Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union. David Satter
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original placement and urged them to get on with the work.
Victor, himself a young Soviet bureaucrat, tried to explain the reason for the delays. “There are people who can sit in one place for eight hours, look busy and do absolutely nothing. In our country, this is an art.”
The senseless delays are exasperating but they do have a kind of justification. The Soviet bureaucracy is designed to process masses and reflects Soviet society, which guarantees employment and is organized like a giant company store in which payment is in chits, good only for purchasing the company’s products.
Pay is low in the Soviet Union, usually not much above 140 rubles a month (approximately $ 187), and the Soviet bureaucrat or workman, so indifferent to the people he’s serving, may feel his effort is not appreciated. “Why should people work hard for 100 rubles a month?” said one young secretary. “It’s barely enough to live on.” Or as one man put it, “I pretend that I’m working, and they pretend that they’re paying me.”
Soviet Citizens and longtime foreign residents avoid established bureaucratic channels and get things done through informal contacts. This is because delays and inefficiencies seem endemic to Soviet organizations and the consumer economy. Buying an item in a Russian shop, for example, can involve waiting in as many as three different lines, a line to read the prices on available items, a line to pay for them and a line to collect them.
Even in institutions where there is the potential for efficiency, one may find it difficult to operate because, to an extent that Westerners find puzzling, Russians think in terms not of facilitating action, but of preventing it.
In a society governed by an infinite number of regulations and rules, any deviation from the norm is likely to strike someone as an infraction. A perceived violation of the rules, in turn, is a welcome excuse for doing nothing.
No Appointments, No Service
When the office car broke down, I had it towed to a garage. When I arrived, the garage supervisor asked me if I had made an appointment. When I said I hadn’t, he said it would be impossible to service the car. After several hours of discussion interrupted by a lengthy lunch break, he relented and directed me to a slow-moving queue to fill out the relevant forms and drive the barely functioning car back into the garage.
There, the garage superintendent said he couldn’t service the car because I had brought it into the garage after 3 p.m. When I tried to drive the car back out of the garage area, a woman gatekeeper in her ’60s refused to let me leave with the car because I had no certificate showing I had paid to have it serviced.
Despite the Soviet penchant for over-administration and various inefficient Russian habits, the country has made progress. In recent years, there is more in the shops and the bureaucracy is somewhat less complicated. The Soviet Union, however, is still a long way from being a consumer society.
The confrontations between bourgeois foreigners and the functionaries of the first workers’ state, accordingly, take on an almost symbolic significance. Foreigners complain bitterly about the slow pace at which everything in Moscow moves, and Soviet employees blithely ignore them, secure in the knowledge that whatever anyone says about their efficiency, they are citizens of the first country in the world to have eliminated unemployment.
ERZEUGT DURCH JUTOH - BITTE REGISTRIEREN SIE SICH, UM DIESE ZEILE ZU ENTFERNEN
Chicago Daily News, Sunday, February 5–6, 1977
Angry Russians Can’t Understand Inflation
Russians are reacting with black anger and streams of curses to the news that major price increases go into effect April 1.
Unlike Americans, who accept inflation as only a little less inevitable than death and taxes, Russians are told continually that Soviet society eliminates such capitalist evils as rising prices and unemployment.
So when it was announced last month that cab fares would go up 100 per cent, air fares would increase by approximately 20 per cent and sea and river transport and made-to-measure suits would also be more expensive, the reaction of many Russians was that they were being unfairly squeezed.
"In your country when prices go up,” said Volodya M., a physicist in his late 50s, “salaries go up, too. But in some Soviet professions, salaries haven’t been increased in years.”
There had been rumors since last summer that major price increases were on the way, but Russians, wise to the ways of their government, realized the rumours were true when the press announced in December that the government was increasing salaries.
The salary increases averaged 4 rubles ($5.32) a week for 31 million low- and middle-income employees, and were presented as another step forward in improving the Soviet citizens standard of living.
On closer examination, however, it was clear that the salary increases only took immediate effect in the far north, Far East, and Siberia and were consistent with the established Soviet policies of paying differentials to attract workers to cold and remote areas.
The price increases, however, apply uniformly throughout the Soviet Union and will go into effect this spring.
The reaction of the Soviet public was angry and swift. “Khrushchev said we would have communism by 1980,” said one disgruntled young father bitterly, "yet our life gets worse and worse.”
On the street, people grumbled about the increases, which were the first announced major price increases for basic services or commodities for many years, and said that they feared that more increases were on the way.
“Believe me,” said one young secretary, “this is just the beginning.”
The news of price increases had a demoralizing effect, in part because the Soviet assertion to be an inflation-free society contains a great amount of truth. Prices have increased less than 1 per cent a year, according to Soviet statistics, and almost all basic costs such as for food, municipal transport, rent and utilities have not risen in decades.
This, however, does not mean that the Soviet Union is a shopper’s paradise. The average wage in the Soviet Union now stands at about 150 roubles (about $200) a month and a new winter coat can easily cost that much. A new Soviet Zhiguli automobile costs an average Soviet citizen four years’ salary.
When the price increases were announced, Nikolai Glushkov, the chairman of the state committee on prices, said they were necessary because the additional cost of re-equipping the taxi fleet, civil aviation and the sea and river fleet had caused many enterprises to operate at a loss.
Such logic would appeal to any capitalist, but the difficulty with such reasoning, at least as far as the Soviet consumer is concerned, is that it can be extended indefinitely. The prices of many goods in the Soviet Union are kept artificially low. Last year, the government spent 19 billion roubles, for example, to subsidize the sale of meat and milk at stable retail prices.
If the Soviets decide to begin applying a little capitalist logic to other areas of the economy, perceptible inflation could become even more worrying in the Soviet Union than it is in the West because it would erode the floor of stable prices on which hopes for better Soviet living standards have always been based.
In that case, Soviet consumers might have to learn to fulfil the expectations of a Moscow cabbie who, when asked how he thought people would react to the new doubled cab fares, said, “They’ll get used to it.”
ERZEUGT DURCH JUTOH - BITTE REGISTRIEREN SIE SICH, UM DIESE ZEILE ZU ENTFERNEN
The Financial Times, Monday, March 7, 1977
The Dissidents Who Strive for
Western Freedoms in Russia
“These people are only guilty of gathering information. We have no free Press in this country, if, under these conditions,