Balance-sheet for Utopia

RUSSIA: FIFTY YEARS AFTER —2 TIBOR SZAMUELY

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia fifty years ago they did so with the avowed

aim of building a socialist society. Nineteen years later Stalin formally proclaimed that this object had been attained. Since 1936, runs the party line, Russia has been a socialist society, and this is what has made all the sacrifices worth while. The end has justified the means.

But has it? To begin with : what is 'social- ism'? R. J. Tawney once said that socialism was about equality—as good a definition as any.

Lenin would probably have agreed. By this test Russia is today, and has been for the past thirty years, one of the least socialist countries in the world. lnegalitarianism is a cornerstone of the system. Although unearned income has been (officially) abolished, differences in earned in- come are probably greater than in any 'capitalist' country: a factory director earns about six to eight times, a minister ten to twelve times, a top scientist twenty to twenty-five times as much as the average industrial worker (not to mention the lavish perquisites). And the top rate of in- come tax is a mere 13 per cent, whereas the average worker with three dependants pays more tax than his British equivalent.

The great communist Principle of inegali- tarianism extends to much.more than incomes: it includes the rigid hierarchical distinctions, the brutal arrogance of social or administra- tive superiors to inferiors (unimaginable in our 'class-ridden' society), and, perhaps most im- portant of all, the absence of real, equality before the law.

Socialism being clearly absent, the sacrifices would have to be justified by some other results.

And, indeed, the positive achievements of the Soviet regime are very real and very widely known, including the rapid transformation of a backward agricultural country into the second greatest industrial and technological power in the world. But were one to draw up a true balance-sheet of the results, the impression would be rather different from the mythical 'Russian miracle.' For one thing, there is the cost of the 'Great Experiment' The full scope of the horrors endured by the peoples of Russia in the cause of 'Socialist con- struction' has not been realised in the West. As in the case of the Nazis, the enormity is too great to be comprehended. In Russia the human cost, purely in terms of people killed or deliberately forced to die—excluding war losses —is no fewer than twenty million lives.

The calculation is fairly simple. At least four million peasants perished in the course of `dekulakisation.' Another six million died in the terrible famine of 1932-33, created deliberately by the government through confiscating the food production of the Ukraine and exporting most of it to pay for machines from the West. Six or seven million more perished at the hand of the executioner or in slave-labour camps as a result of the Great Purge of 1936-38. The war- time and postwar purges of 'collaborators,' ex-prisoners of war and returned deportees, the mass expulsions from the Baltic states and other western regions, and -the forced deportation of Whole small nationalities in 1944-45, took a toll of no fewer than three or four million lives. These are fairly conservative estimates, and they do not include the high death rate in labour camps among the regular intake of 'politicale

and 'common criminals' between the great cam- paigns of 'political re-education' and 'social engineering.'

Dead men can—approximately—be counted. Other sacrifices are incalculable: ruined lives, broken families, misshapen characters; two generations of husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, taught to de- nounce each other to the police; the destruction of a great tradition of literature and art that had been in the forefront of European culture. All this, and much else besides, must be in- cluded in the price.

What, then, have the people received for all their sacrifices? Well, there is industrialisation: the fact, incessantly repeated by every medium of propaganda, that Russia's share of world in- dustrial production has risen since the revolu- tion from 4 per cent to nearly one fifth. Un- doubtedly, a remarkable achievement, and one from which Russians seem to derive peculiar moral satisfaction.

The economic system of the USSR, like its political structure, is a strange creature. In the political field the overriding object is the strengthening of the party-state, so in economics the power of the Russian state must be con- stantly augmented through the uninterrupted growth of heavy industrial production. The means have become the ends. This has resulted in an economic structure abnormal by any western standards. While the mammoth figures of steel, coal, oil and electricity production rise year by year, other aspects, elsewhere regarded as vital, languish. The total railway mileage is less than one quarter, and the covered road mileage only one tenth that of the us. But—they send spacecraft to Venus! Here is the basic dichotomy of the Russian 'economic miracle.' A totalitarian state is able, at immense cost, to concentrate all the resources of a huge and rich country on a few selected sectors—to the complete neglect of everything else. Russia today presents the features both of a highly developed technological society, and of a backward, semi-Asiatic country. The last applies, of course, primarily to the-field of agri- culture—and nearly half the total population still lives on the land. Only in recent years has the country's agricultural production managed to catch up with the growth of population—and this by the miserable standards of Tsarist Russia. In 1963 the harvest failed—and the country was revealed to be bare of all food reserves. Indeed, were it not for the 'non- socialist' sector the population would starve: on their tiny private holdings, comprising a mere 2 per cent of the total cultivated area, the collective farmers produce roughly half the country's milk, meat, eggs, vegetables. Could,/ the failure of 'socialism' be more dismal?

Unlike capitalism, the totalitarian method of industrialisation can develop the economy with- out also raising living standards. Today the Soviet Union enjoys the lowest standard of liv- ing of any industrialised country—despite all the starry-eyed reports of privileged foreign travellers. Astonishing as it may sound, the real wages of the Russian industrial worker today are hardly higher than in 1913. Such compari- sons are always difficult to make, but we can go by certain indicators: according to official Soviet figures, the 1913 level of real wages in industry (but not elsewhere) had been largely re-established by 1928; in 1940, by all calculations, they had fallen by one half; and in 1958 Khrushchev himself announced that the 1940 level of real wages had at last been doubled. Since 1958 it has largely stagnated. (Food prices today, relative to wages, are cer- tainly higher than in 1913.) Not only does the Soviet worker today earn, in real terms, about one fifth that of his American, and less than half that of his British counterpart, but the differential between the Russian and the western worker has actually widened since 1913. In one decisive respect—that of housing— living standards have definitely fallen. Only in 1965 did the Russians regain the wretched pre- revolutionary urban average of 6.6 square metres of living space per person, a mere frac- tion of western housing standards. But, unlike the old days, the majority of townspeople now live in 'communal flats,' with several families sharing kitchen, bathroom, etc. As for the positive changes in the way of life caused by industrialisation—the appearance of a whole new range of goods and appliances—the sur- prising thing is not that this should have hap- pened, but that there is so little of it. Take

automobiles: their number per head of popu-

lation in the USSR is between a quarter and a fifth that of the non-whites in South Africa. But economics are not all. There is the un- doubtedly tremendous quantitative progress in

education (the quality is more controversial).

However, Soviet propagandists do their cause an actual disservice by making ridiculously extravagant claims for their educational achievements. The real results are quite good enough as they are. The 1959 Soviet census shows that only 13 per cent of the adult population had had ten or more years of schooling, while in the us this proportion was more than 50 per cent. In Britain, of course, ten years' compulsory education has long been the law. It has yet to be introduced in Russia.

The same exaggerated picture exists with re- gard to social services. The Soviet health ser- vice is unquestionably very good—but only rarely does one hear that it is, in fact, less com- prehensive than Britain's. As for pensions: until three years ago collective farmers—or about 40

per cent of the population—were not even en-

titled to a pension (something never mentioned either inside or outside the Soviet Union). What of the 'progressive' social legislation?

Much of it falls far short of what the West would regard as progress, and certain of its features are retrogressive by any standard. In the significant field of penology the Soviet re- cord is infinitely worse than even that of 'reac- tionary' Tsarist Russia. Since the middle of the eighteenth century capital punishment had been abolished for all crimes in time of peace except

attempts against the life of the emperor or

members of his family. Today in the ussa capital punishment exists not only for a variety of political crimes but also for aggravated mut-

der or rape, for attacking the police, and even for numerous economic crimes: theft and em- bezzlement of state property, counterfeiting, illegal currency transactions and bribe-taking. These barbaric statutes constitute perhaps the severest of all indictments of the Soviet system.

The facts about Soviet slave-labour camps are fairly well known. From a peak of fifteen to eighteen million inmates in 1952 the camp and prison population has now declined to probably three or four million. Progress in- deed! By comparison, the us has about 180,000 persons in confinement, Britain 35,000, and a much-maligned Tsarist Russia had, in 1912, only some 235,000.

To mention a few more little-known 'pro- gressive' items of Soviet social legislation: no unemployment benefits—although the existence of unemployment is now tacitly acknowledged; the main source of taxation not direct income tax, but the so-called 'turnover' tax on consumer goods, especially food—traditionally regarded as the most regressive form of tax, directed mainly against the poor; the existence of the legal concept, and stigma, of illegitimacy, with a prohibition on paternity suits—and 11 per cent of all Russian births are illegitimate; the virtual serfdom of the collective farm peasants, who cannot leave their district without special permission—and who are paid less than the pre-revolutionary agricultural labourer.

Much has been made of the emancipation of women. Here, too, the reality is very different from the myth. With the exception of one lady minister, women occupy no positions of power or influence in the USSR. At the time of the last census women comprised 48 per cent of the total labour force—but a detailed breakdown of the figures shows that in the great majority of cases they filled the least skilled, worst paid and physically most arduous jobs in the eco- nomy. Foreigners are often shocked at the sight of women building roads, digging ditches, carry- ing heavy loads—under the command of men. This is the rule, not the exception. A survey of one of the large building sites, recently pub- lished in a Russian paper, shows that women filled 1,030 of 1,217 manual jobs, and only 138 of 1,033 mechanised and automated jobs. Women workers have, in fact, become the de- pressed lower stratum of the Soviet labour force. And Russian husbands do not believe in helping out at home. But one wage-earner is not enough—so the woman goes out to become 'emancipated.'

It is a balance-sheet of great progress in some fields and of untold misery and suffering in others. Russia has become a great military and industrial power, with an educated population and a system of social welfare. In other words, she has achieved, only at an incomparably greater cost and without any real rise in living standards, the same results as Bismarck's Germany—but for some reason nobody thinks of the latter as an exemplar of virtue or a model for emulation. The transformation of Japan, to mention another case, is even more striking. And most people have heard about the astonish- ing development of the United States. The only features of Soviet industrialisation that are really unique are the methods employed and the price paid. But all this is irrelevant to the question of the impact of the Russian Revolu- tion upon the world, for what counts here is not the reality but the myth, not the economic achievement but the extraordinary ideological- political-social system that stands behind it and that has made it possible.

(To be concluded next week)