The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

seryozha was a grandchild, not a child, of a top Party functionary, so some of his early life passed in what he thought, then and later, were regular Soviet conditions. His family, like other families, faced shortages of food and other consumer products, from toilet paper to wall paint. Little Seryozha took his turn standing in line with his number written in ballpoint pen on his palm—when lines went on for hours and days, assigning numbers became an additional measure for maintaining self-organization and what passed for fairness. But the place where Seryozha lived with his parents was known in the vernacular as tsarskoye selo—"the Czars' Village." The original Tsarskoye Selo—a real place that was officially named the Czar's Village—was the site of Peter the Great's summer residence in the early eighteenth century. Under the Soviets, Tsarskoye Selo was renamed Pushkin, for the poet who had been educated there, but the name "the Czars' Village" began attaching itself to blocks and small neighborhoods that housed the Soviet elites.

The stores here were better stocked, even though they were affected by the shortages. The buildings were better designed and constructed.⁷ The air was better than anywhere else in the city: the neighborhood in the west of Moscow contained less industry and more parks than any other.⁸ A state born of protest against inequality had created one of the most intricate and rigid systems of privilege that the world had ever seen. It began when the first Bolsheviks moved themselves into the palaces and the luxury hotels. Within the first few years of Bolshevik Russia's existence, the main mechanisms of privilege were defined and created. Even before the October Revolution—a few months before—Lenin had written that "the first phase of Communism" would not bring equality for all: "differences in wealth will remain unjust differences." Just a week after the Revolution, Lenin wrote that highly qualified professionals would need to retain their privileged position "for the time being." While the idle rich had to be stripped of their possessions, the highly trained had to be enticed to work for the new regime. The Marxist principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was replaced with the more pragmatic approach of paying what the state could pay for extracting the maximum from those with high ability. Over the next few years, the list of those whose labor the state valued most highly was established, as were the mechanisms of compensation. The Bolsheviks placed a premium on the "creative intelligentsia," as it was termed—writers, artists, and, especially, filmmakers—as well as scholars and scientists. Military officers ranked even higher. But most of all, the Bolsheviks valued themselves: privileges and benefits for "political workers" exceeded those of all other groups.

The reasons were not only pragmatic but also ideological. "The leadership of the Soviet Communist Party has, from its early days, been profoundly elitist in its attitudes," Mervyn Matthews, a British scholar of Soviet society, wrote in the 1970s. "It has regarded itself as an enlightened band which understands the march of history and is destined to lead the Russian people—indeed the whole world—to communism. In daily life it has always ensured for itself and its close associates privileges commensurate with these awesome demands."⁹ The Soviet privileged were entitled to higher salaries and a set of additional financial rewards; bigger and better apartments; favored access to consumer goods; and certain education and travel privileges.¹⁰ The privileges grew in value and scope during the three decades of Stalin's rule, as did the wealth gap. In the Khrushchev decade, which saw a giant residential construction push, the gap narrowed slightly, but when Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964, the old tendency of growing differentiation resumed.¹¹

Paradoxically, the peculiarities of the Soviet economic system made the borders between differently valued groups of citizens only starker and harder to penetrate. Taxation was minimal, and redistribution of wealth was not its goal.¹² Because most of the extra compensation for the privileged was non-monetary, and because all of it was centrally administered, members of a given caste were grouped together socially and geographically. Members of the

Politburo lived in the same building as other members of the Politburo, procured consumer goods at the same distribution centers, sent their children to the same schools, got treated at the same clinics, were given plots of land on which to build a wooden dacha—a weekend or summer house—in the same area, and took the waters in the same sanatoriums. The same was true for members of the Academy of Sciences, who had their own special infrastructure, and for members of any of the "creative unions," such as those of the writers, artists, or cinematographers.