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Gail Warshofsky Lapidus
Introduction
As THE Soviet system enters the last two decades of the twentieth century, it faces an array of economic, political, and social problems whose scope, complexity, and cumulative impact are unprecedented in the postwar period. At a minimum they portend a widening gap between the expectations of the Soviet population and the capacity of the system to meet them and growing strains over the conduct of economic policy, management of political affairs, and allocation of status and rewards among different social and ethnic groups. At a maximum they could precipitate real manifestations of sociopolitical instability.
In comparison with the situation likely to prevail in the years ahead, the decades following Stalin’s death were characterized by a high degree of social and political stability. The relaxation of terror diminished what had been a major source of popular alienation from the regime, while the combination of rapid economic growth and expanding educational and occupational opportunities helped strengthen the system’s popular support and legitimacy and eased the task of allocating wealth, status, and power among rival social claimants. By ensuring political continuity and stability, by meeting the population’s modest expectations for improved living standards, and by enhancing the power and status of the Soviet Union on the global scene, the post-Stalin leadership was able to tap substantial reservoirs of popular approval and support.
By the time of Brezhnev’s death, the Soviet system had already entered a new era. Andropov and his successors face a considerably bleaker economic and social environment, as well as the prospects of increased political uncertainty both at home and abroad. Declining economic prospects and the crystallization and hardening of social structure are likely to create intensified competition over shrinking increments of material goods and social opportunities. Growing social malaise and increasing manifestations of social strain are already visible. In the absence of an overriding external threat, these internal problems are far more likely to divide than to unite the Soviet population. They are also more likely to constrain than to propel the Soviet leadership in its pursuit of expanded influence abroad.
This essay will examine the evolution of Soviet society in the 1980s and beyond, focusing on five key trends which have direct bearing on the prospects for sociopolitical stability and implications for the conduct of Soviet foreign policy. The task is a daunting one. The Soviet political system, economic system, and military establishment are subject matters relatively well defined, if vast; Soviet “society,” however, is all too often a kind of residual category. Its substance is amorphous, its boundaries ill defined, its independence of political and economic forces problematic, and its impact on foreign policy exceptionally difficult to conceptualize. Moreover, to assess the role and significance of social issues on the conduct of any state’s policies is complicated, even when active and organized groups working in an open democratic environment are able easily to express their policy preferences. Making such judgments about a society which places sharp constraints on public discussion of social issues, and for which observers cannot readily obtain objective data on social conditions, is more difficult still.
This paper will nonetheless attempt to identify and assess points of real or potential strain in the Soviet social fabric which evoke leadership concern, as well as effort toward amelioration. However, connecting these in any precise manner with present and future trends in Soviet external behavior is complicated by several factors: (1) The traditional tendency of all governments and the considerable ability of the Soviet government to insulate the process of foreign policy formulation and execution from domestic pressures; (2) The fact that domestic conditions affect Soviet foreign policy not directly but through the filters of leadership perceptions, filters about which we know little, because of our limited access to the governing elite; (3) The coming replacement of one generation of Soviet leaders by another that may have different perceptions and orientations; (4) The extraordinary juxtaposition of contradictory elements on the contemporary Soviet scene: enormous military power combined with great insecurity, vast economic resources combined with slowing economic growth, considerable social resiliency alongside serious social problems, and institutional rigidity in the face of rising pressures for change. These factors make it exceptionally difficult to offer a balanced assessment of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the Soviet social system and to relate them, however loosely, to the pressures and constraints present and future Soviet leaderships will experience in formulating and pursuing foreign policy objectives.
The Bases of Social and Political Stability after Stalin
The high degree of sociopolitical stability that characterized the post-Stalin era reflected a broad congruence of societal expectations and regime performance in several crucial areas. It depended, first and foremost, on the ability of the leadership to deliver substantial improvements in mass consumption and the level of economic welfare. Despite continuing shortcomings in the level and quality of consumer goods and services, these decades were marked by significant growth in real per-capita consumption. The gains were substantially greater in the 1950s and 1960s than in the 1970s, and they varied considerably among republics, but over the period through 1978 per- capita consumption for the USSR as a whole grew, on the average, 3.2 percent per year. Soviet families, particularly urban families, acquired more and better housing, enjoyed improved diets, and gained access to a wider supply of goods and services, especially consumer durables.
The economic policies pursued by the leadership after Stalin also entailed a substantial reduction of wage differentials while preserving security of employment and relative price stability, especially for basic commodities. The collective farmers, neglected for so long, enjoyed rising incomes and gained access to social programs and benefits from which they had previously been excluded, while the process of “leveling up” wages also brought substantial gains to the poorer-paid segments of the industrial labor force. Increasing equality in the distribution of official incomes was supplemented by two additional policies: a continuing commitment to job security, and the maintenance of stable prices for basic commodities. Taken together, these constituted the central ingredients of a tacit “social compact” between the leadership and its population, in which the latter was expected to support the regime and its policies. This compact, in turn, established the foundation for the special benefits enjoyed by key elites, whom the Brezhnev regime accorded enhanced personal and political security, increased material rewards, and a broad array of privileges.
For substantial segments of the Soviet population, a rising stan-dard of living was also a function of substantial upward social mobility. The expansion of educational opportunities and attainments provided a major channel for social advancement, while rapid growth of white-collar and technical occupations offered new employment opportunities and enhanced social status to the offspring of peasants and workers. This process was especially dramatic in the less developed republics of the USSR and contributed significantly to the regime’s success in coopting native elites in non-Russian areas. The leadership was thus in a position to expand and consolidate its social base by supplementing material rewards with social recognition and status.
A third factor contributing to stability was the substantial congruence of elite and popular values. As the refugee interviews of the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System demonstrated in the 1950s, and as more recent emigre interviews reaffirm, even those Soviet citizens who reject many aspects of the system reveal great attachment to the dominant values of its political culture: order, discipline, paternalism, and social conservatism. They highly value security and stability in social and political life and appear to assign relatively low importance to political and civil liberties. Moreover, the experience of past decades suggests that the average Soviet citizen holds relatively modest material as well as political expectations and is rather passive in the face of disappointment. Finally, the leadership has been able to capitalize on a considerable reservoir of nationalist and patriotic feeling, not only on the part of the Russian majority but extending to the population as a whole. Soviet victory in the Second World War, the emergence of the Soviet Union as a major military and industrial power, the achievement of strategic parity in the 1970s, and its status and recognition as a global actor on the international arena all evoke considerable pride and satisfaction. These attitudes constitute a major political asset and contribute to the stability and perceived legitimacy of the Soviet system.
This combination of material and normative incentives was sus-tained by a residual system of coercion employing a wide and subtle range of instruments to maintain social control and deter sociopolitical deviance but far less central, visible, and unpredictable than during the Stalin period. All these factors help explain the ability of the post-Stalin Soviet leadership to deal successfully with significant challenges to its rule, including an unprecedented level of intelligentsia dissent.
Potential Constraints on Regime Performance
A number of domestic factors will affect the capacity of the Soviet leaders to meet societal demands and expectations in the 1980s and beyond.
First and foremost among the potential constraints on regime performance are declining rates of economic growth. Because economic performance has been so central to the stability and perceived legitimacy of the system, within the elite as well as for the population itself, the prospect of low-growth introduces new uncertainties. It will compel difficult choices about the allocation of resources in a system which until now has enjoyed the luxury of being able to afford guns, butter, and growth simultaneously. Where high rates of growth permitted the leadership to satisfy the demands of key interest groups, bureaucracies, and regional elites, low-growth will intensify the competition among rival claimants and reduce the resources available for managing conflicts. It is already constraining the leadership’s ability to sustain steady improvements in consumer welfare. Moreover, to the extent that current problems compel new initiatives in economic policy, they are likely to entail relatively high social costs. Thus, measures which might alleviate current economic difficulties, such as freeing the labor market at the expense of job security or reforming the price structure to reduce the state subsidy of basic commodities, would jeopardize key elements of the existing social compact and generate significant working-class discontent.
Economic constraints will be compounded in coming decades by broad changes in social structure which reduce opportunities for upward social mobility. A sequence of major upheavals and social trans-formations—from the revolution itself to the rapid industrialization and urbanization created by the Five-Year plans, to the impact of the purges and of World War II—generated opportunities for rapid upward movement. Sons and daughters of peasants left the countryside to join the urban working class, while the offspring of urban workers moved into rapidly expanding white-collar and administrative jobs. Education increasingly became the major channel of upward social mobility, especially for movement across the manual-nonmanual line. While the drama of transition from rural to urban, from peasant to industrial society is largely over, the ambitions and aspirations it generated linger to create a set of major social problems for the Soviet leadership.
Moreover, as prospects for further improvement in living stan-dards decline, the stakes in the mobility competition increase. The relative costs or benefits associated with different social statuses become more salient, and the visibility of the stratification system is enhanced. A growing social potential for disaffection and alienation is therefore a likely consequence of current trends.
Unfavorable demographic trends constitute a third source of constraints demanding the Soviet leadership’s attention. Declining birthrates among the Slavic and Baltic populations, coupled with high rates of reproduction among the Moslem populations of Soviet Central Asia, will intensify competition for resources among different regions and republics and for access to higher education and valued jobs within them. Moreover, differential birthrates will also compound the problems posed by a labor shortage and by an economically irrational distribution of labor resources among the major regions of the country, as well as the problems posed by rising ethnonationalism among Russians and non-Russians alike.
Fourth, the process of political succession is likely to complicate the management of current problems further. The Brezhnev era was characterized by elite consensus around the rules of the political game and a tacit understanding to confine conflicts within a circumscribed milieu; the Andropov era offers the likelihood of intensified political competition. The immobilism of the Brezhnev leadership served to intensify the pressures for new initiatives, while the imminence of a massive turnover of an entire political generation provides an element of additional high unpredictability. Major conflicts over policy and power, articulation of alternative programs, and even appeals to domestic constituencies are likely to be more frequent in the years ahead, given the considerable temptations to aspiring contenders to expand their social and political base. Thus, the political climate carries the potential for significant shifts in orientations of the political elite, which could affect such major social issues as the relative priority of consumer welfare, the scope and limits of egalitarianism in economic and social policy, and the balance between the claims of Russian nationalism and the demands of the non-Russian nationalities.
Finally, the Soviet leadership faces a less benign international environment than has prevailed during much of the post-Stalin era. The demise of Soviet-American detente and the confrontational foreign policy stance of the Reagan administration in its dealings with the USSR necessarily impinge on domestic priorities, concerns, and policy debates. Pressures for increased military outlays, greater economic autarky, heightened internal vigilance, and reduced exposure of the Soviet population to foreign influences are more easily sustained in an atmosphere of siege and confrontation than in the more benign environment associated with detente. Increased repression of dissidents, renewed jamming of foreign radio broadcasts after a seven-year lull, major cutbacks in telephone communications between the USSR and the West, the decline in the number of exit visas for Israel granted by Soviet authorities (from 51,000 in 1979 to 10,000 in 1981 to 2600 in 1982), and renewed attacks on Western lifestyles and on contacts between Soviet citizens and foreigners are but a few examples of the tightening of internal controls which have accompanied the deterioration of Soviet-American relations.
Political legitimacy can be eroded by unfavorable changes in ob-jective social and economic conditions or by subjective changes in expectations and demands which alter the terms of the implicit social compact between leaders and led. The potential for such a de-velopment is greater than at any time in postwar Soviet history as the Soviet leadership faces a series of unprecedented social problems.
Stagnation in Living Standards
The most critical social problem with which the Soviet leadership of the 1980s will have to contend, one with direct bearing on the prospects for sociopolitical stability, is the impact of resource con-straints on the leadership’s ability to sustain its commitment to improve living conditions. For the first time in the last thirty years, economic performance will be insufficient to provide more than a marginal increase in per-capita consumption unless productivity increases dramatically or resources are reallocated from investment or military spending. In their absence, improvements in the standard of living could come to a halt.
Progress since Stalin
From the late 1920s until 1953, the Soviet population was victim of a strategy of economic growth that accelerated the development of heavy industrial and military capabilities at the expense of mass welfare. At the time of Stalin’s death, the Soviet living standard was only slightly above that of 1928; the Soviet people were “ill-fed, ill-housed, and ill-clothed by any modern standard.”1 Their diet was worse, and the scarcity of consumer goods and personal services reflected the low priority Stalin’s investment strategy assigned to consumer needs. Only education and health care, treated as investments in human capital, had experienced real advances.
The quarter century which followed Stalin’s death saw a major reordering of priorities to redress the gross imbalance of the Stalinist strategy, and the Soviet consumer benefited from allocation of a higher share of annual increments from rising GNP to consumption. Rising living standards, reflected in improved diet, housing, supplies of consumer durables, and clothing, resulted from an increase in percapita consumption averaging roughly 4 percent annually from 1951 to 1975. The greatest gains were made in the 1950s and in the late 1960s; during the 1970s growth rates slowed to roughly 2.5 percent per year and fell below 2 percent in 1981 (Table 4.1).
For the Soviet consumer, these broad trends translate into con-crete improvements in everyday welfare. A sharp increase in percapita food consumption has meant improvements for the average diet, which now contains higher proportions of meat, milk, and vegetables and less bread and potatoes than previously. Even so, the Soviet consumer still obtains half his or her calories from bread and potatoes and eats less than half as much meat as his or her Western counter-part.
An improvement in housing conditions has been another benefit of the “new deal” for Soviet consumers. As a result of a massive building program, a majority of urban families now have their own apartments, although an estimated 30 percent still live in dormitories or share kitchen and bathroom facilities with neighbors. Virtually all urban housing now has electricity, indoor plumbing, hot water, gas, and central heating; in rural areas only electricity is widely available. Cramped conditions and poor quality remain a subject of widespread complaints. Despite a virtual doubling from 4.7 square meters in 1950 to 8.4 square meters in 1978, urban living space still remains below the norm for minimum “health and decency” of 9 square meters per capita that the Soviet government set in 1929.
The availability of other consumer goods, from clothing to con-sumer durables, has increased sharply in recent decades. A high proportion of Soviet families are reported to own radios (85 percent), televisions (83 percent), refrigerators (86 percent), and washing machines (70 percent), all virtually nonexistent in the 1950s, although automobiles remain the exception rather than the rule, with 9 cars for every 100 families in 198o.
International Comparisons
By international standards, the growth in consumption from the mid-1950s to 1978 was substantial but far from unique: Soviet rates of growth were exceeded by those registered in Japan, West Germany, and France, equalled those of Italy, and remained ahead of the United States and the United Kingdom. During the 1970s, however, the slowing Soviet rate left only Italy, the United Kingdom, and Czechoslovakia behind. Although the gap between Soviet living standards and those of Western industrial societies narrowed during the 1960s, in the 1970s it began to widen.
A Soviet citizen in a position to make the comparison would have discovered that per-capita consumption in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s was roughly one-third that of the United States. He or she would also have observed striking variations among categories. Expenditures on education, for example, were relatively high compared to American levels, reaching almost four-fifths of the American level, while those on food and clothing were half the American level, on medical care one-third, on consumer durables one-fifth, on housing one-seventh, and on private transportation one-twenty-fifth of the American level. The structure of Soviet consumption more closely resembles that of less developed countries than it does patterns prevailing in other industrial societies, with relatively high expenditures devoted to goods, and relatively low expenditures to the poorly developed service sector. Thus, food, beverages, and tobacco represent almost half of total Soviet consumption, compared with one-fifth of American and 25—40 percent of European totals. The share of consumption devoted to hard liquor is exceptionally high, 17 percent, while the shares for housing, health, and education are lowest of all. The low expenditures on health, 4 percent, may appear surprising, but they reflect the low wages, sparse use of materials, price differentials, and relatively inferior quality of Soviet health services in comparison with European and American standards.
Another way of placing Soviet consumption into a broader com-parative perspective is by comparing the relationship between average wages and the prices of basic commodities in different countries. As Table 4.2 indicates, to purchase the contents of a typical weekly shopping basket for a Soviet family of four, an industrial worker in Washington, D.C. would have to work 18.6 hours, in Munich 23.3, in Paris 22.2, in London 25.7, and in Moscow 53.5. Combining monthly rent with the shopping basket reduces the disparities because of the heavy state subsidization of housing costs in the Soviet Union. The most extreme differences occur with respect to certain consumer durables, particularly automobiles, where a Moscow worker would have to devote five times as many months of work for its purchase as his London counterpart, and ten times as long as a worker in Washington, D.C.
Retail Prices of Goods and Services in Units of Work-Time,March 1982 (Weekly Basket of Consumer Goods for FourPersons at Soviet Level of Consumption in March 1982, Expressed as Work-Time Units)
The 1980s
In the 1980s, declining allocations to consumption are likely to compound serious shortcomings in the provision of consumer goods and services and to further intensify a serious imbalance between the supply of desired goods and services and effective demand. Acute shortages of food products and other prized consumer goods develop side by side with rising inventories of unsalable products. As rising incomes outstrip the production of wanted goods and services, a thriving private “second economy” flourishes to bridge the gap. Mounting cash deposits in savings banks exceeded half of total disposable money incomes in 1979, while Soviet and Western economists alike can only guess at the size of cash hoards in private hands. This combination of slowing growth in material welfare and a growing overhang of purchasing power poses difficult economic and social problems, while available remedies carry high social costs.
Food. The food supply has become an especially serious economic and political problem in the last few years. Chronic agricultural problems, compounded by a succession of poor harvests, have created near-stagnation in agricultural output and widespread shortages of meat, dairy products, fruits, and vegetables, especially in smaller cities. The state has imposed rationing of a number of food products, and has relied increasingly on special distribution channels to supplement distribution through retail trade outlets. The widening gap in prices between state stores and collective farm markets further reflects growing shortages; official Soviet writings confirm unofficial reports that indicate price differentials ranging from 1.5 to 4 times higher. According to one Soviet economist, prices on collective farm markets exceeded state prices by 37 percent in 1965, 55 percent in 1970, 75 percent in 1975, and 100 percent in 1979.2
The willingness of the Soviet leadership to import large quan-tities of grain and food products—which now account for one-third of all hard currency imports—is clear evidence of the high priority assigned the food program and the real concern about its social and political consequences. Indeed, by the final year of Brezhnev’s rule it had become the central domestic issue, “not only a paramount economic task but also an urgent social and political task,” as Brezhnev himself put it in convening a special session of the Central Committee in 1982 to address it.3
Consumer goods. Although the food supply has taken on particular urgency, the limited availability and poor quality of consumer goods and services more generally are an important source of dissatisfaction. Rising incomes and living standards have increased the demands and expectations of consumers, who fill Soviet publications with com-plaints about the poor quality, durability, and style of Soviet products. According to one source, the proportion of goods either rejected or lowered in grade when received by trade organizations has increased in recent years to the point that “trade refuses to accept one of every 10 garments, one of every 8 pairs of shoes, and one of every 10 meters of fabric.”4 Repairs were needed on 227,000 refrigerators from enterprises of one ministry alone and on over 1.5 million television sets of another. Greater consumer leverage has also resulted in growing ac-cumulations of unsalable goods. In 1978 alone some 4.6 billion rubles worth of goods had accumulated in unsold inventories, and the state budget allocated about $1 billion annually to cover losses on such goods.
The underdevelopment of the retail trade network and the in-adequate development of consumer and personal services create further problems for the Soviet consumer. In the mid-196os housework consumed close to 1 billion manand woman-hours. The average Soviet woman walked 12 to 13 km/day in the course of four hours of domestic chores. He, or more usually, she, devoted enormous time and energy to the tasks of “hunting and gathering.” The word “to shop” is “dostat’.,” meaning “to procure,” with a broad spectrum of connotations: locating desired goods at suitable prices, queuing, bartering, bribing, and exchanging favors. In a recent article devoted entirely to the problem of shortages, a Soviet economist lamented that “a large part of the population is preoccupied with the search for scarce goods.”5
The social consequences of declining rates of economic growth will depend on both the severity of the slowdown itself and on the policy choices which the leadership makes in attempting to cope with it. If productivity remains flat in the 1980s, if the share of defense spending remains constant, and if investment continues to rise at 3.5 percent per annum, a growth rate of GNP of roughly 3 percent per year would permit per-capita consumption to rise approximately 2 percent per year, a level that would allow a slow but nonetheless continuing improvement in living conditions. Under more pessimistic and likely assumptions of growth rates at or below 2 percent per year, or of rising defense expenditures, the growth of consumption would fall below 1 percent per year, bringing the improvement of mass welfare to a virtual standstill.
While initial economies are likely to touch those categories of socially marginal expenditures least visible in the short run, such as health and education, a severe slowdown over a protracted period would force retrenchment in higher-priority and more visible areas. While the expectations of the Soviet population remain modest by Western standards, they have nonetheless been shaped by the promises and achievements of the past three decades, as well as by exposure to the world outside Soviet borders.
Social consequences. Because economic performance has been so central to sociopolitical stability, the consequences of this stagnation are potentially serious. First, a slowdown in the rate of improvement of living standards will disappoint the expectations which past promises and performance have generated. While Khrushchev’s promise that by 1980 the Soviet population would enjoy “the highest living standard in the world” has long been discounted, the Soviet leadership has repeatedly declared raising the level of material welfare its major goal. The large investments of recent years in agriculture, including grain imports, housing, consumer goods, and automobiles offer evidence of the degree to which it bases its own sense of legitimacy on improvements in mass welfare. A standstill or reversal of these trends would clearly weaken its popular support as well.
Second, these problems erode the effectiveness of the material incentives so critical to the leadership’s efforts to improve labor pro-ductivity and to maximize labor force participation. An increasingly educated and sophisticated labor force cannot be coerced into increased efficiency; only a developed and flexible incentive system is likely to elicit the needed results. At this stage in Soviet history these incentives depend above all on the availability of desired goods and services; if increased effort cannot be translated into improved living standards, worker motivation is eroded.
Third, shortcomings in the supply and distribution of goods and services in official channels not only divert increasing shares of time and energy into procurement but also encourage the expansion of unofficial or illegal networks. The imbalance between effective demand and the supply of goods and services provides a powerful impetus to the development of the “second economy,” which in turn leads to an unofficial and uncontrollable redistribution of resources and income. While this may have its functional aspects and provide a safety valve for consumer discontent, it does so at the price of severe distortions of economic relations and the erosion of public norms. Ultimately, reduced availability of resources for material incentives and the growing difficulties of controlling and directing their use may contribute to increased authoritarianism and greater reliance on coercive instruments for dealing with labor problems, however counterproductive they might prove to be.
Soviet options. While there are a number of possible remedies to this situation, each of them carries high costs. A price reform that would attempt to bring supply and demand into balance, possibly combined with a currency revaluation to capture large cash hoards, would require sharp increases in the prices of basic commodities, particularly food. While this would make possible a substantial reduction in government subsidies as well, now covering virtually half the cost of meat, to take one example, the Soviet leadership has been fearful of such an approach because of its potential for social unrest. Events in Poland have a double edge: they demonstrate not only the urgency of economic reform but also its extraordinary risk. Moreover, because the Soviet elite is itself deeply enmeshed in economic corruption, as was its Polish counterpart, the potential for instability exists at every level of the system. Under these circumstances, the costs of fundamental reform may continue to outweigh the perceived costs of the status quo.
A second option would attempt to increase labor productivity and make more efficient use of labor resources by encouraging the dismissal and transfer of redundant workers. While the Shchekino experiment, which attempted this on a small scale, demonstrated its possible rewards, it also raised the specter of unemployed workers. The potential threat to the job security that is so central to the tacit social compact between the regime and the population and central also to the ideological contrast of socialist and capitalist systems has thus far prevented a broader application of this approach.
A third option would allot an increased role to the private sector for providing not only food supplies but other consumer goods and services. Some steps in this direction have already been taken in ag-riculture, both by expanding private plots and by encouraging industrial enterprises to develop auxiliary agricultural activities. The possibilities in retail trade are especially great. But both ideological and practical concerns place obstacles in the path of such developments and discussion has not been followed by action.
Finally, the leadership could contemplate a more radical expan-sion of the private sector, a reform along the lines of the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, which would encourage small-scale private entrepreneurship in retail trade and the services while maintaining central control over the “commanding heights” of the economy. But a major reform of the economic system in the direction of decentralizing would be so far-reaching in its consequences for virtually every aspect of economic, political, and social life that it would require a unique combination of economic and political conditions to make it appear both essential and feasible. Consequently, a continuing but unofficial expansion of private economic activity and a continuing growth of the second economy—punctuated by periodic official campaigns against corruption—are the most likely short-term responses to the declining prospects of the state sector.
Declining Opportunities for Upward Social Mobility
One of the Soviet system’s major political assets has been its asso-ciation with greatly expanded opportunities for educational and pro-fessional advancement. The Stalin regime enjoyed immense success in persuading the population that it provided significantly greater chances for upward social mobility than had a tsarism few remembered or a capitalism none had experienced. The rhetorical exaltation of workers as the “leading” social class and of collectivized peasants as their close ally combined, paradoxically, with periodic reminders that Soviet conditions made it easy for the talented to ascend from these classes and become members of the intelligentsia. Membership in the “leading class” and upward mobility out of it were taken, simultaneously, as evidence of the justice of the new social order. In a period of slowing growth and growing crystalization of the social structure, this particular political asset is nearly spent.
Moreover, the conjunction of diminishing economic growth with slowing social mobility creates a distinctively new set of problems. An economy in straitened circumstances can moderate public dissatisfaction if it can nonetheless offer large numbers the prospect of improving their individual positions by some combination of effort, acquisition of credentials, and expertise. Career success, the ability to claim a larger share of a stable or shrinking economic pie, and enhanced social status can serve to offset or compensate for a slowdown in mass consumption. However, the Soviet economy is no longer expanding in ways that hold out that prospect, and the comparatively fluid social structure of earlier times has frozen in ways that tend to maintain existing social groups in their places.
Social Mobility under Stalin
A succession of historical developments were responsible for the high rates of social mobility which characterized Soviet society under Stalin: the revolution, with its violent attack on traditional social elites and the distribution of wealth, status, and power; the process of rapid industrialization, collectivization of agriculture, and urbanization launched by the Five-Year Plans which precipitated an exodus from the countryside and created an insatiable demand for industrial workers and a larger intelligentsia and administrative apparatus; the swelling of the state and Party bureaucracies, which gave further impetus to expansion of the intelligentsia; and the casualties of the purges and then of World War II, which created a growing deficit of males and fueled the massive entry of women into the labor force. These developments sustained a fluidity of social structure and expanding opportunities for social mobility until well into the post-Stalin period. The pressures from above were complemented by a “demand” from below, as the sons and daughters of peasants left the countryside in pursuit of urban employment, while the offspring of workers sought to move into prestigious and better-rewarded white-collar jobs. Their desires were nourished by and largely coincided with the needs of the regime itself.
Increasingly, education became the key to social mobility, espe-cially for movement across the manual-nonmanual line. Demand and desire, plus basic literacy, sufficed to move a peasant to worker status. For ambitious urban workers and their children, workers’ facilities (rabfaki) were created to prepare, in rapidfire fashion, talented “proletarians” with the equivalent of secondary schooling necessary to go on to higher education, while vydvizhenie, direct promotion, based largely on political and social criteria, propelled former workers into management positions. The network of formal educational institutions also expanded rapidly, with growing numbers of children entering primary and secondary institutions as well as trade schools, and growing numbers continuing to universities or more specialized higher educational institutions.
Stalin’s social policies in the 1930s began to stabilize and consoli-date an increasingly hierarchical social system, which offered extraor-dinary rewards for political loyalty and technical skill but still retained a high degree of fluidity. The removal of political impediments to access to higher education for children of formerly privileged strata and the institution of fees for later years of secondary (and higher) education in 1940 altered the class composition of student bodies. Worker and peasant students made up 72 percent of higher education enrollment in 1932, but only 56 percent, a vast underrepresentation of their “weight” in the society at large, in 1938. A new Stalinist elite began to emerge, for whom personal insecurity was the price of social advantage. Even so, these were still years of educational expansion and upward mobility. More children of humble birth, year by year, completed secondary education (though still a minority), more in absolute numbers moved on to higher education. The upper reaches of the system retained room for both privileged and under-privileged. The system offered a stake to those who took advantage of the opportunities it offered, while rapid social mobility helped to compensate for the decline in real incomes and mass welfare which accompanied Stalinist industrialization.
The Social Hierarchy
The drama of transition from rural to urban, from peasant to in-dustrial society is a tale once told. But the desires it fostered and the aspirations for mobility with which it suffused many sectors of society remain and create a major problem for the Soviet leadership in the years ahead. The problems became visible in the early 196os, when the Soviet social system reflected many features associated with modern industrial societies everywhere. It was a hierarchical social system composed of five major groups. At the bottom of the social ladder were the collective farm peasants, disadvantaged on virtually all social indicators and excluded until the mid-1960s from state pensions and other welfare benefits. Next in the hierarchy stood workers, varying in their educational level, skills, and incomes, depending on whether they worked in favored branches of heavy industry or in lower-paid light and consumer industries. The white-collar stratum, largely female in composition, ranked somewhere in the middle in terms of education, income, and prestige. At the apex of the social pyramid stood the intelligentsia and the nachalniks or governing political elite, sharing comparable life styles and incomes but distinguished by the fact that the power of the ruling elite derived from its positions, while that of the intelligentsia stemmed from the authority and prestige inherent in the functions it performed.
These broad social groups differed significantly not only in such objective indicators as education, income, prestige, political participation, and access to scarce goods and services, but also in attitudes, life styles, and behavior, as a proliferation of Soviet sociological studies has made abundantly clear. Indeed, while some Soviet sociologists deny the applicability of Western stratification theory to the USSR, insisting that the concept of “lower” and “higher” social strata is fundamentally inapplicable to a socialist society, others maintain that differentiation among socio-occupational groups is even more significant under socialism than under capitalism precisely because property recedes in importance as a determinant of social status.
This social structure, like that of other modern industrial societies, is based on socio-occupational groupings, but it differs in one significant respect. In the West, market forces are decisive in shaping the stratification system, and the class position an individual occupies is the crucial determinant of his or her life chances. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, political decisions shape social stratification and political or administrative roles create access to resources or opportunities that are quite independent of market forces. Because the distribution of rewards reflects political regulation rather than the operation of market forces, the policy choices of different groups of leaders have considerable influence on both individual incomes and the position of social groups.
To the extent that the party consciously attempted to prevent social strata from consolidating and transmitting their privileges, as was the case under Khrushchev, the system preserved elements of its earlier social fluidity. In more recent years, however, the combination of enhanced personal security, reduced political turnover, and consolidation of the elite’s prerogatives has promoted the emergence of a privileged stratum which enjoys not merely high incomes but access to goods and services not available on the “market” or accessible to the ordinary Soviet citizen; from high-quality housing to restricted stores carrying deficit or imported goods at nominal prices to special medical and vacation facilities and to travel abroad.
Access to Higher Education
The crystalization of a new social hierarchy has also meant the growing ability of new elites to transmit their advantaged position to offspring. Here the evolution of the Soviet educational system played a crucial role. While a “sorting” process still occurs at the transition from eightto ten-year education (with the social profile of those who continue for the ninth and tenth years more “elite”), a growing share of the age cohort completes the ten years of education necessary for subsequent admission to a higher educational institution. However, admissions to such institutions are restricted, and as their rate of growth slowed—from 10 percent between 1961 and 1965 to 3.5 percent from 1966 to 1970 to only 1.2 percent from 1971 to 1975—only a progressively smaller share of growing cohort of secondary school graduates could continue to higher education. Where over half could go on in the early 1950s, today only one in seven enjoys that opportunity (Table 4.3). This situation is responsible for a growing gap between the aspirations of young people for higher education and the possibilities of their realization. Khrushchev’s ill-fated educational reforms of 1958, though largely prompted by a growing labor shortage, were also an effort to address the consequences of this problem: a society increasingly overeducated for its occupational structure, a generation of young people aspiring to be engineers and disdainful of manual jobs, and a privileged elite attempting to use the educational system to pass its advantaged position to its offspring.
By the 1960s Soviet sociologists were openly expressing concern about the lack of “fit” between the educational and career aspirations of young people and the possibilities open to them. The disparity was evident in a succession of studies that revealed that over three- quarters of graduating secondary school students hoped to continue their studies at a time when far fewer were actually able to do so (Table 4.4). In the heightened competition for access, different social strata differed markedly in their prospects for success, with the offspring of peasant background uniquely disadvantaged: nine out of ten children of urban nonmanuals who desired to continue their education full-time were able to do so, compared to only one out of ten peasant offspring.
Less systematic but more humorous testimony to the disparity between young people’s aspirations and societal needs was offered by a 1973 account of the results of a Young Communist League survey:
Let us transport ourselves magically to a desert island where each of the pupils has become what he wanted to be. We find many designers, but only seven construction workers and one work superintendent. Every tenth person is a doctor, but there are only five nurses. Manufacturing is hopelessly bad, with only eighty factory workers. There are hundreds of journalists and writers, but no printers to publish their work. We find one restaurant director, twenty-three cooks and no waiter—but with only seven livestock specialists, one tractor driver and one fisherman it is hard to feed all the scientists, actors and coaches at work on the island.6
In the view of many Soviet sociologists, the combination of exces-sively high aspirations on the one hand and disdain for blue-collar jobs on the other has resulted in serious demoralization when expectations were disappointed. The “shattering” of career plans contributes to “attitudes of skepticism” and “a weakening of belief in ideals,” according to one leading Soviet specialist.7 High labor turnover reflects the unhealthy tendency for young people to “roam” from one low-level and unsatisfying job to another, jobs they view as “temporary evils” until they succeed in gaining admission to a higher educational institution, which usually fails to happen.
Educational Aspirations of Secondary School Graduatesand Their Realization, by Social Group,Novosibirsk Region, 1963 (%)
Some Soviet scholars maintain that the problem has begun to ease in the last few years as students reduce their aspirations to correspond with a realistic assessment of their chances. Supporting his contention that “the career plans of graduating students are moving into greater conformity with the objective requirements of Soviet society,” one well-known Soviet sociologist, F. R. Filippov, maintains that 80 to 90 percent of secondary school students in the mid-1960s were inclined to continue their studies, but that the figure had dropped to about 46 percent in 1973—75.8 Fragmentary evidence of a decline in applications to higher educational institutions, from 269 per 100 vacancies in 1970 to 245 in 1977, would support his view. However, it is children of workers and collective farmers who are more likely to scale down their aspirations than the offspring of employees and specialists. The increasing competitiveness over access in the past two decades has therefore tended to strengthen the position of children from advantaged families.
Numerous studies conducted by Soviet sociologists since the early 1960s document that children from higher status families tend to begin formal schooling with better preparation, achieve higher levels of academic performance, have higher educational aspirations, and experience greater success in fulfilling those aspirations than their less advantaged counterparts. They dominate the specialized secondary schools for talented children that offer advanced training in the sciences, mathematics, and foreign languages. Moreover, not only do they make up a disproportionate share of the applicant pool at higher educational institutions, but they are more successful in winning admission. In short, the Soviet system experiences the same contradiction between a commitment to equality and a commitment to rapid social and economic development that other societies confront. As two leading sociologists put it:
Socialist society is interested in selecting those individuals who will yield maximum benefits in the future as skilled specialists. Competitive examinations for higher educational institutions, generally speaking, enable us to choose those who are best prepared to master a given specialty. But it is well known that the degree of preparation of an applicant depends not only on his natural abilities, but also on the material and cultural level of the family in which he was raised, on the quality of teaching in the secondary school that he attended, and on many other factors that promote the early development of abilities and the acquisition of greater knowledge by the time of the examination…. In ignoring the conditions under which applicants are trained, and in making judgments based only on the applicants’ knowledge, admissions committees in effect sanction inequality of opportunity.9
Family position affects educational opportunities in more direct and material ways as well. Children of higher status families are more successful in passing the entrance examinations because of their ability to utilize private tutoring. The rector of Moscow University himself announced in 1969 that 85 percent of the students admitted to the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics that year had received private instruction prior to taking the entrance examinations.10 A 1975 article in Komsomol’.skaia pravda testified to the widespread social acceptance of this phenomenon:
“The contest of tutors”—do you remember how at first this sounded like a joke? But only at first. Just listen to your acquaintances, sit in on the entrance examinations for the higher schools, where the parents of secondary school graduates nervously await the results—it is a surprising fact that people are no longer ashamed of having tutors, they are proud of them. They call them by their titles and, among circles of friends, by the posts they hold. The costlier the tutor, the more prestige he has. This means that our system of free education, equally available to everyone and based on competition in knowledge, has been invaded by the ruble.11
Financial circumstances also affect the ability of young people to defer employment in order to continue their studies. Although the state heavily subsidizes higher education, providing stipends for almost three-fourths of full-time students and subsidized dormitory accommodations for roughly half, students still depend in varying degrees upon family support.
Finally, the meritocratic features of educational access are tem-pered by informal practices which discriminate against or offer pref-erential treatment to particular individuals or members of social groups. Accumulating evidence makes it clear that examination procedures are manipulated to exclude Jewish applications or to promote “affirmative action” on behalf of non-Russian nationalities and that well-placed or well-endowed parents are frequently in a position to influence the selection process on behalf of their offspring.12 Although the use of influence or bribery by elite families has come under attack in recent years, the selection process itself invites such corruption.
As a consequence, higher educational institutions have taken on an increasingly elitist profile, with the most prestigious institutions drawing a larger share of students from intelligentsia families, while those of lower quality or those offering training in less prestigious fields attract higher proportions of students of working class or peasant background. The emergence of a hierarchically stratified system of higher educational institutions thus corresponds to the crystalization of status within the population more broadly and to a decline in opportunities for upward social mobility via formal education for worker and particularly for peasant youth.
Increasingly competitive access to higher education does not completely close off the opportunity for upward mobility to working class or peasant offspring. Extensive programs of continuing, adult, and on-the-job education are available to the Soviet worker; although their quality is low, formal certification of new skills is an almost automatic guarantee of job promotion. More important still, the party itself continues to represent an alternative channel for upward movement, as do careers in the KGB and the military, although these too demand increasing qualifications. Ambitious and talented young people rising within these channels have access to separate educational and training institutions at various stages of their careers; the party in particular maintains a broad network of schools and programs for this purpose.
Nonetheless, the Soviet leadership has been sufficiently concerned about the problem to have attempted to diminish or defuse the frustration of aspirations inherent in this situation in a number of ways. Not wishing to expand enrollments in higher education, and thereby create an even greater imbalance between educational enrollments and occupational needs, it has sought simultaneously to expand opportunities for lower social strata and to lower aspirations.
First, it established highly visible, if limited, opportunities for more disadvantaged young people to enter higher educational in-stitutions. In 1969, it created preparatory divisions, reminiscent of the rabfaks of an earlier era, to alter the social composition of higher educational institutions by offering college preparatory programs to young people employed as workers or collective farmers for at least a year. At the same time, the leadership has promoted a major expansion and upgrading of the network of vocational-technical schools to attract larger numbers of young people into programs training skilled workers. Thirdly, it has sought to increase the attractiveness of bluecollar occupations by increasing their rewards. The narrowing of wage differentials between blue-collar, white-collar, and engineering occupations during the past two decades represents just such an effort, although it appears to have reached its limits. Finally, it has launched a highly visible if selective attack on bribery and other forms of corruption in the competition for access to higher education. Indeed, the head of the Azerbaidzhan party organization and recently elected full member of the Politburo, Gaidar Aliev, specifically described such efforts in a recent article, mentioning a decree that specifically forbade family members of the republic’s administrative elite from even applying for admission to medical schools, an implicit admission that only Draconian measures could forestall corrupt practices.
It is too early to evaluate the success of these efforts. Yet even if aspirations, expressed by application to higher education, are moderating, this does not resolve the problem; much expressed willingness to settle for less than an intelligentsia career may mask serious disgruntlement. Were this not the case, young men and women would make more use of specialized secondary or vocational-technical “trade” schools. While enrollment in the latter increased in the 1970s for those deciding not to complete academic secondary school (from 6.4 percent of those completing eighth year in schools in the Russian Republic in 1973 to 14.0 percent in 1977), so also did the percentage of eighth graders moving into complete academic secondary education: 54 percent in 1973, 61 in 1977.
Moreover, even if a larger cohort moves from secondary education directly into employment, the gap between aspirations and job content will not necessarily diminish. Rising educational attainments tend to increase the demand for more satisfying and nonroutine jobs, but educational attainment in the USSR is actually outrunning the increase of such jobs. Indeed, a number of Soviet analysts are concerned that job dissatisfaction will be a growing rather than a diminishing problem in the years ahead. V. Churbanov, writing in 1973, formulated the problem of “educated youth and uninteresting work” in these terms:
The higher a young person’s educational level, the greater his need for interesting work. Yet most industrial work presently requires no more than a sixth to eighth grade education, and the scientific and technical revolution is not expected to keep pace with the spread of education in the next few years. The transition to universal secondary education, otherwise so desirable, will only exacerbate this problem.13
Thus, Soviet social policy faces in the 1980s and 1990s a situation which calls for considerable finesse. Ideally, in the face of labor and capital shortages the state should divert teenagers from general secondary training and expand instead specialized secondary or vocational-technical education which will lead them to jobs as skilled and more productive workers. Morale should rise, productivity should increase (insofar as this is an outcome of workers’ skill and morale), and this generation of new workers should in turn raise a generation of offspring ready in large numbers to duplicate their parental status, in line with a realistic appreciation of the “needs” of the economy in the years to come.
This is not likely to happen. As the prospects for significant further improvement of living standards grow distant in a low-growth economy, stakes in the mobility competition increase. Except in the unlikely event that the structure of wages is radically transformed, the relative costs of being a worker and the advantages of being a professional will increase. A highly stratified society may be able to “block” from higher education those who desire to rise through it to higher status, but to “cool out” the desires themselves is a far more difficult undertaking.
Thus, declining opportunities for upward social mobility are likely to intensify the efforts of privileged families to defend and transmit their social status to offspring and to increase the resentment of those who perceive themselves to be excluded. The erosion of an official ideology which seeks to prevent the development of class consciousness, combined with the scarcity of resources to compensate in part for status differences, points to increasing visibility of social differentiation and increasing tension between social strata.
Compounding this problem is the growing gap between educa-tional qualifications and job content. Under ideal conditions, a high degree of job satisfaction in the workplace itself might well offset other sources of alienation or discontent. Although numerous expertments with work organization are underway, Soviet writings are rather pessimistic about their prospects and do not anticipate that dissatisfaction will be substantially reduced in the years ahead. High rates of labor turnover, low productivity, and problems of worker morale are therefore likely to be a source of continuing problems in the years ahead.
Unfavorable Demographic Trends
Declining Rates of Population Growth
Declining rates of population growth, compounded by other un-favorable demographic trends, present Soviet policy makers with an additional set of dilemmas in the 1980s. Stemming in part from broader transformations universally associated with urbanization and rising educational levels and in part from conditions specific to Soviet society, these demographic trends have provoked considerable alarm in Soviet scholarly and policy circles in recent years and have prompted a number of policy initiatives seeking to reverse them.
First among these problems is the slowdown in the rate of popu-lation growth. Throughout Soviet history until the 1960s, the tendency for successive cohorts of women to bear fewer and fewer children was partially offset by declining mortality. More recently, however, the combination of declining birthrates and rising mortality rates have resulted in a sharp drop in net population increase, from 18 per thousand in 1969 to 9 per thousand in 1970 to 8 per thousand in 1980 and to a projected 7.5 per thousand in 1990 and possibly under 4 per thousand in the year 2000.
As a result of the combined effects of declining birthrates and rising mortality rates, by the year 2000 the size of the Soviet population will have increased to about 300 million, rather than the 340-350 million anticipated earlier by Soviet analysts (Table 4.5). The disparity between a rate of reproduction a number of Soviet demographers would consider optimal and the actual rate, which in some regions falls below the replacement rate, is in their view sufficiently alarming to require that the government give highest priority to eliminating the possibility of a future decline in population “regardless of any considerations that may be advanced from an economic, ecological, sociological, or any other point of view.”14 Debate over the causes of and remedies for declining fertility has become a national pastime.
Reasons for Concern
That declining fertility rates should be a source of anxiety in a world where some view zero population growth as the only solution to resource constraints reflects a concern with their implications for Soviet economic and political development. First is the potential effect a stable or shrinking population exercises on future economic growth. In the face of a mounting labor shortage and of male and female participation rates that already approach the demographic maximum, a continuing supply of new entrants to the labor force seems essential to continuing economic growth. By 1984 the entire labor force for the rest of the century will already have been born. That virtually no net increases in labor resources can be expected from this source for the remainder of the century is sobering news. Although efforts are underway to shift from an extensive to an intensive pattern of economic development and to compensate for labor shortages by encouraging technological innovation, increased labor productivity, and continued employment of the pension-aged population, the record holds little promise of significant gains. In the past few years the USSR has even resorted to importing labor from Eastern Europe and more recently Vietnam to overcome specific shortages. Labor constraints in the prime industrial regions of the USSR, especially Russia and Siberia, are likely to become especially acute because a growing proportion of new labor supplies will be located in regions such as Central Asia, where relatively low levels of industrialization and low rates of outmigration have already produced a labor surplus. The prospects of shifting large supplies of Central Asian labor to regions of labor scarcity are exceedingly dim in the near future, given the lack of “fit” in skills and lifestyles and the comfortable living conditions and relative immobility of the Central Asian population. On the other hand, the acceleration of industrial development in Central Asia would demand enormous investments for river diversion and irrigation, expansion of small-scale light industry in small towns and massive development of day care institutions to make most effective use of rural labor surpluses, including women. No easy resolution of current dilemmas is, therefore, in sight.
In addition to its contribution to future labor resources, expand-ing population is also considered necessary to maintain an optimal balance between the productive and the dependent segments of the population. The growing weight of the pension-aged in the total Soviet population, from 10 percent in 1950 to 15 percent in 1970 and possibly 20 percent by the year 2000, places increasing strains on the system of social services. In 1978 they consumed more than 7 percent of national income and 72 percent of the 40.3 billion ruble welfare budget. Thus, the combined effects of a growing population of aged and the urgently needed liberalization of pension benefits will constitute an increasing drain on resources in coming decades.
A further source of concern less openly discussed is the effect of current demographic trends on military and political power. The view that “a country’s position in the world, all other things being equal, is determined by the size of the population” is not confined to demographers. Frequent comparisons of Soviet population trends with those of the United States, Japan, and China indicate that Soviet analysts are sensitive to the strategic implications of population dynamics, a sensitivity that undoubtedly prompted a recent suggestion that the Soviet leadership adopt as its goal the maintenance of a constant ratio between the size of the world’s population and that of the USSR.15
Estimates and Projections of the Age Distribution of the PopulationUSSR and by Republic, Both Sexes: 1970 and 2000
Ethnic Differentials
Declining rates of population growth, however, are only part of the demographic problem: ethnic differentials in birthrates and mortality rates complicate it further. The national data tend to obscure the fact that the more industrialized Western regions of the USSR, including the Russian, Ukrainian, and Baltic republics, are experiencing sharp declines in birthrates, while the rates of population growth remain high and have even been increasing in other parts of the country, particularly in the Moslem areas of Central Asia. While the single-child family is now the norm in the Slavic and Baltic republics, large families are widespread among many of the non-Slavic populations. For example, only one percent of all families in the urban areas of the Russian republic have four or more children, compared with 25 percent of all urban families in Turkmenistan. The proportion of large families is greater still in rural areas, constituting almost half the total in Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, and Turkmenistan and even more in Azerbaidzhan. Regional variations in marriage and divorce rates and in the age structure of the population further compound demo-graphic disparities resulting from economic and cultural patterns that affect desired family size. Thus, the rate of births per 1000 population in the Central Asian republics is roughly two and a half times greater than in the Baltic and Slavic republics. Since the age structure of the latter republics also generates higher mortality rates, the net differences in population growth are even greater than differences in birthrates alone.
As a consequence of these variations, the Moslem populations of the Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics will provide an increasing share of future net population growth. In 1959, these republics accounted for just over 12 percent of all births in the USSR; by 1970, their share had risen to 20 percent. The disparity is even more dramatic with respect to the natural increase of population overall because of the smaller proportion of aged with high mortality rates. In 1959, these republics accounted for 15 percent of the total, and eleven years later for 30 percent. Thus, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Russian Republic’s share of the total Soviet population will decline from its present 52 percent to 46 percent, while Central Asia’s share will rise from 14 percent to 21 percent of the total.
The profound implications of these trends for the supply and quality of military manpower, as well as for the nature and availability of future labor resources, are of particular concern to Soviet analysts and policy makers. As Table 4.6 suggests, ethnic differentials in birthrates will have major consequences for the ethnic composition of the Soviet armed forces by the end of the century. Because of the poorer quality of their educational background and more limited command of the Russian language, as well as more generalized distrust, Central Asian conscripts have traditionally been relegated in disproportionate numbers to lower-status services or those branches of service demanding fewest technical skills. They tend to concentrate in noncombat units, such as construction battalions, or in noncombat capacities in combat units, and often receive no systematic military instruction beyond basic training. While levels of educational attainment and Russian language competence have been steadily rising in recent years, and while these issues are now receiving serious attention from the leadership, the prospect that Central Asian conscripts will constitute a growing share of the total is clearly a source of concern. Thus, while the high fertility rates in these regions are in some respects a welcome compensation for the low rates prevailing elsewhere, they create additional and delicate problems of their own.
Increases in Mortality Rates
Yet a third demographic problem contributing to the slowdown in population growth and troubling Soviet scholars and policy makers alike is the sharp and puzzling increase in mortality rates. Until the mid-1960s, crude death rates had steadily declined, but since then they have risen sharply. While rising mortality rates partly reflect changes in the age structure of the population, more specifically its general “aging,” the rates show the same trend even when age is eliminated as a factor. This is in turn the product of two alarming developments: an apparent increase in infant mortality, and a rise in the overall level of mortality among Soviet males, especially pronounced among the cohort of males between the ages of 40 and 50.
A recent study of Soviet infant mortality by two Western special-ists argues that after a long period of decline in infant mortality rates, which by 1971 reached a low of 22.9 deaths per thousand live births, infant mortality began to rise again, making the Soviet Union the first and only developed country to experience a sustained reversal of the normal downward trend.16 Moreover, this reversal was astonishingly sharp; it rose to 27.9 in 1974, at which point the Soviets stopped publishing the figures, to an estimated 31.1 per thousand in 1976, an increase of over one-third in just five years, and to a possible figure of 39 to 40 per thousand in 1979. These statistics are particularly striking when compared to the U.S. figure of 12.9 deaths per thousand live births in 1979; the Soviet rate would appear to be virtually triple.
Estimates and Projections, Male Population 16, 18, and 20Years of Age, USSR and by Republic: 1970 to 2000 (as of July 1, in Thousands)
This same period also witnessed a startling rise in mortality rates among males, especially those in the prime working and military age bracket of 20 to 44. The death rate for this category increased to a level roughly three times that of the comparable female group, to the point that premature deaths of males now exceed divorce as the main cause of the increase of female-headed households. As a consequence of this trend, the life expectancy of Soviet males, which had reached 66 years in 1965—66, declined to 64 years in 1971—72 and may in 1982 be as low as 62, compared to female life expectancy of roughly 73 years.
The dimension of these trends and their causes and implications have been a subject of considerable controversy among Western spe-cialists,17 exacerbated by confusion among Soviet officials and scholars themselves. While a substantial part of the problem in the case of infant mortality is attributable to the unreliability of Soviet statistics, especially for earlier periods when infant deaths were underreported, particularly in Central Asia, and Soviet achievements thereby exaggerated, the evidence suggests that at least part of the apparent increase in infant mortality may be more than a statistical artifact and that the Soviets themselves believe that they face a real problem. If indeed a part of the apparent increase is due to better reporting, then past levels of infant mortality have been much higher than was hitherto believed to be the case and the impact of improvements in health care was correspondingly lower.
In the case of infant mortality, rising rates appear to be associated with several factors whose importance differs in different regions of the country. They include more extensive reliance on day care facilities as rates of female employment rose; underutilization of existing health care facilities and their failure to keep pace with new needs; replacement of breast feeding by the use of formula in conditions where adequate nutrition and sanitation were not assured; the widespread reliance on abortion as the major method of birth control; rising female alcoholism; and the effects of several virulent strains of influenza in the 1970s with which the Soviet health system was unable to deal adequately.
In the case of male mortality, increased alcohol consumption appears to bear a large share of the responsibility. Alcohol abuse is an important contributing factor in coronary heart disease, which accounted for two-thirds of the total mortality change. The residual change was largely attributable to the combined effects of accidents, poisonings, traumas, and to a lesser extent respiratory system diseases, with alcohol abuse the underlying cause of roughly half the total. Alcohol poisoning alone was responsible for 40,000 deaths in a single year, 1976, compared to 400 such deaths in the United States.18
While it would be an exaggeration to conclude that the Soviet health care system is experiencing a “crisis,” there is mounting evi-dence that it is not responding adequately to growing demands upon it and that existing problems are exacerbated by the reduced investments in health care in the 1970s. In his report to the Twenty-sixth Party Congress in 1981 Brezhnev himself drew attention to continuing shortcomings in the delivery of health care:
The work of polyclinics, dispensaries, and out-patient clinics which handle 80 percent of all the sick must substantially improve. Unfortunately, in a number of places they lag behind the possibilities of medicine, there is a shortage of personnel, especially middle and junior, equipment is obsolete, and modern medicines are in short supply. Plans for the construction of hospitals and health facilities fall behind schedule.19
A health care system that places a heart clinic in its capital city on the fifth floor of a building without an elevator offers substantial room for improvement.
A number of Soviet scholars have begun to explore the negative impact of the “scientific-technical revolution” on working and living conditions. Occupational hazards, environmental changes, high mobility, information overload, and increased stress, among other factors, are adversely affecting health. These changes expand both the need and the demand for health services, including preventive medical care. Improvements in the health of the Soviet population, in their view, as well as a reduction in mortality rates, require major improvements in the quality of health care as well as increases in the expenditures devoted to it.20
The Pro-Natalist Program and Its Problems
The 1959 census first alerted both Soviet and Western observers to these demographic trends and inaugurated an increasingly public discussion of their causes and consequences. The revival of sociology and then demography, both suppressed under Stalin, provided the scholarly underpinning for public debates. The results of the 1970 census confirmed the urgency of the problem and gave impetus to Brezhnev’s call at the Twenty-fifth Party Congress in 1975 for formulation of an “effective demographic policy.” While many specialists were skeptical of the need for or desirability of such an effort, their reservations were overshadowed by the arguments of a vocal group of demographers, economists, and sociologists who had long urged the adoption of pro-natalist measures to mitigate the effects of declining fertility in the European areas of the USSR, if not to reverse the trend altogether. Despite precedents in Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria, or perhaps mindful of the Soviet precedent of 1936—55, the advocates of such pro-natalist measures refrained by and large from recommending restrictions on abortion, insisting that such measures were inadmissible in principle, ineffective in practice, and potentially harmful in their effects. They urged instead a series of measures that would alter the social and economic context of re-productive behavior.
The recommendations included measures designed to enhance fertility potential by enlarging the pool of married females in the prime reproductive age cohort and by providing additional incentives to marriage. Second, they urged policies designed to alter social values in favor of large families. Placing the blame for low birthrates on social trends that raised the cost and reduced the benefits of children and that devalued reproduction in favor of other social and personal goals, they advocated a national effort to stimulate the desire for children. In order to achieve an optimal 2.65 children per family, they launched a campaign to persuade young couples to have at least two and preferably three children as a patriotic duty as well as a guarantee of family happiness.
A third group of recommendations stemmed from the view that living conditions rather than reproductive motivation constituted the major obstacles to increased family size, a view buttressed by extensive demographic surveys which indicated that an overwhelming majority of Soviet families had fewer children than they desired. These measures sought to reduce the material burden of child-rearing by offsetting its cost.
Whether pro-natalist measures should be uniformly applied nationwide or whether demographic policy should be regionally, and by implication ethnically, differentiated has become the subject of serious if muted controversy. Any uniform policy would in any case have a different impact on different regions of the country, given the socioeconomic and cultural diversity of Soviet society. Advocates of a differentiated approach urge that demographic policy explicitly attempt to depress the birthrate in high-fertility regions as well as to increase birthrates in the more developed regions where they are especially low. Implicitly criticizing the existing system of uniform child payments, which inevitably directed the bulk of these resources to the “heroine-mothers” of Central Asia, they urged anti-natalist measures in this region designed to “liberate” women from large families and improve the quality of life. In a discreetly worded passage, a leading Soviet demographer suggested the contours of such a differentiated approach:
For the USSR, where there exist large regional differences in the processes of reproduction of the population, from approximately stationary to greatly expanding, and where, moreover, these differences are largely determined by different levels of fertility, it is an important question whether demographic policy should vary by region of the country. If one proceeds from the view that demographic policy should primarily be directed at the creation of a single optimum type of population reproduction in the nation, then there should exist a single general direction of demographic policy for the entire country. For example, if we consider the optimal type of reproduction of population which is characterized by a net coefficient of 1.0-1.2 … with such parameters … it is necessary to stimulate by various measures the birth of first, second, and third children in the family … but beginning with the fourth child all measures of an encouraging nature should cease, or at a minimum significantly weaken. Such a system might stimulate fertility in areas where it is low and at the same time further the lowering of fertility in areas where it is very high.21
The implications of such an approach were not lost on Central Asian demographers, who in turn defended large families as a legitimate “national tradition” altogether compatible with full participation of women in social life.
The debate sharpened in the late 1970s, with proponents of a differentiated approach arguing that a concern with quantitative population growth must be accompanied by concern with “quality” and that the Soviet state could not be “indifferent to what kind of population increase occurs, whether it is highly mobile or, owing to a variety of circumstances (including large families and language barriers), bound to one specific region.” Criticizing this view, a prominent Kazakh demographer bluntly asserted that a “differentiated population policy is by its nature and intent the same thing as a discriminatory policy.”22
The Twenty-sixth Party Congress in 1981 brought the debate to a close: the Soviet leadership opted for a compromise that sought to stimulate fertility in the European regions without rescinding the existing system of child allowances. New initiatives announced at the Congress and additional decrees which followed outlined a twopronged effort: first, introduction of partially paid maternity leave for working mothers (initially promised in 1976) at the very modest rate of 35 rubles a month for the first year (and 50 rubles in Siberia, the Soviet Far East and certain northern regions) to be introduced in unspecified stages; second, a new system of child allowances paying 50 rubles on the birth of a first child, 100 rubles each for the second and third, and nothing for subsequent children. This plan was superimposed on the existing system of state family benefits, so that resources flowing to poor families and to the large families of Central Asia would not be cut off, but the clear intent of the new measure is to encourage single-child couples of the low-fertility regions to have second and third children.
Taken by themselves, these measures are too limited and the scale of payments too small to have significant effect on demographic behavior; they are far more limited, for example, than those adopted in Hungary. The preferential assignment of new housing to young families would probably have a more potent effect. Nonetheless, these measures indicate the high priority which the Soviet leadership has begun to assign to demographic and family policy, the pro-natalist direction that future policies are likely to take, and the increasingly influential role of social scientists in shaping the contours of such measures. The nature of current demographic trends, however, makes them relatively resistant to small-scale tinkering. Without a farreaching effort to reduce significantly the costs of children to working mothers of the European urban regions and to create economic opportunities that would significantly raise their cost in Central Asia, current demographic trends are not likely to alter greatly in the foreseeable future, nor will the problems they raise be easily resolved.
The Rise of Ethnonationalism
The multinational character of the Soviet state is the source of still further problems in the decades ahead. Although the resurgence of ethnic self-assertion has been a worldwide phenomenon in this century, and a major source of political instability from Canada to India, the Soviet system has thus far proven comparatively immune to its disruptive effects. It is unlikely that a future Soviet leadership will continue to enjoy this luxury; the “nationality problem,” in the view of Western and Soviet analysts alike, is likely to become one of the most difficult in the years ahead.
As the largest multinational state in the world, dominated by its Russian core but comprising over 10o distinct nationalities of which 22 number over one million people each, the USSR has had to grapple from the beginning with the problem of combining centralized economic and political control with some degree of cultural pluralism. The result has been a nationality policy marked by a fundamental tension. On the one hand, the system proclaims a commitment to the development and flourishing of all nationalities, with the major groups given political and administrative recognition in their own republics or autonomous regions and social recognition in a partially pluralist educational and cultural system. At the same time, the expectation that modernization will promote the ultimate withering away of national identities and the emergence of a homogeneous and unified “Soviet” nation undercuts this very commitment. The very effort to promote integration and convergence, connoting as it does increasing Russification, provokes intensified ethnic consciousness and selfassertion among the non-Russian minorities, which elicits increased Russian nationalism in response.
The Problem of Nationalism Appears
The experience of the past three decades, beginning with the self-assertion which Khrushchev’s thaw facilitated, has provided evidence that the repressive policies of the Stalin era had temporarily silenced the quest for collective identity but hardly obliterated it. The appearance of the dissident movement, which included an important national and religious component, focused new attention on the sources of alienation in the Soviet system. A rising tide of protests in the Baltic and Ukraine, among the Crimean Tartars, and in Georgia, coupled with the large-scale emigration of Germans, Armenians, and Jews, demonstrated the degree to which ethnic identity might form an independent basis of political action. More recently, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, with its growing salience for Soviet policy, coupled with the astonishing demographic vitality of Soviet Central Asia revealed in the 1959 and 1970 censuses, has brought this region to the forefront of both scholarly and policy concern.
These developments have generated a major reassessment of Soviet perceptions and expectations. Until two decades ago, Soviet scholars routinely asserted that the nationality problem had largely been solved. The convergence of socioeconomic systems among the various republics and nationalities of the USSR had produced a gradual rapprochement (sblizhenie) of values and behavior among the nation’s varied ethnic groups, which would in turn result in their full assimilation and their ultimate merging (sliianie) into a new identity, the Soviet narod. These views have undergone profound alteration in recent years. Sliianie has virtually disappeared from the official vocabulary, and scholars castigate the emphasis on merging as “onesided.”
The Soviet leadership has come to appreciate that the rapproche-ment of Soviet nationalities is a far more problematic and long-term process than was anticipated under Khrushchev and one demanding patient and delicate social engineering. It now encourages Soviet scholars to devote serious study to ethnonational processes and in 1969 created a Scientific Council for Nationality Problems under the Academy of Sciences to coordinate research, plan future projects, and prepare “scientifically based” proposals for resolution of nationality problems. Khrushchev’s optimistic assertion at the Twenty-second Party Congress that “the Party has solved one of the most complex of problems, which has plagued mankind for ages and remains acute in the world of capitalism to this day—the problem of relations between nations,” has been superseded by Brezhnev’s more somber recognition at the Twenty-sixth Party Congress that “the dynamics of the development of a large multinational state like ours gives rise to many problems requiring the Party’s tactful attention.”
The increased assertiveness of the non-Russian nationalities, given impetus by de-Stalinization, by reopening discussion of the na-tionality question, and by the successes of national groups in other parts of the world, and reinforced by demographic trends which appear to give biological reinforcement to new political demands, have contributed in turn to an upsurge of Russian national consciousness. While some of this resurgence reflects a broader search for roots or has taken the form of movements for the restoration of historical and cultural monuments, some of it carries chauvinistic overtones which in turn stimulate the counternationalism of the non-Russian nationalities.
Several distinct issues bearing directly on the resources, power, and status of both Russian and non-Russian nationalities have come to the forefront of recent debates and provide a focus for the crystalization of ethnic identifications and cleavages. The first of these involves the nature of the federal system and the balance between a unitary and centralized, as opposed to a federal or pluralist, definition of its structure. A protracted controversy over the autonomy, power, and status of the Union Republics long delayed promulgation of the Soviet Constitution of 1977. Advocates of reducing the formal status and role of the republics urged their case both on grounds of economic rationality, namely, that the present system is an impediment to the optimal planning of economic development overall, and presumably on grounds of political expediency as well, that retention of the republican structure constituted an impediment to rapid political and cultural integration and ultimate assimilation. Defenders of the intrinsic legitimacy of the original autonomist arrangement cited Lenin and other Russian leaders on its behalf. In the end, the existing structure was preserved, although with some diminution of republic autonomy. In subsequent comments about these discussions, however, Brezhnev did not challenge the principle of a unitary system but indicated only that a change in that direction was inexpedient at the present time.
The pace and pattern of economic development constitute a sec-ond source of controversy bearing directly on regional and ethnic concerns. Within the framework of a unified national economy based on regional specialization and a “fraternal division of labor,” considerable controversy remains over the degree to which the allocation of investments should encourage, or at a minimum permit, a balanced pattern of economic growth within republics. The narrow concentration on cotton cultivation in Uzbekistan, for example, has created a virtual “plantation economy,” while much recent development in Central Asia is based on extractive industries similarly dependent on external processing and oriented toward external markets. Low productivity, increasing underemployment, disadvantageous terms of trade, and intimations of the perpetuation of underdevelopment, all stemming from the absence of a sufficiently diversified pattern of industrial development capable of drawing on indigenous labor, have been the object of concern and criticism by local elites, who have in turn been accused of “national narrow-mindedness” and “localism.”
Closely linked to issues of the pace and pattern of economic development are questions concerning the criteria for economic in-vestment. The emphasis on Siberian development characteristic of recent Soviet economic policy, both because of its vast reserves of natural resources, including energy, and its strategic geopolitical position, has been challenged by advocates of a “European” strategy who insist that the higher productivity of investments in the more developed regions of European Russia, with skilled labor forces, excellent transportation network, and nearby markets should attract the bulk of investment. The advocates of increased investment in Central Asia urge yet a third strategy, based on availability of labor and commitment to equalization of development levels among republics. Implicitly challenging Brezhnev’s 1972 statement that “the problem of the leveling of development of the national republics has on the whole been solved,” a position he reaffirmed most recently at the Twentysixth Party Congress in 1981, Central Asian authors insist that equalization is far from achieved and press for increased allocation of resources to their region to achieve this goal.23 Their efforts are unlikely to succeed because such a strategy would have less immediate economic payoffs and would not provide the same cultural and symbolic rewards to Russian-dominated elites as investments in the heartland. Nonetheless, the growing labor surplus in Central Asia will compel some new investment initiatives, however modest, and will sustain a continuing debate over this issue.
The allocation of opportunities, or “life chances” more broadly, constitutes yet another focus of interethnic tensions. The commitment to rapid socioeconomic modernization facilitated the creation of indigenous scientific, cultural, and administrative elites endowed with the skills and resources as well as the aspiration to fill the new positions which rapid industrialization, urbanization, and cultural development have generated. Widespread opportunities for upward mobility, particularly in cultural and scientific domains, have in turn facilitated cooptation of local elites and given them a substantial stake in the system.
At the same time, the process of modernization brought with it a major influx of Russian and other Slavic settlers into urban centers who provided needed technical and political-administrative skills and enjoyed, in turn, career opportunities and living conditions beyond what they might have attained in the provincial capitals of the Russian Republic. Expanded contacts between indigenous and settler communities heightened the ethnic self-awareness of each and generated a significant degree of tension over competition for elite positions. Language and cultural policies have become especially sensitive; longterm upward mobility, especially in political and scientific or technical arenas, depends upon the mastery by local elites of Russian language and cultural norms. The Slavic settler communities, however, faced little pressure to master the indigenous languages of the republics in which they lived and worked, a source of widespread resentment among indigenous elites.
The competition for access to higher education and desirable professional positions, and for upward social mobility generally, thus pits indigenous aspirations against those of the settler communities, leading to demands by local elites for further compensatory efforts and complaints by the settlers that members of the indigenous nationalities receive preferential treatment in their own republics, a policy justified during earlier stages of Soviet development but now in need of change.
Cadres policy constitutes yet another highly sensitive area of conflict within the party itself, involving closely controlled access to positions of political power. The nomenklatura system has preserved the dominance of Slavic elites in the most sensitive positions of the political hierarchy, not merely in central state and party organs but in the non-Russian republics as well. For example, while the first secretary of the Union Republic’s Communist Party is now customarily a member of the titular nationality, the second secretary, who controls allimportant cadres policy, is usually a Russian or other Slav, in effect an agent of central control. A rather explicit hierarchy has emerged in which a number of republics—Georgia, Azerbaidzhan, and Armenia among them—have received a substantial degree of responsibility for management of their political affairs, while Slavic cadres dominate the political elites of other republics, including those of Central Asia. This is increasingly less true at the local level, where “indigenization” has proceeded quite far and where the Slavic cadres are themselves “locals” rather than agents deployed from the center.
Moreover, despite slight variations in the pattern, local members of the non-Russian nationalities play a significant political role only in their own republics, except for Ukrainians and Armenians; upward mobility does not extend to responsible positions in other republics or at the all-Union level. Thus, of some 123 non-Russians serving in leading political roles, all but one was a member of the titular nationality of the republic in which he served. While the resentment this generates seldom reaches public expression, substantial evidence exists of dissatisfaction and of efforts for increased, even proportional, representations of indigenous cadres in republic-level organs. Brezhnev was undoubtedly alluding to this problem in his speech at the Twenty-sixth Congress when he tactfully stated:
The population of the Soviet republics is multinational. All nations, of course, have the right to be adequately represented in their party and government organs. Needless to say, the competence and ideological and moral make-up of each candidate must be carefully scrutinized.
Others have opposed such demands with less tact and greater force:
In the past, when actual equality among peoples had not yet been established, when there still existed significant residues of the former backwardness of the indigenous nation in this or that republic, it was necessary to conduct a policy of indigenization of the apparatus…. But under present-day conditions … where there are no longer any backward national districts the need for such advantages no longer exists.24
Purges of republican officials of the local nationality are often accom-panied by charges that they attempted to substitute ascriptive criteria for merit in appointments and promotions to responsible positions.
The sociocultural status and recognition accorded various Soviet nationalities amount to a further source of interethnic tension. Changing interpretations of national history and cultural evolution, of the relationship between the minority nationality and the Russian “elder brother,” and the development of national languages all involve, in the broadest sense, both an assertion of developing cultural identities and an effort by Russian and non-Russian elites alike to convert cultural traditions into a political resource. Exploration and glorification of a group past, resurrection of folk heroes, including those previously under opprobrium, purification of national languages and exclusion of foreign borrowings, evocation of group achievements, and concern with preserving the group’s environment, both cultural and natural, all represent efforts at national selfassertion typically led by local cultural elites and directed against Russian cultural domination.
Language policy has been an especially sensitive barometer of nationalist attitudes. A large-scale effort has been under way since the 1970s to expand and improve mastery of Russian language not only as a lingua franca in government, economic, military, and scholarly domains but also as a vehicle for the acculturation of the non-Russian nationalities into a “Soviet” people. The elevation and glorification of the Russian language has in turn provoked resistance, subtly in reminders that Lenin had opposed a compulsory official language or in calls for Russians to master the local languages of the republics in which they work, and more dramatically in public demonstrations in Georgia opposing changes in language policy.
Finally, interethnic relations, particularly at the personal level, continue to reveal elements of tension. While the Soviet regime has been remarkably successful in maintaining outward order and respect in relations among ethnic groups, ethnic antagonisms continue to simmer below the surface. These latent tensions appear especially sharp in the armed services. While some dissident nationalist writings have depicted military service as a “denationalizing” experience, indirectly supporting the official view that the armed forces are an integrative mechanism, other evidence suggests that barracks life may in fact heighten ethnic self-awareness. Emigre sources report that conscripts of different nationalities tend to form their own groups, partly because of linguistic and cultural affinity and partly out of selfdefense; that racist attitudes and ethnic discrimination directed against Central Asians, and occasionally also Georgians and Armenians, are widespread; and that numerous episodes of ethnic-related conflict and violence take place.
While it is impossible to assess the frequency and intensity of such conflicts or to place them in a comparative context, Soviet writings testify to their presence. A major 1980 article in the military journal Krasnaia zvezda complained that “national prejudices” in the military are “extremely tenacious” and that frictions between various ethnic groups would not disappear spontaneously, and warned that the elimination of discrimination and of national tensions was a matter of “decisive importance” for the Soviet armed forces.25
The 1980s
The dangers a rise in ethnonationalism pose are self-evident: they threaten the unifying force of Soviet patriotism, provide a social base for the organization of group activity directed against official values and policies, infinitely complicate the resolution of other issues, virtually ruling out reforms that entail some degree of decentralization, challenge the unitary structure of such major organs of social control as the party and the military, and strengthen ties of affinity and loyalty with regions outside Soviet borders, with serious consequences. It is no wonder that such leading Soviet figures as the late Mikhail Suslov have identified ethnic antagonism as one of the three major conflicts standing in the way of building Communism.
There are three conditions under which ethnic tensions might grow and their control become more tenuous in the years ahead: changes in the expectations and demands of either Russian or nonRussian nationalities that increase dissatisfaction with the status quo; change in the system, or in its performance, which these groups perceive disadvantageous to their interests; and loss of effectiveness on the part of dominant elites which increases the capacity of subelites to mobilize challenges to the prevailing distribution of power and benefits. Several emerging trends in Soviet political life increase the likelihood for such developments.
The process of replacement of an entire political generation, which promises heightened competition and instability at the apex of the political system, and the likelihood of important shifts in orientations and policies, could well impinge upon nationality policy. The present pattern of ethnogeographical representation within the Politburo is not immune to challenge, and the growing weight of Central Asia in the Soviet system lends itself to demands for increased political representation. The promotion of Aliev to the Politburo may well have symbolic importance in this respect. On the other hand, the reemergence of nationalist and imperial themes in Russian political culture in recent years and the predominant role of Russians in the Soviet “selectorate,” the key apparatuses of the party, the military, the security police, and the central state bureaucracy, all arenas in which non-Russians have limited leverage, make appeals to Great Russian patriotism a more likely scenario. Such a “tilt” in the delicate balance of official ideology, however, would jeopardize the integration of the non-Russian nationalities into a larger Soviet nationhood.
Declining rates of economic growth are also likely to make more difficult the management of ethnic relations, intensifying competition over allocation of limited resources among the union republics as well as within them. An expanding economic base has mitigated both the costs of empire on the one hand and resentment at exploitation on the other. In straitened economic circumstances, rival groups are more likely to directly and bitterly voice their perceptions and claims. A recent article in the prominent journal Soviet State and Law, for example, expresses a widespread sense of grievance among Russians by cataloguing a succession of policies, from family allowances to state procurement prices, which transfer resources from the Russian heartland to unspecified “outlying regions.” “As for budget policy,” it concludes, “not once in the entire existence of the Soviet state has the Russian republic benefited by a subsidy from the all-Union budget, as several other republics have.”26
Major shifts in the relative “weight” of different regions resulting from new technological and resource constraints and from current demographic trends further compound problems of low growth. The increasingly critical role of energy resources and of labor will have an important impact on development strategies. At the same time, making optimal use of these resources and accommodating the necessary shifts in relative priorities demand a more flexible deployment of resources between the older industrial regions and the emerging “sun belt” than the Soviet system has attained in recent years. Recent efforts to address the problems of differential birthrates and immobile labor are far too limited both in scope and in financing to offer promise of substantial success, while newly introduced demographic policies, which implicitly discriminate against the large families of Central Asia, may breed local resentment.
The prospect of reduced social mobility in the decades ahead is especially likely to exacerbate ethnic tensions. In the absence of major investments in the industrialization of Central Asia, particularly the Siberian river diversion project, which would result in massive expansion of urban employment and which regional elites so ardently advocate, the competition for educational and professional advancement is likely to sharpen. Differential birthrates intensify the difficulties: a rapidly expanding cohort of young people of indigenous nationalities will compete with a small and relatively stable cohort of their Slavic counterparts. Graduates of Central Asian educational institutions are encouraged to accept jobs outside their republic, with limited success. In the West as well as in the Third World, activists in nationalist movements have been recruited largely from among white-collar strata facing limited career opportunities. In the Soviet Union, where survey data repeatedly demonstrate the importance of educational opportunity and professional advancement for levels of personal satisfaction, and where a high level of social mobility has been an important factor in reducing ethnic prejudice among intellectuals and professionals, disappointed expectations pose serious future dilemmas.27
The increasing salience of foreign policy in Soviet domestic af-fairs may also interact with ethnic assertiveness. The greater involvement of the Soviet Union in the outside world during the past two decades has exposed the Soviet population to a wider variety of influences, values, and experiences than when official media held an unchallenged monopoly. Both the forms of interaction and their impact are highly differentiated for different regions of the country. In the case of Central Asia, for example, the orientation of Soviet policy toward the Third World, in particular the Middle East, has accelerated emergence of Tashkent and of Soviet Central Asia generally as a showcase of Soviet achievement: proliferation of officially spon-sored technical, cultural, and even religious delegations; increasing reliance on Central Asian cadres in technical and diplomatic roles; and, most recently, dispatch of Soviet armed forces and administrative personnel into Afghanistan have created both opportunities and problems for Soviet policy. The gains from using members of different nationalities to expand Soviet influence abroad are undeniable, but recent developments have also rekindled traditional anxieties about divided loyalties, anxieties amply evident in recent Soviet writings.
The consequences of increased interaction with the outside world on popular attitudes are extremely difficult to assess. At a maximum, they may well introduce a new frame of reference for evaluating Soviet accomplishments and failures. Whether or not comparisons of Tashkent with Kabul or Tehran are as unfavorable to the Soviet Union as comparisons of Moscow with New York, renewed campaigns against religious organizations and activities, now embracing “foreign Moslem reactionaries,” testify to official sensitivities. Recent Soviet publications issue sharp warnings against efforts to bring the “flame of the Islamic revival” to the USSR in order to destabilize Central Asia, inflame nationalist prejudices in these regions, and “arouse discontent among believers with the policies of the Communist Party and the Soviet state.28
The greater visibility and impact of linkages between foreign policy and regional domestic needs also help explain the growing attention to foreign policy issues on the part of Soviet regional elites. Finally, the Sino-Soviet conflict may also intersect with the Soviet na-tionality problem, both in providing impetus for better treatment of the indigenous nationalities of Soviet Central Asia and in prompting Soviet appeals to fellow nationals across the Chinese frontier.
The combination of the ethnic problems with these long-term trends creates mutually reinforcing dilemmas. Ethnic cleavages intensify many functional problems and complicate their solution, as in the case of decentralizing economic reforms, while certain functional problems in turn sharpen ethnic cleavages and create additional bases for ethnic solidarity. The potential for political instability is greatest precisely where socioeconomic and cultural cleavages converge. However, the presence of ethnic cleavages and the potential for growing competition and even conflict are a necessary but not sufficient condition of future political instability. To threaten stability, additional ingredients are essential. One is the availability of an organizational infrastructure and local leadership in a position to capitalize on popular grievances (i.e., able to build political or religious careers on exploitation of ethnic issues) and having an interest in doing so. A second is the possibility of mobilizing popular support on the basis of a single major cleavage along ethnic lines that would overcome all other bases of identification. The capacity of the system to forestall or manage such developments then becomes critical.
Constraints on the Political Mobilization of Ethnicity
Here, the Soviet system possesses important assets as well as liabilities. First, significant intrinsic constraints restrict the political mobilization of ethnicity in the Soviet Union as elsewhere. The repertoire of potential ethnic identities is relatively broad, and their salience varies among individuals and in different situations. In the case of Central Asia any individual may identify himself/herself as Soviet, Central Asian, Turkic, Uzbek, or Muslim or some combination of these, depending on the context or role at any given moment. It is difficult to imagine circumstances in which a politically significant grass roots movement might crystalize around a single one of these. Furthermore, individuals have multiple and overlapping identities and roles, of which ethnicity is only one and not necessarily the most salient. The limited evidence of Soviet sociological surveys suggests that educational level and professional role are often more critical determinants of attitudes and behavior than ethnicity.
An additional constraint on the political mobilization of ethnicity in the USSR is the absence of a single overriding cleavage around which mobilization might take place. The issues which pit the interests of Russians against those of the non-Russian nationalities form only a small part of a large spectrum. This spectrum includes points of competition and conflict among the non-Russian nationalities themselves, For some of whom the Russians represent allies or protectors against traditional enemies; competition among republics over allocation of resources; and conflicts internal to each republic which divide its ethnic communities within themselves. The existence of multiple cross-cutting cleavages which are not cumulative and mutually rein-Forcing constitutes a major regime asset in the management of ethnic relations.
Another Soviet system asset turns on matters of comparative size, ‘consciousness,” integration, and demand on the system among national groups. The most “advanced” of the Soviet nationalities, the peoples of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia brought nto the Soviet Union after World War II, who are likely to make the greatest demands and are potentially least “digestible,” are also nunerically smallest. The potential demographic weight of the Central Asian republics is offset in the short run by their more parochial, inderdeveloped, and self-sufficient way of life, which makes comaaratively few demands on the system.
Apart from the intrinsic obstacles to the political mobilization of ethnicity, members of non-Russian nationalities derive substantial benefits from working within the system. Unlike classical colonial sys-tems, the Soviet Union proffers full and equal citizenship, providing symbolic recognition and genuine opportunities for participation and advancement to the non-Russian nationalities in exchange for loyalty and partial assimilation. Having initially destroyed traditional local elites and eliminated the economic and political bases of alternative centers of power, the Soviet system has gone on to train, promote, and coopt new indigenous subelites and to reward them for collaboration and loyalty. These elites are more likely to direct their energies toward within-system demands than toward secessionism.
In addition, a potential nationalist movement faces a political system which has exceptionally highly developed control mechanisms. Repression and the threat of repression have been and remain a central component of Soviet nationality policy. The official monopoly over all forms of organization and association as well as over all means of public communication is a further impediment to expression of demands outside official channels, while the assignment of soldiers outside their own regions ensures the loyalty of the armed forces in possible use in local disturbances.
Displacement and depoliticization are further instruments for management of ethnic tensions: the enormous expansion of cultural and scientific elites in Central Asia channels ethnic aspirations away from more sensitive political and administrative domains, while the creation of societies for the preservation of cultural monuments is a comparatively harmless alternative to other forms of ethnic selfassertion. The regime has also employed a strategy of avoidance in certain areas. By concentrating control on the “commanding heights” and avoiding direct assaults on local customs and norms, the regime has prevented counterproductive confrontations. The treatment of Islam in Soviet Central Asia is an illustration. Thanks to its control of the recruitment, training, and activities of official religious elites, and to an active campaign of antireligious propaganda, the regime can afford to tolerate some private religious practice.
Another major device in the management of non-Russian nationalisms is exploitation of alternative lines of cleavage and solidarity. By emphasizing class rather than ethnicity as a fundamental social division, by promoting contacts across ethnic boundaries among different professional groups, from writers and artists to natural and social scientists, and by exploiting conflict between ethnic groups, as well as conflicting tendencies within groups (like pitting traditionalists against modernizers), the Soviet leadership has sought to create and reinforce solidarities that transcend ethnic boundaries and to exploit lines of cleavage that cut across them. It has also sought to avoid situations which activate ethnic identities in politically destabilizing ways.
Finally, the leadership has motivated ethnic elites to participate in and benefit from the system, rather than to exacerbate ethnic conflict. By exploiting external threats, particularly from China directed at Soviet Central Asia, by pressing the view that any conflict would detract from the economic well-being of the whole, and by making clear that the acquisition or retention of political power depends upon collaboration with central elites, the Soviet leadership has emphasized the benefits the present system confers as well as the dangers of fragmentation. Under these circumstances, while the political salience of ethnicity will probably increase significantly over the next decade, it is difficult to imagine a scenario, short of major war, in which ethnonationalism would seriously threaten the stability of the regime.
The Decline of Civic Morale
Possibly the most dramatic change of recent years, and one with profound implications for the legitimacy and stability of the Soviet system, has been a shift in attitudes within the Soviet population during the past two decades. Most visible within the middle class and intelligentsia but extending to the working class as well, it involves growing pessimism about the Soviet future, increasing disillusionment with official values, and an accompanying decline in civic morale.
This judgment necessarily rests on fragmentary data. Soviet studies of public opinion are, with a few exceptions, rudimentary, uninformative, and methodologically flawed. Investigations of public attitudes on politically sensitive issues are pursued in closed institutes, and their results circulate only among a small group of party officials. Moreover, Soviet political indoctrination over several decades has reinforced a political vocabulary so lacking in complexity and nuance that broad and unbiased studies would not be very revealing, even if they were conducted.
The Soviet press is another possible source of information about popular attitudes because it offers a forum for criticism of public institutions and for debate over domestic policy and implementation. It is more useful in identifying problems than in assessing the scope or intensity of attitudes, however, and it is far from comprehensive in its coverage. Soviet literature is a potentially rich source of insights into popular attitudes, but one that social scientists have barely tapped. We are thus obliged to rely, for the most part, on fragmentary and impressionistic accounts of Westerners who have some famil iarity with Soviet society, though a familiarity confined largely to limited contact with an educated urban milieu in Moscow and Leningrad, and of emigres whose attitudes may not be typical of a large part of the Soviet population.
The accumulating evidence from these varied sources, however, indicates that a major shift in attitudes among the Soviet population is indeed taking place, a shift far-reaching in its scope and profound in its implications.
The Basic Consensus:
Discipline, Authority, Welfare
In order to comprehend fully the nature and implications of this change, it will be useful to look backward briefly to the most extensive body of evidence concerning popular attitudes and expectations and their bearing on Soviet political culture: that of the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, conducted in 1950-51 and based on a survey of almost 2,500 refugees. The findings of this survey, which Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer summarized in The Soviet Citizen, were extraordinarily revealing, for they called into question beliefs then widely held about the fragility of the Soviet system. The project found that the system had acquired a high degree of legitimacy in the eyes of its people and conformed in such important respects to their fundamental expectations and values that even refugees not favorably disposed to many specific features of the system nonetheless expressed a high degree of attachment to many core values and in-stitutions. This study did not anticipate the emergence of serious intelligentsia dissent, nor of nationalist disaffection in subsequent years, for a number of reasons. But its findings with respect to core political culture were reinforced some twenty-five years later when a new wave of Soviet emigration enabled scholars to compare the attitudes of a new Soviet generation with those of their predecessors. The continuity of the two proved striking, lending confidence to the results summarized here.
Both surveys demonstrated a substantial degree of consensus around basic elements of Soviet political culture. Respondents in both groups attached high value to order, discipline, and strong leadership. While they saluted the principle of civil liberties, they were willing to tolerate a high degree of governmental intervention so long as it was exercised benevolently and on behalf of the national interest. Tolerance for a high degree of government paternalism was reinforced by strong support for the welfare-oriented features of the system. The refugees highly valued free public education, socialized health care, job security, and other social benefits and considered them the most attractive features of the Soviet system. Its basic polit ical and economic arrangements were also widely accepted, except for the terror, which all resented. Public ownership of heavy industry was more solidly supported than of light industry and the services, but on the whole respondents were proud of Soviet accomplishments and criticized regime performance rather than institutional arrangements. Little evidence indicated they saw any alternatives to the system, or that they viewed “capitalism” as preferable. Political freedom had attractions, but they associated it with anarchy, lack of control, and insecurity.
Moreover, the study carried potential implications for future so-cial trends. While all respondents were relatively modest in their material and political aspirations, a positive correlation emerged between social status and approval of the system. Workers and collective farmers, the two groups experiencing the greatest degree of material deprivation, tended to express greater dissatisfaction and alienation, while those with higher levels of education and social status expressed greater approval. Thus, although higher educational level was also associated with greater “liberalism,” economic and social opportunity had greater impact on political attitudes than did political conditions in and of themselves. Finally, acceptance of the Soviet system appeared to increase with each successive generation, with younger cohorts expressing more favorable views than their parents or grandparents.
The findings of their research prompted Inkeles and Bauer to predict that a post-Stalin political leadership seeking to increase social support would likely focus on diminution of terror and improvement in living conditions and would particularly concern itself with the material welfare of collective farm and working-class strata. Were it to do so, in their view, it would find a broad and welcome response and would tap substantial reservoirs of popular support and approval.
The Old Optimism
Had the Khrushchev leadership read The Soviet Citizen, it could not have responded more directly and astutely to the sources of alienation the study identified. By reducing the terror, identifying improved material welfare—particularly among workers and collective farmers—as a high regime priority, and promising the Soviet population a standard of living which would overtake that of the West within a short period of time, Khrushchev’s reforms tapped those reservoirs of popular approval and support.
They also created an atmosphere of optimism and heightened expectations about the future. A small illustration of the exaggerated expectations Khrushchev’s utopianism stimulated comes from an account by Jerzy Kosinski of a poll he took among Moscow University students in the late 1950s which John Bushnell has cited in a stimulat-ing essay.29 Of 85 fifth-year students he asked about their chances of acquiring an automobile, 52 said they expected to be able to purchase one within two or three years, another 28 estimated four to six years, while only 5 believed they would never have an opportunity to own one. Of 85 workers polled at the same time, 23 saw purchase as a likely prospect in two to three years, 31 in four to six years, and 31 believed they would never own one. While the differences in expectations reflected realistic perceptions of differences in the opportunities of different social classes, at a time when the system was producing virtually no passenger cars for private purchase such expectations were unrealistic in the extreme.
Bushnell has described in some detail the optimism that ex-tended from this student milieu throughout the middle class. Despite economic difficulties in the mid-1960s that provoked working-class demonstrations and compelled the leadership’s partial retreat from unrealistic promises, the optimism persisted. If anything, the sobriety of the Kosygin-Brezhnev leadership offered greater assurances that the future was in good hands. Opinion surveys not only within the USSR but among emigres who had recently departed testify to the widespread view that material conditions had improved considerably, that the people believed the regime had their interests at heart, and that conditions were likely to continue to improve.
Growing Pessimism
The intellectuals were among the first to experience a shift in attitude. The reversal of de-Stalinization, trials of dissident writers, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and general tightening of political controls played a major role in their increased malaise. But it was not until prospects of economic slowdown reinforced political concerns that this mood spread to the middle class more widely and to the working class as well. The 1975 crop failure provided the final shock; growing food shortages and disruptions of supply in subsequent years simply compounded the growing conviction that the economy was unable to deliver further improvements in living standards and that the economic system itself was at fault. Shortcomings which were viewed in the early 1960s as deviations from the overall upward movement had by the 1970s come to be viewed as the norm.
The decline in optimism was strikingly captured by two Soviet surveys, the first, taken in 1971, to ascertain the social expectations of working people in Leningrad and the second, taken four years later, to determine whether anticipated improvements had occurred. In the case of both earnings and education, improvements had exceeded expectations. In other categories, however, including living conditions, service industries, and medical services, achievements fell short of what correspondents had anticipated. Moreover, the expectations themselves appeared quite modest: while 57 percent of those surveyed expected improvements in the quantity and quality of the Tenth Five-Year Plan, only 45 percent were convinced their incomes would rise during this period and only 35 percent expected their housing conditions to improve.30
Rising pessimism reflected a shift in the standards by which the population evaluated regime performance. The traditional explanations of failure—the survival of capitalist remnants, growing pains, the aftermath of war, the machinations of unseen enemies—were no longer compelling to a generation raised to expect that the USSR was on the verge of overtaking the West. The distant past no longer formed the standard against which to measure present achievements; rather, it was the recent past and expectations of the future. Moreover, the comparative reference was no longer the peasant or worker household of the 1930s but the living standard of the Soviet or, increasingly, foreign elite.
The growing exposure of the Soviet population to the world outside its borders, one of the major consequences of the changes after Stalin and of detente, had an incalculable impact on the evolution of Soviet society. Increasing imports of Western scientific and technical equipment for Soviet laboratories, factories, mines, and oil wells, and of consumer goods from Eastern and Western Europe, exposed millions of Soviet citizens to the qualities of Western products. Scientific and cultural exchanges as well as expanded tourism provided growing opportunities for Soviet citizens to travel abroad, to encounter foreign visitors in the USSR, or to hear of the experiences and impressions of acquaintances who enjoyed such opportunities and who flaunted the products of their privileged travel. Western books and films as well as radio broadcasts supplemented direct personal experience in providing information about, and whetting appetites for, the accoutrements of a Western life style. The emigration during the 1970s of over 300,000 Soviet citizens who maintained close communication with friends and relatives back home added to the flow of information about Western goods and prices. The variety, quality, and sheer quantity of Western goods seen and described established new standards for evaluating Soviet products and services, and invited increasingly negative evaluations of Soviet economic per-formance.
Even comparisons with an Eastern Europe more accessible and less ideologically suspect to the average Soviet citizen had subversive implications. Between 1960 and 1976 roughly eleven million Soviet tourists visited Eastern Europe, perhaps half of them for the first time, in addition to two and one half million soldiers, and large num-bers of East Europeans visited the USSR. The legendary acquisitiveness of Soviet travelers abroad offered ample testimony to both the scarcity and the poor quality of Soviet goods.
The growing tide of criticism gradually extended beyond the realm of consumer goods and services to include even features of the Soviet system once quite highly regarded. Health care is a case in point. Widespread dissatisfaction and criticism of an institution once hailed as one of the system’s great achievements is almost commonplace in the press. The survey of attitudes toward living standards and prospects for improvements discussed earlier revealed the greatest disappointment in the area of medical services. Whether the system has actually deteriorated in recent years is the subject of some controversy, but it is clear that medical care, like many other social services, has failed to keep pace with new needs, or with the expectations placed upon it by an increasingly educated and demanding population less tolerant of shortcomings and failures than at earlier stages of Soviet development.
George Feifer, a veteran observer of the Soviet scene returning to Moscow in 1981, after an absence of some ten years, offers especially graphic testimony of a whole array of social changes countless Western observers, emigres, and Soviet sources have reported.31 Food shortages and disruptions in the supply of other goods and services have generated a preoccupation with procurement that extends from manual workers to senior engineers and that feeds a rapidly growing second economy. Energy is increasingly diverted from work, and from other civic activities, into moonlighting, black-market activities, and the pursuit of desired goods: “It is private enterprise running wild, although the enterprise goes almost entirely into obtaining, rather than into producing, goods and services.” The loss of confidence in public distribution, the surge in cheating and bribery have led to disintegration of old restraints and widespread demoralization. As one friend of Feifer’s recounted, “The scorn [for official values] has led to the moral emptiness—as demonstrated by mass apathy, lying and cheating—in which we live.”
Decline in Civic Morale
This decline in civic morale has three distinct though interrelated elements: loss of optimism, loss of purpose, and disintegration of internal controls and self-discipline. The loss of optimism is associated with a growing sense that the system cannot live up to expectations and that problems associated with a new stage of development have outrun the capacity of existing institutions. A growing feeling is developing within the elite that the problem may be systemic, but there is little sense of viable alternatives and no belief that the United States or any other capitalist system offers a preferable model.
The loss of a sense of purpose is connected with the declining relevance and vitality of official ideology. Khrushchev’s effort to revive the utopian, egalitarian, and populist features of Marxism- Leninism as a way of rekindling mass enthusiasm and dedication represented a last gasp of a tradition well on the way to extinction. There is increasing recognition that the values and policies of an earlier era are inadequate to contemporary challenges and require serious rethinking.
Finally, the erosion of social control and individual selfdiscipline, evident in significant increases in the entire gamut of “antisocial” behavior, from alcoholism to corruption to violations of labor discipline to theft of state property, reflects the limited success at internalizing new social norms and their breakdown under conditions of reduced reliance on coercion and of social relaxation. At an earlier period of Soviet history the leadership could attribute such behavior to capitalist remnants or to strains associated with urbanization and subjecting a peasant population to the discipline of factory life. Two generations later, without a great national crisis to bind the social fabric, traditional explanations ring hollow.
New Values
To attempt to characterize the full range of responses to these trends is a separate undertaking. Broadly speaking, the loss of optimism associated with declining performance has been accompanied by a shift of expectations to the private realm. The decline in the relevance and vitality of ideology has awakened a quest for alternative sources of values and a revival of religious activity. Also, the breakdown in social controls has fueled a nostalgia for greater order and discipline and growing social conservatism.
The shift in expectations and concerns to the private realm is nowhere more powerfully illustrated than in the virtual revolution in Soviet attitudes toward the family that has occurred in recent years. It suffices to evoke the image of the Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai to recall the critical attitude of revolutionary Marxism- Leninism toward the bourgeois family and the expectation that in the socialist society of the future the traditional economic and social functions of the family, from cooking to housework to child care, would be taken over by communal facilities. While the Stalin period inaugurated a shift away from these expectations, only in recent years has a family-centered value system emerged full-blown. The economic and social policies of the Brezhnev regime supported this trend by assigning the family a central social role, enhancing the resources of income, privacy, and leisure available to it, and strengthening its role in transmitting social status.
Official policy is supplemented by a growing body of literature which virtually glorifies the family as the basis of social stability, the decisive factor in the education, socialization, and moral upbringing of children, and the indispensable provider of necessary social services which the state either cannot or should not supplant. In a striking inversion of revolutionary values, leading Soviet sociologists now maintain that communal arrangements would not permit satisfaction of increasingly diverse and individual needs, tastes, and lifestyles, and that even if society were in a position to assume the burdens of housework and child care, it should refrain from doing so in order to maintain, even artificially, the cohesion of the family as a social unit.
An analogous shift in values is evident in recent discussions of the balance to be struck between public and private consumption. Special-ists are now questioning the traditional reliance on social consumption funds as an instrument of income equalization and a symbol of social solidarity. Arguing that the Soviet system need no longer retain social arrangements which originated in the different historical conditions of the 1920s and 1930s, some urge that although a “safety net” should still extend to low-income families, the state should reduce or end its subsidization of housing, medical care, vacations, and other goods and services and should allow and even encourage the use of private incomes for their purchase.
These two examples, though limited to relatively specialized scholarly publications, illustrate the emergence in recent years of an intellectual and moral rationale for the increasing “privatization” of Soviet life, and legitimization of the greater social inequality, as well as diversity, it is bound to generate.
The decline in a sense of purpose, and with it the disappearance of the enthusiasm and zeal which has accompanied, in varying degree, the great campaigns of earlier times from the First Five-Year Plan to the Great Fatherland War to even the Virgin Lands program, and the spread of cynicism and political apathy have also prompted a relatively widespread quest, largely by the intelligentsia, for alternative values and sources of meaning. Heightened interest in religion among younger people, evident in increased church attendance, growing use of religious symbolism, and the affirmation of moral and spiritual values, is a manifestation of this quest. It is associated as well with a revival of interest in national traditions and nostalgia for the past.
While much of this interest focuses on culture and is illustrated by the rapid rise and massive membership of the Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments, the first “grass roots” organization to emerge in the USSR with a reported twelve million members, it extends to the political realm as well. Moreover, this revival is not confined to the Russian past; from the Baltic to Central Asia it has parallels and counterparts among the non-Russian nationalities. To the extent that this quest embodies a critical attitude toward or even rejection of the scientific positivism and materialistic world view associated with official ideology and the “scientific- technological revolution” it so repetitiously extols, it also contains ele-ments of an anti-urban, anti-industrial set of values. The emergence of a Soviet-style environmental movement, the first more or less spontaneous large-scale phenomenon of its kind in the USSR, represents both a concern for the preservation of the natural environment against the ravages of unbridled industrialism and an effort to exert pressure on behalf of a balanced weighing of costs and benefits. Finally, there is the impulse to sheer escapism, whether to other countries in the form of travelogues, to the more intimate universe of personal relations, to the realms of parapsychology, or to the unexplored universe of science fiction.
Widespread anxiety over the erosion of traditional social norms and growing evidence of indiscipline, social disorder, and corruption extending to the highest levels of the political hierarchy, including the Politburo itself, have evoked a growing impulse for restoration of “law and order,” greater discipline, and a reassertion of authority. This finds expression in a wide variety of ways, from nostalgia for Stalin, the krepkii khoziain (strong boss), to the inchoate yearning expressed in the village prose movement for a return to an idealized patriarchal rural society where male and female roles were more sharply differentiated and “women knew their place and things were in order.” The selection of Andropov as Brezhnev’s successor might well be a response to this widespread yearning for strong and decisive leadership after the immobilism of the late Brezhnev period.
Anxiety over the erosion of civic morale is also a factor in the extraordinary importance of World War II as a cultural symbol. The search for sources of pride and satisfaction, and heroic causes with which to identify, leads backward rather than forward, to a renewed emphasis on patriotism, a focus on World War II, and the widespread praise of military virtues. World War II offers the single most potent unifying symbol for positive identification; it epitomizes the optimism, clarity of goals, righteousness of purpose, and extremes of selfdiscipline which the nation had once sustained and which are now felt to be lacking in a society viewed as preoccupied with consumerism and self-gratification and tainted by pacifism. It is, however, far more a focus of nostalgia and comfort than a premonition of future intent; few foreign policy objectives, short of a conflict with China, could generate comparable intensity.
The political consequences of this erosion of civic morale are ambiguous. These trends reflect a growing retreat from, rather than direct challenge to, the political domain, a diversion of energies and ambitions into more rewarding private concerns. They ease the tasks of ruling even as they undermine the mobilization ethos. At the same time, such trends are a source of serious concern to a political elite already worried about declining labor productivity, social discontent, and diminishing respect for authority, and fearful that its own legitimacy will be eroded in the revival of many elements of traditional political culture.
Conclusions
Implications for Domestic Stability
What are the likely political consequences of these broad social trends? These developments point to a widening gap between the leadership’s aspirations to shape and channel the direction of social change and its diminishing capacity to do so, the result of a progressive weakening of the three mechanisms of social control traditionally available: coercive, material, and normative.
A diminished reliance on terror, increased predictability in the definition and punishment of violations of Soviet law, and greater use of material and normative incentives to elicit desired social behavior have characterized the period since Stalin. While this shift reflected an assessment that the benefits of such an approach would outweigh costs, particularly in view of the new challenges and opportunities the emergence of an increasingly complex modern society and educated population presents, it also created dilemmas for the system. At an earlier date one could speak of a “revolution from above,” with connotations of state domination of a largely passive society. Today the image no longer corresponds to reality. Not only have social forces achieved a certain degree of autonomy, but they actively impinge on the political system in unprecedented ways. The erosion of political control over important sectors of economic life is clearly demonstrated by the evolution of the “second economy,” which by its existence subverts centrally established priorities and challenges centralized control over prices, income distribution, and the allocation of resources of manpower as well as capital. The spread of corruption, particularly within the political elite, threatens the organizational integrity and political legitimacy of the party and feeds both the resentment of those excluded from patronage and the hostility of those critical of its existence.
A parallel development is visible in the escape of important di-mensions of social behavior from regime control. Families marry, reproduce, and divorce without reference to demographic policy; populations migrate from north and east to south and west, rather than vice-versa; labor absenteeism and turnover defy repeated calls for strengthening labor discipline; and religious practices continue despite efforts to invigorate atheistic propaganda. A whole spectrum of social pathologies, from rising alcoholism and crime to declining civic morale, dramatize the limits of regime control. While the diminution of terror reduces the costs of such behavior, it remains unclear to what extent reimposition of tighter social controls would in fact resolve these problems. In a complex modern society, successful social policies require a high degree of fine tuning, a strategy of the scalpel rather than of the hammer. While a more authoritarian pattern of political rule might produce greater compliance, it would hardly elicit the initiative, creativity, and motivation which current problems demand.
Having increased its reliance on material incentives and social advancement to elicit greater individual initiative and productivity, the Soviet leadership now faces a situation in which the combination of economic slowdown and diminished social mobility erodes the availability of these incentives as a mechanism of social control. The ties between the political elite and the working class are especially vulnerable. The precarious balance of the existing social compact is threatened by the possibility that the elites may not match declining mass consumption by equivalent sacrifices but will adopt a more energetic defense of established privileges. The combination of deteriorating welfare and growing inequalities could thus enhance the potential for social unrest.
Finally, the weakening of the normative underpinnings of the system of social control are visible in the decline of civic morale. Throughout its history, the Soviet system has successfully mobilized its population on behalf of a succession of political and economic goals, defining a series of large purposes in heroic terms and invoking external and internal enemies to elicit the popular zeal and national unity necessary. This “heroic” period of Soviet history is past. Neither official ideology nor current economic and social policy is capable of eliciting the popular enthusiasm and unity of purpose that characterized an earlier epoch now remembered with nostalgia, and it is not clear that pride in superpower status will continue to offer a sufficiently powerful compensation.
Thus, the cumulative nature of current social difficulties exacer-bating the erosion of traditional mechanisms of social control presents the Soviet leadership with unprecedented problems. During the 1980s a new and less experienced leadership will have to address simultaneously economic stagnation, declining prospects for social mobility, unfavorable demographic trends, and the rise of both Russian and non-Russian nationalism, at the time of a major systemic crisis in Poland and a less benign international environment.
While these problems are serious and not easily managed, only a very particular and somewhat remote conjunction of circumstances could endow them with crisis proportions. First, although the gap between expectations and possibilities may be widening, the demands of the Soviet population for material goods, social opportunities, and political freedoms remain modest, not only by comparison with Western societies but even with Eastern Europe. Moreover, unlike the situation in Poland, patriotism strengthens support for the Soviet regime rather than working against it. Given the likelihood that economic difficulties will cause a slowdown in improvements but not an absolute decline in mass welfare, the regime will still have at its disposal resources with which to moderate discontent.
Even were social frustrations to reach considerable proportions, the Soviet system imposes severe constraints on their political expression. The paucity of institutionalized channels for making demands on the system and the numerous barriers to the formation of groups and the articulation of interests make the mobilization of social protest difficult. Moreover, deep cleavages divide Soviet social strata and ethnic groups from each other, preventing the formation of broad social coalitions which might sustain alternative political programs. By contrast with Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980, there have been few efforts in the USSR thus far to link intelligentsia dissent with working class demands. While the force of nationalism might bridge that gap in some non-Russian areas, such as the Baltic republics, the relative success of the regime in coopting local elites reduces the likelihood of such developments. Thus, while the decades ahead are likely to see increased working-class unrest and more frequent though still sporadic outbreaks of strikes and demonstrations, these are likely to be local rather than nationwide, to focus on specific economic grievances, and to submit to a combination of repression and redress.
The Soviet leadership has, moreover, demonstrated considerable skill at conflict-management. It has successfully isolated and managed cultural and political dissent by a combination of repression, bribery, and emigration. At the same time, it has recognized the need for more and better information about social attitudes, trends, and behavior, and has sponsored an increasingly broad and sophisticated program of social research. Virtually every major party organization and industrial complex has its resident or consulting sociologist. Leading Politburo members including Chernenko and Andropov himself have repeatedly called for greater party reliance on opinion surveys as a guide to popular attitudes. The party has not only sought to keep in touch with social trends, but it has also committed considerable resources to policies aimed at improving food supplies, rais-ing living standards, and heading off working class unrest, all with the spectacle of “Polonization” very much in mind. Moreover, it has attempted to coopt both social and national elites by offering a substantial stake in the system and considerable rewards in exchange for loyalty, exploiting both social and ethnic cleavages to undermine the foundations of hostile coalitions.
While it is therefore likely that the Soviet system will evolve in more authoritarian directions and will rely on a greater degree of repression to contain growing social tensions and conflict in the years ahead, it is difficult to imagine circumstances under which current social trends will become unmanageable or provoke a serious political crisis. Indeed, the power and the resolution the leadership has consistently shown and the respect and fear the security police and the other forms of repression still command constitute a convincing demonstration that the regime will not tolerate the expression of serious discontent and will crush any efforts to give it organized form.
Implications for Foreign Policy
How will these internal problems affect Soviet objectives and capabilities in the international environment in the years ahead? Will these accumulating domestic problems have a restraining effect on Soviet behavior abroad, or are they likely on the contrary to evoke a more assertive and expansionist pattern of behavior to compensate for domestic failures?
There is no way to predict confidently the impact of domestic factors on Soviet foreign policy for several reasons. First, social trends will affect foreign policy only indirectly, as they are mediated through the filter of leadership perceptions and perceived reactions. Given our uncertainty concerning the composition of the future Soviet elite, our lack of knowledge of its major concerns and priorities, and the difficulty in anticipating the international environment it is likely to encounter, efforts to anticipate its likely behavior are highly speculative.
Moreover, the feature of Soviet foreign policy making which most distinguishes it from that of the United States is its insulation from domestic social pressures. Control over information and access to the policy making process is even more tightly circumscribed in the case of foreign policy than it is with respect to domestic issues, even within the ruling group. Soviet citizens are notoriously ignorant about the outside world, and they have virtually no exposure to competing points of view about foreign policy. The tradition of rallying around the state against a foreign enemy, especially in circumstances when knowledge of the nature and character of the enemy is limited and gravely distorted, assures the Soviet leadership considerable freedom in formulating and executing its policies toward other states.
Some observers have therefore argued that the Soviet leadership is likely to compensate for domestic failures by pursuing a more ag-gressively expansionist foreign policy and by calling upon reserves of patriotism, if not outright chauvinism, in support. Such an effort would forge increased national unity in the face of growing social divisiveness, rekindle a fading sense of national purpose, and revive public morale. Its domestic consequences would be strengthened Russian nationalism, an appeal to patriotic and military virtues, increased reliance on the military as a symbol of national power and potent source of legitimation, and repression of domestic dissent.
While such a scenario cannot be excluded, it suffers from several flaws. First, it tends mechanistically to project outward from domestic conditions without adequate consideration of the international envi-ronment itself and the kinds of opportunities or challenges it will present to the Soviet leadership in the years ahead. Moreover, there is no historical precedent for the view that the Soviet Union has used external adventures to compensate for domestic difficulties, and much evidence to suggest the contrary. Periods of domestic crisis have usually been accompanied by a partial withdrawal from international involvement. While the achievement of strategic parity may reduce the relevance of historical precedents, it is significant that the treatment of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan in the Soviet press has, if anything, sought to minimize its military dimension and to focus instead on the economic, cultural, and administrative support rendered by Soviet troops. In other cases as well, the leadership has tried to avoid fueling popular resentment at the diversion of resources from domestic needs by minimizing the scale of its foreign commitments in the media. China aside, it is difficult to imagine a foreign policy scenario that would serve as the functional equivalent of World War II in mobilizing the Soviet population on behalf of a popular and unifying national cause.
This does not preclude the possibility that Soviet imperial arro-gance will exacerbate the long succession of regional problems and crises which are likely in the years ahead and that competitive demagogy and greater risk taking will contribute to increased international instability. While many factors, and above all the international environment itself, will shape Soviet foreign policy behavior in the 1980s, and while it is as difficult to anticipate the many opportunities and challenges that will arise as it is to predict the outcomes, the Soviet leadership will undoubtedly have accumulating domestic problems and vulnerabilities very much in mind as it weighs the costs and benefits of alternative foreign policies.
NOTES
1. Gertrude Schroeder Greenslade, “Consumption and Income Distribution,” in Abram Bergson and Herbert Levine, eds., The Soviet Economy to the Year 2000 (London: Allen 8c Unwin, 1982), p. 2. See also her article, “Soviet Living Standards: Achievements and Prospects,” in U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, The Soviet Economy in the 198os: Problems and Prospects (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1982).
2. For evidence of food shortages and price differentials based on interviews with recent Soviet emigrants, see Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Food Supply in the USSR: Evidence of Widespread Shortages,” AR 2-82, April 1982.
3. Pravda, May 25, 1982, p. 1.
4. Voprosy ekonomiki, 1978, no. 7, p. 60.
5. V. I. Zorkaltsev, “Anatomiia defitsita: Voprosy bez otveta” [The Anatomy of the Deficit: Questions without an Answer], Ekonomika i organizat- siiapromyshlennogo proizvodstva, EKO, no. 2, February 1982.
6. Cited in Richard B. Dobson, “Socialism and Social Stratification,” in Jerry G. Pankhurst and Michael Paul Sacks, eds., Contemporary Soviet Society (New York: Praeger, 1980), p. 97.
7. M. N. Rutkevich, ed., Zhiznennye plany molodezhi [Life Plans of Youth] (Sverdlovsk, 1966), p. 35.
8. F. R. Filippov, “The Role of the Higher School in Changing the Social Structure of Soviet Society,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 1977, no. 2, p. 48.
9. M. N. Rutkevich and F. R. Filippov, “Social Sources of Recruitment of the Intelligentsia,” in Murray Yanowitch and Wesley A. Fisher, eds., Social Stratification and Mobility in the USSR (White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1973), pp. 256-57.
10. Cited in Richard B. Dobson, “Education and Opportunity,” in Pank-hurst and Sacks, Contemporary Soviet Society, p. 129.
11. Komsomol’.skaia pravda, January 17, 1975, p. 2.
12. A discussion of discriminatory examination procedures based on interviews with emigres is found in Michael Swafford, “Political Attitudes and Behavior of Soviet University Students,” unpublished paper, U.S. International Communications Agency, 1979, pp. 54-60. Extensive documentation of “affirmative action” in admissions to higher education in Uzbekistan is provided by Nancy Lubin, Labor and Nationality in Soviet Central Asia (New York: Macmillan, forthcoming). Efforts “not only to eliminate any opportunity for dishonesty but also to convince candidates … that all prospective students stand a fair and equal chance of success” were instituted in the three Transcaucasian republics where the intense competition for university admis-sions encouraged widespread bribery. The measures included radio and TV coverage of the examinations, tape recording of the oral sections, allowing candidates to review the written papers of those who gained higher marks, and allowing friends of candidates to attend oral exams. The Armenian and Georgian party first secretaries also stressed that no university teacher who engages in private tutoring should be appointed to exam committees. See Elizabeth Fuller, “University Admissions in the Transcaucasian Republics,” Radio Liberty Research Bulletin, 349/81, September 4, 1981.
13. V. Churbanov, “The Young Worker and Uninteresting Labor,” Molodoi kommunist, 1972, no. 6, pp. 64-71, cited in Dobson, “Socialism and Social Stratification,” p. 104.
14. B. Urlanis, Problemy dinamiki naseleniia SSSR [The Problems of Population Dynamics in the USSR] (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), p. 283.
15. A leading exponent of this view is V. Perevedentsev; see, for example, his articles in Literaturnaia gazeta, March 20, 1968, p. 11, and Voprosy ekonomiki 1976, no. 6, pp. 127-33. The recommendation is from E. D. Grazhdannikov, Prognosticheskie modeli sotsial’.no-demograficheskikh protsessov [Prognostic Models of Socio-Demographic Processes] (Novosibirsk, 1974).
16. Christopher Davis and Murray Feshbach, Rising Infant Mortality in the USSR (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, 1980).
17. See, for example, the exaggerated interpretation offered by Nick Eber- stadt, “The Health Care Crisis in the USSR,” New York Review of Books, February 19, 1981, and the exchange with Albert Szymanski in New York Review of Books, November 5, 1981, pp. 57-60. Szymanski’s critique of Eberstadt, and to a limited extent of Feshbach and Davis, is developed further in an article “On the Uses of Disinformation to Legitimize the Revival of the Cold War: Health in the USSR,” Science and Society 45, no. 4, Winter 1981/82, pp. 453—74, although Szymanski obscures the problem of male mortality by lumping together male and female life expectancy. See also Murray Feshbach, “Health in Russia: Statistics and Reality,” Wall Street Journal, September 14, 1981, p. 30.
18. John C. Dutton, “Causes of Soviet Adult Mortality Increases,” Soviet Studies 33, no. 4, October 1981, pp. 548—59; John C. Dutton, “Changes in Soviet Mortality Patterns, 1959—1977,” Population and Development Review 5, no. 2, June 1979, pp. 267-91; Murray Feshbach, “Issues in Soviet Health Problems,” U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Soviet Economy in the 1980s: Problems and Prospects (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, forthcoming).
19. Tsentral’nyi komitet kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza, Materialy XXVI s”ezda KPSS [Materials of the Twenty-sixth Congress of the CPSU] (Moscow: Politizdat, 1981), p. 61.
20. V. Korchagin, “Rol’. zdravookhraneniia v vosproizvodstve trudovykh resursov” [The Role of Health Care in the Reproduction of Labor Resources], Voprosy ekonomiki, 1981, no. 12, pp. 65—72.
21. A. Ia. Kvasha, Problemy ekonomiko-demograficheskogo razvitiia SSSR [Problems of Economic-Demographic Development in the USSR] (Moscow, 1974), pp. 139-40. At a meeting sponsored by the Academy of Sciences in 1975, a participant from Turkmenistan noted that “from the standpoint of economic and social interests, this highly expanded type of population reproduction in Turkmenia and other republics with similar birthrate indices is less than optimal. The present high birthrate makes it virtually impossible for mothers to work.” Another contributor urged that the government encourage vocational education for women in Central Asia and that it publicize different methods of contraception more widely. R. Galetskaia, “Sfery demograficheskoi politiki” [Spheres of Demographic Policy], Voprosy ekonomiki, 1975, no. 8, pp. 152, 149.
22. For an account of these debates, see Cynthia Weber and Ann Good-man, “The Demographic Policy Debate in the USSR,” Population and De-velopment Review 7, no. 2, June 1981, pp. 279-95.
23. For one example among many, see A. S. Kadyrszhanova, “O metodologicheskikh problemakh issledovaniia vyravnivaniia urovnei ekonomicheskogo razvitiia sotsialisticheskikh natsii” [On Methodological Problems in the Investigation of Equalization of Levels of Economic De-velopment in Socialist Nations], Akademiia Nauk Kazakhskoi SSR, Izvestiia; Seriia obschestvennyhh nauk, 1981, no. 4, pp. 37—43.
24. I. P. Tsamerian, “Vklad XXVI s” ezda KPSS v marksistsko-leninskuiu teoriiu natsional’nykh otnoshenii” [The Contribution of the 26th CPSU Con-gress to the Marxist-Leninist Theory of National Relations], Nauchnyi kommunizm, no. 4, July—August 1981, pp. 63-64.
25. N. Shumikhin, Krasnaia zvezda, October 9, 1980.
26. G. I. Litvinova and B. Ts. Urlanis, Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, 1982, no. 3, pp. 38-46.
27. The interesting work of Iu. V. Arutiunian identifies two distinct sources of narrow ethnic orientations. The first is, in effect, traditionalism; the second is associated with the sociooccupational interests of professionals and is rooted in socioeconomic factors: the supply and demand relationship for skilled employees and the opportunities for social and occupational ad-vancement. “Konkretno-sotsiologicheskoe issledovanie natsional’nykh ot-noshenii” [Concrete Sociological Research on National Relations], Voprosy filosofii, 1969, no. 2, pp. 129—39.
28. Sovetskaia Kirgiziia editorial, December 27, 1981, p. 3.
29. Cited in the excellent article by John Bushnell, “The ‘New Soviet Man’ Turns Pessimist,” in Stephen F. Cohen, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Robert Sharlet, eds., The Soviet Union Since Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 183.
30. V. K. Alekseev, B. Z. Doktorov, and B. M. Firsov, “Izuchenie ob- shchestvennogo mneniia: Opyt i problemy," Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 1979, no. 4, pp. 23-32.
31. George Feifer, “Russian Disorders,” Harper’s, February 1981, pp. 4155-
I should like to express my appreciation to Walter Connor, Murray Feshbach, and Gregory Massell for their contributions and critical comments, and to thank Amy Saldinger for her research assistance.