Maurice Friedberg - Soviet Society Under Gorbachev: Current Trends and the Prospects for Change: Current Trends and the Prospects for Change

Current Trends and the Prospects for Reform

Maurice Friedberg and Heyward Isham, editors

First published 1987 by M.E. Sharpe

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Soviet society under Gorbachev.

Papers from a conference on Soviet society convened by the Department of State and held at Airlie House, Virginia in the fall of 1986.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
Contents: The family in the Soviet Union / Mark G. Field Labor problems and the prospects for accelerated economic growth / Vladimir Kontorovich A noble experiment? / Vladimir Treml [etc.]
1. Soviet UnionSocial conditions1970- Congresses. 2. Soviet UnionPolitics and government1982- Congresses.
I. Friedberg, Maurice, 1929
II. Isham, Heyward.
HN523.5.S685 1987 947.085'3 87-16572

ISBN 13: 9780873324434 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 9780873324427 (hbk)

Maurice Friedberg

Not since Nikita S. Khrushchev's advent to power over thirty years ago has a change in Soviet leadership given rise to as many great expectations as has Mikhail S. Gorbachev's accession to the helm of state. To be sure, there are parallels that suggest themselves at once. Both men succeeded the two longest-ruling leaders in Soviet history, and both promptly promised rather radical changes, if not a clear break with the past. True, the moderately repressive two decades of Brezhnev's reign (and the brief tenures of Andropov and Chernenko) lack the drama of Stalin's terror-filled era, and Gorbachev, however charismatic, lacks the flamboyancy of Khrushchev. Even had he been so inclined, Gorbachev could not produce a denunciation of his predecessor's bloody crimes that could remotely rival Khrushchev's stirring oration at the 1956 Communist Party Congress. Whatever the differences imposed by history and individual leadership styles (Brezhnev did not lead the nation during the travail of a world war, and he lacked Stalin's tyrannical instincts), both Stalin and Brezhnev bequeathed to their successors an economy that was a shambles and a society ravaged by a host of ills. They also left it militarily strong and diplomatically on the offensive.

Both Khrushchev and Gorbachev immediately proposed to address a wide variety of domestic problems. Surely, the lessons of Khrushchev's experiments with a variety of economic stratagems and his lackadaisical attempts at greater permissiveness and tolerance after decades of Stalin's police and prisons have not been lost on Gorbachev. Khrushchev's successes and failuresto say nothing of his ultimate fate, his ouster at the hand of his own associatessuggest a bewildering variety of practical constraints and tradeoffs, not to mention those imposed by the ideological parameters of a state dedicated to the communist idea. Understandably, any Soviet leaderand especially one whose background is primarily that of a Party functionary, as is Gorbachev's would be loathe to resort to drastic changes of an indisputably systemic nature that would expose him to charges of doctrinal heresy and betrayal, and would prefer first to exhaust less drastic alternatives. Past experience, however, suggests that the latter are all too often inadequate to deal with the ingrained, deep-seated problems of a huge country made further immobile by an understandably passive citizenry and a mammoth state bureaucracy that overlaps with a Party apparatus of similar dimensions, to say nothing of special-interest groups that often conflict but must all somehow be appeased or at least neutralized.

In an attempt to assess the state of the Soviet Union at the end of the second year of the Gorbachev administration (and thus also to gauge the prospects of alternative future policies and developments), a conference on Soviet society was convened by the Department of State at Airlie House, Virginia, in the autumn of 1986. The gathering, which was co-chaired by the editors of this volume, was attended by government specialists on Soviet affairs as well as academics representing a wide range of disciplines. The latter included American scholars as well as several recent emigrs from the USSR. The papers selected for publication here are those that focused most directly on current trends, but they reflect also the presentations and comments of the other conference participants.

No attempt was made to evaluate the diplomatic dimensions of the present condition of the USSR. However, nearly every other aspect of Soviet domestic affairs was addressed directly or obliquely, thus providing a careful and detailed appraisal of the Soviet Union as of the end of 1986.

The state of the Soviet family seldom commands newspaper headlines in the West. In New York and Paris and London it is the news of Soviet dissidents, of literary sensations, and of restrictions on the sale of vodka that dominate dispatches from Moscow. Soviet media, for all their relative liveliness today, are also, understandably, preoccupied with personnel changes and official pronouncements by Gorbachev and his associates.

The family, however, is the molecule of a society. Even in Soviet conditions, it remains a "private" institution that may harbor, foster, and perpetuate values at variance with those of society at large. Hence, Soviet attitudes toward the family have been ambivalent over the years, at times hostile, at times friendly. The Soviet family today, while still to all appearances a solid enough institution (90 percent of the Soviet population, Mark Field indicates, lives in family units), is beset by grave tensions, not unlike those that American families face. Foremost among these is divorce. While still lower than the American, the Soviet divorce rate in 1984 was thirteen times higher than in 1950. Roughly half of Soviet marriages now end in divorce, about 800,000 annually, and fewer than half of the divorced women will remarry. Men blame the breakup of their marriages on incompatibility, while women cite alcoholism. Illegitimacy is rampant, with about a million children born annually out of wedlock. This, according to Field, may be a contributing factor to the very high infant mortality rateabout three times as high as in the United States. The high incidence of illegitimacy is also certainly a consequence of the primitive nature of Soviet contraceptive devices. The pill is still largely unavailable, and the crude and thick condoms are lovingly called "galoshes." As a result, abortions are often the birth-control method of first resort. About 80 percent of all pregnancies end in abortionwhich was illegal as recently as 1955. In the past such evidence of social pathology was rarely if ever discussed in public or in the mass media. The subject is now in the open, one of the first beneficiaries of Gorbachev's glasnost', or openness.