ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Content

Abbreviations and Administrative Delineations

Introduction

Never Speak to Strangers

Impressions of Moscow: Beyond the Looking Glass

Soviets’ Long Queue to Nowhere

Angry Russians Can’t Understand Inflation

The Dissidents Who Strive for Western Freedoms in Russia

The Ghost in the Machine

The Price of Respectability

Taking a Healthy Rest

The Price of Soviet Achievements

A Burning Issue

From Russia Without Love

Trials of the Workers

The Price of Calling the Helsinki Bluff

Shaken, but Ready to Rise Again

Soviet Dissent and the Cold War

Why Moscow Has Georgia on Its Mind

Angry Nationalist Struggle Against Soviet Power

Afghanistan’s Rocky Road to Socialism

Russia’s ‘Civilised North’

Moscow Yields to ‘Interference’

Tensions Between Systems Show at Summit

Bitter-Sweet Search for Ancestors in Ukraine

The Crime That Can Only Exist Behind Closed Borders

Planning and Politics Strangle the Soviet Economy

Josef Stalin’s Legacy Leaves Soviet Leaders in Dilemma

Sakharov’s Arrest Links Dissidence with Detente

The Limits of Detente

200 Soviet Officials Held

Fighting a War of Shadows

Moscow Starts ‘Phoney War’ Over Peace

Why the Russians Think They Have Taken Schmidt for a Ride

Russia Through the Looking Glass

View from Middle Russia

How the Kremlin Kept Moscow Under Wraps

Russia Keeping Its Hands off Poland

Where Some Miners Are More Equal Than Others

Moscow Weighs Gains and Losses Against Dictates of Ideology

Soviet Defeat in Poland

Few Goods in Grocery Store 7

The Soviet View of Information

A Match for the Soviets

The KGB Puts Down a Marker

The System of Forced Labor in Russia

The Soviets Freeze a Peace Worker

What Russia Tells Russians About Afghanistan

The Legacy of Leonid Brezhnev

The Soviets Slam the Door on Jewish Emigration

Soviet Threat Is One of Ideas More Than Arms

Treating Soviet Psychiatric Abuse

The Kremlin Tortures a Psychiatrist

Yuri Andropov: The Specter Vanishes

Private Soviet Screenings of Forbidden Films? Insane!

In New Gulag, Soviets Turning to Murder by Neglect

Don’t Talk with Murderers

Moscow Feeds a Lap-Dog Foreign Press

Moscow’s ‘New Openness’ Illusion

A Test Case

Why Glasnost Can’t Work

A Journalist Who Loved His Country

Response to Fukuyama

Winter in Moscow

Setting the Sverdlovsk Story Straight

Moscow Believes in Tears

The Seeds of Soviet Instability

The Rise of Nationalism

Yeltsin: Shadow of a Doubt

A Tragic Master Plan

The Failure of Russian Reformers

Rude Awakening

Yeltsin: Modified Victory

Organized Crime Is Smothering Russian Civil Society

The Wild East

The Shadow of Aum Shinri Kyo

The Cost of the Yeltsin Presidency

The Rise of the Russian Criminal State

David Satter interviews Ida Milgrom, the mother of Jewish dissident, Anatoly Shcharansky, outside the courthouse in Moscow where Shcharansky was tried in July, 1978. In the background (center) is Kevin Klose, Moscow correspondent of The Washington Post (photo by Robin Knight).

The Human Rights Situation in Russia

Anatomy of a Massacre

The Shadow of Ryazan

Not so Quick

Death in Moscow

Stalin’s Legacy

A Low, Dishonest Decadence

Terror in Russia: Myths and Facts

Ordinary Monsters

The Murder of Paul Klebnikov

The Tragedy of Beslan

The Communist Curse

Stalin Is Back

What Andropov Knew

G-8 Crasher

Nikita Khrushchev’s Hard Bargains

Who Killed Litvinenko?

Boris Yeltsin

Russia on Trial

Land for Peace

Putin Changes Jobs—and Russia

Poisonous Patriotism

Obama and Russia

Who Murdered These Russian Journalists?

Obama’s Outreach to Muslims Won’t Achieve Its Goal

Putin Runs the Russian State —and the Russian Church Too

Mission to Moscow

Obama’s Russian Odyssey

Psyching out U.S. Leaders

The President’s Mission to Moscow

The Summit: Day 2

Natalya Estemirova

A Wounded Bear Is Dangerous

Pining for Authoritarianism

Remembering Beslan

Afghanistan: Lessons from the Soviet Invasion

Yesterday Communism, Today Radical Islam

A Passion to Relive the Past

Road to ‘Zero’

Symposium: Is Hannah Arendt Still Relevant?

Women Who Blow Themselves Up

A Hollow Achievement in Prague

Symposium: When Does a Religion Become an Ideology?

That Russian Spy Ring: The Broader Meaning

Never Forget: New Fanatical Ideology, Same Prescription: Defeat

Khodorkovsky’s Fate

Putin’s Facade Begins to Crumble

Why Putin Is Tottering

The Character of Russia

Obama’s Open Microphone

Russia’s Chance for Redemption

Russia and the Communist Past

Awaiting the Next Revolution

Clinton in the WSJ Strays on Russia Relations

Punk-Rock Authoritarianism

The Long Shadow of “Nord Ost”

Russia’s Orphans

David Satter on Life in the Soviet Police State

Russians Arrest CIA Agent

The NSA and the Soviet Union

Obama Defends Putin

Russia’s False Concern for Children

Putin and Obama in St. Petersburg

The Curse of Russian “Exceptionalism”

Snowden’s New Identity

Did Putin Insult the Pope?

Why Journalists Frighten Putin

Open Letter to Margarita Simonyan, Chief Editor of Russia Today

My Expulsion from Russia

Putin’s Shaky Hold on Power

The Russian State of Murder Under Putin

Putin Is No Partner on Terrorism

Russia Questions for Rex Tillerson

The ‘Trump Report’ Is a Russian Provocation

Trump Gives a Boost to Putin’s Propaganda

From Russia With Chaos

Trump Must Stand Strong Against Putin

How America Helped Make Vladimir Putin Dictator for Life

Who Killed Boris Nemtsov?

100 Years of Communism —and 100 Million Dead

A Christmas Encounter With the ‘Russian Soul’

How to Answer Russia’s Escalation

Putin’s Aggression Is the Issue in Helsinki

The Satirist Who Mocked the Kremlin —and Russian Character

When Russian Democracy Died

Contribution to “We Need Sakharov”

Collusion or Russian Disinformation?

A Pioneer Who Witnessed Revolutions

Hold Russia Accountable for MH17

Afterword to English Language Edition of Judgment in Moscow

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and
Administrative Delineations

FSB — Federal Security Service

FSO — Federal Guard Service

IMF — International Monetary Fund

KGB — Committee for State Security

RUBOP (formerly RUOP) — Regional Directorate for the Struggle with Organized Crime

SVR — Foreign Intelligence Service

Krai — Province or territory

Oblast — Region

Raion — District

Okrug — Administrative subdivision, for example, of Moscow or military district

Introduction

The Marquis de Coustine, writing in the early 19th century, said that it was possible for a foreigner to travel from one end of Russia to the other and see nothing but false facades. In June, 1976, when I arrived in Moscow as the accredited correspondent of the Financial Times of London, I was confronted by a country that resembled nothing so much as a giant theater of the absurd.

I spent six years in the Soviet Union, from 1976–82. During this period, I sensed the uniqueness of the situation and began collecting the personal stories of Soviet citizens with the intent of preserving them for posterity. I was banned from the Soviet Union after 1982, allowed back in 1990, and finally expelled from Russia in 2013 on the grounds that the security organs regarded my presence as “undesirable.”

During these years, I observed four different Russias which managed to differ radically from each other while remaining essentially the same. From 1976 to 1982, I witnessed the Soviet Union at the height of its world power and a people in a state of ideological stupefaction. With the advent of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Soviet population was liberated from the unreal world of the ideology and the state hurtled to its inevitable collapse. When independent Russia emerged from the wreckage, the failure to replace the missing ideology with a genuine set of universal moral values led to Russia’s complete criminalization.

Finally, the unreal world of the Soviet ideology took its revenge in September, 1999 with the bombing of four Russian apartment buildings that made possible Vladimir Putin’s rise to power and the resurrection in Russia of the Soviet Union in a different guise.

The imaginary world of Marxist-Leninist ideology never really went away because the issue was never its validity but rather its political effectiveness. Mentally subjugated individuals can be treated as raw material for the purposes of the state which is why an ideology is so useful. By the time I was expelled from Russia in 2013, the re-propagandizing of Russia had been long accomplished and Russia is in a state of ideological control without an ideology to this day.

As Russia evolved, the conditions of work for a journalist also changed. During the Brezhnev period, all official information was organized to confirm the truth of the imaginary world. Real information was available but it was unofficial and getting it entailed taking a risk. This accounted for the unique role of the Soviet dissidents. They took it upon themselves—and often paid for their efforts with terms in Soviet labor camps—to provide truthful information about historical events and the conditions in the country to diplomats and journalists. The best informed foreign journalists were those with the closest ties to dissidents.

During the perestroika period, the regime itself began to release information that, had it been published months earlier by a dissident would have led to the latter’s arrest. Gorbachev wanted to use limited freedom to, as he put it, “unleash the potential of socialism”. This was only possible, however, by lifting the dead hand of the ideology which meant free information. For journalists, this situation was nearly incomprehensible. The regime seemed to be organizing its own demise. But journalists were not the only ones who were confused. Gorbachev’s effort to reform the Soviet Union by undermining the credibility of its ideology led inevitably to the Soviet Union’s collapse.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, journalists faced a country that, while no longer communist, was taken over by criminals and so was not truly free. If the Soviet Union was justified by the myths of communism, Yeltsin’s Russia was justified by the myth of democratic, anti-communist reform. Foreign journalists could travel and write freely (although Russian journalists were frequently killed) but they had to struggle to distinguish appearance from reality. The endurance of the belief that the Yeltsin period was the flowering of Russian democracy is a tribute to the fact that very few journalists passed that test.

In September, 1999, Western journalists in Russia faced their greatest challenge as apartment buildings were blown up in the middle of the night and evidence mounted that the perpetrators were agents of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). The bombings were used to justify a new invasion of Chechnya which helped Putin to become Russia’s new president. Putin restored the institutions of the Soviet Union—false propaganda, militarism and hostility to the West. But as Putin’s grip on power tightened and the apartment bombings were followed by assassinations and new provocations, journalists largely restricted themselves to the official version of events, leaving the reality of Putin’s Russia concealed by ever more elaborate lies.

The articles in this collection are a chronicle of Russia almost from the day I arrived in the Soviet Union as a young correspondent in 1976 until the present. Depicted here are the things I saw, the people I met and the events I witnessed as reported by me to my readers in the West. In the broad sense, this is a record of one person’s attempt to penetrate the false reality of a country which was not like other countries but always sought to depict itself as something it is not.

Emigres from the former Soviet Union often despair of their inability to convey the truth of their experiences to the West. Arthur Koestler, a former communist and the author of Darkness at Noon, the classic novel about the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s, told a colleague that it was always the same with the comfortable and insular West. “You hate our Cassandra cries and resent us as allies,” he said. “But when all is said, we ex-communists are the only people … who know what it’s all about.”

In fact, it is not necessary to be an ex-communist to understand what it is all about. But penetrating the veil of Russian mystification requires effort and the ability to understand that seeing is not always believing. The Russians have created an entire false world for our benefit. The articles in this collection reflect my 40 year attempt to see them as they are.

Never Speak to Strangers

By David Satter

February, 1977

A bleak, overcast day in Riga had given way to a night that was clear and bitter cold. The red lights on the last car of the Riga to Tallinn overnight train glowed in the frigid air as the train backed into the station. I gathered my things and walked to the seventh car where I handed in my ticket and boarded the train. I entered my compartment and was surprised to see a young woman seated on one of the bunks. She had black hair, which was freshly set, a heart shaped face, pale complexion, and lovely dark eyes. I guessed she was about 28 years old.

I took off my coat, put my suitcase under the bunk and sat down opposite her. Two other persons soon joined us. The first was a tall, sandy haired man with broad shoulders who was wearing a heavy coat and a double-breasted jacket. He said that he was a boxing instructor from the Ukraine. The second was another woman in her 20’s, who entered the compartment carrying several packages. She was thin and bird like with a petulant expression. She had red hair and wore bright red lipstick. She said her name was Masha Ivanova.

As the train began moving, the attendant gave us back our tickets and brought us glasses of tea. Rivers and the skeletons of bridges passed by in the moonlight. The pale lights of occasional villages appeared and disappeared on the horizon and the train was soon rolling rhythmically through a landscape of pine forests and snow blanketed fields.

It occurred to me that it might be more than just a coincidence that a man and two attractive women my own age were riding in the same compartment with me but I decided that this compartment on a train between two Baltic capitals, on a quiet Saturday night—which the KGB was undoubtedly taking off anyway—was a sanctuary. I felt relaxed and, in any case, believed that members of my generation had something in common wherever we happened to be.

I decided to travel to the Baltics at the suggestion of Kestutis Jokubynas, a former Lithuanian political prisoner who I had met in Moscow. Kestutis and I agreed to meet in Vilnius and he promised to give me the names of contacts in Riga and Tallinn. But, being new to the Soviet Union, I also asked the Soviet news agency, Novosti, for help in setting up official interviews.

I arrived in Vilnius by train on February 15, 1977 shortly after dawn and met Jokubynas at my hotel. We took a bus to Kestutis’s apartment. Kestutis lived in a single room in a housing block in a new area of the city. A solitary window let in the gray light of an overcast day and the walls were bare except for a rectangle of barbed wire over the fold out bed, a reminder of 17 years that Kestutis had spent in the camps. Kestutis poured me a cup of tea. He said he had little hope that he would live to see an independent Lithuania. He then mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that the next day, February 16, was the anniversary of Lithuanian independence.

At 5 pm, it became dark. We traveled by bus to the Old City, the heart of historic Vilnius, a section of weathered stone buildings, winding narrow streets, and gloomy inner courtyards in the shadow of ornate Catholic churches. From there, we took a bus to see Antanas Terleckas, another nationalist, who lived outside of Vilnius, on the edge of the Nemencine Forest. When we arrived, Terleckas welcomed us and we entered a small room crowded with people of all ages who were sitting on worn couches and chairs. The conversation was about what would happen the next day with nearly everyone predicting a show of force on the streets as in past years on February 16.

Several of the teenagers said that they would try to put flowers on the grave of Jonas Basanavicius, the father of the Lithuanian national movement who, by an odd coincidence, died on February 16. The point of laying flowers on his grave was to mark the national anniversary. But if stopped by the police, they could pretend that it was a personal gesture on the anniversary of Basanavicius’s death. This would convince no one, of course, but the police could be counted on not to arrest them at the graveside because that would acknowledge their fear of nationalism which officially did not exist.

The dissidents described the Lithuanian national activity in recent months—underground journals, the raising of the old Lithuanian flag over the ministry of internal affairs, arrests. I filled up most of a notebook and agreed to meet with Jokubynas in front of my hotel at 7 pm the following night.

The next morning was cold and overcast. I went with my guide for an interview with a government official and in the afternoon, for a trip to a collective farm. On the way, our car stopped to pick up a man who said he was an agronomist.

We left the collective farm in the late afternoon and the agronomist proposed that we take tea at a nearby club. I was anxious to return to Vilnius but agreed and we drove for 20 minutes before arriving at an isolated house. Although we had supposedly come for tea, the table was set for an elaborate meal. The agronomist said the club contained a Finnish sauna. He referred to the sauna several more times and then, elbowing me gently, asked, “How would you like to try it out?”

An hour passed in increasingly stilted conversation. Finally, ignoring the agronomist and addressing the guide, I said I wanted to leave. This brought an angry response from the agronomist who said the time had come to try out the Finnish bath. The agronomist, the guide and the manager of the club began chanting, “Finnish bath, Finnish bath.” I finally got up, took my coat and walked out to the car. It was only after I stood outside for 15 minutes that my guide and the agronomist joined me and we rode back into town.

I arrived in Vilnius at 7:30 pm but there was no sign of Jokubynas. I called Valery Smolkin, one of his friends. He said Kestutis had probably been arrested and suggested I come to his apartment to wait. I caught a cab and we turned down one of the side streets where I saw the scene that had been predicted by the nationalists the previous night. At each corner, uniformed police surrounded by milling crowds of obvious plainclothesmen were stopping passersby and checking their documents. The cabdriver, a Russian, said a policeman had been shot in a robbery of the state insurance company.

I arrived at Smolkin’s apartment at 8:40 pm. Three hours later, there was a knock at the door and Smolkin opened it to Kestutis who took off his coat, which was wet with newly fallen snow. He said that he had been on his way to meet me in front of the hotel when he was surrounded by five plain clothesmen. He was taken to a police station, the same one where he was taken after his first arrest in 1947, and put in a cell. He was then interrogated by a police officer who appeared drunk and spoke in a weird combination of Russian and Lithuanian and told him he was a suspect in the robbery of the state insurance company.” “I’ve been in the camps,” Kestutis said, “I’m not going to participate in your comedy.”

In the end, we spoke for several more hours and Kestutis gave me the address of Ints Tsalitis, a Latvian nationalist in Riga and the names and addresses of dissidents in Estonia. He also made one request. He asked me to make sure my notes from Lithuania never left my hands. I agreed and at that moment, I certainly intended to keep my promise.

The next morning I flew to Riga. The train from Vilnius to Riga was closed to foreigners. After I checked into my hotel, I realized that I had filled a notebook in Vilnius and would need a new one to interview city officials. I had promised the Lithuanians that I would keep my notes with me but the notebook was an awkward size. I finally forced it into my jacket pocket and left for the interview. That afternoon, however, I put the notebook in my suitcase and locked the suitcase in my room, leaving the key with the room clerk downstairs.

When I returned to the hotel, it was already dark. I asked the girl at the reception desk for the key to my room. But she looked and said she could not find it. I went upstairs and asked the floor attendant but she did not have the key either. I was now seriously worried. I went out for a walk. When I returned, I asked the girl at the desk to check again for my key. “Here it is,” she said, reaching into a slot in the key rack, “it was here all along.”

I took the key and went upstairs to my room. The light of the street lamps cast a pale glow in the darkness through the room’s nylon curtains. I opened my suitcase and saw that the notebook from Vilnius was still there. Everything appeared untouched.

I put the notebook back into my jacket pocket and caught a cab for Vecmilgravis, outside of Riga, to meet Tsalitis. I arrived at his home at 9 pm. He welcomed me and, as we sat in his kitchen, I told him about the events in Vilnius and warned him that I was probably being followed. He put on his coat and went outside with his dog, a large St. Bernard. When he came back, he said there was a black car parked at the end of the street with four men in it. “They’ve probably been there for several hours,” he said. “They don’t have to follow you. They know there are only a few places for you to go. It saves them time and energy.”

Tsalitis said that, in general, the situation was quieter in Latvia. There were no active dissident groups or samizdat journals. “The Latvians find it easier to get along with others,” he said. “It’s a virtue but it’s also our tragedy.” A half an hour later, Viktors Kalnins, another nationalist, joined us and he and Tsalitis gave me the names and addresses of Estonian nationalists in Tallinn. I wrote them on a separate piece of paper but they were the same names Kestutis had given me in Lithuania.

The next day in Riga I visited another collective farm. That evening I checked out of the hotel and prepared to go for a walk. Once again, I had to decide what to do with my notes. I had put the notebook in my suitcase. But I did not want to take a walk carrying a suitcase. I decided to leave it with the doorman. When I returned, I opened the suitcase. It appeared that nothing had been touched.

It was only on the night train to Tallinn that I began to feel at ease. The coach poured out drinks for each of us and Masha asked me where I was from. I told her that I was an American and that I was working in Moscow for the London Financial Times.

The coach asked what women were like in the United States. I said that they were better dressed than Soviet women but not necessarily prettier. Masha asked if I believed in God. I said that I did. This puzzled her. “Here, no one believes in God,” she said. I then began to explain my views. As I continued, trying to make sense in less than perfect Russian, Masha moved slightly forward, leaning over the small table and resting her chin childishly on the rim of one of the tea glasses. The dark haired girl also fixed her eyes on me and, inexplicably relaxed, I motioned to Masha to sit beside me. She complied and although I tried to continue what I was saying, she put her arms around me and began kissing me. The coach immediately went over to the other bunk and started kissing the dark haired girl, holding her in his arms and pressing her breasts against him.

This situation did not last long because the two girls almost immediately told us to go into the corridor so they could make the beds and get undressed. Most of the other passengers in the car had retired for the night. As we waited in the corridor, it occurred to me that the women in the compartment, the offer of easy sex, were the standard techniques of entrapment but it was exactly this that allayed my fears. Putting women in an overnight train compartment was too obvious. If the goal was entrapment, the KGB would have tried something less primitive. The idea that my new friends had been seated in my compartment for no other reason than to compromise me was just too incredible to believe.

When we entered the compartment, the women were in their nightgowns. Masha was sitting on the upper bunk, her breasts and a crucifix visible through the opening of her gown. The dark haired girl was lying on her side on the bottom bunk. We began to undress and the boxing coach turned off the overhead lamp so the only light came from the reading lights above each of the berths. I climbed into the upper berth and the coach got into the lower berth. The small lights were then turned off, leaving nothing to illuminate what went on until several hours later when the first filtering rays of sunlight indicated the break of day.

During the night, I was troubled by a strange dream. There was an indistinct image of the dark haired girl moving around the compartment as if she was making preparations to leave. After I had opened my eyes, I became concerned about my suitcase. I pulled on my pants and climbed down from the upper bunk. The fields and forests looked blue in the early morning light. The coach was already dressed and sitting on the opposite lower berth. The girls were asleep in their beds. Joking with the coach, I reached for my suitcase. It was then that I discovered that it was gone.

Suddenly, the coach began feeling the pockets of his jacket. “Wait a minute,” he said, “my watch is gone!”

He looked down at the bunk where the dark haired girl was sleeping, curled up in a tight ball facing the wall. He pulled back the top blanket and under it found other blankets tightly rolled from the inside out and arranged to create the impression of a sleeping person. I woke up Masha Ivanova and asked her what she knew about the dark haired girl. She said that she had met her that evening for the first time. I called the attendant and asked her if she had noticed anyone leaving the train in the middle of the night. I explained that I had lost my suitcase and the boxing coach had lost his watch. She promised to alert the police.

The train arrived in Tallinn at 8:30 am and we were met by the police and taken to their headquarters in the station. The police made clear that they viewed the case with the utmost seriousness. They insisted that we write detailed statements and stressed that any omission could impair the investigation. The coach and Masha wrote their statements and then Masha helped me to write mine. Reading the statements, the officer in charge began to wonder. “Two men and two women in one compartment,” he said, his voice trailing off thoughtfully.

I now faced a dilemma of my own making. My notes from Lithuania were gone. It was urgent that I find the Estonian dissidents whose names and addresses were in my suitcase. Fortunately, I also had written them down on a piece of paper that was in my wallet.

We left the station and got in a line at the taxi stand. It was a cool, foggy morning and behind us, the Upper City of Tallinn, with its medieval walls and spires, was wreathed in mist. A jeep pulled up and a policeman offered us a ride. We were taken to the Viru Hotel. As I got out of the jeep, Masha gave me her address in Tallinn.

I entered the hotel and got in line to register. As I waited, I gradually became aware of a short man in a fur hat and long coat trying to attract my attention. He finally cleared his throat, walked up to me and shook hands, leaving a tiny piece of paper that had been folded over several times in my hand. He then turned and walked quickly through the lobby and out the front door of the hotel.

As I put the piece of paper in my pocket, a change came over me. For the first time, I started to feel like a spectator at a play in which I was also an involuntary participant. In spite of myself, I began to look forward to the next act.

I registered and took the elevator to my room. Once in my room, I read the note. It asked me to call a telephone number in Tallinn from an automatic phone. I went downstairs and dialed the number. I told myself that if a Russian answered the phone, I had reached the KGB. If the voice was Estonian, it might be the Estonian dissidents. The voice was Estonian. In heavily accented Russian, a man asked me to wait in front of the Tallinna Kaubamaja, the city’s main department store, at exactly one o’clock. The person who gave me the note would meet me there. When I tried to ask another question, he hung up.

I left the hotel and went to the department store. At 1 pm, I was met by the man from the hotel lobby. He signaled to me to follow him and we proceeded in single file down a diagonal street between five story housing blocks to an archway and entered a courtyard. He then stepped into an entryway and up a flight of steps. The door opened for him and as soon as I followed him into the small apartment, it was quickly closed and locked behind me.

I was ushered into a dimly lit sitting room. In the middle of the table, there were several empty glasses and an unopened bottle of cognac. The man who had brought me to the apartment motioned for me to take a chair at the head of the table and the others—three men of about middle age—gathered in chairs around the table in a rough semi-circle. My guide then took up a perch directly opposite me on the windowsill.

I looked around at my companions. The man on my right was tall and thin with a mournful expression. Next to him was the man who had met me in the hotel. The next person was also short with a sheaf of sandy colored hair over his forehead. On my left, the fourth member of the group sat in a large armchair. He had a round face and intelligent, gray eyes. He was the only member of the group with a genuinely humane expression.

The tall, mournful looking man got up, opened the bottle of cognac and poured me a drink. I nodded and took a sip. He then returned to his chair and said in Russian but with a thick Estonian accent, “What happened to you? We saw you with the police at the station.”

For some reason, I suddenly was convinced that I was in the presence of the KGB. “I think you know the answer to that question better than I do,” I said.

“We are very worried,” said the man with the sandy hair, ignoring my reaction, “we want to know what happened to you.”

“I was with the police,” I said, “because my suitcase was stolen in the middle of the night from the train. Why don’t you tell me where it is?”

“Our movement may be in danger because of you,” the sandy haired man continued. “Were our names in the suitcase that was stolen?”

“I don’t know who you are. I also don’t know anything about any names.”

“Did Viktors Kalnins give you our names?” the sandy haired man persisted.

The tall, solemn man seemed demoralized by the hopelessness of the situation. “Viktors called me,” he said, “and we went to the station to meet you but we left when we saw you talking to the police.”

“So,” I said, “you are trying to tell me that someone arranged for you to meet me in Tallinn?” Several of them nodded their heads yes.

“Show me some identification,” I said.

“No, we don’t show any identification,” said the sandy haired man, shaking his head firmly.

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said, “because for a moment it occurred to me that you might actually be the dissidents but if you won’t identify yourselves, it only proves to me that you’re the KGB.”

The superficial politeness that had prevailed up until that point disappeared. The tall, solemn member of the group leaned over the table. “I spent twelve years in the camps,” he said. “My friends have spent six, seven and eight years in the camps. You’re not going to treat us like a bunch of niggers.”

This remark took me completely by surprise. Could it be that I was accusing them unfairly?

“You’re operating on a false assumption,” said the older man whose expression had been the most sympathetic. “The KGB can forge any kind of identification it wants. In a situation like this, you can’t rely on documents.” He hesitated and then added gently, “You have to believe what is in your heart.”

He asked me if I had the names and addresses of the people I was to see. I said that I knew who I was supposed to see. I then removed the paper with the names and addresses from my wallet. “Now, tell me,” I said, “who are you?” The tall, solemn man on my right said, “I am Valdo Reinart.” The man who met me in the hotel lobby said, “I am Endel Ratas.” The intense, sandy haired man said, “I am Mart Niklus” and the older man on the left, smiled and said, “And I am Erik Udam.” Udam was the leader of the Estonian dissidents. Udam then asked if there were addresses written on my note. I said there were and each person gave his correct address.

Reinart got up, a little less obviously distressed, and filled my glass with cognac and then poured drinks for the others around the table, who also began to relax. Udam asked me to tell him about the theft of my suitcase. I hesitated for a moment and then decided to tell them what had happened. If they were dissidents, they were entitled to know and if they were KGB agents, what I said would come as no surprise. I began to describe what had happened and, as I told them how I was distracted, pained expressions came over the faces of the four men. When I finished, Reinart said, “I’ll call Viktors immediately so he can warn everyone that your notes are missing.”

They then began to argue among themselves. Udam suggested that the theft was organized by black market operators but Niklus disagreed. “This was the KGB,” he said. Reinart asked me what we talked about. “Not much,” I said, “just trivialities.”

“They didn’t ask you any questions?”

“Nothing special.”

“That doesn’t sound like the KGB,” Reinart said. “They always try to find out everything they can.”

The conversation shifted to whether or not it was safe for us to meet later. We finally agreed that they would try to assess the situation and Ratas would meet me at 10 pm that night in front of the Tallinna Kaubamaja.

Before we got ready to leave, I told Reinart that I was sorry about what had happened. For the first time, his manner seemed to soften. “What can you do,” he said reflectively, “a young man, a beautiful woman …”

Udam said he had one request before I left. He wanted me to leave the list with the dissidents’ addresses and names with them. “It’s not that we don’t trust you,” he said. “We just can’t afford another mistake.” I took the list out of my wallet and gave it to Udam and he put it in an ashtray and lit it with a match, holding the match to the list until it had been reduced to a wisp of ash.

I returned to my hotel where I met my official guide. We agreed on a program for the next day. I then left the hotel to look for Masha. But I soon discovered that the address she had given me did not exist.

I returned to the Viru, went to my room and then to the lobby where I stopped to buy a postcard. I suddenly had the feeling that someone was watching me. When I turned to look, the only person I noticed was a young man with a mustache and goatee who was holding a square attaché case.

I finally left the hotel and walked to the Old City. There had been a slight break in the weather and there was a fine rain. Some of the accumulated ice on the roofs was beginning to thaw, causing water to drip from the eaves and run down the drainpipes. In the streetlamps’ hazy light, the paint peeling from the facades of the buildings made them appear particularly shabby. I turned down one of the side streets and through the window of a gabled stone building, I could see people queuing, waiting to test loaves in the bread racks. The drumbeat of dripping water was punctuated by the slamming of the heavy wooden door to the bread store as people left with their purchases. A little bit further down the same street, I passed a dimly lit café where, through a gauze curtain, I could see pensioners carrying their tin trays to metal tables and an old crone mopping up the broken tiles on the floor. I entered a quiet alleyway that ran along the city wall. At last, I came to a cul de sac where I was surprised to see an old woman with a few wisps of scraggly gray hair, a lined face and a dazed look in her wide open eyes. She stood motionless in the rain holding a tin can filled with pencils and made no effort to speak, looking past me as if I wasn’t there.

Shortly before ten I returned to the hotel where a group of Finnish tourists were showing the effects of heavy drinking. Finally, I walked to the door and glanced behind me. On the upper mezzanine, I saw the man with the attaché case.

At ten o’clock, I met Ratas at the Tallinna Kaubamaja. “They’re following you!” he said, his face completely contorted. “Be here tomorrow, two o’clock.”

The next morning I went with my guide to an agricultural institute outside Tallinn. The meeting lasted for several hours. I excused myself from the lunch that had been prepared and left the institute at 1 pm.

As we rode back to Tallinn, I tried to imagine how to meet the dissidents without being followed. Suddenly, I recalled a rundown hotel in the Old City called the Hotel Baltika that I had noticed the previous night. As we approached the Old City, I asked the driver to leave me off at this hotel. There was a moment of confusion but the guide agreed that the driver could stop there.

I got out of the car. I then cut back through a small park and started to climb the stone steps to the Upper City. Factories and railroad lines, the yellow cranes of Tallinn harbor and rows of brown and grey Soviet apartment blocks spread out before me. Glancing back, I turned and saw a man in a silver jacket at the bottom of the steps climbing rapidly. I hurried along a narrow path between the stone houses. Looking back again, I saw that my pursuer had reached the top of the steps. I turned into the entryway of a Lutheran church where an official Soviet guide, mistaking me for a tourist, began to describe the torture of heretics that had been performed there.

I left the church, turned down a cobbled path between two stone walls and then hurried across a broad square. My pursuer appeared from around a corner. Finally, in desperation, I turned and began to advance on him. When he realized that I was coming toward him, he quickly turned his back. I changed directions and doubled back behind one of the government buildings and made my way to the wall of the Upper City. I began going down the steps, watching for my pursuer. To my surprise, I did not see him. I plunged into the crowded streets of the Old City and flagged down a cab. With 15 minutes to go before the scheduled meeting, I arrived at the Tallinna Kaubamaja, where scores of people were stepping through the slush. There were old, fat women with canes, young women with pallid faces and stringy blonde hair, nondescript men in worn overcoats and, off to one side, the old woman with the can of pencils whom I had encountered the previous night.

At exactly 2 pm, Ratas appeared on the street and led me to a nearby courtyard. He said that KGB agents were everywhere and the group had decided that it was too dangerous for us to meet in Tallinn. They wanted to meet not in Tallinn but in Moscow. I asked Ratas if he had reached Kalnins to tell him about the loss of my notes. He said “our friends” had been informed.

The train for Moscow left as darkness fell and I was relieved to see that my companion in the compartment was a woman engineer in her 50’s with a dark mustache. As we rode to Moscow, I tried to restore my notes from memory, adding to them and elaborating on them.

The next few days in Moscow were uneventful. Life assumed its previous rhythm. I began to think that the events in the Baltics were an aberration and maybe even, to some extent, the product of my imagination. One night, about a week after I had gotten back, I decided to call Kestutis in Vilnius although I had no doubt that Udam had already told him what happened on the Riga to Tallinn train. I called from the central telegraph office reaching him at the institute where he worked as an archivist.

After I described the loss of my suitcase, there was silence at the other end of the line. “What happened” Jokubynas asked, “were you drunk?” “Kestutis,” I said, “We have to be careful. They may be listening.” “Oh, yes,” Kestutis said and then his voice began to tremble. “They’re listening. Of course, they’re listening. They’re listening to every word.” With that I broke off the conversation and promised to call him again.

A week passed and there was no word from anyone in the Baltics until one night I received a frantic call from someone who said he had to meet me and was waiting in front of the Puppet Theater across the street from my apartment on the Ring Road. I didn’t recognize the caller’s voice and after the affair in the Baltics, I was wary of provocation. But I decided to go. When I pulled up in my car, I saw Antanas Terleckas and Ints Tsalitis.

We got into my car and began looking for a place to talk. It was too dangerous to talk in an apartment and we would have had to queue for hours to get into a café. Finally, after driving around for half an hour, we adjourned to the stairwell of a building on Leninsky Prospect.

Neither Terleckas nor Tsalitis appeared upset about the consequences for them of the loss of my suitcase. They were more concerned to make sure that I did not lose the opportunity to write about nationalism, particularly in Lithuania. During the next hour, they repeated to me the information that I had received in the Baltics, much of which I had already reconstructed from memory. When my notes were complete, we left the building and went for a ride in my car.

“The one thing you’ll never find,” Terleckas said as we drove, “or at least almost never find is a Russian who is willing to recognize a small people’s right to its own country. If you talk about Lithuania, they say that’s our Russian land, our country.”

I remarked to Antanas that I liked the Russian people. “They are good, sweet, kind people,” he replied, “but it doesn’t occur to them that the Lithuanians consider Lithuania to be their country and want to be able to live in it without them.”

“By the way,” Tsalitis said. “Why didn’t you meet our friends in Estonia?” Below us, Moscow was a carpet of apartment lights broken by the shadows of gothic government skyscrapers. “They called me and wanted to know why you never contacted them.”

“Who called you?”

“The Estonian nationalists, Udam, Ratas …”

“They said I never contacted them?”

“Yes.”

“Ints, I spent two days in Tallinn with Udam and Ratas. I’m expecting them to meet me here. Did either of you get a telephone call from Estonia telling you that my suitcase with the notes on Latvia and Lithuania had been stolen?”

“No,” Tsalitis said, “we heard about it from Kestutis.” I pulled the car over to the side of the road. A light snow began to fall and the snowflakes seemed to hang immobile in the arcs of light cast by the streetlamps.

I turned to look at Tsalitis and Terleckas who were sitting in the back seat. “If I didn’t spend those two days with Udam and Ratas,” I said, “then who did I spend them with?”

There was silence in the car.

“Do you mean?”

Antanas smiled. “They’re clever. You’ve got to hand them that.”

“Yes,” I said, “but these were Estonians.”

“The Estonian KGB,” Tsalitis said.

“You mean the whole thing, the meetings, the arguments, the discussion of KGB tactics, the small army they had following me, all that was a performance?”

“They are brilliant actors,” Antanas said.

“But what was the point of it? Just to prevent me from meeting a group of Estonian dissidents?”

“Not only that,” said Antanas. “The Soviet Union is a land of miracles and from time to time the KGB likes to create reality.”

The snow was coming down harder now and it was getting late. We rode silently through the Lenin Hills and along the embankment to Kutuzovsky Prospekt and then across the bridge and past the American Embassy to the Sadovoye Ring Road. I drove them to the bridge over the Tsvetnoy Boulevard where we got out of the car and shook hands. Terleckas gestured toward me as they got ready to leave. “Look at him,” he said to Tsalitis, “a free man. Can you imagine, a free man.”

Several weeks after my meeting with Terleckas and Tsalitis, the Financial Times published my report on nationalism in Lithuania under the headline, “The Ghost in the Machine.” A detailed summary of the article was broadcast back to the Soviet Union by the Russian service of the BBC so, in the end, the Lithuanian dissidents got their wish. What was happening in the republic became known in both the Soviet Union and the West.

I never made direct contact with the Estonian dissidents but, in May, the real Erik Udam arrived in Moscow and left a statement describing the KGB’s reaction to my visit to Tallinn. I was away and only received a copy of the statement several weeks later. According to the statement, Major Albert Molok of the Estonian KGB met with Udam in April at Molok’s request and suggested he organize a dissident group to give false information to Western correspondents. Molok said that it was his achievement that David Satter of the Financial Times had not met with him in February. He said Udam could choose the group’s members but they would have to be approved by the KGB. Udam said that such a scheme would quickly be discovered, Molok said that to keep the KGB connection secret, he would make sure that the group was lightly persecuted. When Udam rejected Molok’s suggestion, Molok asked him if he could recommend someone else but Udam said he would not recommend such a gigantic deception to anyone.

I ended up working five more years for the Financial Times in Moscow and never again fell for a KGB provocation. Indeed, I became convinced that Terleckas was right and the whole point of the Soviet system was to create reality and then impose this world of illusions on a helpless population by force. In early 1983, I testified before the U.S. Congress on “Stopping Communism without War” and argued that the Soviet Union’s false ideology compelled it to create illusions and, as a result, the most effective weapon against communism was not arms but the truth. I published an article based on this testimony on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.

Several days after the article appeared, I wrote to Kestutis and enclosed a copy. Kestutis had succeeded in leaving Lithuania and was working for the Lithuanian service of Radio Liberty in Munich. A week later, a reply came that showed he had finally forgiven me for my mistakes in the Baltics. It said: “You did not spend your years in the Soviet Union in vain.”

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.

The decision to speak out, to refuse to lie “quieter than the water and lower than the grass” was at one time or another taken by all the active dissidents. In itself, however, the act of speaking out will not usually lead to imprisonment and arrest. The Soviet Union today is a more liberal country than it was 15 or even ten years ago, when it was possible to receive a prison sentence just for possessing Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward. The circulation of works of literature in typescript (samizdat), was also major crime. Now imprisonment and arrest come when the dissidents try to exercise those freedoms which they have supported orally.

This is what happened with the formation of the dissident Committee to Monitor Soviet Observance of the Helsinki Accords, which during recent months were the focus of Soviet dissident activity. The Helsinki Group members gathered information on Soviet human rights abuses, interviewed affected individuals and held Press conferences exactly as if they were citizens of a Western democracy. The arrests of Dr. Orlov, February 10, Helsinki Group member Mr. A. Ginzburg, on February 3, Ukrainian Helsinki group leader Mr. Rudenko, and Ukrainian Helsinki group member Olexy Tikhy on February 5 were a means of demonstrating to them that they are not.

Dissidents learn to live with uncertainty. The Soviet Government operates in secrecy and it is hard to judge the mood of the authorities. For many months it appeared possible that the Soviet authorities would tolerate the existence of the unofficial Helsinki monitoring committee because of their justification in the light of the Helsinki agreement and the obvious violation of the spirit of the agreement which arresting the members of the monitoring committees would represent.

Solzhenitsyn Fund

Now, however, it is clear that the Soviet authorities will continue to punish organised dissident activity even when it conforms to internationally accepted standards of human rights. Under these circumstances, Soviet dissidents form an important category of the population. They are the only group in the Soviet Union which openly challenges the authorities.

The dissident subculture is populated by people who know each other well and can always be found at each-others’ homes. None can be confident that their actions are unknown to the KGB. Many, like Mr. Ginzburg, are chronically ill, the legacy of unrelenting pressures and years in a camp. Dissidents cannot speak freely on the phone (if their phone has not been disconnected) or in their apartments for fear of bugging. Outsiders must be treated with suspicion because a neighbour or casual friend could be an informer.

They do, however, have two institutions. The Solzhenitsyn fund was set up by exiled author Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974 with royalties from his book about Stalinist prison camps, the Gulag Archipelago. Since then, the fund has dispersed 270,000 roubles (£210,000) to about 1,500 political prisoners or their families. The fund was administered until his arrest by Mr. Ginzburg who said its purpose was to assure that “political prisoners today had a chance to survive.” It is undoubtedly a source of irritation to the authorities because it takes the illegitimacy of political arrests for granted and works to mitigate the severity of State punishment.

Unofficial Chronicle

The Chronicle of Current Events, also operates unofficially and has become an important part of the Soviet scene. Now in its ninth year, the Chronicle appears once every two or three months in typewritten carbon copies. Probably no more than a few hundred copies of each issue are produced, but the Chronicle circulates widely by hand and contains the most recent dissident information, including searches and arrests. The Chronicle’s accuracy and impartiality have led many to suggest that it is the best newspaper in the Soviet Union.

The dissidents inevitably become outcasts despite this pressure however, their way of life has a certain attraction which the Soviet authorities have at various times indirectly acknowledged. The Communist Party newspaper Pravda, in its attack on the dissidents on February 12, said that there are still people in the Soviet Union, who are attracted by talk of greater freedom in the West, and thus it was necessary to be politically vigilant as “never before.”

There are at least several hundred people in Moscow who, although not active dissidents, are willing to risk signing petitions in support of arrested dissidents. At least 1,000 have made personal contributions to the Solzhenitsyn Fund. A petition circulated on behalf of Mr. Ginzburg was signed by more than 200 persons. There was a time when signing a petition meant almost automatic dismissal. Now it may merely limit a person’s progress in a career without costing him his job.

Sympathetic Listeners

Those who do sign petitions must always live with the uncertainty of a possible call from the KGB, informing their employers. But the KGB is now believed to be hesitant to see people fired for signing petitions lest they form an ever-growing and embarrassing pool of dissidents.

Beyond those who support the dissidents, moreover, there is a far larger number of persons who sympathise. Just who and how many is impossible to say. I estimate that as many as a fourth of the people in the major cities may listen to foreign radio broadcasts and are aware of the reaction to dissident arrests in the West. But many take it for granted that they have less freedom in the Soviet Union, and while they may sympathise, regard the dissidents’ efforts as useless.

However, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, continues to maintain itself. As older dissidents are imprisoned or emigrate, new ones appear. “Many people want to live decently,” said Dr. Turchin, “But most have no courage to do so. For some people, however, the desire to live decently is stronger than the fear of possible consequences. The dissidents exist as a subculture within the dominant culture. They think otherwise, act otherwise, do otherwise and so defy totalitarianism. You will always find some persons to represent the subculture.”

The Financial Times, Tuesday, April 5, 1977

Nationalism in Lithuania

The Ghost in the Machine

Something odd went on one night last month in Vilnius, capital of Soviet Lithuania. Along Lenin Prospekt, the main avenue, clusters of militiamen were in. evidence at regular intervals, and in the darkened side streets police were stopping passers-by and asking for identification.

There were two explanations for what was taking place. The police said they were investigating the fatal shooting of a militiaman during the robbery of an office of the state insurance company. Lithuanian nationalists said that Vilnius is always ringed with police on February 16, because it is the anniversary of Lithuania gaining independence after the First World War.

Mr. Kestutis Jokubynas, an archivist who spent 17 years in Soviet prison camps for nationalist activities, was picked up that evening in front of one of the main hotels in Vilnius. He spent his years in the camps learning foreign languages and has applied to emigrate to Canada. When the police asked him about the shooting, he told them. “I’m not going to play a part in your comedy.”

Whatever the reason for the display of force that night, there is no doubt that nationalism continues to be a factor in Lithuanian life even today, 37 years after the country was incorporated into the Soviet Union to be transformed from a somewhat backward, independent nation with a largely agrarian economy into a highly industrial and primarily urban Soviet republic.

The incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1940 was accompanied by mass deportations. Lithuania was subsequently occupied by the Nazis during the Second World War and then, for eight years after the war, new deportations took place together with forced collectivisation and bitter partisan warfare against Soviet rule.

Once the partisans were suppressed and the futility of further resistance was generally accepted, Lithuania embarked on a period of remarkable economic growth under a programme of rapid industrialisation. During 1940–69, taking the period as a whole, Lithuania actually led all Soviet republics with the growth rate of its gross industrial product. Soviet figures show that Lithuanian industrial output has risen 49 times over since 1940, whereas industrial output in the Soviet Union as a whole between 1940 and 1972 increased by 13.6 times.

The creation of a modern industrial base, which has made Lithuania a major producer of machine tools, automation equipment, electronic computers, radio and TV sets, refrigerators, and fishing trawlers, has been accompanied by urbanisation.

Only 22.9 per cent of the population of Lithuania lived in cities in 1939, but by 1975 the urban population had risen to 57 per cent, including about 450,000 persons in Vilnius. The post-war collectivisation of agriculture, which provoked armed resistance from Lithuanian peasants, was 96 per cent accomplished by mid-1952. Today the emphasis is on inducing peasants to leave their surviving individual homesteads for prefabricated “agro-towns” and creating automated complexes for highly specialised agricultural production, freeing workers to go into industry which is short of manpower, and changing the character of the republic still further.

Against this background, Lithuanian nationalism, which is thought to be among the most fervent of local nationalisms in the Soviet Union, only rarely takes the form of open mass resistance. Although there was a riot in Kaunas in 1972 following the self-immolation of a young Roman Catholic, it was by far the worst nationalist disturbance in the Soviet Union during the last 20 years. Resistance now manifests itself in frequent acts of individual protest, rare in other parts of the Soviet Union; the circulation of Lithuanian language underground journals; and the existence of various ill-defined nationalist groups which have a marked appeal, particularly for the young.

The atmosphere in Vilnius is one of surface calm brought about at least partially by economic development. The fate of the formerly independent country is aptly reflected in the appearance of the town, which is circled by rows of modern apartment blocks built with materials and processes standard throughout the Soviet Union, but has at its heart the old city with darkened passageways and inner courtyards in the shadow of old, ornate Catholic churches.

Lithuania enjoys a material standard of living which is higher than that of the Soviet Union as a whole. It trails only Estonia and Latvia among Soviet republics in terms of produced income per capita.

Nationalist incidents are seldom mentioned in the Press, but the following are reliably reported to have taken place in recent months in the city of Vilnius: a Lithuanian Soviet Republic flag was torn down from the dormitory of Vilnius state university; students removed a portrait of Lenin from the central post office; signs saying “Free Lithuania—Russians get out,” appeared on public buildings; and the old Lithuanian national flag was raised for a brief moment above the Ministry of Internal Affairs which has charge of the police.

Such incidents are not likely to interfere with the Lithuanian Republic’s economic growth which will be aided during the 1976–80 five-year plan period by the construction of an atomic power station and the opening of the first stage of the massive Mazeikiai oil refinery which is to go into service in 1978. But overt acts of protest are not typical in the Soviet Union and stand, as visible manifestations of a nationalist feeling that material progress has not been able to eliminate.

There are believed to be many small groups of people scattered throughout the Republic who meet for religious or national purposes but have no legal means of communicating with each other. On December 21 four men in Kaunas and Ionova were arrested. Typewriters and hundreds of nationalist leaflets were confiscated. The men were connected with a group called the Union of Organisations of Independent Peoples, but despite signs that they had made extensive organisational preparations, their group was completely unknown to nationalists in Vilnius.

The most tangible manifestations of enduring Lithuanian nationalism are the underground Lithuanian language journals which appear regularly and discuss religious issues as well as aspects of Lithuanian history during the period when the country was independent. There are four such journals today, the oldest and most famous being the Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church which, despite attempts to repress it, has been appearing in typescript since the spring of 1972. Two arrests were made in Vilnius recently in connection with the chronicle. No underground journals appear in Latvia or Estonia, the two other Baltic republics absorbed by the Soviet Union.

Lithuania has recovered demographically as well as economically, from the destruction of the Second World War and the mass deportations of 1940–41 and 1946–50. In 1975, however, the population of 3.3m was only slightly higher than the population had been in 1939. About 80 per cent, of the population are Lithuanians (although Lithuanians comprise only 43 per cent, of the population of Vilnius), and the national balance is relatively stable. Lithuanians have dominated the leadership of the Lithuanian Communist Party since the Khrushchev era and the party leadership is believed to be committed to developing national culture in a socialist context.

The difficulty in Lithuania, as in other Soviet national republics, is that not all aspects of Lithuanian national culture fit easily into the socialist framework. The collectivisation and transformation of agriculture is helping to complete the process of placing the republic on an urbanised basis more amenable to Soviet rule. But the teachings of the Church, in what is traditionally a devout outpost of Catholicism in north-eastern Europe, are opposed to Marxism. It is this ideological conflict which gives nationalism in Lithuania its unusual tenacity.

There are now believed to be 1½ m believers in Lithuania. Their share in the population is far higher than in the Soviet Union as a whole. Many people in Lithuania attend Church festivals and many often mark special occasions such as births, or funerals with religious rites as a passive means of expressing nationalist sentiments.

A nationalist Catholic priest in Vilnius, however, said he saw little hope for the future of Catholicism in Lithuania. There is a shortage of bibles and religious texts, he said, and a Soviet law forbids anyone but a parent from giving religious instruction to a child, which effectively precludes not only religious schools—but even, according to the strict letter of the law, religious instruction by close relatives. At the same time, children are subject to a steady stream of atheist propaganda.

Financial Times, Thursday, June 16, 1977

The Belgrade conference

The Price of Respectability

With the convening of the Belgrade Conference at which fulfilment of the 1975 Helsinki Agreement is to be reviewed, the Soviet leaders are aware of the steep price in terms of respect for human rights they are being asked for Soviet entry as a respected member of the world community.

The Soviet Union’s recent attempts to expand ties with the West have all met the insistence that they consent to some measure of internal liberalization.

Even against this background, the Belgrade Conference represents a new stage in East-West relations because, although the Helsinki Agreement reflected Soviet acceptance of the humanitarian provisions of the Final Act in return for Western agreement to security arrangements and the European territorial status quo, the discussions at Belgrade promise to move beyond what human rights commitments the USSR is ready to make publicly to the even more sensitive question of how fulfilment of these commitments is to be judged.

The need to proceed from the general to the particular will mean that the conference will concern itself with the fate of the nine imprisoned members of the unofficial Helsinki Agreement Monitoring Group and of Mr. Anatoly Shcharansky, the group’s liaison with the Western Press, who faces charges of treason punishable by execution.

The prospective espionage trial of Mr. Shcharansky and the trials of the other imprisoned Helsinki Group members will probably not begin until well after the Belgrade preparatory meeting is over, but the prospect of these trials is one measure of Soviet resistance to being pressed on the human rights issue.

The USSR has every reason to seek to avoid discussion at Belgrade of their implementation of the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Agreement. They have not honoured their human rights pledges and in the Belgrade review of Helsinki they face Western attempts to force them to accept some degree of internal liberalization in exchange for mutual security arrangements and closer ties.

The USSR was the driving force behind the idea of a European Security Conference ever since the Warsaw Pact first suggested it in the mid-1960s. The human rights provisions of the Helsinki Agreement’s Final Act, however, were accepted only reluctantly and growing Soviet apprehension over the possibility of being humiliated at Belgrade over the human rights issue has been reflected in a highly defensive propaganda campaign in the Soviet Press.

Soviet propaganda does not appear to have deterred the West from pressing the human rights question and the West’s determination to examine the issue thoroughly at Belgrade puts the Soviet Union in a quandary. The Soviet media have supported the Helsinki Agreement vociferously and were it not for the human rights provisions, the USSR could make a strong case that it has implemented the accords responsibly.

The USSR has incorporated the Helsinki statement of principles on international relations almost verbatim into the chapter of the new Soviet constitution on foreign policy and the 1975 friendship treaty signed by the Soviet Union and East Germany also enumerated the principles in the Helsinki Final Act.

The USSR has notified neighbouring countries about two sets of military manoeuvres in the last two years involving more than 25,000 men—one in the Caucasus and one in the area north of Leningrad—as called for in the Final Act, and Soviet disarmament proposals, such as the proposal for a treaty renouncing first use of nuclear weapons, are in keeping with the Helsinki call for steps toward effective disarmament.

The Soviet Communist Party leader Mr. Brezhnev has suggested international conferences on the environment, transport and energy in compliance with sections of the Final Act calling for international co-operation in these areas, and the Soviet Union has expanded its trade and industrial co-operation with the West and begun supplying trade statistics in keeping with the provisions of the Final Act on the exchange of commercial and economic information. It has also simplified procedures for foreign journalists and taken other steps to implement the agreement.

However, the Soviet Union has not honoured its Helsinki pledges to respect human rights and facilitate the free flow of information and it is this failure which is likely to be taken up at Belgrade because it undermines the Helsinki understanding on which better East-West relations were to be based.

The most striking example of the Soviet Union’s failure here has been the arrests of the members of the dissident groups who sought to monitor fulfilment of the Helsinki pledges. Between February and April, 10 members of the main Helsinki group in Moscow and affiliated groups in Georgia and the Ukraine were arrested (one was subsequently released), others emigrated under pressure and there were numerous house searches and confiscations directed against persons connected with the groups. Those few group members who remain active are under constant threat of arrest.

Against the general lack of democratic liberties, specific examples of the Soviet Union’s direct violation of its Helsinki human rights pledges include the widespread refusal of applications for family reunification (there are 50 outstanding cases involving Britain alone), the denial of the right to emigrate to more than 1,000 Penteconstalists and Baptists, the denial of national rights to the Crimean Tatars who have sought for many years to return to their homeland in the Crimea from which they were deported en masse in 1944, the denial of permission to emigrate to Germans and Jews for arbitrary reasons or with no reason given at all, and retaliation against those who seek to emigrate through dismissals, psychiatric confinement and arrests or trumped up charges.

Other violations of the Soviet pledge to facilitate the free flow of information include the switching-off of telephones for dissidents or those with contacts abroad, massive eavesdropping, mail and telegraph censorship, the effective embargo on non-communist foreign newspapers and periodicals, and the harassment of foreign journalists.

Soviet officials, in an implicit recognition that the Soviet Union has done little to improve its human rights record in the last two years, say implementation of the Helsinki human rights provisions depends on the level of détente. This may mean that the Soviet Union will not accept any Western attempt to make the level and quality of détente dependent on Soviet human rights observation.

At its final meeting before the Belgrade conference, the dissident committee to monitor the Helsinki accords made its own recommendations to the Belgrade conference. It suggested that objective criteria be established for assessing the Soviet Union’s human rights performance, which would bring the Western attempt to compel Soviet liberalisation into sharper focus. If the participants at Belgrade try to arrive at an East-West consensus on what it means to respect human rights, however, the result may not merely clarify the situation—it could also clarify how far apart the two sides really are.

Financial Times, Tuesday, September 20, 1977

Holidays in Russia

Taking a Healthy Rest

The Soviet masses are once again trickling away from the summer resorts, back to school and factory. The biggest exodus will come from Sochi, the country’s principal health resort and unofficial capital of the “Russian Riviera,” where at the height of the season holiday makers were arriving at a rate of over 50 trainloads and 100 flights a day.

Developed in the 1930s as a resort for working people, Sochi today extends for hundreds of miles along the Black Sea. It is a place of gardens, cypresses and palm trees, crowds milling along the promenades and rows of modern high rise sanatoria and rest houses.

Sochi offers the distractions of any seaside resort, notably miles of coast. But it also prides itself on being a “city of health.” Of the 3m. visitors to Sochi last year, over lm. received some form of medical treatment.

The rest homes and sanatoria were originally built because of the proximity of the Matsesta hydrogen sulphide mineral springs, now the basis for the Soviet Union’s largest physiotherapeutic establishment, where 6m. treatments a year are given for diseases of the joints, heart, skin, and nervous system.

Life in the lush, subtropical spa has two different sides. The sanatoria and rest homes are run by Soviet trade unions and represent the organised side. Besides medical treatment in the sanatoria, they generally provide semi-private rooms, landscaped grounds, exercise and recreational facilities, and a secluded stretch of private beach.

But most of the hundreds of thousands who pour into Sochi at the height of the season do not stay in the rest homes or sanatoria. These “wild people,” as the Soviet press calls them participate in the unorganised side of Sochi life—a world of cots in private homes for roubles 1.50 a night, busy arcades, long queues at restaurants and waterfront cafes, and beaches so crowded that there is hardly room to sit.

The Black Sea has the warmest sea water in the Soviet Union. Summer weather there lasts from May until November. The novelty particularly for visitors from Siberia and the far north, whose fares to Sochi are frequently government-subsidised, may be why the air and water temperature are continually announced over public address systems. As a change, visitors can take an interest in the radio and poster propaganda campaign against alcoholism and smoking.

Treatment

The Metallurg Sanatorium, which serves Soviet engineering workers, specialises in treating cardiovascular and neurological ailments. Treatment begins at 8 a.m. each morning for half a day with special exercises, examinations, treatment, diet and trips to take the waters of the Matsesta springs.

“Wild people” who do not get a place in a sanatorium can buy a treatment entitling them to use a sanatorium clinic and its other facilities. Packages can even be purchased following a medical examination at the Sochi railway station, provided by an on duty doctor for new arrivals, just getting off the train.

Sochi grew up around the idea of organised rest, but because of the attraction to individual visitors to the Black Sea coast and the Matsesta waters, the “wild” side of life grew up along with it. Demand for places in rest homes and sanatoria in the Soviet Union is now several times greater than the supply, and no programme of major resort construction is currently under way.

Although there can be more than 600,000 visitors to Sochi at any given time during the season, there are only 200.000 rest home or sanatoria places. This shortage gives rise to the two different ways of vacation life. The difference is visible from one of the hydrofoils which regularly carry passengers between the resorts up and down the coast. From several miles out to sea, the green foothills of the Caucasus mountains form a backdrop to a chequered pattern where densely crowded beaches alternate with the beaches of the rest homes and sanatoria which appear all but empty by comparison.

The sanatoria or rest homes are inexpensive. In the Metallurg Sanatorium, the maximum cost of four days of treatment and rest costs 160 roubles (£127) of which roubles 48 (£38) is paid by the patient, the rest by his trade union. Places are frequently apportioned by an organisation on the basis of that organisation’s own needs Individuals who work in different ministries or organisations, even if they happen to be married to each other, are frequently given different packaged vacations, at different places and different times. Only about 30 per cent of those in the Sochi sanatoria or rest homes come with their families, compared with an estimated 90 per cent of these who come to Sochi under their own steam.

At the height if the season Sochi is a mix of Russians, Armenians, Georgians, Ukrainians, and Tatars, and feels like the summer crossroads of the Soviet Union. Those who cannot get places at the rest homes or sanatoria make arrangements with the private owners whose wooden cottages line the shaded by-ways and streets. Typical “wild people” live four in a room, and either reserve places by writing in advance or make arrangements on arrival with a landlady waiting at the railway station or through the nearby apartment bureau.

Sponsored visitors and the “wild people,” as well as the foreign tourists who make up a third and growing category of Sochi holiday makers, seem to co-exist happily.

Financial Times, Monday, November 7, 1977

The Price of Soviet Achievements

It has been 60 years since the Bolshevik seizure of power created out of the old Tsarist Empire a new kind of society based on a vision of progress and social justice but sustained by force. The Soviets say the Revolution was “the greatest event of the twentieth century.” What has it meant?

On Kallinin Prospekt, Moscow’s answer to the Champs Elysées, shoppers stroll past a futuristic arcade of stores and cafes and rows of sweeping high rise apartment buildings. An outdoor screen flashes scenes from current Soviet films. The street is full of traffic, including many new Soviet “Zhiguli” automobiles, and the stores and cafes are crowded with patrons.

Kallinin Prospekt is a model of what the Soviet leaders would like their country to be. Modem and striking, it conveys a picture of progress and economic success.

In spite of this, the centrally located street feels utterly different from any Western grand avenue. The buildings are modem but uniform. The crowds are unfailingly orderly but lack spontaneity, for which something from above seems to have been substituted. Ubiquitous doormen enforce long waits in the cold while places go begging in restaurants upstairs. Newsstands are well stocked, but only with communist publications. Above the street, a Soviet model plane circles an illuminated globe advertising international air tickets that passers-by cannot buy.

The Soviet Union at 60, in many ways, bears comparison with its would-be representative street. It shows great achievement but also an atmosphere of unreality, as the society seeks to deny the coercion which helped to build it.

Without attempting to evaluate what it means in terms of efficiency or quality for Soviet industrial output to have increased 145 times since the Revolution, or for national income to have increased 68 times, there can be little doubt that the Soviet economic achievement was extraordinary. The 60th anniversary calls to mind that in the 12 years between 1928 and 1940 the Soviet Union, internationally isolated and operating on economic principles that were completely untested, transformed itself from a predominantly rural, peasant country into a formidable industrial power with the help of neither significant foreign investment nor sizeable external trade.

Terrible Cost

This Soviet achievement, however, came at a terrible cost. The new society was created by violence directed at existing classes and institutions. The effects of that violence, which reached its culmination during the Stalin period, are still perceptible in Soviet life today.

The Soviet Union now accounts for one-fifth of the world’s industrial output, boasts a vast, technologically sophisticated military, establishment which allows it to compete for power and influence in every corner of the globe, directs the world’s only ongoing manned space mission programme, and has successfully developed such modern forms of transport as the TU-144 supersonic airliner and the 125-mile-an-hour ER-200 high speed train.

The system capable of organising dramatic achievements, however, has such power over the individual that few persons dare do anything to challenge it directly. The Soviet citizen needs the approval of the Committee for State Security (KGB)—which supplements its information with the results of massive eavesdropping—and opening of mail—to travel abroad, to get a desirable job or to qualify for a promotion. At the same time, evidence of “negative political tendencies” can lead to immediate sacking or being hounded from job to job. It can prejudice attempts to get an apartment.

“Those who were frightened by Stalin,” said a Jewish activist whose parents were Stalinist purge victims, “have been frightened to the end of their lives.” The younger generation have less of this primordial fear but do not “tease the goose” lest they tip an invisible political balance and endlessly complicate their lives.

The Soviet Union was the first revolutionary Socialist state and the sight of red flags flying legally from the tops of official government buildings still lends to one’s impressions of Moscow a disquieting sense of having stepped into another world. The Revolution did not realise a philosophic ideal of justice and freedom and much of the unreal atmosphere in the Soviet Union lies in the fact that all Soviet propaganda is based on the notion that it did. In fact, the Politburo or Communist Party Central Committee, meeting in secret, set policies which the people as a whole, who have no voice in the matter, unanimously resolve to “carry into life.”

The eeriness of the situation is striking, but it must be balanced against the regime’s positive aspects. The economic and technical progress in the Soviet Union also brought the creation of a comprehensive welfare state. Since the 1930s, the Soviet Union has guaranteed full employment as well as paid holidays and an assured pension at 60 (55 for women). Housing is subsidised so rents are nominal, and education and medical care are free. There is claimed to be total literacy today in a country where 60 years ago only one in four could read, and the infant mortality rate has fallen from 269 deaths per thousand in 1913 to 26 deaths per thousand today. Average life expectancy has risen from 32 years to more than 70.

The Paradox

The Soviets set out to create both a new society and a “new man.” Although they created a new socialist society, the goal of the new man—strong, unselfish, and disdainful of personal power when confronted with the needs of the community—continues to elude them. Unfortunately in the Soviet case, the goals were complementary. Without the new man to oversee it, the purity of the new socialist society was itself in danger.

In the Soviet Union today, government control of the economy and the interpretation of a guaranteed job as the basis of social and political participation create a sense of security but also lend to political life much of the inherent authoritarianism and control of the work place. At political meetings and lectures in offices and factories, people learn to agree ritually to the party policy being explained, although they may not agree with a word of it. The economic consequences of objecting or even appearing indifferent are not worth the risk.

The system maintains itself by controlling the flow of information. Foreign radio broadcasts are no longer being jammed, but there are no foreign newspapers on sale in Moscow except in foreigners’ hotels and at the airport. In spite of the Soviet claim to be the best-read nation, works of serious literature, including the Russian classics, are in chronically short supply, as are valuable statistical yearbooks. The result of these restrictions and the omnipresence of deadening consistent official propaganda is mass confusion. There is widespread dissatisfaction in the Soviet Union, but few are able to articulate what is on their minds.

The 60th anniversary inevitably prompts comparisons, and in many ways the situation in the Soviet Union—economically, socially, politically—is better than it has ever been. The Stalinist Terror appears to be a thing of the past, and people’s standard of living improves year by year, but the cautious statement of Mr. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, in his report last week on the 60th anniversary, that “we have stood our ground and won” is indicative of the fact that the Soviet Union, which once saw itself as the embodiment of historical dynamism, is slowing down.

The Soviet leadership of the revolutionary State has become a gerontocracy, or rule by the elderly. The majority of the ruling Politburo are 70, or close to it, and they have passed up several opportunities to promote younger men. Only five Politburo members have been dropped since the Brezhnev-Kosygin leadership took over in 1964 and only one of these, former President Nikolai Podgorny, was a central figure. The stability of the Soviet leadership is reflected in the Communist Party Central Committee, where 90 per cent of the full Central Committee members elected at the 25th Party Congress in 1975 were re-elected to posts they held at the 24th Party Congress in 1971—a sharp contrast to the heavy turnover under Khrushchev and Stalin.

More Trade

At the same time, the years of spectacular economic growth appear to be over. In 1976, the growth of Soviet industrial output was less than a third of what it had been in 1951. The increase in productivity of labour, a crucial index for the Soviet Union’s future economic health, was also last year less than a third of the 1951 increase. Soviet foreign trade, however, has greatly expanded. Soviet trade with the West has more than doubled in the past six years, and Soviet foreign trade as a whole has increased almost tenfold in the past 20 years. The Soviet Union is no longer isolated from the world economy or insulated from its problems. The result is a relationship of interdependence with the capitalists which the early communists sought to minimise.

Under these circumstances, the Soviet Union does not have and apparently does not want the revolutionary’s disdain for convention and his relative freedom of action. The Soviet Union at 60 appears to prefer international respectability and recognition of its place as one of the world’s two great superpowers under circumstances in which neither the coercion of Communist Party rule, nor the post-millennial enthusiasm which conceals it, is called into question.

The two clearest threats to the Soviets in this regard are the Eurocommunists and the dissidents. At last week’s two day celebration meeting marking the 60th anniversary, the most important note of discord was heard over the issue of Eurocommunism, which promises Communism in a pluralist political society. The task of consolidating the Soviet regime and Soviet international influence among communists and non-communists alike will be greatly complicated by any successful Western European example of a Marxist government operating in conditions of political and intellectual freedom.

The Soviet international position, and particularly the relationship with the U.S., could be jeopardised by the dissidents. The West has shown a predilection to press the Soviet Union to adhere to its international and human rights commitments, and the dissidents, by basing their activities, as they have in recent years, on explicit Soviet undertakings, are always in the position of having a potential external ally.

The Soviets enjoy birthdays, and the prospectis of regular celebrations of the events of the October Revolution at least every decade. As the Revolution fades into history, the Soviet Union will remain a superpower on the basis of its formidable strength. It is hard to escape the impression, however, that the retelling of the events of October and the glorification of Lenin, such as have taken place in the week preceding today’s anniversary, will not of themselves continue to inspire other peoples to follow the Soviet example unless the Russians can reverse the trend towards rigidification and embourgeoisement and—politically, economically, and ideologically—begin to offer the world something new.

Financial Times, Thursday, November 24, 1977

Smoking in the Soviet Union

A Burning Issue

Hypnosis is being used to combat the smoking habit in the Russian actors’ sanatorium at Sochi, the resort which is the centre of the Soviet antismoking campaign.

Instructions calculated to induce a trance and accompanied by organ music or the sound of birds chirping are transmitted to receivers in the pillows of those taking the cure upstairs. The instructions are followed by a carefully phrased antismoking message, the last sound the actor hears before falling asleep.

The method is only one of the sophisticated means being employed in Russia to get people to give up smoking. Although tobacco production is scheduled to rise 16 per cent in the 1976–80 five year plan, the countervailing efforts to discourage the habit are considerable, and growing.

Smoking is banned on all international Aeroflot flights of less than five hours, in dining cars, sports stadiums, swimming pools, ticket offices and—with difficulty—in many cafes. Moscow recently banned smoking at tables in the city’s 120 restaurants, allowing it only in restrooms and special foyers.

Russia is the world’s fourth largest tobacco grower, after the U.S., China and India, with total production in 1976 of 264,000 tonnes of raw tobacco, 218 bn. cigarettes and 1.57 bn. “Papirosi,” potent cigarettes which consist of a two-inch holder made of rolled paper and an inch of chewing quality tobacco. Demand for tobacco products is high and last year Russia supplemented domestic production by importing 74,000 tonnes of raw tobacco and about 53 bn. cigarettes, mostly from Bulgaria.

Sochi has undertaken a coordinated drive against the habit. City officials report a 25 per cent drop in cigarette sales and no decline in tourism. The Sochi anti-smoking effort is largely a characteristic of the “city of health” but it could presage wider efforts against smoking in the country as a whole.

Cautionary placards at the station and airport greet visitors to Sochi who are also met with anti-smoking propaganda in the sanatoria and rest homes where many spend their holidays. On arrival in the sanatoria, they’re asked whether they want to give up smoking. Those who try, inspired by the aura of good health and clean living, either do so unaided or with the help of medicines that help over withdrawal by imitating the effects of nicotine.

The treatment in the Sanatoria is largely psychological. Doctors discuss the harmful effects of smoking with those who want to stop the habit and there are discussion groups. Those who succeed are given a certificate congratulating them on their willpower and doctors at the sanatorium write to them to avoid a relapse.

In Sochi omnipresent posters proclaim that “work, rest and medical treatment are incompatible with smoking.” The campaign is supported by articles in the newspapers and programmes on radio and television. Smoking is banned in cinemas, hotels and public buildings, including the Sochi town hall. Kiosks that sell cigarettes also display antismoking literature.

This total approach to combatting smoking works well in a resort where the healthful atmosphere, nearby mineral springs, and the break in the work routine, encourage people to try to stop. An estimated 200,000 persons a year are now giving up smoking in Sochi, though only 10,000 succeed for good.

Other towns could follow the example. Exhortatory public propaganda is almost as common in Russia as advertising is in the West, so a national antismoking campaign would be both feasible and in character. The Soviet Health Ministry is concerned about the increase of smoking in the country, and particularly, the use of tobacco by schoolchildren. Literatarnaya Gazeta, the writers’ union weekly, has called for health warnings on cigarette packages, a ban on cigarette sales in grocery shops and from newsstands, and the elimination of inducements to smoke such as scenes of cinema stars smoking.

Oddly, the campaign has apparently met bureaucratic obstacles from ministries responsible for growing tobacco and making cigarettes. Per capita cigarette consumption by persons over 18 in 1974 was estimated to be only 60 per cent of that in the U.S., a tribute perhaps to Russia’s lack of cigarette advertisements, but consumption is rising and tobacco production is a 4 bn. rouble a year industry. According to Literaturnaya Gazeta, trade officials recently opposed the proposed inclusion of a health wanting in each cigarette packet and the Ministry of Light Industry, which oversees 54 tobacco factories, and the Ministry of Agriculture, which oversees 189,000 hectares of tobacco crops, are other potential sources of opposition to stringent anti-smoking measures.

More than 20 brands of cigarettes are on sale in Moscow and many more in the national republics. The most popular appear to be Yavaplain and Stolichnaya filter cigarettes at 30 Kopecks (about 33 pence) for 20. The Apollo-Soyuz brand, commemorating the joint U.S.–Soviet space flight, also appears popular, probably because of its American association and the American tobacco of which it is made, but is hard to get.

Cigarettes imported from the West are only sold to foreigners for hard currency.

The potent papirosi, production of which is to be cut one third by 1980, sell for 22 Kopeks for 250. There have been efforts to create tobacco substitutes but after unsuccessful attempts to make something smokable out of such substances as cellulose, sawdust, cabbage leaves, beetroot, dandelion leaves and pollen, the tobacco industry has given up. Scientists in Kiev, however, have designed a special cigarette holder which may go into wider use. It contains pills made of baked metal powder which act as a filter and are said to retain up to 75 per cent of the most harmful components of cigarette smoke drawn through the holder.

Financial Times, Friday, November 25, 1977

The Soviet strategy on dissidents

From Russia Without Love

While the debate in Belgrade has been going on about Soviet human rights abuses, the Soviet authorities have continued to pursue a strategy intended to make dissent a largely academic issue.

During the course of this year, a wave of arrests and many approvals of requests to emigrate have succeeded in so depleting the dissident ranks that they appear to be greatly weakened for the foreseeable future.

Twelve members of citizens’ groups which sought to monitor Soviet observance of the 1975 Helsinki agreements have been arrested or sentenced since February of this year. In Moscow, those arrested were Dr. Yuri Orlov, the leader of the Moscow-based group, and members Alexander Ginzburg and Anatoly Shcharansky, who faces treason charges. A fourth member, Malva Landa, was sentenced to two years exile in the Soviet Far East for negligence in connection with a fire in her apartment last December.

In the Ukraine; there have been four arrests of members of the Ukrainian-Helsinki group including Mr. Mikola Rudenko, the group leader, and Mr. Olexy Tikhy, who were convicted in July of anti-Soviet agitation. The only Helsinki group members so far convicted on political charges.

Mr. Rudenko, a Ukrainian poet and war invalid, was sentenced to seven years hard labour and five years exile. Mr. Tikhy was sentenced to ten years hard labour and five years exile. There have also been three arrests of Georgian Helsinki group members. And in Lithuania; Viktorus Petkus, head of the Lithuanian Helsinki group, was arrested this summer.

Manv dissidents have been induced to emigrate. Gen. Pyotr Grigorenko leaves next week on a six month visa for medical treatment in the U.S. Gen. Grigorenko insists that he will come back to the Soviet Union and said he regards the granting of the visa as “a humanitarian act.” Once in the U.S. he may be stripped of his citizenship and refused permission to return.

The departure of Gen. Grigorenko, Moscow’s best-known dissident after Dr. Andrei Sakharov, will follow the recent emigration of Dr. Valentin Turchin, leader of the Soviet branch of Amnesty International, who accepted an offer to leave after being unable to find work for three and a half years, and the emigration of Tatyana Khodorovich, the last remaining director of a fund to aid political prisoners, who decided to leave after being threatened with criminal charges.

Other dissidents who have emigrated in recent months include Lyudmilla Alexeeva and Yuri Mnyukh, both former members of the Moscow based Helsinki group, and Kronid Lubarsky, an astronomer who helped Mrs. Khodorovich manage the fund to aid political prisoners.

The Soviet dissident movement appeared in its present form in the late 1960s and has suffered repeated repressions since then. But never before has it lost so many of its key personalities in such a short time. Dr. Sakharov is now almost the only major dissident still active in Moscow and the absence of other well-known personalities such as Dr. Orlov, Mr. Ginzburg, and in a few days, Gen. Grigorenko, removes men whose wide contacts made them invaluable sources of information about human rights abuses throughout the Soviet Union.

The tactics being used against the dissidents are sometimes brutal. But, as a rule the KGB attempts to suppress dissent with a minimum of violence. This can be done by arresting some people, allowing many others to emigrate and making the choice between emigration and arrest almost a matter of whim. Dissidents speak of the “black box” which contains their fate. It is impossible to say with certainty, for example, why Anatoly Shcharansky was arrested and faces treason charges while Dr. Turchin, who succeeded him as the principal dissident spokesman, was allowed to emigrate to the U.S. The inability of the individual to predict the reactions of the KGB, predisposes him toward restraint.

The disorganised state of the dissident movement today comes as a particular irony since it was the 1975 Helsinki agreements with their clear pledges to respect human rights and facilitate the free flow of information which last year gave the movement new life. The Soviet Union is anxious to sign human rights commitments in keeping with its world stature but, for internal reasons, reluctant to honour them. The dissident Helsinki monitoring group, which was founded by veteran dissidents last year, for the first time managed to unite all the principal strands of Soviet dissent—the democratic movement, the Jewish emigration movement, the religious rights movement—into an organisation dedicated to taking the Soviet Union at its liberal word. From the Soviet point of view, the group probably had to be repressed to ward off independent pressure on the Soviet Government to honour its international commitments emanating from within the country.

The dissident, movement may enter a period of relative inactivity in the months ahead. The Helsinki group in Moscow it still functioning but has only four members and there is widespread apprehension about the expected trials of Dr. Orlov, Mr. Ginzburg and Mr. Shcharansky.

The forces which produce new dissidents, however, continue to operate. Sergei Polikanov, a nuclear physicist and corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences held a Press conference recently to protest the refusal of the authorities to allow his family to accompany him for a year of research at a nuclear laboratory in Geneva. By speaking out against the kind of harassment to which almost all Soviet scientists are subjected, Professor Polikanov put his career at risk and took the first step toward one day joining the ranks of those active dissidents whose numbers in Moscow are so depleted now.

Financial Times, Thursday, December 8, 1977

Soviet intellectuals are not the only ones being hounded

Trials of the Workers

“We are a vast army of Soviet unemployed, thrown out of the gates of Soviet enterprises for attempting to exercise the right to complain, the right to criticise, the right to freedom of speech.”

So begins an open letter by 72 working people from 42 cities who lost their jobs for protesting against bad working conditions and corruption. The letter and the testimony of several representatives of the group in Moscow cast doubt on the view that, although ideological criticism is barred in the Soviet Union, it is possible for the individual worker to voice objections to specific industrial practices.

“We undertook to offer publicly,” the open letter said, “critical remarks against the plundering of socialist property, bad conditions of work, low pay, high injury rates, the raising of production norms leading to waste and low quality production.”

Seven representatives of the signatories recently met with foreign correspondents in an apartment in a new district on the outskirts of Moscow where they described their personal experiences. They insisted they are not “dissidents” but rather working people concerned to correct specific injustices. They supplemented their personal stories with documentation of other cases and copies of appeals to State and party organisations, as well as a second letter, protesting recent repression against complainants, addressed to the Soviet Press.

The working people at the Moscow meeting said the 72 signatories met each other while seeking hearings for their individual complaints in the reception hall of the Soviet Procurator, the Communist Party central committee, and the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Parliament. These halls are the scenes of considerable tension because, according to the letter to the Soviet Press, “it is difficult to foresee in advance who among those waiting will be seized” and taken to the militia station, or for a “conversation” with the admitting doctor at a mental hospital.

The workers said they began to organise their efforts after discussion in the crowded halls convinced those present that their similar individual problems had more than a “private character.” The following cases, related to correspondents by workers present at the recent meeting and taken from the documents the workers’ group provided, cannot be verified under Soviet conditions. The signers, however, took a considerable risk by making them public and insist they are representative of the fate of thousands of individuals in the USSR who openly challenge industrial abuses.

Vladimir Klebanov (45), of Makeevka in the Donetsk industrial district, told correspondents that he worked in the Bazhanova coal mine for 16 years. He became concerned about excessive overtime at plan fulfilment time which frequently meant that men worked 12 hours a day instead of the standard six-hour coal miner’s shift, contributing to between 12 and 15 deaths and 700 injuries a year, which, he said, was considered “normal.”

Mr. Klebanov said that in 1968, after he became a shift foreman, he refused to require overtime of his men or to send them into the mine when safety equipment was missing or broken. He was charged with slandering the State and committed to a mental hospital.

Mr. Klebanov is the leader and principal organiser of the “worker-dissidents” and the documents he and others distributed at the meeting described industrial abuses that, in the West, would have been combated by a labour union.

These included the cases of Natalia Matyusheva, who worked as a hostess in a pension in Gorki and was sacked for “truancy” after protesting publicly about the death of a motorist which she said was the fault of the resort doctor, and Maria Melenteva, who lost her job for seeking a pension after 27 years of arduous labour.

Soviet unions exist on a per industry basis but they are run by the Communist Party which arranges the appointment or election of officials. These officials arrange special services such as paid holidays, but also aid management in meeting production quotas and maintaining discipline. The victims of industrial abuses appear to have no recourse.

Anatoli Poznyakov (39), worked as a locksmith for Roubles 75 (£58) a month. He told correspondents at the meeting that when he asked for a rise, he was insulted and after appealing to the local party organisation, told that his destiny in life was “to eat from a pig’s trough.” Further appeals led to his dismissal and he now lives on a semi-disability pension of Roubles 21 a month (he is an epileptic) and his mother’s pension of Roubles 45 a month.

Nedzhda Kurakin told correspondents she had worked for 25 years in a “closed restaurant in Volgograd.” She said restaurant managers were docking her pay and that of other waitresses for fictitious broken crockery and then ordering new crockery for themselves. In 1975, she made these charges at a party meeting and was fired for shirking. She said the Volgograd party leader she had known for 20 years refused to see her and she has been unable to find a job since.

Many of the industrial grievances described to correspondents or mentioned in the documents, like that of Mrs. Kurakin, concerned cases of organised corruption or theft, known to be serious and a growing problem for Soviet industry. Even in such cases, however, the response of Soviet institutions, including legal institutions, appeared to be instinctive support for existing authority.

Valentin Poplavsky (44), formerly head of the maintenance department for company housing at a factory in Klimovsk outside Moscow, said he was sacked after refusing to write a reprimand into the work record of a woman who protested about the use of company funds for drinking parties. To silence his vehement protests against the firing, he said the militia, acting on his ex-director’s instructions, entered his apartment and beat him in front of his wife, children, and 97-year-old father. When he tried to file a complaint at the prosecutor’s office, he was given a 15-day jail sentence and shortly afterward, his wife was fired from the job she held for 18 years.

The worker dissidents said in their open letter that they do not have philosophical objections to the Soviet system but simply wants its constitutional guarantees, such as the right to lodge complaints and the right to protection by the courts, to be honoured in practice.

Financial Times, Friday, May 19, 1978

Yuri Orlov’s Trial

The Price of Calling the Helsinki Bluff

The crowd outside the courtroom where Dr Yuri Orlov1 was being tried provided an uneasy audience for an animated debate between a dissident and a clean cut young man who was defending the Soviet system.

The argument ranged over the material situation of Soviet citizens and conflicting claims about freedom in the Soviet Union, and finally came down to the question of why close friends of Dr. Orlov were being barred from his trial.

“Who said that you are barred from the trial?” said the clean-cut young man. “I’ll go over there and get in now,” he added and began striding purposefully toward the iron barricades and crowd of militia men barring the entrance to the courtroom.

At the barricade, he was overheard by a Western correspondent to ask the police “what do I tell them? They want to know why they can’t get into the court.” One of the police, apparently taken aback by his co-worker’s stupidity, told him, “Tell them the hall is full.”

That was how it was during the four-day vigil on the sidewalk outside the “open” trial of Dr. Orlov. The testimony came from prosecution witnesses; the audience, with the exception of Dr. Orlov’s wife, Irina, came from the ranks of the country’s “enthusiasts”; and the honest workers who mingled menacingly with dissidents and journalists were provided by the police.

At the weary Press conference with Mrs. Orlova following the announcement of the sentence, Mr. Vladimir Slepak, a Helsinki group member who has been trying to emigrate to Israel for nine years, said: “All this was a play and all the sentence and everything was decided before the trial and what happened in the court had no influence on the sentence or the case.”

In retrospect, it now appears that not just the trial of Dr. Orlov but the Helsinki agreements themselves were a kind of play in which the Soviet authorities pretended that an ideological system imposed through force could honour solemn human rights commitments without undermining its own existence, and the Western signatories pretended to believe them.

At least 18 people connected with Helsinki agreement monitoring groups have now either been arrested or sentenced in various parts of the Soviet Union. Although attention has focused on Dr. Orlov, Alexander Ginzburg, and Anatoly Shcharansky, who were the founders and key members of the Moscow group, four members of an affiliated group in the Ukraine, including the Ukrainian poet Mikola Rudenko, have already been convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and received maximum sentences.

Dr. Orlov was in many respects well qualified to organise a dissident committee which sought to exert pressure on the authorities to translate public Soviet international commitments into genuine rights for Soviet citizens. A member of the Communist Party until his expulsion in 1956 for going too far at a party meeting in criticising the practices of the Stalin era, he moved to Armenia where he was able to find work as a physicist and in time became a corresponding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences.

A specialist in high energy particle accelerators, Dr. Orlov returned to Moscow in 1972 and began work at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism and Propagation of Radio Waves but was fired after sending a letter in 1973 to Mr. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet President, in which he called for democratic reforms and connected the question with the campaign against Academician Andreo Sakharov.

Dr. Orlov became a member of the Soviet chapter of Amnesty International and in May 1976 founded the Helsinki monitoring group which for the first time drew together all the strands of Soviet dissent—the democratic movement, the Jewish emigration movement, and the religious rights movement—into a single organisation based on explicit Soviet acceptance of an international agreement.

In a country without a free Press, the Helsinki group quickly established itself as the best—and in many instances, the only—means of verifying whether Soviet pledges to honour freedom of religion and the right to emigrate, and to allow reunification of families, were being honoured in practice. The group demonstrated an ability to gather accurate, factual information on the Soviet human rights situation from sources all over the country.

Although Dr. Orlov’s trial was a trial of the Helsinki monitoring committee, the word “Helsinki” was never mentioned. The parade of prosecution witnesses—who apparently in the eyes of the authorities made defence witnesses unnecessary—demonstrated in their glowing encomia to Soviet power the kind of impartiality the West can expect if the Soviet Government is left to evaluate its Helsinki fulfilment record completely on its own.

The challenge to the Western signatories of the Helsinki agreement implicit in the trial of Dr. Orlov has been clearly laid down. The Soviet Union is not going to allow anyone to challenge the disparity between what it promises in international forums in order to appear respectable and what it will tolerate for fear of losing control. It is now up to the Western powers to decide how to react.

1 Dr. Orlov, the leader of the Helsinki monitoring group was on trial for “anti-soviet agitation.” He was arrested in February, 1977.

Financial Times, Thursday, July 27, 1978

Soviet dissent after the trials

Shaken, but Ready to Rise Again

With sentencing of Dr. Yuri Orlov, Alexander Ginzburg and Anatoly Shcharansky, an uneasy sense of ideological calm has settled over Moscow. The Soviet authorities’ bid to destroy the groups set up to monitor the 1975 Helsinki accords has shaken the dissident movement, which never, in any case, contained more than a few hundred activists, and it will need time to reorganise.

However, it is virtually certain that the authorities’ attempt to crush dissent through long prison and exile sentences, but without full recourse to Stalin’s bloody methods, will fail.

With each wave of arrests and trials since the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in 1966, the end of the dissidents has been predicted. On each occasion, they have resurfaced with renewed energy.

The resilience of Soviet dissent lies in the facts that it is both an inevitable response to the complete lack of individual political rights, and a specific subculture which, because its members have chosen to join it fully aware of the risks they run, is ineradicable under present circumstances.

The Soviet Union, although more tolerant than it was in Stalin’s time, employs intensive police surveillance, ubiquitous informers, eavesdropping and letter opening. The Soviet citizen has in practice no right to free speech or assembly, no ability to form independent organisations or to publish opposing opinions. As the trials of the dissidents demonstrated, there is no guarantee of due process of law.

The dissident movement has various elements—democratic dissidents, nationalists, the religious rights movement, Jews seeking to emigrate—but in general consists of people who have dedicated themselves to working for the creation of reliable political rights as the only means through which their other goals can be effectively realised.

The dissidents are self-selected. They know their activities will end their careers and could mean that they go to prison. The need to be prepared to accept the grim consequences is why the dissident movement is so small numerically, but also so wide in influence (almost everyone in the Soviet Union is aware of it) and so difficult to suppress. Any dissident gathering is peopled by those who have been to the labour camps or are soon to go, and they are hard to intimidate.

The present campaign against dissent, which is only the latest of a series dating from the late 1960s, began with the seizure of Alexander Ginzburg in February 1977 outside a pay telephone booth near his wife’s apartment. It grew out of a basic feature of Soviet life, the Soviet desire to make solemn international human rights commitments without loosening the State’s total control.

The Soviet authorities signed the Helsinki accords aware that they could not honour them. With their formation of the Helsinki agreement monitoring group in May 1976, the dissidents accepted the implicit challenge to hold the authorities to their word.

The arrest of more than 20 members of “Helsinki” groups in Moscow, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia, and Armenia in the last year and a half and the sentencing of 16 of them has deprived the movement of its most effective leaders but has far from destroyed it.

On July 16, the day after Anatoly Shcharansky was sentenced, remaining Moscow dissidents crowded into the apartment of Dr. Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, to reiterate their determination and announce the appointment of a new member of the Moscow-based Helsinki Group, Professor Sergei Polikanoff, a nuclear physicist and corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Professor Polikanoff said he was joining the group in light of recent “significant losses” and would contribute to its work in any way he could.

The disparity between the freedoms the Government professes to guarantee and those it actually grants is typical of the Soviet Union. The authorities make human rights commitments because they want to attribute the apparent unanimity of Soviet society to Marxist development rather than to the absence of freedom. Unanimity in the Soviet Union, exemplified perhaps in the Supreme Soviet, which may be the world’s only parliament never to have voted no, is always held to be voluntary.

Soviet authorities may thus ignore ostensible rights and freedoms but can never disavow them. When two dissidents went to the Moscow City Council last year to say that they planned to hold a demonstration in Pushkin Square to mark United Nations Human Rights Day, they were not told that such a demonstration would he illegal, but merely advised that if hooligans from nearby cafes decided to beat them up, it would be exclusively their fault.

The atmosphere of unreality which this situation creates is part of the life here and limits the extent to which the dissidents, who always attempt to take human rights commitments literally, can pressure the authorities to honour the rights the authorities have themselves promulgated.

When, however, the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki agreements in which it derived tangible benefits such as Western agreement to the European territorial status quo in exchange for specific Soviet undertaking on human rights, the situation changed. If the West was serious about compliance, the Western powers would need information about Soviet violations which only the dissidents could supply and, for the first time, the dissidents would have a directly concerned external ally.

The crackdown on dissent, which has been unprecedentedly thorough has often been depicted as a response to President Carter’s human rights campaign. In fact, the interrogations and searches which are normal preparations for arrest, began before President Carter assumed office and the authorities would have almost certainly acted to suppress the Helsinki group regardless of who had been in the White House.

The Soviet Union was born of a successful conspiracy and perhaps acting out of unconscious memory, the authorities immediately suppress any form of independent organisation. This is in no way surprising. The Communist Party’s dominance of all organisational life—political, religious or cultural—means there is a social vacuum in the Soviet Union which would immediately draw in a wide range of discontented elements were it allowed to be utilised.

The Helsinki group, in the eight months during which it operated freely, established a network of contacts all over the country, and began receiving an enormous volume of mail. If allowed to exist, it could have become an institutionalised internal opposition with wide sources of information and important foreign contacts.

President Carter’s human rights campaign far from inspiring the arrests, may actually have helped the dissidents in the long run, by emphasising to the Soviet leader the continuing outside interest in the dissidents’ fate.

The international reaction to persecution of dissidents for attempting to exercise rights officially endorsed by the Soviet Government and generally acknowledged to be basic to human dignity, sets limits on Soviet behaviour the system would never generate itself. There will be no protest demonstrations in Red Square if Dr. Sakharov is arrested but the Soviet authorities must consider what would happen outside the country and to the Soviet Union’s prestige.

Part of the reason the Soviet Union signs international human rights agreements in the first place is because it wants international respectability. The Soviets will probably continue to sign such documents if, for no other reason, out of a reluctance to disqualify themselves as suitable signatories.

What the Soviet authorities may not fully realise is that the rest of the world, which does not accept the Soviet definition of the individual as without political rights before the State, will probably continue to react. The continuance of mendacious political trials backed by the full authority of the Soviet State is likely, therefore, to be a source of tension between Russia and the West for years to come.

It may be hoped, however, that, the dissidents’ selfless activities—so apparently fruitless—may over time and with the help of this Western reaction be a source of pressure on the Soviet Union to become less closed and rigid.

International Conference Trento, Friday/Saturday, December 6–7, 2002

Soviet Dissent and the Cold War

During the Cold War, the secret that the Soviet Union sought to hide from the West was its fundamentally ideological character. Although the Soviet system was animated by the drive to change human nature and remake reality, the Soviet Union depicted itself as a democracy that differed from Western democracies only in the population’s extraordinary degree of unanimity.

The Soviet Union boasted an array of supposedly democratic institutions—trade unions, courts, a parliament and a press. Faced with this democratic façade, it was often easiest for Western representatives to treat the Soviet Union, if not as a democracy, then at least as a country whose motives were those of any great power. The ideological underpinning of the Soviet state was frequently ignored.

In this context, the Soviet dissidents were important because they spoiled the mirage of voluntary unanimity that the Soviet regime took pains to construct. Because of their dedication and bravery (and the repression that their courage inspired), the democratic façade of the Soviet Union was discredited and the ideological nature of the East-West confrontation because impossible to conceal.

The Soviet dissident movement during the Cold War had an important effect on both the Soviet Union and the West.

In the case of the West, the dissident movement acted to push Western societies toward attention to first principles, even unwillingly.

The first effect of the dissident movement was its impact on Western public opinion. The emergence of protest within the Soviet Union demonstrated to many in the West that the surface calm of Soviet society was misleading. Soviet leaders continued to speak about the "total political and ideological unity of the Soviet people" but due to the activities of the dissidents, this claim became increasingly hollow.

First, the dissidents revealed the mechanism of political repression in the Soviet Union. They did this by speaking openly, in that way, refusing to play the roles assigned to them as Soviet citizens in the nationwide political play. This defiance led to arrests that were publicized by other dissidents who were arrested in turn. As the number of arrests grew, more information became available and other dissidents compiled and made public accounts of the system of labour camps and psychiatric hospitals that was used to enforce political conformity. It became undeniable that element holding the system together was fear.

At the same time, the dissidents, by gathering and circulating information, identified the hidden fault lines in Soviet society, calling attention to the plight of persecuted groups—Uniates, Pentecostalists, Jews and Germans seeking to emigrate, nationalists, worker-activists and others—whose situation had been little noticed or poorly understood.

The dissidents also wrote and helped to produce and circulate works of analysis and literature that constituted a free culture. These works, when they became available in the West, discredited the Soviet "experiment" in ways that works written by those outside the society rarely could.

The effect of the dissidents’ activities was to establish a source of truthful information independent and, in some cases, competing for attention in the West with the disinformation apparatus of the Soviet state. This proved highly important. The dissidents were not able to give the West a complete understanding of the character of the Soviet system but they provided enough information to raise doubts about the Soviet Union’s intentions.

By affecting Western public opinion, the Soviet dissident movement, in turn, had an impact on the policies of Western governments. There were those in Western governments who would have preferred to deal with the Soviet Union “pragmatically,” concentrating on what they imagined to be “mutual interests.” But, in many Western countries, the repression of the dissidents had aroused public opinion and made such policies politically impossible. With the expansion of detente era measures advantageous to the Soviet Union, e.g. trade, scientific exchanges and arms control treaties, all of which presumed a degree of trust, there began to be calls in the West for accompanying steps to make the Soviet Union more open and to protect human rights. This led to such measures as the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the U.S. Trade Act and the 1975 Helsinki Agreements which, in exchange for Western acquiescence in the European territorial status quo, committed the Soviet Union to respect human rights and facilitate the free exchange of information. The emotions inspired by the struggle of the Soviet dissidents also helped to motivate the human rights campaign that was initiated under President Carter and represented the first attempt at an ideological counter offensive directed against the moral vulnerability of the Soviet Union.

Because the dissidents had an effect on Western public opinion and the policies of Western governments, they also influenced the policies of the Soviet government. The Soviet authorities could have crushed the dissident movement overnight but behind the dissidents stood the West and it was this that gave the Soviet dissidents their strength.

The first way in which the dissidents influenced the Soviet government was by forcing it to grant limited freedom of written expression. In 1965, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were sentenced to long labour camp sentences for publishing their works abroad. The international reaction to the case, however, did serious damage to the image of the Soviet Union. Sinyavsky and Daniel served out their labour camp terms but the Soviet Union never again imprisoned a writer for his writing. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was forcibly exiled and Vladimir Voinovich, Vasily Aksyonov, and Georgy Vladimov emigrated under pressure. But in the meantime they and other writers were able to create the non-communist Russian literature that helped to sustain the cultural and moral values of more than one generation of Soviet citizens.

The activities of dissidents also compelled the Soviet authorities, for the first time, to allow mass emigration from the Soviet Union. Before the 1970s, it was virtually impossible to leave the Soviet Union legally. With the birth of the Jewish emigration movement, however, the Soviet authorities faced a choice between allowing Jews to emigrate or accepting the political cost of repression. The decision was made to allow Jews to emigrate under a formula—that they were returning to their “historic homeland”—that opened emigration for Soviet Germans as well.

Finally, the dissidents influenced the government’s policies in the treatment of dissenters themselves. Yuri Galanskov, one of the earliest dissidents, died in a Soviet labour camp but for many years afterward, despite extremely harsh treatment, the Soviet authorities tried to keep well known dissidents alive. They also spaced out the arrests of prominent dissidents, allowing many of them to continue their activities, declined to arrest Sakharov (although he was exiled) and allowed some dissidents to emigrate. As a result, dissent became a somewhat more viable option for Soviet citizens.

The concessions that the Soviet dissidents were able to force from the authorities wrought important changes in Soviet society.

In the first place, Moscow, and, to a degree, Leningrad became centers of serious political discussion. The authorities did not want mass arrests in the capital that would, on the one hand, embarrass them internationally, and, on the other, create new dissidents so they behaved with tolerance toward expressions of opinion as long as they did not take public form. The result of these tolerated conversations was that, when perestroika began, alternatives to the communist system had already been considered.

At the same time, the stream of free information that the dissidents provided (much of it broadcast back to the Soviet Union by the Western radio stations) helped to give moral orientation to a large part of the Soviet intelligentsia. By their example, the dissidents also demonstrated that resistance was possible. As a result, when the controls were drastically loosened in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, there were millions of people who were immediately ready to assume an active political role.

The story of the Soviet dissidents during the Cold War is the story of people whose power derived solely from the power of an idea. By refusing to participate in the obligatory ideological play in the Soviet Union, they became de facto the defenders of the values of civilization that the Soviet system had been organized to destroy.

It was sometimes argued in the West that the dissidents did not deserve the attention that they received in the Western media, that they were few in number and that they represented no one but themselves. This logic, which would have made sense in a democracy, was completely fallacious when applied to the Soviet Union where political strength derived from ideological subservience and opposition was inevitably, the opposition of an idea. The dissidents were powerful because the idea was powerful and, under totalitarian conditions, they found the strength to represent that idea.

Financial Times, Monday, September 11, 1978

Why Moscow Has Georgia on Its Mind

Whatever others may think of him, Stalin is far from discredited in his native Georgia. His portrait, carried—by street vendors, seen in shoe shine kiosks or glimpsed through labyrinthine courtyards on the walls of workers’ flats, lends a macabre touch to the life of this otherwise lush and sunny republic.

“Everyone makes mistakes,” as one Georgian woman put it.

There is a Stalin museum in Stalin’s birthplace, Gori, a modern town of 50,000 inhabitants set in a valley between green hills, as well as a statue of Stalin flanked by silver pine trees in front of the city hall.

In the centre of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, streams of traffic use the Stalin embankment and on a mountain 2,000 feet above the city, children enjoy rides at the Stalin amusement park.

All this, however, probably says more about the Soviet attitude towards Georgia than about any nostalgia for Stalin.

Georgia differs from Russia historically, temperamentally and culturally, and since Stalin has been regarded as a national hero by those poorer workers who were least affected by his purges, it is apparently deemed prudent to encourage a reverential attitude to him in an attempt to tie Georgian loyalties more firmly to the Soviet state.

Just how different Georgia is from the rest of the Soviet Union becomes clear walking down Rustavelli Street, Tbilisi’s main avenue. It is lined with French baroque style buildings and spreading trees, and feels more Latin than Russian.

Beyond Rustavelli Street, Tbilisi is a city of crumbling stone buildings with iron latticework balconies and terraced Caucasian one-storey cottages on the sides of hills. The mountains which characterise the republic are visible in the distance. Much of the old city centre is preserved and Tbilisi, unlike other Soviet cities, has distinct neighbourhoods.

The atmosphere on Rustavelli Street on a typical summer night is friendly and relaxed. But the street has also witnessed striking manifestations of Georgian nationalism, as on April 14, when the largest mass demonstration in more than 20 years took place to protest against an attempt to abolish Georgian as the republic’s official language. The demonstration showed that Georgia’s accommodation to the Soviet state is potentially uneasy and requires concessions to national feelings.

The draft text of the new Georgian constitution had been published and, unlike the constitution of 1937, it contained no reference to Georgian as the official language of the republic but only granted the right to use the native language or other languages of the USSR during the “discussion” period in factories and offices prior to the formal adoption of the document. But the usual unanimous approval was not forthcoming. Heated arguments broke out, especially in academic and scientific establishments. Petitions began to circulate.

As April 14, the day when the constitution was supposed to be adopted, approached, it became obvious that thousands of people were going to gather outside the Supreme Soviet building to demand the retention of Georgian as the official language and the authorities, perhaps sensing the costs of suppressing the demonstration, acted instead to infiltrate the demonstration and direct it away from anything overtly anti-Soviet toward the one goal of reinstating the Georgian language.

There were at least 5,000, and perhaps 10,000, persons on the street on that day, halting all traffic. The situation, however, remained under control. The only placards contained quotes from Georgian classics and lines from a Georgian children’s reader. The opening of the Supreme Soviet session was delayed and the demonstration ended when Eduard Shevarnadze, the Georgian communist leader, appeared before the demonstrators and told them Georgian would be retained as the official language.

Almost all communication in Georgia is in Georgian, so the proposed constitutional change would not have, had great practical effect. The local news programme is broadcast in Georgian seven times a week, in Russian only once. The Georgian language newspaper, Kommisti, has five times the circulation of Zarya Vostoka, its Russian counterpart. There are Georgian plays, books and an active film industry.

But the retention of Georgian as the Republic’s official language is of as much symbolic significance in 1978 as 56 years earlier, in 1922, when Lenin accepted it in a “historic compromise” as part of an effort to refute claims that the Bolsheviks would eradicate Georgian culture.

The crowded, winding streets, the markets piled high with fruits, vegetables and flowers and the modish dress of Georgian young people all provide reminders that Georgia has its own distinctive character and a history far pre-dating that of Russia.

This sense of history and an awareness of its ironies may contribute to the fact that normally there is an atmosphere of easy tolerance within Georgia. There are Jewish, Armenian and Azerbaijani residential sections near the old synagogue. The Armenians sometimes irritate their neighbours by packing the Tbilisi versus Yerevan soccer games and cheering for Yerevan. But there is little real hostility among its peoples.

The fact remains, however, that Georgia, with its flourishing agriculture, its history, language and culture, has all the attributes of an independent nation but exists only as a compartment of the Russian-dominated Soviet state.

The Soviet system offers a Marxist-Leninist substitute for most of the components of any traditional culture. Atheism is a substitute for traditional religion, dialectical materialism replaces national history and socialist ideology sets limits on cultural expression. That leaves language as the pre-eminent symbol of national identity.

The impossibility of changing the situation, and the Soviet skill in placating the Georgians with national symbols and timely concessions seem to have created a mood of resigned cynicism. The Georgians, who make up 70 per cent of the republic’s population, make the best of the situation: “There are few active dissidents but everyone ‘thinks differently.’ No one believes what he reads in the newspaper,” as one Georgian intellectual put it.

Georgian culture is not free to establish its own character any more than is the national culture in the other non-Russian republics. The language issue which provoked the Tbilisi demonstration on April 14 has great symbolic importance elsewhere. But in each republic there are different points of conflict between socialist ideology and native traditions. In Lithuania, for example, the intensity of national feeling stems in part from the Soviet suppression of the Catholic religion. In Georgia there is, in addition to general cultural resentment, a specific resistance to the rigidities of the planned economy.

Soviet citizens elsewhere uncharitably attribute a penchant for corruption to the Georgians. In some cases, it could just as easily be described as impatience with centralisation and a persecuted talent for private enterprise.

In the live and let live atmosphere which prevailed before the accession of Mr. Shevarnadze in 1972, the living standard in Georgia was reputedly the highest in the Soviet Union. It may still be. A not inconsiderable portion of the wealth is derived from the unofficial but highly organised purchase of fruits, flowers and vegetables and their resale in northern cities.

The practice has been mostly brought under control, partially because of the Government’s decision to pay higher prices to farmers for their produce. But it has not been eliminated.

The Press is full of stories about speculators being caught trying to smuggle fruit out of Georgia or manufacturing bootleg liquor in their bathtubs. Recently, three lorries full of fruits and vegetables and protected by armed guards were stopped at the border between Georgia and the Russian republic by a night patrol.

The crackdown on corruption in Georgia was initiated by Mr. Shevarnadze after he replaced the former Georgian communist leader, Mr. Vasily Mzhavandze. Thousands of Georgian officials were fired or deprived of their influence and tough penalties began to be meted out to bribe takers and black market operators. One response was a series of fires and bombings, beginning with the torching of the Tbilisi opera house in 1974 and culminating in the bombing of the Council of Ministers’ building in 1976 for which a man was reportedly shot.

Mr. Shevarnadze’s activities after taking office had the potential to evoke considerable resentment on the part of ordinary Georgians tempted to view him as Moscow’s agent assigned to bring the republic in line, Mr. Shevarnadze’s personal qualities, however, unusually in the case of a Soviet leader, have won him widespread respect.

Mr. Shevarnadze has established a reputation of integrity and unlike the secretive Communist Party leaders in Moscow, is willing to appear at the centre of events. Last year he single-handedly quelled a soccer disturbance during a game between Tbilisi and Voroshilovgrad by appearing alone before the crowd and promising to review the film of a disputed play.

Even Mr. Shevarnadze, however, has not been able to extinguish the Georgians’ enterprising spirit, or the resentment against Soviet control. Jobs as taxi drivers and store managers, and places at university, are no longer for sale, but a visitor cannot fail to notice that blue jeans—Soviet black market item number one—are more common in Tbilisi than elsewhere in the Soviet Union. In the central market, amid the piles of grapes, peaches, melons and pears, caviar is said to be still available for 100 roubles a kilo to those who know whom to ask and how.

Financial Times, Thursday, October 5, 1978

Armenia

Angry Nationalist Struggle
Against Soviet Power

On Saturday afternoon, January 8, 1977, a sudden explosion ripped through a carriage of the Moscow metro as it approached the Pervomaiskaya station. The carriage, filled with passengers including many children, was destroyed.

Official reports minimised the casualties, but a man who took part in the rescue work said that he saw at least 30 dead on the station platform. Scores more people were terribly injured and many died later in hospital. It was the worst act of terrorism in modern Soviet history.

In the months after the explosion, the KGB interrogated dissidents, and rumours swept Moscow that the blast was the work of Zionists. There were many, however, who believed that the trail might ultimately lead not to traditional dissenters but to hot, dusty Yerevan where the historically ill-fated Armenians have shown signs of restiveness under Soviet rule.

Yerevan is a city of lush parks, stolid, rose-coloured apartment blocks built of volcanic rock and columned Government buildings on broad squares. The whites and greys of one-storey houses line the sides of arid hills where vines coil around iron frames on the pavement, creating canopies.

In March this year, two Armenians, Mesrup Saratikyan, and his brother were seized in Yerevan and taken to Moscow, bringing to five the number of Armenians from Yerevan arrested in connection with the metro explosion.

The other three suspects were detained in Moscow and Yerevan in November, 1977. They included Yakov Stepanian, a former political prisoner, and a second unidentified man. They were reportedly arrested after planting a bomb at the busy Kursk station in Moscow which serves trains to the Caucasus. The third man was Stepan Zatikian, who once served a labour camp sentence for anti-Soviet agitation.

On June 7 this year, the Soviet news agency Tass said in a terse dispatch about the metro explosion, that “the criminals have been found by the state security committee organs” and that the men had “admitted their involvement.”

In Yerevan, the news of the arrests had leaked out much earlier through relatives of the accused and dissidents who had been questioned about them. The fact that anti-regime Armenians were apparently involved in the metro bombing had a chilling effect on organised Armenian dissent, which has been supressed in repeated waves of arrests since the early 1960s.

The atmosphere in Armenia is more relaxed than in Moscow. There are attractive cafes and the Soviet Union’s only gallery of modern art. Old men play chess in the park and young people gather on summer nights around the fountain in Lenin Square, where Western rock music is broadcast over a loudspeaker.

Despite this, there has been an active dissident movement in the area since at least 1963 and many more people have apparently been arrested in Armenia than in neighbouring Georgia, where nationalism is also a basic issue. Armenian nationalism has a more emotional edge because of the memory of the 1915–18 massacres at the hands of the Turks.

Many Armenians, particularly members of the older generation, give the Russians credit for saving the Armenians from annihilation. “If it hadn’t been for the Russians,” one taxi driver told me, “The Turks would have murdered every one of us.” Others, however, express regret that the Armenians survived the Turkish massacres only to be delivered into the hands of the Stalinists. “The nationalists feel that Soviet power interferes with the ability of Armenians to act for themselves,” one woman said.

The monument to the 1.5m victims of the 1915–18 massacres in Yerevan is a tall obelisk rising starkly to a needle point and, nearby there is a circular mausoleum of 12 inclining pillars around an eternal flame. Oddly, the monument was not built until 1965, after decades when no memorial was allowed. Even today, there is little mention of the Turkish massacres in Armenian schools or in the Press.

Armenian nationalism, which draws some of its force from a sense of historical victimisation, first surfaced in 1963 when more than 200 people demonstrated peacefully outside Communist Party headquarters. They were asking for increased protection for the Armenian language. Then in 1965 a group called “free Armenia” tried to set up a newspaper but those involved were arrested and their press destroyed.

By 1968, a number of nationalist groups had formed, the most important of which was the National Unification Party I (NOP), which succeeded in publishing Armenia’s first genuine underground newspaper, “Paros,” which is Armenian for “beacon.”

NOP’s goal was independence and the unification of the Armenian lands, including Turkish Armenia and Karabach Nakhichevan, a part of Soviet Azerbaijan. Two issues of “Paros” appeared with a circulation of 3,000 each before NOP was suppressed and its press destroyed.

Among the first NOP members to be arrested and subsequently convicted of anti-Soviet agitation were Shagin Arutunyan, later to become a founding member of the Armenian Helsinki Agreement monitoring group, Heikaz Khachatarian, an Armenian artist, and Stepan Zatikian, arrested in Yerevan in November 1977 in connection with the Moscow metro explosion.

In 1976, Mr. Arutunyan helped found the Armenian Helsinki group, which hoped to operate openly. The group collected information about deaths in prisons, interference with contacts with Armenians abroad and persons denied permission to emigrate.

Virtually none of this information sent to Moscow ever reached its destination.

Mr. Arutunyan was beaten by KGB and militia men on the morning of December 22, 1977, and then charged with hooliganism and sentenced to three years in a labour camp at a trial from which his wife was barred. Eduard Artunyan, another Helsinki member and a scientist, was put in a mental hospital and Robert Nazarian, a third Helsinki group member, was also arrested on December 22 and is awaiting trial on charges of anti-Soviet agitation. The charge, carries a maximum penalty of seven years imprisonment and five years exile.

Shortly before Shagin Arutunyan was arrested last winter, he was called to KGB headquarters and questioned about Stepan Zatikian, whom he had not seen for many years.

Friends of Mr. Arutunyan recalled that he and Mr. Zatikian had quarrelled angrily in the Mordovia labour camp where both were serving their terms for anti-Soviet agitation. Mr. Arutunyan said that the way to achieve Armenian independence was to work peacefully for the establishment of human rights in the Soviet Union. Mr. Zatikian, however, ridiculed peaceful attempts to establish legal rights and argued for the kind of methods which were finally used in the bombing of the Moscow metro.

Financial Times, Tuesday, October 31, 1978

Afghanistan’s Rocky Road to Socialism

In the crowded bazaars of Kabul’s old city, life proceeds at a pace set centuries ago. Craftsmen hone their fine copper, and brass merchants in shallow stalls idly sip tea while veiled women inspect meat carcasses amid swarms of flies.

In a city of 700,000 where many pray five times a day but which has no municipal sewage system, the activities of the middle ages linger on. Itinerant barbers cut their customers’ hair on patches of earth and scribes compose letters for men in flowing robes.

The cities and baked mud villages of Afghanistan have seen little change for centuries but the country now appears on the brink of one of the most important attempts at modernisation in its history and, possibly, it could bring with it unprecedented bloodshed.

The regime which seized power six months ago in a coup has moved the country appreciably deeper into the Soviet orbit and has pledged itself to abolish feudalism. Mr. Hafizullah Amin, the foreign minister and apparent strongman in the Government, said the goal of the ruling Khalq (People’s) party is to create a modern, Socialist society.

The party is conducting an intensive drive to recruit young men in every village and productive unit in the country at the same time as making many arrests, particularly in the armed forces, and suppressing Islamic revolts in the eastern provinces of Badakhshan, Kunar, Paktia, Logar, and Laghman.

Russians have become the most common foreigners passing through Kabul airport and are now a common sight in Kabul in the crowds behind the Pul-I-Kheshti mosque or strolling past the rug emporiums on Chicken Street under the eyes of suspicious merchants.

The anomaly of a socialist government in a fundamentally conservative, deeply religious country like Afghanistan has not been lost on either the Government or its many actual and potential opponents. Government representatives are being assassinated in the provinces by the Akhwani, the semi-secret Moslem brotherhood and there have been mass desertions from the armed forces and the beginnings of guerrilla activity.

The best estimate of the Khalq Party’s present strength is that it numbers no more than 2,000 hard core members. For purposes of comparison, there are believed to be more than twice that many people under arrest and awaiting an uncertain fate at the Pul-e-Charki prison outside Kabul.

Russian Backers

This small, organised group and its Russian backers want to remake this country where the terraced mud and adobe houses rise mirage-like atop each other in clouds of mist and dust on the sides of barren hills and the devout pray on prayermats in the corners of public buildings. To do this, however, they may have to use great violence which the regime is now in no position to apply.

The coup itself is believed to have involved only 600 officers commanding two divisions and an armoured brigade. Loyal units were prevented from coming to the relief of the regime by the air force, under the command of Major General Abdul Qader, a member of the Parcham (flag) Party—rivals of the Khalqists since Afghan Marxist-Leninists factionalised in the 1960s.

As against this, however, the Khalq Government—which, is headed by President Noor Mohammed Tarakki, a poet, ex-shipping clerk, and former Press attaché in the Afghan Embassy in Washington—can count on the support of 2,000 Soviet military advisers and 3,000 Soviet civilian advisers, in all, four times as many Soviet advisers as before the coup.

The regime’s ultimate intentions are far from clear. Government meetings are opened with readings from the Koran in an attempt to still Moslem fears but the actions the regime has taken in promulgating, although not implementing, a policy of dividing up the estates of large landowners, and abolishing smallholders’ debts to money lenders, give an indication of the Socialist direction in which they intend to proceed.

The increasing Soviet presence in Afghanistan and the new regime’s dependence on Soviet support have caused alarm in the West. This is belated in light of the fact that social and political conditions created years ago made it a virtual certainty that any modernising government would inevitably be Soviet oriented.

With 60 per cent of the population of 17 m seeking out a living as farmers, an ossified social structure and mass illiteracy, the voluntary processes of a market economy have long seemed to many educated Afghans to have little to offer.

Soviet influence was first established in the 1950s when the Russians agreed to supply Afghanistan with arms after the U.S. turned down Afghan requests for arms in connection with the border dispute with Pakistan. Young Afghan officers thereafter spent up to seven years training in the USSR. Many returned to join the Khalq or Parcham parties.

In the last 20 to 25 years, Soviet assistance has totalled $1.5 bn—more than that provided by any other country. The impact of this was to bring Soviet advisers into the ministries, particularly of planning and mines and industries. A Soviet model of development based on industrialisation is accepted by the Government—as it was by the former regime of President Mohammed Daoud—as the most valid approach for Afghanistan’s future development.

Under the Daoud Government, the situation in Afghanistan, however, was one of complete stagnation. In a country where half the children die before the age of five, the Daoud regime had no stated commitment to development.

A member of the Mohammad Zai clan, which had ruled Afghanistan for 200 years, Mr. Daoud did not make use of a Soviet credit line worth $308m. The smallest Western aid proposals were debated at Cabinet level where weeks were lost in arguments over the wording of agreements. In April of this year, Mir Akhbar Khaibar, a leading Parcham ideologist, was assassinated by unknown persons. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people took part in the funeral and a demonstration at U.S. Embassy, frightened the Daoud Cabinet and led to the arrests of Mr. Tarakki and Mr. Amin, the organisers of Khalq support in the armed forces. On April 27, a Cabinet meeting was called to consider purges in the armed forces. This triggered the coup.

The coup has been described as “desperate, daring and do or die”—it was violent, involving heavy fighting and hundreds of deaths, including those of Mr. Daoud and his family, and its outcome was uncertain all through the night of the 27th. Its success was followed by waves of arrests in the armed forces and a purge of the civil service.

As soon as the new Government had organised itself, however, the Khalqists began the elimination of their Parchamist partners in the coup starting with the dispatch of Mr. Babrak Karmal, former leader of the Parcham, and four other Parchamists to ambassadorial posts and their subsequent dismissal. This was followed by the arrest of Gen. Qader.

The purge of Parcham leaders was followed by the arrests of rank and file Parchamists in the armed forces and a second purge of the civil service.

These measures secured a Khalq monopoly of power but whittled down the regime’s base still further. Public lectures, rallies in military units and factories, and the requirement of Khalq membership for important posts are all now being used to swell the party’s ranks.

The purges appear to be over for the time being and there are signs that the new Government is growing in self-confidence. The Khalq Party still declines to refer to itself as “Marxist-Leninist” for fear of posing too sharply the conflict with Islam but two weeks ago, the regime introduced the new Afghan flag, which is entirely red and no longer sports the traditional Islamic colour of green.

Still, the Government is taking no chances. There are 60 tanks inside the palace grounds as a precaution against a counter coup, and an 11 pm curfew is strictly enforced while powerful searchlights nightly sweep Kabul’s surrounding hills. Military units are constantly being shuffled, the command structure is shattered and the air force is grounded.

If the regime consolidates itself, it must decide how far to go in transforming Afghanistan society. The five-year plan now being prepared is intended to introduce the first serious industrialisation in the country’s history.

The intention is for the share of industry to increase with each subsequent five-year plan. Agriculture is to be collectivised on a voluntary basis following land reform. Private enterprise, is eventually to be abolished, and the 10 per cent of the population which is nomadic is to be offered land for voluntary resettlement.

Agriculture

Western experts view this programme with distrust. They believe Afghanistan cannot be competitive as an industrial society and have urged diversification of agriculture with concentration on cash crops such as cotton, nuts and dried and fresh fruit.

In keeping with national pride and the regime’s “antiimperialist” bias, the Afghans have rejected this advice and although dependent on outside sources for an estimated 70 per cent of the funds for their five-year plan—most from the Eastern Bloc—they are going ahead with capital intensive projects such as exploitation of the Ainak copper deposits. This will isolate them from the world economy and tie them irrevocably to the Soviet Union.

The effective date of the decree on land reform has been postponed until next autumn—in effect, for two more harvests—and the article abolishing peasants’ debts to money lenders is, in many cases, being ignored by peasants who are paying their debts lest they be deprived of credit to get seed for next year’s planting.

There seems little doubt, however, that if the regime wants to make rapid progress in industrialisation and collectivisation it will at some point have to decide whether to use overwhelming force to achieve its ends.

There is another worldly quality to this remote, mountainous country where life seems to centre on prayer, the local tearooms, which are full of animated Afghans at the height of the working day, and the campfires of tribal nomads, which dot the side of the main highway to the capital at night. The reaction to an attempt to destroy the traditional patriarchal society by Marxist-Leninist ideology would probably throw the country into chaos.

There is however some backing in Afghanistan for forcible methods.

If the Khalqi regime emerges as militantly revolutionary, its activities could also have an international dimension. The regime could inspire increased violence in Pakistan and Iran by giving support, at the Soviet Union’s behest to the left-wing separatist movement, acting on behalf of 5 m Baluchi tribesmen.

If the Baluchis, using Afghanistan as a staging area, are successful in separating Baluchistan from Pakistan—and there are many who believe that in the medium term they will make the attempt—Afghan militancy would have helped destabilise the regional balance, allowing the Soviets, at long last, to realise the long-held aspiration of dominating Afghanistan and Baluchistan, thus achieving a warm water port—Gwadar—on the Arabian sea.

Financial Times, Wednesday, March 8, 1978

David Satter visits Murmansk, the USSR’s Arctic metropolis

Russia’s ‘Civilised North’

The low-lying Arctic sun burns through the white mist for only a few hours in midwinter as Murmansk, the world’s largest city north of the Arctic Circle, emerges from the total darkness of three months of polar nights.

Beyond the pillared stone buildings on Lenin Prospekt, the city’s main street, the railway yards and massive harbour, with its steam-shrouded cranes and ocean-going ships, testify to the accident of geography which is the city’s raison d’être.

Although 69 degrees north, Murmansk has the only ice-free port in North European Russia at the eastern end of the Gulf, Stream. The city has become, perforce, a social laboratory for testing man’s ability to thrive in arctic conditions.

Murmansk is 1,000 miles north-west of Moscow at the top of the sparsely populated Kola Peninsula. There are no nearby cities of any consequence and, with little in the way of cultural facilities, Murmansk is one of the most isolated cities of its size in the Soviet Union.

The most difficult adjustment for Murmansk’s new residents, however, is getting used to three months of total darkness between mid-October and mid-January. This is followed by a three month period in the summer when there is no darkness at all.

Under these conditions, Murmansk could have the same difficulty holding population as new cities in remote areas of Siberia. But although 5,000 to 6,000 persons leave Murmansk every year, the city’s population has grown by 8,000 a year since 1959. This is a tribute to the complex of economic, health and recreational measures designed to keep it functioning.

Murmansk is what its residents call the “civilised north” to distinguish it from cities in Siberia where conditions are primitive. There is a housing shortage in Murmansk, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, and many live in communal flats.

But the housing stock is modern and with 400,000 inhabitants, Murmansk boasts the largest library and the only trolleybus service north of the Arctic Circle.

This winter in Murmansk has been one of the worst in memory with temperatures hovering around −30 centigrade. For the first time in 13 years, passenger ship transport to the port, a major transit point for Soviet goods shipments, actually stopped on February 14.

Despite difficulties, however, the port, which was the destination of Allied convoys during the Second World War, was soon operating again and this reliability in a country largely frozen in winter is what has made Murmansk an essential urban centre.

The impressive harbour is used extensively by the Soviet northern fishing fleet, which is serviced by Sevryba, the Soviet Union’s largest fish processing combine. Although the catch from the Barents Sea is declining after years of over-fishing, Murmansk remains one of the Soviet Union’s biggest fish centres.

The Soviet naval presence is even more important but less obvious. The northern fleet in Murmansk and the nearby submarine base of Severomorsk constitutes the greatest concentration of naval military power in the world. Western intelligence places the strength of the northern fleet at 51 surface ships and 126 submarines, of which 54 are nuclear powered.

The use by commercial and military shipping of the fiord like Kola Bay is so intensive that there is no place on the bay set aside for recreational purposes. It is this concentration of activity, carried on for months in sub-zero cold and often in conditions of total darkness, which is made possible ultimately by the social measures to maintain Murmansk in a desolate area where snow falls 10 months out of the year and trees only reach sapling size after 65 years.

The most important incentive to work in Murmansk is economic. On arrival, a worker receives a 40 per cent pay increase raised at six months’ intervals by 10 per cent, until, after four years, he is earning at least 200 per cent of what he would have earned at a job farther south.

The number of people employed in the fishing industry is expected to decrease with technological improvement and the declining catch in northern waters. Plans call for the development of light industry, including knitted ware, manufacturing and the opening of a vodka factory to save the cost of transporting bottles 900 miles up the railway line.

The goal of holding population in the far north would probably not be achieved, however, were it not also for Murmansk’s comprehensive health care system. The long Polar night and a period in February and March when the sun shines but gives off no ultra-violet rays can cause severe vitamin deficiencies. These are warded off by ultraviolet lights in factories and schools and daily vitamin doses for every Murmansk resident at “health points.”

In the summer, Murmansk becomes a city without children as virtually every child is packed off to pioneer camp in the south. Adults have 42-day holidays—twice what they would have in the south. People come to Murmansk in their twenties, spend 30 or more years of their lives there, and then leave the city for a more comfortable existence further south.

The state encourages this. Salaries are high in Murmansk and so pensions are also generous. The retirement age is 55 for men and 50 for women compared with 60 for men and 55 for women in the rest of the USSR.

Financial Times, Tuesday, May 1, 1979

David Satter examines the latest

U.S.-Soviet prisoner exchange

Moscow Yields to ‘Interference’

The largest exchange of prisoners ever arranged between the U.S. and the Soviet Union has confirmed that despite its protest, Moscow now accepts that foreign “interference” in Soviet internal affairs is an established fact.

East-West prisoner exchanges have, of course, occurred before, beginning with that in 1962 of Gary Powers, the U-2 spy pilot, for the Soviet agent Rudolf Abel. But last week’s exchange of two Soviet spies for five Soviet dissidents represented the first time that the Soviet Union has agreed to retrieve two of its spies by granting freedom, not to foreign-agents, but to five of its own citizens.

Despite the extra difficulty of discouraging dissent when prominent dissidents are freed from prison and sent to the West, last week’s events could also lead to further exchanges resulting in freedom for Anatoly Shcharansky and Dr. Yuri Orlov, two prominent members of the group which tried to monitor Soviet observance of the Helsinki accords.

When Mr. Leonid Zamyatin, a top Kremlin spokesman, was asked on Saturday, following Soviet-French talks, about the effect of the exchange on detente, he replied angrily that detente was a question of major issues and he had nothing to say to those who saw detente in such narrow terms.

However, it was almost certainly with an eye to the SALT 2 arms treaty and the effect of Soviet treatment of dissidents on Western public opinion, that plans were made for the release of the dissidents. Although they were traded for convicted spies, there was nothing in the charges against any of them to show they had ever had any connection with a foreign power.

The best known of them is Alexander Ginzburg, a veteran Soviet dissenter who has been in and out of labour camps since the 1950s, and was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in a special-regime labour camp last July after being convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.

Mr. Ginzberg was, with Mr. Shcharansky and Dr. Orlov, a member of the now all but suppressed Helsinki monitoring group. But the principal charge against him was that he helped to distribute copies of “The Gulag Archipelago,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s history of the Soviet labour camp system.

The two Jewish dissidents who were freed, Mark Dymshits and Edward Kuznetsov, were also jailed on charges which had nothing to do with espionage. They were sentenced to death in 1970 for their part in an unsuccessful attempt to commandeer a light aircraft at Leningrad Airport and to fly it to Sweden from where they hoped to go to Israel.

The sentences were later reduced to 15 years’ imprisonment after widespread international protests. In 1971, Mr. Kuznetsov’s “Prison Diaries” were published in the West. Five other Jews involved directly or indirectly in what became known as the “Leningrad Affair,” were released from prison earlier this month during the visit to the Soviet Union of a delegation of U.S. Congressmen.

Another of those exchanged, Mr. Valentin Moroz, was a Ukrainian historian jailed in 1970 for anti-Soviet propaganda. After six years in prison, Mr. Moroz was moved to an institute of criminal psychiatry. When the move was announced, 20 U.S. Senators called on Mr. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet President, to allow Mr. Moroz to take up a post at Harvard University.

The last of the exchanged dissidents was Georgi Vins, leader of a faction which broke away from the officially sanctioned Baptist Church. He was jailed for inciting Soviet citizens to illegal actions. Just as he was about to be released last month, dissident sources said he had been sent back for a long prison term in Siberia after being held for seven weeks in a Moscow jail.

All five were convicted according to the normal operation of Soviet law and the exchange appears to mean that the long-standing subordination of the Soviet legal process to the political interests of the state can now be extended to include subordination to the desires and pressures of foreign states as well.

The five dissidents arrived in New York, amid intense publicity but the Soviet media carried no news of the return to Moscow of Valdik Enger and Rudolf Cheryayev, the two Soviet employees of the United Nations who were sentenced to 50 years each in New Jersey last October for receiving secret naval documents from a double agent.

It is believed that negotiations for the release of Mr. Shcharansky, and possibly Dr. Orlov, are taking place. It is speculated that a second exchange may be timed for a strategic moment to ease Senate ratification of the SALT 2 agreement.

Most observers believe that the release of other prominent dissidents will have a good effect on U.S.-Soviet relations but this remains only one of the factors that the Soviet authorities must bear in mind.

They may want good relations with the West, but releasing political prisoners to get it makes the consequences of dissent less frightening and affirms that the Soviet Union is not as resolute in rejecting attempts at outside interference in the legal process as it would like others to believe.

.

Financial Times, Monday, June 18, 1979

Tensions Between Systems Show at Summit

The first meeting between Mr. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet President, and President Carder may improve the atmosphere of Soviet-U.S. relations but, in this neutral and historic Viennese setting, there is ample evidence that interaction between the American and Soviet systems does not come without strain.

Tension derives from the fact that although the U.S. is a democracy and the Soviet Union is a dictatorship with a totalitarian structure, the Soviet leaders strive consistently to depict their country as a democracy, a feat more easily accomplished within the Soviet Union than in Vienna.

The possibility that the U.S. Senate may refuse to ratify SALT 2 has been an important concern at the summit and when Mr. Leonid Zamyatin, chief of international information for the Communist Party Central Committee, was asked at a press conference if the ratification question had been raised in the talks, he said that it had been and was agreed to be an internal matter for each country.

Mr. Zamyatin then added that Mr. Brezhnev expressed his hope and confidence that the Supreme Soviet, which he described as the Soviet legislature, would approve the treaty without amendments.

The Supreme Soviet is a purely formal, powerless body which votes unanimously to approve all policies of the Communist Party leadership and when Mr. Zamyatin’s reference to it was met with laughter in the hall, he said: “I ascribe this laughter to lack of knowledge of the Soviet structure.”

Obligations of protocol and great power equality demand that the two sides have the opportunity for an approximately equal number of press conferences, airport ceremonies and public appearances, but these activities, familiar to the Americans and to any broadly popular democratic politician, are a visible strain for the Soviet leadership.

Mr. Brezhnev has avoided making statements in public and his public appearances, either going into the talks with President Carter or coming out of them, have been as brief as possible.

The one-hour Press conference, at which correspondents had a chance to question Mr. Zamyatin, was at least half taken up with a lengthy description of Mr. Brezhnev’s commitment to peace and to questions by Soviet journalists, who are also Government officials, about U.S. missile deployment and NATO.

The questions were propagandist and raised arguments that could only be answered in considerable detail. As intended, they took up time that could have been used in gaining information.

Mr. Jody Powell, President Carter’s Press secretary, betrayed annoyance with the Soviet journalists’ questions and with statements by Mr. Zamyatin.

Mr. Powell also reacted sarcastically to Mr. Zamyatin’s remarks about ratification.

Financial Times, Friday, July 13, 1979

Bitter-Sweet Search for Ancestors in Ukraine

The two-lane highway to Chernoble wound its way north from Kiev through small, wooden villages, past lush, green pasture land and open fields of rye. Only the occasional sand dune hinted at the nearness of the Dnieper River.

At various times during my three years in Moscow, I considered making a trip to the formerly Jewish town of Chernoble, which my grandparents left in 1913 for the United States, but something always dissuaded me.

The Nazis occupied Chernoble and although a great-uncle had stayed behind, I held little hope of finding anything familiar there. I also knew that the Soviet Union, except for the major cities, is a closed country and any attempt to visit an out-of-the-way place like Chernoble would be met with endless bureaucratic difficulties.

In early May, however, my mother and sister arrived in Moscow for a month’s visit and after establishing that the area around Chernoble was officially open to foreigners, I decided to plan a trip.

My reasons were mixed. The last letter from Shaya K., my great uncle, to his brothers arrived more than 40 years ago, but I thought it was still possible that we could learn something of his fate. I also wanted to try to understand better the traditional animosity between Ukrainians and Jews.

The pogroms which swept the Ukraine 70 to 80 years ago ensured that millions of Jews would emigrate, that others would fervently back the 1917 revolution and that Zionism would find its base of mass support in Russia. The antagonisms of the Ukrainian farmlands affected the shape of the modern world.

We submitted our itinerary to the Foreign Ministry 10 days in advance of our trip and it was, at first, approved. The approval was cancelled the day before our departure, however, because Yanov, a railway station six miles from Chernoble and apparently the site of the Chernoble atomic energy station, was said to be “closed.”

Four re-routings and 36 hours later, we at last found ourselves driving north on the Kiev to Chernoble road accompanied by an Intourist driver and an official “guide” whose presence we were forced to accept and to pay for in hard currency in order to be allowed to proceed.

The trip, however, began to seem worth the trouble. If the Ukraine had endured more than most areas due to the upheavals of the present century, there was little sign of it that sunny afternoon. Swaddled old women shooed cows off the road with rope lashes, moving them in the direction of the brick barns of nearby collective farms.

The scenery opened into vast green plains broken only occasionally by stands of birch and pine trees, reminding one that it had once been possible to earn a living from timber in the area, as my mother’s family had done.

As we approached the outskirts of Chernoble, a town of 20,000 people, we saw a long row of modern housing blocks on the plain, but driving down the main street into the town itself, it was obvious that physically at least, very little had changed.

We left our guide and car and began walking down narrow, shaded streets, past white log and plaster cottages with stacks of wood piled neatly in the yards. Cottonwood floated in the air and the sounds of motorcycles in the distance competed with the crowing of cocks.

We saw an old woman standing near a water tap and, acting on an instinct, I asked her if she could direct us to the Jewish cemetery. She told us how to get there and then, her curiosity aroused, asked us which grave we were trying to find. I asked her if she had ever known anyone by the name of K――.

Seventy years after all but one member of the K―― family had left Chernoble, the old woman smiled and said, “of course I know them. My sister studied with one of the K daughters. They lived in a house on the main street.”

We agreed to visit the old woman and her 80-year-old sister later in the day, but walking back towards the main street, we were met by our guide who told us we were wanted in the city hall.

We followed her to the city hall where we were greeted by Mr. Nikolai Zhavoronkov, the mayor of Chernoble. He seemed uneasy about our presence but immediately assumed responsibility for organising a “programme” for us although we had not requested one.

He called a procession of old Jewish and Ukrainian women to his office and they, comparing recollections in a mixture of languages agreed that Shaya K. had lived in a house on the main street but that he and his daughters had not been seen in Chernoble since the late 1920s.

We were unable to learn anything more definite from them and we wanted to continue walking around the town. But Mr. Zhavoronkov, apparently in his role as tour organiser, presented us with flowers and insisted on taking us to the Jewish cemetery.

Chernoble had once been three-quarters Jewish but only 2,000 Jews live there today. The Jews who did not flee ahead of the advancing Nazis were rounded up and brought to the old cemetery and forced to dig a long, deep trench within sight of their ancestral graves.

The trench is now covered with a marble slab about 300 ft long and closed off by a metal fence with a small gate. A monument above the common grave reads in both Yiddish and Russian, “Here lie the ashes of citizens beastially murdered by the fascists on November 19, 1941.”

Mr. Zhavoronkov waited respectfully as we laid the flowers at the monument but as soon as we had left, he signalled to our driver to take us back to Kiev. I got out of the car and approached him but his friendliness had disappeared. He said the visit was over and if we did not leave immediately there would be “unpleasantness.”

Just how well co-ordinated was the effort to foreshorten our visit became clear when the Intourist driver and guide refused my request to drive us back into town. This forced me to tell my mother and sister to get out of the car and the three of us then began walking back in the direction of Chernoble.

The driver and guide relented, as I knew they would, and after some hesitation, they turned the car round, and drove us back into Chernoble.

We left them sitting in the parked car and began to stroll through the main square with its gilded statue of Lenin decked with red flags. By the time we arrived at Sovetskaya Street and the large brick house at number 33, our presence had been noticed and was beginning to attract a crowd.

We may have been the first foreigners to visit Chernoble since the revolution and after we had told people who we were, they clustered round us on the tree-shaded main street, showering us with questions. Women hugged my mother, calling her a “Chernobylyanka” although she was born in the U.S. and children were dispatched to knock on the doors of elderly Jewish people to ask them to come out.

The size of the crowd in front of my great-uncle’s house increased—at one point, it even included a passing militia man—and finally a white-haired man in his 60s emerged who said he had actually been a friend of my great uncle’s.

He said that the K family owned a lumber yard which was expropriated after the revolution, but that they continued to live in the house on Sovetskaya Street until it was also requisitioned in 1927.

Shortly after collectivisation began, the K family left Chernoble. It was at this time, perhaps because of the Stalinist terror, that the letters from Shaya K stopped arriving. He then moved to Kiev where he got a job buying equipment for a collective farm and when the Nazis invaded the Ukraine, he and his family were evacuated.

The family returned to Kiev after the war and Shaya K died peacefully in Kiev in the 1950s, a “kindly old man” in his 80s.

Satisfied at last with our visit, we left Chernoble for Kiev that evening and then went by train to Moscow. Several weeks later, however, an article appeared in Pravda Ukraina, the Ukrainian newspaper, accusing me of having been rude and abusive to officials. The authors never called me for comment but they did manage to reach my Intourist driver who told them if he had his way, I would be thrown out of the country.

It may be a long time before another foreigner visits Chernoble but the secretiveness and xenophobia that Soviet officials showed during this episode were all the more puzzling because they were so unnecessary. Chernoble makes a favourable impression.

The peace and apparent lack of racial hatred in Chernoble may only reflect collective exhaustion, but in a world which underwent civil war, collectivisation, famine and Nazi occupation, I think they must be counted a form of progress too.

Financial Times, Saturday, September 29, 1979

Russia assumes no Soviet citizen will return

home of his own free will: From Moscow,

David Satter reports on defections

The Crime That Can Only Exist
Behind Closed Borders

Defection is probably the quintessential Soviet crime. Whenever prominent Soviet sportsmen and artists make the decision to defect, it has a disproportionate impact on their society, and only in a society like the Soviet Union could the crime exist at all.

The latest defections have been those of Oleg Protopopov and his wife, Lyudmilla Belousova, two figure skaters who are extremely well known here. There followed Leonid and Valentina Kozlov and Alexander Godunov, the Bolshoi Ballet dancers who defected during the troupe’s tour of the U.S.

The defections within the space of a month of two skaters who were double Olympic gold medallists and three stars of the Bolshoi, which had never lost a principal performer through defection before, has more than counterbalanced Soviet satisfaction over the return of Lyudmilla Vlasova, Mr. Godunov’s wife, who decided not to remain in the U.S. with her husband.

Soviet citizens—even if they speak only Russian—are startled by the freedom, diversity and sheer material prosperity of the West. To make sure that increasing travel abroad by Soviet citizens, whether on business or in official exchanges, does not result in continual defections, the Soviet authorities employ a series of policies. These are normally effective because they operate on the assumption that no Soviet citizen will return home of his own free will.

As a preliminary, but as a matter of course, people who are allowed to travel are carefully selected for visible career success, personal conformity and political reliability. Artists who may be called upon to perform abroad are kept under close surveillance inside the Soviet Union by officials of the Ministry of Culture and by the KGB through informers. They do not travel if their attitude or behaviour suggest they may be unreliable.

Soviet officials or scientists who go abroad must have a recommendation from an immediate superior, who will face retribution if they defect and so is inclined to be cautious. Those who have been abroad and want to go again try not to show too much enthusiasm for the places they have visited.

Since, in the final analysis, it is difficult to judge any individual’s innermost motivation, a high premium in every profession is placed on Communist Party membership, or membership in communist youth organizations. Unfortunately, this may only encourage hypocrisy. Four of the five most recent defectors—the Kozlovs, Mr. Protopopov and Miss Belousova—had given the impression of being active, enthusiastic communists.

The Soviet authorities are now reported to be involved in a concerted effort to review their means of presenting defections. Lest the five most recent defections set off a chain reaction the Soviet Culture Ministry said on Thursday it had cancelled a month-long tour of the United States by the 110-member Soviet State Symphony-Orchestra, which was to have begun next week.

Once selected Soviet citizens are finally allowed to go abroad, efforts are made to limit their movements and inhibit their curiosity. They are generally advised that the police of the country they are visiting may seek to compromise them.

Wherever possible, Soviet citizens travel in groups. These are usually divided into “teams” of 10, with one person responsible for himself and the nine others. The group as a whole is accompanied by KGB men who represent themselves as interpreters or officials. But for the benefit of anyone contemplating defection they post themselves, for example, at the front and rear of the group every time it enters a tour bus.

In such an uneasy situation, hotel rooms and meals are arranged by the sponsoring Soviet organisation and spending money is kept to an absolute minimum. Since meals are taken together, anyone’s absence is immediately noticed and many Soviet citizens are unaware that they are not subject to Soviet law while abroad according to which defection is treason, carrying a maximum penalty of death.

There are limits to a regime’s ability to control its citizens once they are abroad. The most effective bar to defection remains the rule that when Soviet citizens travel abroad, they must do so without any members of their immediate family. The traveller knows that if he defects, he will never see his family again.

Rudolph Nureyev who was with the Leningrad Kirov Ballet before his defection in 1961, has not been able to see his mother and sister despite a request to the Soviet authorities on his behalf by Sir Harold Wilson, the former British Prime Minister.

Victor Korchnoi, the chess grand master who defected to Holland in 1976, has not seen his wife and son. Lyudmilla Agapova, wife of a Soviet sailor who jumped ship in Sweden in 1974, tried and failed to join her husband through an escape arrangement with the pilot of a private plane.

Miss Vlasova was aware last month when she made her decision to return to the Soviet Union that staying in the U.S. with her husband would have meant never seeing her mother again. She was quickly separated from the group and put on a plane, not only to prevent her from defecting too but also so that the traditional punishment for defectors, separation from wife and family, would, in the case of Mr. Godunov, go into immediate effect.

The combination of practices affecting Soviet citizens who go abroad do have the effect of making defection a relatively unusual occurrence. But the five most recent defections, like the earlier defections of Mr. Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the eminent Soviet conductor, Kiril Kondrashin and Viktor Balenko, who eluded two sets of air defences to flee in the then top secret MiG-25 to Japan, are a serious embarrassment to the Soviet Government.

The difficulty stems from the Soviet Union’s ideological pretensions. Aaron Vergelis, an officially approved Jewish writer, wrote recently in connection with the defections that the socialist and bourgeois worlds are markedly different and that no capitalist country can boast “the unity and complete identity of views” which exists in the Soviet Union.

Defections by prominent artists and sportsmen with exemplary records of party activism do little to bear out the purported unanimity of Soviet society. Yet the only way to prevent defection is to open the borders which, in the Soviet context, would create enormous pressure for internal liberalisation because it would give people the option of “voting with their feet.”

Closed borders make the Soviet system possible, and since the present Soviet authorities show no readiness to contemplate liberalisation, defection. Le Vice Sovietique, seems likely to shadow the regime’s pretensions for many years to come.

Financial Times, Wednesday, December 19, 1979

Planning and Politics Strangle
the Soviet Economy

The recent speech by Mr. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet President, singling out Soviet Ministers for public criticism and threatening officials with the sack was a graphic illustration that the Soviet leadership is deeply upset about the state of the economy.

It was therefore all the more surprising that despite the existence of detailed plans for economic reform, there was no indication in Mr. Brezhnev’s speech that the leaders foresee any change in the economy more basic that tougher punishments for those who fail to reform.

The malaise of the Soviet economy manifests itself in warehouses full of unbought goods, long queues in the snowy streets for household essentials, a ubiquitous black market and statistical tables displaying the worst economic growth rates in more than 30 years.

Soviet national income, a measure similar to GNP, will grow only 2 per cent this year, the worst result since World War Two. Moreover this figure, because it includes shoddy goods which are produced but never purchased, distorts the level of consumption, which in 1979 will probably not increase at all.

In his speech Mr. Brezhnev said the culprits behind each “negligence, lack of responsibility and stupid bungling,” should be found and “punished.” His anger was understandable but the decline in Soviet economic performance stems from the fact that the rigid, centralised system inherited from Joseph Stalin is running down.

This can only be reversed through fundamental reform, not by tighter discipline. Economic and political leadership in the Soviet Union is vested in the Communist Party, and economic decisions reflect political priorities. The factory manager is subordinate not only to the local party committee of which he must be a member but to the department of the Central Committee which oversees his particular branch of industry.

No deviation from the economic plan is legal without party approval, but party leaders are free to commandeer workers to help at construction sites, beautify the city or bring in the harvest. Responsibility for meeting targets lies with the factory manager.

The intention behind all this is to concentrate economic decision-making in the hands of the top party leadership acting through Gosplan, the State planning agency. The Soviet factory manager must execute a blizzard of orders and directives, while his individual role is restricted to maximising output. He is told what to produce, from whom to obtain materials, how many people to employ and what to pay them.

Factory directors have no authority to deal with unexpected contingencies. At a big construction site near Ryazan, for example, a gear broke on some Polish-manufactured excavators. The replacement cost was no more than 250 roubles (about £180), but the new parts could not be ordered direct from Poland.

Instead the project’s chief engineer had to travel to Moscow, wait two weeks for an appointment with the Vice-Minister of Foreign Trade and then see an official in the Ministry of Finance because the purchase of the replacement parts required hard currency. Only with the approval of these officials could an order for the new parts be issued. They took another two months to arrive. In the meantime, the entire project was at a standstill.

Mr. Brezhnev expressed surprise that although the Soviet Union is the world’s larger producer of steel, iron, mineral fertiliser and cement, these basic goods are often in short supply. But this stems from the fact that the country’s highly centralised economic system must measure results on the basis of gross aggregates, which can supposedly be expressed in figures.

The planners set high production targets to force factory managers to make maximum use of men, materials and equipment. But managers protect themselves by overstating their resource requirements, and the system breeds a passion for fictitious results.

An engine factory in Kharkov, for example, satisfied its plan requirements by using 200 KG ingots to produce 30 KG units. The waste of steel was enormous but the factory met its targets because output was calculated on the basic of the value which was presumed to have been added to the material inputs. Reducing the steel order would have saved steel, but reduced the factory’s ostensible output too.

Transport workers who send cargoes back and forth between distant Soviet cities in order to accumulate mileage, or construction engineers who start projects but don’t finish them (unfinished projects have come to 80 per cent of capital investment in recent years) also reflect the logic of a system which rewards plan fulfilment rather than the filling of specific needs.

The relation between waste and the excessive concentration on gross output as an economic indicator was outlined persuasively in November 1977 in the party newspaper Pravda in a series of articles by Mr. Dimitri Valovoi, the paper’s deputy editor. There was no sign in Mr. Brezhnev’s speech, however, of any intention to move to qualitative indicators of economic performance which would require human judgments and vitiate central control.

The rigidity of the Soviet economic structure restricts not just factory managers but apparently ordinary workers as well. Under Stalin the economic system was backed up by political terror. With the passing of that era, increases in labour productivity have steadily declined and labour delinquency has increased. Labour productivity increased only 2.4 per cent during the first nine months of this year against a target of 4.7 per cent. In 1951, it increased more than 10 per cent.

Acute alcoholism is a growing and dangerous problem. Alone among modern countries, the Soviet Union shows declining life expectancy, which fell from 66 in 1966 to 64 in 1972 and has now dropped to the point where a figure for males is no longer published. This is attributed to the effects of alcoholism, and Soviet researchers have estimated that with complete sobriety at the work place, Soviet productivity would increase.

Efficiency is also hampered because the burden of adapting to the needs of the bureaucracy which directs the world’s largest planned economy is placed entirely on the average citizen.

In the early years of Soviet power, centralisation had unquestionable advantages. The Russians were proceeding from an undeveloped industrial base; quantity production and the ability to concentrate on specific objectives were beneficial. Agriculture was depressed and living standards were held down to produce capital for investment. Raw materials were plentiful.

Now, however, with the heavy industry base created, the need for efficiency is paramount because the economy faces an exhaustion of inputs. Oil production will increase only 2 per cent this year and may soon begin to fall. Population growth has levelled off, particularly in the European areas where industrial labour is most badly needed and the area of arable land is expected to decline.

Achieving efficiency would appear to require some measure of liberalisation and decentralisation, with the introduction of qualitative measures of economic performance and greater autonomy for factory managers. This was tried at the time of the Kosygin reform in 1965, but had little practical effect. There is now little likelihood that the Soviet economy will be decentralised, and it is no accident that Mr. Brezhnev failed to mention this as a possibility.

Allowing individual factory managers greater freedom to make economic decisions on economic grounds would not have direct political consequences. But the element of economic democracy represented by local decision-making would indirectly create greater possibilities for political democracy because economic discussion inevitably touches on questions of policy.

Under the Soviet system the State, which is ruled by the Party, must have full authority in all areas including the economy. Even the seemingly innocuous decentralisation of economic decision-making would weaken the authority of the Central Government.

This is why, despite Mr. Brezhnev’s threat to replace officials who fail to meet their targets, the decline of the Soviet economy is likely to continue throughout the next decade, leading to ideological vulnerability and public discontent, and giving the authorities an object lesson in the limits of centralised power.

Financial Times, Friday, December 21, 1979

Josef Stalin’s Legacy Leaves
Soviet Leaders in Dilemma

Each member of the older generation will be left with his own memories, but no official celebration is planned today for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Josef Stalin and few people are expected at the Kremlin Wall to lay flowers at the former dictator’s grave.

Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, the man known as Stalin, literally “man of steel” created the modern Soviet state. But the Soviet authorities show little inclination either to glorify or condemn him. Sometimes it seems that they would prefer most of all to forget him.

The dilemma posed by Stalin springs from the fact that he turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian state. Though the present leaders may want to disassociate themselves from his crimes, they continue to exercise absolute power through the structure he created.

Kommunist, the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, tried to draw a distinction this week between Stalin and the Soviet system. The journal said Stalin’s career had both positive and negative sides but that the “negative phenomena,” namely “Stalin’s crude abuses of power,” did not reflect the nature of the Soviet system, only the distortions of the “personality cult.”

The only serious Soviet attempt to come to terms with the consequences of Stalin’s rule was made by Nikita Khrushchev, the former Soviet premier who authorised publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

Between 1962 and 1964 there was a sharp increase in historical and sociological research into the Stalin period. But when Khrushchev was removed, at the October 1964 plenum, this research and the publication of literature about Stalin came to an end.

There is now a basic lack of comprehension about Stalin in the Soviet Union, both on the part of ordinary people who remember how soldiers threw themselves under tanks shouting “For country, for Stalin, for mother,” and on the part of Soviet officials who, anxious for respectability, prefer not to dwell on how the regime was established.

By today’s standards, the first years of Soviet power under Lenin were open and democratic. Lenin used terror but he operated on the Marxist assumption that the need for repressive measures was temporary. The Press wrote frankly about famine and disasters, and there was intensive intra-party debate. Censorship was comparatively lax. Even the memoirs of White Army generals were officially published.

Stalin put his imprint on the Soviet State by effectively gathering all power into his own hands and then, through mass indiscriminate terror, putting an end to the diversity Lenin had tolerated. Stalin put to death 90 per cent of the members of the 1934 Central Committee during the purges of 1937 and 1938 and also most of the staff personnel who worked in the Central Party apparatus.

When Aldo Moro, the Italian Christian Democratic leader, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades last year, the Soviet Press expressed its outrage that the Red Brigades might be associated in some people’s minds with the Soviet Union. In fact no imagined regime run by the Brigades could prove more pitiless than the regime actually established by Stalin.

If total fear deprives people of human qualities and turns them into examples of the animal species Man then it was no accident that in 1937, when the terror reached its apex, a foreign resident found that Russians she approached on the streets “scattered like mice.”

The surrealism of Soviet political life, in which everything accomplished through compulsion is said to be voluntary and a population which dare not speak out is depicted as unanimous behind the Party’s policies, reflects a tradition established by Stalin. While secretly sending millions to their deaths, he spoke publicly of the need to be responsive to the wishes of the people and to treat individuals with the tenderness a gardener shows to a delicate plant.

There will never be a precise figure for the number of blameless persons sent to their deaths by Stalin. No family was untouched, and the figure of 20m cited by Western historians may be realistic.

The regime Stalin created made it possible for a single man whose outstanding characteristics were deviousness and crudity to bring an entire country to its knees. The Soviet Union after 1930 gave the impression of a land of total unanimity in which Stalin’s wishes were law. Stalin chose to eliminate even the possibility of opposition and elements of the realm he created are clearly visible in Soviet life today.

The Soviet political system concentrates power today as effectively as it did in Stalin’s day. The last policy debate inside the party occurred under Stalin, in 1929. It was on collectivisation and Nikolai Bukharin, the Politburo member who argued for a moderate approach, was tried nine years later as a German spy and shot.

The present Politburo meets in secret; 26 years after Stalin’s death, there has not been a single case of a policy being debated in the lower party ranks. Even when Khrushchev was removed from power in 1964 and the charges against him were read out at local party meetings, people were not allowed to discuss the charges but only to ask questions. The notion of the party as the all-powerful instrument of a ruler or ruling elite comes from Stalin.

Stalin both realised Marxist ideology and discarded it, and this pattern too has become characteristic of the Soviet State. The development of the Soviet Union’s “productive forces” predicted by Marx did not happen of its own accord, so he strengthened the repressive power of the State, which—also according to Marx—was supposed to fade away. He then pretended the repression did not exist.

Stalin greatly intensified the system of censorship established by Lenin and sought through it to control all published or broadcast information. He wanted to eliminate any research which directly or indirectly cast doubt on the value of the Soviet system and he wanted all art to reflect his personal taste.

Today this system has been liberalised. Foreign radio broadcasts are no longer jammed. Some previously banned poets, such as Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva and Akhmatova, are now published in limited form. Information remains curbed but the goal now is not to programme individuals but simply to make it impossible for the average citizen to form a coherent view of the outside world.

Stalin also affected the structure of Soviet ambition. The old Bolsheviks who were shot in 1937–38 were replaced by cadres completely loyal to him personally. Each of the old Bolsheviks had a long political biography, but the young men promoted rapidly to take their places had little political experience and were in no position to gain any under the conditions of terror. Their satisfaction came from career advancement; and Soviet careerism has proved as apolitical and ideologically indifferent as any in the West.

In the final analysis, perhaps the most important and the most ominous aspect of Stalin’s legacy is that he chose to fall back on the Russian tradition of progress through terror and force. Stalin’s apologists, both in Russia and the West, frequently refer to the difficult conditions he faced and the tangible gains the Soviet Union achieved. These calculations fail to consider the fact that Stalin set a pattern which may claim victims for many generations to come.

Stalin’s rule left behind political passivity, because Soviet citizens came to take it for granted that all major decisions would be taken without their participation. It also left behind an abiding fear of the state machine on which the present Government freely draws.

Soviet leaders now want stability. After Stalin’s death they took a number of steps to dismantle the terror apparatus he set up. The KGB, which was a parallel system for arresting, trying, and killing those thought guilty of political crimes, was reduced to an investigative body which must turn over its information to the prosecutors and the courts. Several KGB functions were given to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and both the KGB and Ministry were put under the control of the Party.

It is too soon to say whether these changes will forestall a new wave of terror. The Soviet form of government is a centralised, one-party system with extraordinary government powers. If opposition arises, there is a built-in tendency to eliminate it. At the same time the torpor of Russian life too often shows that a nation accustomed to being bullied can lose the ability to act on its own.

There is likely to be no honest attempt to understand Stalin in the Soviet Union. The silence may be convenient but it is far from neutral, because against the reality of state achievements it implicitly supports the notion that the interests of the state justify any human cost.

The tragedy of the Stalin era is that once again Russian leadership was cast in the mould of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible, reinforcing the worst aspects of the Russian state tradition at the very moment when the legatees of serfdom were seeking a new way forward.

Financial Times, Wednesday, January 23, 1980

Sakharov’s Arrest Links
Dissidence with Detente

The arrest of Dr. Andrei Sakharov1 shows that the Soviet Union is prepared to add a cynical linkage principle of its own to the East-West struggle to define the terms of detente.

Soviet authorities have stressed that Moscow has no intention of retaliating against the United States for the grain embargo or the proposal to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics. But the arrest and exile of Dr. Sakharov cannot be understood as anything but a direct reflection of the present conflict between the two super-powers.

The Soviet Union depicts itself as the victim of US punitive measures but, as the seizure of Dr. Sakharov shows, a decision has been taken at the highest level to strike back at the US. This will be done not through diplomatic action but through retaliation against the Soviet Union’s own citizens.

The USSR has consistently rejected any linkage between detente era agreements and Soviet military expansion in the Third World, but for several years it has tacitly agreed to the linkage between detente’s advantages and its treatment of its own people.

Dr. Sakharov, more than any other Soviet citizen, has represented opposition to totalitarianism and the desire of some Soviet citizens for democratic freedoms. There have been Press campaigns against him and he has been warned by state prosecutors that he was “abusing their patience.” But the Soviet desire for international acceptance always prevented his arrest.

In early 1977, the KGB began an unprecedentedly thorough crackdown on dissent which included the almost complete suppression of the various dissident groups which were formed to monitor the Soviet Union’s observance of the Helsinki Accords. But Dr. Sakharov remained untouched.

This was important because, by his very presence, Dr. Sakharov afforded a measure of protection to all other Soviet dissidents. They benefited from the fact that his international stature as a scientist and recipient of the highest Soviet academic honours leant status to the dissident movement as a whole.

Dr. Sakharov’s position came to symbolise the Soviet reluctance to offend the West. But now that the international situation has changed dramatically and U.S.-Soviet relations have sunk to their lowest point since the Cold War, Dr. Sakharov has been seized. He has been sent into what may be permanent exile in a city where no foreigner can reach him, and where he will be remote from his friends.

With Dr. Sakharov removed from Moscow, the Soviet authorities will have all but achieved their goal of eliminating active dissent. The past three months, which have witnessed a steady deterioration in U.S.-Soviet relations, have also been marked by over 40 arrests including those, of Tatyana Velikanova, who helped put out the “Chronicle of Current Events,” Father Dmitri Dudko and Father Gleb Yakunin, two dissenting orthodox priests, and Antanas Terleckas, a Lithuanian nationalist.

It is unlikely the authorities will stop with the latest arrests. The dissidents commanded the sympathy, if not the active support, of a significant part of the Soviet intelligentsia. With almost all of the active dissidents in prison or in exile, the Soviet authorities are free to bring greater pressure on intellectual and cultural figures or citizens who simply fail to conform.

The “decent opinion of mankind” played a vital role in Soviet internal political life, because the system does not set its own limits. In many cases it has seemed that the Soviet Union took an action specifically to provoke a Western response because it was powerless to make value judgments on its own.

Soviet acceptance of “foreign interference” in its internal affairs was made explicit last year, when Moscow bargained with Washington for two convicted spies by releasing five of its own political prisoners. It thereby confirmed the right of the U.S. to interest itself in the fate of Soviet citizens on general humanitarian grounds even if the persons involved had no connection with the U.S.

The USSR allowed Jewish emigration in 1979 to increase to 50,000 a year in an effort to gain most favoured nation trade status from the U.S.

The action against Dr. Sakharov, however, shows that the authority’s readiness to bargain Soviet internal liberty for Western concessions also has ominous connotations. If relations suffered, entire sections of the population could be held hostage.

Now, with detente faltering, Moscow has acted against Dr. Sakharov who symbolised the hope for greater freedom. Without the extra protection to others which his presence in Moscow afforded, the Kremlin will find little to restrain it if it decides to intensify repression to levels not seen in many years as the particular Soviet response to the chance pattern of foreign events.

1 Dr. Sakharov was arrested in Moscow on January 22, 1980 and exiled to the Volga River city of Gorky (now Nizhnii Novgorod).

Financial Times, Friday, January 25, 1980

The Limits of Detente

The progress of detente has always been based on some necessary illusions. With the invasion of Afghanistan and the exile of Dr. Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and leader of the Soviet human rights movement, they are being dispelled all at once.

The Soviets want detente for political, economic and psychological reasons. Disarmament reduces arms expenditures and trade brings access to western goods. Cultural, technological and sporting exchanges earn the respectability which comes of co-operation with the rest of the world. But the Soviets, because of the ideological nature of their society, have no political goal—including detente—which transcends their commitment to expanding their own power. They have insisted from the beginning that Soviet military intervention in the Third World and the final say on how they treat their own people are no concern of anyone else.

Recent events have seemed to be dominated by a sinister automatism. The invasion of Afghanistan expanded at a stroke the area of the Soviet military bloc, but it also prompted U.S. grain and technology embargoes and President Carter’s intention to boycott the Olympic Games in Moscow.

Soviet officials answered the U.S. moves not by taking economic and political steps against the U.S., but by exiling Dr. Sakharov.

While it lasted, the freedom of Dr. Sakharov, who symbolised resistance to totalitarianism, epitomised the Soviet authorities’ desire to appear less repressive and to preserve elements of trust and mutual comprehension essential to the development of East-West relations. His forcible removal from Moscow signals a new attitude towards dissent and towards the opinion of the outside world.

Relations between the Soviet Union and the U.S. have now sunk to their lowest level since the Cold War, and the speed with which the fabric of relations has come unravelled reflects the diametric opposition of the Soviet and American conceptions of detente, which could only be ignored, but not reconciled.

The U.S., guided by Dr. Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State, sought to restrain Soviet behaviour by creating a web of mutually beneficial relations that the Soviets would be unwilling to risk by adventures in the Third World or by the kind of mistreatment of their own citizens that would attract unfavourable attention in the West.

The Soviets saw detente more narrowly, as a means of reducing military tension with the West to enable them to meet the threat from China and to gain western technology. They assumed it would be possible to continue to expand militarily in the third world and that the fate of the Soviet human rights movement, however much it might exercise western public opinion, would not affect their relations with western governments.

The incompatibility of the two viewpoints became obvious at the latest with the invasion of Afghanistan. But the Soviets mounted their first overt challenge to detente, as the U.S. understood it, in 1975, three years after President Nixon had gone to Moscow to sign the first Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement, SALT 1, and the major agreements on scientific and cultural exchanges and trade. Soviet advisers and Cuban troops intervened in the Angolan civil war and assured the victory of the MPLA faction of Mr. Agostinho Neto. The angry public reaction in the U.S. to the intervention was an important reason why the SALT 2 negotiations were put off for more than a year.

Flexibility

The Soviets did show some flexibility on human rights. They avoided arresting prominent dissidents and allowed others to be exchanged. They did renounce the 1974 Trade Act when amendments made to it in the U.S. Congress tied trade advantages to explicit assurances that Jews would be allowed to leave the country. But Jewish emigration, after a temporary drop, began to increase to record levels a short time later. Soviet officials made a quiet effort to use this fact to get the amendments removed.

When President Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, the SALT 2 negotiations were resumed, but the reaction to the Angolan intervention did nothing to dissuade the Soviets, using the Cubans as their proxies, from mounting another military operation in Ethiopia early in 1978. Soviet advisers, $1bn worth of Soviet weapons and 17,000 Cuban soldiers helped the regime of Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam defeat an invasion from neighbouring Somalia. In 1978, Vietnam, a close ally of Moscow’s, invaded Kampuchea and replaced the Pol Pot regime with the Vietnamese puppet government of Heng Samrin.

It was against this background that the Afghanistan crisis which threatens to take U.S.-Soviet relations back to the Cold War emerged. The Soviets were faced with a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan where a pro-Soviet Government, installed by a coup in 1978, appeared in danger of being overthrown by anti-Soviet Muslim guerrillas.

The Soviets paid no political price for their intervention in Angola and Ethiopia. But they cannot have been under any doubt that there would be a sharp American reaction if they flouted the U.S. notion of detente by intervening openly in Afghanistan.

Detente created greater security in Europe, but only on the condition that the Soviets did not go too far through open military intervention in tipping the balance of forces in the Third World. The U.S. had little choice but to link detente agreements to Soviet behaviour in the Third World because the Soviet Union has several inherent advantages there. No public outcry within the Soviet Union will prevent the dispatch of Soviet or Cuban troops to a zone of conflict. Once a Soviet-style regime has been installed in another country, the Soviets work to ensure that it will never be displaced.

When the Soviets decided to go into Afghanistan they had reason to be worried about the strategic situation on their southern border. Soviet officials saw little prospectfor good relations with Iran’s religious leaders in the long run, in spite of present U.S.-Iranian conflicts. All attempts to improve relations with China had been rejected as China moved steadily closer to the U.S.

Soviet officials have said that when the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan they believed that they had very little to lose because of the failure of the U.S. Senate to ratify SALT-2, the NATO decision to deploy new medium range missiles in western Europe, the increase of U.S. and NATO defence spending, and the long standing U.S. failure to respond to Soviet “signals” asking for broader trade opportunities.

All this is probably true. But there is little possibility that the Soviet Union would have desisted from invading Afghanistan had the survival of a Marxist regime there depended on it, no matter what the state of detente. The goodwill of the detente era carried within it the risk that people in West, who value the benefits of East-West cooperation, would lose their sense of realism. Even President Carter was affected by this.

Hierarchical

The Soviet Union, although an established power, differs fundamentally from most other states. It is organised like a revolutionary movement with the hierarchy, discipline and secrecy of the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik Party.

The idea of the Soviet Union as the vanguard of a committed ideological movement is false if measured against the Soviet people’s true beliefs and could almost be abandoned were it not frozen into the power structure of Soviet society with its lack of liberty, hierarchical gradations of authority and privilege, and proliferation of “secret” establishment; which do not guard anything that would be considered secret in any other society. But being organised like an ideological movement, it feels compelled to act like one.

When the U.S. announced its retaliatory measures, it was restricted in the methods it could choose, but the grain and technology embargoes and the threatened Olympic boycott, whatever their practical consequences, are certain to have a deep and lasting effect.

Soviet leaders often betray a desire for Western style respectability and their decision to banish Dr. Sakharov, after 10 years of tolerating his dissident activities, is one measure of how deeply the U.S. rejection of them has hurt. The attitude of the Soviet regime towards dissidents has always been repressive. The arrest and exile of Dr. Sakharov is a sign that, having given up hope of attaining Western style respectability, the Soviets are now about to demonstrate to the world the extent to which they had previously been restrained.

Mr. Roy Medvedev, the dissident historian, once noted that the 1970s had been the quietest decade in Soviet history, but added cautiously that there was no way to be sure that the stability that the leadership of Mr. Brezhnev had sought to bring to the country could be guaranteed in the years ahead.

With Mr. Aleksei Kosygin, the 75-year-old Prime Minister, seriously ill after a heart attack and Mr. Brezhnev reportedly working only three or four hours a day because of failing health, the Soviet leaders and those who will soon succeed them face a world situation clouded with uncertainty.

Financial Times, Tuesday, April 15, 1980

Caviar sold as herring

200 Soviet Officials Held

The Soviet authorities have arrested more than 200 employees of the Fisheries Ministry, including top officials, in connection with a multimillion dollar caviar swindle which appears to be among the most serious economic crimes in Soviet history.

It is understood Ministry officials made a secret and illegal agreement with a Western firm to send black caviar abroad in sealed 3–5 litre tins marked “smoked, seasoned herring.”

A Western firm which imported the caviar paid the hard currency price for herring. Then it repacked the caviar and sold it at enormous profit, splitting the proceeds with Ministry officials, whose share was deposited in Swiss bank accounts.

Economic crimes involving foreign currency, are punishable by death in the Soviet Union if big enough. It is believed more than 150 people could be liable to capital punishment for their role in the caviar operation which involved the Okean stores in Moscow and was undetected for more than 10 years.

Fisheries Ministry officials asked about the report declined to speak to the Financial Times. However, an official of the Internal Affairs Ministry acknowledged he was working on an investigation involving the Okean stores, but declined to discuss the case.

The Soviet Foreign Ministry also declined to comment and there has been no mention of the case in the press.

The Soviet system, with its uncertain distribution network, shoddy consumer goods and tough currency restrictions, creates rich opportunities for black market operations and illegal economic activity. Some is overlooked by the authorities if it is economically beneficial.

There is a history of large scale operations, although not, it is believed, as complex as the caviar swindle. The insistence on fulfilling the plan creates possibilities for massive concealment, if all staff of an enterprise are willing to falsify results.

What appears unprecedented in the Okean scandal is the alleged involvement of Ministry hierarchy, as opposed to an individual enterprise, and that the payments were in hard currency.

The investigation has been going on since February last year, when Mr. Alexander Ishkov resigned as Fisheries Minister. Also replaced were other high officials, including Mr. Vladimir I. Rytov, a deputy minister, Mr. I. V. Nikonorov and Mr F. P. Zaitsev, two Ministry Secretariat members; and Mr. S. I. Gushchyan, deputy chief of resources and fish products marketing.

Besides the more than 200 people arrested in Moscow, hundreds of people involved in processing, packing and distributing caviar have been held in the provinces, especially Soviet Azerbaijan, where most black caviar originates.

Also apparently involved in the operation were scores of restaurant managers in Moscow, the Black Sea resort of Sochi, and other cities.

Mr. Ishkov has not been arrested, although the state prosecutor’s office has demanded that he be charged. Other major figures are about to go on trial, however, and the investigation continues.

Red caviar from the Soviet Far East and other types of fish delicacies were also reportedly involved, but black caviar was the largest item because of the substantial increase in production from the Caspian Sea in the last 10 or 15 years.

Mr. Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet Prime Minister, is reported to have interceded for Mr. Ishkov—one of the longest-serving Ministers and a member of the Communist Party Central Committee—at the beginning of the investigation last year. It is not known if Mr. Kosygin has involved himself in the case since then.

If Mr. Ishkov were brought to trial, it would be the first time in Soviet history that a Minister had been charged with violation of the criminal code.

In the past, high-ranking officials accused of corruption have been allowed to retire or, in some cases, to retain their posts after a warning.

There is reported to be strong sentiment in favour of bringing Mt Ishkov to trial because of the size of the operation and because top officials of an entire ministry were reportedly implicated.

It is understood the operation might have continued undetected for many more years, but for what one source described as a case of “typical Russian disorganisation.” Some of the mislabelled tins of caviar began to slip into general circulation.

Financial Times, Friday, May 16, 1980

Moscow ‘lacks Afghan strategy’

Fighting a War of Shadows

Almost five months after the Soviet invasion, the war in Afghanistan has become a war of shadows. Western observers believe the Soviet army has not yet developed a strategy for defeating the Afghan rebels, who melt away as Soviet units approach.

There is little information about the fighting, but there have been signs in Moscow that Afghan resistance has been greater than expected, while Soviet military performance has been poorer.

The first indication of problems was the speed with which the Russians replaced the original invasion force, drawn from quarter-strength Central Asian reserve units. The Soviet troops in Afghanistan are now overwhelmingly European, with some reported to have been transferred to Afghanistan from bases in East Germany.

There has been no confirmation of reports of desertions by Central Asian soldiers, but it is thought the Soviets would not have replaced thousands of Asian troops as quickly as they did if they had been satisfied with their discipline or performance.

The Communist Party newspaper Pravda, in a highly unusual acknowledgment of the problems facing Soviet troops and their Afghan Allies, said last Saturday that “the struggle against the bandits in the mountains is no easy matter.”

Pravda said that “just 10 or so men, occupying good vantage points and wellarmed with automatic weapons, machine guns and grenade throwers provided by the United States and China, can hold up the advance of a much superior force.” The narrow ravines prevent the use of tanks, while the echoes of shots make it difficult to determine the source of attacks.

There was no acknowledgement that Soviet troops were taking part in the fighting, and the problems were said to affect only Afghan army units. Soviet forces, however, are now believed to have taken over almost the whole burden of the war against the rebels. According to one report from Indian travellers young Afghans are being rounded up every night in Kabul and forced into the Afghan armed forces’ depleted ranks.

The Soviet armed forces newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda, has carried almost no information about fighting in Afghanistan, but there have been an increasing number of reports about training exercises on Soviet territory in such specialities as mountain warfare, airborne operations and since the February rioting in Kabul, fighting in cities.

Western military observers believe the Soviet forces in Afghanistan are mechanised and road-bound, and the growing emphasis on training in unconventional warfare stresses the fact that Soviet military training has traditionally presumed front-to-front confrontations of the kind which might be expected in a conflict in Central Europe. The Russians have little experience of anti-guerrilla warfare.

There are now 80,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan, and about 25,000 in the Soviet Union near the Afghan border. But the long-awaited spring offensive against the guerrillas has not come, and may be postponed indefinitely.

The Soviet forces have secured major cities and the roads between them, but military observers believe they have not adjusted psychologically to the kind of war they are fighting. The vast amounts of ultra-modern equipment they have moved into Afghanistan, including the latest rifles, mortars, anti-aircraft missiles and long-range artillery, can be thoroughly tested in Afghanistan but the equipment is of little use in pursuing the guerrillas on their own terrain.

Soviet and Afghan units typically respond to calls for help from beleaguered local authorities only to arrive and find that the Afghan rebels have disappeared. They may search houses and make a few arrests, but they do not take drastic action to assert government authority. The rebels return as soon as the Soviet units withdraw.

When Soviet and Afghan units come into direct conflict with the Afghan rebels, the rebels are usually the initiator and the Soviet troops normally take up defensive positions behind their heavy equipment. This minimises casualties, but does little to suppress the insurgency. The Soviet troops apparently seldom pursue the rebels on foot into the mountains.

The deployment pattern suggests the Russians believe their own propaganda about defending the Afghans against “foreign aggression.” There have been punishing Soviet strikes against some rebel strongholds, including, most recently, a battle involving hundreds of Soviet tanks in the Ghazni area, south of Kabul. But the Soviet force, military specialists believe, would have to be increased to no less than a quarter of a million men if they were to subjugate the entire country.

The Soviet authorities appear hesitant to commit a much larger number of troops, and the reasons may be both military and political. Massive attacks and a huge Soviet presence could eliminate any possibility of President Babrak Karmal’s government broadening its base. If indigenous support for the Karmal’s Government cannot be created, a large Soviet occupation force will have to remain in the country for many years.

The Soviet authorities may, therefore, be very uneasy. The war is unpopular in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet newspapers say almost nothing about casualties or fighting—aware that they cannot count on broad public support. Reports from Afghanistan have concerned Mr Karmal’s Government, co-operation between Soviet and Afghan specialists, and the successes of the Afghan army against “gangsters” “criminals” "mercenaries” and “bandits,” with Soviet troops said to be playing only a support role.

The control over information affects the families of soldiers posted to Afghanistan. Throughout a Soviet soldier’s service, his relatives know only the number of his division but not where the soldier and division are posted. There have been cases of Soviet soldiers passing word to their families that they were not in Afghanistan. When a soldier is killed in battle, his family is told that he was “killed in the fulfilment of his duties”—the same formula used for accidental death—but not where he died or how.

This lack of information has softened the impact of Afghanistan. Many of the seriously wounded are treated in East Germany, and maimed or disfigured soldiers are reported to be resting in sanatoria on the Black Sea. They will probably not return to their home towns until after the Olympics at the earliest.

Sometimes, however, reality still manages to intrude on the all-but-pervasive impression in Moscow of a distant war against an ill-defined foe. Thirty officers were reported in mid-April to have been buried in the military cemetery in Kiev, a high toll for one locality. By the end of the month, there were 25 more fresh graves.

The Soviet takeover in Afghanistan was rapid and painless, but the Soviet authorities may be unable to consolidate their control so easily. The war has had little impact on Soviet society so far, but the choices which the Soviet armed forces must face suggest that, even with only the barest access to information in Moscow, the Afghan War may soon come to people’s attention of its own accord.

Financial Times, Wednesday, June 4, 1980

Afghanistan

Moscow Starts ‘Phoney War’ Over Peace

With Afghanistan far from pacified, but at least firmly under Soviet control, the conflict has entered a new stage which, adapting a phrase from forty years ago, might best be described as the “phoney war.”

A bewildering series of proposals, suggestions and “hints” have been put about by the Soviet and Afghan governments, to the effect that Soviet troops can be withdrawn when “outside interference” in Afghanistan’s affairs is brought to an end.

MValery Giscard d’Estaing, the French President, met Mr Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet President, in Warsaw in an effort to “keep the lines of communication open”; and Herr Helmut Schmidt, the West German Chancellor, is due in Moscow later this month when a new West German-Soviet 25-year economic agreement will be on the agenda.

There is a lull in Soviet military activity in Afghanistan and the number of Soviet troops in that country has levelled off at 80,000, with another 25,000 stationed across the border on Soviet territory. One might almost assume that an agreement on Soviet troop withdrawals was imminent.

If precedent is any guide, however, it is far more likely that the West is witnessing a carefully orchestrated campaign whose purpose is not to prepare the way for Soviet troop withdrawals but to undermine support in Western Europe for economic sanctions against the Soviet Union, and prepare the groundwork for the eventual recognition, particularly in the Islamic world, of the Soviet-backed government of Mr Babrak Karmal.

Shortly after Soviet forces crossed the Afghan border in strength last December, Soviet official spokesmen said they had moved in at the request of the Afghan government in order to protect it against “outside interference.” There was no evidence of interference by anyone but the Soviet Union at the time, and none has materialised since. But Mr Brezhnev offered this explanation to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and Mr Carter reacted by doubting the truth of what Mr Brezhnev said.

In the months since the invasion, the Soviet way of using language has become less confusing. By “outside interference,” the Soviet authorities mean the indigenous Afghan revolt against Soviet occupation; and when they speak of an end to “outside interference,” they are seeking an end to foreign backing for the rebels. This would—for the moment—leave the Karmal government in outright control, making the presence of Soviet forces unnecessary.

The Soviet peace offensive is now four months old but even M Giscard d’Estaing, whose meeting last month with Mr Brezhnev in Warsaw was hailed in the Soviet press as a “fruitful dialogue,” did not deflect Soviet determination to remain in Afghanistan until all resistance to the Karmal government has ceased.

The Soviets, on an official level, are still repeating what Mr Brezhnev said to Mr Carter about “outside interference,” but they have received free publicity for their peaceful intentions by continually reformulating their propaganda position to create the impression that they were offering something new.

Mr Brezhnev, for example, told Mr Armand Hammer, the President of Occidental Petroleum and a major supporter of U.S. Soviet trade that the Soviet Union would not insist on U.S. guarantees of an end to all “outside interference” (in effect, all Afghan resistance which the U.S. has no interest in ending) in return for troop withdrawals recognising that the U.S. might not be able to restrain all the elements at work in Afghanistan.

In April, the Karmal government offered to open negotiations aimed at normalising relations with Iran and Pakistan, based on an end to “outside interference” in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. The offer was doubly unrealistic because Iran and Pakistan not only have no interest in helping suppress the Afghan rebellion, but they also want no part of the Kamal government, which neither country recognizes.

The most recent reformulation of the Soviet position was the Afghan proposal on May 14, which combined the invitation to Iran and Pakistan with the existing Soviet offer to withdraw troops in return for U.S. guarantees of an end to “outside interference.”

Schmidt is now expected to arrive in Moscow on June 30 for the first visit of a Western leader to Moscow since the Afghan invasion. But despite the flurry of “peace feelers,” he has little Prospekt of achieving more than M Giscard d’Estaing in changing the Russian position on Afghanistan.

The Soviet leaders are often regarded as heavy-handed in the West, but they are frequently shrewd enough to outmanoeuvre their Western counterparts. The Soviet authorities realise that West European businessmen have no desire to make economic sacrifices to deter future Afghanistans, and the peace offensive is intended to reinforce this reluctance.

There are fundamental reasons why the peace offensive is not likely to be followed by real peace but rather a rapid doubling or trebling of the number of Soviet troops. The war is going badly for the Soviets in Afghanistan, and military observers believe that it will take a minimum of a quarter of a million men to begin to pacify the country.

This prospect might be daunting for a democratic country, but Soviet political authority is based on a supposed understanding of the iron laws of history.

The Soviet leadership cannot forsake the “Afghan revolution” after having committed troops and its own prestige to it, without undermining its own authority as well.

The damage to the West as a result of the present “peace offensive” may be serious. The inability of the U.S. to rally its allies can only convince Afghanistan’s Islamic neighbours that they have no choice but to accept the inevitable and come to terms with the Karmal government, any recognition of which would legitimise the Soviet presence.

Financial Times, Saturday, July 5, 1980

Why the Russians Think They
Have Taken Schmidt for a Ride

Masters of chess and the psychological novel, the Russians demonstrated once again this week during the visit of Herr Helmut Schmidt, the West German Chancellor, that they are more than a match for the leaders of the West.

Ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the overriding goal of Soviet policy has been to consolidate the Soviet position in Afghanistan while defusing the atmosphere of East-West confrontation in order to ward off damaging western economic sanctions.

The official Soviet Press has indicated that Herr Schmidt deserves some of the credit for the Soviet decision to drop preconditions to talks on Euro-strategic missiles. But to the Russians the real significance of his visit was publicly in signalling that, as far as Western Europe is concerned, there is no longer a crisis over Afghanistan.

The Communist Party Newspaper Pravda, in an editorial on July 1, the day after Herr Schmidt left Moscow, made clear that the Soviet position on Afghanistan would not change. It reiterated that the Soviet Union would not consider any settlement of the Afghan crisis which fails to confirm the power of the Soviet-backed government of Mr. Babrak Karmal.

Pravda said a political settlement was possible but it depended on an end to hostile acts from “outside.” Since the Soviet authorities refer to the indigenous Afghan revolt against Marxist rule as “outside interference,” the Pravda editorial was a reaffirmation of the Soviet refusal to pull out of Afghanistan before all opposition is crushed.

There has been almost no direct Soviet comment by officials or the Press on the Schmidt visit. But Soviet newspapers have quoted foreign comment to the effect that the visit had been a “powerful impulse” to detente and mutual understanding.

That the Soviets could make this assertion, albeit indirectly, immediately after having insisted that they were not going to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan and would, if necessary, increase them, is an indication of how much the Soviets feel they have gained in the wake of Herr Schmidt’s visit.

Unlike their Western counterparts, the Soviet leaders have never agreed to summit meetings solely for an “exchange of views” except where they felt that the fact of the meeting itself could be taken to symbolise foreign acquiescence in a Soviet action such as the invasion of Afghanistan.

By his presence in Moscow, Herr Schmidt almost certainly diminished in Soviet eyes the credibility of Western objections to the invasion of Afghanistan. The impression of irresolution could only have been strengthened by West German readiness to sign a 25 year economic co-operation agreement with the Soviet Union during Herr Schmidt’s stay.

An indication of the Soviet Union’s attitude towards summit meetings can be gained from the experience of the first years in office of U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Mr. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet President, repeatedly refused to meet Mr. Carter after the latter began his human rights crusade. The Russians didn’t want to be put in the position of seeming to endorse the campaign, in the same way that they appear to have manoeuvred both President Giscard d’Estaing and Herr Schmidt in apparently endorsing Soviet policy through their respective summits with Mr. Brezhnev.

The Soviet agreement to negotiate on limiting medium range missiles in Europe may be taken to justify Herr Schmidt’s trip. But Western military observers have long been sceptical of the ostensible Soviet refusal to negotiate while a NATO decision to place U.S. missiles in Western Europe was in force.

The Soviet Union has between 150 and 200 highly accurate medium range SS-20 missiles with multiple warheads targeted on Western Europe. It is introducing one new SS-20 every five days. The NATO decision to deploy 572 Pershing-2 and Cruise missiles, which prompted the Soviet refusal to negotiate, was intended to counter an existing Soviet force.

Radio Moscow, in its English language world service, praised Herr Schmidt for helping to break the deadlock caused by the Soviet refusal to negotiate over the Euromissiles. The Soviet decision, however, could equally have been taken without Herr Schmidt’s presence. It was almost inevitable given NATO’s own determination to press with a matching medium range missile deployment.

The greater likelihood is that the Soviet authorities prepared a “concession” for Herr Schmidt which, like the limited Soviet withdrawal of men and equipment from Afghanistan, was heralded as an achievement.

The general East-West situation has not been fundamentally altered. Herr Schmidt, far from achieving genuine progress over Afghanistan may have only stiffened Soviet resistance by assuring the Soviets that despite their refusal to talk about Afghanistan, as evidenced by the way his remarks were censored and corrected in Pravda, the Soviet Union can still count on West German technology and goods.

Part of the difficulty in trips like those of Herr Schmidt to Moscow and M. Giscard’s to Warsaw is that they are based on the assumption that the tension over the invasion of Afghanistan exists because the Soviets do not understand the West’s position and consultation will help them understand it better. In fact, the Soviet authorities show every sign of understanding the Western position and the tenuous commitment to it at least as well as most Western leaders.

Financial Times, Saturday, July 19, 1980

An Olympian view of the Moscow games starting today

Russia Through the Looking Glass

In a macabre footnote to the pre-Olympic preparations, Soviet television viewers were surprised one night last month by the unscheduled appearance of Father Dmitri Dudko, a Russian Orthodox priest, who had been arrested six months earlier on charges of anti-Soviet agitation.

In a clear, confident voice, Father Dudko began reading a confession in which he renounced his previous dissident activities, praised the Soviet authorities for their humanity and said that he now recognised that his struggle against atheism had been a struggle against Soviet power.

When Father Dudko finished people began calling each other in Moscow’s dissident and intellectual community. Father Dudko was the religious counsellor and friend to most of Moscow’s liberal intelligentsia, and one historian later described his recantation as an “inexpressible blow.”

The confession of Father Dudko, however, did not signal the start of a new campaign against religion but, on the contrary, was followed by intensification of the preparations of religious facilities for the 1980 Olympics. Long neglected Russian Orthodox churches were being restored, crosses erected and icons lit to demonstrate Soviet respect for religious faith.

The irreconcilability between Father Dudko renouncing his beliefs on nationwide television and the final touches being put on the restored cupolas of Russian Orthodox churches is symbolic of the problems foreigners will experience in understanding a society which invests enormous energy in creating a false facade to conceal the ideology which guides it.

More than 30,000 western tourists have come to Moscow for the 1980 Olympics and the overwhelming likelihood is that the impression they will take away with them will be based on the false front, not the ideological reality.

The buildings on main Olympic routes have been repainted, drunks, hooligans and others likely to make public scenes have been exiled, attractive Soviet guides who have been carefully screened will aid foreign visitors and a full cultural programme has been arranged. Meanwhile the ubiquitous police—both uniformed and plain-clothed varieties—will discourage chance encounters in the street.

The Soviet authorities believe that Western visitors to the Soviet Union generally have no interest in probing deeply into Soviet life and will draw their conclusions on the basis of what is visible. The Soviets therefore set out to organise what the visitors will see.

The Olympic Games will be a net gain for the Soviet authorities in the political sense if the vast majority of foreign visitors never give any thought to the ideological essence of Soviet society and assume that in the Soviet Union too, appearances reflect reality.

The foreign visitor—who buys expensive Olympic souvenirs in Soviet dollar shops, travels in an Intourist car, attends the Bolshoi ballet and the Olympic events and admires the golden cupolaed churches which have been carefully restored—may easily return home to tell friends that the Soviet Union is little different from countries in the West.

The western visitor to Moscow may notice that older people are better dressed than he had imagined. But this will be less important than the fact that some of those strolling past him on Kallinin Prospekt are former labour camp prisoners who adopted, as a result of their experiences, the fundamental assumptions of the Soviet “new man.”

The experience of having been arrested, serving 15 years in a Siberian labour camp and then being freed, rehabilitated and restored to one’s previous position as if nothing had happened teaches a man one of totalitarianism’s basic rules—that his actions do not always influence his fate.

The Soviets have tried to create an environment for western visitors in which they will feel comfortable and which they will compare to their own. Having arrived at a gleaming airport built by the West Germans, the western visitors will be quickly taken to luxury hotels and offered the opportunity to participate in familiar activities such as group excursions, buying parties and theatre tours.

The visitor, however, will learn more about Soviet society far away from the tourist facilities. Although it is off the beaten path, the visitor may gain a feel for the way in which totalitarianism made people interchangeable in the Soviet Union by taking a walk in the dimly lit heart of 19th century Moscow.

Watching the reflection of the street lamps on the motionless surface of Patriarch’s Pond, it is easier to understand that the Soviet Union is a country where a figure stepping out of the shadows for a solitary midnight stroll could, with equal ease, have spent his life as a high Soviet official or as an “enemy of the people and saboteur.”

The Soviet Union was not always so diffident about its ideology or so anxious to make bourgeois westerners feel at home. But ideological fervour has slowly drained away to be replaced by ordinary careerism which must nonetheless realise its goals within the established ideological structure. The result is a surrealistic situation which helps explain why the Soviets prefer to conceal the state of their ideological ambiguity behind a protective facade.

The techniques being used to create an atmosphere of normality for Olympic tourists are aimed at misleading journalists, businessmen and Heads of State. Soviet political culture was shaped by Marx and Lenin’s unflattering view of the western bourgeoisie. If the West feels baffled by the Soviet Union this is partially because the Soviet authorities have more confidence in their ability to maintain a misleading facade than in their capacity to defend themselves as an ideological movement.

According to Marxist-Leninist ideology, the elimination of private ownership did away with the basis for social differences which are always class-based. The Soviet Union therefore should, according to doctrine, demonstrate total unanimity and this unanimity should be completely voluntary. In fact, unanimity does not exist in the Soviet Union but the political structure of the country is organised on the assumption that it does.

One of the rituals through which the supposed unanimity of Soviet society manifests itself are the periodic elections to the Supreme Soviet, the nominal Parliament, in which 99.99 per cent of the population votes in favour of the Communist Party candidate. What really happens during these elections, however, is that people vote because they fear bureaucratic revenge at the hands of the State apparatus which affects every part of their life, if they refuse.

The ritualism in the society is also manifested in “Socialist competitions” which take place at every work place and involve pledges by the workers to increase production or reduce tardiness and so-called “Leninist inventories” among young adults who make promises such as to improve their “moral and cultural level” and report on fulfilment at meetings of the Komsomol, the communist youth organisation a year later.

None of these rituals has any real meaning but they are intended to express the unity and “enthusiasm” of the society and although it is a rare Soviet official who will show any eagerness to discuss these practices, none can afford—in a conversation with a foreigner or even an unknown Soviet citizen—to belittle their significance. The ritual reflects the ideology which is the ultimate justification for Soviet power.

In a situation of ritual adherence to an ideology which has been deprived of substance a special role is created for the use of “hints.” Mr. Naum Meiman, the acting head of the dissident Helsinki Monitoring Group, was puzzled one morning last September, to be called to his neighbourhood party organisation to discuss his longstanding application to emigrate.

Emigration matters would normally have been handled by the Soviet Visa Office. But Mr. Meiman went to the local party headquarters nonetheless where the chairman of the party committee spoke to him about his dissident activities and said, “as a resident of our area, we strongly and persistently advise you to change your behaviour.”

To a Soviet citizen, the message was clear. If Mr. Meiman did not cease his dissident activities, he might soon cease to be a resident of the local chairman’s area, which would mean that he could be exiled from Moscow. If a foreigner were to inquire about the conversation, however, a Soviet official would describe the talk as a friendly conversation with no implicit threat.

The Soviet penchant for advertising what is meaningless and concealing what is important can deepen the psychological distance between westerners and Soviet citizens by depriving words of their meaning. This is reflected in a wide variety of situations from Soviet claims to have been “invited” into Afghanistan to the behaviour of the women who manage the cafe next door to my office. They shut the doors when they feel like gossiping and hang up a sign reading “closed for technical reasons.”

The successful creation of a false facade for foreigners and the irresponsibility with words in the Soviet Union both stem from the basic Soviet attempt to convince people that the truth is what they are shown or told and never what they learn independently.

The emphasis is on manipulating what they can see because it is assumed that foreigners have no access to independent impressions. With Soviet citizens, the goal is to get them to ignore what they see and believe what they are told.

One night a friend of mine named Volodya came home after an alcoholic binge to find his wife and mother waiting up for him and, in his words “ready to strangle me.” He had been out with his friend, Petya. In a distinctly Soviet attempt to save himself, he told his wife, “Petya is Dead.”

Volodya’s wife, who was fond of Petya, burst into tears, helped her husband into bed, and brought him a cup of tea. When she left, Volodya picked up the phone and called Petya. He told Petya to stay out of sight for a few days because he had told his wife that he was dead. Petya, who had also been drinking, agreed, and went back to sleep.

The next day, Petya having forgotten the incident, saw Volodya’s wife on the down escalator at the local Metro station as he was riding up. He waved at her and then, realizing his mistake when he saw her look of absolute horror, began shouting, “no, no, I’m dead, I’m dead.”

Only in the Soviet Union would a man in Petya’s position have felt there was a chance to convince her.

Financial Times, Wednesday, July 30, 1980

Light and shade in Shadrinsk

View from Middle Russia

The morning sunlight in Shadrinsk revealed an old Russian merchant town where leaning log houses, warped from centuries of rain and snow, lurched over dusty streets and five-storey housing blocks stood in the background with iron balconies and laundry hanging out to dry.

It had taken 39 hours to reach the Ural mountains town of Shadrinsk, in the Trans-Siberian Express and on the way, we passed timeless wooden villages where peasant women bent over dirt plots in the heat of the sun.

As we approached the outskirts of the town, trucks loaded with chopped wood waited at a crossing and the grassy Russian plain was broken by a pine grove which gave way to a scene of peaceful decrepitude where unused railway sidings were dotted with marigolds and grain elevators rusted in the sun.

We had been prompted to make the trip by the massive Soviet propaganda campaign following the invasion of Afghanistan. In Moscow, educated people are sceptical of their Government but I thought this was probably less true in the towns and villages flung out over thousands of miles of provincial Russia, the “deaf places” where most Soviet citizens live.

During the train journey to Shadrinsk, a factory town of 80,000 in the centre of the USSR, which was picked at random, a colleague and I got some idea of what lay ahead. There were many soldiers on the train, en route to new postings, as well as a reasonable cross section of the travellers one would meet in any second-class compartment on the busy Trans-Siberian Express.

Almost to a man, people we spoke to condemned the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics and said that they supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“We gave the Afghans help, just as the Americans gave us help in the Second World War,” said a retired schoolteacher from Kurgan. “They published the appeal for help in our newspapers.” I asked him if he ever considered the possibility that what he read in the Soviet newspapers might not be true. “How could it not be true?” he replied.

In Shadrinsk, I unpacked my things at the Hotel Ural and walked through the shadeless central square, stopping to talk to some young girls who were sitting on a bench near the war memorial. Across the road at the Motherland Cinema a new film was playing called, “From Your Loved One, Don’t Be Parted.”

In the next three days, I spoke to people in cafes, in the barren farmers’ market, in the restaurant of our hotel, and in the lush, mosquito-ridden city gardens. The overwhelming impression I took away was that there was little realism in the idea of President Jimmy Carter that an Olympic boycott would inform the Soviet people about Western anger over Afghanistan, In remote cities like Shadrinsk which are cut off from outside information, the conditions for informing people do not exist. Soviet propaganda is the reality.

One night in the hotel restaurant, we sat down at a table with some amateur musicians who worked at the Shadrinsk Auto Parts factory, and began talking with them about world events. They said they were disgusted by the Olympic boycott and, echoing the phrase constantly repeated in the Soviet newspapers, said it was wrong to mix, politics with sport. “We all know about Afghanistan,” said Volodya, one of the men, “but I put a fence around this question. Sport is one thing, politics is something else.”

At a table cluttered with empty vodka bottles and half-eaten meat and potato salad, Igor, another of the men, explained the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as an example of “typical Russian generosity.”

The lack of access to uncontrolled information about the world situation in Shadrinsk was complemented by a shortage of decent books. The only bookshop was full of technical books and bound volumes of Lenin’s works. There were only two counters where genuine literature was being offered, a counter where the works of Chekhov were displayed as a prize in a lottery and an exchange desk where a few works of modern literature were being offered in return for specific other books listed in a file of index cards.

One night at Shadrinsk’s floodlit dancing ring in the city gardens we chatted with a pretty 19-year-old shop girl. My colleague asked her if the fact that she wore Western jeans and liked Western music meant she didn’t like the Soviet Union. “No,” she said emphatically, “I love the Soviet Union.”

During our stay, we had several meetings with local officials but the result of the meetings was to give the impression that political discussion is frowned on in Shadrinsk when it departs from the verbatim repetition of official propaganda. With political issues and anything that bears on them eliminated from the conversation, our talks with local officials were taken up with their odd recitals of meaningless facts.

In a 90-minute meeting with leaders of the Komsomol, the Young Communists’ Organisation, we learned that Shadrinsk has four cinemas, 18 secondary schools, six hospitals, 75 retail establishments, 4,000 private cars, 8,000 motorcycles and every year, no fewer than 800 weddings. This information was not apparently prepared in order to waste our time but simply defined the area of independent intellectual competence permitted to local officials.

The impression of faith in the picture of the outside world given by Soviet propaganda and the Soviet Press would have been all but total in Shadrinsk, had it not been for one fleeting, discordant incident which took place while I was out for a quiet stroll.

I turned off on a side street and came upon the site of an old church which was surrounded by broken, weathered scaffolding except for the red bell tower and the golden cupola and cross. In a yard beside the church, an old man was filling pails with sand and I asked him if restoration work was continuing. He laughed disinterestedly without looking at me and said, “the State has more important objectives than restoring churches.”

The man continued his work, apparently unperturbed by being approached by a foreigner. “First they destroyed the churches now they’re restoring them,” he said. “I remember how they destroyed this one. They blew holes to the walls and burned the icons. Then they took out all the silver and gold. They said they needed the metal for industry.”

On our last day to town, we walked through the city gardens where mothers were pushing baby strollers and old men played chess on large outdoor boards. The intense sunlight filtering through the trees threw deep shadows on the sidewalks and the branches and leaves formed thick canopies over the winding dirt paths. We met a worker named Oleg from the telephone equipment factory and sat with him on a bench in an old, unpainted gazebo.

He said that Shadrinsk was a patriotic city which had supported the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia out of affection for the Czechs and the 1956 invasion of Hungary out of a desire to help the Hungarians. “Tell Carter that the Russians don’t want to fight,” he said. “We know how to fight but we don’t want to fight.”

Listening to Oleg, who was obvious in his interest in the outside world and his sincerity, it was easy to imagine the frightening potential of a dedicated army, with recruits drawn from places like Shadrinsk, marching into war full of confidence in the rightness of their cause but without the faintest actual idea what they were fighting for.

“I know we went into Afghanistan for purely humanitarian reasons, in order to help,” he said. “We’re Russians. If I had my last loaf of bread and you needed it, I’d cut it in half. I don’t care who you are, whether you’re English, American, Vietnamese, Israeli, we’re all people. We helped Cambodia, where how many million people died. It made your hair stand on end. We helped Vietnam. We are ready to help any country.”

I walked down some potholed side streets the following afternoon past a derelict church and emerged on the river bank to a scene of worldlessness and peace. Under feathered clouds in a blue sky, wizened old women watched from the steps of wooden houses as two policemen warned a young boy not to cut the branch off a tree.

There seemed little reason for life in Shadrinsk to be affected by events in a place as remote as Afghanistan and in the local newspapers, which were on sale in kiosks on the main street, it was easy to see how the conflict could have escaped people’s notice. In the twice-weekly Shadrinsk Rabochy and Zauralskaya Pravda, the daily regional paper, most of the news concerned the grain harvest or truancy among workers in the local factories.

In the evenings, we could pick up the Russian language service of the BBC and the Voice of America from my hotel room but on an issue like Afghanistan, the information broadcast by the BBC directly contradicts the information conveyed by the central Soviet television and Press. It may therefore indirectly reinforce official propaganda because to trust Western broadcasts, the resident of a provincial Russian city must make the unsettling assumption that much of what he is told about Afghanistan in the Soviet Press is a lie.

One afternoon we were joined at our table in a cafe near the central square by a muscular construction Worker who spoke to us about the world situation and became increasingly vehement as the conversation proceeded.

“The Americans are cunning people,” he said. “In how many countries do they have their bases? How many bases surround the whole Soviet Union.” The Russians were a peace-loving people. The Olympic boycott was an action against peace. He said that everyone supported the policy in Afghanistan and he added that no one had sent him over to talk to us, a possibility which crossed my mind while he was talking.

That night we met Oleg and a friend of his at the hotel restaurant. Oleg insisted on buying us several rounds of drinks and reminiscing about instances of East-West friendship, including the meeting of Allied and Russian forces on the Elbe. He recited a poem by Yevtushenko, “Do the Russians want War.” After delivering the full poem, he raised his voice to recite the last lines: “Russians don’t want war, Russians don’t want war, Russians don’t want war.”

Oleg’s friend, Vitya, offered a few final thoughts at our table on the situation in Afghanistan. I had asked him whether, he was troubled by Soviet Press claims that the Government of Afghanistan invited Soviet forces to help and the head of that government, Hafizullah Amin was immediately killed.

“There could have been two governments, one popular and the other anti-popular,” Vitya said reflectively. “We supported the popular government of Babrak Karmal. We don’t have all the information. We can’t see the peaks of policy. We see what is known to us but we know enough to take a view.”

Financial Times, Tuesday, August 5, 1980

How the Kremlin Kept Moscow Under Wraps

The 1980 Moscow Olympic Games were for long the focus of the most varied hopes and expectations. The games have now passed into history as an athletics success, but their impact on Soviet society has been strangely inconclusive.

To a limited extent, the games have improved the Soviet Union’s image. Athletes and foreign tourists have been impressed with the Olympic restaurants and hotels and the sports facilities, as well as the precision with which the transport to events was organised. But many in Moscow believed the games would mark a turning point towards either liberalisation or repression, a view made plausible by the years of careful preparation.

The opportunity to meet foreigners and be exposed to a different, freer way of life was one aspect of the Olympics which had most appealed to Moscow residents. The tight security thus gave rise to bitterness. People in Moscow began referring to the games as “our lipa,” diminutive for the woman’s name Olympiada which can also be translated as “sham” or “fake.”

To people in Moscow, the Olympics seemed remote. The foreign visitors, whose numbers were cut by the U.S.-led boycott by as much as three-quarters to around 75,000, were little seen by Russians, except in the windows of buses passing in convoy to Olympic events.

The opportunities for tourists to meet Russians were carefully controlled. Foreign visitors proved unadventurous, and tourist hotels were closed to all but registered guests and those with special passes.

Just before the Olympics began, the Soviet Komsomol, the communist youth organisation, opened 20 or so Western-style discotheques in the buildings of professional clubs around Moscow. The discotheques were intended to remedy one of Moscow’s longstanding shortcomings as a tourist attraction—the lack of street life or night clubs.

The discotheques offered Western rock music under strobe lights, and a relatively daring disco fashion show. Foreign tourists were brought to a club by their Soviet guides, ostensibly to show them Moscow’s hidden night life. In some cases, whole delegations were taken to the disco, where they were given the opportunity for political discussion or to dance with carefully vetted young Komsomols as well as plainclothes militia men and members of the KGB.

The number of Russians who might meet tourists was also restricted. The ban on travel to Moscow by non-residents and the successful efforts to persuade residents to take vacations during the Olympics, helped to reduce the number of people in Moscow by at least 1m.

The apparent object of this was to eliminate queues and improve the food supply. But, combined with the massive police presence, the reduction had an eerie effect. Ubiquitous police stood watch over unnaturally thin crowds.

Some Moscovites remember ruefully the last great influx of foreigners in 1957. About 40,000 foreign students, most from the communist bloc, the Third World or Western Socialist organisations, came to Moscow for several weeks for the International Youth Festival, and changed Soviet society fundamentally. For many Russians, the youth festival offered the first contact in their lives with foreigners. After decades of political terror, the free atmosphere in Moscow then, with foreigners and Russians meeting openly, impromptu Jazz concerts in the parks and a carnival atmosphere on the streets, gave people enormous hope as Moscow entered the period known as “the thaw.” Many of those in Moscow old enough to remember the International Youth Festival wondered if the Olympics would rekindle some of the hope for liberalisation and a freer life which surfaced then.

The generous hospitality of individual Russians is as real now as it was in 1957, but the decision to bring in as many as 200,000 uniformed militia men to ensure order during the Olympic Games was, in a sense, an answer to those expectations—an unmistakable sign that, for the moment at least, liberalisation in the Soviet Union has gone as far as it is going to go.

Financial Times, Thursday, August 28, 1980

Russia Keeping Its Hands off Poland

Poland would need to descend into chaos and near civil war before the Soviet Union felt compelled to intervene.

Trouble in Poland has historically been associated with a weakening of the Russian empire. If the Soviet press has given pro-forma endorsement to changes in the Polish political structure unthinkable 10 years ago, it was because, under present circumstances, the Soviet leadership may have had little choice.

The extreme sensitivity of the Polish strikes and the threat they pose to the whole Socialist bloc, were emphasised by the Soviet decision to jam Russian-language broadcasts by the BBC, the Voice of America and Deutsche Welle, and by the almost total silence in the Soviet press about Poland which prevailed until Monday.

Workers emulating the Polish model could undermine the Communist Party dictatorship in every East European Socialist country, and the decision to allow the changes proposed by Mr. Edward Gierek, the Polish party leader, which include free elections to the government trade union, was a major Soviet concession.

To have refused to compromise with the strikers would have carried even graver risks for the Soviet leaders than those presented by liberalisation. The Soviet Union is in no position to launch an invasion in Europe. It is badly strained by the resistance in Afghanistan and the prospect of worsening relations with the West.

The East European allies are independent of the Kremlin only to the extent that they are able to resist its wishes. If Poland were allowed to become as free and pluralistic as Yugoslavia, thereby exerting a strong attraction for people in other Socialist bloc countries, it would be because the Russians knew that, if they invaded, the Poles would be ready to fight.

The Soviet decision to invade a satellite state depends not only on the threat of ideological contamination from fundamental democratic reforms, but also on the military and political risk.

The Soviet leaders had little to lose when they ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Detente and the development of economic and trade ties with the West had not begun, the Soviet Union was not militarily engaged elsewhere, whereas the U.S. was bogged down in Vietnam, and Czechoslovakia, with a population of only 15m, would clearly not resist.

Poland today is far different. Popular animosity towards Russians has deep roots, and the Soviet Union has tried not to interfere in Poland as long as Communist Party rule was not threatened. In 1956, when Mr. Wladyslaw Gomulka came to power backed by popular riots, Mr. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, was taken by surprise and immediately flew to Warsaw without informing Polish border guards.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia required 600,000 troops, 500,000 of them drawn from the Soviet Union itself, even though there was no significant Czechoslovak resistance. An invasion of Poland, through which run vital supply and communications lines between Russia and Soviet forces in East Germany, would require at least a million men. In the face of the expected intense resistance from the Polish Army, such an invasion would arouse little enthusiasm among more liberal Warsaw Pact members.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet leaders have, with remarkable skill, managed to maintain their ties with West Germany, and France. These ties, and the access to Western technology which have flowed from them, have become more important to the Soviet leadership as the U.S.-Soviet relationship has come under strain.

An invasion of Poland, and a long struggle to subdue it, would probably ensure Mr. Ronald Reagan’s election as President of the United States and mark the start of an uncontrolled arms race. By alienating Western Europe, it would threaten the credit and trade position of the entire Socialist bloc, thereby confirming a new cold war. It would also provoke a drop in the Soviet standard of living which could in turn lead to the first widespread labour unrest in the Soviet Union itself.

It was probably with this in mind that the Soviet leaders decided to back Mr. Gierek, tacitly endorsing his proposals by reporting them in some detail in the controlled Press, even though the mention of political reforms being forced on a communist government by “social dissatisfaction” made astonishing reading for Soviet citizens.

Even if the Polish strikers accepted Mr. Gierek’s proposals for free elections to the government unions, rather than holding out for the establishment of independent unions, the party’s power could be seriously reduced. Poland would then have a degree of political pluralism which does not exist in any other Warsaw Pact country. Under the circumstances, new and tighter restrictions on contacts between Polish and Soviet citizens would be inevitable.

The Soviet leadership can probably live with these changes, provided that Poland’s essential allegiance to the Socialist bloc is not called into question and that no opening is created whereby the party could lose overall control.

The Soviet Union’s policy towards its allies is dictated by the expediencies of maintaining control over a vast and diverse empire. As long as communist regimes keep power, these expediencies can change.

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