peasants and peace to the people. Every one of these promises was broken. Under Bolshevism, workers were never given anything but a nominal share in government. Real power in representative bodies, the Soviets, was soon taken over by the Party, to which any show of opposition was brutally crushed. Land was, in the early stages, distributed to peasants but very soon taken away into state ownership. Most people who found their living on the land were forced into collective farms. Huge numbers of the most capable and hard-working were physically eliminated. Solzhenitsyn's researches showed him that fifteen million peasants were transported to extermination in the two years 1929 and 1930 alone. As for peace, quite apart from the more famous rebellions such as those in Murom, Yaroslavl, Rybinsk and Arzamas, and Antonov's, with its centre in Tambov, which were all put down with the utmost savagery, the Communist Party had embarked upon a civil war against its own population which was to continue for half a century, a war in which the dead far outnumbered those of any other war in the whole history of mankind. In place of equality, liberty and fraternity, the hallmarks of an increasingly corrupt society were coercion, fear and distrust. Words themselves seemed to have acquired new meanings in a socialist context. Equality meant no more, as we have seen, than privileges for top Party bureaucrats, with their special shops, foreign travel, high salaries and luxurious homes. There were equal rights for all others, as Bukovsky has put it, to share a common misery, to accommodate themselves to a society they knew was totally corrupt, to stand for ever in queues or else to perish in a Gulag. The total alienation this produced between Party and people brought about in time a general disillusion with socialist aspirations.
By the 1970s hope had long given way to cynicism. A continuous process of petrification seemed to have overcome the bureaucratic machine, producing economic policies and political practice as dogmatic as they were inflexible. The general atmosphere had become one of stagnation. Workers, denied any real incentive, took little interest in their work. Virtues and abilities went unrecognized and certainly, unless they were applied to meeting the state's requirements, earned no promotion. Advancement depended upon conformity. Ideology penetrated the structure of the machine at every level but those who operated it had long since shed any adherence to truly socialist principles. The Party never comprised more than 10 per cent of the population of the Soviet Union and probably not one Party member in ten in 1970 still believed in communism. The process of candidacy for membership to the Party, in which the candidate had to satisfy one Party committee after another of his devotion to the CPSU, and give proof of it, became an elaborate exercise in falsehood.
The cumulative effect of all this on the Soviet economy was by the mid-1970s disastrous. Central planning imposed restrictions on local initiative in situations ill understood at the controlling centre. Local needs, in materials, equipment, spare parts, even roads, were either not known or disregarded. People in the localities made their own arrangements for some fictitious show of meeting planned targets.
The targets, constantly derided by the populace, always rose and were almost never met. Workers anxious to meet them, where any did, faced only the hostility of workmates. Low salaries and shortages stimulated theft. Factories and shops, if unwillingly, fed the black market, under which 30 per cent of the whole of the country's economy by 1983 was operating.
Peasants cultivated their own plots for subsistence, selling any surplus on the black market for the cash they needed. In 1981 it was calculated that these plots — 3 per cent of the totality of arable land — were producing half of all the agricultural output. State investment in the early 1980s to enable peasants to earn more money only resulted in their producing from the land what they themselves needed for their own purposes. Parts of the Soviet Union were in fact, in the early 1980s, approaching starvation. Only a loosening of control could correct this tendency but that would lead, as it had in Hungary, in the direction of a free market economy, which was a trend the system could not tolerate.
By 1985 the growth rate of GNP in the USSR was negative, with a positive growth rate in the population, by far the greater part of the increase being in non-Russian peoples. Pauperization was now a great and growing menace. Inflation, already high and always rising, could no longer be concealed by official manipulation. Within the Soviet Union more and more people were turning to religion, often in forms the state found sufficiently hostile to proscribe. The weaknesses built into the system from the start were beginning to destroy it.
The events of the August war in 1985 worked in two ways to bring matters to a head. The political leadership had long been discredited by developments in Poland. It was the first time a governing European Communist Party had been shown to be unable to cope with dissidence and ideological opposition. Moscow was faced with the choice between direct intervention by Red Army troops and the takeover of Polish security by the Soviet KGB, or recourse to Polish military government. The latter, chosen through old men's inertia rather than conscious decision, put off for a time the international outcry which Soviet military action would have caused, and partially evaded Soviet responsibility for Poland's debt. But it signalled the abdication of the Communist Party of Poland from the control of political life.
The enormity of this breach of ideology and tradition was not everywhere fully recognized in the West, which was accustomed to military takeovers in Latin America and the Middle East, and tended to regard them as a recurrent and unsurprising reaction by the forces of order faced with administrative or parliamentary chaos. But to doctrinal communists the implications were of a different order. The Party, the fountain-head of doctrine and decision, the network which made a certain rough and ready sense in a hopelessly over-centralized bureaucracy, had shown itself powerless, divided and incapable of decision. Solidarity may have been temporarily overcome in Poland, but in its downfall the movement won a famous victory by demonstrating that the Communist Party in a communist state was no longer the all-powerful guardian of the state's authority.
The shock waves of this ideological explosion flowed back into the Soviet Union, exposing even the CPSU to doubt, and seeming to enhance the potential of the Soviet military leadership, which it appeared might one day have to play a similar role to that of Poland. So it was doubly traumatic to those inside the hierarchies when the check to the Soviet advance in Europe demonstrated that the military leadership had feet of clay. They were seen to have made faulty assessments, to have failed to adapt to changing tactical circumstances, and to have based their plans on an operational doctrine geared exclusively to rapid and complete success. When this success was not entirely forthcoming, the military machine was stalled, and the only alternative was nothing more brilliant than a futile nuclear demonstration which could not hope to restore the lost momentum of the Soviet armed forces.
These reflections went far to explain the demoralization of the nerve centre of the Soviet apparatus which made it ripe for Duglenko's takeover. The popular disenchantment had simpler causes, the same as those of many earlier revolutions: empty bellies on one side of the privilege line and full ones on the other. The demands of the war on civil transport had exceeded plans and expectations. The peasants were hoarding stocks of food, as if aware of impending catastrophe, rather than taking it for sale to the towns. The great ones of the regime still found enough in their special shops, but for the man and woman in the street too little food was at last too much for their patience, and the acute shortages in many towns gave rise to riots and disorder which overwhelmed the security militia.
The food riots, which began in Moscow, soon spread to most major towns and cities. For a first-hand view of them in their earliest stages we turn to a local source. The following piece appeared in
“A figure, matronly but none the less imperious, appeared in the shop doorway. There were gold rings on her thick fingers.
“The shop will not be opening today,” she announced. “We have nothing in stock — no bread, no sausage — nothing. So just go away.”
A groan of disappointment rose out of the long queue which already stretched the length of several blocks from the shop door.
“But we've been waiting all night!”
“What will our children eat?”
After a few moments individual shouts began to merge into a continuous murmur of indignation. Nevertheless, the crowd's rage was short-lived. The queue broke up and people began to wander away. They were used to this.
“I've lived in this place for seventy years,” mumbled an untidy and toothless old man. “It's nothing but queues. A whole lifetime in queues.”
Suddenly a small boy's shrill voice rang out above the crowd, directed, it seemed, to the matronly figure.
“You're lying about the bread, fatty. Your car's just around the corner. I saw you carry three bags out to it in the night.”
