This was all certainly aided by the improvement in workers’ educational levels, due in part to an influx of secondary school graduates into factories. The latter put considerable social pressure on management and government when they realized the gap between their level of education and aspirations and the still relatively primitive working conditions in industrial and other concerns, which were slow to introduce the technological innovations young workers expected to see. Whereas many workers from the previous generation had adapted without difficulty to a low-intensity system, this educated section of the workforce was certainly disappointed. Dissatisfied with the monotonous, archaic and often even non-mechanized character of their work, they were ready to look for more interesting jobs elsewhere and now had the right to do so. To retain them, the technological level of enterprises had to improve. But for this to happen, the whole incentive system in industry (and the economy in general) had to be revised – a prospect that raised immensely complicated economic problems and became a real headache for the leadership.
The term ‘sociology’ is shorthand here for the set of interests, interactions, and practices of social groups, and also applies to the production and circulation of ideas, ideologies, political trends and moods, which were now of considerable intensity. This was bound up with the enhanced role of the intelligentsia, the growing weight of public opinion, and the attitudes that now pervaded the bureaucratic class, the party apparatus, the young, and the working population. Some seem to think that there can be no political history – let alone ideological history – in a country that does not recognize the right of other political opinions to exist, express themselves, and take organized form. However, ideological and political trends did indeed exist in the USSR and found ways to make themselves heard, even if they did not assume an organized form and seek to overthrow the regime. Those who pursued that course risked the attentions of the secret police, but the latter, however powerful, proved helpless when it came to ideas diffused among youth and large segments of the general population, the bureaucracy, the army or the intelligentsia. When such diffuse ideas emerge, history (or, if one prefers, political sociology) takes over, and the police are powerless, especially when these opinions are widespread among leading strata, even in their own ranks.
The party, too, was not only helpless, but succumbed to these ideas and trends: varieties of (sometimes virulent) nationalism or ‘statism’, deeply rooted in these circles, were almost openly expressed with impunity, even though they helped undermine the regime that tolerated them. But directly anti-regime forces were not able seriously to threaten it. The regime was not toppled: it died after exhausting its inner resources and collapsed under its own weight – a special case in the history of the fall of empires. Nuclei of individuals and forces who wished to overthrow it certainly existed, but they lacked sufficient popular support. We have seen that Andropov’s agencies put the number of potential opponents and plotters at some 8.5 million people, mainly located in south-east Russia and among the intelligentsia of the capitals. But these elements never managed to combine into a coherent political force.[2]
The presence of police controls and informers (stukachi) is insufficient on its own to explain the regime’s robustness. Citizens must have found something in the system to desire or appreciate, be it the country’s international status, the relative social homogeneity of its population, the considerable openings for social promotion for disadvantaged strata, or the relative novelty of the liberties that were granted, de jure or de facto, during the revitalization of the system after Stalin’s death and even in its declining phase. All these freedoms were bound up with a new urban reality that was probably still too young to allow for the crystallization of new, clear-cut political aspirations, with the capacity to attract broad popular support.
In the context of an expanding urban society, the emergence of sociology as a field of scholarly knowledge is a natural and yet highly significant development. Pressure to develop a hitherto banned discipline derived not only from academicians, but also from various officials and analysts at Gosplan, the Finance Ministry, the Central Statistical Office and the State Labour Committee – so many bodies whose sphere of activity was not restricted to a single branch, but involved the whole economy, society, and the machinery of government. Not to be outdone, the KGB, with the help of the Academy of Sciences, created an institute for the sociological study of various milieux – the student world, in particular – with an emphasis on behaviour that was anti-social and actually or potentially hostile to the regime.
Sociology underwent rapid development. Whether wittingly or otherwise, sociologists became a pressure group (supported by academic institutions and their members) and rapidly seemed indispensable for a better knowledge of society, workplaces, youth and its aspirations, the condition of women, and so on. Sociologists’ articles, and particularly their field studies, offered an image of reality that had little in common with the cliches and rhetoric of official ideology. They forced this reality on the consciousness of ordinary people, but also of party and state officials, attuning them to new realities, new tasks and new approaches. Government agencies soon began to commission sociological studies. Various sociologists stood out (Tatyana Zaslavskaya and her colleagues at the highly innovative academic centre in Novosibirsk, others in Moscow and Leningrad). Without mincing their words, they produced realistic studies on living conditions in the rural world, factories and offices. Economists from various centres, particularly those at the Central Institute of Mathematical Economics, engaged in intensive research, circulating studies, whether or not they were published, which were communicated to the government. Some of these were commissioned; others were carried out on the initiative of the researchers. Political scientists also gave their opinion, even when they had not been asked for it. They sent unsolicited memoranda to the leadership protesting against some particular policy (for example, the intervention in Afghanistan).
The government and party apparatus selected academic experts as permanent or occasional advisers. These academics formed the branch of the intelligentsia best attuned to urban reality in all its complexity and sought to develop a new type of analysis – one that was remote from official ideological discourse or conservative agitprop. In this respect, government circles were sometimes much more open than the party apparatus, which was packed with Brezhnevites, even if their influence was counterbalanced by the tendency on the part of some departments and secretariats to have their own brains trust. Andropov, who probably initiated this trend, introduced some very bright, forward-looking people into his department.[3] Following the fall of the regime, many of them were to demonstrate an intellectual and moral capacity that imparts credibility to their accounts of the past.
2
Identifying and assessing potential ‘sources of trouble’ is one of the tasks of any secret service, whatever the means and methods of surveillance employed against groups or organizations.
3
Based on the memoirs of some of his collaborators – among them, Arbatov, Shakhnazarov, Burlatsky, Cherniaev and Beketin (editor of the outstanding political review,