First Published: The Call, September 1974.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Despite claims from Soviet officials that the Soviet Union is a society “free from antagonistic classes,” evidence continues to mount which shows that in reality, this once proud birthplace of socialism has now degenerated into a capitalist country.
Recent travellers returning from the Soviet Union say that sharp class antagonisms are growing daily between the masses of working people on the one hand and a small handful of privileged bureaucrats on the other. Except for the fact that these growing antagonisms are disguised in many of the socialist forms of state ownership, left over from previous periods (prior to 1956) anyone familiar with existing capitalist relations in the United States would feel right at home in Moscow.
For the working class, who are now being blamed in the Soviet press for their “rising aspirations ”the basic necessities of life (food, housing, transportation and quality medical treatment) grow increasingly inaccessible, while for the rising ruling class, the Soviet Union is a paradise filled with the best of western-made luxuries, fine cars, fancy houses and a leisurely, if not down-right decadent existence.
A recent article in a Soviet newspaper ran a complaint by Nina Danilova, a mother of seven, who told of her seventh-grade son going for a walk in the rain wearing a pair of his father’s heavy work boots.
“He came back in a bad mood and said that his new, friend, the son of a highly qualified specialist, had made fun of his boots. I told him that that boy was badly brought up and said he should pay no attention to him because I could not afford to buy new boots immediately.
“Our children know that our wages are not high enough to buy expensive things so there have never been requests for transistors or trousers of a special cut. They know that they will buy the things for themselves when they start working.”
But despite the pleas to troubled youth to “ignore” it, the fact is that there are some youths who can and do easily afford to buy transistor radios, tape recorders, motorcycles and flared slacks, much of which are imported from the West, or sold on the black market. The money to buy these goods on the markets which thrive in the big cities, comes from parents who are part of the privileged classes and strata of Soviet society.
One Western reporter recently interviewed several college students who were having a fine time over a fancy champagne dinner. The girls and boys were dressed in clothes not sold in Moscow and were smoking American cigarettes.
“My father is a diplomat,” one young man explained. “He brings things home with him from abroad and we buy a lot from foreign tourists.”
Other families, according to the reporter, are allowed to shop at special stores reserved for special government ministries and departments of the Communist Party. The stores are unmarked and guarded to keep out those who do not have the proper credentials.
Also reserved for the privileged few are special health clinics and pharmacies where better quality medical care and drugs are available. Doors to the better lower schools where foreign languages are taught and the big universities and institutes are much more easily available to the children of these privileged families of officials and managers. Tickets to the best theater and concert performances and special events like the recent visit of La Scala opera company of Italy are kept away from the common people and generally distributed to loyal party members and government people.
Housing is given out in the same fashion, with the wealthy being able to afford two or three private country homes (dachas) located in the suburbs. Sound familiar?
Around the Black Sea resorts, high government and military as well as party officials own expensive homes and wallow in splendor.
This rising bourgeoisie has formed out of the developing capitalist relations which take on the form of state monopoly capitalism in much the same way as the gas company might be run here, or the railroads in capitalist countries where they have been nationalized. Along with these developing relations have come all the usual signs of capitalism, including periodic crises of overproduction, inflation and, more recently, unemployment. Most significantly, from the ranks of the party and the bureaucracy has emerged a group of very wealthy people with privileges and power that compare with the giant monopolists here in the U.S. Included in this class are top level party leaders, government elite officials, military and police leaders and performing artists and entertainers to name a few. These people live in a style not even remotely comparable to the majority of the Soviet people.
The most obvious sign of privilege, just like in this country, is the big automobile. For the privileged class it is not unusual to own several fancy limousines, either of the Soviet-made Zil variety, valued at about $80,000, the less expensive Chaika ($14,000) or foreign-made Rolls Royces or Mercedes-Benz.
Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev often rides around town in his Rolls-Royce while his armed guards ride in a Zil on their high-speed trips between the Kremlin and his apartment on the west side of the city.
Violinist David Oistrakh and composer Aram Khatchaturian each own a Mercedes, and Victor Louis, journalist and known KGB spy, owns two, plus a Land Rover. When the privileged get an expensive car, their next task is to build a garage in their houses. An apartment cooperative was formed in Moscow recently to persuade officials to build a garage. “We were lucky,” one member told a Western reporter, “as we had a famous actor and a well-known singer in our cooperative who became our best mediators.”
While ownership of private dachas is quite common to members of the higher echelons of the party and government, Soviet Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furtseva was recently highly embarrassed when some of her opponents in the government publicly disclosed (a la Nixon) that she built her Moscow country place at a cost of $170,000 using government materials purchased at a discount. What one must ask, and what the Soviet press failed to ask, is how any government worker could afford a house of this type in any other way?
Another one of the privileges of the Soviet bourgeoisie is fancy health care. Dr. Mstislave Keldysh, head of the Soviet Academy of Science, had arterial surgery performed, by the American expert, Dr. Michael DeBakey, twice. Journalist Louis was able to go to Zurich for surgery on his aching back. Press reports indicate that some of these privileges apparently are granted by the government to use up excess currency that exists in the Soviet economy. During years of having little to buy in the way of consumer goods, certain well-paid functionaries were able to accumulate huge savings accounts. These upper echelon or middle class citizens can form cooperatives to build apartments in much better style and quality than the government housing agencies provide.
Along with these economic developments can be seen the growing cultural attachment to the West. Bell-bottom jeans, which go for as much as $100 on the black market, and Beatle records are the main pursuit of the upper class youth. Recent Soviet government figures showed that the Beatles were the largest selling foreign record performers in that country. The wealthy will sell stacks of rubles for a fraction of their value in order to get hard currency when they travel abroad in order to bring back luxury goods unavailable in the U.S.S.R.
The private market is another source of wealth for some. A few farmers have made large amounts of money by flying into major cities to hawk cases full of tomatoes at $4.68 per lb. in winter, or strawberries and cherries at $2.34 per lb. in the spring. Other sources of increasing private wealth for a few lie in similar speculation and in hoarding scarce commodities to sell on the private market.
Also similarly to the U.S., the rich blame me growing discontent on the poor. They are told that their “expectations are too high” and that the common people are too greedy, and suffer from “commodity fetishism.”
“The problem is compounded by a tendency to exaggerate the power of things, to make a fetish of them,” Valentin Tolstykh told a forum conducted by the Communist youth paper, Komsomolskaya Pravda. “The problem was created by parents who like to repeat, ’let my children not suffer things that I suffered’.”
But the fact cannot be hidden that the “rising expectations” for material wealth of the Soviet people are only a reflection of the ruling class education that they receive in the Soviet system where the quest for fame and fortune is the main reason a young person goes to college. It is the Soviet elite that has made a fetish of private gain and has pushed material incentives as the main form of labor inducement among the people, rather than putting political work and ’serving the people’ in first place as is done in real socialist countries like China and Albania.
A Moscow mother wrote Komsomolskaya Pravda that her son surprised her recently by asking, “Are we poor or rich?” But this should be no surprise to anyone in a Country where increasingly the contradiction between rich and poor is once again, as it was prior to the 1917 October Revolution, becoming an antagonistic contradiction in society and which again calls for revolutionary overthrow and transformation of the existing social relations.
No amount of talk about a “state of the whole people” can cover this burning question before the Soviet people with their long heroic revolutionary traditions. Classes and class struggle are growing sharper with each day.