It is obvious to the least observant visitor that the present system guaranteed full employment only by perpetuating a ridiculous level of overstaffing. Four people worked in a cloakroom that might be handled by one. To buy a plane ticket or rent a hotel room or get a loaf of bread in a bakery, you were passed from person to person, each of whom undertook some further perfunctory part of the process. A retail purchase that in a state-run shop in China might require the services of two or three persons could easily, in the Soviet Union, take those of four or five—one to show you where the item was, a second to fetch it down, another to take your money, yet another to take your receipt and do the wrapping. As the old socialist jest had it, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” There was an important difference between this arrangement in the Soviet Union and the impression I got in China that the government was at least making the best use of its most obvious asset—the labour force. That it was difficult to feel the same way about Soviets was no doubt coloured by the way the country was routinely rumoured to be on the brink of collapse—an ethnocentric Western view, I feel, since we had no real understanding of how long it had been as bad as it was and no way to measure the Russians’ extraordinary capacity for swallowing adversity and making the best of chaos.
This was the difficulty in trying to interpret events in the socialist world at the time: the Americans refused to believe anything good about the Soviets, that the people were generally better educated, less violent, and leading perhaps altogether deeper lives than they themselves were, whereas the Soviets, or the young ones at least, refused to believe anything bad about the West—the drugs, the crime, the homelessness, the AIDS. A general lack of attention to reality obscured the simple truth that the quality of life in the one place was improving and in the other place deteriorating but that, in any event, they were becoming more alike.
I was told that it wouldn’t be long before Soviet citizens would be free to possess credit cards—despite the absence, so far, of all the necessary mainframes and software. One can imagine what a mess eventually resulted, given that virtually every place of business in the country still used the abacus in preference to the cash register. They had cash registers, all right, but they didn’t use them for any form of tabulation but merely as places to keep large-denomination notes, as one might use a microwave oven as a book-case. In that environment the moves towards a market economy were bound to be painful. People may cheer when bureaucrats are put out of work, but what about when they themselves must go on and living standards plummet? As things then stood, 45 million Soviets lived on 70 rubles a month. In Moscow alone there were 1.7 million people below the official poverty line, and when I was there the new mayor announced plans for municipally funded soup kitchens. Before they could be opened, it was expected that the price of most consumer goods would rise 100 percent. No one disputed that such changes were necessary or that the existing social net had to be remade, but with new measures to protect pensioners and others on fixed incomes, if the country was to stabilize its currency. Stabilizing it was the first step towards internationalizing it. At that time the much-vaunted joint ventures between Soviets and Western businesspeople, about 1,300 of them when I was there, didn’t work because the Westerners didn’t want to be paid in worthless rubles and there were not enough dollars or Deutschmarks for that purpose. The joint ventures were necessary, however, to improve the supply and quality of consumer goods. To an extent I was prepared to accept but couldn’t quite fathom until I saw the situation with my own eyes, the problem of the Soviet Union was the problem of food. No one actually starved to death, as of old, but Gorbachev must have been aware all too acutely of a rule that has cautioned leaders for thousands of years, that hungry people are dangerous people.
Then there were social ills we don’t usually see, for a variety of reasons. There was indeed a slight drug problem in the Soviet Union, though hardly on the scale of any western European country. One of the reasons you heard so little about it was that it did not involve smuggling and international borders, for the drugs came from areas of the country close to Afghanistan (though intelligence specialists have long insisted that China illicitly supplies drugs to its old adversary, just as it is supposed to have flooded the Vietnamese market 35 years ago to help demoralize the American troops). Crime was rising in the big cities, as it is in big cities everywhere, I suppose. There were places in Moscow, just as in the West, where for fear of rape women were afraid to enter their own apartment buildings alone after dark. I saw beggars in the subway underpasses, but not many; so far there was virtually no homelessness as such, though the extent and quality of housing was a pressing problem and a major subject of anxiety—but having said so, there seems no point getting sucked up into any East-West comparisons when the systems are so fundamentally different.
By contrast, the whole range of women’s issues is a useful illustration of the similarities and differences. “There is no feminist movement,” a teacher in her forties explained to me. “We have equal pay for equal work, and women do about all the jobs that men do.” There is, however, a “women’s lobby,” which is expected to challenge the spread of such complacency and to address imbalances, such as that only eight percent of political offices in the Soviet Union were held by women (as compared, for example, with the House of Commons in Ottawa, where at the time 13.5 percent of the MPs were women—hardly a figure to justify smugness). Perhaps the harshest fact of women’s existence is that though both partners must work, the woman still performs all the domestic functions previously expected of her, and moreover that this presents even greater difficulty than in the West. The father does not usually take part in child care. It is also the woman who spends two or three hours shopping for food for the night’s supper (only to find sometimes, after getting to the head of the line, that the food is spoiled). Women are not social equals. What was called male chauvinism in the West in the 1970s was the common currency in the Soviet Union, though there was no name for it and it was almost completely unremarked on by either gender so far as public discussion went; it was simply part of the culture. If lucky enough to be invited into a private home, the Western visitor was often shocked by how the husband denigrated his wife’s domestic skills as a means of apologizing, needlessly of course, for the lack of what he imagined to be Western comfort. No wonder that 33 percent of marriages ended in divorce, which accounted for 70 percent of all activity in the courts; in more than 98 percent of divorce cases involving children, the mother was given custody. The parting couple paid a 300-ruble divorce tax (until recently 200 rubles—inflation again). Child-support payments were generous but of course that never really solves the problem. The nation might now be self-sufficient in blue jeans, much to the impoverishment of black marketeers and shrewd Western tourists. What it lacked so conspicuously were condoms which, when available at ail, were of unreliable quality. I was told that for Western visitors to give their host or hostess condoms would not be misunderstood but, on the contrary, would seem considerate. Abortion might be free on demand, but it was virtually the only form of birth control worthy of the name. Fully 20 percent of first pregnancies ended in abortion.
Alcoholism was another factor in marriage breakdown as it was in poor work productivity. One of Gorbachev’s first initiatives was the major campaign against alcohol abuse, even to the extent of banning the sale of hard liquor (but not its consumption) on trains and planes. Reaction against the “authoritarian” campaign was among the causes that enabled Yeltsin to get his political comeback underway. One sensed that economic loss, not health, was the primary concern, given that virtually no acknowledgement was made of the fact that 78 percent of adult males and 38 percent of adult females smoked cigarettes. The Soviet Union was, in fact, a nation of inveterate chain-smokers. “Sure, we have free housing, or virtually free,” I was told. One person I talked to paid just 17 rubles a month for an apartment in downtown Moscow, a tiny portion of his middle-class salary. “But the quality is poor. With health care, it was similar. It was free of charge, and available to everyone, but the quality I believe you would call lousy.” I heard stories, which I was not able to