This led to ludicrous activity: men deliberately wasting precious building materials, workers frantically trying to dispose of a lump of half-drying concrete in a field before anybody noticed. And in those cases where a breach of the rules was detected, it was invariably the accountant who was sent to jail. My mother did not believe she should be held responsible for the infractions of others. So I did not need to be told that a decision made in an office in Moscow did not always translate into effective action.
As strong as the party’s centralising impulse and calls for obedience were, they were never sufficient to overmaster the incompetence and dishonesty of some of its citizens. Especially since many of its officials deliberately supplied their superiors with misinformation, so that those charged with planning the country’s future were rarely if ever furnished with the facts they needed to build up a picture of the economic landscape. Official schemes always had to coexist with the illicit and disordered. And though I was no expert on agriculture, I knew enough to be aware that it was not like urban industrial processes, where the same work could be completed throughout the year. In the rural villages, life was still necessarily dictated by the changing seasons; no matter how sincere the party’s ambition to increase the yield was, it could not stop summer churning relentlessly into autumn and then winter.
So instead of the praise for our increased productivity that I might have been expected to deliver, I said, ‘Listen, in the Soviet Union we have a planned economy, but I cannot understand how we can fulfil the plan, not in five years, but in four years. What kind of planning do we have?’
‘As for Solzhenitsyn,’ I continued, ‘there is little I can say for I have not read the book in question. If what I have heard about the substance of the book is right, then, yes, I disagree with that. Yet I cannot condemn something that I have not seen with my own eyes.’
Nothing that came out of my mouth that day was in any way conventional. It was the kind of thing you might expect to hear from dissidents, but later on the most senior party representative in the room praised me. Indeed, when he returned to the local headquarters, he called his subordinates together to tell them that, even if they might not agree with the awkward direction my thoughts were heading in, it was important to listen to criticisms made by young men like me. Not long afterwards, I was elected head of the Institute’s Komsomol organisation. There may have been a script, but there was also far more room for improvisation than many people who grew up in the West would imagine. The state was a sprawling, multifarious beast that always struggled to accommodate demands made by numerous different interest groups. Totalitarianism was certainly at the heart of the regime’s ambitions, but in a country as large, complex and unruly as the Soviet Union, it was never possible to achieve complete, unmediated control.
The secret service gave me a panoramic, privileged view of Soviet society and I encountered everyone from academicians, the directors of factories and scientific institutes and artists and musicians, right through to prostitutes, the homeless and homosexuals. I travelled in Europe and was trusted with access to books, documents and ideas that were out of bounds to ordinary people, and I found out other, stranger, things too. How, for instance, the bosses of criminal societies and the top party leaders played cards and billiards together in the same closed clubs; that the party was honeycombed by careerists attracted by the prospects offered by the organisation that had the monopoly on power; or that, in order to meet their quotas, managers routinely provided their superiors with false reports.
But whatever else might be said about the Soviet Union, and however much damage had been wrought by the state’s jealously maintained position as the sole source of education, I believe that this much is true: socialism was a story that gave meaning to all of our lives. Even by the ’80s, when our grey cities were barely lit at night and it was almost impossible to get hold of coffee, even once we knew about the massacre at Novocherkassk, and the dead boys being brought back from Afghanistan in sealed zinc coffins, it told us where we were going, and why we were heading in that direction. It made us proud of our country and its achievements – whether that was universal education or the triumph in the Great Patriotic War. If I might borrow a phrase from an unexpected quarter, socialism was our own shining city on a hill.
I remember reading an account once about an interesting experiment. A dog was put in a room with two plates of food, one of which was attached to an electrical current. When the dog tried to eat from the electrified plate, it received a shock. After a couple of unpleasant encounters, it learned to leave that plate alone and focused its efforts on the safe plate on the other side of the room. But the scientists then wired up both plates. Once the dog discovered that he would be subjected to a nasty shock no matter which dish he chose to eat from, he simply laid down and went to sleep. The researchers concluded that the dog was so stunned and bewildered by the cruel circumstance he had found himself in that, unable to understand what was going on, he gave up and entered into a kind of hibernation.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the population was introduced to a similar kind of mental stress. People were exposed to challenges they had never been confronted with before, but nobody explained to them why they were being forced to suffer like this. We were all enthused by the freedoms offered by the democratic system that had been brought in with such fanfare, and yet we no longer knew what it meant to be Russian. The collapse of the Communist system was not just a political or administrative event; it was a moral catastrophe that robbed an entire society of the norms and ethics that had guided its citizens’ lives for over seven decades, and replaced them with a single imperative: if an act is not expressly forbidden by law, then anything goes.
A healthy, confident culture can absorb ideas from other countries, taking what works in its particular context, and rejecting what does not fit. But in Russia during the ’90s, with the state having abdicated its role as provider of ideology and cohesion, we imported whole systems of thought and belief from the West without any sense of how they might fit with our own. They did not complement what we had already; instead, they began to destroy it. Society became atomised and many people began to privilege self-interest and profit above the communal values with which we had all been raised. (I do not trust anyone who claims they can happily exist alone, without the comforting, sustaining exchanges that come from living alongside others. It is not natural for a human being.) We soon discovered, to our cost, that though it is easy to create consumers – you could build branches of McDonald’s, sell Levi’s jeans, import Mercedes cars, and the whole process needed only a few nudges from the state before it was up and running – it is far more difficult to create a healthy, functioning democratic culture overnight. We had none of the institutions of civil society, and the old traditions that for centuries had been the connective tissue that bound the country together had been allowed to wither away. When the country was hit by a succession of crises that exposed its new weakness, society crumbled.