the illusion that paradise was right around the corner. Such illusions, it was thought, would generate discontent among the people in the near future.
With a sober stance, the leadership looked for an ideological concept that would preserve the communist phraseology (“the building of the material-technological basis of communism”), but instead of waiting for the future, would proclaim that Soviet life could be enjoyed right now. This was the message of developed socialism, which commanded great fanfare in the early 1970s. The leadership’s appeal to the masses to be “satisfied”-a famous term, often used by Brezhnev-with life at present seemed all the more reasonable because they were indeed “deeply satisfied” with the military parity with the West in the 1970s, an achievement that had been dreamed about by all the Russian leaders since Peter the Great.
The authors of the concept described the current Soviet society as having already accomplished many of the goals of socialism in the first stage of communism. They depicted Soviet society as based on highly developed productive forces, as a society that was close to eliminating class and ethnic distinctions, and as a new type of human community and socialist personality. Soviet ideologues also talked about the highly developed socialist democracy, and the scientific character of the political management. Most postulates of the concept had few links to reality. The pathetic statements about the technological revolution in the Soviet economy looked absurd against the backdrop of the growing economic gap between the Soviet and Western economies, particularly in the production of civil goods. The thesis about the flourishing of socialist democracy was ridiculous considering the system’s harsh persecution of dissidents.
There was, however, one element of the new thinking-that is, the mode of life, or obraz zhizni- that held a special place in the concept of developed socialism. The “Soviet mode of life” was closer to reality than most other dogmas. While refusing to claim that Soviet society can in the foreseeable future surpass the level of material consumption and productivity in the West (which had been promised by Khrushchev) the sophisticated Soviet ideologues focused on other elements of everyday life. They used the concept of “quality of life” with its focus on the subjective evaluation of different components of life that had just emerged in the West in the early 1970s.
While in some ways they followed the spirit of Western studies on the quality of life, the Soviet ideologues avoided the comparison of the material consumption in the USSR and the West. As the most important features of Soviet life, they concentrated on the free education and health care system (the quality of which was quite high by international standards) as well as the high level of science and culture, the relatively low social inequality, the importance of cultural activities in the lives of ordinary people, the big network of institutions for children, the vacations in resort institutions accessible to everybody, full employment, the absence of homeless people, and the impossibility of evicting people from their apartments. The Soviet ideologues also described, and not without reason for the significant part of the Soviet population, the Soviet people as patriots, internationalists, collectivists, and optimists. They depicted life in the West as full of various conflicts and deeply immoral. They also ascribed to the Soviet people mostly fictional properties, such as high labor discipline, temperance, active participation in the management of their factories and offices, and a motivation to work that was not driven by material incentives, but by the general willingness to make their country strong and prosperous.
Despite the permanent grumbling about the lines for consumer goods and services, the majority of the Soviet people accepted the propaganda about the superiority of the Soviet style of life compared to capitalist society. In a national survey, which the author conducted in 1976, the majority of the respondents evaluated the quality of life in the USSR as “four” on a five-point scale; they graded life in the USA as “three,” and in the German Democratic Republic as “five.”
The concept of developed socialism, which underpinned the anti-Western propaganda, was used also as a tool against “the Great Chinese Proletarian Revolution.” Both countries since the late 1960s struggled for the leadership of the international communist movement as well as in the third world in the 1960s and 1970s. The Soviet ideo391
DEZHNEV, SEMEN IVANOVICH
logues denounced the Maoist utopian leftist radicalism of the “Great Chinese Cultural Revolution,” opposing it to Soviet “real socialism.”
The concept of developed socialism was concocted as an ideological trick by the Soviet propagandists for the justification of the new regime. It was a laughing stock for liberal intellectuals, and the subject of political jokes from the moment of its birth. However, ironically, it became a monument to the period that is considered by many Russians as the happiest time of their lives. In any case, ten years after the demise of the USSR, one-half to two- thirds of the Russians, according to various polls, believed that life during Brezhnev’s times was much better than in any other period of Russian history in the twentieth century, and definitely better than in post-Soviet Russia. See also: BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; SOCIALISM
Kelley, Donald. (1986). The Politics of Developed Socialism. New York: Greenwood Press. Shlapentokh, Vladimir. (1988). The Soviet Ideologies in the Period of Glasnost. New York: Praeger.
VLADIMIR E. SHLAPENTOKH
(c. 1605-1673), Cossack; explorer of northeastern Siberia.
Originally from the Pomor region, on the North Dvina, Semen Dezhnev entered Siberian service with the Cossacks in 1630. His expeditions, particularly that of 1648-1649, were an important part of the great push eastward that Russia made into Siberia during the seventeenth century.
Based in Yakutsk, Dezhnev helped to explore and survey the Alazeya and Kolyma rivers in northeastern Siberia. In 1647 he set out to find and map the Anadyr River, but this attempt proved abortive. Dezhnev began again in June 1648, at the head of ninety men. From Srednekolymsk, Dezh-nev’s party sailed north, then, upon reaching the Arctic Ocean, turned east, along Russia’s northern coast.
During the next one hundred days, Dezhnev’s party lost six of seven boats. The surviving vessel sailed two thousand miles, rounding the Chukotsk Peninsula, Asia’s northeastern tip. Thus Dezhnev and his men became, albeit unwittingly, the first Europeans to navigate what later came to be known as the Bering Strait. Dezhnev also discovered the Diomede Islands. Dezhnev had sailed between Asia and North America, but not for another century, with Bering’s Great Northern Expedition, would it be proven conclusively that the two continents were not physically linked.
In October 1648, Dezhnev’s boat was cast ashore on Russia’s Pacific coast, well south of the Anadyr. Before winter set in, the party marched north, locating the river’s mouth. Sixteen men, Dezhnev included, survived the winter encampment. In the spring of 1649, they traveled upriver and founded the outpost of Anadyrsk. In 1650 and 1651, Dezhnev consolidated his control over the river basin, aided by Mikhail Stadukhin and Se-myon Motora, who had reached the eastern Anadyr overland. Dezhnev was relieved in 1659 and returned to Yakutsk in 1662. In 1672, shortly before his death, he returned to Moscow. See also: ALASKA; BERING, VITUS JONASSEN; SIBERIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bobrick, Benson. (1992). East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia. New York: Poseidon. Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1993). Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. New York: Random House.
(1872-1929), famed Russian impresario.
Sergei Pavlovich Diagilev founded and led the Ballets Russes, a touring ballet company that attained an unprecedented level of fame throughout Europe and the Americas from 1909 until 1929. Diagilev, his company, and his collaborators introduced Russian dancers, choreographers, painters, composers, and musicians to Western audiences that previously had scant knowledge of them. His Ballets Russes single-handedly established the cen- trality of dance to the artistic culture of the early twentieth century.
A former law student, whose own attempts at musical composition proved a failure, Diagilev broDIALECTICAL MATERIALISM kered the collaborations of some of his century’s most celebrated creative artists, Russian and non-Russian (Stravinsky, Balanchine, Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Chaliapin, as well as Debussy, Ravel, Picasso, and Matisse). A series of art exhibits organized in Russian in 1897 marked the beginning of Diagilev’s
