Revolutionary Melancholy
I recently came across a two part documentary series about the Soviet Union, made by Alice and Harvey Richards, titled A Visit to the Soviet Union. Alice and Harvey Richards, who described themselves as “pro-socialist, radical activists”, made about twenty documentaries on various social struggles ranging from civil rights and anti-war movements to labour strikes and environmental issues. During the Second Red Scare, a state project of fear mongering in the United States, they traveled to the Soviet Union to make a documentary which, in their words, they hope would “… encourage friendship and understanding between the people of the USSR and the USA and to encourage peaceful international relations.”
I was struck by how different it was in its presentation of the Soviet Union. Documentaries of this period were tinged with a competitive streak that typically downplays Soviet accomplishments. Instead, this focuses on the progressive elements of Soviet society and attempts to bring out the humanistic aspirations behind the Soviet project. This contrast is particularly striking since this was made in the midst of the US civil rights movement, and the documentary focuses a lot on ethnic harmony in the Soviet Union.
This was a period of escalating tensions and nuclear brinkmanship between the Soviet Union and the United States. At times the public mood was desperate and apocalyptic, as evident in movies like the On the Beach (1959), La jétee (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964). There was a feeling that the world was gradually descending into an inevitable nuclear confrontation between superpowers that would end society as we know it, and leave the world inhospitable and barren. Several times during the narration, there are appeals to avoid war and to encourage peace between nations.
The Soviet Union is usually associated with the collectivisation of farms under Stalin, the purges of the late 1930s or the food shortages of the late 1970s-early 1980s. But, for almost 30 years after WWII, the USSR enjoyed high growth rates, economic stability and wild-eyed optimism about the prospects for a planned workers’ state. And for a ten year period between 1954 and 1964, known as the Khrushchev Thaw, they enjoyed a relatively relaxed political environment too. Things were going so well for the Soviet Union that Khrushchev, when he visited the United States in 1959, would boast that “your grandchildren will live under communism.”
It is in this context that we get to glimpse the Soviet Union, in the midst of rebuilding the state out of the ruins of WWII. The narration is sympathetic to the Soviet point of view, perhaps glossing over some of the unevenness in Soviet society, and gives it an aspirational quality that we don’t see in such documentaries.
Broadly four topics were covered in the first part of the documentary — women’s equality, the housing situation in Moscow, consumer goods and women’s healthcare.
Although, dachas (countryside homes or retreats) were shown in the documentary, they weren’t available to all universally. They usually belonged to trade unions, institutes, factories and party officers. Frequently, they were awarded as gifts to poets, artists, scientists and generals, and served as status symbols. Under Khrushchev, attempts were made to broaden their availability more generally. Plots of land were distributed, on which the private owners could build a simple second home, or use for agricultural produce. Waiting lists for such plots of land were long and there was frequent abuse of the system to get ahead. By the 1980s nearly a third of urban families had a dacha.
In housing too, the Richards seems to have omitted talking about the worst aspects of housing in Moscow. Until the late 1950s, family apartments such as those shown in the documentary, were not widely available. Partly due to bureaucratic negligence, partly due to urban overcrowding, and partly due to war, most families lived in communal apartments known as kommunalka. Communal apartments were designed such that multiple families lived together, where they shared the living space, the kitchen and toilets, and had separate bedrooms. Instead of being a site of collective joy, these were often sites of bitter struggle and petty feuds. A whole series of soviet literature exists that describes the kinds of fighting and vindictiveness that went on in these apartments. It wasn’t until the mid 1950s that building separate apartments became an official policy.
As for consumer goods, there were actual shortages of consumer goods throughout Soviet Union’s entire existence. Although, Soviet scientists and economists knew how to do the planning necessary for optimal performance of industry (linear programming and similar methods basically), the computing power and technology on the scale they required for it didn’t exist until the late 70s. Secondly, non-perishable goods, unlike services like transportation or healthcare, are prone to hoarding and reselling in secondary informal markets. Hence, rationing was a necessity. The state consumer goods suppliers had little incentive to innovate without the strict fiscal discipline enforced by markets and innovation in the sector lagged behind similar industries in the west. In other words, there was widespread misallocation of resources. The Soviets could outperform OECD countries in selected core industries, but generally lagged behind in creating enough consumer goods to satiate the needs of Soviet citizens. This was widely known to economists and seized upon by the US in it’s propaganda efforts, most famously in the Khrushchev-Nixon Kitchen Debate.
This debate about Soviet consumer goods has a strange afterlife. It’s still a continuing feature of anti-socialist propaganda to show empty supermarket shelves, often in a way that communicates that market economies are lands of plenty, unlike centrally planned economies. But this isn’t a totally honest depiction. Both, market economies and centrally planned economies face misallocation, constraints and implement rationing in their own way. Markets fail all the time, in a variety of ways, like domination by monopoly powers, information failure, and negative externalities. Market economies are rationed by income (a poor person will never get to buy that toaster), while with centrally planned economies you were allocated goods on the basis of need.
There’s also a certain hubris in the fact the Soviet Union was willing to compare it’s lifestyle with the United States. Russian industrialisation began in the mid 1890s with the programme intensifying under Stalin’s first Five Year Plan of 1928. The US heavy industries sector was already maturing by the 1870s. In other words, the US was decades ahead of the Soviet Union, and it never experienced the effects of two world wars and a civil war on the scale that destroyed the Soviet economy and resources.
In part two we get a glimpse of Soviet life in regional city centres away from Moscow. Once again, the lens through which we get to see regional development is its impact on women. There is much to celebrate here, from literacy and education to health and welfare.
Given that this documentary was shot before the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in a period of escalating racial conflict and heightened racial consciousness, there is a particular emphasis on ethnic harmony. At one point a young interracial couple is shown, to stress its everyday commonality. There’s also a tragic quality here, knowing what comes next — within three decades the Soviet Union would fall apart, the states would break away and regional ethnic tensions will flair up again.
In the fallout ensuing from the breakup of the Soviet Union some of the worst ethnic conflicts of the late twentieth century would occur — nearly 200,000 people have lost their lives in post-Soviet conflict. The breakup of the Soviet Union can be described as a result of a series of escalating ethnic and political tensions, exacerbated by the stagnant economy and the opening of political freedoms with glasnost. The vast territorial expanses of the Soviet Union, and the unique histories of various ethnic cultures, and the histories of inter-ethnic conflict made the Soviet Union into a tinderbox waiting to explode. According to the 1979 census, the Soviet Union had a population of 262 million, with 104 distinct nationalities — 15 had their own republics, and another 20 had a lesser status as autonomous republics.
Patrick Cockburn’s 1989 article for Foreign Policy magazine, Ethnic Tremors, gives a vivid description of the sort of ethnic challenges faced by the Soviet politburo during the waning days of the Soviet Union. In it he describes a new type of dissent emerging from the middle strata of Soviet society: the young, urban, well educated masses from the periphery, who had rapidly embraced nationalism. During the 1960s and 70s, Soviet sociologists had worried about the persistence of “backward” Islamic traditions and the possibilities of religious and ethnic conflict emerging from thereof. Instead, it would be the young and well educated — the kind of people who were much celebrated in the documentary — who would lead the nationalist movements and the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The December riot of 1986 is an example of the kind of social and ethnic tension that were developing between young, regional urbanites and Moscow bureaucrats. On December 16, 1986 Soviet president Gorbachev, in a move that came to be seen as insensitive and chauvinistic, dismissed the top official representing Kazakhstan, Kunaev (a Kazakh) and replaced him with Kolbin (a Russian). To the new Moscow bureaucrats under Gorbachev, who believed themselves to be reformers, saw Kunaev, who had been serving in the same post for over 20 years, as corrupt and nepotistic. The immediate reaction to this was two days of serious rioting by university students in Almaty, Kazakhstan, which would spread to neighbouring cities gradually. To contain this troops were sent in to deal with the protests much more violently. In the end, the protests were contained, but they failed to see the emerging pattern of nationalism that were developing, which would in turn lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in five short years.
In her now famous essay, Resisting Left Melancholy, Wendy Brown implores us to move beyond left’s attachment to the past. Melancholia is conservative in nature and fetishises dead objects, instead of allowing us to embrace the present with all its contradictions. It’s a short but brilliant essay, that challenges us to see past merely the defense of the welfare state as the horizon of left politics, and radicalise our imagination. In the twenty years since it was written we’ve imagined all sorts of post-capitalist, post-scarcity societies. We’ve re-invented a left politics that is capable of challenging neoliberalism on its own terms. We’ve fostered mass movements that desire a definite break with economic regimes of the old that are destroying the planet. It was then a strange feeling to watch this decades old documentary, about a place I’ve never experienced, nor an idea of socialism I felt particularly attached to, and feel gloomy, sad and — dare I say it — melancholic.
Like all melancholics I’ve turned to rationalising my own attachment to an irrecoverable past, attached the adjective ‘revolutionary’ for added pomposity, and begun searching for reasons why I should feel this way. Brown, herself, reflecting on Walter Benjamin’s writings says that, at times, he saw melancholy as a creative wellspring. That there was productive value and insights to be gained from reflecting on our attachment to losses and failures.
On closer reflection, it’s not the Soviet Union as it existed that I feel melancholic for, it’s the Soviet Union that was created by Alice and Harvey Richards—a phantasm that always perhaps existed, yet never was. An ideal state that never needs be immersed in the messy reality of having to juggle between competing regional interest groups, or having to sacrifice production for the manufacture of weapons during a cold war. The ideal state that the old Bolsheviks hoped would emerge from the wreckage that was the Great War, but never did. A shining beacon that all workers from all lands could aspire to. Here we are finally realising Marx’s old dream of a rationally organised society, that delivers from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
A spectre haunts our thoughts.
