One of those Soviet political anecdotes that throw a revealing light on realities:

       Finally a shabby little man in the back row stands up. "I have only one question, comrade," he says meekly. "If everything is so good, why is everything so bad?"

       The great gulf between industrial expansion and the squalid living conditions of the masses has been an unchanging feature of the Soviet economic landscape. Heavy industry has held undisputed priority, whatever the cost in retarded consumer industries and depressed living standards. Among the leading industrialized nations, the Soviet Union presents the unique paradox of a country in the front ranks in gross production, second only to the United States, but in the rearmost ranks—twentieth according to most Western calculations—in consumption per inhabitant.

       Not until the mid-fifties did real wages, in true purchasing power, surpass those of 1928, the last NEP year, which in turn had only reached the 1913 levels. Since then, improvement has been too thin to affect the character of life. Government statistics emphasize the great rise in ruble incomes since 1913, but critics readily demonstrate that prices have risen at roughly the same rate. (229) As of 1964, Mihajlo Mihajlov (imprisoned by Tito for his candor) attested in his now celebrated report on his summer in the USSR, that Soviet living standards were "about 40 per cent lower than in Yugoslavia," which itself is no workers' paradise. More than one-third of the national consumer product goes to the 30 million people at the top of the social pyramid, the other 205 million share the remaining two-thirds.

       Consumption of goods per person in 1950-1960 was about one-quarter of the United States, 40 to 60 per cent of West European nations. "The distribution of income within the Soviet society," Professor Cyril E. Black of Princeton University writes, "has also been significantly more unequal than in countries of a comparable level of development, and lower income groups are taxed more heavily." He was referring, of course, to income taxes which are quite low for those in the higher earning brackets, compared to such taxes in America or England, but relatively higher for people in the low earning categories. [Contrary to popular belief, the rate of direct taxation paid by Soviet industrial workers with three dependents who are earning an average wage or less is higher than in any major (free) market economy." Central Research Department, Radio Liberty, Munich, October 1967.] The high costs of growth, he added, "are borne primarily by the lower income groups, in contrast with an elite that lives comfortably and free from progressive taxes."

       Soviet statistics on living norms have always been cagey, ambiguous, with large areas blacked out altogether. Analysts abroad have to be economic detectives, making deductions from available data in other Soviet areas, to reach approximate judgments about incomes, personal budgets, and living conditions. In an article on the subject, "Figures Unfit to Print," in Problems of Communism, Leon M. Herman traced the deepening secrecy since 1927. "The first indicators to be suppressed," he showed, "were those relating to the living standards of the population." (230)

       For instance, "the Soviet government discontinued the release of statistics concerning public health. This step was taken shortly after the trade-union press reported that the rate of industrial accidents increased alarmingly as a result of higher work norms imposed on newly recruited, inexperienced workers." Within a few years the blackout spread to the cost-of-living index, real wages, adjusted for price inflation, family budgets.

       The obvious purpose of the secrecy on matters until then published in the USSR, and routinely published in all other countries, was to hide from the masses and the outside world the calamitous decline of life standards. Prices, rather than wages, determine living conditions—and the government, setting both arbitrarily, can juggle figures to confuse and conceal as it pleases. The ruble, pegged today in theory at $1.11, is entirely artificial; it cannot be exchanged for any other currency at home or abroad. (In the black market an American dollar brings as much as twenty-rive rubles.) Besides, the chronic shortages in consumer goods and their incredibly low quality make comparisons with other countries all but meaningless. Since Soviet and non-Soviet estimates alike rarely take such elements into consideration, the picture they project tends to be a lot rosier than the reality.

       Average earnings for factory and office workers in 1965-1966 have been estimated at 95 rubles a month, about $26 a week. [This figure is considered excessive by some non-Soviet specialists. Thus two economists in Paris, M. Petrovich Kolojarski in Russkaya Misl, in January 1966, and Lucien Laurat, in Est-Quest in May the same year, both calculated the real, monthly average in 1964 to be only 65 rubles. The facts are sufficiently bleak in any case. I have adhered to the official statistics.] If the current Five-Year Plan is fully carried out—a big "if"—the figure by 1970 should be 114 rubles monthly, about $32 a week. Existence for the ordinary citizen in 1970 will consequently remain as cramped and penurious as it has always been. The aristocrats of the labor force, steelworkers, average $41 a week—this according to Meyer Bernstein, head- of the United Steelworkers of America's International Affairs Department, who visited the USSR and its steel mills in late 1966; the average is based on weekly earnings-plus-bonuses of $68.50 by the most skilled down to $13.50 at the lowest levels. (231)

       Consumer prices, whether figured in money or in man-hours of labor, are steeply higher than in Western Europe or the United States. "We priced various articles at the Gum and Zum stores in Moscow," Mr. Bernstein reported. A few of the prices he gathered translated into dollars: a suit of clothes, $191.40; women's shoes, $44; a small stereo radio, $247.50; a small tape recorder, $198. The same items, if and when in stock, can be bought at more reasonable figures, of course, in less swanky shops. When matched against the average income of $26 a week, however, it helps point up the plight of the ordinary consumer.

       But averages are misleading. Tens of millions must subsist on the legal minimum wage, which is now between 40 and 45 rubles a month, and which under the plan would reach 60 rubies by 1970. The monthly income of the largest single group of wage-earners, the collectivized peasants, counting both cash and farm produce, is below the industrial minimum; the range, official figures show, is between 614 rubles a year for specialists such as tractor drivers to 172 rubles at the other extreme for simple farmers. In parts of Central Asia and remoter Siberian areas, even the legal minimum is enjoyed only by the luckier minority of wage earners. A requiem for the pledged communist abundance!

       According to Marxist theory, the abolition of private ownership and profit in the means of production should have redounded in higher living standards for the workers. When this miracle did not transpire, the regime resorted increasingly to daring lies. "For two or three years now/', Stalin declared in December 1, 1935, "we no longer have any poor, unemployment has ceased, undernourishment has disappeared and we have firmly entered the path to prosperity." At about the same time he announced that there were "no more slums" in his country.

       Food queues, unhappily, were universal at that time, the housing situation was disastrous, the ruble was selling in the black market at 4 or 5 per cent of its supposed valuation. (232) And slums in Russian towns and cities were then, and have remained, among the foulest in Europe.

       In 1964, for the first time in thirty years, the Statistical Yearbook of the USSR finally lifted secrecy from the earnings of wage and salary groups. This called for some political courage, since the data confirmed what everyone knew from personal experience: that the levels of living were extremely low. The income of the working population (aside from farmers), the Yearbook showed, was less than one-quarter of corresponding incomes in the United States. Economists abroad, making conservative discounts for purchasing power, quality, and other distorting factors, placed actual wages in the USSR at five to six times lower than in the United States, three to four times lower than in Western Europe.

       For purposes of statistical calculation of living standards, economists set up a weekly "food basket" for a family of two adults and two children. To pay for this "basket," an average American worker must work 7.3 hours—a Soviet worker, 59.2 hours, or more than eight times as long. Since the Soviet workweek is about 42 hours, the fully employed Soviet laborer obviously cannot earn enough to feed a family of four, even if the theoretical "basket" is more skimpy than its American equivalent. At least one other person in the family must become a wage-earner.

       To put a better gloss on the general poverty, Soviet statisticians invariably add what they call indirect "social wages" to the direct earnings. This refers to services and benefits dispensed by the government, such as education, paid vacations, old-age and veterans' pensions, maternity leaves, medical care, children's creches, institutions for the aged and disabled. It even included the generic category of "culture and enlightenment," meaning that the boring propaganda with which the people are deluged is charged to wage earners as extra income.

       A recent Soviet analysis asserts that these "fringe benefits" of Soviet citizenship add about 35 per cent to the average wage, more modest earlier estimates put them around 25 per cent. (233) Without doubt they are vital to the recipient, especially the low rents and bread prices. The government, it should be remembered, is at the same time employer, storekeeper, and landlord, like the corporation in an American "company town" early in this century. It exploits the worker, both at the wage and the price ends of the economy, and exacts not only income taxes, but "voluntary" contributions to various civic organizations, along with dues to the state-controlled trade unions; until 1958 it also forced everyone to purchase "voluntarily' government bonds to the tune of one month's wages.

       The much propagandized benefits merely return to the employee a small part of what has been taken from him. If he received more wages and paid less for his purchases, he would have no need for so many "free" services from the state. Moreover, those celebrated benefits are not uniquely communist. Basically they are the kind nearly all modern societies provide, not alone through government, but through trade-union contracts and private philanthropy. Neither in the USSR nor in capitalist countries does the beneficiary get something for nothing; he pays indirectly instead of directly.

       The average American, Frenchman, or West German, too, receives free education, medical clinics, pensions, day nurseries, unemployment insurance, vacations with pay, etc. He, too, shares in free "culture and enlightenment" (museums, libraries, parks, etc.) as fulsomely as a Soviet citizen. If these "social wages" were added to his direct wages, the comparable average income would appear, if anything, less flattering to the Soviets than the contrasting direct incomes.

       In available health services per inhabitant, according to Professor Black, the USSR ranks below nearly all of the major nations. In the number of hospital beds—one for every 140 people—it was surpassed by twenty-five countries, including all the English-speaking nations. Infant deaths for one thousand live births in 1960 came to thirty-five in Soviet Russia, which was higher than in nineteen other countries; the Netherlands was in first place with 16.5 infant deaths per thousand, the United States in-between with 26.4. (234)

• "Living Space"

       In Soviet Russia, as everywhere, housing is a crucial test of living conditions. It has been pathetically inadequate throughout the Soviet half-century, with the prospects of meaningful improvement in the immediate years ahead extremely dubious. The 1919 Party Program declared that solution of this problem was "a most important task." Forty-two years later, in the 1961 Program, it was still rated "a most acute problem." A formal decision in 1957 ordered the "liquidation" of the housing shortage. Ten years have passed but nothing has changed. Most basements and cellars, even in the biggest cities, are occupied by as many families as can be pressed into them. Hundreds of thousands of workers, to put it conservatively, still live near their industrial sites in crowded, vermin-ridden barracks.

       Although it does not phrase it this way, the Kremlin does not deny that the ordinary wage earner has a smaller area of housing than a convict does in an enlightened Western prison system. The "living space" per person set by law in the leading Soviet cities is nine square meters, or about 91 square feet: a room less than 10 by 10 feet, which happens to be the allotment per inmate in the better American prisons. Not one of the 27 largest cities, however, comes close to providing this legal minimum; half of them average out at less than six square meters; only Moscow, Kiev, and a very few others can provide more than six.

       In 1960 per capita living space for the whole country, the government figures showed, had risen to 5.26 square meters. In the first six months of 1961 the Soviets claimed construction of 15 million square meters of housing—only one million more than West Germany, with one-quarter as many inhabitants, built in the same months. John Scott of Time-Life, returning to Leningrad after an absence of three years, reported: (235) "New housing has been put up in several areas around the city, but officials admitted that the legal sanitary minimum has not been achieved, in spite of rigorous restrictions against any outsider moving into Leningrad."

       At the beginning of the 1960's most of the new housing still provided one room per family, with a common kitchen for three families. By now, the standard, for a family of four or more, is the two-room apartment, but with only marginal improvement in the living space per person. In Moscow, and other primary cities, the waiting period for a new apartment, unless the family can swing heavy political influence or a hefty bribe, is at least five years. There is thus unwitting pathos in an article by an American communist in the Worker (December 5, 1966) on the wonderful progress in the USSR. In an inventory of the splendid advantages of the Soviet over the American worker, he lists "a right ... to be in line for a new apartment."

       Figures do not begin to convey the torments involved in the housing shortages. Families are forced to double up. People intrigue and quarrel and go to court over a few feet of space. Neighbors are denounced to the police in the hope that, if deported, their "living space" will become available. On bulletin boards one finds notices of "a corner" being wanted or being offered for rent—and it refers quite literally to a corner in an occupied room. Disputes in common kitchens and washrooms and inside corridors embitter daily existence.

       Divorced couples are frequently obliged to continue living in the same room, with a curtain to separate them. The divorced couples sometimes bring new partners to their respective sides of the curtain. A satirical writer, Mikhail Zoschenko, once wrote a tongue-in-cheek story on how Soviet conditions sustain the institution of marriage. Husbands and wives, he explained, unable to divorce because they cannot find separate quarters, eventually make up and live happily together.

       The quality of new housing, as of so much else of the new, is abominable. A Soviet witticism refers to it as "instant antiquity." (236) Repeatedly the press has disclosed in futile anger that walls and ceilings crack and the plumbing goes kaput even before the new apartment houses are occupied. Some of these structures in Moscow itself until recently were festooned with nets to catch falling bricks and pediments.

       The findings of the United Steelworkers Union, quoted earlier, indicate that the American trade-unionists did not see the interiors of working-class housing. But "from the outside the workmanship appeared to be poor. We observed similar poor workmanship on the ulterior of the hotels and enterprise buildings. Loose door hinges, wobbling door handles, loose-fitting windows, rusting bath water, missing sink stoppers, poor electric lighting, badly placed switches, all of this and much more was typical of the buildings we entered." It is a fair assumption that the condition of ordinary apartments would be no better, more likely worse, than in hotels and factories.

       Yet the Russians must have been competent builders in the past, as "witnessed by solid structures dating back to the last century and obviously destined to outlive the Soviet buildings. The most desirable dwelling places in the Soviet Union, even in small towns and villages, are those of pre-revolutionary vintage.

       For intimate and vivid accounts of the squalid and harried everyday life of ordinary people, I recommend I am from Moscow, by Yury Krotkov, published in 1967. The author, a successful Soviet writer, defected in London while with a group of tourists. His living quarters, in one of the solidly built pre-revolution houses, were "better than normal by Moscow standards." He was one of nineteen occupants who averaged almost ten square meters per person—"and this for Moscow, at the present time, is luxury:"

• Making Ends Meet

       How ""do Soviet workers and peasants manage to live on their meager wages? The answer is that there are many ways, legal and otherwise, to add to family income. The peasants, of course, have their tiny plots and gardens. Most important, the vast majority of women, and nearly all grown-up children not in school are employed so that few families have less than two wage earners. Besides, man is a resourceful animal. Millions do a bit of black-marketing and engage in private "moonlighting" such as repair jobs for neighbors, all of it necessarily with materials and tools stolen from government supplies.

       Working-class families, even on the outskirts of capital cities, often keep a cow, goat, or pig, or they may have a small backyard vegetable garden and a couple of fruit trees to help fill out their needs. Many of them even produce surpluses, which they sell privately. Denounced as "speculators" (although derogatory labels no longer deter Soviet citizens), they are barred from the public markets to which collectivized peasants bring their products. (238) In January 1967, the Moscow trade-union paper, Trud, proposed that the stigma of "speculation" be removed from this type of transaction and special shops be opened as legal outlets for the produce of marginal urban gardens and orchards. The paper did not conceal that its proposal was prompted by the chronic shortages of fruits and vegetables in the existing state shops.

       A few words are in order about the living conditions of Soviet women, whose supposed new "equality" is always touted in communist propaganda. Actually they have no more privileges, in law or in the economy, than their sisters in the West—unless employment on hard and dangerous jobs normally reserved for men can be rated as a privilege. Back in 1931, I remember, the young Jack Howard, now head of the Scripps-Howard Newspapers, wrote a series of articles after a visit to Soviet Russia. The first of them (I quote from memory) began something like this: "No sooner had I crossed the border than I saw Russian women enjoying their new equality—they were carrying logs."

       Thirty-six years later, they are still carrying logs, digging ditches, sweeping streets, laying bricks, carrying hods, scrubbing the decks of ships, tending furnaces in steel mills and doing other "men's work." The employment of women in coal mining was prohibited in England in 1842; a century and more later the Soviet press was boasting of the high output by women's brigades in coal pits.

       Nearly 50 per "cent-of wage-earners in the USSR are women, compared with less than 25 per cent in the United States. The principal reason for this, of course, is that the male head of a family rarely can support it by his own labor. The pretense that women prefer outside work to what Lenin once called "the primitive and deadening tasks of the household" is largely a propaganda fable.

       vThe truth is that working-class women have no choice. Though they work in a factory or office, they still carry their responsibilities as wives and mothers, doing the cooking and washing and house-cleaning at home. They still must combine care of their children with the outside employment. Those who have an old mother or mother-in-law living with them and helping with the chores are the lucky ones. Soviet men have no more appetite or talent for household tasks than men do elsewhere. (239)

       Western scholars have always been hampered by the lack of reliable Soviet data on the family budget. Only in the late 1950's did the authorities begin to disclose such information, and that in forms obviously intended to veil the low standards—with statistics based, for instance, on relatively high-earning families of skilled workers.

       According to official figures, 54 per cent of the family income goes for the purchase of foodstuffs in the state shops. Since everybody also buys some of the higher-priced products in the peasant free market, it would be fair to raise the expenditure for food to 60 per cent. This, according to the United Nations figures, compares with food budgets ranging from 35 per cent of income in Austria down to 19 per cent in the United States. The Soviet worker has a balance of only 40 per cent of his earnings—about 30 rubles a month, or eight dollars a week—for clothing and all other non-food necessities.

       There is one grim item of living expense that appears in no official or foreign budget studies. It has to be deduced from information in other areas. Yet it has a serious and painful impact on the family budget. I refer to the high incidence and high costs of alcoholism.

       The regime cannot conceal the immense scale of the consumption of hard spirits or the economic and social problems that it creates. The nation was faced, Komsomolskaya Pravda acknowledged on July 31, 1954, with "abysmal drunkenness and abysmal boredom." The continuing preoccupation of the press, books, the theatre, with the scourge of alcoholism indicates that there has surely been no improvement since then. A study of one thousand divorce cases recently made in Leningrad, showed that the largest single cause of the break-up, cited by nearly 30 per cent of the wives, was drunkenness.

       De-drunking clinics are standard in all population centers and never sufficient to care for all those rounded up by the militia in a night. The growth of crime, from hoodlumism to sordid murders, has been blamed by the government upon excessive drinking. A recent defector, interviewed in Germany, in describing life in Sverdlovsk in

       1966 said at one- point: (240) "There are drunkards living in over half the apartments. Unless seen with one's own eyes, it seems incredible . . . . They do it, first, out of sorrow, and then out of habit. It is disgusting and depressing."

       The plague of alcoholism is far beyond anything known in the old Russia, although it also had a reputation for hard drinking. Most social psychologists, including some in the USSR, agree that it is a fair measure of the drabness and oppressive boredom of life, an escape from unpleasant reality. The cold figures are astounding. In 1962, a typical year, the population spent over 12.5 billion rubles on hard spirits—as much as it did for all meat and fish products, canned goods and fats! That it works havoc with the family budget is obvious enough. Sale of alcoholic beverages in 1963 was 2.6 times greater than in the last decade of the monarchy; after making adjustments for a one-third growth in population, it still indicates a shocking rise in alcohol consumption.

       A decree that went into effect on September 1, 1967 made "chronic drunkards" subject to "committal to prophylactic labor centers for compulsory treatment and re-education through labor, for a period of from one to two years." Official action of such a drastic nature provides another clue to the growing seriousness of the problem.

       From Soviet statistics on the pertinent industries, Western students have calculated that to the 60 per cent of its aggregate income that a family spends for food, about 15 per cent should be added for average expenditures on alcohol and tobacco, since both these items are ignored in Soviet budgetary statistics. If this is true, the margin remaining for non-food necessities, including clothing, averages about 25 per cent—25 rubles a month, that is, or six dollars a week.

       Foreign tourists who see the major cities and the Black Sea rivieras briefly can have no real idea of the gray, impoverished lives led by the overwhelming mass of the population. Beyond a few pampered cities, conditions are in most respects as primitive as they were fifty years ago. Erwin C. Canham, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, having alluded to the evidence of industrial growth, added: "Off the beaten track it is a different story. Slums, even in Moscow, axe pervasive and dreadful. (241) Elsewhere, one can step into the Middle Ages." He was there in the late 1950's, but nothing substantial has changed in this respect in the intervening years—nothing in Russia can change basically so fast. Ask a Soviet person how hie is, and he is likely to answer, "Luchi chom zavtra"—"better than tomorrow."

       No nation, however potentially rich, can afford history's most gigantic bureaucracy and internal security establishment, the costs of propaganda and censorship on an unprecedented scale, the inherent waste in centralized planning, the fantastic Soviet mismanagement, plus a tremendous military set-up, space spectaculars and the financing of world-wide revolutionary activities. Moscow and its Soviet bloc at this writing supply about 80 per cent of the military-economic aid to North Vietnam and its Viet Cong for the war on South Vietnam and its allies. With an economy less than half the size, the USSR maintains a military establishment as large as that of the United States, an anti-missile missile program far greater than America's, and space operations at least as vast. The Soviet military budget for 1967 was raised by 81/2 per cent, then re-raised in October by another 15 per cent for 1968, and it is no secret that additional high-priced military projects are concealed in the civilian budget.

       Someone must pay this staggering bill, and in the last analysis it is paid by the people in the coin of atrocious living conditions. The-poverty is so all-embracing that there probably is no other country where the sense of private property is so abnormally developed, the value attached to the simplest material possessions so high. Every scrap and tag-end in the garbage-heap of living is preserved, fought over, traded. Every building, store, bakery, farm, and pile of building material is guarded by armed men and women.

       True, more vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, television sets are being produced. But they are wholly inadequate for the vast population and accessible only to those in middle-class economic brackets. Spare parts and repair facilities are scant. (242) Unless the family has a member who is mechanically apt, there is almost no point in acquiring such luxuries. A medium-sized refrigerator costs about 400 rubles, representing four months of average income. To obtain one of the customer pays in advance, gets on a waiting-list, and if lucky will receive it in a year. Then, according to the Soviet press, his chances are no better than fifty-fifty that it will be operating a year later. A family-sized Volga, the standard car, costs 5,600 rubles, the equivalent of three years' wages for the best-paid middle-class employee. Again it must be paid for in advance and the waiting period may run to five years. In 1966, there were over 150,000 hopeful car buyers on waiting lists throughout the country.

• Goulash Socialism

       The sovereign worker, in whose name the whole communist enterprise was undertaken, must devote much of his spare time to scrounging for food and other products in short supply. The distribution system is so inefficient, standing in line for deficit goods so unavoidable, that some member of the family must devote many hours a day to shopping. The shopper often carries a "perhaps bag" —for items that perhaps may show up unexpectedly; one buys anything available as a hedge against future shortages. Purchases are weighed out into the buyer's bag or into old newspapers; modern wrapping and packaging has not yet reached the second largest industrial power on earth.

       The customer is always wrong—he is cheated, short-weighed, and pushed around. Breakdowns in everyday equipment are as frequent as in industry. Carl T. Rowan, former head of the USIA, after a recent visit to Soviet Russia, reported stalled elevators everywhere. He quoted a Russian as saying: "They can get to the moon but they can't get me to the fifth floor." The "they" is characteristic; always Soviet citizens speak of the rulers in the third person.

       The Soviet worker, so heroic on postage stamps and posters, in real life is poor and harried, bedeviled by propaganda and vigilante attentions. (243) The atmosphere in the celebrated free clinics is familiar to anyone who knows charity wards in other countries; they are likely to be shabby, overcrowded, and little concerned about the sensitivities of their anonymous clients. The Soviet day nurseries and boarding schools have been widely acclaimed, yet they can care for only about 10 per cent of the children under fifteen. This poses problems in households where both father and mother must work to make ends meet.

       Naive enthusiasts who have been spared the ordeal of continual living under Soviet communism may think of the USSR as a sort of superior welfare state. Unfortunately it is closer to an immense poorhouse. Communism, before it was tried on the scale of a great nation, was geared to high human purposes, to happiness, economic justice, and equality. These were to be the criteria of success. The sad part of the story is that the vision, sincerely held by most of the early Bolsheviks, was blotted out by purely materialist criteria—blast furnaces, airplanes, sputniks, and the desperate struggle for sheer subsistence.

       Khrushchev may be remembered in history for reducing the whole purport of Marxism to a pot of stew. What all communist regimes are after, he said during a visit to his fiefs in Eastern Europe, was more goulash. But if goulash is the decisive test of the good society, the major capitalist nations have already achieved it—why experiment with new cookery and cooks? Indeed, Hungary and its neighbors, and Russia itself, had a lot more goulash—or borsch—before the communists took over the kitchens.

       The irony of the business is that communists who deplore and deride materialist criteria in their own affluent homelands do handsprings of enthusiasm over progress toward goulash socialism in Russia. If and when the ordinary Soviet citizen has a refrigerator, a telephone, and a car, we can expect foreign enthusiasts to hail it as an exciting achievement and an argument in favor of communism. The fact that the American citizen already has these things, however, is no argument in favor of capitalism but only a symptom of gross materialism. (244) The tragedy, as some of us see it, is not only in the failure of communism to provide enough goulash but in the fact that its humanist values have been displaced in a sort of reductio ad absurdum of stomach goals. Should those goals be reached in Soviet Russia, which now seems decidedly unlikely for a long, long time to come, the larger tragedy will remain—a well-fed prison is still a prison.

       For fifty years the justification offered for the incalculable sacrifices in death and suffering and indignity visited on the Soviet people has been that they were an investment for the future—if not for themselves, then for their children. But time has run out. The grandchildren are now on the scene, insistent on collecting the interest on the long and grim investments.

       "Governed by fanatical materialists," Joseph A. Gwyer wrote, "the Russian people have been called upon to sacrifice their liberties, their national traditions and their religion for the sake of material progress; and all that they have received in return is a rate of material progress far below that of most other countries. The poor and uninformed peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are persistently being told by communists, by fellow travelers and by just plain muddleheads that communism, while it may have certain drawbacks, is nevertheless the key to material advancement. It should be made clear how very mediocre the economic results of communism have, in fact, been."

       The perceptive Yugoslav, Mihajlo Mihajlov, in touching on the low living standards in Soviet Russia, declared: "Yet it is a fact, no matter how paradoxical, that the common Russian people do not consider material poverty the greatest misfortune." What they crave even more, he wrote, was freedom; what they most miss is "spiritual sustenance." They would not, we may be sure, condone the kind of glorification of their communist system that ignores spiritual deficits on the mistaken assumption that they are compensated by material abundance.

       Only the physical aspects of living conditions, in any country, can be reduced to economic statistics. There is no arithmetic to measure social degradations and spiritual hungers. (245) Day after day the Soviet citizen contends with the nuisances of police surveillance, red tape, documents, passports. He spends a large part of his time in long queues or in the dreary waiting rooms of bored and arrogant little officials—for permissions, purchases, the everlasting pieces of paper that regulate his day-to-day existence. At frequent intervals his right to his cramped "living space" is checked to make sure he isn't occupying a few square feet more than his legal due. No matter how clear his political conscience, how carefully he avoids "dangerous" ideas, malice or error may bring the dreaded call to headquarters for "a little talk." Unless he has official permission, he cannot visit another town for more than seventy-two hours, and his host, too, faces punishment if he fails to inform the police of his illegal presence beyond that limit.

       Where, in an account of living standards, do we fit in the grandmother who secretly, over the heads of more prudent parents, talks to the children about God? Or the man, who comes into possession of an illicit leaflet, reads it greedily behind the locked door of the lavatory, then flushes it down the bowl? Or the parents who baptize their child in secret, fearful that someone may tell and endanger then-jobs? The plight of an open believer in the USSR is like that of the village atheist in a God-fearing American community—it's legal but extremely uncomfortable.

       But why catalog the endless fears and hardships? The world by this time should know what life is like under a totalitarian dispensation. Stalin's only surviving child, Svetlana Alliluyeva, on defecting to the free world, said that she objected to being treated as a piece of "state property." Perhaps she, summed up the quintessential ordeal and humiliation of all Soviet citizens. (246)