Happiness Is Hard Work : A Soviet citizen learn the difficulty of breathing free

I was brought up with a strict sense of duty. I had to profess certain ideological principles, to love the proletariats of all countries and to defend them from imperialist intrigues. It was explained to me all the time “who was who” and “who had the right to what.” My schooling, my medical treatment, my home, my job--the state indefatigably took care of all of them for me. Who my doctor was and where he or she could treat me were prescribed. There were no exceptions. I had no choice but to learn from the sanctioned textbooks in a strictly controlled institution. The hospital in which I was born reflected my parents’ rank and place of residence--a designated apartment. The price of the food I ate--my eventual salary--were set by the state.

The word “freedom” itself was suspect. Its connotations--its very definitions--were always negative.

My way of life and that of the vast majority of Soviet citizens is, in short, as different from yours as American football is from European soccer. For Americans to understand perestroika , they must realize how much we will have to overcome to become part of humanity, because our paths to that goal are so different. Thus, I feel the need to write--so you will understand us better.

I was weaned from the concept of freedom much as submarine crew members are trained not to breathe freely. Yet, over the past few years, the world has sensed how great is our genetic code for freedom. It’s similar to the latent resiliency in a branch that has been bent to the ground under the weight of winter’s snow: As soon as the snow melts, it springs back.

The snow has not yet melted, and we are already springing back. We’re learning how to speak our minds without fearing the person at the adjacent table or the possibility that an unknown listener may be on the telephone line. The prescribed patriotism that was our lifelong duty to honor is being replaced by responsibility for our life and our country. We have learned to call things by their proper names.

An interesting plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party was concluded the second week of February. The party leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, called for an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. This was essentially a confirmation of what is already occurring in the country: The developing democratic processes have broken the party’s monopoly. Many party members also came to understand that increasingly associated with their monopoly on power is responsibility for the state of our society.

Changes are taking place very quickly. Events are piling up. The clock of history is running fast. Throughout, it’s important not to lose contact with the political activism of the masses, which is growing swiftly. The masses are not organized in any real sense; that is dangerous.

The first thing to fly from the awakening popular volcano will be a clod of dirt. The conservative forces are sending little packs of chauvinists in black overcoats into the streets to threaten pogroms and intimidate people. But the lava is stirring and organizing itself.

After a writers’ meeting was broken up by fascist-style organizers last month, I invited several leaders of the semi-formal Moscow associations to the editorial offices of our magazine, Ogonyok. They urged that an anti-conservative demonstration be held to demonstrate mass support for Gorbachev and his democratic reforms. All understood that the Soviet system is incapable of offering anyone more liberal than Gorbachev. Leftist attempts to shake his position may lead not to a more liberal leader but to a Soviet Pinochet.

My visitors said that such a demonstration would attract 200,000 people. I thought they were boasting. I was wrong: More than 200,000 marched to the walls of the Kremlin on Feb. 4.

In preparing to speak to the swaying ocean of heads, I thought again of how the people are attracted to freedom, of how quickly they become fearless, of how hard it will be to stop them now that they are awakened. Moreover, the fearlessness of a people prepared to accept responsibility for the fate of their society and their country must be appreciated. What is wonderful about the present process is that it shows how desperate the people’s determination is to stand up for integrity and freedom, and how doomed are the attempts to intimidate them again.

These days, I try not to leave Moscow for long, because perestroika is imperiled. I am informed in ominous tones that our magazine will make a mistake and “be exposed.” With Ogonyok’s circulation reaching 14.5 million, we are constantly being reproached for having so large a readership. Our color supplements are taken away; the printing process is dragged out. Working conditions are much more difficult. Our pay is very little. Only the salaries of party bureaucrats and those who work for party publications are being raised. All this and more is being done to scare away our best employees or to silence our magazine.

The people do not hide their desire to overcome inequity. Many of the roots of disintegrated movements, both in the Communist Party and in the country, are traceable to the desire to break away quickly from an inequitably organized whole to create a small but honestly conducted association of like minds or nationality. Not that long ago in the Ukrainian town of Chernigov, the local authorities were overthrown. The flash point was the baggage compartment of a car belonging to one of the officials that popped open in the town’s central square. A volume of the classics of Marxism was not inside. Instead, delicacies long absent from the local grocery stores were found.

People in my country are monstrously cut off from the fruits of their labor, yet another reason why they work poorly. The agricultural industry cannot feed the most expansive and resource-rich country in the world because the peasants do not understand who they are working for. Sometimes peasants who produce grain must travel to town to buy baked bread. Those who raise livestock have no idea where the sausage made from their meat is sold. The bureaucratic state has strikingly distanced itself from its own people.

This is why the process of perestroika is so difficult and multilayered and why attempts to achieve new goals using former production methods are pointless. But it’s unclear how to get away from the former leaders. It is like the Australian who bought a new boomerang but went out of his mind because he couldn’t get rid of the old one.

There are growing signs of bureaucratic opposition to perestroika. Be attentive. While getting caught up in the colorfulness of revolutionary flashiness, you sometimes lose sight of the main thing--the difficult process of real change and the routine of renovation. The forces opposing perestroika and democratization are reaching the end of their self-imposed deadline. I feel their hatred with my skin, with my mind. I have known it my entire life, and I am tired of it. But I do not see any way out--except for a daily struggle.

Understand yet another peculiarity of our society: It has practically never known a multiparty system. The authority of the almighty chief, with his right to punish and pardon, has eaten into the genetic code of every one of us, and into our historical memory. It presses on us like an enormous lump of fear. We are becoming a part of humanity with difficulty, but we are doing it. I received a letter from a reader of Ogonyok in California. “What have you come to?” she wrote in reference to the magazine’s struggle against social privileges. “What falls under the category of social privileges, to your mind? The right of a government minister to get a pound of frankfurters without waiting in line? The right to get a tooth filled in a clean clinic? The right for a three-member family to move into a three-room apartment? Just think of how that looks from the outside . . . .”

The rights of the people, and the struggle for these rights, is an unstoppable right in all the countries of the world. Every people has its own concerns, but all the same we are growing together in terms of our humanity and our concerns.

Life is short and stormy. I just received a telephone call from Kharkov, the town in the Ukraine that elected me to Parliament. I was read the resolution of an anti-conservative meeting. An action committee is also meeting in Moscow to discuss the formation of a new political party. The postal carrier has just delivered yet another anonymous, threatening letter. Life, swirling all around, has never been so intense, so dangerous--so full of hope. The cost of happiness is struggle and sometimes life itself, and now is the time for us to win our happiness. This is very hard.