In no social arena did this process emerge as vigorously as in culture. The official orthodoxy prescribes “socialist realism”? Give them absurdist comedies and spiritualist mysticism! The nomenklatura extol friendship among the peoples? Then play on the local ethnic sentiments. The Ministry of Culture enforces the classicist canon in music and arts? Bring forth abstractionism, jazz and rock. The irony is, of course, that the ageing dictatorial regime that stopped acting as a dictatorship became a perfect target for youthful pranks and provocations. The now sclerotic generation of obedient Soviet bureaucrats formed in the end of Stalinist purges could never incorporate this iconoclastic enthusiasm, as the Bolsheviks could in earlier generations.
Just as it could not reign in the intelligentsia, the Soviet regime in its later stage failed to make the workers work. The immediate reason was political. Having reigned in the secret police for the sake of their own safety, the nomenklatura were least of all willing to unleash again any kind of mass repression. In the meantime the expansive industrial economy precluded the disciplining whip of unemployment. The Soviet managers needed labor to accomplish the plan assignments, and workers could in effect bargain for better conditions or seek them elsewhere in the specially supplied Moscow or in the generously paying industries of Siberia.
Yet by far the biggest structural reason giving more power to Soviet workers was demographic transition. The villages of central Russia now stood drained of manpower. By default, this situation significantly increased the social power of women. In the meantime towns, industrial employment, and education irreversibly changed their lifestyles, and birthrates plummeted in merely a generation. The shortage of labor was historically unprecedented in Russia. The tsars and even Stalin could always rely on a seemingly endless supply of peasant labor and army recruits. In the 1960s the demographic pool had suddenly dried up. Recasting peasants into workers was in fact the triumph of Soviet civilization. It also meant the undoing of the centuries-old Russian tradition of supporting the elites and competing militarily with the West at the expense of the peasantry. Relative demographic scarcity left no grounds for traditional despotism.
The formation of Soviet industrial society and its new demographic dynamic fostered two structural preconditions for changing the now hopelessly obsolete structures of Soviet militarized industrialism. The emergent democratization, however, still needed the third and explicitly political condition if it were to overpower the despotic nomenklatura. It was an alliance between the liberal intelligentsia and professionals with the newly empowered labor. In fact, this kind of broad democratic alliance had already proven its force in the explosive popular mobilizations of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980. The post-Stalinist regimes seemed and indeed felt extremely vulnerable to the leftist popular uprisings because they have lost or willingly retired their ideological and coercive resources to confront the challenge of social movements with massive violence. Yet class conflict in a mature industrial society, contrary to the classical Marxist imagery, was not two-sided. It was rather played out in the triangle of Soviet corporate executives, liberal intelligentsia, and workers. Therefore the nomenklatura’s best option was to buy off the workers at the expense of the intelligentsia.
The political taming of Soviet workers in the Brezhnev period was secured with two costly tactics: increased popular consumption and the tacit toleration of inefficiencies. The nomenklatura essentially invited the workers to share in their own complacency and perks while at the same time denigrating the engineers and intellectuals and occasionally bashing dissident intelligentsia for their “rootless cosmopolitanism.” The windfall of petrodollars in the 1970s comfortably subsidized this conservative welfare compact for more than two decades. Its true costs defy material estimation. The notorious rises in alcoholism, male mortality, and petty theft from the workplace, along with the shoddy quality of Soviet goods, all must be regarded as the pathological consequences of lost dynamism and pervasive cynicism. It was this avoidance of consequences and a social immobilism stifling the young that came to be despised in the Brezhnev “decades of stagnation.”
HOW INEVITABLE THE COLLAPSE?
The long-awaited energetic younger leader Mikhail Gorbachev belonged to the generation of Sputnik and de-Stalinization. These achievements of the early sixties had experientially validated the belief of his peers in the Soviet system. Gorbachev might be even considered a part of the New Left resurgence from the sixties. Yet he also came heavily invested in the official positions of authoritarian power and, objectively speaking, his goals were quite conservative. By taking the Soviet bloc into state capitalism, he was hoping essentially to strengthen the existing political structures and recast at least the younger nomenklatura into technocratic managers of large industrial holdings with foreign participation. These were the contradictions that rendered Gorbachev’s ebullient rhetoric so confusing to his prospective supporters and fatally confused the last General Secretary himself. Few observers believed at the time that Gorbachev really meant what he was saying, but everybody assumed that this seasoned apparatchik knew what he was doing. The truth, as it happens, was exactly the opposite. Gorbachev’s policies looked so haphazard and amateurish because the decades-long suppression of policy debate had produced in the U.S.S.R. a highly charged ideological polarization. Between the ritualistic wooden discourse of the Party and the abstract humanism of the dissidents lay a vacuum of ideas and practical solutions. Amateurish improvisation was what remained to the political leader intent on any serious reform.
But imagine for a moment that Gorbachev had succeeded. Extending the key vectors of his policies gives us a fairly plausible end destination. The U.S.S.R. abandons its widespread commitments across the Third World and withdraws from Eastern Europe. From the standpoint of Moscow, this would not be such a loss given that Poland and Czechoslovakia would soon find themselves between the unified Germany and its strategic economic partner Russia. Disarmament deals with America dramatically reduce geopolitical burdens, at last allowing Moscow to restructure its military-industrial complex. The Soviet industries, still formidable and staffed by skilled and comparatively low-paid labor, attract West European investments through government-brokered contracts. (The Soviet managers always felt intuitively close to their German, French, and Italian counterparts embodying broadly similar state-corporatist dispositions.) Pent-up consumer demand in the former communist countries, coupled with job creation, soon generates a big economic upswing. The communist parties perhaps become split into ruling majorities of moderate social democrats and isolated minorities of ideological stalwarts. The entire European continent from the Urals to the Atlantic is unified in a single geopolitical and economic bloc, with Germany as its economic engine and Russia as the supplier of labor, raw materials, and military force. In this version of events, American hegemony fades away much sooner from world geopolitics. A social democratic and paternalistic Europe together with a recast U.S.S.R. would have enough reasons and power to oppose the neoliberal Washington consensus. The geopolitically and ideologically marginalized America, however, would not be doing too badly economically. Given the strengths of the European example, Washington might find the spirit to adopt the political measures necessary to generate internal demand and establish its own trading bloc with Latin America and China. The world in this case remains certainly capitalist but it would be a different variety and configuration of capitalist globalization.