Kitabı oku: «Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union», sayfa 13

Financial Times, Tuesday, August 5, 1980

How the Kremlin Kept Moscow Under Wraps

The 1980 Moscow Olympic Games were for long the focus of the most varied hopes and expectations. The games have now passed into history as an athletics success, but their impact on Soviet society has been strangely inconclusive.

To a limited extent, the games have improved the Soviet Union’s image. Athletes and foreign tourists have been impressed with the Olympic restaurants and hotels and the sports facilities, as well as the precision with which the transport to events was organised. But many in Moscow believed the games would mark a turning point towards either liberalisation or repression, a view made plausible by the years of careful preparation.

The opportunity to meet foreigners and be exposed to a different, freer way of life was one aspect of the Olympics which had most appealed to Moscow residents. The tight security thus gave rise to bitterness. People in Moscow began referring to the games as “our lipa,” diminutive for the woman’s name Olympiada which can also be translated as “sham” or “fake.”

To people in Moscow, the Olympics seemed remote. The foreign visitors, whose numbers were cut by the U.S.-led boycott by as much as three-quarters to around 75,000, were little seen by Russians, except in the windows of buses passing in convoy to Olympic events.

The opportunities for tourists to meet Russians were carefully controlled. Foreign visitors proved unadventurous, and tourist hotels were closed to all but registered guests and those with special passes.

Just before the Olympics began, the Soviet Komsomol, the communist youth organisation, opened 20 or so Western-style discotheques in the buildings of professional clubs around Moscow. The discotheques were intended to remedy one of Moscow’s longstanding shortcomings as a tourist attraction—the lack of street life or night clubs.

The discotheques offered Western rock music under strobe lights, and a relatively daring disco fashion show. Foreign tourists were brought to a club by their Soviet guides, ostensibly to show them Moscow’s hidden night life. In some cases, whole delegations were taken to the disco, where they were given the opportunity for political discussion or to dance with carefully vetted young Komsomols as well as plainclothes militia men and members of the KGB.

The number of Russians who might meet tourists was also restricted. The ban on travel to Moscow by non-residents and the successful efforts to persuade residents to take vacations during the Olympics, helped to reduce the number of people in Moscow by at least 1m.

The apparent object of this was to eliminate queues and improve the food supply. But, combined with the massive police presence, the reduction had an eerie effect. Ubiquitous police stood watch over unnaturally thin crowds.

Some Moscovites remember ruefully the last great influx of foreigners in 1957. About 40,000 foreign students, most from the communist bloc, the Third World or Western Socialist organisations, came to Moscow for several weeks for the International Youth Festival, and changed Soviet society fundamentally. For many Russians, the youth festival offered the first contact in their lives with foreigners. After decades of political terror, the free atmosphere in Moscow then, with foreigners and Russians meeting openly, impromptu Jazz concerts in the parks and a carnival atmosphere on the streets, gave people enormous hope as Moscow entered the period known as “the thaw.” Many of those in Moscow old enough to remember the International Youth Festival wondered if the Olympics would rekindle some of the hope for liberalisation and a freer life which surfaced then.

The generous hospitality of individual Russians is as real now as it was in 1957, but the decision to bring in as many as 200,000 uniformed militia men to ensure order during the Olympic Games was, in a sense, an answer to those expectations—an unmistakable sign that, for the moment at least, liberalisation in the Soviet Union has gone as far as it is going to go.

Financial Times, Thursday, August 28, 1980

Russia Keeping Its Hands off Poland

Poland would need to descend into chaos and near civil war before the Soviet Union felt compelled to intervene.

Trouble in Poland has historically been associated with a weakening of the Russian empire. If the Soviet press has given pro-forma endorsement to changes in the Polish political structure unthinkable 10 years ago, it was because, under present circumstances, the Soviet leadership may have had little choice.

The extreme sensitivity of the Polish strikes and the threat they pose to the whole Socialist bloc, were emphasised by the Soviet decision to jam Russian-language broadcasts by the BBC, the Voice of America and Deutsche Welle, and by the almost total silence in the Soviet press about Poland which prevailed until Monday.

Workers emulating the Polish model could undermine the Communist Party dictatorship in every East European Socialist country, and the decision to allow the changes proposed by Mr. Edward Gierek, the Polish party leader, which include free elections to the government trade union, was a major Soviet concession.

To have refused to compromise with the strikers would have carried even graver risks for the Soviet leaders than those presented by liberalisation. The Soviet Union is in no position to launch an invasion in Europe. It is badly strained by the resistance in Afghanistan and the prospect of worsening relations with the West.

The East European allies are independent of the Kremlin only to the extent that they are able to resist its wishes. If Poland were allowed to become as free and pluralistic as Yugoslavia, thereby exerting a strong attraction for people in other Socialist bloc countries, it would be because the Russians knew that, if they invaded, the Poles would be ready to fight.

The Soviet decision to invade a satellite state depends not only on the threat of ideological contamination from fundamental democratic reforms, but also on the military and political risk.

The Soviet leaders had little to lose when they ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Detente and the development of economic and trade ties with the West had not begun, the Soviet Union was not militarily engaged elsewhere, whereas the U.S. was bogged down in Vietnam, and Czechoslovakia, with a population of only 15m, would clearly not resist.

Poland today is far different. Popular animosity towards Russians has deep roots, and the Soviet Union has tried not to interfere in Poland as long as Communist Party rule was not threatened. In 1956, when Mr. Wladyslaw Gomulka came to power backed by popular riots, Mr. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, was taken by surprise and immediately flew to Warsaw without informing Polish border guards.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia required 600,000 troops, 500,000 of them drawn from the Soviet Union itself, even though there was no significant Czechoslovak resistance. An invasion of Poland, through which run vital supply and communications lines between Russia and Soviet forces in East Germany, would require at least a million men. In the face of the expected intense resistance from the Polish Army, such an invasion would arouse little enthusiasm among more liberal Warsaw Pact members.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet leaders have, with remarkable skill, managed to maintain their ties with West Germany, and France. These ties, and the access to Western technology which have flowed from them, have become more important to the Soviet leadership as the U.S.-Soviet relationship has come under strain.

An invasion of Poland, and a long struggle to subdue it, would probably ensure Mr. Ronald Reagan’s election as President of the United States and mark the start of an uncontrolled arms race. By alienating Western Europe, it would threaten the credit and trade position of the entire Socialist bloc, thereby confirming a new cold war. It would also provoke a drop in the Soviet standard of living which could in turn lead to the first widespread labour unrest in the Soviet Union itself.

It was probably with this in mind that the Soviet leaders decided to back Mr. Gierek, tacitly endorsing his proposals by reporting them in some detail in the controlled Press, even though the mention of political reforms being forced on a communist government by “social dissatisfaction” made astonishing reading for Soviet citizens.

Even if the Polish strikers accepted Mr. Gierek’s proposals for free elections to the government unions, rather than holding out for the establishment of independent unions, the party’s power could be seriously reduced. Poland would then have a degree of political pluralism which does not exist in any other Warsaw Pact country. Under the circumstances, new and tighter restrictions on contacts between Polish and Soviet citizens would be inevitable.

The Soviet leadership can probably live with these changes, provided that Poland’s essential allegiance to the Socialist bloc is not called into question and that no opening is created whereby the party could lose overall control.

The Soviet Union’s policy towards its allies is dictated by the expediencies of maintaining control over a vast and diverse empire. As long as communist regimes keep power, these expediencies can change.

Financial Times, Friday, January 9, 1981

Where Some Miners Are
More Equal Than Others

A fine rain washed the streets in Donetsk and the air was suffused with a smoky mist as a group of men gathered at the bus stop across from the Butovka-Donetsk coalmine after working the night shift.

“We all know about Poland, said a miner standing in the faint light of a street lamp. “But what can we do about it? We are for the Polish workers but if we attack Poland today—tomorrow it can be us.”

I had gone to Donetsk in the eastern Ukraine to speak to miners with the help of Mr. Alexei Nikitin, a former engineer at Butovka, who had been in conflict with the Soviet authorities since leading a miners’ protest in 1969.

Mr. Nikitin was arrested on December 12, three days after a colleague and I left Donetsk. While we were in Donetsk he was ready to speak to us about conditions in the mines and, in his presence, other miners were ready to speak as well.

We also met, during our stay in Donetsk, officials of the Gorlovka mine, which is one of the Donetsk mines which is regularly shown to foreigners, but we did not meet with officials at Butovka where foreigners are almost never taken.

In four days of conversations at bus stops, in the barren parks outside mines and in communal flats with water dripping from the ceiling, the miners clearly indicated that all the conditions which led to worker unrest in Poland exist in more extreme form in the Soviet Union.

The vulnerability of the individual miner in the Soviet Union could be compared to that of a worker in, say, a U.S. company town where a single corporation comes to dominate the entire town, including the local law enforcement agencies. In the Soviet Union, however, the company town is backed by the full power of the state.

In Donetsk, the directors of the mine are chosen by the local committee of the Communist Party which also selects the judges, city officials and state procurators. They are responsible for prosecuting violations of the law, including the labour code. The mine management has, therefore, close ties with anyone to whom the worker might turn for recourse in dealing with the management. This power is magnified further by the fact that the directors of the mine control not just the work place but, to an appreciable extent, living conditions as well.

The allocation of separate apartments, for which miners may wait in communal flats shared by two or more families for as long as 25 years, is completely in the hands of the mine, which is free to change the queue order, and this can lead to scenes of anguish as people who have waited most of their lives for separate apartments are passed over year after year.

The management also decides who receives prized vacation packages for a few weeks by the sea once in 10 to 15 years and decides if a miner may join the queue for such relative luxuries as a car and some types of furniture and carpets. The mine must support applications by a miner for credit at local shops.

Mine and factory directors and all local officials are united by a common interest, which is seeing to it that every enterprise fulfils the Plan. The work in the mine is organised with one single goal in mind—that it should meet the targets laid down in the Plan.

Under these circumstances, abuses take place not because the law is repressive or because it does not exist but rather because no one in authority has an interest in seeing it enforced. The official trade unions are subordinated to the management of the mine and although they can defend miners accused of drunkenness or truancy, they do not defend those fired for insisting on their formal rights.

At Butovka, for example, miners are formally only required to work a five-day week, but Plan fulfilment is impossible on a normal schedule and Sunday long ago became a regular working day. In November, the miners worked all five Sundays at Butovka, and, in violation of the rules, were paid double time for only two of them. It was said that anyone invoking formal right to refuse overtime work would immediately be dismissed.

Shifts are juggled so that a worker may work three different shifts in the course of a month. Compensatory time off has to be taken only during shifts when equipment is being repaired regardless of when it was earned. The discontent to which these conditions give rise is aggravated by the fact that for many miners, the reward for their labour is not very high.

Many miners in Donetsk return home to crowded communal flats. In one apartment I visited, a man had lost his legs in the mine 40 years ago, slept in a communal kitchen while his wife and their son, who also worked in the mine, shared a shabby adjacent room in an apartment with no running water.

In the wake of unsuccessful grain harvests, the housing problem has been aggravated by food shortages. In the queue at a dairy products store near the Butovka mine, people said that milk supplies run out by mid-afternoon and complained of shortages of cheese and eggs. The State meat store did not even bother to open for the day but stood shut and padlocked, its empty counters visible through a window in the door.

In this situation, miners in another country might strike for better conditions. But the miners in Donetsk hesitate to even discuss any collective action because the system which has evolved in the mines over the years has left them convinced that unlike the Polish workers, they cannot count on the solidarity of the working class.

The guarantee that there will be no collective action by workers in the mines is ensured by the management’s success in engineering a split in the workforce. According to a well established Soviet practice, for every job in the mines, except the most menial, there is a model brigade made up of “udarniki” or “achievers,” who are chosen for their loyalty to management and who receive the best equipment, first access to materials and spare parts, and the best conditions.

This inevitably creates a highly paid, privileged group of up to 25 per cent of the work force which, in exchange for its privileges, will back management in any confrontation.

The division of the work force into two mutually watchful and distrustful parts demoralises the workers and greatly strengthens the hands of management, leaving them free to “pick off” dissenting workers as individuals.

This is why the workers I met expressed little hope of free trade unions on the Polish model appearing in the Soviet Union. Years of experience with the system which prevails in the Donetsk mines, have convinced them that there are few things as hopeless as a challenge to the power of the Soviet state.

The Bonus Claim Which Changed the Life of
Mr. Nikitin

A challenge to the management of a Donetsk coal mine is so rare that, 11 years after Mr. Alexei Nikitin dared to make one, he is still remembered by some miners at Butovka-Donetsk with a mixture of astonishment and regret.

A mining engineer and former member of the Communist Party, Mr. Nikitin, like the Polish trade union leader Mr. Lech Walesa, has had to endure long years of unemployment, and in addition years in Soviet prisons and mental hospitals.

Mr. Nikitin says that his difficulties began in December 1969 with a single act whose consequences have shaped his life to this day. He led a group of workers to see Mr. Viktor Savitch, the director of the Butovka mine, to complain that no bonus was being paid for extra coal produced on Sundays.

The complaint was rejected so Mr. Nikitin and 129 other miners sent a letter to the Communist Party Central Committee in Moscow. The letter was referred back to the Donetsk party and Mr. Nikitin was dismissed in February 1970. The majority of the other miners were forced to renounce their signatures.

Unable to find work, but convinced he had done nothing wrong, Mr. Nikitin says he went repeatedly to Moscow to appeal against his dismissal in the reception halls of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Procurator and the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

In the reception halls every complainant is under surveillance and anyone can be seized for what is euphemistically described as a “conversation” with the admitting doctor at a mental hospital. During his long waits Mr. Nikitin says he met many other “truth seekers,” as they have been known for centuries in Russia. They had come to Moscow from all over the Soviet Union.

Mr. Nikitin’s experiences over a period of two years correspond closely to those of other plaintiffs. He was referred from one official organisation to another and obliged to fill out new and ever more numerous forms at every stage. In the end he was referred back to the organisation where he started, which claimed to have no knowledge of his case.

Mr. Nikitin says he could not accept that there was no hope of final justice and on April 15, 1971, he entered the Norwegian Embassy in Moscow with appeals intended for the United Nations and the World Federation of Labour.

He says he was seized on the street in Moscow a short time afterwards and taken to a psychiatric hospital before being sent back to Donetsk. There he was arrested on January 13, 1972, and taken to Donetsk prison. He was, he says, pronounced mentally ill in his absence. And in June he was taken to the Dnepropetrovsk special psychiatric prison.

Mr. Nikitin say that, judging by external indications, the majority of the inmates at Dnepropetrovsk were sane. He met a Soviet soldier who, while serving in Egypt, had tried to cross the border into Israel, Ukrainian nationalists, Baptists who had distributed leaflets, and worker dissidents like himself, including Vladimir Klebanov, who is said to have tried to organise the Soviet Union’s first independent trade union in 1977.

The inmates were treated with sulfazine, a powerful behaviour modification drug, which causes prolonged, agonising convulsions. The treatment continued for months until patients showed signs of complete physical and moral submission. Mr. Nikitin was freed in March, 1976, after four years at Dnepropetrovsk, and he returned to Donetsk, where he moved in with his sister.

Despite repeated attempts, he was unable to find a regular job and, unwilling to accept his helplessness, Mr. Nikitin finally returned to Moscow and on February 22, 1977, entered the Norwegian Embassy to request political asylum. The request was denied. Mr. Nikitin says he was seized when he left the embassy and sent back to Dnepropetrovsk, where he says he was again “treated” with massive doses of behaviour modification drugs for three years until his release in May, 1980.

I met Mr. Nikitin in Moscow in the autumn shortly after he had been examined by Mr. Anatoly Koryagin, a Kharkov psychiatrist, who had pronounced him completely sane. Intrigued by his story, a colleague and I travelled to Donetsk last month to speak to Mr. Nikitin about his experiences and also to meet other miners who were willing to talk about conditions in the mines.

The opportunity was an important one because although hundreds of visits to mines and factories are arranged every year for foreign correspondents by official Soviet organisations, there are relatively few possibilities to talk to Soviet workers under normal conditions.

On December 12, three days after we left Donetsk, Mr. Nikitin was arrested. He vowed before we left that if arrested he would begin a hunger strike and that, if placed in a mental hospital, he would not allow himself to be treated with behaviour modification drugs. His present whereabouts are unknown.