10 He had heard about the thieves’ marathon card sessions: for thieves and their card games in the Gulag, see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 2, 1918–1956, Parts III–IV, translated by Thomas P. Whitney (London: Collins/Harvill, 1975), pp. 410–30. For a fictional representation, drawing on the Siberian experience of the imprisoned Yugoslav Karlo Stajner, see Danilo Kis, ‘The Magic Card Dealing’ (story), in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, translated anonymously from the Serbian (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).
11 Couple of stilyagi. Really stomped me, the little bastards: quiffed, music-loving members of the Soviet Union’s first distinctive teenage tribe. Associated with delinquency, and therefore conveniently blamable for all ills, and not just by Russians; Anthony Burgess claimed that it was a violent encounter with stilyagi outside a Leningrad nightclub that inspired him to create Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange.
12 This is a budget problem? Nobody cares about those: I have cheated here slightly, and given Uralmash a problem with money which, strictly speaking, would not have existed in this form until after the 1965 reform, which changed the measure of plan fulfilment from physical volume of output to profit made. Hence the need here for the additional factor of special scrutiny by Gosplan. Otherwise, in 1963, the chemical fibre equipment division of Uralmash really would have worried about the number of machines produced, and little else. By having Solkemfib’s problem with getting their upgrade turn, anachronistically, on price irrationality, I’m dramatising in advance the consequences of a price-irrational reform when it comes in the next chapter.
13 Pricing of equipment in the chemical industry is calculated chiefly by weight: a genuine statement, but actually made, later, to a plant manufacturing car-tyre-moulding machines in Tambov. See Ellman, Planning Problems in the Soviet Union.
Straight away the archer was seized as if by an impetuous breeze, and carried into the air so fast his cap fell off. ‘Hey, genie, stop for a minute!’ he cried. ‘Too late, master,’ said the genie, ‘your cap is now five thousand versts behind us.’ Towns and villages, rivers and forests flashed before his eyes …
PART V
Baggy two-piece suits are not the obvious costume for philosopher kings: but that, in theory, was whatng ipparatchiks who ruled the Soviet Union in the 1960s were supposed to be. Lenin’s state made the same bet that Plato had twenty-five centuries earlier, when he proposed that enlightened intelligence given absolute powers would serve the public good better than the grubby politicking of republics. On paper the USSR was a republic, a grand multi- ethnic federation of republics indeed, and its constitutions (there were several) guaranteed its citizens all manner of civil rights. But in truth the Soviet system was utterly unsympathetic to the idea of rights, if you meant by them any suggestion that the two hundred million men, women and children who inhabited the Soviet Union should be autonomously fixing on two hundred million separate directions in which to pursue happiness. This was a society with just one programme for happiness, which had been declared to be scientific and therefore – the people were told – was as factual as gravity. It had originated in a profound discovery, the programme: an unveiling of the entire logic of human history. Then it had been clarified, codified, simplified and finally brought down to a headful of maxims, all without losing its completeness or its authority.
To carry it out, those in whom the knowledge was installed were authorised to act on it directly, unrestrained by laws or by any moral code of the old style. So, alongside the nominal structures of state and society in the USSR, the Party existed, its hierarchy shadowing all other hierarchies, its organisation chart mapping the true nervous system for the country. Every factory, every army unit, every university faculty, every town council, had its corresponding Party committee, staffed with people who might not, on paper, outrank the soldiers or professors or managers or functionaries they worked among; but who possessed, in fact, an unlimited authority to guide, nudge, cajole, threaten, intervene, overrule. Up at the top the arrangement became explicit. The Presidium which ruled the Soviet Union was not the cabinet of the Soviet state. It was the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Party; it was the court of the First Secretary, chief and principal among all the philosophical kings of the USSR. Sometimes the First Secretary was also prime minister of the Soviet Union, sometimes he wasn’t. It didn’t matter much. The notional premiership was a second-order position, a nice bauble to hang round the neck of real power.
The ordinary apparatchiks were not, of course, allowed to do freelance philosophy on their own account. Ideological direction was set at the top, and passed down, by conference resolutions and newspaper editorials, as a ‘Party line’ which only needed to be applied. But on the kingship side of things, even junior apparatchiks had considerable discretion – or perhaps it would be better to say, they were obliged to improvise. They had to make endless, quick, unappealable decisions about the fate of the human beings in front of them. The theory in their heads was universal in its reach, and their expertise was supposed to be universal too. They were the agents of humanity’s future, which they were to manufacture by being, in the present, experts in human nature. In this sense, even the grimmest of them was, professionally, a people person. They acted as progress-chasers, fixers, censors, seducers, talent-scouts, comedians, therapists, judges, executioners, inspirational speakers, coaches, and even from time to time as politicians of the representative variety, carrying a concern of their constituents to t consideraentre for attention. It was a quality deliberately designed into their power that it should be unlimited, that it should have the weight of the whole project behind it, in whatever unforeseeable situation the little monarchs found themselves. There had been a period, under Stalin, when the security police seemed to be supplanting them, but Khrushchev had restored the supremacy of the apparat. Here was another reason for the baggy suits. Earlier, at the turbulent beginning of Lenin’s state, the Party’s operatives had signified their power by using the direct iconography of force. They wore leather jackets and cavalry coats, they carried visible revolvers. Stalin’s Party, later, dressed with a vaguely military austerity. Stalin himself had favoured plain tunics, unlimited by badges of rank; at the very end of his life, when he was being hailed as the strategic genius of the Great Patriotic War, he enjoyed wearing the fantasy uniforms of an ice-cream generalissimo. Now, by contrast, the symbolism was emphatically civil, managerial. The Party suit of the 1960s declared that the wearer was not a soldier, not a policeman. He was the person who could give the soldier and the policeman orders. The philosopher kings were back on top.
But the Soviet experiment had run into exactly the difficulty that Plato’s admirers encountered, back in the fifth century BC, when they attempted to mould philosophical monarchies for Syracuse and Macedonia. The recipe called for rule by heavily-armed virtue – or in the Leninist case, not exactly virtue, but a sort of intentionally post-ethical counterpart to it, self-righteously brutal. Wisdom was to be set where it could be ruthless. Once such a system existed, though, the qualities required to rise in it had much more to do with ruthlessness than with wisdom. Lenin’s core of original Bolsheviks, and the socialists like Trotsky who joined them, were many of them highly educated people, literate in multiple European languages, learned in the scholastic traditions of Marxism; and they preserved these attributes even as they murdered and lied and tortured and terrorised. They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters. But their successors – the vydvizhentsy who refilled the Central Committee in the thirties – were not the most selfless people in Soviet society, or the most principled, or the most scrupulous. They were the most ambitious, the most domineering, the most manipulative, the most greedy, the most sycophantic; people whose adherence to Bolshevik ideas was inseparable from the power that came with them. Gradually their loyalty to the ideas became more and more instrumental, more and more a matter of what the ideas would let them grip in their two hands. High-leve
l Party meetings became extravagantly foul- mouthed from the 1930s on, as a way of signalling that practical people were now in charge, down-to-earth people: and honest Russians too, not those dubious Balzac-readers with funny foreign names. ‘Ladies, cover your ears!’ became the traditional start-of- meeting announcement.
In a way, the surprise is that Bolshevik idealism lasted as long as it did. Stalin took his philosophical obligations entirely seriously. The time he spent in his Kremlin library was time spent reading. He held forth on linguistics, and genetics, and economics, and the proper writing of history, because he believed that intellectual decision-making was the duty of power. His associates, too, tended to possess treasured collections of Marxist literature. It was practicalf Molotov’s complaints, after Stalin’s death, that by sending him off to be ambassador to Outer Mongolia, Khrushchev had parted him from his books. And Khrushchev, in his turn, tried his best to talk like the great theoretician one magically became by elbowing and conniving one’s way to the First Secretaryship. It came even less easily to him, but the transition to utopia by 1980 was all his own work, and so was the idea of peaceful competition with the capitalists. He was not a cynic. The idea that he might be committing an imposture bothered him deeply: he worried away at it, out loud, in public, busily denying and denying. A sculptor dared to tell him he didn’t understand art: ‘When I was a miner,’ he snapped, ‘they said I didn’t understand. When I was a political worker in the army, they said I didn’t understand. When I was this and that, they said I didn’t understand. Well, now I’m party leader and premier, and you mean to say I still don’t understand? Who are you working for, anyway?’ Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khrushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.
*
In 1964, Khrushchev was entirely surrounded by people he had appointed himself. Initially, he had had to share power with the other survivors of Stalin’s inner circle. With the backing of Marshal Zhukov and the army, he and Malenkov and Molotov had been able to arrest and kill the most dangerous of their colleagues, Stalin’s rapist police chief Beria. Then with Zhukov’s help Khrushchev outmanoeuvred Malenkov and Molotov. Then he sacked Zhukov, and after that he had a free hand. The rivals he had competed with for Stalin’s favour were all gone. Only his ally Mikoyan remained. He restocked the Presidium from the Central Committee, with apparatchiks whose life histories had followed paths like his own. Half of them were vydvizhentsy, the other half were the postwar equivalent. So when he looked along the table – at Brezhnev, Kosygin of Gosplan, Andropov, Podgorny, the rising stars Shelepin and Kirichenko, the culture minister Furtseva – he saw people he had hoisted to power personally. He had made them. They were his.
But he was starting to frighten them. Not in the sense of making them fear for their individual safety – he had banished that fear from the top of Soviet politics – but because the fervour of his true belief now seemed to be making him take bigger and bigger risks with exactly the order of things exemplified by the baggy, two-piece Party suit. He had made alarmingly specific, alarmingly verifiable economic promises, and given these promises a redemption date only sixteen years away. It might yet be that the mathematicians would come to the rescue and wave their cybernetic wand over Gosplan, but for now the growth rate continued to drift on gently down. Khrushchev had made a vast public fuss over the reform of agriculture, filling the newspapers with his pet initiatives; now drought and falling yields had pushed the Soviet Union to the brink of bread rationing and forced them to waste precious foreign currency on importing wheat, ten million humiliating tonnes of it. He had tried to stick his thumb in the scales of the strategic balance by putting the missiles in Cuba; and the world had nearlyburned. He was getting angrier and angrier, more and more impatient, more and more puzzled. ‘You’d think as first secretary I could change anything in this country,’ he told Fidel Castro. ‘The hell I can! No matter what changes I propose and carry out, everything stays the same. Russia’s like a tub full of dough …’ The yeasty mass kept pushing back, and all he knew how to do was to keep trying the same methods, more and more frantically, more and more frenziedly, announcing new policies, rejigging the organisation chart, tinkering and revising, even to the point of messing with the basis of philosophical kingship itself. He had split the Party into separate agricultural and industrial sections, for no very apparent reason. He was taking away apparat privileges. He was talking about running multi-candidate elections for Party posts – although only the low-level ones. Meanwhile, he listened less. He mocked his colleagues to their faces. He sent Mikoyan to Cuba while his wife was dying, then failed to turn up to her funeral. He absent-mindedly alienated supporter after supporter, till by October 1964 there was a solid majority around the Presidium table for replacing him.
Which left the question of what to do about his promises.
Notes – Introduction
1 The same bet that Plato had twenty-five centuries earlier: see Plato, The Republic, 473d. As Benjamin Jowett’s 1871 translation puts it, ‘Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils, – nor the human race, as I believe …’ The classic twentieth-century philosophical rejoinder to Plato is Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).
2 The Party existed, its hierarchy shadowing all other hierarchies: for the Leninist justification for cadres’ unlimited authority, see Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, pp. 664–74, 754–63. For the way the dual structure of power left the Soviet state ‘booby-trapped with idealism’, and the role it eventually played in the downfall of the USSR, see Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: OUP, 2001). Conversely, for an argument that the philosophical kingship of the USSR only continued a traditional local approach to modernisation, see Marshall T. Poe, The Russian Moment in World History (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
3 They were the agents of humanity’s future: or, in Stalin’s famous phrase, ‘the engineers of human souls’.
4 They acted as progress-chasers, fixers, censors, seducers: but not, by design, as bureaucrats, in one very specific sense of the word. The Soviet Union had regular campaigns against ‘bureaucracy’, hard though this is for an outsider to make immediate sense of in a system where every employee was a state employee. ‘Bureaucracy’ as a Soviet pejorative implied coldness, impersonality, slowness, trivial rule-following. Apparatchiks were supposed, by contrast, to be quick, ‘conscious’, lively, free to engage in brilliant improvisation to get the job done by any means necessary. See Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, pp. 28–35. And there was some support for this model of power at the receiving end: it was the aim of anyone dealing with an official to try and get themselves treated po-chelovecheski, ‘like a human being’, on the basis of an emotional recognition rather than some cold rule. See Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours. The result was that Soviet bureaucracy, while pervasive, did not exhibit some of the classic features of bureaucracy elsewhere. It was not predictable and rule-governed; thus, by a neat circle of cause and effect, you had to approach it personally, emotionally, looking for the individual with whom to make a relationship.
5 Not exactly virtue, but a sort of intentionally post-ethical counterpart to it: see Charles Taylor’s characterisation of ‘the Bolshevik stance’ as a version of disengaged liberal benevolence in which one’s identity as a good person has been entirely invested in a ‘titanic control over history’. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 682–3.
6 High-level Party meetings
became extravagantly foul-mouthed from the 1930s on: see Aganbegyan, Moving the Mountain.
7 ‘When I was a miner,’ he snapped: see Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 590.
8 In 1964, Khrushchev was entirely surrounded by people he had appointed himself: for the political history of the last frantic months of Khrushchev’s leadership, see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 3–17, 620–45. For the warning signs of the approaching putsch, which Sergei Khrushchev tried to get his father to notice, see the first two chapters of Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev: An Inside Account of the Man and His Era, edited and translated by William Taubman (Boston MA: Little Brown, 1990). For the shifting mood in the Presidium among Khrushchev-made figures such as Andropov, see Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, pp. 196-203.
9 ‘You’d think as first secretary I could change anything in this country’:see Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 598.
Once a turnip said, ‘I taste very good with honey.’ ‘Get away, you boaster,’ replied the honey. ‘I taste good without you.’
1.
Trading Down, 1964
The Zil had disappeared in the night and so had the familiar bodyguards. The new guard captain stopped him in the wet grass by the garage door.
‘You’re the driver, right?’ he saidth honey. much use looking in there, I’m afraid.’
He cranked up the garage door anyway, and looked at the bare concrete floor where the Zil had been parked. His workbench looked small against the rear wall without the big black bulk of the limo filling the space. The Zil was a marvellous car. It was a copy of the Cadillac Eldorado. In the whole country, only three men were entitled to ride in one. Which meant that when he drove the boss, he was one of only three people getting to feel the burbling surge when you gave its six-litre engine some gas, one of only three getting to guide its chromed immensity down the highway’s special lane. Which had meant that.
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