If the Russians ever had any illusions about the nature of capitalism, they must have shed them now. Their basic industries are in dire trouble, or have been stolen by oligarchs whose wealth, obscene even by tsarist standards, is poured into mansions in London or spent on chasing football dreams. Who would have thought that the great experiment would end in such lumpen devastation?
Not the Russians themselves, if Simon Pirani’s new analysis is anything to go by. “People reasoned that capitalism could not be worse than what they had lived under”, he argues. “Now, the false dichotomy between Soviet ‘socialism’ and Western capitalism is receding further into the past, and the monstrous destructive power of 20th century capitalism is staring us in the face. It is difficult to say how people in Russia will react – but it will not just be more of the same”.
Difficult, but worth trying. Pirani, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, pins his hopes on undefined social movements, bringing together large numbers of people acting collectively to shape their future, taking politics out of the hands of the economic and political elites. This is pilmini in the sky, as he almost admits, accepting that such movements in Russia today are “embryonic and mostly local”.
This situation is a paradox, “but it can, and eventually will, be resolved”. Can it, really? And will it? Capitalism red in tooth and claw is well established, though substantially operating at the behest of the Kremlin and in a legal void. The elites look pretty well established, too, and it would be wishful drinking to pretend otherwise.
I assume this is the same Simon Pirani with whom I once (almost) shared a room in a Glasgow University student block when we were both delegates at an NUJ conference there in the late 1980s.
He got there first and, by the time I arrived, he had a small library of Marxist and ultra-left volumes stacked by his bedhead.
My noisy appearance (it had been a long, bibulous train journey) seemed to unnerve him and he swiftly departed “to stay with a comrade in the city”. My reassurance that this might possibly be a wise step, because I snored for Siberia, hastened his departure and I had the room to myself for the rest of the week.
If the author of this book is another Simon Pirani, then I must apologise, but his high seriousness suggests they are one and the same. In the intervening years he has lived in Russia, studied the people, the language and the economy.
His opus probably deserves to be solemnly debated, but it is numbingly dense. And any study that seeks to be taken seriously, but ends with such a trite formula for political revolution, is not going to be a textbook for students of today’s maddeningly free-but-not-free Russia.
The second book under review here goes to the opposite extreme. The text is commendably brief and straightforward: only 44 pages, with thumbnail pics and one inadequate map.
If the GDR wasn’t a workers’ paradise, then it was certainly the ante-room to Valhalla. Stasi Hell or Workers’ Paradise? is rather like one of those propaganda books about the Soviet republics that bulged in racks in the VIP lounges of airports in the USSR during the days of stagnation.
Packed with carefully-potted history and “facts” about steel ingot production, they argued that life was already perfect in the Soviet Union – but it would get better.
This book’s colour cover shows a man in a Trabi waiting while women wheel a pram across the road, against a sunny backdrop of a huge department store and a television tower.
Yes, this was a paradise of sorts, argue Green (who worked there in TV for 20 years) and de la Motte, characterised by a more egalitarian society, religious freedom, sport for all, workers’ rights, co-operative farms, women’s rights, free education, health service and culture for the masses.
One almost hears the words of Fred Kite, the communist shop steward in I’m All Right Jack, who rhapsodises about the USSR: “All them waving wheatfields and ballet in the evenings.”
So why did so many, particularly the young and educated, risk – and sometimes lose – their lives seeking to escape from this paradise? Some “didn’t fit in or hankered after Western material wealth” the authors concede, “but they were not a majority”.
Oh no? And where is the evidence for this statement? Green and de la Motte fall back on a generalised Utilitarian argument that the GDR realised “the greatest good for the greatest number of people”, relying to prove this proposition on a single poll in Der Spiegel in 2008 which found that more than half of those from the East defended the GDR and what it stood for.
It could, alternatively, be argued that this was just another case of “Ostalgia”.
The writers are on firmer ground castigating the ruthless dismantling of the old economic and social order by victorious Wessies. Virtually a whole generation of men and women over 55 were forcibly retired, so the population is now 43 per cent pensioners.
Industry has largely collapsed. Many thousands were evicted from their homes, the victims of “restitution”. The young are forced to migrate to find work, as four in ten are classed as living in “economically precarious circumstances”.
This was truly a Western determination to “teach the people in the communist East a lesson, that unlike in the aftermath of the Nazi period ‘this time around the totalitarian system would be properly eradicated and its supporters duly punished’.” More than a million former state employees were blacklisted and had their pensions reduced.
This is history written by the defeated, which makes a change. Such a small squib of a book cannot rewrite history, but it might enable us to learn from it.
