I am reading an interesting article in The Saturday Evening Post from March 26, 1966. It’s about Russia. It’s worth noting that USSR is used much less frequently in the magazine than Russia. Specifically, in the article, Soviet Union appears 24 times whereas Russia appears 5 times.
Below are some fragments from the middle of the article translated into Russian (be warned — there’s a lot of text!):
“What is Brezhnev’s and Kosygin’s Russia?
For a tourist, it is still something less than paradise.
The reason, I think, lies in the words of a Frenchman when we were watching a waitress in the National Hotel’s restaurant, the best in Moscow.
“These people just aren’t customer-oriented,” he said.
The girl was serving two men at the next table. She placed the tray on the table, about 15 feet from us, on the other side of the room.
She took a plate of bread and crossed the room; then she returned and brought another plate of bread.
Then she brought a plate of fish soup and again returned to fetch another plate, this time with a chicken cutlet.
Then she brought potatoes for one of the men, and then went back again to bring potatoes to the second visitor.
In total, she made 14 trips across the room to serve two people.
* * *
Making a purchase in a store is as difficult as getting fed.
The customer selects a product, receives a receipt, goes to the cashier, watches her count on an abacus, pays the money, receives a receipt for the exact amount, then returns to the counter to collect his purchase.
About 20,000 persistent American tourists visit Russia every year, and some soon learn that their movements are closely watched.
Communications between Soviet bodies are indeed fast.
Once in Leningrad, photographer Marvin Lichtner and I visited the Hermitage, one of the finest art museums in the world.
In front of Picasso’s “Three Graces,” Lichtner stopped to take a great shot of an old witch with a grandma on her head.
Russians do not like their poor and sick to be photographed.
Our guide whispered something to the woman and returned with the words: “She does not want to be photographed.”
Well, no problem. Lichtner found a soldier with a girl to pose in front of the same painting, and they would be just as good.
The next day in Moscow, a Russian official from another department said, “I heard you had troubles in Leningrad yesterday.”
If Moscow sometimes proves to be a challenging destination for tourists, living there is also no piece of cake.
Even 788 Africans at Patrice Lumumba University miss their homes badly, and many wives of African diplomats have packed up and left, leaving their husbands alone with Russia.
The Western European and American diplomatic corps rarely interact with the Russians, except at official diplomatic receptions.
* * *
By Western standards, the life of a Russian person is quite grim, even in Moscow, which by comparison to other places, is considered quite good.
Despite hundreds of new five- and eight-story buildings that have sprung up along the boulevards like slabs of Stonehenge, a two-room apartment is still considered standard for a couple with two children.
Such an apartment costs only 4 or 5 dollars a month, but prices for clothes and food are often far from the average weekly wage of $25.
80% of women work, yet the average Russian somehow manages to afford to buy a pair of shoes, even if it costs a week’s salary.
Fourteen million Russians bought televisions ($450 for a 14-inch screen). Last year, the Moskvich automobile plant produced 76,000 of its small cars, the size of a Fiat, which cost about 4,000 dollars each.
Now there are enough cars, buses, and trucks to cause periodic traffic jams on the wide Moscow boulevards.
…
One astonishing fact shows how well the Soviet farmer can cope with even limited autonomy.
They are allowed to have a small plot of about 1 acre, and keep the produce for themselves.
These tiny plots of land make up only 3 percent of all the cultivable land in Russia, yet they provide 34 percent of its food — including 42 percent of its vegetables and 44 percent of its meat.
Many peasants earn extra money by selling part of their crop.
At the central market in Moscow, I was amazed to see sellers from Moldova, about 600 miles to the southwest, offering apples and onions at 30 cents each, and swarthy Georgians and Armenians, living about 1,000 miles from the capital, trading tomatoes at four dollars a pound.
I learned that these people packed suitcases with vegetables and fruits they grew on their plots and flew to Moscow to make money on it.
Tickets on state airlines are cheaper than a suitcase full of tomatoes!
* * *
In the meantime, the Soviet Union quietly makes new friends in Asia. In January, Kosygin went to Tashkent, the largest city in his country in South Asia, to carry out a historic mission. To everyone’s surprise, he successfully persuaded the Prime Minister of India, Shastri, and the President of Pakistan, Ayub Khan, to withdraw their opposing forces from the ceasefire line in the disputed region of Kashmir. Never before had a Russian been able to act as a peacekeeper between two non-Communist nations — and right in China’s backyard, to boot.
At the same time, the Russians were busy in other parts of Asia. Brezhnev went to Outer Mongolia, which acted as a buffer between Russia and China, strengthening the Soviet position in that country. The third high-ranking member of the Presidium, Alexander Shelepin, went to Hanoi to promise the North Vietnamese more military support in their war against South Vietnam and the United States. But Shelepin failed to convince the North Vietnamese to start seeking a solution to the conflict. Eleven months prior, Kosygin had not had any luck in these negotiations when visiting Hanoi with the words: “You must leave the Americans a way out.” Brezhnev and Kosygin sometimes showed remarkable prudence in foreign policy.
One example occurred last December, when Foy Kohler, the U.S. Ambassador (who probably has one of the toughest jobs in the world), returned from Washington and told Foreign Minister Gromyko, “Why don’t you stop staging all those anti-American demonstrations? Every day in ‘Pravda’ a picture of demonstrations for North Vietnam in Kiev, Sverdlovsk, Gorky, or somewhere else. President Johnson is trying not to expand the war in Vietnam, and you’re not helping at all.” The next day, the demonstrations (and pictures in ‘Pravda’) abruptly stopped.
A Western diplomat who told me this story—not an American—shook his head and said, “Interesting, why did they do that? Interesting, why did they do that?” Trying to understand Russia’s behavior, Western diplomats long ago realized that there’s sometimes a clue in how a country treats its intellectuals. When Russia is gearing up to take a hard line, it restricts freedom of thought; when it considers moderation, it loosens it up. At least, that’s the theory, and it has often worked in the past.
* * *
Under Stalin, creative life for an intellectual practically came to a halt; he was generally not allowed to have personal freedom. When Khrushchev first came to power, he relaxed control during a period called the “Thaw,” and regretted the day as intellectuals began to move about the entire Communist bloc. After the Hungarian revolution of 1956, Khrushchev summoned a group of leading Russian writers and told them that the revolution would never have happened if the Hungarian government had shot a few liberal authors. If force was necessary against Russian writers, he warned, “the hand would not tremble.”
Nevertheless, two years later, Khrushchev dared not execute Boris Pasternak, who became a world figure when he smuggled “Doctor Zhivago” out of the country. But Pasternak had to decline the Nobel Prize. Everything will depend on how bold Brezhnev and Kosygin decide to be. As Khrushchev’s power grew, his attitude hardened. In 1962, he articulated his philosophy before an audience of 900 artists and writers, saying, “You have powerful tools at your disposal. All of them must be directed toward achieving a single goal—the triumph of communism.”
When they appear before the 23rd Congress, observers will carefully watch Brezhnev and Kosygin’s stance on the role of the intellectual. So far, they have acted ambiguously—giving some freedom here, taking it away there. At the beginning of this year, the government issued a passport to poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko to go to Australia after several years of house arrest. Nevertheless, the chairman of the Artists’ Union is still conducting the same line of conformism that he has been pursuing for three years, and most union members are just as shackled as they were in 1962, when Khrushchev horrifyingly looked at a collection of abstract paintings and exclaimed, “What dog shit did this depict?”
The confusion in Brezhnev’s and Kosygin’s minds about the role an artist should play is best illustrated by two events that happened last month. The court sentenced Andrei D. Sinyavsky, a well-known Moscow literary critic and teacher, to seven years and poet and translator Yuli M. Daniel to five years. Both were charged with slandering the Soviet Union in works that had been smuggled out of the country. Both men confessed to sending their books abroad, but both insisted they wrote for art, not political motives. “A person should remain a person under any conditions, under any influence,” Daniel told the court. The trial was a huge blow to freedom of expression in Russia, but while it was going on, the authorities allowed one of their fiercest critics to go to England and express his opinion.
The critic was Valery Tarsis, who began sending anti-communist stories from Russia in 1960. In 1962, Tarsis was thrown into a psychiatric hospital for eight months. There, he gathered material for a book titled “Ward No. 7,” also published abroad, which was an even more venomous attack on the idiotic Soviet bureaucracy. For some time, it seemed the Russians were willing to let Tarsis speak his mind, because they considered him a harmless madman (and under government laws he was not accountable). “The authorities very well know that I hate communism, that I hate the Soviet regime,” he told one interviewer. “I believe in God, and I cannot live in a country where it’s not possible to be an honest person.” When Tarsis predicted the overthrow of the Soviet regime “within five or six years,” the Russians stripped him of his citizenship.
One Soviet writer who suffered from the government’s changing judgment about his work is a short, shrewd man named Vladimir Dudintsev. Ten years ago, during the “Thaw,” he became known thanks to writing the novel “Not by Bread Alone,” which was published in the magazine “New World.” Despite its literary mediocrity, the novel caused a sensation in Russia and abroad because it dared to portray the despondency and stagnation of Soviet life. One evening, Dudintsev told me how he was greeted at a meeting of the Writers’ Union. “One after another, the great writers praised my novel,” he said. “It was amazing.” Then the backlash began. Khrushchev scolded the writer but said, “Comrade Dudintsev, with our help and his own desire, can find the right path.” Dudintsev could and did. He wrote an explanatory introduction, and Khrushchev allowed the publication of a limited hardcover edition. Now the new regime allows the publication of “Not by Bread Alone,” and this fall Dudintsev will publish a second novel, “Unknown Soldier.” “The difference between now and ten years ago is like heaven and earth,” Dudintsev told me. “I’m planning a big party.” Dudintsev’s party plans may be premature. No one knows what line Brezhnev and Kosygin will take by that time. Moreover, Kremlinologists wonder how long these two will be able to hold onto power, although so far there have been no signs of any real unrest. In the Kremlin, as in every government, there are ambitious young men who, undoubtedly, hope to take power into their own hands in the future.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 