Europe: A History (225 page)

The Soviet political dictatorship, which reached maturity after Stalin’s death, did not conform to its popular image abroad. It was supported by the largest ‘secret police’ in the world, by the Gulag, by an aggressive brand of pre-emptive censorship, by a vast arsenal of tanks and security forces. But these were not the primary instruments of oppression: the dictatorship relied above all on the dual structures of the party-state, that is, on the civilian organs of the Communist Party and their control over the parallel institutions of the state (see Appendix III, p. 1321). There was no branch of human activity which was not subordinated to the relevant department of the state. There was no branch of the state which was not governed by orders from the relevant ‘committee’ of the Party. Whatever was going on, be it in the most august of ministries or in the lowliest of local farms, factories, or football clubs, it could only be legal if organized by the state; and it could only be organized if approved by the Party.

The plight of the individual citizen was dire. Since state law and state judges were subject to the universal principle of Party control, anything which the Party disliked could be promptly and legally suppressed, without effective right of appeal. Since all human needs were supplied by state monopolies, any person who chose to defy the Party’s wishes stood to be rendered destitute on the spot, or, as the jargon had it, to be given their ‘wolfs ticket’. Recalcitrant individuals and their families could be routinely deprived of their residence permits, their ration cards, their identity papers, and hence their access to employment, housing, education, and health care. Once the Party’s bureaucratic dictatorship was in place, the more violent instruments of oppression did not need to be invoked except against exceptionally courageous and resourceful dissidents. In theory at least, there simply was no place for private initiative, individual judgement, or spontaneous social action. In normal circumstances, it was virtually impossible to organize a strike, to form a private society, or to publish unauthorized information. News of popular uprisings, such as that at Novocherkassk in 1962, which led to huge massacres, could be concealed for decades.

Party control over state institutions was exercised by an elaborate array of laws, levers, structures, and psychological taboos. Party control was enshrined in law. The only important clause of the Soviet Constitution was the one which proclaimed ‘the leading role’ of the Party. This simple device ensured that all other clauses of the Constitution, and all other Soviet laws, were subject to the interpretation of the Party and its officials. By outside standards, they were not laws at all. The Party rule-book was a much more efficacious document than the Soviet Constitution. The
nomenklatura
system ensured that every appointment, from the State Presidency to the chair of the village council, was exclusively filled by the Party’s nominees. Each Party committee reserved the right to draw up lists of
posts at its level in the state and Party hierarchy, and of suitable candidates to fill them (including lists of Party-approved ‘non-Party’ persons). As a result, Party members would generally hold one position in the Party apparatus and a second one in some state institution. The
nomenklatura
of the Party’s Central Committee secured all appointments in the ministries, and in the supreme commands of the armed forces and the KGB.

The management of all state institutions was further restricted by Party control exercised ‘from without and from within’. The nominal heads of all state institutions—ministers, generals, ambassadors, leaders of delegations, all directors of factories, schools, or institutes—were formally obliged to accept instructions from a parallel Party committee. They were the servants of more powerful Party secretaries operating behind the scenes. At the same time, they had to bow to the day-to-day supervision of the primary Party organization, or ‘Party cell’, made up of all Party members within the ranks of their own personnel. As a result, ministers
qua
ministers did not really run their ministries; army commanders did not command their units; managers did not manage their firms.

Everything depended on the efficient transmission of the Party’s orders. Party discipline ensured that the decisions of the ‘higher organs’ were enforced right down the line. Party members were sworn both to obedience and to secrecy (not least about the contents of the rule-book). They were trained to anticipate and to execute the wishes of their superiors without question. Open debate was discouraged; discussion was limited to the means whereby higher decisions could be implemented.

These realities were so alien to the experience of democracies that it is easy to understand why political scientists could be so easily misled. All explanations to outsiders have to begin with the warning that Western concepts and Western terminology simply did not apply. The ruling Communist Party, for instance, was
not
a political party; it was a political army which had been transformed into the executive branch of government. The Soviet state was no more than the administrative agency of the Party. The so-called Soviet Government, i.e. the Council of Ministers, was not the government, since it was subordinate both to the Party’s Politburo and to the Party’s Secretariat. The chief executive of the system was not the President of the USSR or his Prime Minister, but the Party’s General Secretary (who was free to appoint himself President or Prime Minister if he so wished). The Supreme Soviet or state legislative assembly was not supreme, since it could only register statutes prepared in advance by the Party’s Central Committee. State elections, above all, were not elections, since there was no element of choice. Citizens were compelled by law to endorse the lists of Party nominees.

In a very real sense, therefore, the Soviet Union never really existed, except as a facade for Party power. It was the grandest communist front organization in history. That is why, when the CPSU eventually collapsed, the USSR could not possibly exist without it.

An important shift of political power took place in the Brezhnev era, largely unnoticed. In return for absolute loyalty to the policies of the centre, Brezhnev was ready to let the Party bosses of the 14 non-Russian republics of the USSR run
their affairs without interference. The Soviet republics were turning almost imperceptibly into national fiefdoms, where Moscow’s writ ran ever more uncertainly. Brezhnev’s regional baronies did not enjoy the same latitude as the East European satellites: they were prominently represented in the Politburo, and were an important pillar of the conservative order. But their emergence helps to explain why their centrifugal trajectory could accelerate so surprisingly and so rapidly when the signals from Moscow grew confused.

The Soviet armed forces, though enormous and very prestigious, were deprived of all capacity for independent action: the Party left nothing to chance. It was not sufficient that all military officers were trained in Party-run academies, that they could only obtain promotion by joining the CPSU, or that they could issue no orders without the counter-signature of a
politruk
or ‘political director’ working alongside them. The entire fabric of the military hierarchy was run by agents of
Glavpolity
the Main Political-Military Department, whose senior members included the most important marshals of the General Staff and whose juniors filled key positions throughout the lower echelons. As a matter of routine, rocket forces were not given control over their own warheads, parachute forces did not control their transports, tank forces did not possess their own ammunition or fuel.

The Soviet armed forces comprised four main components—the strategic nuclear forces, the air forces, the army, and the navy. At their height they contained perhaps 10 million men. According to the wishes of their masters, they were designed to be the most formidable, or the most impotent, force imaginable. From 1955, when the Warsaw Pact was formed in belated response to NATO, the Soviet military became enmeshed in yet another layer of bureaucracy. They retained absolute control over the running of the Pact, whose HQ was in Moscow, not Warsaw.

The scale and organization of the Soviet security forces bore little resemblance to counterparts elsewhere. To call them ‘the secret police’ was a travesty. The KGB was the equivalent of the CIA, the FBI, and the US Coast Guard rolled into one, with many other functions to boot. Apart from foreign intelligence, its various directorates ran the Gulag, the
Glavpolit
, the civilian militia, and the system of censorship. Its principal mission, however, was to keep itself informed of everything and everyone, and to root out ‘unreliable elements’ by all means available. Its uniformed officers, with their sky-blue epaulettes, could be encountered in every Soviet town. They commanded a vast horde of informers, thugs, and secret agents hidden within the population, and a duplicate army of up to a million crack internal troops trained to police the army, to watch the borders, to man the camps, to quell disorder, and to protect the Party élite. As their most public and sacred duty, they mounted guard on Lenin’s mausoleum. Their headquarters in the Lyubianka in central Moscow looked out on a statue of Feliks Dzierzyński, their founder. It contained the most feared dungeons in all Russia.

Soviet society, officially classless, was dominated by a growing gulf between the Party élite and the rest of the population. Once the Purges stopped, the members of the
nomenklatura
were able to entrench their position, to purloin state property for their own use, and to grow rich and powerful from patronage. The
higher echelons were allocated luxury flats and dachas, expensive limousines, exclusive access to closed stores, Western currency, and foreign travel. They were, as Milovan Djilas declared as early as 1957, the ‘New Class’—the proprietorial caste. The collectivized peasants, in contrast, suffered deprivations worse than those of the serfs. Until the 1970s they possessed neither social security benefits nor personal identity papers. The industrial workers were told that they had inherited the earth; they toiled in expectation of the improved housing, wages, and safety which never materialized. The intelligentsia—which in the official definition represented a professional stratum of ‘brain workers’—enjoyed high prestige but low incomes. Despite the fact that several professions, such as medical doctors, were predominantly female, Soviet women received little relief from conditions that their sisters in the West would not have tolerated. As in Nazi Germany, the official ethos encouraged heroic child-bearing; abortion was the only form of family planning to be widely available. ‘Developed socialism’ was, by European standards, very underdeveloped.

Not surprisingly, earlier Soviet demographic trends started to falter, especially in European Russia. In the 1950s and 1960s the Soviet population recovered from the traumatic losses of the Stalin years, rising from 178.5 million (1950) to 262.4 million (1974); and there was a spectacular rise in the size and number of large cities. But the hardships of Soviet urban living were not conducive to carefree reproduction. By the 1980s both the birth rate and life expectancy were falling. Thanks to sustained growth in the central Asian republics, the dominant Russian nationality was declining. Even if the official figure of 52 per cent in 1979 was accurate, the Russians were poised to fall into an absolute minority.

The Soviet economic system held to the basic methods and priorities laid down by Stalin—central command planning, militarization, heavy industry. Its fundamental failures were long concealed behind the screen of falsified statistics. Five-Year Plans continued to give the illusion of continuing quantitative success even when growth rates inevitably slowed and targets failed to be met. Global results still looked impressive right up to 1980:

USSR: Selected indices of production

Not till the early 1980s did the truth begin to dawn that global production figures were next to irrelevant, and that the Soviet Union’s rivals were forging far ahead in almost every sector.

Unknown to the public or the outside world, the privileged military and nuclear sector was consuming over 30 per cent of Soviet GNP—at least five times more than was officially admitted. At the same time, the overblown communist shibboleth of heavy industry continued to pour out unwanted iron, steel, and crude chemicals. The result was an economy which produced tanks, rockets, and aircraft in huge quantities but which could not support the basic needs of the population. All the most important elements of the civilian economy were woefully neglected. Soviet agriculture produced low-grade food in huge amounts; but was incapable of delivering it to the family table. The USSR became a net importer of grain, whilst domestic supplies relied increasingly on the collective farmers’ back gardens (50 per cent of food derived from 3 per cent of arable land). Science and technology remained far behind the state of the art in the civilian sphere. Soviet conditions proved specially inimical to computerization and to the free flow of information outside the central bureaucracy. Motorization, which began in a big way in the 1960s with the purchase of a licence from Fiat to build Lada cars, was hampered by the absence of supporting services, especially modern roads. The service sector in general was no more than nascent. The consumer sector remained starved of goods. Subsidized prices in food and housing guaranteed a subsistence standard of living whilst nourishing a vigorous black market. The infrastructure remained woefully inadequate. After 70 years of progress, the Soviet Union had not built a single all-weather road link from west to east. The single-track trans-Siberian railway remained a solitary lifeline to the Far East. Aeroflot, the world’s largest airline, was also the most overworked. The riches of Siberia could not be properly exploited. The more commands emitted by Moscow, the feebler the response. Notwithstanding Comecon, the East European satellites moved from being net contributors to being a net burden. Soviet export earnings were unhealthily dependent on gold and oil. By the early 1980s the combination of uncontrolled military spending and the diminishing returns of domestic performance spelled the onset of a systemic crisis requiring urgent treatment.