Leonid Sinelnikov - Smoke and Mirrors: From the Soviet Union to Russia, the Pipedream Meets Reality

P eoples attitudes to tobacco cover a whole gamut of emotions, from I cant live without a cigarette to I regard tobacco as one of the vilest enemies

If you ask me about tobacco, you will risk getting the answer, Read my book! because in my case, tobacco has been my lifes career. There is probably no point now in dwelling on whether or not I chose the right path. In any case, back when, as a freshly baked Moscow college graduate, I was sent to work at the tobacco factory, I had little choice in the matter. Ill do a stint at the Yava factory, I told my parents, not imagining that this stint would go on for half a century.

I never thought that I would witness such changes in attitudes to smoking as we are seeing now the world over. Even in Russia, where people are fairly conservative in their habits, cigarette consumption is in decline. In the USSR, cigarettes were considered a vitally important product without which consumers simply could not live a view borne out by the serious unrest that broke out whenever there were tobacco shortages. This is why the countrys leadership paid great attention to ensuring that the country was properly supplied with tobacco products, putting tobacco on a par with bread and vodka. In the rest of the world too, of course, smoking was a major influence in society and something that governments kept a watch over, but the problems there were of a different nature from those in Russia.

Now, smokers are giving up or cutting down on cigarettes of their own accord. They are switching to electronic cigarettes or other products that mimic traditional smoking but without the burning of tobacco. I will touch upon this topic in the concluding part of the book. However, my main subject is much broader than the traditional production of cigarettes. In this book, dear reader, tobacco is also a pretext to describe the people I have known and the events that I have been involved in and witnessed, to talk about the difficult times our country has faced and about the fates of people who made their contribution to Russias development.

Was the tobacco industry in the USSR just an anomalous weak point in a viable system, or were we all, by constantly plugging the holes in a shortage-based economy, propping up an illusion of the sustainability of the command system? To use an English expression, was it all just smoke and mirrors? That is for you to judge. The purpose of my account is to help the next generation draw the right conclusions from the lessons of history.

I began pondering over the fundamental problems of the system when it became clear that our country had hit a dead end. The sequence of deaths of one elderly General Secretary after another provided us with a fecund source of bleak jokes, but precious little in terms of hopes for the future. And when a new leader, Gorbachev, appeared atop the political Olympus, no one expected his appointment to turn the life of this vast country upside down. That era, which became popularly known throughout the world as perestroika, may without any exaggeration be called the brightest period in the history of the USSR. Events that brought long-established stereotypes crashing down and had life-changing consequences for the whole country occurred in rapid succession. The man who instigated and inspired these momentous changes was the General Secretary himself, Mikhail Gorbachev, who very astutely identified the primary targets of long-overdue reforms.

Almost immediately after he came to power, concepts that were fundamentally new to Soviet power were suddenly proclaimed as policy. Perestroika and glasnost were designed to overcome the worst vices of the Brezhnev era: stagnation and the concealment of the real state of affairs in the country from the people. There was particular awe over the way Mikhail Sergeyevich interacted with members of the public. People sat in astonishment at television reports covering Gorbachevs visits to various places around the country. It was in the course of Mikhail Sergeyevichs frank and open engagement with the public that the catchphrase we cannot live like this was born.

I think that those of my compatriots who these days like to criticise Gorbachev, accusing him of all the mortal sins, would do well to remember how we lived before he bravely took on the challenge and responsibility of breaking a monstrously vicious circle.