Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union

Financial Times, Tuesday, August 17, 1976

Impressions of Moscow:

Beyond the Looking Glass

On a summer afternoon, Moscow from the Lenin Hills is a vast city of wide avenues and brownish yellow apartment blocks, crisscrossed by greenbelts of forests and parks. A meandering river divides it, lined by factories pouring smoke into a hazy sky and dotted by ancient churches with golden cupolas.

The city spreads out for miles, powerful, busy, like any other major capital. It is only down below, on crowded streets full of bare shops and communist slogans, that it is different.

Few, if any, cities can compete with Moscow in the style of its public pronouncements or the omnipresence of the police. Rooftop signs and placards extol comradeship, brotherhood and freedom. Posters on street corners call for an end to the arms race.

Even so, it is not Moscow’s progressivism that strikes one so much as that for the capital of a “peace-loving” society, it is unusually tightly controlled. Militia men are a common sight on the streets or in cars, traffic police are posted at virtually every intersection and armed guards stand watch 24 hours a day at the entrances to every one of Moscow’s embassies and foreign “ghettos.” Sometimes it seems that the city exists simultaneously on two different levels, propaganda and reality, with a continual effort being made to convince people that the first is the truth.

To help propaganda along, ordinary Russians are cut off from outside sources of information and from foreigners, who live, shop, and work in special facilities. The guards at the embassies and foreign ghettos give a friendly salute to foreigners they recognise. But if an unauthorised Russian approaches, they become sneering and, if the Russian has the nerve to try to get past, rough.

After a few weeks in Moscow, the new arrival begins to realise that he is living in an unreal world where there is little connection between what he is being told and what he knows to be true. Because of the control over information, what is obviously black can frequently be referred to as white.

Examples are everywhere. Although Soviet citizens will feel its effects for years to come, the 1975 harvest failure is always referred to obliquely in public and attributed exclusively to unfavourable weather conditions. Signs in restaurants announce that Thursday is “fish day,” not because of a nationwide meat shortage but to “balance people’s diets.”

Three middle-aged American correspondents are not only denounced as CIA agents and described for good measure as men whose adventures resemble those of “James Bond.” The attempt to construct reality is also extended to Soviet history, which is presented as a series of triumphs with little mention of its darker side.

Few foreigners realise how much attention is still devoted in the Soviet Union to the last war. It is a favourite subject of newspaper articles, television programmes and films. Posters printed last year to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the victory hang in people’s offices and flats, young men wear commemorative medals and people buy cups with 30th anniversary of the victory insignias.

There are human reminders of the war too, an entire generation of widows. They are a familiar sight in Moscow checking coats in restaurants, working as attendants in hotels or offices or sweeping the streets with twig brooms near the Kremlin Wall. They can be officious busybodies or sweet and kind-hearted but somehow the sight of them lends a certain credence to the Russians’ oft-repeated desire for peace.

On the other hand, there is not a word about the millions who died in Stalin’s purges and labour camps. Most of the old Bolsheviks put to death by Stalin remain non-persons in the country they helped found, and no guide is likely to point out “Solzhenitsyn Square,” on busy Leninsky Prospekt, where the now exiled writer worked as a prison labourer on a construction site, or the large grey house opposite the Kremlin where members of the Soviet elite lived a privileged existence until the fury of the purges in the late 1930s.

Reality is distorted in the Soviet Union. But the task of disentangling Soviet reality from Soviet propaganda, filling in the spaces deliberately left blank, is all the more difficult because the Soviets occasionally succeed, by concentrating enormous effort and talent in a specific area in injecting some truth into their propaganda-coated world.

The Soviet Union is a poor country with a standard of living far below that of the West. Yet the Soviets successfully launched two cosmonauts into outer space who may set a new endurance record. This achievement impressed people everywhere, but nowhere more than in Moscow itself because while the two cosmonauts were making a perfect link-up at the Salyut 5 space station, Soviets here on earth were getting stuck in lifts and taking months to complete the simplest job.

Maybe it is all an attempt to convince the world that Soviet society is capable of achieving the ambitious goals it has set itself. But most Soviet citizens react to propaganda by shutting it out or simply distrusting all sources of information. Foreigners have Western sources of information. But even they get affected by a society that tries to create its own reality. Most people speak of going to or coming from a country but foreigners in Moscow always refer to arriving in the Soviet Union as “coming in” and leaving as “going out.”

Chicago Daily News, Thursday, January 6, 1977

End of one delay just triggers another,

and not getting things done is an art

Soviets’ Long Queue to Nowhere

Every weekday morning, a crowd of nervous foreigners gathers on the steps of the Moscow Bank for Foreign Trade, waiting for the bank to open.

They come early because they know that as the morning wears on the atmosphere in the bank will deteriorate as the queues lengthen and angry arguments erupt between foreigners and bank employees.

The scenes at the bank are repeated at institutions throughout Moscow, and you would be struck by the similarity of the confrontations.

Everywhere, indifferent Soviet employees process reams of paper and figure sums on wooden abacuses, demanding official letters, receipts, passports and proofs of identity while irate foreigners forced to stand in long queues try to impress on them that they come from societies where time is a valuable commodity.

Although the Soviet Union to an outsider may seem to be a highly regimented, efficient society, anyone who lives in Moscow knows how maddeningly slowly the wheels of the Soviet bureaucracy turn.

“My advice is to have patience,” a long time foreign resident told me after I arrived. “You’re not going to change the Soviet Union, and if you try, you’ll only give yourself a headache.”

A prime example of the Soviet bureaucracy’s ability to waste time is the need to write a letter for the performance of any bureaucratic task, no matter how minor. The letter must be written on office stationery, stamped with an office stamp and delivered by hand. “This is why we never write to each other,” said one woman with extensive experience in such matters. “We’re too busy writing letters to bureaucratic organizations.”

When I went for my first appointment at a Soviet government ministry, I was surprised to learn that the man I had made an appointment to see was not in his office, I wasn’t allowed past the guard downstairs.

Several phone calls during the day to the man’s office brought varying theories as to his whereabouts. When I finally contacted him at 4:30 p.m., he cheerfully told me to come back the next day. I had forgotten to write him a letter.

The need to waste time writing reams of useless letters can make life difficult, but it is not as serious as the months of seemingly endless delay before any request is filled.

The delivery of a letter to a Soviet bureaucratic organization, far from insuring that the matter will be attended to, only signals the beginning of a long process of negotiations that reaches its climax after exhausting every possibility of delay.

One of the first things I needed in Moscow was a Telex, which I requested shortly after I arrived. Initial application was made to the press department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As summer turned to fall, inquiries about the Telex were answered with, “You must wait a little longer,” or “We’re thinking about it,” “Call back in two weeks,” or “it’s being considered.”

Finally, demands for action and persistent harassment of the woman responsible brought Foreign Ministry approval—and the news that I had to apply to the Ministry of Communications. There I was told that installation of the Telex presented complicated technical problems. Weeks and months elapsed while the problems were considered in all their complexities.

At last, installation was ruled technically feasible but legally not permitted because of the layout of the apartment where the Telex was to be placed. Only after several more weeks of negotiations, punctuated by angry arguments, was the Telex finally installed.

The bureaucratic immobility of Soviet organizations is a part of life in Moscow and holds true for everything, from arranging life’s necessities to getting permission to emigrate.

In my case, the requirements were routine, but hiring a secretary took three months, getting a new car has taken six months, getting hot water three months, and routine repairs for a relatively small apartment took almost three months.

The rooted inefficiency seems to reflect bureaucratic indifference, but it has an effect on ordinary workmen when they work under official auspices and at official rates of pay.

When I was allocated my apartment in a solidly built building on Moscow’s main ring road, I was told that the work would be completed in a few days. And, with six men working, it should have been.

A Place in the Sun

During the weeks that followed, however, those six workmen became a familiar sight around the building, taking extended breaks, which in the Soviet Union are often longer than actual worktime, sunning themselves in the courtyard and socializing with friends.

By the time I began making daily visits to the apartment to encourage them to work faster, they had succeeded in installing a stove and sink, removing them, and installing them again. They were considering removing them a second time when I stressed my approval of the original placement and urged them to get on with the work.

Victor, himself a young Soviet bureaucrat, tried to explain the reason for the delays. “There are people who can sit in one place for eight hours, look busy and do absolutely nothing. In our country, this is an art.”

The senseless delays are exasperating but they do have a kind of justification. The Soviet bureaucracy is designed to process masses and reflects Soviet society, which guarantees employment and is organized like a giant company store in which payment is in chits, good only for purchasing the company’s products.

Pay is low in the Soviet Union, usually not much above 140 rubles a month (approximately $ 187), and the Soviet bureaucrat or workman, so indifferent to the people he’s serving, may feel his effort is not appreciated. “Why should people work hard for 100 rubles a month?” said one young secretary. “It’s barely enough to live on.” Or as one man put it, “I pretend that I’m working, and they pretend that they’re paying me.”

Soviet Citizens and longtime foreign residents avoid established bureaucratic channels and get things done through informal contacts. This is because delays and inefficiencies seem endemic to Soviet organizations and the consumer economy. Buying an item in a Russian shop, for example, can involve waiting in as many as three different lines, a line to read the prices on available items, a line to pay for them and a line to collect them.

Even in institutions where there is the potential for efficiency, one may find it difficult to operate because, to an extent that Westerners find puzzling, Russians think in terms not of facilitating action, but of preventing it.

In a society governed by an infinite number of regulations and rules, any deviation from the norm is likely to strike someone as an infraction. A perceived violation of the rules, in turn, is a welcome excuse for doing nothing.

No Appointments, No Service

When the office car broke down, I had it towed to a garage. When I arrived, the garage supervisor asked me if I had made an appointment. When I said I hadn’t, he said it would be impossible to service the car. After several hours of discussion interrupted by a lengthy lunch break, he relented and directed me to a slow-moving queue to fill out the relevant forms and drive the barely functioning car back into the garage.

There, the garage superintendent said he couldn’t service the car because I had brought it into the garage after 3 p.m. When I tried to drive the car back out of the garage area, a woman gatekeeper in her ’60s refused to let me leave with the car because I had no certificate showing I had paid to have it serviced.

Despite the Soviet penchant for over-administration and various inefficient Russian habits, the country has made progress. In recent years, there is more in the shops and the bureaucracy is somewhat less complicated. The Soviet Union, however, is still a long way from being a consumer society.

The confrontations between bourgeois foreigners and the functionaries of the first workers’ state, accordingly, take on an almost symbolic significance. Foreigners complain bitterly about the slow pace at which everything in Moscow moves, and Soviet employees blithely ignore them, secure in the knowledge that whatever anyone says about their efficiency, they are citizens of the first country in the world to have eliminated unemployment.

Chicago Daily News, Sunday, February 5–6, 1977

Angry Russians Can’t Understand Inflation

Russians are reacting with black anger and streams of curses to the news that major price increases go into effect April 1.

Unlike Americans, who accept inflation as only a little less inevitable than death and taxes, Russians are told continually that Soviet society eliminates such capitalist evils as rising prices and unemployment.

So when it was announced last month that cab fares would go up 100 per cent, air fares would increase by approximately 20 per cent and sea and river transport and made-to-measure suits would also be more expensive, the reaction of many Russians was that they were being unfairly squeezed.

"In your country when prices go up,” said Volodya M., a physicist in his late 50s, “salaries go up, too. But in some Soviet professions, salaries haven’t been increased in years.”

There had been rumors since last summer that major price increases were on the way, but Russians, wise to the ways of their government, realized the rumours were true when the press announced in December that the government was increasing salaries.

The salary increases averaged 4 rubles ($5.32) a week for 31 million low- and middle-income employees, and were presented as another step forward in improving the Soviet citizens standard of living.

On closer examination, however, it was clear that the salary increases only took immediate effect in the far north, Far East, and Siberia and were consistent with the established Soviet policies of paying differentials to attract workers to cold and remote areas.

The price increases, however, apply uniformly throughout the Soviet Union and will go into effect this spring.

The reaction of the Soviet public was angry and swift. “Khrushchev said we would have communism by 1980,” said one disgruntled young father bitterly, "yet our life gets worse and worse.”

On the street, people grumbled about the increases, which were the first announced major price increases for basic services or commodities for many years, and said that they feared that more increases were on the way.

“Believe me,” said one young secretary, “this is just the beginning.”

The news of price increases had a demoralizing effect, in part because the Soviet assertion to be an inflation-free society contains a great amount of truth. Prices have increased less than 1 per cent a year, according to Soviet statistics, and almost all basic costs such as for food, municipal transport, rent and utilities have not risen in decades.

This, however, does not mean that the Soviet Union is a shopper’s paradise. The average wage in the Soviet Union now stands at about 150 roubles (about $200) a month and a new winter coat can easily cost that much. A new Soviet Zhiguli automobile costs an average Soviet citizen four years’ salary.

When the price increases were announced, Nikolai Glushkov, the chairman of the state committee on prices, said they were necessary because the additional cost of re-equipping the taxi fleet, civil aviation and the sea and river fleet had caused many enterprises to operate at a loss.

Such logic would appeal to any capitalist, but the difficulty with such reasoning, at least as far as the Soviet consumer is concerned, is that it can be extended indefinitely. The prices of many goods in the Soviet Union are kept artificially low. Last year, the government spent 19 billion roubles, for example, to subsidize the sale of meat and milk at stable retail prices.

If the Soviets decide to begin applying a little capitalist logic to other areas of the economy, perceptible inflation could become even more worrying in the Soviet Union than it is in the West because it would erode the floor of stable prices on which hopes for better Soviet living standards have always been based.

In that case, Soviet consumers might have to learn to fulfil the expectations of a Moscow cabbie who, when asked how he thought people would react to the new doubled cab fares, said, “They’ll get used to it.”

The Financial Times, Monday, March 7, 1977

The Dissidents Who Strive for

Western Freedoms in Russia

“These people are only guilty of gathering information. We have no free Press in this country, if, under these conditions, they are arrested for gathering facts, then how can you continue to speak of the Helsinki Agreements?”

The speaker was Dr. Valentin Turchin, leader of the Soviet branch of Amnesty International. The scene was his apartment shortly after the arrest this month of three members of various unofficial Helsinki monitoring committees: Dr. Yuri Orlov, Mr. Alexander Ginzburg and Mr. Mikola Rudenko.

His audience consisted of three westerners and a group of dissidents including Orlov’s wife, Irina, the veteran dissident Mrs. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who was to get her exit visa a few days later, Father Gleb Yakunin, leader of a committee to defend religious rights, and Mr. Evgeni Yakir, a Jewish activist. They represented the 50 or so people in various dissident movements who can be considered activists.

Support from Outside

All look to the outside world for moral, political, and psychological support, aware that they are striving for freedoms in the Soviet Union that are guaranteed as a matter of course in the West. To work for western freedoms in the Soviet Union is to give up any hope of being integrated into Soviet society. Prominent dissidents face arrest and imprisonment, and an assured end to their careers. Among the well-known dissidents, only Dr. Andrei D. Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, still holds a job. He works alone, doing purely theoretical work as a senior scientific associate in the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences. Almost all the others were fired as an immediate consequence of their decision to speak out.

Dr. Orlov, a physicist and corresponding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences, was removed from his position as senior scientific associate in an institute near Moscow in 1973, after writing a letter to Mr. Leonid Brezhnev deploring the “shabby campaign in the Press against Dr. Sakharov.” Dr. Turchin, also a physicist, was demoted from chief of a laboratory, after issuing a public statement in defence of Dr. Sakharov. He was publicly denounced at a meeting attended by 300 of his colleagues, not one of whom voted publicly in his favour, and was eventually fired in July, 1974.

Father Yakunin lost his job in 1965 after protesting against what he considered violations of the rights of believers and many of the Jewish “refuseniks,” persons who requested visas to Israel but were turned down, lost their jobs as soon as they applied to emigrate, and are now working in Moscow as night watchmen and lift operators.

Because of the economic consequences, dissent in the Soviet Union is not a youth movement. Most of the dissidents are over 40 and in severe financial straits, earning money by giving private lessons or doing translations. Many are scientists or mathematicians, a reflection of the fact that these professions are considered necessary to the State and have always enjoyed slightly more freedom from ideological control as a result.

Decision to Speak Out

Having lost their jobs in a society where the State is the sole employer, the active dissidents learn that it’s almost impossible to find new ones. Most institutes or publishing offices have a “first department” with links to the KGB and access to detailed personal and political information about a prospective employee. In addition, in many institutes an applicant must be approved by both the institute and the local party organisation, and an employee’s social and political record is subject to periodic review. If an active dissident is ultimately offered some kind of work it may be as a manual labourer. Mr. Vladimir Slepak, an engineer by training and a member of the Helsinki monitoring group who has been trying for the last seven years to emigrate to Israel, has not worked since 1972. In that year he was offered and turned down a job as a loader in a concrete plant.