Who was it who said after a visit to the Soviet Union: “I have seen tomorrow, it works”? It could have been George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Webb or one of many other distinguished figures in the ‘thirties. Today it is difficult to find a similarly distinguished non-communist writer who can speak in such ringing terms of communism anywhere. It is a god that has failed.
Indeed, the failure should have been obvious five decades ago when Stalin dragooned millions of peasants into collectives in the face of strong opposition by them, began purging the Soviet communist party of everyone who was not willing to be a complete sycophant and set up concentration camps which grew into what Solzhenitsyn has described as the Gulag archipelago. It was, to some discerning individuals, Bertrand Russell, for instance. But essentially the myth of a new just order being built in the Soviet Union continued to triumph over the ghastly reality till Khrushchev exposed the true face of Stalinist Russia in 1956. Since then there has not been much room for illusion regarding the nature of the Soviet state and society.
But illusions die hard. The dying ones yield place to new ones. Even those who concede, often grudgingly, that Stalin was one of the worst tyrants humanity has known in recorded history, praise him on the ground that he built a “backward and predominantly agricultural” Russia into a great industrial and military power, next only to the United States. He was neither a just ruler nor a good man but he was a great man, they say, in utter ignorance of the fact that Russia was one of the great powers as far back as the 18th century and that in all probability it would have taken its place alongside America as a super-power even if it had not gone communist. Even in the 19th century farsighted men had predicted the rise of both these countries.
Stalin justified forced industrialisation, the unheard of cruelties it involved and the imposition of Soviet domination on Eastern and Central Europe in the name of national security. His successors have liberalised the system. They have greatly reduced the size of the Gulag archipelago even if they have not abolished it and they have raised the standards of living. But they have not deviated from the essentials of the Stalinist system. They continue to assign top priority to the military build-up and the heavy industries which need the awesome military machine; they have refused to give up their hold on Eastern and Central Europe and they do not allow dissent in any form.
One of the consequences – the military might of the Soviet Union – attracts world-wide attention to the point of dominating all discussion regarding that country. This is understandable. The Soviet Union has achieved military parity with the United States and thus acquired the capacity to make its power felt in all parts of the globe.
This is a phenomenon of the last two decades. Moscow embarked on a massive naval build-up in the ‘sixties in the wake of the Cuban crisis in 1962 when it had to back down in the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the United States for want of adequate naval power. And it made its first direct intervention outside its recognised sphere of influence in 1975 in Angola. Since then it has felt free to intervene in the Ethiopia-Somalia border conflict on the side of Addis Ababa and in Afghanistan. The present Soviet leadership headed by Mr. Brezhnev can claim credit for this remarkable achievement. But how well-founded is this achievement? How secure is the great Soviet empire, the only one to have survived the nationalist revolution in the post-World War II period?
It is ironical that two of the Soviet Union’s gravest weaknesses should have been exposed just at this stage when it has achieved its biggest objective – military parity with the United States. While recent events in Poland have once again exposed the vulnerability of communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe, the drop in Soviet food output from 225 million tonnes last year to 180 million tonnes this year shows that agriculture remains that country’s Achilles’ heel. The system is incapable of solving either of these problems.
The issue of agriculture is easily disposed of. Moscow has poured billions and billions of roubles into agriculture since the death of Stalin in 1953. The level of investment has greatly stepped up in the last ten years. The result in terms of output has no relation to the investment. The reasons for this state of affairs are well-known but the authorities cannot remove the bottlenecks without dismantling the collective and state farms which obviously they cannot even think of doing.
The centralised system has become thoroughly dysfunctional. The peasants lack the necessary incentive to work hard. In fact most of them are anxious to migrate to towns and cities where life is a little more bearable. They devote much of their time and energy to looking after their private plots which produce almost fifty per cent of the country’s supply of high-quality food items like meat, eggs, butter and milk.
As for developments in Poland, these have created for the Soviet leadership a crisis which it just cannot resolve. If driven to desperation it may send its troops into Poland as it did in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. But the Poles are proud nationalists and they are not likely to accept Soviet occupation without putting up a determined and perhaps prolonged fight. Possibly in the final analysis the Russians can crush the resistance but at the cost of destroying much of the Polish economy. And to what purpose? An embittered Poland which it will need to feed and nurse back to some kind of economic health will be no great asset to the Soviet Union. In fact the burden can be crushing.
The alternative is not much less unpleasant. Perhaps the communist rule can survive in Poland if the Kremlin does not intervene militarily and if the Polish leadership is sufficiently flexible, imaginative and competent. But while it is difficult to anticipate the outcome of a constructive interaction between free trade unions enjoying the solid support of the working class and the party apparatus dominated by bureaucrats of one kind or another, it can safely be predicted that the new system can at best bear only a superficial resemblance to what has passed for communism since 1924 when Stalin seized power. And this is bound to set in a chain reaction not only in Eastern Europe but in the Soviet Union itself.
The Soviet leadership refused to countenance the prospect of “communism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and crushed it with the help of its tanks. It cannot but be even more appalled at the turn of events in Poland. For while in Czechoslovakia the leadership of the search for “communism with a human face” came from the educated middle class (communist societies have their version of class divisions), in Poland, the working class has raised the demand for a free and just society. As such this is a far more fundamental challenge. It questions the basic Marxist myth that the Communist Party is the sole representative of the working class and embodies all its aspirations.
The vulnerability of the communist rule in deeply Catholic Poland with its long history of struggle against Russia and of romantic nationalism has been evident for years. This has not been so in the case of the Soviet Union. But for those who take the long-term survival of the Soviet system for granted, it must be a sobering thought that only a few months ago they could not have anticipated the rise of free trade unions in Poland. The Soviet people, especially the workers, have not been known to be as volatile and restless as their Polish counterparts. But they are said to be disenchanted with the system, and they have resorted to strikes at the Togliatti car and Kama truck plants some months ago.
Other weaknesses of the Soviet system are equally evident. The productivity in Russia is half of America’s. Apart from the military field, there is hardly an industry which is not one decade and more behind Western Europe’s and Japan’s. Till recently, the Kremlin could have drawn on the large pool of manpower in the countryside to sustain its growth. This pool has dried up. Future progress will depend on higher productivity which calls for incentives for workers as well as managers, in other words for decentralisation. The system is too rigid to accept such a change easily.
Western commentators are paying a great deal of attention to demographic changes in the Soviet Union. While the great Russian people are not growing at all, the Muslim population is increasing rapidly. The so-far dominant great Russians will soon be reduced to a minority. While it is too early to say whether the system will be able to cope with the problem, it is obvious that in order to do so it will need to display a kind of resilience it has not shown so far. The Soviet Union may not be a prison house of nationalities as Lenin described Czarist Russia. But it has not been a commonwealth of nationalities either. The great Russians have acted very much like the Big Brother keeping an eye on the young ones lest they step out of the straight and narrow path.
As his reign draws to a close, Mr Brezhnev can look with some satisfaction over the expansion of Soviet power. He would only be human if he were to pride himself over his government’s successful interventions in Angola, Mozambique, and the Ethiopia-Somalia war. He may even view the action in Afghanistan as a stepping stone to subsequent gains farther afield – in Pakistan and the Gulf. But he must also be a worried man. He cannot possibly be insensitive to the weaknesses of the system, the hollowness of the victories (Cuban soldiers guard oilfields in Angola which Western companies develop), the big losses as in Egypt and Sudan and the magnitude of the commitment in Afghanistan. He must also be concerned that he might have provoked the American giant into an arms race.
The Times of India, Sunday Magazine, 14 December 1980