The most brazen piece of make-believe in Soviet mythology, fabricated in the middle thirties, is that the country has a "classless society." Joseph Stalin proclaimed this glorious lie—and his terror machine kept on exterminating "class enemies." When his "mistakes" were exposed by his heirs, this outrageous claim was not among them. It remains an official "fact" and a standard boast; for any party man to think aloud that there are still classes is tantamount to political suicide.

         The sheer impudence of the pretense is breath taking: the kind of falsehood only a regime safe from contradiction could hope to maintain. None of its "dialectical" wordplay, however, can blur what is visible to the naked eye, which is a society of extremes in rich and poor, privilege and deprivation, strong and weak, as in all countries—only more so.

         Modern apartment houses for the new middle class stand on the edges of foul slums in Soviet cities. Fine dachas or country vacation houses are within view of wretched peasant hovels. The collectivized peasant envies the better life of the urban worker, and both of them aspire for their children, if not themselves, the relative comforts and luxuries of middle-class officials, economic managers, and professional people.

         The contrasts in living conditions for the masses and the classes are as sharp as in capitalist nations, the contrasts in power and privilege vastly sharper. A recent tourist to Russia has written: "They flash around the city in curtained, chauffeur-driven cars. They wear dresses from, Paris and tailor-made suits. (74) They eat out-of-season delicacies. 'They' are the various Soviet elites." How does one square this with a classless society? The fact that they do is proof of the magic of "dialectic" thinking, in which opposites are supposedly resolved in a new truth.

         While ordinary mortals queue up for hours to obtain some of the everyday necessities, the new aristocrats shop at leisure in special stores stocked with the best the country produces and imported goods. While top officials and managers draw hundreds of rubles a month—plus an array of perquisites like chauffeured motorcars, choice apartments—millions on the nether levels struggle to survive on the legal minimum of 45 rubles a month. In factories and institutions the dining rooms are socially graded: first-rate for the important people, third-rate for the workers. Trains have three or four classes, according to ability to pay. The best hospitals are reserved for "the best people."

         The upper classes have their status symbols: private suburban houses built on public land, cooperative apartments in town, cars, refrigerators, and other products in short supply, tailor-made clothes—all hopelessly beyond the great mass of the population. They take their vacations as a matter of right in elegant resorts, where a token number of skilled workers gain access only as rewards for outstanding achievement. Even enrollment in higher educational institutions is easier for the children of families with political pull or money bribes to get around academic standards for admission.

         Then there are what might be called the collective status symbols of the state, in monuments and buildings unrelated to everyday needs. Soviet architecture for public buildings leans heavily to the ostentatious, the sumptuous, reflecting the grandiosity of the state, and intimidating its lowly citizens. Subways are as ornate as palaces, far beyond the call of transportation comfort. The worker goes from the luxurious marble underground station to his shoddy one-room apartment or his verminous slum. Against a background of poverty and weariness, spectacular Sputniks trumpet to the world the might and modernity of the new overlords. (75)

         To the normal mind a classless society means political, economic, and social equality. But in the USSR the very principle of equality is taboo: "a piece of petty bourgeois stupidity, worthy of a primitive sect of ascetics but not of a socialist society organized on Marxian lines." The words are Stalin's and still express official doctrine.

         A minister of state in Soviet Russia earns ten to fifteen times as much as an average typist—roughly 9,000 as against 600 to 900 rubles a year. In the United States the comparable ratio is five to one. The Soviet public is not allowed to know specifically how astronomical are the economic distances between the lowest and the highest in the social structure; such things are state secrets, to hold down grumbling. But the facts, if not the exact figures, cannot be kept secret.

         A British trade-unionist, George Brown, at the time a Labour Member of Parliament and now the Minister of Foreign Affairs in a Labour Government, visited Russia in 1954. "The inequalities, the unhappiness and the oppression just can't be hidden or ignored," he reported, but "there is a bureaucratic minority that is extremely comfortably off by any standards." The expensive restaurants in the bigger cities are filled with well-dressed men and women, paying prices that automatically bar the ordinary mortal, precisely as in non-communist countries: oases of abundance and swank in a desert of drabness and want.

         Karl Marx once wrote, "the bureaucracy possesses the state as its private property." He was referring, of course, to the bourgeois state. But his words are far more descriptive of the Soviet Union, where the bureaucrats not only possess the state but have this private property protected by secret police, armies, censors, legions of indoctrinators. And the Soviet, unlike the bourgeois state, owns and disposes of everything.

         In 1928, in the course of the struggle with Stalin, an outstanding supporter of Trotsky, Christian Rakovsky, said: "By means of demoralizing methods, which convert thinking communists into machines, destroying will, character and human dignity, the ruling circles have succeeded in converting themselves into an unremovable and inviolate oligarchy, which replaces the class and the party." (76) In 1933, the exiled philosopher, Nikolai Berdiaev, wrote in The Sources and Meaning of Russian Communism: "This new Soviet bureaucracy is stronger than the tsarist bureaucracy; it is a new privileged class which can ferociously exploit the masses. This is happening."

         Trotsky himself wrote, in his exile: "In establishing and defending the advantages of a minority, it of course draws off the cream for its own use. Nobody who has wealth to distribute ever omits himself. The Soviet bureaucracy . . . is in the full sense of the word the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society. The means of production belong to the state. But the state, so to speak, 'belongs' to the bureaucracy."

         Such statements could be cited by the hundred, from as many sources. Their gist is that under communism "a new class of owners and exploiters" has emerged. It is more avaricious and self-indulgent and entrenched than such classes elsewhere, because it has also a monopoly of political and police power.

         "A new class of owners and exploiters"—the description is from the classic book analyzing communist societies: The New Class, by Milovan Djilas. The author was confined for many years in a Yugoslav prison for this and other critiques of communism in practice. Until his disillusionment and his monumental courage in expressing it, Djilas was Vice-President of Communist Yugoslavia and regarded as the most likely successor to Tito. No one has a moral right to prattle about the classless society, I submit, without a careful reading of his lucid book. Here we can only indicate its essence through a few quotations that no more than suggest the character of his findings.

         Before the communists came to power in Russia and in his own country, Djilas declares, "it was believed that the differences between cities and the villages, between intellectual and physical labor, would slowly disappear; instead these differences have increased . . . . The greatest illusion was that industrialization and collectivization in the USSR, and destruction of capitalist ownership, would result in a classless society."(77)

         The previous exploiting classes did, indeed, cease to exist. But "a new class, previously unknown in history, has been formed. . . . The monopoly which the new class establishes in the name of the working class over the whole society is, primarily, a monopoly over the working class itself. . . . The so-called socialist ownership is a disguise for the real ownership by the political bureaucracy."

         Government controls in the economy were necessary at first, Djilas believes, but it "has gradually turned into a vital personal interest on the part of the ruling bureaucrats. ... In addition to being motivated by the historical need for rapid industrialization, the communist bureaucracy has been compelled to establish a type of economic system designed to insure perpetuation of its own power."

         What distinguishes it from all previous exploiting classes, he writes, "is its collective ownership." One has to reach back to ancient despotisms like Egypt until fifteen centuries BC for a comparable system: "The communists did not invent collective ownership as such, but invented its all-encompassing character, more widely extended than in earlier epochs, even more extensive than in Pharaoh's Egypt."

         Historically, as he sees it, Stalin, the main instrument of the new exploitation, had to abolish private ownership of farms, because "the new class felt itself insecure as long as there were other owners than itself." In effect he nationalized not only physical goods, but the human being—the peasant through collectivization, the worker through absolute control of his job. Forced labor in camps has been merely the extreme expression of that fact. Under communism so-called free labor is also compulsory: "The worker finds himself in the position of not only having to sell his labor; he must sell it under conditions which are beyond his control, since he is unable to seek another, better employer. There is only one employer, the state . . . . Labor cannot be free in a society where all material goods are monopolized by one group. The labor force is indirectly the property of that group."

         Legally, property under communism is considered national and social, "but in actuality a single group manages it in its own interests. . . . (78) This is a class whose power over men is the most complete known in history ... a power which unites within itself the control of ideas, authority, and ownership, a power which has become an end in itself. . . . When the new class leaves the historic scene—and this must happen—there will be less sorrow than there was for any other class before it. Smothering everything except what suited its ego, it has condemned itself to failure and shameful ruin."

• New Classes for Old

         Certainly the ruling minority is more hated by its subjects than older types of oligarchy. This I can attest also from personal observation during six years in Soviet Russia. The absence of any countervailing social elements (church, landowners, a free intelligentsia, etc.) has denied the Soviet oligarchs the benefits of restraints on their conduct. They are in a sense victims of their unlimited authority. Self-willed dictators at the apex have bred a hierarchy of little tyrants, down to the arrogant party boss of a village, which has foreclosed a rapprochement between the rulers and the ruled.

         In a system resting on force, it was inevitable that the squeamish, the doubters, the soul-searchers, those psychologically unable to kill and kill, should be eliminated. They were driven from, or shunned, the orbit of power. "Party members," Djilas writes, "feel that authority, that control over property, brings with it the privileges of this world. Consequently unscrupulous ambition, duplicity, toadyism, and jealousy inevitably must increase. Careerism and an ever-expanding bureaucracy are the incurable diseases of communism."

         The best people, by moral criteria, are the most likely to be excluded. Those capable of applying force within stint, the fanatics and the sadists, have tended to take over. Soviet history has been a process of triumph for the most insensitive and egotistical, the connivers and bullyboys. By intellectual criteria, too, in a world where questioning and truth-seeking are crimes, the mediocre have had an advantage over the brilliant. (79) Among the upper-echelon "establishments" of the world, the Soviet is probably the crudest. It represents the end product of a struggle for the survival of the fittest—the fittest for a totalitarian society —and therefore the most unfit for a humane, civilized society.

         The effects of almost unlimited power are corrupting even upon basically good men. Former revolutionary heroes, self-sacrificing and full of ideals, Djilas writes, "become self-centered cowards without ideas or comrades, willing to renounce everything—honor, name, truth and morals—in order to keep their place in the ruling class and the hierarchical circle." The world, he believes, "has probably never seen such characterless wretches and stupid defenders of arid formulas they become after attaining power."

         Within the new class, of course, there are also wide gradations of status, power, and profit. The great majority in the bureaucracy are administrators and technical specialists: they constitute, roughly, the new middle classes. They hold their status by delegation or by the toleration of the "governing bureaucracy" in the party and government, the apparatchiki or managers of the power apparatus. It is this governing elite that has the largest stake in collective ownership and shows the greatest zeal in protecting it against other claimants.

         In the last decade the economic managers, technocrats, engineers, and the like have been "feeling their oats," by reason of their increasing importance in modern technology. They crave more of the goods and authority inherent in their functions, and in fact need more autonomy as against the politicians for efficient production. In this they are passionately opposed by the apparatchiki, who are more concerned with political stability than national economic progress. Whatever the theoretical arguments advanced for limiting and postponing economic reforms and concessions in the areas of intellectual work, what is at play is the built-in conservatism of a new class unwilling, and by its conditioning unable, to share the power and proceeds with those on lower rungs. (80)

         The outrageous myth of a classless society cannot be made to jibe with the denial of democracy—not the bogus "socialist democracy" in words but the garden varieties recognized since the days of ancient Athens. Even the limited democracy inside the Communist Party of the first Lenin years has been consigned to history.

         When inner-party democracy was being demanded by the Trotskyists in the 1920's, they evoked a remarkably candid warning from Leo Kamenev, one of the founding fathers. "They say today," he argued, "let us have democracy in the party; tomorrow they will say, let us have democracy in the trade unions; the day after tomorrow, workers who do not belong to the party may well say: give us democracy too . . . and surely the myriad of peasants cannot be prevented from asking for democracy."

         What a horrible prospect! But obviously there was logic, the logic of totalitarianism, on Kamenev's side. Stalin won that debate and it has never been reopened. A verbal democracy, unrelated to living human beings, was his substitute. In defending his "most democratic constitution in the world," he explained on November 25, 1934: "There is no question of freedom for political parties in the Soviet Union apart from the Communist Party. We Bolsheviks consider this provision one of the merits of the constitutional project." The Moscow Pravda wrote rapturously, "What a delight to be able- to divide the history of human civilization into two phases so clearly: Before and after the constitution bestowed upon us by the great Stalin." Nearly all the authors of the constitution, along with the editor of Pravda, were duly executed in its name, some of them before the document had been formally adopted.

         Like any other all-powerful class, the Soviet master-elite is Self-perpetuating. The sons of the influential people have the easiest access to an education and to the juiciest political and economic assignments. But even they are held back by the reluctance of those entrenched in power to surrender their jobs. The governing apparatus has been largely unchanging and therefore aging. The average age of the top four oligarchs as of 1967—Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgorny, and Suslov—is sixty-three.(81)

         There are no signs of the "Soviet Man" who was to inhabit the classless society. Lenin's insistence that party members and high officials must not earn more than ordinary workers—a sort of "rule of poverty," as in a monastic order—was abandoned even before he died. His promise that officials could be recalled from below similarly has been forgotten; they can be recalled only from above.

         Since Stalin's ukase against "rotten-liberal equality," the new class has been able, and even expected, to flaunt its economic and social superiority, just as it flaunts its medals, as visible evidence of rewards from a grateful proletariat. "Life has become beautiful and happy in our country," Stalin announced at that time, so there was no longer any reason for the elite to be self-conscious about being happy in public. One of these days everybody would live well; meanwhile the surrogates for the people would enjoy the experience, disregarding the envy and despair of lesser breeds. And that is how things have remained to the present day.

         "By a revolutionary's lean and hungry standards," a Newsweek correspondent concluded in 1966, "the Soviet Union is now becoming bourgeois and fat. Its citizens are developing middle-class mentalities. Its law enforcement agencies are grappling with middle-class problems. Its leaders are openly catering to middle-class appetites."

         The old Adam, in short, has prevailed over the new man. A new class, snobbish as well as arrogant, rules the roost, and below it are other classes, hoping and intriguing for the same comforts and advantages that have moved mortal man since the beginning of time. Only in the lowest depths, in penal camps and exile regions, among the lowest-grade kolkhoz workers and unskilled laborers, is there a certain equality, the kind Dostoyevsky talked of through one of the characters in his novel The Possessed: "All are slaves and equal in their slavery.... Slaves are bound to be equal."