The quest for Soviet man

RUSSIA FIFTY YEARS AFTER-1 TIBOR SZAMUELY

`Should all progress in Russia be carried out solely by the government, we would present to the world an unprecedented example of a despotism armed with everything that liberty has produced; of slavery and brute force up- held by every achievement of science. This would be a Genghis Khan equipped with tele- graph, steamships and railways.'—Alexander Herzen (1857).

Forty, thirty, even twenty years ago not very many people would have agreed that the Rus- sian Revolution was the most important event of the century. Today this proposition would be accepted—rightly—by the great majority. Yet were one to conduct a poll on the reasons why 1917 became one of history's great turning- points, the answers would certainly show a wide diversity of views. The original hope—that Russia would spark off a world-wide socialist revolution—has lapsed many years ago; it is held now only by Mao-style fundamentalist be- lievers. Officially, communists say that the October Revolution transformed world history by putting an end, for the very first time, to the exploitation of man by man. But even in Russia this arouses a certain scepticism, well expressed by the irreverent joke: 'Under capitalism man is exploited by man, whereas under socialism it is the other way round.'

Much more extensively held, even among non-communists, is the belief that the Russian Revolution created the first socialist state in history. To accept this requires an act of faith: the conviction that present-day Russia is, in fact, a socialist society—a conviction hardly borne out either by the facts or by the teachings of the prophets of socialism. A more matter-of- fact judgment on 1917 is that it revolutionised the world balance of power by transforming Russia into a superpower second only to the United States. But Russia had been a great power long before the Revolution: between 1815 and 1855 her predominance on the conti- nent was probably even greater than after 1945.

Why, then, was 1917 the most momentous date of our times? Because the Russian Revo- lution succeeded in shattering the world, in the fullest sense of the word. It split the previously unified global pattern of westernised develop- ment, creating a fissure that has since then grown ever deeper and more dangerous. In place of a single basic model of state and society it created two.

The pre-eminent achievement of the Russian Revolution has been in establishing an alter- native path of historical development, a second model of a modern industrial society, based upon concepts not only different from, but diametrically opposed to, those of the West The Soviet political, social and economic order is the only distinctively new system of state and society developed in the modern era. Demo- cracy, despotism, tyranny, oligarchy, kingship, military dictatorship, theocracy, absolutism— all these could have been known for centuries. Totalitarianism was born in 1917. Nor could it have appeared in any earlier age: only the twentieth century has produced the techno- logical means of mass communications, mass control, mass indoctrination, of monolithic and hypercentralised administration, which are the prerequisites of totalitarianism. But what, in fact, is totalitarianism? The word itself has already become such an overworked part of our vocabulary that—like 'fascism' before it—it is coming to lose any relationship to the terrifyingly tangible reality behind it. The indiscriminate dilution of a very specific politi- cal concept has obscured the genuine revolu- tionary novelty of the Soviet state. The truth is that the western world has shown itself largely incapable of understanding the nature of the Soviet system and the rationale of Soviet policy—sometimes with disastrous conse- quences.

One of the main causes of incomprehension is the extraordinary degree of ignorance of Soviet reality still prevailing in the West—in itself a striking confirmation of the true origin- ality of the Soviet system. Almost all we know about Russia we learn from her press: no other source exists. But Soviet communications media have functions entirely different from ours. Their basic principle was formulated by Lenin long before the revolution: 'A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a col- lective agitator but also a collective organiser.' Russian newspapers are not controlled or cen- sored: they are actually written by the "con- trollers' and 'censors'; their object is not to en- lighten but to indoctrinate.

One remarkable example of this comes to mind. For six and a half years, from July 1941 to December 1947, an all-embracing system of food-rationing existed in Russia. Food was ex- ceedingly scarce, and people's lives revolved round their ration cards. To lose them meant starvation, possibly death. Yet through all those years the word 'rationing' was never once men- tioned in any one of the thousands of news- papers or millions of radio-hours issued to the population. The existence of rationing was acknowledged in public for the first time on the day it was abolished. Can one wonder about the reasons for the peculiar mentality of the Soviet citizen, so often inexplicable to the westerner, when, as in this case, he knew from experience that food was rationed, yet lived his life in a world in which rationing did not officially exist? Nor has anything changed in this respect: Mr Khrushchev, whose name was never out of the news for ten years, was suddenly removed three years ago—and has never once been mentioned since, in any context. He, too, might never have existed.

And the same applies to so many of the things that make up the Russian citizen's life: food shortages, slum housing, illegal strikes, riots, a rising crime wave, arbitrary arrests, concen- tration camps. These exist only on the private level of the citizen's consciousness—to disap- pear on its other, public level, where their place is taken by enthusiasm, unanimity, production successes, and an endless stream of gratitude to `the party and government.' Orwell called it 'double-think.'

But it is not only the mind of the Soviet citi- zen that exists on two levels: so does every. thing else in Russia. The West is confronted, for the first time in its experience, by a country seemingly equipped with every familiar institu- tion and practice of public life—constitution, parliament, elections, trade unions, civil liber- ties, judiciary and all the rest—not a single one of which bears the slightest resemblance to reality. Even the Soviets, those revolutionary bodies of workers and soldiers on whose osten- sible behalf the revolution was carried out and who gave their name to the very system itself, have long been deprived of any real substance. Small wonder that rational, legalistic, matter- of-fact western man is lost in this wonderland where nothing is what it seems, where words have lost their meaning, and even the past can be changed from one day to another; in a so- ciety which has taken over every humanistic, egalitarian. democratic, spiritual value of wes- tern civilisation and turned it inside •out.

The real Russia is the society created by the Revolution. Nineteen-seventeen was only the first step: the total social and economic revo- lution took place in the decade 1929-39, when the threefold process of industrialisation, col- lectivisation and purge pulverised and melted down every existing social, economic and politi- cal unit, and brought into being a homogeneous, undifferentiated, 'monolithic' society that fully conformed to the party's ideological blueprint (the party, of course, also had to be melted down). Now society was reduced to its lowest common denominator; the naked, isolated in- dividuaL Nothing—no barrier, no law, no institution, no tradition, no association, no property rights, no interest group—stood be- tween him and the omnipotent state. The state is the sole employer—that goes without saying. But the state is also the trade union, the pen- sions board, the arbitration committee, the landlord, the sports manager, the sole educator. the sole newspaper proprietor, the sole pub- lisher, the film producer, the theatre director. the neighbourhood grocer. the hotelier, the Academy of Sciences, the dry-cleaner, the youth club. It is the policeman, judge, jury, prosecu- tor and executioner, all in one. It codifies not only the laws, but the moral standards—and changes them at will. And, as laid down by Lenin, there can be no restraints, no limitations upon the untramelled power of the state. This is totalitarianism.

Certain of these features have existed before, in the traditional autocracies, whether of the oriental despotic or European absolutist varieties. But what distinguishes the system created by the October Revolution from any preceding autocracy, what has made it into a forceful instrument of modernisation, into a genuine alternative model of a modern society, is the unique combination of three new ele- ments: a mass elite party, a dynamic ideology, and the technological revolution.

Without the Communist party—Lenin's `party of a new type'—there could have been no Soviet system. The party provided the drive, the elan, the leadership, the mystique behind the unparalleled feat of social engineering. The party provided the means for the total revolu- tion from above, aimed at altering the country's natural course of development in a direction dictated by its ideology. Terror was needed, too—and on a huge scale. But the terror has been reduced from time to time, while nothing has ever been allowed to weaken the party's iron grip. The Communist party of the Soviet

Union is an organisation unlike anything the world has ever seen. It is not really a 'political party' in any accepted sense of the word. But it is a great many other things. In a certain sense it is itself 'the state.' Whatever the constitu- tional, social or legal forms, the content is al- ways one: the Party.

Russia is governed by the party: its leader-

ship has the monopoly of decision-making, while its members are entrusted with the task of mobilising the country to carry them out. The party members constitute the state machine —the bureaucracy, the army, the police—and this alone makes nonsense of some western experts' attempts to represent these as separate rival centres of power. They are the party's instruments of administration, mobilisation, indoctrination and control. It is a system both rigid and flexible, preventing the establishment of any truly independent units, yet at the same time creating the semblance of genuine mass-participation in decision-making and .policy implementation. Add to this the total monopoly of information, and an ideology that presents a convincing picture of the world, a universal explanation of every- thing and an inspiration for the future—and you have a basis of power that .terror alone

could never establish.

These. peculiar properties of the party.ancl.of party rule provide the explanation for the stability of the Soviet system, which has weathered an unrivalled succession of crises to reach its fiftieth anniversary. We, may, not realise it, but Russia's political and social structure has changed less in the, past thirty years than that of probably any other country in the world. Absolute power is not based on one man's dictatorship: it is inherent in the system itself,. What is often called 'Stalinism' is actually nothing more than 'Soviet power.' Stalin inherited the system, developed it in ac- cordance with communist ideology and by communist methods, and handed it over to his successors. The power structure has remained unchanged since his day. The Much-touted 'liberalisation' of today is even less real than it was in 1954.

But one crucial change has taken place; one vital element hp been forfeited. The party's claim to legitimacy has always been based on its profession of infallibility, on its proclaimed mastery over the laws of the past and the future. The shock of `destalinisation,' the public admis- sion that for twenty-five years it had been ruled by a homicidal maniac, followed later by the revelation that for the next ten years it was run by a bungling idiot, has put an end, once and for all, to the legend of communist infallibility. All the Agitprop's horses' and all the Politburo's men can never put the legend together again. What was perhaps the essential prop of the whole monstrous edifice has been destroyed. And down below, among the people, something seems to be changing. Defiance is in the air: young people are disaffected, workers are riot- ing, students demonstrating in the streets, writers sending their critical manuscripts abroad. It all may, of course, be no more than a temporary phenomenon; the communist leadership can reinstitute the terror at any time it sees fit—the tools are all there, well-oiled and lovingly maintained. Yet whatever the further development of the Soviet system, it can already be stated with certainty that at least one task of the October Revolution has remained un- fulfilled: after fifty years of intensive and costly experimentation Homo Sorieticus has not emerged from the test-tube.

(To be continued next week)