At any rate, Moscow was having considerable difficulty in digesting Poland, but there was worse. Could Poland digest the Soviet Union? There was an imponderable, television. Telecommunications were now such that in the furthest reaches of the Soviet Union truth could be told: people would know that they lived ‘like dogs’, as Richard Pipes’s fellow traveller had known in fifties Leningrad. Maybe in Brezhnev’s time the blockage of information meant that most Soviet citizens imagined that the West still lived in the world of Dickens’s novels, that the imperialized Third World was only waiting for shining tomorrows courtesy of Moscow. But cameras could now be dropped in the remotest places, from there to beam instant images to a waiting world (Robert Harris’s Archangel has a good description of the process). In East Germany Western television had generally been available, such that the inhabitants were under no illusions as to the relative poverty of their living conditions — as Enzensberger said, Communism was the highest stage of underdevelopment, and East Germany was a state that sich selber mitmacht, an imitation of itself, as Musil had called Austria-Hungary. This line was now true of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. What was to be done? A sign that matters were going out of control was that the secret police took charge.
This situation was not at all new for the bosses in the Kremlin. In 1921 the West had not followed the Bolsheviks’ pattern. There had been no revolution, or at any rate not a 1917, in Germany. By rights, the Germans should have produced one, and for a few weeks there had been workers’ and soldiers’ councils on the Soviet model. But then there had been deals — the Social Democrats with the generals, the trade unions with the bosses — and the final revolution was not Lenin’s but Hitler’s. Moscow had responded by finding common ground with Berlin. Now there was a wooden replay of this, an effort to separate the Europeans from the USA. ‘Our common European home’, an old tune of Molotov’s in 1954, came up again under Brezhnev.
In 1921 Lenin had responded quite creatively. In the short term the Revolution had failed. There was famine, and there were revolts. In 1920 the peasants were given a New Economic Policy, by which private buying and selling had again been allowed. Then there had been an approach to the Germans, and German industrialists and even military officers had co-operated with the new Soviet Union. Bolshevik diplomats put on white ties, appeared in the West, talking good French, and money came their way. On the whole, the West did not really understand 1917. Why could the Bolsheviks not be bought, like everybody else? Now in the 1980s, as Moscow saw the failure of everything, everywhere, that calculation came back in great force. Lenin is said to have said, around 1921, that there were Western ‘useful idiots’ who would talk about feminism or ecology or town planning or humanism and who could be put on the same platform as Bolsheviks whose intentions were to take over the planet. Now Moscow came up with the last useful idiot, Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev, in himself an obviously decent man, whose task was to soft-soap the West. Seeing him in action, Yuri Lyubimov, a theatrical producer of genius, scratched his head and wondered as to whom Gorbachev reminded him of. He said, at last, ‘Chichikov’, the anti-hero of Gogol’s Dead Souls, who worked out a scheme for buying serfs whose deaths had not been recorded — a scheme which in the short term makes Chichikov appear to be a great landowner, but which ends in farcial collapse. In the Soviet Union, there were many equivalents.
The statistics of the seventies could not conceal a slowing down and even a reversal of the economy. Labour was no longer migrant, and construction — its forte — slowed down. In the sixties labour began to run short, then in the seventies arable land, then in the eighties fuel, energy, petrol, and, as Vladimir Bukovsky puts it, ‘the system turned out not even able to pillage itself efficiently’. More and more of the GNP — one third in 1980 — went on investment, and a rough fifth went on defence, but the investment led nowhere. The statistics were in any case fictional, and in 1987 the economists Vasily Selyunin and G. I. Khanin challenged the whole set, claiming that the national income had grown far less since 1928 than had been suggested; growth rates had declined from the 4 per cent of the later sixties to 1 per cent; any growth was a statistical illusion, ascribable to inflation. It is an extraordinary fact that the most vociferous anti-Communists, starting with Reader’s Digest, understood such things much better than all the institutes set up for sympathetic study of the Soviet economy (for which ‘production’ would be an apter description). Time was to come when, at St Antony’s, Oxford, a Polish or Hungarian professor, didactically bearded, in a shiny brown suit, would lecture on such subjects as the possibility of market reforms under Socialism, and be discovered, a little later, buying Marks and Spencer female underwear from his expenses. Outdated technology and the exhaustion of plant caused shortfalls, and the quality of consumer goods was dismal; and, besides, the printing of money was causing a great overhang of deposits in savings banks, of 20 billion roubles in 1965 and 91 billion in 1975 (in 1985 more than twice that).
Technology, here, was the prompter. Already in 1975 Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, had noted with alarm the rise of new ‘smart’ American weaponry. The ‘smart’ bombs were one aspect, but there was much more. A French historian of philosophy, himself a one-time Communist, Alain Besançon, wrote the best analysis of Soviet Communism (called ‘Anatomy of a Spectre’). It had an ‘A’ system, which was very ‘A’, an illustration that the Revolution was better at the best than the West. That was the Bolshoy, the satellites, the foreign ministry, sophisticated people speaking languages. There was a ‘B’ system, very ‘B’, which produced the consumer goods. There was a surreptitious ‘C’, which was the reality, and in which everyone lied and stole. When Communism collapsed, it was the ‘C’ system which came to the top. Now, in 1980, the ‘A’ system was under challenge. Its missiles were being frustrated in space. But the ‘B’ system was challenged as well, since ordinary people could understand how dismally ‘real existing socialism’ looked after them, in comparison with what happened in the West. Men and (they tended to be more acute in Russia) women in the intelligentsia worried, and wrote memoranda. Other citizens responded differently, and stole or lied with greater sophistication. In modern society revolution is not possible. The alternative is sabotage, and that was what was happening: a permanent Bummelstreik, as Stefan Wolle said of East Germany.