Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union

Financial Times, Friday, July 13, 1979

Bitter-Sweet Search for Ancestors in Ukraine

The two-lane highway to Chernoble wound its way north from Kiev through small, wooden villages, past lush, green pasture land and open fields of rye. Only the occasional sand dune hinted at the nearness of the Dnieper River.

At various times during my three years in Moscow, I considered making a trip to the formerly Jewish town of Chernoble, which my grandparents left in 1913 for the United States, but something always dissuaded me.

The Nazis occupied Chernoble and although a great-uncle had stayed behind, I held little hope of finding anything familiar there. I also knew that the Soviet Union, except for the major cities, is a closed country and any attempt to visit an out-of-the-way place like Chernoble would be met with endless bureaucratic difficulties.

In early May, however, my mother and sister arrived in Moscow for a month’s visit and after establishing that the area around Chernoble was officially open to foreigners, I decided to plan a trip.

My reasons were mixed. The last letter from Shaya K., my great uncle, to his brothers arrived more than 40 years ago, but I thought it was still possible that we could learn something of his fate. I also wanted to try to understand better the traditional animosity between Ukrainians and Jews.

The pogroms which swept the Ukraine 70 to 80 years ago ensured that millions of Jews would emigrate, that others would fervently back the 1917 revolution and that Zionism would find its base of mass support in Russia. The antagonisms of the Ukrainian farmlands affected the shape of the modern world.

We submitted our itinerary to the Foreign Ministry 10 days in advance of our trip and it was, at first, approved. The approval was cancelled the day before our departure, however, because Yanov, a railway station six miles from Chernoble and apparently the site of the Chernoble atomic energy station, was said to be “closed.”

Four re-routings and 36 hours later, we at last found ourselves driving north on the Kiev to Chernoble road accompanied by an Intourist driver and an official “guide” whose presence we were forced to accept and to pay for in hard currency in order to be allowed to proceed.

The trip, however, began to seem worth the trouble. If the Ukraine had endured more than most areas due to the upheavals of the present century, there was little sign of it that sunny afternoon. Swaddled old women shooed cows off the road with rope lashes, moving them in the direction of the brick barns of nearby collective farms.

The scenery opened into vast green plains broken only occasionally by stands of birch and pine trees, reminding one that it had once been possible to earn a living from timber in the area, as my mother’s family had done.

As we approached the outskirts of Chernoble, a town of 20,000 people, we saw a long row of modern housing blocks on the plain, but driving down the main street into the town itself, it was obvious that physically at least, very little had changed.

We left our guide and car and began walking down narrow, shaded streets, past white log and plaster cottages with stacks of wood piled neatly in the yards. Cottonwood floated in the air and the sounds of motorcycles in the distance competed with the crowing of cocks.

We saw an old woman standing near a water tap and, acting on an instinct, I asked her if she could direct us to the Jewish cemetery. She told us how to get there and then, her curiosity aroused, asked us which grave we were trying to find. I asked her if she had ever known anyone by the name of K――.

Seventy years after all but one member of the K―― family had left Chernoble, the old woman smiled and said, “of course I know them. My sister studied with one of the K daughters. They lived in a house on the main street.”

We agreed to visit the old woman and her 80-year-old sister later in the day, but walking back towards the main street, we were met by our guide who told us we were wanted in the city hall.

We followed her to the city hall where we were greeted by Mr. Nikolai Zhavoronkov, the mayor of Chernoble. He seemed uneasy about our presence but immediately assumed responsibility for organising a “programme” for us although we had not requested one.

He called a procession of old Jewish and Ukrainian women to his office and they, comparing recollections in a mixture of languages agreed that Shaya K. had lived in a house on the main street but that he and his daughters had not been seen in Chernoble since the late 1920s.

We were unable to learn anything more definite from them and we wanted to continue walking around the town. But Mr. Zhavoronkov, apparently in his role as tour organiser, presented us with flowers and insisted on taking us to the Jewish cemetery.

Chernoble had once been three-quarters Jewish but only 2,000 Jews live there today. The Jews who did not flee ahead of the advancing Nazis were rounded up and brought to the old cemetery and forced to dig a long, deep trench within sight of their ancestral graves.

The trench is now covered with a marble slab about 300 ft long and closed off by a metal fence with a small gate. A monument above the common grave reads in both Yiddish and Russian, “Here lie the ashes of citizens beastially murdered by the fascists on November 19, 1941.”

Mr. Zhavoronkov waited respectfully as we laid the flowers at the monument but as soon as we had left, he signalled to our driver to take us back to Kiev. I got out of the car and approached him but his friendliness had disappeared. He said the visit was over and if we did not leave immediately there would be “unpleasantness.”

Just how well co-ordinated was the effort to foreshorten our visit became clear when the Intourist driver and guide refused my request to drive us back into town. This forced me to tell my mother and sister to get out of the car and the three of us then began walking back in the direction of Chernoble.

The driver and guide relented, as I knew they would, and after some hesitation, they turned the car round, and drove us back into Chernoble.

We left them sitting in the parked car and began to stroll through the main square with its gilded statue of Lenin decked with red flags. By the time we arrived at Sovetskaya Street and the large brick house at number 33, our presence had been noticed and was beginning to attract a crowd.

We may have been the first foreigners to visit Chernoble since the revolution and after we had told people who we were, they clustered round us on the tree-shaded main street, showering us with questions. Women hugged my mother, calling her a “Chernobylyanka” although she was born in the U.S. and children were dispatched to knock on the doors of elderly Jewish people to ask them to come out.

The size of the crowd in front of my great-uncle’s house increased—at one point, it even included a passing militia man—and finally a white-haired man in his 60s emerged who said he had actually been a friend of my great uncle’s.

He said that the K family owned a lumber yard which was expropriated after the revolution, but that they continued to live in the house on Sovetskaya Street until it was also requisitioned in 1927.

Shortly after collectivisation began, the K family left Chernoble. It was at this time, perhaps because of the Stalinist terror, that the letters from Shaya K stopped arriving. He then moved to Kiev where he got a job buying equipment for a collective farm and when the Nazis invaded the Ukraine, he and his family were evacuated.

The family returned to Kiev after the war and Shaya K died peacefully in Kiev in the 1950s, a “kindly old man” in his 80s.

Satisfied at last with our visit, we left Chernoble for Kiev that evening and then went by train to Moscow. Several weeks later, however, an article appeared in Pravda Ukraina, the Ukrainian newspaper, accusing me of having been rude and abusive to officials. The authors never called me for comment but they did manage to reach my Intourist driver who told them if he had his way, I would be thrown out of the country.

It may be a long time before another foreigner visits Chernoble but the secretiveness and xenophobia that Soviet officials showed during this episode were all the more puzzling because they were so unnecessary. Chernoble makes a favourable impression.

The peace and apparent lack of racial hatred in Chernoble may only reflect collective exhaustion, but in a world which underwent civil war, collectivisation, famine and Nazi occupation, I think they must be counted a form of progress too.

Financial Times, Saturday, September 29, 1979

Russia assumes no Soviet citizen will return

home of his own free will: From Moscow,

David Satter reports on defections

The Crime That Can Only Exist

Behind Closed Borders

Defection is probably the quintessential Soviet crime. Whenever prominent Soviet sportsmen and artists make the decision to defect, it has a disproportionate impact on their society, and only in a society like the Soviet Union could the crime exist at all.

The latest defections have been those of Oleg Protopopov and his wife, Lyudmilla Belousova, two figure skaters who are extremely well known here. There followed Leonid and Valentina Kozlov and Alexander Godunov, the Bolshoi Ballet dancers who defected during the troupe’s tour of the U.S.

The defections within the space of a month of two skaters who were double Olympic gold medallists and three stars of the Bolshoi, which had never lost a principal performer through defection before, has more than counterbalanced Soviet satisfaction over the return of Lyudmilla Vlasova, Mr. Godunov’s wife, who decided not to remain in the U.S. with her husband.

Soviet citizens—even if they speak only Russian—are startled by the freedom, diversity and sheer material prosperity of the West. To make sure that increasing travel abroad by Soviet citizens, whether on business or in official exchanges, does not result in continual defections, the Soviet authorities employ a series of policies. These are normally effective because they operate on the assumption that no Soviet citizen will return home of his own free will.

As a preliminary, but as a matter of course, people who are allowed to travel are carefully selected for visible career success, personal conformity and political reliability. Artists who may be called upon to perform abroad are kept under close surveillance inside the Soviet Union by officials of the Ministry of Culture and by the KGB through informers. They do not travel if their attitude or behaviour suggest they may be unreliable.

Soviet officials or scientists who go abroad must have a recommendation from an immediate superior, who will face retribution if they defect and so is inclined to be cautious. Those who have been abroad and want to go again try not to show too much enthusiasm for the places they have visited.

Since, in the final analysis, it is difficult to judge any individual’s innermost motivation, a high premium in every profession is placed on Communist Party membership, or membership in communist youth organizations. Unfortunately, this may only encourage hypocrisy. Four of the five most recent defectors—the Kozlovs, Mr. Protopopov and Miss Belousova—had given the impression of being active, enthusiastic communists.

The Soviet authorities are now reported to be involved in a concerted effort to review their means of presenting defections. Lest the five most recent defections set off a chain reaction the Soviet Culture Ministry said on Thursday it had cancelled a month-long tour of the United States by the 110-member Soviet State Symphony-Orchestra, which was to have begun next week.

Once selected Soviet citizens are finally allowed to go abroad, efforts are made to limit their movements and inhibit their curiosity. They are generally advised that the police of the country they are visiting may seek to compromise them.

Wherever possible, Soviet citizens travel in groups. These are usually divided into “teams” of 10, with one person responsible for himself and the nine others. The group as a whole is accompanied by KGB men who represent themselves as interpreters or officials. But for the benefit of anyone contemplating defection they post themselves, for example, at the front and rear of the group every time it enters a tour bus.

In such an uneasy situation, hotel rooms and meals are arranged by the sponsoring Soviet organisation and spending money is kept to an absolute minimum. Since meals are taken together, anyone’s absence is immediately noticed and many Soviet citizens are unaware that they are not subject to Soviet law while abroad according to which defection is treason, carrying a maximum penalty of death.

There are limits to a regime’s ability to control its citizens once they are abroad. The most effective bar to defection remains the rule that when Soviet citizens travel abroad, they must do so without any members of their immediate family. The traveller knows that if he defects, he will never see his family again.

Rudolph Nureyev who was with the Leningrad Kirov Ballet before his defection in 1961, has not been able to see his mother and sister despite a request to the Soviet authorities on his behalf by Sir Harold Wilson, the former British Prime Minister.

Victor Korchnoi, the chess grand master who defected to Holland in 1976, has not seen his wife and son. Lyudmilla Agapova, wife of a Soviet sailor who jumped ship in Sweden in 1974, tried and failed to join her husband through an escape arrangement with the pilot of a private plane.

Miss Vlasova was aware last month when she made her decision to return to the Soviet Union that staying in the U.S. with her husband would have meant never seeing her mother again. She was quickly separated from the group and put on a plane, not only to prevent her from defecting too but also so that the traditional punishment for defectors, separation from wife and family, would, in the case of Mr. Godunov, go into immediate effect.

The combination of practices affecting Soviet citizens who go abroad do have the effect of making defection a relatively unusual occurrence. But the five most recent defections, like the earlier defections of Mr. Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the eminent Soviet conductor, Kiril Kondrashin and Viktor Balenko, who eluded two sets of air defences to flee in the then top secret MiG-25 to Japan, are a serious embarrassment to the Soviet Government.

The difficulty stems from the Soviet Union’s ideological pretensions. Aaron Vergelis, an officially approved Jewish writer, wrote recently in connection with the defections that the socialist and bourgeois worlds are markedly different and that no capitalist country can boast “the unity and complete identity of views” which exists in the Soviet Union.

Defections by prominent artists and sportsmen with exemplary records of party activism do little to bear out the purported unanimity of Soviet society. Yet the only way to prevent defection is to open the borders which, in the Soviet context, would create enormous pressure for internal liberalisation because it would give people the option of “voting with their feet.”

Closed borders make the Soviet system possible, and since the present Soviet authorities show no readiness to contemplate liberalisation, defection. Le Vice Sovietique, seems likely to shadow the regime’s pretensions for many years to come.

Financial Times, Wednesday, December 19, 1979

Planning and Politics Strangle

the Soviet Economy

The recent speech by Mr. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet President, singling out Soviet Ministers for public criticism and threatening officials with the sack was a graphic illustration that the Soviet leadership is deeply upset about the state of the economy.

It was therefore all the more surprising that despite the existence of detailed plans for economic reform, there was no indication in Mr. Brezhnev’s speech that the leaders foresee any change in the economy more basic that tougher punishments for those who fail to reform.

The malaise of the Soviet economy manifests itself in warehouses full of unbought goods, long queues in the snowy streets for household essentials, a ubiquitous black market and statistical tables displaying the worst economic growth rates in more than 30 years.

Soviet national income, a measure similar to GNP, will grow only 2 per cent this year, the worst result since World War Two. Moreover this figure, because it includes shoddy goods which are produced but never purchased, distorts the level of consumption, which in 1979 will probably not increase at all.

In his speech Mr. Brezhnev said the culprits behind each “negligence, lack of responsibility and stupid bungling,” should be found and “punished.” His anger was understandable but the decline in Soviet economic performance stems from the fact that the rigid, centralised system inherited from Joseph Stalin is running down.

This can only be reversed through fundamental reform, not by tighter discipline. Economic and political leadership in the Soviet Union is vested in the Communist Party, and economic decisions reflect political priorities. The factory manager is subordinate not only to the local party committee of which he must be a member but to the department of the Central Committee which oversees his particular branch of industry.

No deviation from the economic plan is legal without party approval, but party leaders are free to commandeer workers to help at construction sites, beautify the city or bring in the harvest. Responsibility for meeting targets lies with the factory manager.

The intention behind all this is to concentrate economic decision-making in the hands of the top party leadership acting through Gosplan, the State planning agency. The Soviet factory manager must execute a blizzard of orders and directives, while his individual role is restricted to maximising output. He is told what to produce, from whom to obtain materials, how many people to employ and what to pay them.

Factory directors have no authority to deal with unexpected contingencies. At a big construction site near Ryazan, for example, a gear broke on some Polish-manufactured excavators. The replacement cost was no more than 250 roubles (about £180), but the new parts could not be ordered direct from Poland.

Instead the project’s chief engineer had to travel to Moscow, wait two weeks for an appointment with the Vice-Minister of Foreign Trade and then see an official in the Ministry of Finance because the purchase of the replacement parts required hard currency. Only with the approval of these officials could an order for the new parts be issued. They took another two months to arrive. In the meantime, the entire project was at a standstill.

Mr. Brezhnev expressed surprise that although the Soviet Union is the world’s larger producer of steel, iron, mineral fertiliser and cement, these basic goods are often in short supply. But this stems from the fact that the country’s highly centralised economic system must measure results on the basis of gross aggregates, which can supposedly be expressed in figures.

The planners set high production targets to force factory managers to make maximum use of men, materials and equipment. But managers protect themselves by overstating their resource requirements, and the system breeds a passion for fictitious results.

An engine factory in Kharkov, for example, satisfied its plan requirements by using 200 KG ingots to produce 30 KG units. The waste of steel was enormous but the factory met its targets because output was calculated on the basic of the value which was presumed to have been added to the material inputs. Reducing the steel order would have saved steel, but reduced the factory’s ostensible output too.

Transport workers who send cargoes back and forth between distant Soviet cities in order to accumulate mileage, or construction engineers who start projects but don’t finish them (unfinished projects have come to 80 per cent of capital investment in recent years) also reflect the logic of a system which rewards plan fulfilment rather than the filling of specific needs.

The relation between waste and the excessive concentration on gross output as an economic indicator was outlined persuasively in November 1977 in the party newspaper Pravda in a series of articles by Mr. Dimitri Valovoi, the paper’s deputy editor. There was no sign in Mr. Brezhnev’s speech, however, of any intention to move to qualitative indicators of economic performance which would require human judgments and vitiate central control.

The rigidity of the Soviet economic structure restricts not just factory managers but apparently ordinary workers as well. Under Stalin the economic system was backed up by political terror. With the passing of that era, increases in labour productivity have steadily declined and labour delinquency has increased. Labour productivity increased only 2.4 per cent during the first nine months of this year against a target of 4.7 per cent. In 1951, it increased more than 10 per cent.

Acute alcoholism is a growing and dangerous problem. Alone among modern countries, the Soviet Union shows declining life expectancy, which fell from 66 in 1966 to 64 in 1972 and has now dropped to the point where a figure for males is no longer published. This is attributed to the effects of alcoholism, and Soviet researchers have estimated that with complete sobriety at the work place, Soviet productivity would increase.

Efficiency is also hampered because the burden of adapting to the needs of the bureaucracy which directs the world’s largest planned economy is placed entirely on the average citizen.

In the early years of Soviet power, centralisation had unquestionable advantages. The Russians were proceeding from an undeveloped industrial base; quantity production and the ability to concentrate on specific objectives were beneficial. Agriculture was depressed and living standards were held down to produce capital for investment. Raw materials were plentiful.

Now, however, with the heavy industry base created, the need for efficiency is paramount because the economy faces an exhaustion of inputs. Oil production will increase only 2 per cent this year and may soon begin to fall. Population growth has levelled off, particularly in the European areas where industrial labour is most badly needed and the area of arable land is expected to decline.

Achieving efficiency would appear to require some measure of liberalisation and decentralisation, with the introduction of qualitative measures of economic performance and greater autonomy for factory managers. This was tried at the time of the Kosygin reform in 1965, but had little practical effect. There is now little likelihood that the Soviet economy will be decentralised, and it is no accident that Mr. Brezhnev failed to mention this as a possibility.