A student of Soviet history and politics, ROGER MARKWICK first visited the Soviet Union at the very beginning of perestroika, as a language student and tourist. Seven years later he returned, this time as a research student, to the newly established Commonwealth of Independent States. Here he describes how the momentous changes of those seven years have affected daily life.
When I went to the former USSR in mid-1985, I was part of group of mainly European and North American language students studying Russian in Leningrad and the Ukrainian city of Kharkov.
I could not help but be impressed by the organisation of the course and by the seriousness of the Soviet teachers and Komsomol members who were our hosts. Also striking were the apparent civility and calm of daily life, especially in comparison with the gross poverty I had witnessed in Third World countries such as India and Mexico.
Nevertheless, I was not an uncritical observer. A visit to a collective farm outside Kharkov, I recall, was carefully organised to prevent us from actually seeing the farmers at work, our Intourist guide ensuring that the closest contact we had with rural Russia was the icons in a provincial church. The protests of our group were mollified with vodka.
Moreover, the traditions of Stalinist sanitation of history were evident too. I observed with discreet, if amused, silence the photographs of the old Bolshevik leaders with the air-brushed gaps where Trotsky should have been. My discretion was justified. A KGB officer, it turned out, had been regularly questioning our Komsomol hosts on our views of Soviet life.
Still, it was disarmingly impressive, and in retrospect I realised how even in the 1930s it was possible for two otherwise intelligent socialists, the Webbs, to be fooled into believing that Stalin had created the workers' paradise on earth.
Perestroika, glasnost and the suppression and collapse of the CPSU lifted the veil on the ills of ex-Soviet society, and even exacerbated them. The Moscow I encountered in February this year was clearly a society in crisis, heading for its own, unique brand of underdevelopment.
This was obvious at Sheremetovo airport, the gateway to Moscow. The shabbiness of the facilities, the filthiness of the toilets, the broken and exposed electrical fittings I was to encounter time and again during the next four months.
Moreover, where previously customs officials carefully screened your baggage and documents, now it was possible to enter Russia with only the most cursory examination — a boon to western tourists loaded with hard currency for the burgeoning black market, not to mention bright-eyed Christian fundamentalists weighed down with bibles and or the desperate Moscow citizenry.
With the demise of the CPSU, the trappings of the secular religion of official "Marxism-Leninism" had ceded place to commercial and religious advertising . Where once slogans exclaimed "long live the glorious socialist motherland" or images of Lenin stared back at you from every billboard, now the virtues of Japanese videos and the Bhagavad Gita adorn the Moscow transport system. On Red Square, next to Lenin's mausoleum, a gigantic billboard mounted on the facade of the Museum of the October Revolution triumphantly proclaims in Russian and English: "Freedom Works!".
The citizens of Moscow have good reason to think otherwise. Price rises of 300-400% and more for the most basic items, from petrol and furniture to meat and vegetables, have caused the most catastrophic reduction in living standards for most Russians. A well-paid university lecturer on, say, 1200 roubles per month, now spends most of her/his salary on food — there is little or nothing left over to buy new boots or maintain a flat or car, if they have one.
For pensioners on about 400 roubles a month, such inflation means extreme malnutrition and even starvation. Russia's "new poor" are increasingly visible on the streets and in the metro stations. Old men and women, cripples and young, legless war veterans seated on little carts and Gypsy mothers with filthy babies implore you for alms. Younger people sing Russian ballads or play excellent jazz all day long for some pitiful roubles, at times turning the metros into impromptu dance floors.
This is not to say that there wasn't poverty before, but the destitution is now visible and increasingly widespread.
The introduction of the so-called free market has reduced thousands of Muscovites to petty traders. Crowds clogged the streets of Moscow (at least until May, when they were forced to sell their wares at the metros on the outskirts of Moscow) from morning until night selling anything they can, from sewing machines and car parts to pornography, bottles of champagne, razor blades or syringes. So critical are the shortages that people are prepared to stand all day long holding up a calendars with pictures of the latest F-16 bomber, hoping for a sale.
When I visited Detskii mir (Children's world) looking for a present for my daughters, the shelves were virtually empty but the store itself was choked with people offering children's toys and clothes for sale.
Moscow has been turned into a gigantic bazaar, where the most elementary consumer items have become luxuries. In this sense Russia is becoming worse than a Third World nation, where at least you can, if you have the money, obtain consumer goods.
Shortages of consumer items, long the standing joke about Soviet society, are often deliberately engineered by apparatchiki or mafia elements to force prices up. To obtain elementary necessities like bread, people are forced to get up at four in the morning to win
The surprising thing is that there is rarely conflict between those queuing, though for instance the priority that used to be accorded to war veterans in queues has lapsed. I even heard of veterans who sought to exercise that right being beaten up, but in general the response of Russians to their plight has been stoic resignation rather than violence, let alone resistance.
Perhaps it is this elementary struggle for survival that explains the seeming indifference of people towards politics. Friends of mine, well-educated interpreters who were once privileged enough to travel overseas, now find life so precarious and stressful that they have completely withdrawn from social life. Their phone was silent, they said, because they no longer wished to socialise when the constant topic of conversation was shortages.
They lived in a neat, well-appointed three-room flat — but appearances are deceptive. An Olympus camera gathered dust on the shelf for lack of film. Their fridge no longer worked because there was nobody to repair it, and their car had broken down. Now they had to find spare parts and then somebody to fix it. They have a pet cat but it was expensive to maintain because it ate only meat or fish.
They live in the knowledge that tomorrow their jobs could disappear, as happened to thousands of public servants with the collapse of the Union and the subsequent abolition of Soviet ministries that were not incorporated into Russian ones. "We are in a state of shock", said Nikolai. "We did not know about the crimes of Stalin. Before we were told we had the best education and health system in the world. Now we are told we have the worst."
There was good reason to be sceptical about the Russian health system, now and before. Medical horror stories are legion. It was not uncommon for surgery, an appendicectomy for instance, to be performed without anaesthetic. It was simply a matter of tying you down so that you didn't thrash around; the shock of the incision was then enough to knock you out. Shades of the Crimean War, and little wonder that infant mortality rates had risen and longevity fallen in the 1980s. To have children in Russia today is not only a luxury but a danger to the woman giving birth, unless she has access to the medical services that only hard currency can provide.