telescope it appeared that extraordinary concessions were being made to non-Marxist opinion. But from the other end things looked different: sceptics were less impressed by the licence gained by Assyriologists than by the unchallengeability of the official party historians who affirmed that, from 1917 to the present day, the party leadership had largely avoided error. Anything new written about Assurbanipal mattered a thousand times less than the fixed catechism about Lenin.
This was indeed a contradictory situation. On the one hand, Marxism-Leninism’s self-restrictions signalled a diminishing official confidence. On the other, Suslov and his subordinate ideologists were eradicating any surviving liveliness in interpretations of Lenin, the October Revolution, Soviet history and current official policies. The authorities had given up ground to its critics, but made a bitter defence of the remaining ideological terrain.
Even Lenin’s books were handled with caution. The fifty-five volumes of the fifth edition of his collected works had been brought to completion in 1965. But in the late 1970s an unpublicized official ban was placed on the sale of the edition in second-hand bookshops.12 Many of Lenin’s statements were at variance with many of the party’s contemporary doctrines. Consequently the authorities preferred to use excerpts from his writings, carefully chosen to fit in with Brezhnev’s policies. It was a funny old Leninist world where Lenin had become a suspect author. Yet only a few Russians bothered about this paradox since Lenin’s writings were abundantly available at least in some fashion or another. This was not true of thousands of authors who still attracted unconditional disapproval; and the regime had not abandoned its key dogmas on politics, economy and society.
The systematic curtailment of information affected even the pettiest aspects of daily life. KGB operatives were attached to harmless groups of tourists visiting the West, and the card-indexed files of the security organs bulged with reports by its unpaid informers as well as by its own officials. Not even telephone directories were on sale, but were held behind the counter of ‘information kiosks’ — and the employees in these kiosks were not permitted to tell the ordinary enquirer the phone number of foreign embassies. What is more, the Politburo dedicated large financial resources to the development of the technology of control. The KGB’s bugging devices were especially sophisticated. At the same time Soviet citizens were prevented from acquiring equipment that might enable them to pass information among themselves without official permission. Walky-talky radios, photocopiers and word-processing computers were not purchasable in the shops.
These barriers to communication, however, were only partially effective. Citizens had their own direct experience of Soviet history and politics, and were in an excellent position to pass private judgement on the words of party propagandists. Hardly a family existed without relatives who had been killed in Stalin’s time. And everyone could remember the boasts made by successive rulers. After decades in power it was hard for the Politburo to claim that the country’s problems were not the party’s fault to a decisive extent.
And so this most politicizing of states had induced a pervasive political apathy. The messages and the methods of official ideology were deeply unappealing. On Soviet TV, the female continuity announcer’s rigid, bouffant hairdo and humourless mien set the tone; and there was a steam-rolling pomposity about series such as ‘For You, Parents’ and ‘For You, Veterans’. Most TV programmes were heavily didactic. But the public reacted unenthusiastically to them. Sport, crime thrillers, variety shows, science-fiction films and melodramas were much more popular: even Politburo members were scunnered by any media output that was intellectually demanding. Brezhnev liked ‘low-brow’ entertainment as much as did ordinary citizens. Ice-hockey games between the Soviet Union and Canada were much more to his liking than the theory of ‘developed socialism’.
Much leisure in any case was spent outside the home. The Soviet Union, like other communist states, linked its international prestige closely to the performance of its sports teams. The network of facilities was the envy of foreign countries. Soviet youngsters had access to well-funded premises, training and equipment; they knew that, if they had talent, they would be rewarded by privileges which would not fade when they retired: the typical ex- athlete would move into the profession of trainer. The football goalkeeper Lev Yashin and the weightlifter Aleksei Vlasov remained major personalities in Soviet public life.
The state also provided several institutions for daily recreation and annual holidays. Trade unions provided beach vacations in Crimea and Georgia to members who showed a high level of activism and obedience (and children could be sent separately by their parents to summer camps). Workers achieving the monthly production quotas had their names placed on their factory’s Roll of Honour. The state continued to award badges for all manner of public services, and bemedalled war veterans were allowed to go to the head of queues in shops. Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences — who had their own special badge — were each provided with a chauffeur-driven car. The hierarchy of honour and privilege paralleled the hierarchy of job occupations. A large enough minority of citizens benefited sufficiently from these perks to give considerable solidity to the Soviet order.
Yet the long-term dissolvent tendencies in society were unmistakable. The villages went on losing their skilled males to the towns since the improvement in the conditions of kolkhozniki failed to stem the exodus from the countryside. Tractor drivers could nearly always better themselves in the urban work-force. The kolkhozniki, who were typically female and either late middle aged or elderly, had neither the morale nor the energy to organize harvests adequate to feed an industrial country. In the towns and cities a different set of problems prevailed. Workers entering employment in the 1930s and 1940s could reasonably expect promotion to white-collar jobs if they worked and studied hard and obeyed the political authorities. In the 1950s the number of posts in management was ceasing to expand; in the 1970s the holders of these posts hung on to them: mere incompetence was scarcely ever deemed due cause for an individual to be sacked. Social rigidification was setting in: once a worker, always a worker.13
Simultaneously the structure of families in many regions of the USSR was causing trepidation. Across Russia, as well as the other Slavic republics and the Baltic region, married couples increasingly limited themselves to having one child. The inadequate living-space and the financial pressure upon wives to stay in the labour-force were the causes. The main birth-control technique was itself a problem: abortion. It was far from unusual for a woman to endure a dozen aborted pregnancies before reaching the menopause. This was terrible enough; but the long-term prospect was equally dispiriting since the proportion of the population supporting their pensioner relatives in Russia and other such regions was going into decline.
In January 1981 Kosygin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Nikolai Tikhonov, acknowledged that ‘demographic policy’ was one of the weakest areas of his government’s activity. In reality he was referring to the ‘national question’; for Tikhonov’s unstated worry was that not enough Russians were being born. Many people, including non-communists, sympathized with him. If current trends continued, the Russian nation would soon constitute a minority in the Soviet Union. The evidence was provided by a census, which revealed that ethnic Russians had dropped from fifty-five per cent of the USSR’s population in 1959 to fifty-two per cent in 1979.14 For the attitude to family size in the Transcaucasus and central Asia had not followed the pattern of Russia. Tajiks and Uzbeks, who had gained better medical services from the hands of the Soviet state, produced more children than ever who survived to adulthood. The idea circulated among Russians that they would soon be outnumbered and politically downgraded by ‘orientals’.
Such language was racist; it was also rather laughable since several of the supposedly oriental cities, such as the Georgian capital Tbilisi, are located on a line of longitude to the west of cities in central Russia! Nevertheless the feeling behind the words was deep. Russians had for decades been treated as the primary nation of the USSR. Not only did they feel superior to the other peoples but also they considered that their contribution to the development and preservation of the USSR had been the greatest.
The Russian nation’s resentments could no longer be totally ignored, and the Politburo became increasingly frantic to assuage them. Anti-Semitism, which had been approved by Stalin not long before he died, was given semi-official respectability again. Already in 1963 the central party leadership had permitted the Ukrainian writer T. Kichko to publish
None the less there was a still higher standard of living in Georgia and Estonia than across the RSFSR. This naturally caused many Russians to believe that current policies were injurious to the Russian national interest. The
