Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Part 1
One of the more unique books on my shrinking number of bookshelves (we are in the e-book era after all, so every time we move, fewer hard copies move with us) is called Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? It was written by a Soviet dissident named Andrei Amalrik and published in 1970.
I was thumbing through the book randomly the other day and happened on a passage which happens to be the reason I have never given the book away:
It now became evident that in Soviet law there exists, if I may use the term, a broad “gray belt” – activities which the law does not formally forbid but which are, in fact, forbidden in practice-for instance: contacts between Soviet citizens and foreigners; a concern over non-Marxist philosophies or art inconsistent with the notions of socialist realism; attempts to put out typewritten literary collections; spoken or written criticism not of the system as a whole, which is forbidden under Articles 70 and 190/1 of the Criminal Code, but particular institutions within the system.
This sort of setup – where some topics are de facto illegal – destroys the social fabric in a country. If people know that that saying X will cost them their livelihood, most of them won’t say X. But that doesn’t mean they won’t believe it. In fact, knowing that X cannot be discussed is just going to convince more people that there must be something to it. Refutations of X from those authorized to state what is good and what is true will only serve to make matters worse.
Also, even if X is not true, people will mouth approved denials of X but nobody competent to do so will actually go through the effort of proving X is wrong. After all, in matters like this, the views that are acceptable to hold become progressively narrower and more specific over time. The hero who proves X wrong today is sent to the Gulag tomorrow. Tomorrow, the proof doesn’t show that X is wrong enough.
Worse still for Comrades Yuri and Svetlana who only want to survive and raise their children, sometimes the pendulum swings the other way.
Lysenkoism, a fraud cooked up by a charlatan based on fake data was (rightly) a crackpot idea in 1927. By the mid 1940s it was textbook Soviet Biology and the Trotskyite wreckers, Western stooges and Nazi sympathizers who opposed it had already been processed through the People’s Courts. And then, in the 1960s, another turnabout. Lysenkoism was denounced. But the famines it had caused had still happened, and the biologists, geneticists and (might I add) the statisticians who had called bull&$%# were still dead.
The New Soviet Man was, is, and always will be on the march. Of course, the Soviet Union did make it to 1984. But alas, it had already done so by 1920, if not earlier.
Key word is “illegal”.
Same church, different pew.
Comrade EMichael,
Your denunciations until now have been limited to pointing and yelling “Racist.” Subtlety doesn’t work for you.
I wasn’t being subtle.
yeah, Mike, you gotta watch out for them communists under your bed.
but just for the record, i wasn’t going to take your job away or send you to the gulag. i was just asking you to make sense.
you, know, the kind that begins with a topic sentence and marshalls arguments paragraph by paragraph, and doesn’t respond to questions of error by starting a new rabbit.
been down that hole before.
Amalrik wasn’t the only one predicting the collapse of the USSR back in the 1970s. Emmanuel Todd, the French historian, wrote a very good analysis which pointed out the inherent limits of the Soviet system. Since available data on the USSR was limited, he used the techniques of a historian to patch together an economic and social model. He recognized that the USSR could not respond to a crisis or even modernize in any meaningful way. One interesting limitation flowed from the Soviet emphasis on minimizing the political challenges of urbanism and a rising urban middle class. They could not afford to allow any city grow much larger than 500,000 people lest it foment change. It’s a rather interesting analysis, and surprisingly accurate.
By the 1980s others were doing more detailed analyses. I read one paper on the costs of the Soviet empire which claimed that empire had been running in the red since the 1970s. No wonder they were so desperate for western natural gas technology as well as western wheat. Also no wonder they stomped Hungary in ’56, Czechoslovokia in ’68, but not Poland in ’80. George Kennan, who wrote the seminal paper on the Cold War, noted in the 90s that the only thing holding the USSR together in the 80s was the US military build up under Reagan. Our tax dollars at work.
We needed the Soviet Union to protect the Pentagon.
and also to save us from the Afghans.
Kaleberg,
Not sure what you mean by not stomping Poland in ’80. In what way was martial law not stomping? If you mean that they were not invaded, that had more to do with reconnaissance technology than with any limitations or concerns with operating in the red had. It’s not possible to prepare to invade Poland without it looking like preparation for an invasion of West Germany. It was easier to pull off invasions with the limited reconnaissance abilities of the 50’s and 60’s and the geographic locations of the invaded countries.
jj:
Welcome to Angry Bear. First comments are always moderated. Afterwards you are mostly free to comment.
The following is a very old joke.
“In England (or America), what is not forbidden is permitted.
In France, what is forbidden is permitted.
In Germany, that which is not permitted is forbidden,
and in Russia, that which is permitted is forbidden.”
Rosser
i heard
that which is not forbidden is mandatory
from someone who thought it was a good idea.