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.
Part V
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 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.
V.1 Trading Down, 1964
1 The Zil had disappeared in the night: though the chauffeur himself is fictional, the sequence of appearing and disappearing cars on the day after Khrushchev’s fall from power is entirely factual. For a description of that day on which this chapter draws heavily, see Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev, pp. 165–9. See also Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 620–1.
2 It was a copy of the Cadillac Eldorado: the American originals for the Zil, Chaika and Volga are all authentic. The Soviet car industry had been founded in the 1930s with the import of a complete Buick/Ford production line, including American engineers to act as consultants, and Soviet automobile design was still very imitative of American models, though not always on a neat one-to-one basis. Some Soviet cars copied several different American cars at once. Later, with the establishment of the giant plant to build Fiats at Tolyatti on the Volga, the American influence was diluted, and by the 1980s the Soviet Union had a distinctive automotive style of its own, though without anything approaching the idiosyncrasy of the Czech Tatra marque or the cardboard-chassised Trabant in the GDR. But then, both East Germany and Czechoslovakia had had indigenous motor industries of their own before the Second World War. Middle-class consumers who cannot afford German or Japanese imports continue to buy Volgas in present-day Russia. For a roll-call of models, with photographs, see www.autosoviet.com.
3 It had come straight from the general-service pool: I have no knowledge of the Kremlin’s carpool arrangements, and this is guesswork.
4 But compared to the Zil it was a tin can: the chauffeur is being snotty in the extreme about the Gaz M-21 Volga, which most Soviet citizens coveted, and which is now recalled by Russians in their fifties and sixties with the kind of nostalgia that the chromed monsters of Detroit rouse up in Americans of the same age. There are numerous M-21 fan sites on the internet.
5 Metamorphosed into a Moskvitch. Or a bicycle: the Moskvich 400, produced from 1946 to 1964 by MZMA, the Moscow Factory for Small Displacement Automobiles, closely resembled the 1938 model of the Opel Kadett. This was because it was manufactured with the tooling for the 1938 Kadett, which the Red Army had captured intact during the advance into Germany. But after 1964 it was redesigned with ‘sleek modern lines’, and the Moskvich 412 even won a small export following among budget-conscious Western motorists. Thanks to stern rules limiting the value of the prizes that could be offered on television in Britain, the star prize in the early 1970s on the British TV gameshow Sale of the Century was frequently a 412 in bright orange. See Andrew Roberts, ‘Moscow Mule’, The Independent Motoring Section p. 7, 11 October 2005.
6 She had made canapés for the President of Finland: this, the seventieth birthday party and the reception for the Chinese Foreign Minister were all real occasions, but the cook herself is imaginary.
7 ‘Good morning, Nikita Sergeyevich,’ he said: the real words of the real Sergei Melnikov, from Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev. Melnikov appears to have tried to treat the fallen leader with as much dignity as possible, and was fired a few years into Khrushchev’s retirement for showing excessive sympathy. Khrushchev’s reply is word-for-word accurate as well.
8 ‘No one needs me now,’ he said
to the air straight in front of him: a real uterance of Khrushchev’s on that first stunned day, but addressed to ‘no one in particular’, not a chauffeur.
V.2 Ladies, Cover Your Ears! 1965
1 Emil splashed his head with cold water: the entire occasion described in this chapter is a confabulation, designed to dramatise the disappointment of the reform economists over the limits of the ‘Kosygin reforms’ of 1965. Kosygin did make a point of stopping off in Akademgorodok on his way back from a state visit to Vietnam, and while talking to Kantorovich and Aganbegyan there did utter the immortal sentences ‘What have prices to do with it? What are you talking about?’ – but most of the reformers’ access to discussions over the design of the reform was through committees and reports of the Academy of Sciences, in which they struggled to make themselves heard clearly. The case against adopting Kantorovich’s prices, though, which I have put into Kosygin’s mouth and the mouth of the fictional Mokhov, is so far as I have been able to find out the probable one, compounded of shrewd realism as well as self-interest and incomprehension. And Kosygin’s character as represented here is also authentic, down to the habit of continual contemptuous interruption. Abel Aganbegyan really did in fact lose his temper in the face of it, and snap ‘I don’t understand?’ back at him, with temporarily disastrous results, but not until ten years later, in the mid-1970s. See Aganbegyan, Moving the Mountain. For my understanding of the technical aspects of the reform, I have used the analysis in Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR, and (by the same author) ‘Seven Theses on Kosyginism’ in Collectivism, Convergence and Capitalism (London: Harcourt Brace, 1984). There is an accessible account of the reform’s aims in Berliner, ‘Economic Reform in the USSR’. For a general sense of the economists as players in contemporary Soviet politics, see R. Judy, ‘The Economists’, in G. Skilling and F. Griffith, eds, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). For a much more fine-grained and bitchy account, see Katsenelinboigen, Soviet Economic Thought and Political Power in the USSR.
2 Mr K. had slipped into real puce-faced spittle-streaked raving: it had been in the interests of the Presidium majority who overthrew Khrushchev that his instability should be exaggerated, and Emil has clearly picked up some deliberately hyperbolic gossip. But the First Secretary’s temper had been getting out of control, and there had been spur-of-the-moment threats to the Red Army (see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 585–6) and the Academy (Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 616).
3 The new men exuded a deliberate, welcome calm: for the mood- music of the transition, see Michel Tatu, Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev’s Decline to Collective Leadership, translated from the French by Helen Katel (London: Collins, 1969), and Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring.
4 A peculiar and discordant piece had been published in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta: see unsigned article, ‘Economics and Politics’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 7 no. 11, March 1965; originally in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, 11 November 1964.
5 There came a reorganisation of the lacework of Party committees within all the institutes: see Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
6 An experiment in letting clothing stores determine the output of two textile factories: for the experiment at the Bolshevichka and Mayak factories, see V. Sokolov, M. Nazarov and N. Kozlov, ‘The Firm and the Customer’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 8 no. 4, August 1965, pp. 3–14; originally in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, 6 Jan 1965.
7 ‘We have to free ourselves completely,’ he said: this technocratic speech was given on 19 March 1965, published in Gosplan’s journal Planovoe Khozyaistvo no. 4, April 1965, and reprinted in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta on 21 April 1965. Quoted in English in Tatu, Power in the Kremlin, p. 447. Kosygin’s report on the completed reform measure appeared in Izvestiya, 28 September 1965; see A.N.Kosygin, ‘On Improving Industrial Management, Perfecting Planning, and Enhancing Economic Incentives in Industrial Production’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 8 no. 6, October 1965, pp. 3–28.
8 A beautiful paper at the end of last year had skewered Academician Glushkov’s hypercentralised rival scheme: see Vsevolod Pugachev, ‘Voprosy optimal’nogo planirovaniia narodnogo khoziaistva s pomoshch’iu edinoi gosudarstvennoi seti vychistel’nykh tsentrov’, Voprosy Ekonomiki (1964) no. 7, pp. 93–103. No English translation. According to Katsenelinboigen, Soviet Economic Thought, Pugachev was a TSEMI economist deployed to Gosplan who had gone over to the planners’ critique of mathematical reform.
9 They had decided he’d better not, for obvious reasons: I have once again exaggerated and coarsened Kantorovich’s unworldliness. He was not a skilled politician, but in this case he served alongside Aganbegyan on the ‘Commission of 18’ tasked by the Academy to prepare its submission on the reform.
10 An optimal plan is by definition a profitable plan: from Kantorovich, The Best Use of Economic Resources.
11 There was a report in January in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta: Emil is referring to Sokolov, Nazarov and Kozlov, ‘The Firm and the Customer’, cited above.
12 We should let a machine take over a job as sensitive as deciding prices?: See the discussion in Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR, of which elements were, and were not, usually adopted when an ‘optimal plan’ had been drawn up for some Soviet institution.
13 ‘He liked to smash telephones,’ said Emil: true. See Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, for the uninhibited management styles of Stalin’s industrial barons like Kaganovich and Ordzhon64) nze. The Committee on Labour was Lazar Kaganovich’s last major appointment. He was pushed out of the Presidium in disgrace by Khrushchev in 1957 as one of the ‘anti-Party group’, and sent to run the Urals Potash Works in Solikamsk, Perm Province. See Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 369.
14 I specialise more in, uh, organisation, and, uh, psychology: an anecdote taken from Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, pp. 213– 14. Apparently Brezhnev made little rotary hand movements in the air as he said it.
15 ‘Do you know what my first job was, when I got back from the war?’: the details of the rota, the delivery vans and the incinerator are all invented, but the postwar burning of the bonds is real. See Hachten, Property Relations. The currency reform of 1947, which converted old roubles to new roubles in savings accounts at the rate of 10:1 while keeping prices the same, was another deliberate move to abolish the state’s liabilities. And Khrushchev did it again when, on 8 April 1957, he deferred the repayment of all outstanding bond issues ‘for 20–25 years’, and the 3% interest due on them too, which had been paid out as lottery prizes to bondholders. But in this last case, the gain to citizens’ pay-packets in not having to buy any more new bonds outweighed the theoretical loss of all their previous subscriptions. See James R. Miller, ‘History and Analysis of Soviet Domestic Bond Policy’, Soviet Studies 27 no. 4 (1975), p. 601; and Franklyn D. Holzman, ‘The Soviet Bond Hoax’, Problems of Communism 6, no. 5 (1957), pp. 47–9.
V.3 Psychoprophylaxis, 1966
1 He was registered with the All-Union Legal Correspondence Institute: founded in 1932, with more than forty thousand graduates by 1968. Added together, students attending evening classes (652,000 in 1967–8) and studying by correspondence (1.77 million in 1967–8) earned almost half of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in the USSR, and for law degrees the proportion was even higher, 43,000 out of 65,000 in 1967–8. A law degree was a tool of working-class social mobility, as in the United States, appealing to those on the rise, like Fyodor, rather than to those with established family traditions of education. Figures from Churchward, The Soviet Intelligentsia.
2 The thousand skirmishes of communalka life: see Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, pp. 47–9; and for the special political claustrophobia of communal flats in times of purge and denunciation, see Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2007), which includes floor plans of the extraordinarily cramme
d places his witnesses inhabited. For the surreal spectacle of Stalin himself picking his way through a communalka, and looking with touristic interest at the writing on the wall around the telephone, see Grossman, Life and Fate.
3 Orange or lime-green orlon: orlon being the Soviet brand-name equivalent to Western nylon.
4 The deputy director of a pig farm’s on trial: a famous case from 1969, hoicked back in time for the usual unscrupulous reasons of dramatic foreshortening. For the trial coverage, as presented for the outrage of liberal-minded intellectuals, see Literaturnaya Gazeta (1969) no. 27, p. 10.
5 One of the three Moscow maternity homes that specialised in Rh-neg patients: I get my details of hospital conditions for this chapter from Katherine Bliss Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union (Westport CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), pp. 185–7, and Peter Osnos, ‘Childbirth, Soviet Style: A Labor in Keeping With the Party Line’, Washington Post, 28 November 1976, pp. G13–G14. Some details of Soviet medical procedure for childbirth come from Elizabeth Lee, ‘Health Care in the Soviet Union. Two. Childbirth – Soviet Style’, Nursing Times (1984), 1–7 February; 80 (5):44–5, which is a view of a system by a British midwife, focused mainly on differences in goals and intentions. All of these apply to periods ten to twenty years after the date at which Galina is giving birth, so some of what happens here is inevitably conjectural. But the system does not appear to have changed fundamentally, and any allowance made for decaying facilities and increasing cynicism as the Brezhnev years went on can be balanced against the truth that the special Rhesus-negative maternity hospitals were the sought-after best of the system. A different kind of allowance needs to be made for my other major source on procedure. I. Velvovsky, K. Platonov, V. Ploticher and E. Shugom, Painless Childbirth Through Psychoprophylaxis: Lectures for Obstetricians, translated by David A. Myshne (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1960) is a manual for export, offering an idealised version of psychoprophylactic childbirth as it would have been if implemented in every Soviet hospital with the care it was given in the one hospital where it was invented. What Galina experiences is my best guess at psychoprophylaxis as actually practised.
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