We were brought up on the examples of the heroes of the Patriotic War of 1812 and the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45, and learned about the achievements of socialists across the world. We were encouraged to feel proud of our education system, of our cosmonauts’ brave journeys into outer space, and also of the advances that had been made by our fellow progressives. When Fidel Castro visited the USSR in 1963, he was mobbed in the street by children who had escaped from their schools just so they could greet this hero; they were joined by their parents and friends – so many people that the police struggled to control the excitement.
Once we left school and started to work, we would discover that every factory, every shop, had some kind of representative from the regime’s local apparatus. Our lives, whether we always were conscious of it or not, were permeated by the values of socialism, and by the time we reached adulthood, the vast majority of us shared the same ideals, and were all committed to achieving the same targets.
Socialism was a system that had given us all a great deal and which we regarded as superior to the selfish, bloated and unequal capitalist regimes we learned about in our textbooks, even if it was not without its own faults. When you consider where my forebears had come from, then perhaps this confidence does not seem so misplaced. My father, who eventually would go on to be a highly respected pilot in the Soviet Frontier Guards – was born into a family of poor peasants in central Russia. It seemed to them like a miracle when he graduated from the military academy in Moscow. Sputnik was launched in 1957, when I was nine, but the most significant event for his parents that year was that they finally got electricity in their home – it is hard not to think of Lenin’s famous saying: ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country’. There was no golden age for my forebears to look back on to compare – generations had led lives scarred by poverty and exclusion.
I remember that a little later, when I was still a young boy, their household was afflicted by a tragedy: their cow passed away. It seems inconceivable now, but they depended on that animal; indeed, they were far from alone in relying on such a fragile thread for their survival. My father was forced to give his family his entire officer’s salary, together with loans from friends – 4,000 roubles, if I remember correctly; an enormous sum at the time – because he understood that they would die without it. At exactly the same time as large swathes of Russia were undergoing enormous urbanisation and industrialisation, and millions of previously impoverished citizens were offered new hope and dignity, they were part of a shadow population, left behind and forgotten by the modern world.
Though I was born only twenty-nine years after my father, the advantages I enjoyed compared to him meant that we might as well have been raised in different centuries. Those living in the first years of communism suffered terribly; they sacrificed their comfort so that we might enjoy a different kind of life. Despite the terrible losses suffered in the Great Patriotic War, by 1948 our nation had made many decades’ worth of progress in just one generation. Unlike our parents, my friends and I did not grow up stalked by hunger or frustrated by ignorance. We felt safe, well fed and secure in the knowledge that we would be receiving one of the best educations available anywhere in the world. Under the tsars, only a minority of the population had been able to read, whereas the Bolsheviks introduced compulsory universal education and built thousands of schools – I grew up in an almost completely literate society, where books were cheap and writers valued. Even in the 1930s, a time when many capitalist nations were struggling with the effects of a crippling global depression, there was close to full employment in the Soviet Union, and the same remained true when I came of age. By the time I was a teenager, it felt as if the only question that hung over us was: what would you like to be when you are older? A doctor? An engineer? A scientist?
It helped that few of us were afraid of sacrifice. We were aware of the concept of political necessity – that in order to achieve great aims, sometimes small things must be sacrificed along the way. We were prepared to put up with the occasional shortage, the incursions by the state into our private lives, the crumbling apartment blocks that stank of beer and stale smoke, because we were patriots confident that whatever we endured would be for the greater good and that the final triumph of socialism was in sight.
Later, I would come to learn about the Soviet Union’s dissidents, or ‘other-thinkers’ as they referred to themselves, whose relationship with the state and its ideology diverged sharply from the position I had taken, and who wanted their lives to unfurl in different ways to the rest of the population (although it is worth mentioning that, more often than not, their criticisms were of the way in which the USSR had veered away from the true path set out by Lenin all those years ago; it was rare that any argued for imitating the capitalistic systems of the West, which would not have occurred to people who knew nothing but a Communist regime). I knew of people who had been sent to camps, but at the time it remained a peripheral kind of knowledge, glimpsed as it were out of the corners of my eyes; it did not trespass on my loyalty.
I never had any problems with the system myself – why would I, when it had given me and my family everything? I felt free; I did not need to pretend to be something I was not, or articulate opinions I did not share. It is too easy – too convenient – to say that in the Soviet Union we were automatons who ate, dressed, danced or thought in exactly the same way. Even within the KGB, where you might imagine people would be dogmatic ideologists determined to control your every move, there was space for pragmatic, humane behaviour. Early on in my career, my sister became engaged to an unsavoury character who, by any measure (political or moral), was profoundly unsuitable. Because I knew that my sister was desperate to start a family, I offered to resign from my post: I could not stand in the way of her happiness, but nor did I wish to risk compromising my work or that of my colleagues in any way. Rather than accepting, as I had expected, my director simply told me that since it was a personal issue, it did not concern him or the agency. And that, as far as he was concerned, was that.
This freedom, this generally positive attitude towards the system, was not incompatible with being aware of some of its faults. In the early 1970s, after having graduated from the Leningrad Mechanical Institute, I was a researcher at the State Institute of Applied Chemistry in Leningrad. I had been asked to speak at a big conference attended by all the local party and Komsomol bosses. The idea was that I would deliver a report eulogising the inevitable fulfilment of the country’s latest economic plan – which, it had just been announced, would be completed in just four years, rather than the initially proclaimed five – and condemning Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
It was fashionable then to compare the respective productivity of the USSR and the USA. Because it appeared from the calculations we were privy to that our country’s output per capita was about half of that achieved in America, the idea was that the gap would be made up by keeping the machinery on in factories right through the night, and scheduling three different working shifts per day. The other area in which it was felt that significant improvements could be made was in the countryside – would it not be better, the theory ran, if farms were organised to run more like factories?
I was not at all confident that simply having the machinery running almost permanently would lead to an increase in productivity – in fact, I feared the opposite. For one thing, I remember my mother telling me the reason why she had left her job as an accountant at a factory in Leningrad. At that time, the targets set by the Gosplan, the central planning agency, related not only to what you were expected to produce (it did not matter if your goods were shoddy, or that there was no demand from them, as long as you hit your goals everything was fine), but also how much material you were expected to use in order to do so. And the logic of this system dictated that if you built a house, and an inspector noticed that you had not employed your full allotted quantity of concrete to do so, you were liable to be punished.