6 And then he was backing, dwindling, absenting himself from the scene: husbands were forbidden to attend childbirths, or even to visit during the mandatory ten-day stay in the hospital afterwards. Some will have been sorrier than others about this, just as some women will have been sorrier than others for the enforced rest from family life. See Hedrick Smith, The Russians (London, 1976), for a description of the gaggle of men crowded beneath the recovery-ward windows to see the babies their wives were holding up, and to load eatables into the baskets the women lowered on strings.
7 A face beneath the white flowerpot that seemed to disapprove of the world: Inna Oegovna is entirely fictional, but my sketch of her aunt-like self-righteousness borrows from my memory of the array of censorious, reproving middle-aged men and women in the late-Soviet documentary film Is It Easy to Be Young?
8 Everything was white tiles, but not very clean ones: see Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union, p. 186. Her witness reports ‘sliminess’.
9 She let the midwife take back the gown and put her under a sluggish blood-warm shower: the shower, the enema, the shaving and the painting with disinfectant were all standard procedure. Having to walk up flights of stairs while in labour was not standard procedure, but happened frequently anyway.
10 ‘Primipara,’ she said to the Angry Aunt, standing by with a clipboard: medical vocabulary authentic, and taken from the sample case histories given in Velvovsky et al., Painless Childbirth Through Psychoprophylaxis.
11 ‘You didn’t do the psychoprophylaxis classes?’: expectant mothers were in theory supposed to be led by patient stages through a confrontation with their fears over birth pain, a reassuring explanation of the physiology of childbirth and a demonstration of relaxation and breathing techniques. In fact, in almost every case the classes were taught by midwives or doctors who had not been specially trained, and did indeed consist mainly of the ‘stuff about taking lots of walks’ which Galina’s neighbour reports to her on the labour ward, with the specifics of what to expect and to do reduced to an unhelpful gabble at the end. Not knowing that there was anything important to learn, most women, like Galina, didn’t bother to go. So the positive programme of the psychoprophylactic method scarcely touched them, yet they were still subject to the prohibition on drugs associated with it, and were still likely to be judged as if difficulty with the pain represented a failure of virtue on their part.
12 When the contractions come, breathe deeply: if the few bits of psychoprophylactic advice Galina gets seem vaguely familiar, that’s because they are. Psychoprophylaxis, in a melancholy irony, is the basis of the phenomenally successful Lamaze method for natural birth in the West. The Soviet ideas were carried back to Paris by the French doctor (and communist) Fernand Lamaze, and humanised there – partly by bringing in birth partners, and less passive positions for labour, and more sophisticated techniques of auto-suggestion, but most of all by being made voluntary. A woman ‘doing Lamaze’ can aim for a birth with minimal medical intervention while knowing that the pethidine and the gas and the epidurals are there if she needs them. Psychoprophylaxis may seem to Galina here to be just another form of compulsory pretence; but it would be equally just to see it as another piece of mangled Soviet idealism, another genuinely promising idea ruined by the magic combination of compulsion and neglect. Velvovsky and his colleagues were the century’s pioneers in trying to see childbirth as something better than an illness to be endured.
13 It was really only messages from the subcortex of the brain which you could turn off by stimulating the cortex: one reason for the rapid promotion of psychoprphylaxis to orthodoxy in the USSR lay in its use of a Pavlovian framework that dovetailed with late-Stalinist ideological preferences. For the history and personalities involved here, and the role played by this association with soon-discredited science in later Soviet obstetricians’ indifference to the technique they were supposed to be promoting, see John D. Bell, ‘Giving Birth to the New Soviet Man: Politics and Obstetrics in the USSR’, Slavic Review vol. 40 no. 1 (Spring 1981), pp. 1–16.
14 It means they’re not going to give us any painkillers: in some hospitals, a single small injection of painkillers was allowed. See Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union.
15 She had only brought a bowl of water, and briskly wiped all the foreheads in the room with it: the only thing a midwife was permitted to do for women at this stage of labour, apart from watching for complications which might require surgery.
16 So pull yourself together and breathe right, or you’ll kill the baby: an encouraging remark passed on to the American journalist Peter Osnos by the woman who had it said to her. See Osnos, ‘Childbirth, Soviet Style’.
17 They were all mashed flies, swatted and left to fester: attested in Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union.
18 Baby already papoosed up and whisked away: immediately after birth, the newborn was swaddled in a tight roll of white cloth, held up for the mother to see, and then carried off to a nursery for twenty-four hours – apparently to reduce mother–baby transmission of infections, although it is hard to see how this can have worked. After that, the baby would be returned for breastfeeding, the Soviet Union being, in one more authoritarian commitment to naturalness, partly caused by the faulty supply of powdered milk, an entirely pro-breast society. See Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union, and Lee, ‘Health Care in the Soviet Union’.
‘No my boys,’ said the merchant, ‘it is hard to live by right, it is easier to live by wrong. We are cheated, and we must cheat others too.’
PART VI
The ‘Kosygin reforms’ of 1965 put a lot more money in factory managers’ pockets, but they did almost nothing to stop the slowing of the Soviet growth rate. Even according to the generous official figures, there was only a 0.5% upward blip in growth during the Five-Year Plan that ran from 1966 to 1970. CIA estimates put the i>effect at only 0.2%, and recalculations later suggest there may have been no improvement at all. Whatever the effect, it was momentary: in every set of figures, official and unofficial, the growth rate then went on inexorably falling and falling, plan period after plan period, trending grimly downwards towards zero. The growth machine was grinding to a halt. Leviathan’s gears had jammed. This was one of the reasons for Kosygin’s own relative loss of power in the government. He and Brezhnev had been equals when they deposed Khrushchev. By the end of the 1960s, Kosygin was just one of Brezhnev’s ministers, a definite underling to the placidly wily specialist in ‘organisation and psychology’. In political terms, it turned out that the winning response to the problem was not even to try.
For help was arriving from an unexpected direction. In 1961, the first oilfield had been discovered in western Siberia, and by 1969 geologists – many working out of Akademgorodok – had identified almost sixty of them, brimming with saleable crude. They were just about all on-line and pumping in time for the 1973 oil shock, when the world price for petroleum rose by 400%. Suddenly, instead of being a giant autarchy, trying to bootstrap its way to prosperity, the Soviet Union was a producer for the world market, and it was awash with petrodollars. Suddenly, it was possible for the Soviet leadership to buy its way out of some of the deficiencies of the economy. If the collective farms still couldn’t feed the country, then food could be quietly imported. If the people wanted consumer goods, you could buy the technology to produce them, like the complete Fiat car plant assembled on the banks of the Volga. The Brezhnev regime managed to make some everyday luxuries available. There were thirty million TV sets in Soviet homes in 1968, and ninety million at the end of the 1970s; by which time, too, most Soviet families owned a fridge and a majority had a washing machine. Vacations to the sunny beaches of the Black Sea became ordinary. Cigarettes and vodka and chocolate and perfume were usually on the shelves, even when milk and meat were not.
But the oil windfall was nowhere near big enough to pay for the threefold commitment that Khrushchev had made: to superpower- sized military spending, plus abundant consumption, plus a complete n
ew industrial revolution. They could afford the guns – the Politburo made it a priority to funnel the oil dollars into fighter planes and aircraft carriers and helicopter gunships – and they could contrive to find a certain amount of butter; but the limitless, utopian plenty that Khrushchev had promised for 1980 had depended (so far as it was plausible at all) on successfully reconstructing the economy at the next level of technology and productivity, and it was this that did not get funded.
The Soviet economy did not move on from coal and steel and cement to plastics and microelectronics and software design, except in a very few military applications. It continued to compete with what capitalism had been doing in the 1930s, not with what it was doing now. It continued to suck resources and human labour in vast quantities into a heavy-industrial sector which had once been intended to exist as a springboard for something else, but which by now had become its own justification. Soviet industry in its last decades existed because it existed, an empire of inertia expanding ever more slowly, yet attaining the wretched distinction of absorbing more of the total effort of the economy that hosted it than heavy industry has ever done anywhere else in human history, before or since. Every year it produced goods that less and less corresponded to human needs, and whatever it once started producing, it tended to go on producing ad infinitum, since it possessed no effective stop signals except ruthless commands from above, and the people at the top no longer did ruthless, in the economic sphere. The control system for industry grew more and more erratic, the information flowing back to the planners grew more and more corrupt. And the activity of industry, all that human time and machine time it used up, added less and less value to the raw materials it sucked in. Maybe no value. Maybe less than none. One economist has argued that, by the end, it was actively destroying value; it had become a system for spoiling perfectly good materials by turning them into objects no one wanted.
The gap with American living standards widened again, precipitously. It became clear by any measurement that the Soviet Union was not going to overtake and surpass. All talk of full communism was abandoned, and in its place Brezhnev’s government promoted the idea of ‘developed socialism’, an era in which the USSR could comfortably announce it had already arrived. Developed socialism was due to last a nice long time, with no awkward timetable. There only remained the problem of the 1961 Party Programme. Convenient official amnesia engulfed it. It was buried in silence, never to be dug up again. Indeed an émigré journal reported the rumour that when a couple of citizens in Balashov who really had buried the Programme in a home-made time capsule exhumed it in 1980 and read it aloud in public, they were promptly arrested under Article 190 of the Criminal Code, for ‘spreading fabrications and defaming the Soviet social and state order’.
Suspiciously neat, this may be an example, not of a Brezhnev-era event but of Brezhnev-era Soviet joke-telling, which was sometimes difficult to tell apart from a reality that constantly verged on satire. If it did happen though it would have been of a piece with the Brezhnev answer to anything that seemed to offer an explicit challenge in the realm of ideas: always and every time, the police. Brezhnev had abolished the Ideological Commission as soon as he took over. There were to be be no more of Khrushchev’s shouting matches. But what replaced exhortation was enforcement. Gradually, all of the relatively liberal areas of life during the Thaw were closed down. After a last burst of adventurous releases in 1964–6, Soviet film became a steady progression of conformist comedies and tub-thumping war spectaculars. Literature shrivelled. Science, said the Central Committee secretary responsible for it, was to be ‘administered’ not ‘supported’. Universities became infested with the discreet little unmarked offices of the security service’s Fifth Department, which scholars were encouraged to drop into to denounce their colleagues. This was the era when the psychiatric hospital was pioneered as a place of punishment for people who made a nuisance of themselves; this was the time when a minute fraction of the intelligentsia gave up on the Soviet system altogether and became ‘dissidents’.
On the other hand, Brezhnev’s government was conciliatory towards labour unrest. Several times in the late 1960s and 1970s there were strikes, especially in the oil industry, where the workers lured out east to work the Siberian wells knew teir own bargaining power. Never again was the Novocherkassk solution applied. Each time, a Politburo member flew promptly out and negotiated. After all, what the workers were doing was no different, really, from what the waiter was up to in the restaurant when he wanted a little something before giving you a decent table, or what the saleswoman in the department store meant when she needed you to make it worth her while to look for your shoe size. There was nothing troubling in it; no threat, no malice. They were good Soviet citizens; they were just looking out for a little reciprocity in their dealings with their fellow creatures, ty-mne, ya-tebe, ‘you to me and I to you’. All the indicators suggest that the vast majority of the Soviet population were, indeed, basically contented with their government. This was not history’s end, with every obstacle to human fulfilment dissolved in the gush from the horn of plenty, but it was quite comfortable, especially compared to earlier Soviet decades. The work was pointless but not hard. The environment was increasingly toxic, but the concrete flats were cosy boxes of warmth. The spectacle of Soviet power on the telly was gratifying, and after the news was over and the missile launchers had rolled by, it’d be time for KVN, Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh, ‘the club of the gay and the witty’. Life was not bad. Nobody bothered you if you didn’t bother them. Things seemed to have settled into a status quo that could last forever.
And if you were one of the real elite, you had a little personal exemption from some of the constraints of the world you ruled over. You could command the command economy to simulate, just for you, a little bit of what you had admired on your trips abroad. Brezhnev himself, for example, was very taken with denim jackets when he visited America, despite being a bulky sixty-something at the time. When he came home he summoned his tailor, Aleksandr Igmand, and had one made to measure. The problem was the metal buttons. The USSR didn’t manufacture the right kind. So a special order was put in to a steel foundry, and back came just enough round American-type metal buttons to ornament one jacket. As a procedure, it was the absolute opposite of the dream of harnessing the fecundity of mass production: but as Brezhnev drove out of Moscow on a summer evening in his jean jacket, black coiffure shining, a tyrant without a cause, he could tell himself that the promise of abundance had been kept for him, at least.
Notes – Introduction
1 The ‘Kosygin reforms’ of 1965 put a lot more money in factory managers’ pockets: see Ellman, Planning Problems in the Soviet Union. The reforms created, as well as the cash bonus fund for managers (still tied to the overfulfilment of the plan), three ‘incentive funds’ indexed to enterprises’ sales growth. These were supposed to stimulate local initiatives, and received about 14% of profits by 1968; their distribution was strongly skewed towards management and ‘engineering-technical personnel’, with the result that they reversed the very egalitarian income policy of Khrushchev’s time, under which in some places foremen had received less than workers and workers had earned more than all white-collar staff without technical qualifications. It is also worth remembering that management had very considerable discretion about how the two non-cash incentive funds (for local investment and workers’ facilities) were actually spent, so long as the books looked all right.
2 There was only a 0.5% upward blip in growth: see above, note to the introduction to part II, for the full panoply of sources on Soviet growth. Figures here from Gregory and Stuart, Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure.
3 In 1961 the first oilfield had been discovered in western Siberia: for the transforming effects of the Soviet oilstrikes, and their fortuitous timing, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005); also Nove, Economic History of the USSR, and Shabad, Basic Industrial Resourc
es of the USSR.
4 There were thirty million TV sets in Soviet homes in 1968: figures here from Nove, Economic History of the USSR.
5 A heavy-industrial sector which had once been intended to exist as a springboard for something else, but which had now become its own justification: as seen as early as the mid-1960s, with oblique but inescapable intellectual force, in the ‘variant calculation’ performed by the Gosplan Research Institute for the 1966–70 Five-Year Plan. Gosplan’s figures showed that increasing the rate of investment in the economy would increase output growth in industry but give only minimal extra growth in consumption – 0.3% extra consumption growth for nearly 6% more investment. Industrial growth in the USSR did not carry over into general prosperity. The linkages were missing. See Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR.
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