Reporter Returns : Soviet Life: Big Changes Since 1960

When I left the Soviet Union in January of 1960, after a tour of duty as a correspondent, my Russian acquaintances were beginning to have expectations. They sensed change.

I don’t know how “the masses” felt. In Soviet society, it was hard to tell. But things seemed to be looking up.

That was my final impression before coming back more than a quarter of a century later.

Now, even Russians ask how it used to be “back then.”

“What changes have you found?” asked Dmitri Chernikov, an articulate economist in his late 30s and deputy director of a research institute for Gosplan, the state planning committee.

“That a Soviet official would put the question is the biggest change,” I replied, with a smile.

People much over 40 don’t ask. They remember.

Rosy Khrushchev Plans

In 1960, Nikita S. Khrushchev, then the Soviet leader, was giving the country an almost daily shot in the arm with predictions and plans far rosier and bolder than those people have come to expect from Mikhail S. Gorbachev since he took the Kremlin’s top job.

But the changes that have occurred since I left are not exactly what anyone anticipated.

Although more goods are on sale, for civilians it is still an economy of acute shortage. The plenitude promised by Khrushchev “within this generation” is far from here.

Russia’s famous queues are shorter but they still abound.

Across the counter, quality of goods is universally abysmal. In fact, a quality crisis may be growing as the quantity crisis diminishes. On a 17-mile drive to a collective farm outside Moscow, we saw four disabled cars, two of which had lost a wheel.

Russian misery is legend, of course. But in some respects, the country has come a long way.

Orange a Treat

At the time of my departure, cabbage, frostbitten potatoes, garlic and bread represented winter’s staples. An orange or a chunk of meat created an occasion. Life offered few treats.

Yet none of my Soviet friends was an “ordinary Russian.” Either they carried official sanction for contact with a Westerner or they felt secure for another reason, such as an influential relative. But they or their relatives, often an elder, endured queues like everyone.

And they yearned deeply for material comfort. Like most Russians, they had suffered much from war, Josef Stalin’s terror, and everlasting priorities during peacetime for steel, machine tools and still more weapons.

Cynicism saturated their outlook. At times, vodka did, too. Today, new special stores make life more pleasant for the growing elite class.

While I was a correspondent here, Khrushchev frequently boasted that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in industrial production by 1970, surpass it overall by 1980 and leave it in the dust ever after. The Soviet lead in space established by Sputnik and the Lunik moon probes offered credibility (and is memorialized today in an awesome monument to space exploration that draws millions of visitors yearly to Moscow’s outskirts).

Leads in Steel Production

In fact, the Soviet economy is now the world’s largest producer of steel, heavy equipment, machine tools, cement and probably smokestacks. But these things have come to mean far less, as the Western world has hurtled into high technology and other new realms.

Globalization--the central new reality for most industrialized nations--has entirely passed by the Soviet Union.

The huge international flows of technology, capital and people have washed completely around the nation, isolated as ever behind a wall of political obstacles and the non-convertible ruble.

(“How many hours do you work to pay for a car, shoes or house?” was the typical question Russians used to ask during my tour in Moscow. The ruble and dollar did not equate but work hours did.)

Gap Wider Now

The Soviet economy has not stood still, but in many ways the gap is wider between East and West today than it was a quarter century ago. The government has bought turnkey factories from the West, produces cars based on old Fiat designs and reproduces copies of many Western products. Yet the average Russian survives, essentially, at a Third World level.

Today’s ambitions are less lofty than those of Khrushchev, who had promised to achieve pure communism, the Marxist paradise, “within this generation.”

“Catching up with the United States is no longer the goal,” a senior Soviet economist and member of the Academy of Sciences, who requested anonymity, said. “We do not seek the American level of mass consumption. Our goal now is to reach world standards.”

Actually, the Soviet economy has done better than some of its detractors claim. In terms of bulk, without regard to quality or assortment, it grew faster than the U.S. economy until the mid-1970s.

Heavy Investment

During the Khrushchev era and the early part of Leonid I. Brezhnev’s tenure, investment approached one-third of gross national product (about twice the U.S. figure), and the rate of growth hit at least 5% for a number of years, before plummeting to not much above the 2% level for most of the past decade.

And at just over half of the American gross national product of $3.7 trillion, the Soviet economy, at $2 trillion, still ranks second in the world.

But Soviet investment was lopsided in favor of construction rather than equipment. The result is many unfinished buildings, since incentives in the Soviet system encourage starts, not completions.

In old factories, equipment grew obsolete. Today, obtaining high technology for industry is a high priority.

Economic growth also suffers because more than 14% of Soviet output goes to military spending, more than twice the 6% share of U.S. GNP spent on arms. And arms plants get first crack at equipment and technical talent in the work force.

Persistent Problems

The old economic goblins that thwarted Khrushchev have outlived Brezhnev, Yuri V. Andropov and Konstantin U. Chernenko to confront Gorbachev: an alienated work force, inefficient management and the difficulties inherent in central planning of an economy with administered prices.

Because prices are determined arbitrarily at the top, without regard for the principles of supply and demand, it is impossible to know the real cost of anything. It therefore is impossible to determine what is a profitable investment--and profit is one of the measures by which a Soviet enterprise is judged each year.

A Harvard professor, Vasily Leontiev, once likened the Soviet economy to a talking horse. “It is not remarkable for what it says but for the fact that it talks at all,” he said.

But statistics and economic humor cannot convey the realities of individual lives, and over the past 25 years I have wondered about my friends and their expectations.

Did Vladimir ever get a car? Did Sasha and Ludmilla find an apartment of their own and decide to reproduce? Did Georgi garner his promotions or hard-drinking, lecherous Ivan his just desserts?

Did anyone button down consistent meat? Or a telephone?

And, of course, what about the dark side? Had it devoured anyone? Could anyone breathe?

$3 a Month for Phone

Coming back entailed networking. I used the time to prowl Moscow as the lines reached out to scattered names, aided by a vastly increased number of telephones. From very few in 1960, the Soviet Union now has installed a total of 35 million telephones, overwhelmingly in cities. The charge for a phone is about $3 a month regardless of use.

The number of passenger cars also stumped me. At times, traffic in the squares jammed. Autos outnumbered trucks.

Under Khrushchev, a public transport zealot who favored taxi fleets and the idea of eventual giant motor pools for passenger cars, civilian auto production was a scant 200,000 a year; today it is that number plus 1 million because, under auto enthusiast Brezhnev, the private passenger car arrived as an acceptable idea for the masses.

The clothing, though of poor quality, bedazzled by past Soviet standards. In a variety of colors and styles, fashions were distinctly Western, if not exactly current, right down to moon-boots and running shoes, jeans and denim jackets.

And people looked fitter.

Better Diet

The reason emerged from figures supplied by the government: It was the diet.

Over the past 25 years, according to Novosti, an official state agency, meat consumption has risen more than half (to 136 pounds a year per person), fish nearly twice (to 39 pounds) and eggs from 118 a year to 260.

At the same time, potato consumption has dropped from 314 pounds a year per person to 242 pounds and bread from 360 pounds to 297 pounds--still a lot of bread and potatoes.

“We need to increase our use of fruits and vegetables,” a Novosti official said.

Moscow, of course, is the showcase. Over the years, billions of rubles have gone into new hotels and buildings to adorn and equip the city for the Olympics and other major international events. Its consumers get priority.

Stream of Visitors

That is why Moscow receives 2 million Soviet visitors a day, a figure confirmed by Vladimir Voronenko, the city’s deputy mayor. From villages and towns hundreds of miles away, rural Russians come in streams to shop, especially and ironically for food (especially lettuce and fruit, judging from parcels); then they turn around and go home. (“They come to sightsee,” the deputy mayor contended.)

As before, rural Russians get shorted. Drab and ill-fitting, their clothes do not dazzle; in their city outfits, they reminded me of Muscovites in 1958--which, for farmers, represents vast improvement.

Besides food, the country people carried wrapped packages. One man boarding a train headed southeast from Moscow lugged four new auto tires and a jerry can.

A burgeoning black market draws on savings. For foreign-made products, a mania exists. A $60 Sony Walkman, brought in by Russians who travel abroad, foreign diplomats or tourists, commands more than $600 in rubles.

Meager Wages

But earnings are meager. Workers average 190 rubles ($243) a month, about two and a half times more than in 1960.

That is more buying power than it might seem because the state provides or heavily subsidizes housing, education, health care and utilities, and taxes are very low. In fact, about 70% of income is available, according to officials, for food and discretionary spending.

And whatever other shortcomings exist, inflation is not one. Except for caviar, alcohol, tobacco, furs, coffee, some kinds of fish and delicacies, prices have risen little since I left Moscow. Subway fare is still 5 kopeks, about 6 cents.

Distortions exist. Consumer credit--which began on a spot basis in 1959 as a means to push a limited number of items that had been overproduced, such as radios and primitive cameras--is now widely available in department stores to help move slow-moving, big-ticket items.

On buy-now, pay-later, a department store on the edge of central Moscow offered relatively sophisticated cameras (a Soviet copy of the Hasselblad camera went for 916 rubles, or about $1,172), TV sets and stereo systems.

A new product, the Soviet video player Elektronika, costs 1,200 rubles (a ruble is $1.28 at the official exchange rate) if one can be found. For two or three years, Japanese and other foreign made VCRs have sold in so-called commission stores, which deal in secondhand goods, for up to 3,500 rubles.

Although a limited number of Soviet movie tapes rent from a state shop for three rubles a day, Russians can buy Western movies on the black market for prices above 200 rubles. A Russian said he had seen Sylvester Stallone’s “First Blood” and looked forward to seeing “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” a sequel. He much enjoyed “Amadeus,” the Academy-Award winning film about composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri.

In state food stores and “open” markets, where farmers sell on a free-lance basis, I found beef, pork, lamb, chicken and duck, as well as a limited variety of vegetables, including lettuce and tomatoes.

Quality is another matter. Chickens and piglets appeared to have had a hard life and not a single meat cut would have found a place in my local butcher’s case.

To a visitor returning after 25 years, that was not the point. Edible meat and poultry were available, and although lines formed almost everywhere, they seemed to move.

Only a few of my old friends could be found.

A New Man

I was struck by the change in Vladimir’s appearance. (That is not his real name nor are the other names to follow.) It was an entirely new Vladimir, physically streamlined into middle age. He was sour as ever.

A writer in his late 50s, a Jew who wishes to stay in Russia, noncommittal on refuseniks, Vladimir is a survivor who spent seven years in camps of the gulag, a young victim of Stalin’s rule.

‘(”How did you learn so many languages and so much history,” I asked not long after we met in 1958, impressed by Vladimir’s deep knowledge of medieval Germany and renaissance France. “I was in camps,” he replied. “The finest professors in the Soviet Union were there, and I learned.”)

Although bitter that his internal passport identified him as a Jew, Vladimir was pleased with the apartment allocated to him after his release from prison under the Khrushchev amnesties. It was tiny but new, airtight, and nothing yet leaked uncontrollably in the private kitchen and bathroom.

Bloating Diet

Out of the camps for two years, Vladimir at the time we met had been eating normally for a Soviet citizen. His face was pale and turgid, his teeth had problems and he carried the bloat of many physically inactive Russians on a high carbohydrate, high fat, low protein diet.

Now, the “new” Vladimir entered the apartment of a mutual friend: After two and a half decades of progressively more meat, fish, eggs and poultry and less bread, butter, greasy soup and potatoes, pastiness has left Vladimir’s face. He is almost trim.

Vladimir’s hair has luster, his shirt and jacket fit, and he peers without squinting through fashionably framed eyeglasses. Except for flimsy shoes, Vladimir would pass as a West European. He owns a Moskvitch, a compact car that needs repair (“They all do,” Vladimir groused. He said everybody wants a Zhiguli--which requires at least a three-year wait.)

Immediately, vodka arose. Nobody accepted the host’s offer of vodka but everyone had a comment on Gorbachev’s crackdown on drinking.

A joke from Vladimir set the tone: “In 1905 when the police came, you hid the political tracts and brought out the vodka. In 1985 when the police come, it is just the opposite.”

Long Vodka Lines

“They have made abstainers out of social drinkers,” Nataliya, a translator married to an engineer, said. “The drunks still drink. They stand in line, the lines are longer, and if you want a bottle for a party you have to arrange for somebody to spend the afternoon in line for you.”

Sasha and Ludmilla have two sons, one in university and a teenager with a learning disability at home--and a minute apartment in one of the new 12-story high-rises. (The old “Khrushchevskies, “ under construction when I lived in Moscow and supposed to last for 100 years, are no longer a status symbol, but just the opposite. Deemed unsafe, many have been torn down. They were built to five stories to eliminate the need for elevators).

Today as before, construction quality is a national scandal. “Nothing fits, nothing works, everything leaks and nine flights of stairs is a lot when you are carrying packages,” Ludmilla, a librarian, said from personal experience. “What good is an elevator that doesn’t move?”

Ludmilla is not a happy consumer. When she and Sasha decided to buy a washer for his mother, with whom they lived until recently, machines were available at a department store--but only one in six worked, the sales clerk told Ludmilla. Instead of getting a new one that might never operate, they purchased a broken old one and had it repaired as the safer of options.

Need for Repairmen

Their teen-ager with a learning disability has skill with hand tools. “I do not worry about him,” Sasha said. “In the Soviet Union he will always be able to make a living fixing things.”

For Sasha’s family, a major lift comes from the underground economy, which has mushroomed in the past 25 years. Not only does nalyevo (“on the left,” as the underground economy is called) assure livelihood for a free-lance handyman, it supplies food, merchandise and services almost inaccessible in the official economy.

A pragmatist, Sasha sees nothing wrong with the moonlighting economy, which employs 18 million to 35 million Russians in private sector, mainly illegal jobs (the total population is 270 million).

For every need, a moonlighter seems to exist. Entire apartment buildings have been erected by construction crews on spare time, after privately contracting with a tenants’ group already awaiting occupancy.

The non-news of Ivan came in a chilling way.

KGB Connection

He was a middle-ranking official with one of the state committees when I met him in 1958. On all our social encounters, Ivan had a drink in his hand; he fancied himself a womanizer. He never spoke of politics in my presence and I was told his primary connection was KGB.

Ivan collected jokes, he was popular. In the 1960s, I heard that he had been assigned to Paris but recalled to Moscow in disgrace for having succumbed to “bourgeois temptations”--that is, women and liquor. True or not, it was the last word.

A few days after my return, at a small dinner party in Moscow, I brought up his name with a KGB-connected Russian who had been Ivan’s friend and had exchanged banter with him many a time in my presence.

“Where is Ivan B-- these days?” I asked.

“Who?” the former mutual friend replied, voice dropping, his tone suddenly, ominously heavy.

Icy Reply

I gave Ivan’s patronymic, the middle name Russians use when formality demands, which I had learned originally from the person now across from me. “Ivan Ivanovich B--,” I said. “What has become of him?”

A veil seemed to drop. After a moment, Ivan’s former friend looked icily at me and said, “I never heard of him.”

Before ending our visit, my wife and I drove to Peredelkino, the writer’s colony, on a private pilgrimage to Boris Pasternak’s grave. Bleak, wintry, without a shred of sunlight, the day’s grayness set the mood.

A literary hero to the world for his novel, “Dr. Zhivago,” which was repudiated by Soviet authorities but won the Nobel Prize, Pasternak died in 1960 of natural causes at the age of 70, still officially scorned.

Novel Still Banned

Profoundly in love with Russia and fearing exclusion if he left the Soviet Union to accept the prize in Stockholm, he spent his last days in nearly cloistered seclusion in Peredelkino, a literary leper, his novel banned to this day in his motherland.

For many Russians, Pasternak became a symbol of courage, dignity and strength in the face of Soviet repression.

At first, we could not locate the grave. It is a fairly spacious cemetery, and no marker points the way. At last, in a lovely copse barren of leaves, we found his burial place, marked with a stone bearing his profile and name.

We were not the only ones to visit that day. While we silently paid homage, several young Russian women with a man arrived and stood back, in a mute cluster, giving us our privacy at the graveside while awaiting their own.

Nor were we the first ones. At the foot of the tombstone, drenched and browning in the sleet, was a fresh rose.