ANOTHER VOICE AUBERON WAUGH
Can socialism survive in the Soviet state without vodka?
It is no earthly use pretending that any problem in Britain is anything like as serious as the drink problem in the Soviet Union. For Soviet citizens not prepared to hijack an aeroplane — they are nearly always repatriated by the weasel democra- cies of the West in any case — the only effective escape from the horrors of state socialism and the Russian winter has al- ways been found in a bottle of vodka. The equivalent institution in this country would probably be television, which saves us from the need to talk or think or do anything. Under socialism, needless to say, television is so boring, so rigidly controlled, so parsimonious with information and so full of lies that its only effect is to drive people back to the vodka bottle. But to under- stand the enormity of Gorbachev's drive against drunkenness in Russia one must try to imagine some crazy intellectual among politicians in this country — Enoch, perhaps — proposing that the only way for Britain to recover its soul, for our kiddies to be saved from delinquency, vice and drugs, was for the television stations to be closed down, cable television to be banned and videos impounded.
Even as I write I hear the cheers going up in a thousand Spectator homes. Of course, a ban on television is exactly what is required to save the new generation of Englishmen and Englishwomen. Let our children learn once again to be children blow blackbirds' eggs, tickle trout, torture the neighbour's cat etc. Married couples might even rediscover the simple pleasures of sexual intercourse. A total ban on television is the sort of thing which would be passed in half the undergraduate debat- ing societies and loudly supported in every saloon bar in the land. Nevertheless, we all know it is unthinkable. So long as any vestige of democracy remains, so will television.
In the Soviet Union, of course, there is no vestige of democracy, but the whole system of oppression by the Party is kept going by two big Lies, and it will be interesting to see how these two Lies stand up to this determined assault on the one institution which sustains them. The first and immensely the less important of the two Lies is that of the Virtuous State. Communism aspires to create the sort of society where drunkenness and crime will wither away because their social causes have been removed. State socialism re- quires occasional assurances that things are moving in that direction. Nobody who looked around the Soviet Union and saw half the workers dead drunk half the time would be much impressed by that claim. Now Mr Gorbachev demonstrates that the way to stop socialists drinking is to cut off their supply of drink, rather than to re- educate them or create the sort of ideal society where nobody wants to be drunk. Perhaps he plans to cut off supplies now, then create his ideal society, then let anyone buy as much as he wants so that the world can see how nobody wants to buy it.
I suspect that this Lie of the Virtuous State was never of much interest to anyone in the Soviet Union, except at the Wolf Club or Brown Owl level of Komsomol training. The second Lie is more important because it is the one which the Party bureaucrats in their less secure moments genuinely believe to be the force keeping the country together, and keeping them- selves in their positions of privilege and power. This is the lie of the Workers' State — a society run by and for its workers.
For reasons which many may find hard to understand, the privileged and great of the Soviet Union are no less terrified of revolution — what they would call counter- revolution — than our own privileged and great in the West. In fact, to judge by the enormous resources devoted to tracking down and punishing the first hint of sub- version, they are considerably more ner- vous. To this end, the myth of the Work- ers' State is sustained by one vital conces- sion which capitalism can never make, a more or less total security of employment. Unless workers do something which is actually High Treason, like going on strike, they are almost impossible to sack. They are also given extremely cheap housing, if of a quality and size which would be illegal for pigs in this country, and have a rudimentary health service such as might be described in an article by John Pilger about collapsing Liverpool.
But what really keeps the show on the road is vodka. Factory production is so bad and planning so incompetent that workers have precious little else to spend their money on; in any case it is all they want to know about. Take that away and their blunted, brutalised brains will be capable of only one thought — that they have not got the single thing they really want.
Gorbachev hopes that without vodka they will work harder, and produce more goods which they can then buy with the money that they would otherwise have spent on vodka. Anybody who lives out- side that accursed, groaning slave empire, can see perfectly well that he has got everthing in the wrong order, he is attack- ing the symptoms, not the cause. It is socialism which leads initially to incompe- tence, idleness, poverty and vodka. Vodka then leads to further poverty, idleness, incompetence — and socialism.
At present, when he goes impulse- shopping, the Soviet worker has a choice of two articles which are unrationed and in plentiful supply: he can buy either a curious, ethnic doll with other, smaller versions of the same doll inside it; or he can buy tinned mackerel in various sizes of tin. Otherwise he must queue, often for long periods, and often, no doubt, in working hours, thereby adding one more unit to his work place's statistics for absenteeism, no doubt attributed to drunk- enness. Since it is considered no disgrace in the Soviet Union to be drunk (except by the increasingly alienated authorities) the Soviet worker may well claim to have been drunk when in fact he was queuing for razor blades, or lavatory paper, or some other unimaginable luxury.
I often think it strangely suitable that vodka should be the national drink of Russia — the dullest and most brutish way of imbibing alcohol which mankind has yet invented. But after the armed forces and the secret police, I should judge it the chief pillar of the Soviet state. I wonder how Mr Gorbachev hopes to keep his workforce placid when its incentive to work is in the form of plastic flowers and Dralon cur- tains. Opium is presumably ruled out by the requirements of the Virtuous State. Perhaps he will try religion.
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