Russia Profile
www.russiaprofile.org
October 22, 2007
Waxing Nostalgic
Still Missing the Soviet Union
Comment by Yelena Rykovtseva
Yelena Rykovtseva is a correspondent for Radio Liberty. This comment represents her own views, and not those of Radio Liberty.
Historians, analysts, and, not least, psychiatrists will have to spend many years trying to understand why the Russian people, who suffered so much during the Soviet era, remained sympathetic to the regime after its collapse in 1991. Almost every Soviet family lost a relative or friend during Stalin's purges; many people were not allowed to travel abroad; you couldn't read or watch what you wanted; consumer goods were so scarce, you couldn't buy even the most necessary things. But today no one seems to remember any of this. If you were to ask an average person about life in the Soviet Union, he would automatically start talking about free medical care and about the feeling of security and confidence in the future, while forgetting that the medical care was atrocious, salaries were meager and pensions worse. If you were to remind such a person about the lack of civil rights in the Soviet Union, he would likely snap back at you with some unrelated counterargument, mentioning, for example, the great brotherhood of the Soviet peoples.
A few days ago, the newspaper Izvestia published a series of pieces on Soviet consumer items, such as the Spidola radio and the FED camera. I asked my radio listeners to name the Soviet consumer goods they missed the most and was astonished at their enthusiasm. It turns out that Russians terribly miss furniture items manufactured in socialist Poland; Shiliapis TVs, produced in Soviet Lithuania; the two-compartment Soviet Oka refrigerator, as well as ordinary pig iron frying pans, "which, alas, are nowhere to be found nowadays!" Listeners spoke fondly about Soviet high-quality meat and dairy products, and not a single person seemed to remember how difficult it was to procure them. Nobody mentioned the "sausage commuter trains," packed by crowds of non-Muscovites traveling to the capital in the hope of chancing upon some decent food for their families. Nobody was appalled at the thought that the list of high-quality Soviet consumer goods consisted of only a dozen or so items. On the contrary, everyone waxed nostalgic about this time, and to be honest, I didn't want to spoil my listeners' festive mood by asking them tricky questions or reminding them of the unseemly aspects of their Soviet experience.
Why is that so? Why do people have such upbeat feelings about the Soviet Union? Why do they say that "there were no traffic jams in those days," while failing to mention that owning a car was the privilege of a select few? Why do they miss the low prices on milk, sausages, and vacations, but are utterly oblivious to the fact that they had to save money for years in order to purchase a mediocre TV or refrigerator?
An easy answer would be that that was the time of their youth, and it is easy to remember those years as golden in spite of all the difficulties that had to be endured. Yet I would like to disagree with such a view. The time of youth can take a variety of shapes. If a man spends his youth behind prison bars, he is unlikely to have fond memories of that time based solely on the fact that he was young and full of energy then.
I am afraid that everything is much more complicated. The people are under the sway of some very powerful conviction, having long ago been infected, as it were, with unqualified love for the Soviet regime. This passion courses through their veins like venom whose effects never wear off, and the antidote has not yet been invented.
Perhaps the Soviet leadership inadvertently invented some infallible method of propaganda, whose long-term effects it failed to foresee. Perhaps the brain structure of former Soviet citizens is unique in some way and sets them apart from the rest of humanity, inspiring them with a masochistic longing for an iron hand and leaving them indifferent to the absence of basic personal freedoms in the country they inhabit.
As soon as the new prime minister, Viktor Zubkov, raised his voice to reprimand the ministers, his ratings increased fivefold. During his first trip to the Russian regions, Zubkov only had to pat a little girl on the back, to promise a new set of dentures to a tractor driver and to chastise a few local bigwigs in the manner of a Brezhnev-era party secretary, for one third of the electorate to express a willingness to vote for him in the next presidential elections. No doubt, if Zubkov sticks to his communist era style of behavior and runs for president in March, he will win the elections. Moreover, his chances would be even better than Putin's four years ago. After all, Russians are somewhat afraid of the secret services, to which Putin belongs. Zubkov, on the other hand, is a thoroughly civil figure, a reincarnation of a party secretary, and the people's nostalgia for such a leader is no less strong than for the refrigerator Oka.