic West were compounded by foreign affairs. Moscow seemed to have in many ways the demand hand, with Americans and Germans coming back and forth, to offer this and that, in return for insubstantial concessions. Seen from Moscow, the later seventies were not a bad time; they ended with a classic piece of triumphalism, the Olympic Games of 1980, for which Moscow was cleaned up, acquiring some more huge buildings in the process - a hotel complex called ‘International One’ and ‘International Two’, otherwise known as the ‘Hammer Horror’, constructed for world trade exhibition purposes at the behest of the aged and, now, iguana-like go-between, Armand Hammer. Undesirables were cleared out of town, and the centre became a sort of Forbidden City. To the skyscraper foreign ministry, the clients and satellites came and went; and there was a new, expanded Soviet navy going round the world, its crews coming back to port, gleefully bringing cheap jeans and ballpoint pens, at home in short supply. The chief preoccupation was China, no doubt, but she was in no splendid condition; Mao died in 1976, leaving a battle for succession in a country that had experienced a grotesque version of the War Communism that had nearly destroyed Russia in 1919. True, there was a Chinese-American understanding of sorts, but America was also in no happy state. President Carter, grinning and maladroit, did not inspire respect. Europe was also not a threat - very far from it. The main NATO element, Great Britain, was in steep decline; the Germans had run to Moscow, signed away thousands of millions in return for a few old-age pensioners’ trips to West Berlin, and the promise that the West Germans could pay some more millions to buy out political prisoners. Besides, matters in the West began to worsen again. The ‘stagflation’ period ended raggedly in 1975, and two years of relative stability followed. But then in 1978 things went sour again, with another twofold increase in oil prices, and another bout of inflation. England was in especially bad shape, and even appeared to be near collapse; another important NATO country, Turkey, was on the edge of civil war; Italy was in disrepair, her governments needing Communist support; and the Shah of Iran fled in January 1979, having been overthrown by a sort of bazaar-Islam revolution that Communists regarded with glee, not imagining that it would destroy them as well. When oil prices doubled, within a few weeks, the USSR profited.

It was true that the USSR was not itself in brilliant health, but its leaders were comparing the Moscow of 1975 with the Moscow they had known in Stalin’s time, and there was no likeness. Later on, the years between Khrushchev and Brezhnev were called ‘the period of stagnation’, but the term is not entirely accurate: some parts of the system worked well enough, and the men who succeeded Khrushchev had had quite enough of reform schemes that went awry. His fall was arranged by men of much cautiousness who were already not young; Leonid Brezhnev had seen the Second World War, had been a minor lion in the occupation of Hungary, and was not far off sixty. The others were much the same. Khrushchev had terrified them with the Cuban gamble, and they had been much dismayed at the internal turmoil associated with his campaign against Stalinism: intellectuals such as Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn had broken free and there had even been an ugly riot-cum-strike or two in the south. Khrushchev’s schemes to divide the Party between industrial and agrarian wings had been particularly convulsive, and he was overthrown in 1964, when he was seventy, for gambling. After the usual year or two of obscure manoeuvrings, Leonid Brezhnev emerged as successor, and his overall line was simple: ‘Reform, reform: people ought to work better, that’s the problem.’ He was right; the whole system was, as an East German critic said, a permanent
Bummelstreik
, what the French called a
grève de zèle
, the only English equivalent of which is ‘bloody-mindedness’. Brezhnev stopped the assaults on Stalin, and even installed a small work on the Kremlin Wall in commemoration of him. Khrushchev’s reforms were reversed, and a re-reform, given the name of Brezhnev’s (for a time) head of government associate, Kosygin, restored the powers of the central ministries, twenty-seven of them by 1975, with two dozen ‘main administrations’ covering assorted products. Khrushchev’s regional economic councils were scrapped, because there was a danger that these councils would be taken over by some republican - in effect nationalist - coterie. The authority of Gosplan - the State Planning Committee - was reinforced. Of course, the centralization of things meant preposterous inefficiencies and delays. The Rosa Luxemburg knitwear factory in Kiev complained that it had to report on the fulfilment of fifteen different indicators, and authorization from above was needed even for small sums of money. An idea of the Kosygin reforms was for pretend firms to be set up, giving out a bonus to managers, as distinct from ‘main administrations’, but of course this led to abuse, hence demands for more central control, hence larger monopolies.

But at least corruption was under some sort of control, and there was even a hope that information technology (meaning computers) would bring dramatic improvements as regards the mountains of paperwork. Economists anxious to keep up with the West suggested computerization to deal with the tidal wave of information coming in, and Vasily Nemchinov’s Central Mathematics-Economics Institute devised a new planning system called ‘Optimal Functioning’. OGAS, ‘a total informational processing system with an analytical function’, lumbered onto the stage in 1971, but computers were distinguished only by their weight, and managers resented young computer scientists telling them what to do. Print-outs sprawled their way across dirty factory floors, and the managers just got on with managing in the old ways, but such problems were not unknown in the West. In any case, and it is one of the extraordinary features of this period, Western economists of considerable reputation took the Soviet economy very seriously. John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, thought that the full employment that the Soviet system ensured was admirable, and whole institutes were set up in Vienna and points west to examine the workings of the Soviet economy. In England, hardly an advertisement for capitalism, there was an institute at Birmingham University to study the workings of the Polish economy, directed by an Italian Keynesian, Mario Nuti; a great cemetery of information was installed, R. W. Davies the chief undertaker. At least with economic affairs, there were some facts to deal with; libraries to build up, and on the whole, in such institutions, the remarks of ‘Solzhenitsyn et al.’ were dismissed. The grandest of these Sovietologists was E. H. Carr, who had written a multivolume history of the Russian Revolution and stopped it in 1929, when collectivization of agriculture happened, and the information shut down. Poor Davies, a Welsh Communist and not a dishonest man, attached himself to the far grander Carr, who said that murdering peasants was one of the prices to pay for progress, to chronicle the advance of the Soviet Union beyond 1929, and even to call his volumes on the murderous collectivization, ‘The Socialist Offensive’. The next generation of students was brought up on such tomes, and was therefore caught gawping when the Soviet Union collapsed. (This writer will not plead innocent: as late as 1987, he was telling students that the USSR had ‘solved the nationality problem’, the worst mistake in academic life that he has ever made, and fortunately not preserved in print. At the time, minority nationalism was causing pointless mayhem in countries that he knew about - Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Spain.) People who said that nationalism in the USSR was very much alive, and very angry, were of course right, but their evidence at the time consisted of trivialities and impressions - a girl at a Latvian boat-race wearing a T-shirt with a Latvian inscription; a Ukrainian Catholic imprisoned for decades, and emerging, incoherently, with a grand beard, to massacre English at a press conference. Vladimir Bukovsky, a long-term victim of the system, and utterly irrepressible, could not believe his ears and eyes when at last, in 1976, he came to the West and was asked to lecture at the Ford Foundation and suchlike: eyes of naïve vacancy, peering through festoons of hair, to put stupefyingly silly questions. President Carter refused to meet him, and the Ford Foundation missed him off the Christmas card list; in revenge, he wrote a book, based on the Soviet archives, that demonstrated quite how misguided they had been, in the style of the ‘useful idiots’ whom Lenin had found such bores. When the founder of jogging dropped dead at the age of fifty-four, Bukovsky responded with glee.

As regards the Soviet economy of this period, Alain Besançon remarked, ‘It is a strange feature of the sovietological world that a certain economic approach to Soviet reality, however knowledgeable, honest and sophisticated, meets, in people with a different approach, a disbelief so vast that they do not even bother to criticize - not knowing where to begin, let alone to inform themselves further. It is much like the attitude of the dissidents to official statistics, or the figures at which the Western economists arrive: derision and shoulder-shrugging.’ These dissidents ‘et al.’ were of course closer to the truth than their Western critics, and their derision was even shared by the more astute elements in the KGB, such as (no doubt) Vladimir Putin. But for the moment the USSR functioned. Rockets fired off; disarmament discussions went on with Americans who could not quite reconcile the potholes in the Moscow roads with the satellites in space (New York, going bankrupt at the time?). And there was always the cultural argument. A concert by Svyatoslav Richter was unanswerable. There was something about Russia that produced musicians of a world class beyond compare. A certain conservatoire tradition, an intelligently critical public concentrating culturally because the political economy was so primitive, or just grown-up attitudes towards alcohol and cigarettes: who knows why?

In this perspective, Brezhnev becomes understandable, because the USSR worked, and the West did not. Leonid Brezhnev was now in charge of a vast system in which only the KGB really knew what was happening, through its huge network of informers, and under him that organization came to be all-important. Stalin had controlled it by the simplest of methods, a periodic cull. Now, and this was Khrushchev’s contribution, such culling was not possible: to that he himself owed his life, as he said. The system worked for a time, and quite well, because of an external factor, the rise in commodity prices, and especially oil and gold. In the early 1970s Western investment also went into pipelines to carry natural gas to Germany, the lines amounting to a length four times that of the globe’s circumference. By 1985 gas was almost fifteen times greater in volume than in 1965 and development might have been more had the road system been better developed (lorries, ubiquitous in the system, chugged along at less than the speed of a decent bicycle). With these sums in foreign currency, Moscow could still indulge some megalomania, and a Brezhnev could carry on in the old way: the ‘A’ system launched its space-shots and intervened all over the world. It even built an enormous navy, in the 1970s, and made itself felt in parts of the world that were new to it, such as the Middle East. The basis was being eaten away, but external help could be obtained, as had happened in any crisis of the system, from the Volga Famine of 1921-2 to Hitler’s attack in 1941. The Western world just needed to be reminded of the importance of Russia.

It was of course true that the peoples of what the West called eastern Europe were ‘captive nations’. That problem was not, in Brezhnev’s eyes, enormously serious. The West had become disinterested in the subject at Teheran in 1943, when Churchill had in effect agreed to a displacement of Poland, bodily moved west into Pomerania and Silesia at the expense of Podolia and Volhynia. East Germans had rebelled in 1953, and had been widely ignored. Yugoslavia had been disaffected by Stalin, was not part of the Soviet empire, but co-operated with it, and as a Communist country worked, like the USSR, as a purported federation of nations devoted to the construction of socialism. Hungary had rebelled in 1956, and Moscow had adapted its dealings with Hungary accordingly: she had a certain room for manoeuvre, could make deals with the diaspora (like Armenia in the USSR) and even produce plans for economic reform of a sort that might at some stage have relevance for Moscow. Poland had also been allowed some headroom, and the Church was no longer persecuted. A small-farm peasantry obstinately persisted with its horses and carts, but heavy industry had been built up, and in the later seventies Western banks were anxious to invest in it, swallowing whole the propaganda that a new leader, Edward Gierek, was launching, to the effect that Poland would be the new Japan. Poles could travel to visit relatives in the West, and dissidents were picturesquely part of the scenery: the Party was a nuisance, not a tyranny. Communism, Brezhnev-vintage, was even quite a useful discipline for the Poles, whose intelligentsia, freed from romantic nationalism, became world-class.

There was a problem as regards Czechoslovakia. She was unique among the satellite states, in that her native Communists had been numerous and strong, based in a modern industry, in 1939 on much the same level as Belgium’s: true at any rate of the Czech two thirds, though not for the Slovak part. Czech Communists kept much of the investment for themselves, and Slovaks groused, as they did on cultural matters, since they counted as bumpkins, not unlike the Ukrainians over the border. A constitution of 1960 was strictly centralized,
i.e.
making no concessions to Slovak desires for autonomy, and collective farms were stronger than in Hungary, let alone Poland. President Antonín Novotný, visiting the Slovak cultural centre, was enraged by demands that Slovak culture should be promoted by the foreign machine; like most Czechs he did not think that there was any. There were little signs that matters were not going his way; very obscurely, key figures were moved in and out (this writer, spending a few months in prison in Bratislava at the time, had his own experience:
v
. Note, pp. 371-81). In 1964 Gustáv Husák made a secret speech, in the course of criticisms by the Bratislava municipal government, which led to demands from Prague for his expulsion, and Alexandr Dubček, who had a key role in matters economic, spoke up for the intelligentsia. But it was all very small-scale.