Soviet Life
Nine Soviet Portraits.
by Raymond A. Bauer.
Technology Press of M.I.T. and John Wiley. 190 pp. $3.95.
Vorkuta.
by Joseph Scholmer.
Holt. 302 pp. $3.75.
Face of a Victim.
by Elizabeth Lermolo.
Harper. 311 pp. $3.75.
A great many books have been written about the political, social, and economic aspects, of the Soviet world, but we know very little about the day-to-day life, thoughts, and feelings of the Soviet citizen. The three books at hand help in varying degrees to supply this lack.
The scholarly and readable Nine Soviet Portraits, by Raymond A. Bauer, author of an earlier book in the same field, The New Man in Soviet Psychology, is by far the best. Mr. Bauer uses the fictional form to image the lives of nine typical Soviet citizens: a factory manager, doctor, secret police agent, student, tractor driver, creative artist, housewife, woman collective farmer, and party secretary. But these sketches are fictional in form only; their content is based on a painstaking analysis of a series of interviews with Soviet emigrés, and a thorough knowledge of the background of Soviet life. By skillfully relating these personal histories to such external factors as the statutes of a collective farm or the regulations governing the rights and duties of a Soviet doctor, Mr. Bauer has given life and meaning, and, most important, depth, to what we know of Soviet society.
Mr. Bauer’s Russians emerge as people of flesh and blood, consistent and believable; in their aggregate, however, they neither embrace the main sectors of Soviet society nor do they adequately present a specific sector within it. As a result, the total picture we get of Soviet society is somewhat diffuse and possibly even misleading. The author states that he deliberately focused his attention on the “middle ranks of the elite,” in part because “their contribution to the functioning of the system is so crucial, and the degree of skill and initiative required of them so considerable, that control and motivation of their behavior is a matter of life or death to the system as a whole.” But Nine Soviet Portraits either ignores entirely or says very little about Soviet scientists, engineers, teachers, economists, military officers, shock-workers, and others who hold key positions in the “middle ranks of the elite.” Some of these groups, particularly the technical experts, not only enjoy prestige, power, and a high standard of living, but their relation to what Mr. Bauer calls the “all-pervasive politicization of life” is qualitatively different from that of the professional people, party functionaries, and bureaucrats he describes.
Because of their vital importance to the regime, a good number of experts enjoy a degree of freedom, both professional and private, denied to the majority of Soviet citizens. It is known, for instance, that institutions of higher learning regularly receive a wide range of publications from the West, and that translation pools have been organized to enable selected students and teachers to read, discuss, and use their contents. What the author fails to make explicit is that there are strategically situated persons in Soviet society whose conflicts with the regime do not necessarily grow out of their social roles but out of their “disinterested” observations of the injustices of Soviet life, out of the discrepancies between propaganda promises and Soviet reality. These privileged groups of course suffer from political interference, but it is often scarcely comparable with what the creative artist, who is Mr. Bauer’s prototype of the intellectual, has to endure.
On the whole, however, to recognize the existence of some measure of professional freedom in the Soviet system is not to invalidate the main theses implicit in Mr. Bauer’s study. By and large, membership in any section of the Soviet elite requires the individual to conform as closely as possible to a rigid norm. Still, for some people, such conformity does not always involve the petty egotism, cowardice, and fears that warp the lives of Mr. Bauer’s characters.
Owing in part to its omissions, Nine Soviet Portraits tends to overemphasize the actual or potential hostility of the managerial elite to the Soviet system. On the other hand, by excluding a worker from his range of subjects, and by failing to touch on the critical nationality problem, Mr. Bauer’s work minimizes the tensions inherent in the process of the industrialization and Russification of Soviet society.
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These two latter aspects of Soviet life—its domination by Great Russians and the role of the industrial proletariat—are essential elements in the story told by Joseph Scholmer in Vorkuta. Dr. Scholmer is a German and former Communist who was imprisoned by the Gestapo and later became an official in the East German Ministry of Health; arrested by the NKVD in 1949, he was accused of espionage, interrogated to the point where he attempted suicide, sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor, and shipped off to the Vorkuta concentration camp in the Arctic. There, in the summer of 1953, he witnessed the first mass strike ever held in the “fatherland of socialism.”
Dr. Scholmer makes some shrewd observations on individuals in the camps and on camp life in general, but he is also given to sweeping generalizations many of which are palpably unwarranted. He contends, for example, often intemperately, that the West fails to understand the nature of social relations in the Soviet Union, particularly the Soviet exploitation of labor, both “free” and captive, and therefore missed a unique chance to bring about the downfall of the regime: “The strike in Vorkuta in the summer of 1953 could have spread from the camps to the factories. Brutal military suppression would have been the signal for a general rising. . . .”
The trouble with this argument is that it equates conditions at Vorkuta with conditions in other camps and in the Soviet Union as a whole. The author fails to see that only in a concentration camp are the social lines so clearly drawn: despite informers among the inmates, the party and secret police remain outsiders, and it is in the nature of the situation that prisoners should unite against them. But as Mr. Bauer indicates in his Nine Soviet Portraits, the “free” Soviet individual’s relations to the system are never that simple.
Dr. Scholmer’s comments occasionally indicate something of a Marxist hangover. He sees Soviet society divided into classes, each with its own clearly defined aims, “consciousness,” and interests: “. . . ever since the beginning of the first Five Year Plan, a large industrial proletariat has been developing in the Soviet Union and it is being forced to live under conditions similar to those endured by the European workingmen in the early days of capitalism. This proletariat is just as discontented as its counterpart of a hundred years or so ago, and it has the same fundamentally hostile attitude to the existing order.” This is not only an oversimplification of 19th-century capitalism, but an almost meaningless comparison. Soviet industrial workers in general enjoy a greater measure of prestige, a higher standard of living, more privileges, and better chances for advancement than any other group except the party-state managerial aristocracy. They resent and resist the regime as people, not in their character as members of the working class. If they are to overthrow the system, they probably will have to be led by a vocal, determined, strategically placed elite drawn almost certainly from the “middle class,” a group not considered in the author’s speculations.
He is on somewhat safer ground When discussing the potentially disruptive force represented by subjugated minorities: Ukrainians, Baits, Jews, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tartars, Circassians, and others, all of whom have suffered under Great Russian domination. But here again, Dr. Scholmer’s speculations do not take into account differences between camp life, where national solidarity is almost automatic, and Soviet society at large, where it is far less real and effective.
According to Dr. Scholmer, “The anti-Semitic feeling in the camps at Vorkuta is more intense than it ever was even among the anti-Semitic German middle classes under Hitler.” In addition to the brutality and deprivations suffered by all inmates, Jews have to live side by side with their most fanatical persecutors, men who enthusiastically murdered hundreds of Jews under the Nazi occupation. Jews are tormented by anti-Communists, who blame them for the regime’s atrocities, and also by Communists, who readily succumbed to Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign. However, in view of the author’s tendency to sensational overstatement, we must question his forecast of a wholesale pogrom of Russia’s four million Jews the day the regime collapses.
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By contrast with Vorkuta, Elizabeth Lermolo’s Face of a Victim is an unassuming, almost pedestrian book. It tells the story of the author’s eight years’ imprisonment on a faked charge of having been connected with the 1934 murder of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad party boss and then No. 2 man in the hierarchy, whose assassination touched off the successive waves of Stalinist purges and terror in the 30’s. Her interrogators and “judges” included Stalin himself, Voroshilov, Yezhov, and Vishinsky; among her cellmates were Zinoviev, Kamenev, and many other Old Bolshevik leaders. The author was in a position to learn much. But the book itself is so awkward, haphazard, and politically superficial that it misses much of its potential effect.
Among the many mysteries Face of a Victim does not explain satisfactorily is Stalin’s part in the Kirov case. It is generally believed that he arranged to have his Leningrad lieutenant assassinated because he thought the latter was building a faction potentially dangerous to himself; and by attributing the murder to his enemies and rivals—including Zinoviev and Kamenev—he hoped to set the scene for their destruction. Elizabeth Lermolo corroborates this view, against Russian experts like Isaac Deutscher, who in his Stalin maintains that “the assassination of Kirov alarmed Stalin.” But if Stalin was indeed the real murderer, then his personal interrogation of the author is difficult to understand. Was it a political ruse, or an inquisitorial grotesquerie?
The author’s naivety, her unadorned directness, makes the account of her harrowing experiences all the more vivid. The story of her torture by the secret police, of the physical privations and mental anguish she suffered in the “isolators,” is remarkable for what it reveals of human endurance. It is also remarkable for the light it throws on an aspect of Soviet “society” discussed neither in Nine Soviet Portraits nor in Vorkuta. Mr. Bauer’s main characters are all “free,” while Dr. Scholmer’s people, though confined in camps, are nevertheless economically indispensable to the state. Both these books therefore deal with people who help to keep the Soviet system going. Face of a Victim tells us the terrible story of the expendable ones, most of whom are shot without trial. The few who, like the author, are held prisoner over many years survive only because the state needs their confessions to implicate others, or even because it “forgets” them. Face of a Victim is an all too vivid illustration of what Pravda meant when it recently reiterated the old Stalinist maxim: “Some think that if a man performs his work properly, nobody has the right to interfere with his private life. Such ideas are anti-Marxist and radically alien to the foundations of a Socialist society.”
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