Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

In the struggle for life chances, another vital lubricator was blat. This was the unofficial mutual exchange of goods and services: one needed a patron with good access to official sources or a friend with a link to the shadow economy, where ‘illegal’ goods were obtainable. If a water pipe in the bathroom burst, then one needed someone to repair it urgently. The state repair system was usually too cumbersome to react speedily and effectively, so one would hastily ring round among friends and find a fitter who had access to the tools and lengths of pipe necessary to do the job. He would be diverting state property for his own personal profit, but at least he would perform the repair competently and in time to avoid major damage. In return, one would either offer some service or commodity, or pay him at a much higher rate than for state services.

Many forms of non-monetary exchange were mediated through personal relationships. If one needed to get one’s son into a good school, one would work through acquaintances who knew the head teacher there. In return, one might be able to provide certain goods or services: a French perfume, an Italian suit, a Japanese tape recorder, or even just regular access to a good car repairer. In the process, one might actually form a good personal relationship. That was not necessary, but it would help to confirm and consolidate the exchange of goods and services. In this way, contrary to the theory of Hannah Arendt, who argued that totalitarianism ‘atomized’ society, new kinds of social bonds were generated, though totally unlike anything envisaged by the party.

This kind of social bonding became crucial in the field of science and culture. The USSR needed highly qualified scientists able to think independently and keep in touch with their foreign colleagues. Their institutes became islands of free thought and exchange of information not available to the ordinary population. Theatres, orchestras, publishing houses, and literary journals had their own tightly knit circles of creative personalities who chafed at party control and pervasive censorship. One of those journals, Novy mir, under its editor, Alexander Tvardovsky, himself a member of the CPSU Central Committee, managed to build on Khrushchev’s revelations and tell more of the truth about the Soviet past. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), which described honestly the routine of a Stalinist labour camp, broke a long-established taboo and aroused heartfelt reactions from its readers. Once again, literature was being forced to assume a civic, even a political, role as a kind of loyal opposition. In Novy mir, readers could follow in muffled form a debate which could not be articulated openly in the media.

The USSR was becoming more permeable. Information from the outside world was reaching it from its own ‘outer empire’, from Western visitors, and from Western short-wave radio stations. At its best, the Soviet education system produced enquiring minds, eager to absorb this information; and in their new private apartments, Soviet citizens could freely discuss with family and friends information and ideas excluded from the public media.

The result was to perpetuate the 19th-century dichotomy between Russia and ‘the West’, only now in a new form. Among free-thinking intellectuals reforming ideas took one of two paths. One could be called ‘internationalist liberal’, embodied in the person of the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov. He proposed that the Soviet Union should introduce genuine rule of law, legalize political opposition, reduce its armaments (especially nuclear), and fulfil the international commitments it had undertaken after the war. His position was strengthened by the Helsinki Final Act (1975), which finally confirmed the Soviet Union’s post-1945 territorial gains, but also stipulated that all signatories should respect ‘human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief’.