Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 5, 1992 TAG: 9201050267
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SCOTT SHANE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
UTOPIA ONCE HELD PROMISE
IN 1931, a venturesome 20-year-old American named John Scott graduated from the University of Wisconsin, pondered his possibilities - and headed for the Soviet Union.It was not an irrational choice. The United States was in the grip of a deep depression that seemed to betray a fundamental flaw in capitalism. Millions were out of work, and plants were closing every day.
Scott was intrigued by what he heard of the Bolshevik experiment. In once-backward Russia, plants were opening, not closing. The proletariat, led by the great Josef Stalin, was powering a breakneck industrialization unprecedented in history. There was talk of a "new Soviet man," homo Sovieticus, motivated by communist ideals and not base self-interest.
Soviet factories were owned by the workers - and not subject to the whims of absentee, coupon-clipping capitalists. In the Soviet Union, there was no unemployment. The economy was not rocked by mysterious and terrifying cycles of boom and bust. It was ruled by The Plan, a scientific blueprint that would tell managers how much to produce and what to sell it for.
Scott "came to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks had found answers to at least some of the questions Americans were asking each other," as he wrote later in his book "Behind the Urals." "I decided to go to Russia to work, study and to lend a hand in the construction of a society which seemed to be at least one step ahead of the American." He embarked for the Ural Mountains, to join thousands of workers building the world's biggest steel plant at Magnitogorsk.
The Soviet Union, after a lingering illness at the age of 74, has now slipped into history. The utopian promise that caught John Scott's imagination had long ago been shattered by terror and poverty, though its grandiose rhetoric lived on.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics died in such penury, political chaos and universal disgrace that it was hard to remember the more vigorous days of its youth and middle age. The Soviet Union had, to a considerable degree, shaped the century's American politics, from the allied intervention in the Russian civil war, to the strange bedfellows of the anti-Hitler coalition, to the Red scares, domino theories and basement bomb shelters of the Cold War.
At the end, it was hard to remember that for most of the Soviet Union's seven decades, it was far from a foregone conclusion that Soviet communism would perish while American capitalism survived, and not the other way around.
Take 1943, when Wendell Willkie, the businessman and Republican presidential candidate, made a wartime tour of the Soviet Union, which was bearing the brunt of Hitler's defeat and paying for it with 27 million lives. "There is hardly a resident of Russia today whose lot is not as good as or better than his parents' lot was prior to the revolution," Willkie wrote. "Russia is a dynamic country, a vital new society, a force that cannot be bypassed in any future world."
One October day in 1957, the Soviet Union shook the United States by launching the world's first satellite.
In that stunning moment, Sputnik I seemed proof that, far from being the inefficient, second-rate power of U.S. propaganda, the Soviet Union was a disciplined society able to compete and win on the cutting edge of technology.
Take the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1967. In a volume titled "The Soviet Achievement," the British historian J.P. Nettl concluded that the achievement was impressive indeed.
He saw bright prospects: "The Soviet consumer will undoubtedly continue to be substantially better off. His rate of betterment will appear . . . extremely favorable in comparison to Western countries, for the industrial basis of a high expansion rate of consumer goods exists."
Or take, even, December 1979, when Westerners' Christmas was interrupted by the news that Soviet troops had invaded Afghanistan. U.S. officials argued over how vehemently to respond, but no one doubted that the Soviet Union was a superpower that would ruthlessly pursue its geopolitical interests. The cliches then were aggression and expansion, not stagnation or collapse.
There was some objective basis for both respect and fear. Where central control and planned application of resources worked, the Soviet Union worked, as anyone who ever rode Moscow's fast, clean, reliable, even elegant subway can attest. The Bolsheviks made a peasant empire literate, extended the benefits of basic public health to the cities, built a mammoth transportation and energy system and hammered heavy industry into the No. 1 spot in world production of concrete and steel. The Soviet Union matched the military power of the economically stronger United States and in some respects outpaced it in space exploration.
But from the beginning, Soviet myth-making embellished reality, and many Westerners were taken in.
Scott, the University of Wisconsin graduate, saw his idealism tarnished by reality. He discovered workers laboring and living in squalor, with scant attention to such concerns of Western labor unions as job safety. Worse, he found that many of his co-workers were not enthusiastic socialists but prisoners, often arrested on patently false charges and and sentenced to slave labor.
Stalin, Willkie's modest Georgian peasant, who ruled from 1924 to 1953, was building the workers' paradise from the blood and bones of the workers. Between famine, terror and war, some demographers estimate that the Soviet Union may have lost 60 million people between 1917 and 1945.
Ironically, the mass annihilation of human lives under Stalin was inseparable from the country's utopian mission. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag's victim and chronicler, wrote: "The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. . . . Thanks to ideology, the 20th century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions."
Nikita Khrushchev, himself schooled in Stalinist brutality, made a valiant attempt to refashion this legacy. His denunciation of Stalin in the "secret speech" of 1956 promised a break with the past. Sputnik and the cultural thaw added to the promise, and Khrushchev rashly prophesied that the Soviet Union would pass the United States about 1980 and enter the bright future of communism shortly thereafter.
He underestimated the reactionary resilience of the Stalinist legacy. A majority of his colleagues, led by Leonid Brezhnev, seized power in 1964 in a palace coup, sent him to his dacha to contemplate human treachery and put de-Stalinization in the deep freeze for two decades.
Brezhnev's "era of stagnation" would have been an era of sharp decline except for one thing: oil. By a stroke of luck, the discovery of a vast quantity of oil and natural gas in Western Siberia essentially coincided with Brezhnev's consolidation of power. By pumping it inefficiently but rapidly into Soviet cities for domestic use and into oil tankers for export, the Brezhnev regime took the country on a 15-year joy ride that disguised economic decline as "developed socialism."
By 1987, the Soviet Union was far ahead of the United States in production of oil, concrete and steel, but it had 200,000 personal computers compared to the U.S. total of 25 million. There was not a whisper of the information revolution that was transforming not only the United States, but nations like South Korea, Singapore and Thailand as well.
Yuri Andropov, in his brief rule, and his protege, Mikhail Gorbachev, well understood that the Soviet Union was headed for economic catastrophe. Without the oil cushion, it would be impossible to compete with the United States militarily and maintain even the paltry living standard achieved in the 1970s.
So it was that Gorbachev sought to modernize the Soviet system, mainly by easing controls on information. Eventually he learned that there was no way to modernize the system - that there would have to be a choice between modernization and the system. After increasingly dramatic confrontations between the loosed forces of democracy and the market on one side and the old order on the other, culminating in the August coup, the revolution swept aside the Communist Party and the Soviet empire.
As the Soviet Union tumbles onto the ash heap of history, Americans have a stubborn recession to make them appreciate the Bolsheviks' struggle for a better way to organize economic life. American plants are closing again, but there is no more Bolshevik utopia to beckon to the John Scotts of the 1990s.