Trans-Siberian Railroad / Wikimedia Commons
By Dr. Lewis Siegelbaum / 09.24.2015
Professor of Russian and European History
Michigan State University
Baikal-Amur Mainlin (BAM)
Left: The Seventh Spring of BAM, by Aleksandr Iakovlev (1982) / Moscow: Sovietskii khudozhnik
Right: BAM, by A.B. Iakushin (1975) / Moscow: Sovietskii khudozhnik
The last great hero project of the Soviet era was BAM, the Baikal-Amur Mainline, an over two-thousand mile-long rail line across Siberia about four hundred miles north of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. First planned as a route to the rich mineral resources of Siberia, a section from Taishet to Bratsk was built in the 1930s. Most of the eastern section was built in 1944-1946, mainly by POWs and political prisoners, of whom as many as 150,000 died. The tremendous investment of funds and lives seemingly went to waste when the project was abandoned to the elements after Stalin’s death in 1953.
Left: The First Intersection of Western BAM, by Iurii Stansilavovich Podliaskii / Moscow: Sovietskii khudozhnik
Right: Seeing the Komsomol Off… / Wikimedia Commons
The project was revived in March 1974; General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev declared that it would become the next great hero project of the Komsomol. Its further fate reflected the declining condition of socialist society. Developed as a second Siberian route to the Pacific, the railroad allayed official fears that the Trans-Siberian line would be cut-off by a cross-border Chinese incursion. It never served a clear economic function. Natural impediments demanded a huge investment. Crossing seven mountain ranges, swamps, taiga, seismic zones, and with forty percent of its rail laid on permafrost, BAM was planned as an electrified double track, but was scaled down to single track as money ran out. Without prison labor, labor costs were prohibitive, even with the Komsomol volunteers. Environmental costs were also staggering. The pristine northern forests transected by the line suffered permanent damage, and Lake Baikal, one of the world’s cleanest, was fouled by the dumping of construction debris. Construction of the city of Severobaikalsk (with a population of 30 000 people) on the lake’s northern shore to house personnel led to widespread erosion.
Left: Victor Pechinitsyn, Builder of the BAM, by Il’ia Glazunov (1977) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Medal for the Construction of BAM (1976) / Wikimedia Commons
Hero projects were difficult in the age of stagnation, when public cynicism made heroism obsolete. Fewer Komsomols were willing to sacrifice their youths to the common good, and with good reason. Although a “golden spike” connecting eastern and western sections was hammered into place in 1984, less than a third of the line was actually operational. BAM was only declared complete in 1991, the year that the Soviet Union fell apart. By the mid-1990s BAM, though operational, was proving to be one of Russia’s least profitable railroads.
Our Little Father
Left: Brezhnev at Artek (1979) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Brezhnev and Politibiuro Visit Azerbaijan / Wikimedia Commons
Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev — “our father and provider (kormilets)” in some official slogans, Il’ich in other slogans (exploiting the coincidence of patronymics with Vladimir Il’ich Lenin), and Lenya in popular anecdotes that mocked the echo with Lenin’s last name — was in the midst of his long decline in 1980. Failing health and mental capacities, already audible in a 1975 speech, made him an ineffective leader of the so-called gerontocracy, the aging Politbiuro that locked the government in stagnation. On his death in 1982, power passed first to Iurii Andropov, the KGB chief who died in a little more than a year, and then to Brezhnev crony Konstantin Chernenko, who also soon died.
Left: Portrait of Fedoskino Lacquer Box, by Mikhail Grigorevich Pashinin (1980) / Russian Sunbirds
Right: Brezhnev Resplendent (1980) / Wikimedia Commons
Judging by the titles he accumulated and the medals that bedecked his chest, Brezhnev was at the height of his powers in the late 1970s. He became a marshal of the Soviet Union in 1976, and a year later he became chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the first leader to head both the Presidium and the Communist party. In 1979 Brezhnev received the Lenin prize for literature (the prize was later recalled). He staked his legacy on a number of purported accomplishments. A commissar in the Soviet Army during the Great Patriotic War, he later recounted his exploits in a ghost-written memoir that gave him a prominent role in several victories. His political legacy was to have been the attainment of what was called “developed” or mature socialism, which in reality was a way to explain the stagnation of the system. The so-called Brezhnev Constitution was promulgated in 1977. Yet none of these illusory deeds could eradicate the stench of corruption. The decay of the Soviet system apparent by 1980 was a cruel mirror of the decay of his body, although it took a bit longer to perish. By the mid-1980s Brezhnev’s legacy was in disrepute, attacked by historians and journalists, and more effectively perhaps, by popular jokes.
Left: Brezhnev in Kishinev (1976) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Brezhnev at Artek (1979) / Wikimedia Commons
Although the involvement of Brezhnev’s family in wide-scale corruption, and the failures of his leadership are now well-known, some in post-Soviet Russia look back to the stability of his era with some nostalgia. Patient and benign compared to his predecessors, the Brezhnev regime worked on a consensus model that foreswore mercurial swings and gave citizens a measure of control over their lives. Although the reputation Soviet life in the 1970s has experienced a revival, almost nobody would claim that Brezhnev himself was a gifted leader.
Cleaning Up Baikal
Left: Sunset on Baikal / Wikimedia Commons
Right: This is Paradise!, by V. Dimitriuk (1989) / From Soviet Humor. The Best of Krokodil.
Lake Baikal, world’s largest and clearest freshwater body, stood soiled and battered amid the ravaged expanse of Siberia by 1980. The story of how its breathtaking beauty could be spoiled goes to the heart of many decades of Soviet environmental neglect. The mineral wealth of Siberia attracted the plotters of the First Five Year Plan in the late 1920s, who projected great cities and rail routes through its expanse. During the war it housed factories evacuated to safety from western cities. Oil and mineral exploration, large-scale lumbering, military and prison populations all put the Siberian environment under stress. The assumption that a space so vast could absorb unlimited pollution eventually proved false. Baikal itself, its shorelines eroded by lumbering and population growth, fouled by waste from construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline, found its clear waters growing murky from wastes pumped by the Baikal Pulp and Paper Plant, which stood on its banks. Built in the late 1950s, and from the start a source of controversy, the plant was the target of protests and journalistic campaigns throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Left: Baikal Shoreline (1980) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: NASA Space Image of Baikal / NASA
Lake Baikal, or the “sacred sea,” is located in the Irkutsk region of southeastern Siberia and the Buryat Autonomous Republic. At eighty kilometers wide and 636 kilometers long, averaging a depth of 630 meters, the lake holds twenty percent of the world’s fresh water, as much as the Great Lakes combined. The waters are exceptionally clear, transparent to a depth of seventy meters, and although the lake freezes over every January, it is home to 1200 different animal species and 1000 species of plants, eighty percent of which are endemic. These include the unique freshwater seal species called the Nerpa. The lake was already considered sacred when the Russians colonized the region in the 1600s, and the new residents continued the tradition.
Left: Well? Has the Commission Left?, by B. Semenov (1984) / “Fighting Pencil” Group
Right: Citizens Obliged to Preserve Nature / Posters from the Former Soviet Union
Environmental issues such as Lake Baikal allowed Soviet citizens to mobilize their civic concerns in a way no other issue did. Although Soviet scientists were among the world’s most progressive preservationists in the 1920s, Stalin’s aggressive industrialization plan marginalized them entirely. For decades the environment was assaulted in the name of industrial growth. Russian environmentalists were ignored; colleagues in the republics were brutally repressed as nationalists. State authorities did not recognize the environment to be a political issue, allowing citizens to rally against state decisions with some freedom. Much of the most effective opposition to the Baikal factory appeared in the official press. Citizens could disagree with the government without bearing the taint of disloyalty that damaged the dissident movement. Local scientists, writers, fishermen, and ordinary citizens banded together to fight the Baikal plant, and ignited an environmental movement throughout the country. Environmentalism provided a forum for ideas that were otherwise unacceptable in Soviet discourse. In the republics, environmental issues allowed nationalists to organize; and in Russia, it let national conservatives give voice to their concerns.
Vladimir Vysotskii
Vysotskii and Marina Vladi / Vladimir Vysotskii Official Site, Masha Shkolnikova
On July 24, 1980 Vladimir Vysotskii, the most popular actor of his time, troubadour of a declining Soviet society, fast liver, hard drinker and inveterate smoker, died of a heart attack. Voice of dissent but not a dissident, a movie star whose poetry and songs were never acceptable to the Party, Vysotskii voiced the desperate passions of a disillusioned generation. Born in 1938, he graduated from the Moscow Art Theater school of acting in 1960, and immediately plunged into writing the songs that would become underground favorites circulated from tape recorder to tape recorder throughout the Soviet Union. In 1964 he began working at the Moscow Theater of Drama and Comedy, popularly known as Taganka for the district of Moscow it graced, and scored a string of starring roles that included Hamlet and the Russian poet Sergei Esenin … His chiseled features, gravelly voice, and acting skills brought him to the attention of film directors and television producers, such as the detective series The Meeting Place Cannot be Changed.
Left: Vladimir Vysotskii in Moscow, photo by Viktor Akhlomov (1966) / Photodome
Right: Vysotskii at Rest (1980) / Vladimir Vysotskii Official Site, Masha Shkolnikova
Vysotskii the legend is as important as Vysotskii the actor and singer. Many of his songs were sung in the voice of a former prison camp inmate, which led many fans to assume that this had been his fate as well. Although Vysotskii was the darling of Soviet cultural institutions and moved comfortably among the Moscow elite, he embodied for his compatriots a defiance of social convenient that many mistook for dissidence. Although he bemoaned the spiritual vacuum of Soviet life, and flagrantly tested the boundaries of cultural expression, he never questioned or even addressed the foundations of the Soviet order.
Left: From the funeral of Vysotskii (1980) / Vladimir Vysotskii Official Site, Masha Shkolnikova
Right: Grave site of Vladimir Vysotskii / Vladimir Vysotskii Official Site, Masha Shkolnikova
From the moment of his death, Vysotskii assumed the dimensions of a cult object, perhaps even a martyr to the Soviet way of life. His gravesite became a site of pilgrimage, the record maker Melodiia which had spurned him during his life made a fortune on his recordings after death. Celebrated in memory, movie and song, he was celebrated by a second generation in website as well. All along the main guardian of his legacy has been Marina Vladi, his French-born wife whose Russian roots, French acting career and good looks endeared her to the Russian audience.
Drawing Together
Left: I Learned Russian Because Lenin Spoke that Language / Posters from the Former Soviet Union
Right: My Homeland is the USSR / Posters from the Former Soviet Union
Soviet nationality policy, particularly with respect to non-Russians, was deeply contradictory. On the one hand, it established as the basis of its federative system ethno-territorial units and encouraged the development of national cultures and education within them; on the other, it promoted Russian as a lingua franca, the settling of Russians and other Slavic peoples in the Baltic and Central Asian republics, and policies of industrialization that stimulated social mobility, all of which tended to erode national traditions. Thus, the pull towards greater national self-consciousness and cohesion was countered by the pull towards an amorphous, Russified Soviet culture.
Left: The City of Lenin is a City of Full Literacy, by A.A. Serov (1982) / Hoover Political Poster Database
Right: Forward, to a Worldwide October!, by Viktor Deni (1982) / Hoover Political Poster Database
Under Brezhnev, these contradictions intensified. When in 1978 the draft of a new republic Constitution in Georgia merely referred to “official concern” for the development of the Georgian language, protests erupted leading to the reinstatement of Georgian as “the official language of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.” At the same time, at meetings in the Abkhaz Autonomous Republic within Georgia demands were made to remove Georgian from the list of official languages and even to demand transfer of the Abkhaz republic from Georgia to the Russian republic. Patronage of national cultures continued under the auspices of the party secretariat in republics such as Ukraine, Estonia and Azerbaijan, as well as in Georgia. Despite these and other indications of national assertiveness and friction, party theorists and the media promoted the notion of the “drawing together (sblizhenie) of nations” and of “increasing their internationalist cohesion” via “their voluntary learning of the Russian language — the language of communication between nationalities.” While acknowledging the persistence of ethnic differences in domestic and family relations (for example, the predominance of nuclear families among European peoples and extended or multi-generational families among the peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia; attitudes towards marriage and divorce; rates of female employment, etc.), they pointed to the narrowing of differences in material culture, leisure activities, and educational backgrounds.
Left: Unity of the Soviet Nations (1982) / Hoover Political Poster Database
Right: Fifteen Republics – One Homeland / Posters from the Former Soviet Union
Even as the 1979 census showed the proportion of ethnic Russians declining in the overall Soviet population, the concept of the drawing together of nations, with Russians occupying the special role of “first among equals of the fraternal peoples,” was restated. Celebrating the increasing homogeneity of Soviet society, the chief editor of Kommunist, the party’s main theoretical journal, was moved to condemn both “national nihilism” and “national conceit” and to forecast the eventual fusion or merging (sliianie) of nations. The persistence on the popular level of a rich array of ethnic jokes, drawing on and reinforcing derogatory stereotypes, suggests that the Soviet Union was a far cry from having overcome national conceit or even achieving the degree of fraternity among nations that was officially proclaimed.
The Dying Russian Village
We are loyal to the fields of our fathers! (1980) / Posters from the Former Soviet Union
In May 1962, the Khrushchev administration ordered retail prices of meat and dairy products to be raised by 25 to 30 percent to cover increased costs of production on state and collective farms. The increases provoked widespread anger among the urban population and in the southern Russian city of Novocherkassk led to the most bloody incident of worker protest in the post-war decades. Over the next twenty years, the state’s subsidies to agriculture rose from 3.5 to 54.6 billion rubles, accounting for 11 percent of the state budget by 1980. This was, in effect, the price paid for labor peace during the Brezhnev era. The contrast with Poland, where food price increases in the 1970s precipitated labor unrest and the birth of Solidarity, is apposite.
Village Migrants Gather in a Sokolniki Park, Moscow, photo by Henri-Cartier Bresson (1954) / From The People of Moscow, by Henri-Cartier Bresson
But subsidies did little to satisfy Soviet farmers’ desire for a better life. Between 1939 and 1989 the rural population of the USSR declined from 130.2 to 97.7 million, and within the RSFSR the decrease was even more steep, from 72.0 to 38.9 million. Rural out-migration, averaged 100,000 people a year in the RSFSR between 1979 and 1988. What made matters worse as far as agricultural productivity was concerned, was that a disproportionate share of out-migrants consisted of young people and those trained to become agricultural specialists. Alarmed by this trend, the Soviet leadership sought to narrow the gap in living standards and cultural amenities between rural and urban inhabitants. In 1965, 1974, and again in 1985 it adopted programs that involved channeling funds to improve rural social conditions and the “material-technical base” of the countryside. Despite Brezhnev’s claim in 1978 that many of the problems afflicting agriculture and rural society were being overcome, the rural exodus continued.
Left: There’s a Directive to Take Care of New Machinery!, by V. Kunnap (1976) / “Fighting Pencil” Group
Right: They Raised a New Breed of Chicken for Our Kolkhoz, by B. Semenov (1970) / “Fighting Pencil” Group
The dying Russian village emerged as a prominent theme in Soviet literature already in the 1950s, and it would continue to figure in novels and short stories published in the two succeeding decades. Among the better-known examples of this genre were Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1963 story “Matryona’s Home,” and numerous works by Fedor Abramov, Valentin Rasputin, Aleksei Leonov, Andrei Belov, and other Russian Village Prose writers. They emphasized the loss of spiritual and ethical values associated with the passing of an older generation, the material hardships endured by survivors, and the sense of deracination felt by younger people who had left the villages. That at least some elements of village culture survived in the city was the theme of “Piatachok,” a 1987 made-for-television documentary directed by A. Khaniutin. The documentary told the stories of about a dozen Muscovites who had left the countryside as early as the 1930s and as recently as the mid-1970s. Its title referred to the Saturday gatherings of such migrants in Izmailovskii Park, where they recreated village entertainment and affinities.
Il’ia Glazunov
Left: Lazarus, by Il’ia Glazunov (1988) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Russian Beauty, Il’ia Glazunov (1968) / Wikimedia Commons
Il’ia Glazunov, Russian painter, triumphed on two fronts in 1980, winning recognition from unexpected patrons. One of his grand thematic canvases, The Contribution of the Soviet Peoples to World Culture and Civilization, was accepted by UNESCO officials to be part of their permanent art collection. A second honor was conferred by the Soviet state when it declared him a People’s Artist (narodnyi khudozhnik), one of the lesser of state cultural titles, but enough to ensure a good living. It was the second honor that surprised many. Just three years prior to the award, Glazunov had been castigated by the arts establishment for another grand canvas, Passion Play of the Twentieth Century, which to many accused the Soviet state of destroying Russian culture.
Left: Dmitrii Donskoi, Il’ia Glazunov (1961) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: The Prodigal Son, Il’ia Glazunov (1977) / Wikimedia Commons
Though the purported hostility of the state boosted Glazunov’s reputation, it is hard now to see its roots. Openly religious themes surely contradicted Marxist dogma, but in other ways Glazunov was an entirely Soviet artist. He had apprenticed in the studio of the arch-conservative artist Boris Ioganson, he rejected modernist abstraction for a fleshy realist style, and his forthright Russian nationalism was in keeping with official tastes of the late Brezhnev era. In fact, one cannot help noticing that the faces featured Contribution of the Soviet Peoples are overwhelmingly Russian, embodying the most popular take on the official dogma of the drawing together of Soviet peoples.
Left: City of Kitezh, Il’ia Glazunov (1986) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Volga Girl, Il’ia Glazunov (1977) / Wikimedia Commons
Born 1930 in Leningrad, young Glazunov survived the wartime blockade of his home city, but watched his whole family die of starvation. He is a gifted illustrator whose drawings for the novels of Dostoevskii are filled with the spirit of Petersburg. Glazunov’s ability to defy the Soviet establishment while belonging to it, and to critique communist ideas without showing the disloyalty that many average Russians attributed to the dissidents, brought him huge popularity. His thematic breadth suggested intellectual depth, which he aided by providing guides to the many faces on his canvases. His appeal to national pride and tradition allowed his celebrity to grow even in post-Soviet years. Along with such sons of Soviet culture as film directors Stanislav Govorukhin and Nikita Mikhalkov, he called for a renaissance of the Russian culture destroyed by the Soviet state. He stated the cause most forcefully in a book entitled Crucified Russia.
Invasion of Afghanistan
Left: Soviet Withdrawal, photo by Mikhail Efstaviev (1988) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Afghan communist propaganda (1980) / Wikimedia Commons
On December 25, 1979, Soviet troops entered the territory of the socialist republic of Afghanistan at the invitation of the present government. Its leader, Hafizullah Amin, who had taken power by executing his predecessor, Nur Mohammad Taraki, was now himself executed by Babrak Karmal, a new Soviet-installed leader flown in directly from the Soviet Union. In retrospect, it was not a wise decision. Taraki had taken power in April 1978, when army officers had ousted an non-aligned government that had itself ousted the monarchy in 1975. Headed by Taraki, this regime was friendly to the Soviet Union, and pursued secularist reforms similar to those once implemented in Soviet Central Asia, including secular education, equal rights for women, land reforms, and other administrative reforms. Internal frictions led to Taraki’s ouster soon after he had won the support of Leonid Brezhnev, leaving the Soviet leader feeling betrayed. The invasion, or “exertion of fraternal aid” in classic Soviet parlance, was a chance to square accounts. Though justified by the terms of the 1978 Treaty of Friendship between the two countries, and undertaken “in defense of the gains of the revolution,” the invasion did not account for underlying causes.
Afghan Defends Its Revolution (1980) / Posters from Cuba
Characteristic of foreign policy decisions in the late Brezhnev-era were the small circle of advisors consulted, the overly personal approach taken by Brezhnev and his closest associates, and the reliance on raw power over nuanced understanding. Though firmly in power by dint of armed superiority and Soviet support, the Afghan Communist Party was riddled with factions and had little support from the population. Islamic resistance first aroused by the Taraki reforms was organized and capable of small-scale armed resistance by the time of the invasion. Although unable to engage Soviet troops in open battle, resistance fighters who called themselves mujahideen used the mountainous terrain to their advantage in guerrilla warfare. Soon they united inside Afghanistan and across the Pakistani border in Peshawar to resist the invaders and the Soviet-backed Afghan Army. The “temporary” conflict would continue for ten years, ending in Soviet withdrawal.
Left: Afghan communist propaganda (1980) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Afghan communist propaganda (1980) / Wikimedia Commons
The war, fueled by and fueler of Cold War anxieties, operated on the law of unintended consequences. Plans for a minor palace coup did not consider the possibility of a long-term war between peoples. The Soviet government was forced to increase the size of its armed forces and to draft more young man into the line of fire. Tens of thousands of them returned home in body bags or disfigured by modern weaponry. The war provided a divisive issue right when the dissident movement was at its peak, and diverted funding from the stagnant civilian economy as it ground to a halt. It destroyed the already ailing relationship with the western nations, and undermined Soviet relations with the Third World. Following the bizarre logic of the Cold War, in which the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it caused the United States, recently rocked by the Islamic revolution in Iran, to become an ardent supporter and arms supplying to the Islamic revolt in Afghanistan.
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears
Gosha makes shashlik / Scene from Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, 1980
Katya, heroine of Vladimir Menshov’s smash hit film of 1980, Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears, represented many things to many viewers. Played by Vera Alentova, she was meant to appeal to the mass audience by representing the Soviet everywoman. The character succeeded, selling seventy -five million tickets and pleasing Gosfilm boss Fillip Ermash, whose administration was focused on winning back the Soviet mass viewer. Equal if surprising success was met with the American Film Academy, which awarded the film an Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 1980. If intellectuals and critics were not impressed, few at Mosfilm were worried.
Poster for Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, 1980 / Museum of Russian Posters
Whether or not Katya embodied Soviet womanhood depends on the interpretation of the film, and on a willingness to mix fantasy with fact. The film chronicles the young lives of three emblematic women, who arrive in the Moscow metropolis in 1957 to get educated and catch men. Educated they become, though not always to much purpose; and they do catch men. Two are cads. Katya meets a handsome young man in the exciting new field of television; he turns cad when she becomes pregnant, and he disappears. Liudmila (Irina Muravieva) catches a star hockey player, who disappoints her by becoming an alcoholic. Only simple Antonina (Raisa Riazanova), who catches an equally simple country boy, lives a happy family life. Education and social mobility are clearly not the paths to happiness for women. When the film leaps forward to the year 1979, Katya is a mother, manless and dissatisfied. Although a factory director, in many ways the pinnacle of Soviet success, she has little to point to in her life. Her daughter is rebellious and in need of fatherly discipline, and Katya needs a male shoulder to lean on in her moments of weakness. She eventually finds these in Gosha (played by the classic Soviet male, Aleksei Batalov), the simple work man who puts her house in order. Though an occasional tippler, and as troubled as Katya by her superior work status, his simple goodness enriches everyone in the end.
Batalov as Gosha / Scene from Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, 1980
Female viewers could see in the character of Katya a reflection of their own travails. Unsupported by the men around her, Katya was subject to the “double burden,” giving her equal rights but more than equal duties. She had to carry the load at work and at home, cooking, cleaning, coping with inadequate day care and inadequate food and consumer supplies. She suffered the same anxieties about femininity that Russian women and men felt, and yet felt that she was entitled to a satisfying work life. Thus she was caught in the classic Soviet dilemmas: she had the right to succeed, but not the support to do so; and she was driven by a need to succeed that she herself thought unfeminine.
Moscow Olympics
Olympic Matchbook Cover (1980) / Virtual Matchbox Label Collection
Bread and circuses, the formula by which the emperors of ancient Rome sought to retain their authority and popularity, were not unknown in the Soviet Union. Holiday parades and carnivals, celebrations accompanying feats of aviation and exploration, and other spectacles — including the circus — provided entertainment while reinforcing a sense of national identity and well-being among citizens of the USSR. The Summer Olympic Games of 1980, awarded to Moscow in 1974 by the International Olympic Committee, represented an unparalleled opportunity to showcase the superiority of Soviet athletes as well as the achievements of Soviet socialism before a world-wide audience.
Extraordinary measures were taken to prepare for this grand festival of sports. A frenzy of construction, typical of host cities, resulted in not only new stadiums, training facilities, and hotels, but a new airport at Sheremet’evo. The city itself was spruced up. Roads were newly paved, trees were planted, debris was cleared, and wall murals and flags, many displaying “Misha,” the cuddly bear who was the mascot of these Olympics, festooned the boulevards. Jobs for translators, guides, and guards were highly sought after, and already in October 1978, the Soviet media was authorized to crank out publicity about the games to counteract negative propaganda from the West.
Unfortunately for the (already tarnished) image of the Olympics as transcending politics, if not the prestige of the Soviet Union, the United States and 55 other nations decided to boycott the games in protest over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Still, Soviet fans flocked to even the most obscure events, filling venues to near capacity. In all, 5.2 million tickets were sold of which 3.9 million were purchased by Soviet citizens. The boycott thus failed to cast a pall over the 1980 Olympics, although it did deepen the atmosphere of Cold War. Four years later, the Los Angeles Summer Olympics were boycotted by the Soviet Union and most other Communist nations of eastern Europe, ostensibly for security reasons.
Sakharov Exiled
Sakharov in exile (1986) / Wikimedia Commons
On January 22, 1980 Andrei Sakharov, academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Hero of Socialist Labor, laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, physicist and father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was approached in the streets of Moscow by plain-clothes police and taken by force to the USSR Procurator’s office. There he was informed that a decree of the presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet had deprived him of his titles, ranks and privileges, including his right of residence in Moscow, and that his future residence would be in the Volga city of Gorky (now Nizhnii Novgorod), 250 miles east of Moscow. A special flight that day took him and his wife Elena Bonner to his place of exile, where he would remain for the next six years. In Gorky his life was subject to a strict regime, including surveillance, prohibitions against leaving the city or meeting or communicating with foreigners, a strict control over his associations, even with his family.
Sakharov in exile (1981) / Andrei Sakharov Archive
The rumored cause of the official furor was Sakharov’s “Open Letter on Afghanistan,” released to the foreign press, which criticized the Soviet leadership for the invasion of its southern neighbor. Sakharov had been a thorn in the Soviet paw for at least a decade, although the trip from honored son to reviled dissident was gradual. His first protest took place in 1961 protest, when he lobbied Khrushchev to cancel atmospheric testing of the hydrogen bomb. In 1968 he wrote an essay calling for drastic reductions in nuclear arms. Finally, in 1970 he founded the Committee for Human Rights. Sakharov’s slow decision to become an active dissenter coincided with the rise to KGB leadership of Iurii Andropov, a Politbiuro member whose leadership saw political and police interests merge in the KGB. “Other-thinkers” (инакомыслящие), as official parlance dubbed the dissidents, became a threat to state security prosecutable no less than any other traitors.
Andrei Sakharov – Torch of Conscience, by A.G. Vaganov (1980) / Electronic Museum of Russian Posters
Oddly, the Sakharov affair reflected official concern with the maintenance of “socialist legality,” the need to conform with the letter of Soviet law. Police did not simply arrest and imprison Sakharov, as they would have in Stalin’s day. Such an action would have required a trial, and the need to find and document a violation of law in Sakharov’s actions. A decree from the Supreme Soviet, the ultimate legislative body of the state, could make this action legal. As the successful campaign against dissidents culminated in 1980, authorities tested the limits of socialist legality. Perhaps most ticklish was the question of the Helsinki Watch Group, organized by Soviet citizens to monitor Soviet compliance with the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The Soviet state could not very well suppress a group dedicated to upholding a document signed by the state. Therefore, officials attacked individual members of the group over a variety of charges. Dr. Iurii F. Orlov, founder of the group, was arrested in February 1977. Orlov was sentenced to seven years hard labor and five of exile for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” a relatively new offense under Soviet law, following which twelve other members were arrested or forced into exile. Anatolii Shcharanskii, a computer specialist deprived of work after he applied to emigrate to Israel in 1973, was a founding member of Helsinki Watch, arrested and convicted for espionage and treason in 1978. He was eventually released as part of a 1986 spy trade. At its most extreme, the KGB also used psychiatric diagnoses as a reason to place dissidents under guard and incarceration.
The dissident movement was in ruins after 1980, with leading members in prison, in exile, or abroad in emigration. Evidence suggests that most Soviet citizens were not displeased with this development. Yet former dissidents returned to lead reforms after Gorbachev’s rise to power and the fall of the Soviet Union. Many have assumed political prominence in Russia and their adopted countries, including Sakharov, who became a member of parliament and a leading spokesman for change mourned by millions at his death in 1989.
Sixth All-Union Census
Comparative Soviet Nationalities by Republic (1982) / Marxists Internet Archive
On January 17, 1979 the sixth all-Union census was conducted throughout the USSR. Enormous weight was attached to the results which were analyzed by demographers, economists and other social scientists and discussed in the Soviet media. The three most significant — and to many, alarming — trends revealed by the census were the low birth-rate among the European peoples relative to Central Asians, the continuation of rapid urbanization, and the increasing gap between men’s and women’s life expectancy.
Ethnicity was identified as the “chief variable” in birthrates. The data showed that whereas Russian women of childbearing age bore 2.08 children, Ukrainian women bore 2.02 children, and Latvian women bore only 1.93 children on average, corresponding figures for Kirghiz, Tadzhik, Turkmenian, and Uzbek women were 4.14, 4.84, 4.57 and 5.32 respectively. These fecundity rates were part of a demographic “shift to the south.” Compared to the 1970 census, Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia experienced rates of population growth of only six percent. But Uzbekistan’s population had grown by 30 percent and Turkmenistan’s by 28 percent over the same period. Russians were fast on the way to becoming a minority of the Soviet Union’s total population of 262.4 million.
Ethnic differences in birthrates could be correlated with differential rates of urbanization. Throughout the USSR, the urban population increased by 27.6 million (20 percent) over 1970 figures, whereas the rural population declined by 6.9 million (6.5 percent). The most urbanized republics were Estonia (70 percent), Russia (69 percent), and Latvia (68 percent), and the least urbanized were Tadzhikistan (35 percent), Kirghizia (39 percent) and Turkmenia (48 percent). Moreover, the highest birthrates in Central Asia were recorded in rural areas which is why the rural population of Tadzhikistan increased by 36 percent and Turkmenistan’s by 28 percent. The Russian republic experienced the largest absolute decline in rural population (6.7 million people), exacerbating concerns about the “dying village” and the disappearance of Russia’s rural heritage already expressed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Valentin Rasputin, Fedor Abramov, and other writers.
Finally, the gap between the average life expectancy of men and women widened by two more years compared to 1970, with the result that men were living on average ten years less than women. Higher rates of alcoholism, smoking, and fatal accidents among men were considered the main culprits. Overall, as Viktor Perevedentsev, one of the Soviet Union’s foremost demographers, concluded, “the census confirmed once again that unfavorable changes are taking place in the processes of population increase and reproduction.”
Solidarity in Poland
Left: The Lenin Shipyard Strike (1981) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Vote with Us (1980) / Wilson International Center: Cold War International History Project
The formation in 1980 of the Polish trade union-cum-political movement, Solidarity, and the strike actions it organized throughout Poland profoundly disturbed Soviet authorities. It was, after all, acutely embarrassing for Marxist-Leninists to be confronted with a movement that so obviously enjoyed widespread support from among workers, the very class in whose interests the Polish and Soviet Communist parties claimed to rule. The ability of Solidarity to survive, despite coordinated attempts to repress it, demonstrated the weakness of the ruling Communist party in Poland, eventually leading to the demoralization of its leadership, and contributing to the collapse of ruling Communist parties throughout eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself.
Left: Lech Wales (1980) / Wikimedia Commons
Right: Solidarity 10,000,000 Members, by M. Wieckowski (1981) / Art of the Poster: Polish Poster Collection
The birthplace of Solidarity was the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk. There, in December 1970, workers, disgusted with price increases in food, marched on the city’s party headquarters which was set on fire. The ensuing strike and violence, which spread to other Polish ports, resulted in dozens of deaths. Over the next several years, as the Polish economy stagnated, strikes occurred at various enterprises throughout the country. Attempts to increase food prices again in 1976 provoked a wave of sit-down strikes and spurred a group of dissident intellectuals to form a Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR). The increasing dependence of the Polish economy on western debt financing and the election in 1978 of the Polish cardinal, Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II emboldened worker-activists and put the Polish Communist authorities on the defensive. The immediate precipitant for the strikes that broke out in the summer of 1980 and led to the formation of Solidarity in August was a government decree raising meat prices. Over the next sixteen months, Solidarity and the Polish government engaged in a series of confrontations and negotiations, but without any clear resolution. On December 12-13, 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski, first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, ordered a massive military operation and imposed martial law. Solidarity’s leaders were arrested and the organization was driven into the underground where it remained until 1989.
Solidarity banner (1981) / Wikimedia Commons
Documents from the Soviet archives demonstrate that the Politbiuro closely followed developments in Poland, and frequently consulted with and offered advice to Polish Communist leaders. On September 3, 1980, the Politbiuro came up with six “theses” on the situation, in which Solidarity was characterized as the “anti-socialist opposition” receiving assistance from abroad, and the Polish Communist party and the official trade unions were urged to take measures to strengthen their ties with the Polish working class and improve workers’ standard of living. Subsequently, members of the Politbiuro reported on their meetings with Polish delegations, expressing their frustration with their counterparts’ inability to restore order. Up to the declaration of martial law in December 1981, the Soviet leadership continued to extend economic assistance in the form of fuel and raw materials supplies, expressed doubts about Jaruzelski’s firmness of intentions, but held to its position that Soviet armed intervention was out of the question.
Underground Economy
Left: Work Efficiently and Achieve Good Quality / Posters from the Former Soviet Union
Right: Invisible Hats, by B. Semenov (1974) / “Fighting Pencil” Group
Construction of a cooperative car park has drawn the exemplary Soviet citizens of Eldar Riazanov’s 1979 film Garage into the shadow regions of the Soviet economy. How to get the materials; whether to hire labor through official exchanges, or on the side; who should have the privilege of cooperative membership; how to steer paperwork through a corrupt bureaucracy? Each issue poses the dilemma of either obeying the law, which promises failure, or skirting the law and enabling completion of the project. Making necessary decisions robs the cooperative members of their sense of civic integrity.
Left: Punish Those Who Do Not Work! / Posters from the Former Soviet Union
Right: The plumbing in our house …, by V. Kunnap (1977) / “Fighting Pencil” Group
Involvement in the underground economy had become a fact of Soviet existence by 1980. Economic activities regarded as normal in market economies not only were prohibited under Soviet law, but also carried heavy penalties. The acquisition of consumer services (repairs of appliances and autos, medical services) and residential housing, the resale of scarce consumer goods, trade in western consumer goods such as blue jeans or cigarettes were on a par with criminal activities such as the narcotics trade and moonshine liqueur. Virtually every citizen became a de facto criminal in the quest for a more comfortable life. The command economy was strangled the growing consumer society and created ideal conditions for a black market. At fault were several factors: an economy of shortages with state-controlled prices set well below demand, and the gap between artificial domestic and free-market world prices. Malleable property rights and unaccounted state assets coupled with low administrative salaries gave birth to bribery and corruption. Central players in the second economy were criminal structures and the party bureaucrats who controlled the system.
Left: Let’s work harder, comrades! / Posters from the Former Soviet Union
Right: Live and Work with a Clear Conscience / Posters from the Former Soviet Union
The underground economy both aided and impeded the growth of the Soviet economy. The system was more efficient when independent agents circumvented artificial price and production controls, thus buffering average citizens from the inefficient allocation of resources by central planners. Growth in the unofficial sector far outstripped growth in the stagnant official economy. Yet obligatory law-breaking had a corrosive effect on society, and undermined the legitimacy of the state. Although authorities periodically attempted crackdowns, their ultimate targets were themselves highly placed party officials. Brezhnev’s own family was deeply involved in the black market. Many observers mistook black marketeers for proto-capitalists. However, when the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 took with it the state-planning system, they evolved not into entrepreneurs, but into large-scale criminal racketeers who throttle the economy today no less than state planners once did.