Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 09:36:03 +0000
From: MA&NG Jones <majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: Foucault on USSR


Justin:
You wrote:
> 
> Sorry, Foucault is closer than you on this. There was greater 
>material  equality, but the position of women in Soviet (and 
>Russian) society was > and is degraded. There was better  access to 
>higher education, but in terms  of opportunities  afterwards, forget 
>it. As to healthcare, you are talking  about a  society without 
>contraceptives. Abortion was the usual means  of birth control. 
>This is not a woman-friendly society.

Mark: There is a vast literature on this, obviously, and there is also 
anecdote, both before and after the USSR. For what it is worth, I 
went to Russia with the same kind of assumptions you share (after 
reading the same kind of books, I don't know). I married a Russian 
woman and lived there for ten years off and on after 1985. My wife 
was the senior editor in a big Moscow publishing house. I travelled 
widely with her throughout the USSR before, during and after the 
break-up so I had chance to see how women (and men) lived in the 
Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as European Russia. The only 
place I never really got to know was Ukraine. 

Justin: > There was better access to higher education, but in
 >terms  of opportunities afterwards, forget it.

Mark: In fact this is nonsense. Russia was and is in many respects  a 
backward country, and if you lived amongst ordinary Russians and 
not in some steel-and-glass expat community, you could and can 
touch and feel it's backwardness; the men are sexist. That was a 
reality in Soviet socialism. Many men I met were indescribably 
awful to their long-suffering women and I thought they were just 
plain fucking stupid.

Part of the problem was they had their own tradition of struggle and 
sacrifice (in 1945 less than 3 percent of the cohort of Soviet young 
men aged 18 in 1941, were still alive). But still, I agree Justin, there 
was just no damn excuse for their sexist, vodka-swilling behaviour. 
Of course, it was also true that in Soviet Russia you could just go 
fishing a lot of the time. Mostly that deep-dyed sexism and 
patriarchal attitude was also down to the following: Soviet history 
was a struggle between the deep past and the heroic future, with no 
present to speak of *except* that struggle, which went on right to 
the very end. The Soviet Union did not modernise because it was 
blocked -- cut off from western modernity (cultural revolutions, 
sexual attitude changes, rock and roll) as well as protected from 
Western capitalism.

It was pre-revolutionary Russia preserved by the aspic of 
containment, war, siege and the political and social responses to 
that, i.e. the response that is normally and pejoratively termed 
'Stalinism'. Personally I no longer think Stalinism was bad. I agree 
with Godena. Sorry and all that (and yes, I have read Medved, Pipes, 
Conquest et al, and more than just that -- but read on). So now I am 
searching for some alternative term. But let us pro tem call it Soviet 
socialism. 

Soviet socialism was (I am speaking of my own personal, direct 
experience of it, not more than that) the most wondrous, achingly 
funny, heartbreaking, endearing, frustrating, mind-bogglingly-
senseless, labyrinthine, tragi-comic and ultimately grand, heroic and 
glorious social experiment in human history (this is more or less the 
words my wife used last night when funnily enough we were talking 
about this very matter, before reading any of this thread). It lasted 
glorious seventy years, from 30 December 1922 to 31 December 
1991. A seventy year holiday from the life the rest of us lead.  When 
I lived there I often hated it, often loved it but mostly Iwas just 
gobsmacked. I was dead lucky 'cos of my wife's connections. I saw 
everything, pretty much -- collective farms, tank factories, missile 
factories, polyclinics, artists' communes (every single Soviet era 
town I ever visited has an artist-commune, with municipal housing 
provided -big, high-windowed studio flats, that kind of thing). I 
stayed in all kinds of places. Dacha-villages in Siberia which in 
Gorby's time of opening were set aside for foreign visitors. 
Sometimes they were too-hurriedly set aside, ill-prepared, and the 
cynicism of the authorities showed through. I remember once 
wandering drunkenly around the larch and pine woods in one such 
palisaded-off place (after a heavy banya session with some local 
notables) and meeting a very old lady who was less confused than 
me. She was a poet from Moscow and had been there since 1937. 
The place was actually a camp, she was one of the last inmates, had 
nowhere else to go and they'd forgotten about her. Before we left 
that place my wife laid flowers on the unmarked graves of inmates 
summarily shot in the 1930s (the old lady knew where they were, so 
did the kitchen staff even). Big scandal with local high-ups but a 
phone call to Moscow (I told you, my wife had connections) 
stopped the bullshit and we were able to leave OK. The old lady 
funnily enough was still cheerfully there a year later (I checked). By 
then the place was overrun by carousing western oilmen. Note: this 
was a Gulag. It had nice wooden chalets, a banya, sanatorium, 
cinema and other things. 

Draw your own conclusions, if you can. I can't. But yes, I can: my 
conclusion is the same as my wife's: that Soviet socialism was one 
of the bravest and greatest episodes in human history and the more 
time passes the more it shines like a beacon of hope for all of us, 
and the more clearly we see the breathtaking magnitude of what was 
achieved, by the breathtaking fall that has come after, and we see 
how *much* better socialism was at dealing with human 
backwardness than capitalism is, and we see how it was better in the 
nobility, and futility, and madness and sacrifice, and the blood and 
the tears it called forth from people, and how ready they were to 
sacrifice everything -- every damn thing -- for this cause they so 
passionately and fervently believed in -- and we see in their stories, 
in the things they overcame and the modest but heroic lives they led, 
how foolish and empty are utopian schemes for things like *market 
socialism*, how lacking the gift of vision and compassion these 
sterile *models* are, how lacking the gift of life, even of vicarious 
life, the life of once-existing and now-exterminated Soviet 
socialism. 

There was that grandeur and pathos about the experience of 
everyday life, even right at the end, even and *especially* among 
ordinary people,  and which has no counterpart, none, anywhere else  
on the planet, and never will have again, has only mumbled echoes 
in our jaded dreams and betrayed hopes and mundane plodding lives 
--  believe me, we have nothing better to look forward to than 
ordinary Soviet citizens did.

I cannot even begin to tell you how much I, and a majority of 
Russians if you believe the (Western) pollsters who sample their 
pulse, miss the good ol' USSR. Destroying it was, as one Russian 
woman said in a vox pop interview quoted in JRL the other day, 'the 
greatest crime in history'. I'll second that. I'll third and fourth
that. I'll 
give my life for that. I'll show the world as best I can what we have 
lost, and how we shall all be made to pay, and why to be a 
Communist is therefore the best and bravest thing anyone can ever 
be in their lives. 

In Soviet socialism (like it or not, Justin) there was a profound 
human equality, a willingness to sacrifice, a preparedness (as my 
wife said in our conversation last night) to put up with the shortages 
and lack of consumer goods and the hardships of everyday life -- in 
exchange for what? What? In exchange for what, Justin? 

In exchange for simple human dignity, which is what Soviet people 
had -- even the meanest Gulag survivors (as some of them now 
publicly admit) had their dignity, the dignity of resistance and of 
belief , even if it was wrongheaded resistance and mistaken belief 
(as I believe it was, and some of them now do, seeing what 
*freedom* has actually brought them). Dignity. And education. And 
a health service. And housing. And a job. And the sense of worth 
that comes from knowing that your neighbours are pretty much like 
you are. 

I lived in a north Moscow municipal suburb, in one of those so-
called grey tenements, which was actually a lively place, run by 
harridan-faced old women in a committee called 'Zhek' -- an odd but 
universal survival of Kollontai's Zhenotdel -- but that is another 
story, and I'm coming to that. Our block was called 'Vertolet', 
'Helicopter', and was built in the 1960s out of concrete blocks. I 
loved that place! Now I live in a nice house in England and don't 
give a shit. I am not living in my raucous, lively, beloved 
neighbourhood any more. I do not have a mad Georgian with 2 wives 
on one side, a Bolshoi violinist on the other, a crazy engineer who 
plays the Beatles non-stop 6 hours at a time overhead, and a sweet 
couple, both primary school teachers, always smiling, with nice 
turned out kids, on the floor below. All rubbing along, all doing 
their thing, all helping each other. 

Last year I went back there. Broken entrances. 'Bomzh' -- homeless 
bums sleeping in their own piss. Kiosks selling industrial vodka. A 
big pink Chevvie driven endlessly up and down, slithering over the 
snow, terrorising passers-by, laughing wideboys sneering from 
inside. I do not like this new Russia.

Well, this is all 'I am a camera stuff' and who really gives a shit? Not 
pontificating Justin:

 > As to healthcare, you are talking
>  about a society without contraceptives. Abortion was the usual 
>means of
>> birth control. This is not a woman-friendly society.

As to healthcare, you are talking about a system which (a) worked, 
until finally the west squeezed the life out of the whole place (that, 
my dear, is the real meaning of 'stagnation' and 'Brezhnevism' -- the 
subject of another post, I'm afraid, because I have to stop in a minute 
and go earn a living). And (b) was run mostly by women, who really 
seemed to care, tired and harassed though they mostly were. 
Therefore the gibberish in the last 2 sentences of Justin's, needs to 
be qualified by actual experience on the ground, as it were. Yes, it is 
true they did not have the pill. They had abortions (Karmann 
suction) and they had inner-tube type condoms ('galoshi'). But no 
oestrogen in the women and the water and the air.
Justin: 
> This is not a woman-friendly society.

Well, not now it ain't, when you can walk along Gorky street and see 
the trashed and cast-off women or go in the fine new hotels and see 
them in their original pristine condition, the world's most beautiful 
women, up for sale. 

Russia was patriarchal, Justin, let's face it. Traditionally, I mean. 
Hell, Russia was Russia, no getting away from it.  But in my travels 
I saw women in high places everywhere. Not just European Russia, 
but in the Caucasus and Central Asia. They had educations. They 
had real, not formal equality. They worked in meaningful jobs, in 
universities and clinics, high-tech factories and offices. And down 
on the farm. And in trade, where they ripped off everybody and got 
overfat. Now the clinics are closed, except the posh new hard-
currency ones. The factories are most definitely closed.  The 
universities -- ditto. Two years ago I visited Kirgizia. The veil was 
back in a big way. Men were openly parading their processions of 
dumb wives. A souvenir one of them gave me -- was a bullwhip, 
which he earnestly commended me to use on mine, as he assured me 
he did on his. I believed him. Yes, times are a-changing.

Justin: > As to gays and lesbians. The Bolsheviks legalised 
homosexuality. Stalin
> recriminalized it. Soviet and Russian society was and is 
pathologically
> homophobic.

And the dyedovschina, don't forget that, Justin, the hazing in the 
army, the bromine in the water, the injections of hell-knows-what 
they gave to gays. Yes, they were anti-gay, Justin. No doubt about it. 
Homophobic.

But, you know what the Russians always used to say about Soviet 
reality: no matter how many guards there are on the front door, there 
is always a way in the back. Call it cynicism, or hypocrisy, and I will 
agree, that had it in spaded but I tell you that our cynicism is like 
fluoride in our water, it is even expressed in our genes (we 
comfortable westerners, I mean). In Soviet Russia, cynicism and 
hypocrisy was gigantic, like porridge flooding the streets. But still, 
people always laughed when someone cracked a joke about it ('A 
drunk is in Red Square, shouting abuse about the General Secretary: 
'Khrushchev is an Idiot!' he shouts repeatedly. Arrested, brought to 
trial, he is given two consecutive sentences, for 90 days and 15 
years. Shocked, the now-sober drunk says, 'Why *two* sentences?' 
Judge: '90 days for being drunk and disorderly, 15 years for 
revealing state secrets.')

If things had worked out differently, we certainly would have shared 
with them our lack of homophobia. And they would have been glad 
of it, because it's a liberation not to fear gays, we all know that. But 
we would have to shut up and do a lot more listening than talking, 
Justin. A lot more. Now we won't get the chance.
We are now pretty much like the sometimes kindly friends of SS 
guards who worked at Dachau or like American cinemagoers in the 
days of Audie Murphy (I'm guessing here, I never went to America). 
We talk about 'the Russians' like they talked about the Jews and the 
native Americans -- sometimes we laugh at them. Sometimes they 
irritate us. We patronise them or sympathise with them. We make 
folk-devils of them. We worry about their mafia.
That is because we have stolen away their humanity, their dignity, 
their right even to life.



-- 
Regards,
Mark Jones
majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk
http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~majones/index.htm



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