The Red Flag: A History of Communism (76 page)

The real alternative to Radical and Romantic mobilization in most of the Soviet bloc, however, was the promise to improve consumption. Abandoning the promise of a Communist utopia to justify self-sacrifice and austerity, Communist leaders now claimed that they were the best people to deliver higher living standards, whilst distributing them equitably. The ‘Communism’ which Khrushchev promised would be attained by 1980 was widely interpreted as a society of material plenty rather than an idyll of Marxist creativity.

Efforts to please the consumer began in the 1950s; it was then that some East Europeans finally enjoyed the self-service supermarket – developed before the War in the United States and exported to Western Europe during the Marshall Plan era. In Warsaw the grand neo-classical Stalinist shops were joined by a low-rise modernist, American-style self-service store, the ‘Supersam’, in 1959. As the supermarket’s inventors in Depression-era America intended, it brought liberation and autonomy. Shoppers could wander round the store, choosing what they wanted
without the need to engage with sullen assistants or join long queues at every counter. However, as any resident of or visitor to the old Eastern bloc will remember, an American consumer culture never flourished, and self-service supermarkets remained the exception.

The socialist car was the real symbol of the aspiration to satisfy consumers. The GDR, under most pressure to compete with the West, was the first country to make serious attempts to build cars for the private market with its plastic-bodied, environmentally unfriendly Trabant (meaning ‘satellite’, and named after the Russian sputnik), first introduced in 1958. By the late 1980s about 40 per cent of households had cars – higher than any other country in the bloc, but not nearly as many as in West Germany. The USSR followed in the late 1960s, with its massive $900 million deal with Fiat to build a factory in the Volga town of Togliatti in 1966 and produce the ‘Zhiguli’ or Lada, a version of the Fiat 124.
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Until then, a tiny 65,000 a year had been made available to the public; that increased tenfold, and by the 1980s, 10 per cent of households owned cars.

However, whilst Communist leaders had hoped that cars would become a sign of the socialist world’s ability to provide similar living standards to the West, in fact they became a symbol of their failure: in June 1989 the GDR’s secret police, the Stasi, even reported that ‘Many citizens view the solution of the “automobile problem” as a measure of the success of the GDR’s economic policies.’
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Cars were expensive, and waiting lists were long: in 1989 customers were receiving Trabants they had ordered in 1976.
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This was taking delayed gratification too far. The regimes had raised expectations without being able to meet them.

Why did socialist economies find it so difficult to satisfy consumers, even though their leaders were so eager to do so? A story told by Michael Burawoy, an American industrial sociologist who got a job in 1985 as a steel-worker in the October Revolution Brigade of the enormous Lenin Steel Works in Miskolc, Hungary, helps to explain why. In February, it was announced that the Prime Minister was visiting, and production stopped for days as he and his fellow workers cleaned and painted the factory. ‘Hordes of young lads from neighbouring cooperatives were swarming around’ and soldiers were shovelling the snow. ‘It seemed as if the entire land had been mobilized for the visit of the Prime Minister.’ Burawoy was supposed to be helping to paint one of the machines – the slag drawer – yellow and green, but there were not enough clean brushes
to go round, and he spent his time pointlessly painting shovels with the only tool available: a brush loaded with black paint. The workers were deeply cynical about the whole exercise, seeing it as a typical example of the wastefulness of the system: ‘On seeing workers melting ice with a gas flame, Gyuri [a fellow worker] shakes his head in dismay: “Money doesn’t count, the Prime Minister is coming.”’
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Gyuri was right: in socialist economies – even those with strong market elements, like Hungary’s in the 1980s – politics mattered more than money and profit. Successful managers were those who expanded their empires (whilst, of course, fulfilling plans), and that meant pleasing the political bosses who controlled the purse-strings. It was essential that a good show be put on for the Prime Minister, however much was spent.

In this struggle for resources, it was the politically influential who were best able to compete – especially the heavy industrial and defence industries. Therefore even after Stalin’s death, when the economy was no longer whipped into fulfilling heroic plans, the state continued to neglect the consumer. And without the fear of bankruptcy to rein in their voraciousness, the old industrial interests remained uncontrollably ‘hungry’, sucking up all the resources and creating shortages throughout the economy – from Burawoy’s paint-brushes to Trabant cars.
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Thus the main drawback of Communist economies was not always equality and the concurrent poor incentives for workers, as is often thought (in some economies, like the USSR’s and the GDR’s, from the 1970s incentives were indeed weak, but in others, like Hungary, they were stronger). One of the main problems of the system lay in how capital was allocated – whether it went into productive or unproductive areas. The absence of democracy, combined with the centralization of economic power amongst the planners, allowed well-entrenched interest groups to hijack the honey-pot. This was, at root, the insight of the Austrian right-liberal economist and influential critic of Communism, Friedrich von Hayek.

Inevitably, this rigidity crippled Communists’ ability to innovate. Entrenched interests made sure that they took the lion’s share of resources, starving new ventures which were to be vital for the economy. By the 1980s, therefore, a massive 20–30 per cent of the Soviet national budget was spent on defence. Meanwhile the Soviet bloc seriously lagged behind in the computing industry of the future. By the 1970s the USSR had a quarter of the world’s scientists, half the world’s engineers
and a third of the world’s physicists, but manpower did not make a high-tech economy. The Soviet bloc did develop a serious computer system, copied from an IBM model – the Riad – but, typically, much more energy was spent on producing the computers than helping their consumers in industry to use them.
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In the 1980s, the number of computers in the USSR amounted to less than 1 per cent of the quantity in the United States: 200,000 to 25 million.
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The other main obstacle to the consumer economy – at least in less reformed states – was the Plan, which typically set quantity targets. Factories therefore took the easiest route, producing large quantities of consumer goods of poor quality, which nobody wanted to buy. The result was shoddy, expensive goods that lay mouldering on shop shelves whilst the public competed for the higher-quality, expensive goods on the black market. As the Russian economist Nikolai Shmelev explained in 1987:

Even when efforts were made to improve consumer industries in the 1970s and 1980s, factories were still responding to planners, rather than consumers. Party officials did try to decide what would sell, but sober, puritanical bureaucrats were hardly the ideal people to predict future consumer trends. One member of the Dresden regional administration in the GDR was aware of his limitations, but still, absurdly, found himself having to second-guess fashion-conscious citizens:

By the mid-1960s, it was becoming clear not only that Soviet-type economies were struggling to satisfy the consumer, but that their high growth
rates more generally declining. Between 1950 and 1958, Soviet growth per unit of resource was 3.7 per cent, whilst between 1959 and 1966 it had fallen to 2 per cent. What was to be done? Economists increasingly thought about combining the plan with the market, and Khrushchev’s fall helped them. Khrushchev had dallied with market reforms, and had introduced them in a very limited way in 1964. But he was, at root, a true believer in collectivist economics and was suspicious of encouraging individual, market incentives. Brezhnev, in contrast, whilst he was no liberal, was much less concerned with ideology. It looked as if Khrushchev’s awkward combination of technocracy and Radicalism would give way to a new era of Pragmatism.

The 1970s and early 1980s were some of the most dispiriting years in the history of the Soviet bloc, but, precisely for that reason, they were the golden age of the Communist joke. Two of the best-known capture popular views of Leonid Brezhnev in the early 1980s:

No Moscow dinner party in the late 1970s and 1980s was complete without jokes about his idiocy and vanity, and everybody had their own impersonation, complete with his doddery Ukrainian-accented speech. Kundera’s Ludvik would have had no problems in the USSR of the 1970s. Even Brezhnev did not care. When told about the chest-expansion joke, he said, ‘If they’re telling jokes about me, it means they love me.’
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Yet many of his former colleagues have argued that it was only from the early 1970s that he became the notoriously lazy mediocrity who would brook no criticism, partly as a result of the ill-health that dogged
him from 1968. Before then he and Aleksei Kosygin, the Prime Minister, seemed like energetic, pragmatic reformers, willing to break from Khrushchev’s old ideological mind-set. As the Czech reformer Zdeněk Mlynář remembered, few of his reformist friends in the Soviet party missed Khrushchev, and they welcomed Brezhnev as an interim leader who might preside over a ‘rational line based on expertise’.
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Leonid Brezhnev was born into a Russian workers’ family in Kamenskoe (now Dneprodzerzhinsk, renamed in honour of Felix Dzerzhinskii, the founder of the Cheka) in eastern Ukraine in 1906. His parents were ambitious for him, and he attended a good classical grammar school. The revolution and civil war disrupted his education, but they also opened up new opportunities; had it not been for the Bolsheviks, he would have undoubtedly followed his father into the steel mill. He joined the Komsomol, worked in factories, and acquired a technical education, eventually graduating as a metallurgical engineer. In 1936 he was elected to the Dneprodzerzhinsk town council, and then had a job organizing metal production for Ukraine’s defence industries. It was at this point that he joined the ‘tail’ of an important party boss – Nikita Khrushchev, the new head of the Ukrainian party. During the war, he continued to put his technical and administrative skills at the service of the party, helping with the dismantling of factories in the western USSR for transport to the East. He also became a political commissar, charged with inspiring and disciplining his troops.

Ultimately Khrushchev took him to the Kremlin on his coat-tails. But Brezhnev’s style could not have been more different to his patron’s. He was a technical person before he became a party activist, and when he did become a commissar it was during the most nationalistic and least ideologically Marxist period of the party’s history. He was therefore more consensual than Khrushchev. He was, indeed, a fairly typical official of his generation who owed his extraordinary social mobility to the party. Like Dudintsev’s Drozdov, he was uninterested in ideas, did not enjoy films and disliked reading – acolytes even had to read official papers to him. Some of his pleasures were simple ones: playing dominoes with his security guard and watching football on the TV. But the Brezhnev jokes had some truth to them: he was hilariously vain, loved ceremony and was no puritan. He had accumulated more state awards than all of his predecessors combined; indeed he had more military medals than Marshal Zhukov, who had captured Berlin.
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Other weaknesses included
fast cars and the post-Stalin Communist sport of bear-hunting (Stalin had not permitted his lieutenants to shoot). And whilst Brezhnev hardly lived in the luxury enjoyed by today’s Russian elites (or indeed Western elites at the time), his lifestyle was very different from the mass of the Soviet people, and inevitably generated resentment – and jokes. In one, Brezhnev’s mother visits her son in his luxurious
dacha
. ‘This is my house,’ he boasts; ‘these are my cars; this is my swimming-pool.’ His mother gasps with wonder and pride, tinged with anxiety: ‘You do live well, Lionechka. But I’m worried for you. What happens if the Bolsheviks return?’ As will be seen, the joke turned out to be prescient. Revolutionary Bolsheviks – of a sort – were indeed to return, and Brezhnev’s corrupt legacy was to be one of their first targets.