Russian Revolution Centenary: Part Three

Totalitarianism is the ultimate form of dictatorship. A totalitarian State pervades every aspect of its citizens’ lives.

Music

In 1984, a group of Soviet composers was on an official visit to India. Working with them was my first assignment as a Russian interpreter. Nurilla Zakirov, an Uzbek composer from Tashkent, was part of the group. (Open diary 25: 2008) In private conversations with me, he said, “I would have loved to experiment with different types of music, I can’t. If they could ban Shostakovich’s fourth symphony (note: in Stalin’s time: R.), what will they do to me? I must compose music in the Soviet socialist spirit.”

Literature

Not only music, but literature was strictly censored. I had several arguments with my Russian teachers, asking them as to why Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was banned. It was one of the finest Russian novels I had read, and my teacher, a PhD in Russian literature, was prohibited from reading it. Years later, my Russian wife showed me a photocopy of Animal farm. Her father had taken great risks in obtaining that book in the black market, and until the collapse of the USSR, the family had hidden it inside the house.

Education

Shall we introduce television now or when they introduce colour?

Education in the USSR was excessively patriotic, even the history textbooks. For the Russian students, television was invented by Vladimir Zvorykin (never heard of John Logie Baird). Alexander Popov gifted radio to mankind (not Marconi). Alexander Mozhaisky built the first aeroplane. (Who are Wright brothers?) Alexander Lodygin is the inventor of the light bulb. (Thomas Edison came much later.)

If you think I am talking of ancient times, take the case of my teacher’s granddaughter currently completing Masters in Economics at a Moscow university. We met in December 2016. I asked her what branch of economics she was studying. She looked puzzled. I asked her whether it was the Adam Smith or the Milton Friedman type. She had not heard the name of a single economist I know, nobody from Benham to Samuelson, certainly not Krugman. Despite the USSR failing in Economics, I suspect the same economics continues to be taught in the Russian universities.

These days, we see photo-shopped fake pictures. Soviets had perfected that art in Stalin’s time. Nikolai Yezhov, Commissar for Internal Affairs under Stalin, was not only secretly shot dead in a basement, but disappeared from pictures as well. Many such people became “non-persons”. They disappeared from the Soviet textbooks, as if they had never existed. The heroes in earlier textbooks became the villains in later editions. In the 1930s, history kept changing so often that the Soviet children often studied without any history textbooks.

Soviet education didn’t tolerate non-conforming individuals. Left-handed children were forcefully converted into right-handed. Outside India, I have the largest number of friends in Russia. Not a single one of them is left-handed. Left-handedness was a stigma, a disorder to be treated, disciplined and cured, until 1985, when the health ministry and in the following year the education ministry, officially announced protection of left-handed kids in the USSR. During Gorbachev’s perestroika, the scientists were finally permitted to release the research that showed how harmful the left-to-right conversion was.

Religion

I have written about this extensively in the past. Propagation of religion was banned. Atheism was promoted as part of the Marxist-Leninist ideology. In the 1980s, Soviet followers of religious sects were imprisoned, sent to psychiatric hospitals. Sergei Zuev alias Sucharu Das, a Hare Krishna devotee, whose house I regularly visited to teach Sanskrit and eat vegetarian food, had been sent to a penal colony for 2 ½ years. Other than meditation, he was accused of vegetarianism, a dangerous concept for the Soviet state.

Jeans

In the USSR, blue jeans represented freedom, capitalism and the West. For most part of Soviet history, jeans could be procured only from the black marketers. A Soviet worker needed to part with two months’ salary to get hold of a pair of jeans, which rarely fit him anyway. During the “1957 World festival of youth and students” held in Moscow, the Soviet youth was first exposed to blue jeans worn by the visiting American students.

Traffickers were called the free market sharks, enemies of the State. In 1961, two such smugglers, Rokotov and Faibishenko, were sentenced to death. Their charge sheet included a charge: trafficking in jeans. In the 1980s, some fortunate Soviet tourists could buy jeans in Hungary. But most of them preferred not to wear them at work.

(It is noteworthy that last year, Kim-Jong Un banned jeans and piercings in North Korea).

Pravda

Pravda, translated as “truth” was the official government newspaper. For the communist party members, its subscription was mandatory. Pravda was not allowed to report air crashes. As a result, Aeroflot was the world’s safest airline during the Soviet years. Despite Gorbachev’s glasnost, Pravda didn’t report the Chernobyl accident for four days. By then the rest of the world knew about it.

Elections

Voting was a right of a Soviet citizen, and it was mandatory for him/her to exercise it. Only one party (Communist party) was allowed to take part in the elections. Elections always had a single candidate, and the voter had the choice of voting ‘yes’ or ‘no’. However, in order to vote a ‘no’, you needed to enter a booth, and make a mark with a pen kept in the booth. Only suicidal voters attempted going inside a booth. As a result, most Soviet elections display proud statistics of more than 99% of the eligible voters voting, and more than 99% of them endorsing the single candidate wholeheartedly.

Xerox copies

If you think I am offering examples from Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s time as evidence of the Soviet totalitarianism, you are mistaken. True, it was diluted during Gorbachev’s time, but the all-permeating totalitarian structure remained in place.

Albert Traxler, an Austrian, was my roommate at my Moscow university. His father was a successful businessman trading with the USSR. In 1987, I had gone with Albert to his father’s Moscow office. Albert needed to photocopy some documents. He showed me a ledger. After Xeroxing, one needed to make an entry in that ledger as to how many copies were taken and of which documents. ‘The State auditors visit us to check that’, Albert explained. ‘They don’t want anybody in this country taking photocopies of banned books or undesirable materials.’ Apart from the ledger entries, the auditors would check the level of toner in the printer to ensure it matches with the number of copies made.

I thought I was immune to surprises the Soviet State could spring up, but the photocopy register shocked me.

Exit visa

Soviets had a domestic passport, on which they couldn’t travel abroad. Obtaining a passport to travel internationally was a lengthy, humiliating process (unless your father worked in the politburo). A Russian friend of mine told me how she would stand in a queue outside an office from 04.00 in the morning in freezing cold. At around 08.00 there would be a roll-call (Перекличка) by volunteers. It established your number in the queue. If you didn’t manage to get in that day, that number was lost. Next morning you queued up from scratch once again. Because of the competition, the aspiring passport candidate would wait for weeks, sometimes months.

Getting a passport was not enough. Before you could go abroad, you needed an “exit visa”. This was the permission from Soviet state, without which no foreign government could issue a visa. In most cases, the wait for the exit visa was so long that ordinary citizens missed the deadline. It was the obvious aim of the Soviet state to deny its citizens an opportunity to visit other countries, particularly those in the West.

The ‘exit visa’ rules applied to foreigners as well. In 1987, the same Albert Traxler went to Odessa. He was booked on a ship to take him back to Western Europe from where he would go home to Austria. He had forgotten to take his exit visa from the institute. Despite having the Austrian passport, a ticket on the ferry, and nothing left to do in the USSR, he was sent back from Odessa to Moscow to retrieve the exit visa.

People were discouraged from going abroad, and information that could come from abroad was severely restricted. Soviet state used jammers wherever they could to block BBC and Voice of America. Bringing video cassettes from abroad was illegal.

Police state

The Soviet state had a right to stop any citizen on the streets without reason, and verify his documents. In 1997, when Moscow celebrated its 850^th anniversary, this paranoia reached its peak. I was stopped on the streets every five minutes, by every policeman, who couldn’t distinguish between Chechens and Hindus. It took me a few years after leaving Russia for that instant discomfort at the sight of a policeman to disappear.

During my runs at Patriarshi ponds, policemen twice stopped me to demand my ID. My fluency in Russian saved me.

In 1994, in the south of Moscow, I was handcuffed, frisked, my jacket torn to check if I had hidden drugs inside. The police then let me go without a word of apology.

At least on three occasions, the custom officer at the airport didn’t let me go to catch my flight until I gave him gifts (which he saw in my bag on the x-ray monitor).

Racial profiling was common. In the UK, police are prohibited from using racial descriptions (they can say a tall man, but not a black man). In the USSR, racial profiling was normal. Even today, respectable newspapers occasionally use the word negr.

Movement inside the country was severely restricted. Soviets going outside their own city had to register after three days. They couldn’t become a member of a library, couldn’t work or live officially outside the place mentioned in their passport. For foreigners, visiting cities not mentioned on the visa was a crime.

An American friend of mine, Jennifer, called her mother from the Moscow post office. In 1986, international calls were put through an operator. Jennifer could hear her mother very well, her mother could hear Jennifer very well, but the operator kept telling Jennifer: “please speak louder, I can’t hear you properly.”

What is particularly mind-boggling is that the Soviet State managed to reach sophistication in surveillance and policing of its own citizens at a time when there was no internet, no mobiles, and for many years no computers. I shudder to imagine what USSR would have done if they had access to all those things.

Surveillance in modern world

Modern technology and the bogey of terrorism have encouraged many countries including the USA and the UK to become surveillance states. They are not yet police states in the sense that police can’t arbitrarily stop citizens and demand documents.

Until a few years ago, I was very proud of India, a country whose citizens in principle could live their entire lives without identity documents. Unfortunately, that time is over. India has now introduced a biometric Aadhar card, an ID for each citizen to create the world’s biggest biometric database. It is mandatory in practice though not by law. Bank accounts and mobile phones will be deactivated unless connected to the Aadhar card. (Currently challenged in India’s Supreme Court).

This is a dangerous worldwide trend. The power of the State over an individual is enhancing exponentially even in democratic nations. A powerful surveillance State can first become a police State. A police and surveillance State can become a totalitarian State. Next week, I will discuss what is needed to avoid or postpone this.  

Soviet Communism experiment: Lesson no.3: A totalitarian State can never become part of a civilised world. It is normally a fearful, rude, unhappy, paranoid State that ill-treats its own citizens. (Currently North Korea, Cuba, some Islamic and African states). If you feel your country is becoming a police or surveillance State, protest and resist as much as you can. If your country becomes totalitarian (regulating music, literature, food, clothes, education), run away from it as quickly as you can. Before your State stops you from leaving it.  

Ravi