Russia's Nightmare

"At least we have a roof over our heads."  In rural Russia, where the ceilings of temporary housing disintegrate, and the earth reabsorbs the inadequate building foundations, it is a small but misguided comfort.  There is no money to fix things, and the collective apparatus has broken down, so everyone struggles to get by.  It's the best that can be hoped under the circumstances.  Anyone with aspirations has gone to the city.  The people of the land who have scratched out a living for generations, first as serfs to landowners, then on collective farms, are now cut adrift in the middle of nowhere.  The infrastructure that supplies them is rotting, and the government hopes these last outposts will disappear when the inhabitants die, and the roof really does fall in.   

When the communists took power in Russia, small landholders were forced into the collective farming system, but when that collapsed, it left individuals to whom private property was prohibited with nothing.  These people were initially robbed of their land, made into slaves of the collective, then thrown out the door when the state collapsed on its imperfect foundations.  There is a generational sadness in the eyes of men and women whose dreams have been reduced to ashes.  Like the rest of the world, they were wrenched from the age of God-sanctioned monarchs by the Godless carnage of the war.   While the West retired to lick its wounds and rebuild, Lenin decided to experiment on Russia by translating Marx's thoughts into single-party communism that had nothing to do with democracy.  Lincoln's definition of democracy was "by the people, for the people", but the Russians were only allowed half the cake.  Their government relieved them of the "by the people" burden by telling them that people didn't know what was best for them.  Until they are re-educated, they can't be trusted with the responsibility of self-governance.  Under another guise, small landholders again became serfs working under a master's whip.  If they didn't carry their weight in the collective, they were punished, not with the Tsar's riding crop, but by peer pressure and accusations about sabotaging the motherland.  Unless everyone stayed in line, the world would never know the glory of collectivism.  If a citizen stumbled, they were traitors to the noble cause. 

Rather than give an opinion on why the communist experiment went wrong, perhaps the best idea is to illustrate one of the many mistakes made by the planners of this new society.  The Russian government wanted to change the way people lived.  Workers shouldn't be at the mercy of capitalist bosses, have their wages reduced or be fired from their jobs by greedy corporate barons.  In a communist brave new world, they would be provided with essentials to live a dignified life, including an all-important roof over their heads.  In cities like St. Petersburg, where there had been a massive influx of the poor in search of work, the government of the day confiscated noble houses and partitioned them into accommodation for families.  When the communists took over, they declared that a person only required 9 square meters to live comfortably.  A few years later, this was reduced to 5 square meters, which allowed people to rent a corner of a room.  When there was no more space in converted palatial residences, the government constructed blocks of communal apartments.  They were late in doing so and were desperate to prevent a catastrophic housing crisis, so the buildings were thrown up quickly and as cheaply as possible. Usually, these communal blocks were built in newly created satellite villages on the outskirts of cities, but they were poorly served by public transit.  Nobody except a bureaucrat had a car.  

On Lenin's orders, the accommodations were to be organized on collective principles.  Each family had its own room, or two if the family was large enough, but the hallway, kitchen, and bathroom belonged to nobody.   Although these common areas should have technically been everyone's responsibility, they were considered nobody's, so if one resident made a mess, nobody cleaned up after them.  Notes were posted to remind the delinquent residents that keeping their space clean was their duty to the state, and if they failed to do so, they would be reprimanded at the next compulsory tenants meeting.  There were schedules and rules, but these were for kitchen or bathroom use, so everyone wasn't underfoot at the same time, but queues still formed.  Though each family had its own cooker, or as little as a burner on a cooker, there were not enough sinks to go round, so dishwashing times had to be staggered.  In the few bathrooms of no-man's land, everyone brought their own toilet paper and their own toilet seat.   The shotgun central hallways in these residences were lined with wardrobes, suitcases, bicycles, and crumbling boxes.  Electricity cables looped across the ceiling. Locks were not allowed on doors.  After all, everyone was part of one happy communist family.  Why would anyone steal from a comrade who was just as badly off as he was?  Lenin's objective was to "unite different social groups in one physical space," but he seriously underestimated human self-interest.  A doctor who works long hours, with life and death responsibilities, is not going to live comfortably with a drunk who is determined not to work and disrupts the entire group with his brawling and fighting.  Neither one nor the other is better off for the experience.   Communism only works for the committed, and there have always been and always will be those who do not agree with the government of the day.

I was a child in the 1950's who grew up in a small frontier town in Canada.  We didn't lack anything, had parents who worked full-time, and had a mortgage on our large, comfortable house.  There was never any expectation of paying it off. That would only happen years later when all the children had grown up and moved away.  Having two working parents allowed us to have a car and the borrowing power to replace the wood-fired heating in the house with a gas furnace that would run as long as we could afford the fuel.  Our childhood friends lived in the same circumstances, and we presumed everyone did.  Very few children lived in apartments.  There were sprawling suburbs for those who didn't want to live in the inner city.  If a family's budget didn't stretch to a house purchase, there were always houses to rent. 

If I compare this to a child growing up in Russia in the 1950's, who lived at the same latitude as me, our lives were very different.  We had neighbours, but we did not live together. Everyone had their own free-standing house on at least a fifty-foot private lot, with a front and back garden. If we didn't like our neighbourhood, we could move to another one, or to another city.  The government hardly kept track of us except to keep our address current, and we were permitted to live anywhere in the country we wished.  In a wide-open and new country like Canada, this gave its citizens a sense of limitless possibilities.  I presumed my Russian brothers lived the same way, but at that age, I had little knowledge of how hemmed in and controlled they were.  Russia had the same open spaces and possibilities, but its citizens were not encouraged to be individuals, to rebel, or to explore the country or the world for themselves.  They had a duty to the motherland that was more important than our supposedly frivolous voyages of self-discovery.

I recently heard an interview with a young woman who had grown up in Yugoslavia.  The Russian ally Tito had been in charge of keeping the country united, but by the 1960's the cracks were showing.  The young woman's parents had grown up in a society that wholeheartedly subscribed to the Russian version of communism.  Up to that time, the national factions in Yugoslavia had been at each other's throats in centuries-old tribal bickering.  The newly unified country was happy to wear its identical young socialist uniforms and do its part for the glorious nation that would show the world what miracles a communist society could perform.  Things didn't go as planned, and Yugoslavia was marginalized on the world stage.  Years of rote propaganda couldn't hold up an economy that was based more on hope than reality.  When Tito died and Yugoslavia returned to its original tribal units, the parents of the young woman were devastated.  The more European their country became, the more they realized they had been made to live and believe in an experiment that was based on a faulty interpretation of Marx, and that they had suffered and sacrificed their individuality for nothing.

Although political and economic movements like communism profess to serve the common good, scratch a human being and they will be shown to have at least some self-interest.  Everything can't be for the state.  Although it is admirable for a man to contribute to the community that supports him, he is more than that. He is an individual, and to take that essential state of being away from him is to do violence to his psyche.  

In the 1950's, European countries and large cities in America also threw up faceless housing for the post war population boom, and most of these buildings were quickly and cheaply constructed, but outside the Soviet Union, families weren't expected to live all together by a set of strict rules and believe the propaganda about sacrifices for the motherland.  Outside Russia, many of these housing projects became slums because they were not owned by the residents but by the government, so they were not maintained.  These attempts at social housing using the Russian model failed spectacularly.  In capitalist America, the government had better luck subsidizing the construction of individual residences because that's how people preferred to live.

 Half of my family origins are English / Scottish, so because of their immigration, I knew from a very young age that travelling was as easy as buying a ticket and getting on a boat or a plane.  It never entered my mind that this was unusual and that citizens of some countries, those designated as communist, were not allowed the same privileges.  Why would a country lock its citizens behind a wall?   

When I was a young man, I drove and hitchhiked through much of Europe, often meeting like-minded souls from other countries, mostly European ones, but also American and Australian.  We had little money and weren't allowed to work in foreign countries, but we had saved money from jobs we had quit when we left home.  We were free spirits who were able and allowed to go wherever we wanted.  I never met a Russian doing the same thing, but then neither did I meet anyone Chinese, unless they were American Chinese.  China was in the middle of a revolution.  I never met a black person from Africa hitchhiking around Europe, though I did meet Arabs from North Africa who had the same urge to explore as I did.  American men were scarce in those days because of the Vietnam War, but Russians were nowhere to be seen. I met a professor from Czechoslovakia in the Prague Spring of 1968 who had found his way out for a few days and was on a culture-absorbing rampage through as much of Europe, drinking in as much as possible before the Iron Curtain came down again.

Russians of my postwar generation had already grown up with parents who accepted communism as an everyday fact.  Spiritual life was not allowed unless it was underground, because religion was the opiate of the masses, and those who believed in God were victims of a cult of superstition.  Atheism was the official doctrine of the party.  If there ever was a country that needed to provide an opiate for its long-suffering and disillusioned workers, something to allow them to escape the monotony of their predestined future, it was Russia.   Instead, many Russians tried to forget their grey lives by drowning themselves in cheap vodka.  Besides hockey, drinking was the national sport.  Western society offered every kind of decadent temptation, although Westerners knew that the best of these things were available only to the rich.  But they also knew that with good judgment, luck, and hard work, they could become wealthy and have the stuff of their dreams as well, not something that was an option in Russia except by illegal means.  

In poor countries, often the only way to get ahead is by trickery, by cheating, and not playing by the rules.  If a man lets another steal something that is not bolted down before he does, then he is a fool.  The wise man is not the one who listens to his scruples and conscience.  He will go hungry, but the successful man is the one who got there first to claim the illicit prize.  This moral stance erodes all trust.  When people see the agents of government indulging in corruption, they understand that there are no rules and that dishonesty wins the day.  It's worrying to think about several generations of Russian people growing up like this, people who are not straightforward, who will lie and cheat to get what they want because they have been brutalized and used like lab rats by their governments until they have lost all hope or aspirations for the future.  Having a roof over their head is as much as they can expect.  Instead of dreaming about being a head comrade in some state-supported disintegrating factory, they would probably rather be cruising the Mediterranean on a luxury yacht with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a prostitute in the other, doing every decadent thing their government has denied them.  If they or their fathers had been allowed to flirt with these impossible dreams all along, they would have learned how shallow such aspirations are, but it's hard for a man to think deeply about his actions, to question his morals, when every trace of the higher human spirit has been erased from his soul by a failed experiment.

In my view, there is still time for Russia to rise from its ashes, learn from its mistakes, and build a truly socialist state that does not strip away personal initiative and allows free movement of its people.  The country has the resources to reinvent itself, but in this century, it has done nothing but resist the dubious charms of the West and try to resurrect its long-lost empire, without offering its people workable solutions for modern life. There is no reason except pigheadedness why Russia doesn't look at its Scandinavian neighbours, who have high levels of social satisfaction, and try to save the crumbling motherland from another bloody revolution, though perhaps things have gone too far by now for reason to prevail.