Soviet society has changed since the seventies. Those were years of political equilibrium at the top, but the country’s economic and social development did not mark time. The numbers of the engineering intelligentsia increased markedly:
In the structure of personnel employed in productive industry [engineers] will be two or three times more numerous in the eighties than in 1960. On the average, there will be one engineer or technician for every six or seven manual workers.4
Sociological research reveals a higher cultural level in the working class, a rapprochement between this class and the intelligentsia and — most importantly — that it is no longer diluted by incomers from the countryside. The flight from the village to the town still goes on, but the multimillioned working class easily assimilates the thinned-out ‘reinforcements’. The number of hereditary workers has greatly increased, while at the same time disbelief in official propaganda has become universal. The most important development of all is that the workers of today are keenly aware of the social antagonism between them and the statocracy, and draw a sharp line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. From this differentiation between ‘us’ (the working masses, the people, the workers) and ‘them’ (the bureaucracy, the government, the exploiters) a class-consciousness is beginning to emerge, and the statocracy possesses no means of halting that process.
The remarkable economic and social stability of the system created by Stalin has deluded many, both supporters and opponents of the regime, and especially ‘calm’ observers. In the postwar period the system revealed its economic inefficiency, yet this society continued to exist and even to increase its well-being. The cessation of mass terror did not reduce but rather increased the stability of the system, for both the statocracy and the lower orders felt safer. However, there is no mystery in this.
It is not accidental that societies of the Soviet type outside the USSR proved much less stable. The point is not that the statocracy has ruled in Eastern Europe for a shorter time than in Russia and has been unable to educate the masses properly. The rulers of Eastern Europe made up, between the fifties and the seventies, for the short time they had been in power by means of greater economic efficiency than existed in the USSR. The explanation is simple. The Soviet statocratic system proved extremely stable owing to the abundance of resources in Russia. Until the eighties we had plenty of everything — sources of power, raw materials, land, manpower, and so on. These resources could be so squandered that no economic inefficiency, no bad management would hinder further growth. In Eastern Europe the Stalin-type system started to crack as early as the fifties, immediately after the cessation of mass terror. Only cheap Soviet power resources made possible the maintenance of a more or less high standard of living and comparative social stability in these countries during the sixties and seventies, although they did not prevent the acute crises in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Poland in 1968, 1970, 1976 and, finally, in 1980-81. However, Eastern Europe is not able to decide its future destiny on its own.
A qualitatively new stage began in the eighties when, for the first time in its thousand years of history, Russia came up against the problem of insufficient resources. The results of bad management came home to roost. ‘The Brezhnev period of “historic compromise’”, writes the Russian émigré sociologist V. Zaslavsky,
is at an end. In fact we are on the eve of a conflict between the political rulers and wide sections of the working class, even if this conflict does not develop into open and organized struggle.5
The working class will remind the rulers of its existence through strikes breaking out now here, now there. Fresh forces will enter the historical arena. The workers experienced neither great expectations after the Twentieth Congress nor disenchantment after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The independent spiritual development of our working class is only beginning, and the intelligentsia must help them from its own rich historical experience. This does not mean ‘going to the people’ and instilling the workers with new ideas: the masses will pick those ideas up in their own time, if the intelligentsia develops them and makes them widely known. What is wanted above all is not to form a ‘Union for Emancipation’ but to emancipate ourselves spiritually.
The French right-wing socialist J.-Ph. Revel wrote in his book Ni Marx, ni Jésus that democratic socialism cannot be realized first in the ‘Third World’ or in Western Europe. One can agree with many of his arguments, but this sober appreciation of the situation in the countries of the Old World has led the writer to the strange conclusion that the world revolution will begin in the USA. It may be, of course, that there is something here that we in Russia do not understand, but this prospect does seem, at the very least, unlikely. The complex processes going on in American society suggest anything but revolution. Revel does not even try to estimate the possibility of changes in Eastern Europe, yet Russia is becoming ripe for change.
In The Dialectics of Hope (my previous book), I tried to substantiate the proposition that the Soviet Union stands on the threshold of democratic socialism. How true that is we shall see in the coming decades. In any case, the second half of the eighties will greatly clarify the social situation in our country. Whereas in the sixties and seventies the democratic intelligentsia, despite its immense moral superiority over the bureaucracy, was like Pascal’s thinking reed, lacking real power to resist the bureaucrats’ policy, in the eighties it can already rely on the movement of wide sections of the working people and become part of that movement. The Polish experience has once again confirmed what Marxists have always said: social transformations are impossible unless the working class participates. The experience of summer 1980 in the Soviet Union showed that our working class, too, is able to come forward as an independent active force. The strikes of that time were only the first test, the first step.
Only thus: to wager on the intellectuals alone in the Soviet Union would be as stupid as to count, in the West, on the students alone. Only when the majority of the working people really try to change something — not just protest in words or in intellectually refined manifestos, but when they go on strike, when they launch a general strike and street demonstrations, when all that becomes possible, then the way things are will be changed.6
One cannot disagree with Ernst Bloch. It is all just as Jerzy Lee said: ‘It’s not the same with freedom as with other goods… Freedom is the only thing that costs less the more it’s in demand.’7 From what has been said one should not conclude that the cultural struggle of past years was meaningless or useless. On the contrary, it prepared the social consciousness for the next steps, created the foundations for public opinion. And even if it began to seem, to participants in the events of the sixties and seventies, that everything they had done had been wasted, that deep process which they, consciously or unconsciously, had promoted was still going on. Although the results were not always visible, they were real. Forces had not been expended in vain. History will show what fruits will spring from the work done over many years.
PART TWO
The Intelligentsia and Glasnost'
1
The New Cultural Context1
When, in the spring of 1985, the third ceremonial funeral in three years took place in Moscow, most of the intelligentsia were in a state of apathy and pessimism. This was due, not to regret for the passing of the CPSU general secretary, Konstantin Chernenko, but to quite different causes. The Brezhnev epoch of Soviet history was described by the ideologists of that time as ‘an era of stability’. Later they took to calling it ‘a time of stagnation’. There is an element of truth in both appraisals, but the main problem in the early eighties consisted not in knowing whether Brezhnevism had been good or bad, intrinsically, but in the fact that this policy had now exhausted itself. The country’s economic situation was steadily worsening. Cultural life, based on the ideas and controversies inherited from the sixties, was in profound crisis. Brezhnev’s passing had clearly ‘come too late’, and with it also the change of course. The accession to power of Yuri Andropov in November 1982 aroused in many the hope of seeing radical changes, but unfortunately he was to outlive Brezhnev by no more than fifteen months. In that space of time not only was he unable to carry out any serious changes in the economy and the political sphere, he could not even exert any influence on the general psychological climate. When Andropov was succeeded by Chernenko, whom Brezhnev himself had regarded as his successor, it became obvious that the hopes were not to be realized.