The myth that the Soviet people love the communist system.

       "There is perfect harmony between the rulers and the ruled. Russians may grumble—don't we all?—but they support their government the way we do ours. They are intensely loyal. The people have been taught to love their chains."

       These reassurances are culled from actual reports by Western tourists returning from Russia. In the 1960's, just as in the bigger tourist invasion of Stalinland in the early 1930's, the typical short-term visitor is impressed by the surface calm, the holiday parades, the declarations of loyalty by a few "ordinary Russians" he may have questioned through an interpreter-guide. He sees no barricades, hears no exploding bombs, and naively assumes that the "monolithic unity" advertised by the regime is a fact.

       Even if this were true, a spell of sightseeing is scarcely enough to confirm it. The relations between a totalitarian police-state and its citizenry are never so casually appraised. Opinion-sampling, after all, is a monopoly of secret police operatives, who employ informers and truncheons instead of questionnaires. And "ordinary Russians," who hesitate to express their sentiments in the bosom of their families, would hardly confide to a stranger and foreigner.

       "The system of serving foreign tourists in the USSR has been carefully planned," according to a recent Soviet refugee familiar with the techniques, Yury Krotkov, in his book The Angry Exile.* (104) [* This was the title in Britain; the U.S. edition, by Dutton's, is-called / Am from Moscow.]

       As a rule all activities are prepared and rehearsed in advance, at times so skillfully that it can seem to the tourist as if he were exercising his own free will." "Routes, hotels, transportation, interpreters, the whole organization is devoted to one aim—the effective presentation of the achievements and triumphs of the socialist system

       Certainly the Soviet leaders, judging by their conduct rather than their words, do not share the complacent tourist view. Why, otherwise, would they maintain a political-police establishment unprecedented for size and ruthlessness? Why would they surround their country with barbed-wire and death decrees to keep the "intensely loyal" citizens from running away? Why would they deploy veritable armies of trained "agitators" to "sell" communism to the people, if they were already sold on it? Why would they jam foreign broadcasts and lie to the country about how the people live in the West?

       Common sense should tell us that no regime lavishes huge slices of its budget, brains, energy, and manpower on internal security unless it feels itself insecure. The Kremlin has better sources of information than any visitor to its domain. Its own estimate of the love and loyalty of the people has been spelled out, decade after decade, in terror, periodic purges, frantic warnings against enemies within, draconian laws against dissent.*

       "Communist regimes," Milovan Djilas wrote in The New Class, "are a form of latent civil war between the government and the people." In the USSR it has been more actual than latent. A great gulf of mutual distrust yawns between the government and the people. By this I do not mean that all the people or even a majority of them oppose the system with their full awareness. I mean only that most

       In Look Magazine, October 3, 1967, one of its editors, Warren Rogers, calls the KGB, the Soviet security establishment, "the most extensive authoritarian police force in the world," adding "With a license to kill, answerable only to the elite of the Communist party, it recently gained even broader constitutional power to arrest 'enemies of the state.' (105) Its primary mission, since it began as the Cheka in the 1917 Revolution, has been to protect the party from the people."

       Russians, and this includes rank-and-file communists, are not consciously or ardently "for" the status quo in the way Americans, or Britons are automatically for their respective societies. Psychologically they have never given their consent and imprimatur to the Soviet way of life. In most other countries, people identify themselves with their government, whether they like it or not. Even in pre-war Russia, they were wont to say, "We have sent an ultimatum to the Kaiser. . . . We have liberated the serfs." Soviet citizens, however, refer to the regime in the third person: "They have done thus-and-so . . . . They have built some more apartments." And the pronoun packs as much contempt as the speaker dares to reveal.

• Permanent Civil War

       Even the most sadistic police-state does not engage in large-scale liquidations and brainwashing just for the fun of it, or prescribe capital punishment for "crimes" which in other civilized countries are unknown as such, or treated as misdemeanors. These are measures of self-protection against real or potential dangers. The extent of the people's distaste for their Soviet fate can be deduced from the magnitude, the ferocity, and the persistence of the Kremlin's counter-measures.

       No ruling group in the annals of man has diverted so much of its wealth and thought to its own defense against the population. After half a century of limitless power, it is still promoting what in normal nations is taken for granted: loyalty to the existing order. The communists have failed to win what social scientists call legitimacy, the assumption of the citizen that his country and its government are indivisible. (This central failure became especially conspicuous in June, 1941, when the country was invaded—but the lessons of the Russo-German war are so crucial for our balance sheet that a separate section will be devoted to it.)

       From the day the Bolsheviks seized control of a weakened and chaotic nation, there has been in effect a continuous civil war between the dictators and those to whom they dictate. (106) In the first years, as we have seen, the contest was open and military. Since then it has been largely concealed and political, yet quite obvious to those who watched with unblurred eyes; and even bloodier than the military phase. Once we grasp this concept of permanent internal conflict, much about Soviet Russia that seems enigmatic and baffling begins to make sense.

       The many millions who have perished in the struggle, whether finished off in police dungeons and slave-labor centers, or starved in punitive man-made famine, are the casualties in that war.

       The hordes of inmates of isolators, prison camps, penal colonies, are its prisoners-of-war.

       The special KGB army, with its own air force, tanks, artillery, and communications system—an elite soldiery better paid and fed than the regular armed forces— represents the regime's shock troops in that war.

       The perennial chistkas or purges, the extermination of this or that layer of the population "as a class," the dispersal of entire "republics" and "autonomous regions" are battles in that war. The more spectacular events, such as the forced collectivization of farmers, the blood-purges of the late thirties, and the postwar purges of returning troops, are major campaigns in that war.

       The incessant propaganda—exhortations to sacrifice, threats against enemies at home and alarums about "foreign enemies—is the psychological offensive that has become an element in all modern warfare.

       Yes, permanent civil war-—that is the reality under the outward calm, the key to the whole Soviet scene. On their side of the invisible barricades, the unarmed masses have responded with every species of open and passive resistance. Necessarily, they have resorted to guerrilla methods: sniping, sapping, and sabotaging. Vast numbers of Soviet functionaries, police officials, local communist "activists," "Stakhanovite" pacesetters in industry have been waylaid and murdered through the years. In every town and village communists feel themselves engulfed in suspicion and hatred: they are the satraps of an internal force of occupation and the symbol of their authority is not a title but the ubiquitous revolver. (107)

       Though there has not been a year without episodes of violent resistance to the regime, they are rarely mentioned in the Soviet press. When they are of a major character, with heavy casualties, officials may allude to them vaguely -as "irregularities" or "disorders" in some area. Occasionally a brief press report about the trial and conviction of people involved in some riot confirms the whispered rumors about the occurrence. Sometimes the news of shocking events even reaches the press abroad, usually with a long delay. There have been major strikes despite laws against it. There have been anti-government demonstrations amounting to uprisings, crushed as brutally as the revolt in Hungary was crushed.

       On July 12, 1941, only a few weeks after war started, workers in Shakhty, in the Don coal-mining area, were joined by the local Red Army garrison in an armed uprising. They proclaimed an independent Cossack republic. After several days of spirited fighting, the rebels were annihilated. The following year, from August 3 into September, over 15,000 Kuban Cossack troops of the Red Army mutinied, killing the political commissars. They were defeated by the forces of the secret police.

       Large-scale slave revolts broke out, from 1952 to 1956, in the concentration camps of Vorkuta, Karaganda, Norilsk, Kungur, Karabash, Tayshet, etc., and as far away as Sakhalin Island. They were as desperate, as hopeless, as the Spartacus slave revolts in ancient Rome, and similarly drowned in blood, with hundreds, perhaps thousands, shot down. Much has been written about these events but the gory details are still a state secret. It is fair to surmise that the beginnings of camp uprisings played a role in the Kremlin's decision, while Stalin was still alive, to dismantle the forced-labor network in part and improve conditions in what remained.

       Bloody riots are known to have erupted at Temir-Tau in the Karaganda region in 1959; at Novocherkassk in the Rostov area in 1962; at Pskov in 1963. In Tiflis, the capital of Soviet Georgia, in March, 1956, there were huge demonstrations, in which thousands, mostly young people, fought from behind barricades. (108) The government threw tanks and heavy artillery against them; estimates of the dead ran as high as seven hundred.

       The Novocherkassk tragedy is worth recounting because, after years of rumor and guesswork, the facts were brought out and made public by eyewitnesses who escaped to the West. In June 1962, demonstrations against the government were touched off in a number of areas by the announcement of higher prices for meat and dairy products. Apparently the bloodiest struggle occurred in Novocherkassk, a city of 100,000 about sixty miles from Rostov.

       It began on June 1 as a peaceable student demonstration. Workers left their benches to join them. By next day some 20,000 were in the streets. The local militia proved inadequate and uncooperative against the demonstrators. The first regular soldiers brought into the city refused to shoot into the crowds. Moscow then rushed in motorized units of KGB troops, which did the job of "pacification." An eyewitness, writing in Nashi Dni, an emigre magazine in Germany, said that he counted more than two hundred dead in the central square and that the toll was heavy in other districts.

       After the bloodbath, two Kremlin leaders, Mikoyan and Poliansky, flew to Novocherkassk with promises and soothing words. The city was quarantined for six weeks: nobody could leave or enter without a KGB pass. Not a word appeared in the press, of course, but soon the story was being talked about in whispers throughout the country. The "Budapest of Russia," some called the city. Novocherkassk is the kind of explosion that, given foul political weather, could start a landslide and bury the dictatorship.

       We have a right to surmise, on the basis of past experience, that for every strike or riot that becomes known in the outside world, scores have taken place. One of the best-informed American students of Russia, William Henry Chamberlin, in a book he wrote in the war years, said that in Russia, historically, periods of seeming quiet "are broken by episodes of fierce revolt that reveal another aspect of the Russian character: the aspect of the eternal rebel." (109) Under communism the periods of apparent stability have been few and far between. Only the rigid censorship has hidden this truth.

• Passive Resistance

       Far more extensive and persistent has been the passive resistance: work slow-downs, wastage and diversion of public property, universal law-breaking. More than any scholarly theories, it helps explain the low productivity and low quality on farms and in factories.

       The tactics of non-cooperation come as naturally to most Russians as they did to the masses in India when they were opposing British colonialism. The refusal of the peasants in the collectivization years ago to sow beyond their own immediate needs—for which they paid with millions of lives in 1932-1933—exceeded in scope anything that India had experienced. Their half-hearted work on the collectives ever since, in contrast with the zeal they bring to the tiny plots they have been permitted to farm privately, is a continuation of those tactics. In the factories, slow-downs on the job ("Italian strikes," in Russian slang) and spoilage of goods persist in the face of incredibly harsh laws intended to stop it.

       The worker and the peasant alike helps himself to products and small tools as if they were his by right. Embezzlement of state funds, pilfering of state products, falsification of state accounts are as common in Red Russia as drinking was during Prohibition in the United States. It has become a way of life. Doubtless pervasive poverty is the main cause, but it also has overtones of defiance through acts of protest against an odious existence. No sense of moral wrongdoing attaches to cheating the government.

       The Soviet newspapers are candid in exposing the unpleasant facts, obviously because they are too widespread to be hidden, and sometimes dare hint at the more unpleasant political implications. Thus Sovietskaya Rossia writes (June 16, 1966) that "the dragging off from the factory, office, construction site, etc., of anything you can lay hands on has become deeply rooted among ordinary Soviet citizens." (110) Then it adds: "Whereas it is very easy to get help from the public to catch a person who has committed some petty theft of private property, it is almost impossible to catch such a person who has stolen a factory bus or lorry." The public, that is to say, will not help apprehend those who rob their common foe, the state.

       Exasperated references to an extraordinary variety of frauds are standard in Soviet speeches and editorials. Dozens of pages in an historic address by Georgi Malenkov at the Nineteenth Party Congress were devoted to inveighing against thievery, neglect of duty, illicit trade, criminal bookkeeping, and the rest of the familiar communist corruptions. The litany of complaint on this score was kept up by Khrushchev and is now intoned by his successors.

       According to the Moscow Party Life in 1964, the number of "volunteer guards" of divers types had reached six million—probably a boastful exaggeration. These are a post-Stalin species of neighborhood vigilantes (Druzhiny, or state guards, seems to be the generic term for them) under names like People's Voluntary Militia, Comrades' Courts, Daily Life Brigades, organized at the government's behest to watch and, if necessary, "discipline" their blocks and districts.

       But these millions have been unable to cope with the ground swell of "hooliganism," alcoholism, and thievery. The incidence of vandalism, rape, and murder is chronically on the rise. The problems of juvenile delinquency are standard fare in the press, especially in youth papers like Komsomolskaya Pravda. In 1965, Moscow and other cities imposed a 10:00 P.M. curfew for children under sixteen not accompanied by adults. Indicative of the worsening situation is a government program for "Preservation of Public Order" promulgated in July, 1966, enlarging the authority of the police, setting more drastic penalties for a long inventory of common crimes and enjoining the courts against leniency.

       Old-style banditry exists on a scale unknown in pre-revolutionary times, though in communist theory such evils were to fade out once private enterprise had been socialized. Since "politicals" have been confined with ordinary convicts—an insult that had been abandoned by the monarchy in its last century—much has become known about the criminal elements. (111) The blatnoi, as they are called, live either in the forests or in the largest cities, concealment being easier in both places.

       A number of these gangs are the demoralized remnants of wartime bands which fought the Soviet government in the Carpathians, the Baltics, the Caucasian mountains—in effect fugitives from the law. But uniquely in the modern world of crime, some of the gangs pretend to have a Robin Hood flavor, robbing the rich and helping the poor. The best-known of these calls itself Black Cats. No doubt the public, which believes their pretensions, spreads a good deal of romantic nonsense about them. But this much seems true: the banditry is directed against government property and officialdom rather than private people and their possessions.

       There are strong political overtones, no less, to the highly ramified illegal "free economy" flourishing on an immense scale in the folds and interstices of the socialized society. I shall have more to say about it in the section on the planned economy.

       And there are endless acts of pure malice against the authorities, the Soviet press now and then reveals, in which loot plays no part. Let no one suppose that there is no fire under the smoke of the Kremlin's continuous outcries against "wreckers" and saboteurs. The sand in the gears may be an accident—or it may not. The line between natural inefficiency and purposeful vandalism, between apathetic neglect and deliberate damage, is not always easy to draw. The high incidence of broken-down machines, flooded mines, disrupted assembly lines, inexplicable explosions that have figured in Soviet purges reflect a fundamental lack of interest, even where there is no forthright sabotage.

       The nerves of the Soviet oligarchs and their privileged entourage are consequently strained to the limit. Their souls are guilt-ridden; the fearful contrasts between idealistic professions and gory official crimes have set up intense inner tensions. (112) A besieged minority in a conquered nation, they see a threat in every frown, menace in the most innocent criticism, hostile design in every failure of its complicated politico-economic machinery.

       Romain Rolland, in defending the Soviets, once said, "the proletariat must be led to their happiness against their own will." He did not reckon with the consequences of such fanatic arrogance. He could not know the old Russian proverb: "One is not driven into heaven with a club."

       Henry Yagoda, who headed up the GPU in the 1930's, until he was himself arrested and shot, told an American correspondent, William Reswick of the Associated Press: "We are a minority in a vast country. Abolish the GPU and we are through." An article smuggled out of Russia, signed only "X," in the June, 1965 issue of a Russian-language magazine in New York, Novy Zhurnal, said approximately the same thing: "The overwhelming mass of the population . . . would, of course, sweep it all away in a single day if they were free to do so. The Soviet rulers are perfectly - aware of this, so the guiding principle of their government is to see to it that the population is not allowed freedom."

       No one who has lived in the USSR could be ignorant of the fact that concealment of the information, suppressed or doctored statistics, and overt lying are important elements in Kremlin internal strategy: "From top to bottom," the anonymous writer declared, "the regime is permeated with lies . . . . They fill their ideology, the newspapers, the magazines, the public statements of government officials, economic reports, and everything." A recent article by an American analyst, Leon M. Herman, dealt with the fog of evasion and distortion around official Soviet economic data. "In order to preserve its grip on the government," he concluded, "it must deprive the citizens not only of the means to change the leadership, but also of any facts that may prompt them to question the authority of the rulers."

       All the news fit to print in Izvestiya, and all other Soviet newspapers, doesn't include even terrible accidents and catastrophes. (113) In the Urals, in 1958, an atomic reactor exploded killing many thousands. In the Moscow area, in the summer of 1962, a series of train wrecks claimed hundreds of lives. Almost two hundred persons were killed when an experiment went wrong in Podlipki, also near Moscow, where research on missiles is conducted underground. A good many Soviet astronauts, as American and other intelligence agencies know, have perished—some in the air after launchings, others on the ground during simulated tests. But from their press and radio, Russians would never have known about the disasters. They did know, because such things are spread, perhaps even exaggerated, by word of mouth.

       By and large, therefore, they put little faith in newspapers, radio, and official rhetoric. Many of the more egregious official lies are recognized as such, sooner or later, by the better-informed minority, further undermining the credibility of their political betters.

       A book titled Political Map of the World, put out in Moscow in 1958, declared: "The main burden and the principal victories in defeating the Fascist Germans, and later the Japanese imperialists, fell to the Soviet Union." At another point it said that in the 1956 Suez crisis, "England, France, and Israel, with the help of the United States, unloosed a military adventure in Egypt." Surely some of the readers must have remembered that the United States had joined the USSR against that undertaking, and that Japan had been beaten before Russia entered the war.

       A tenth-grade history textbook contains no references to the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939, no mention of the Soviet-Finnish war or of the Baltic and East Polish annexations. But tenth-graders do grow up, eventually learn the truth, and are forever bitter about having been lied to. The state's power over the people's minds is thus steadily narrowed through what has been called the "erosion by skepticism."

       No one can measure the effects upon the Russian people of half a century of pitiless propaganda and indoctrination, never challenged and never refuted. It has amounted to mental and psychological terror. The phenomenal fact, however, is that it has not always or necessarily "worked," and at times has even backfired against the regime. It happened that I was living in Moscow during the worst years of the Great Depression in the United States. (114) The Soviet press, of course, was filled with accounts of its horrors. Yet I found myself obliged to convince Soviet friends that there really was a depression. Because their press and radio were concentrating on it, they assumed it was untrue or exaggerated.

       American visitors to the USSR have often commented, in pleased astonishment, on the contrast between the frantic official anti-American campaigns and the friendliness, even affection, they were shown by individual Russians. Erwin C. Canham, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, for instance, on returning from the USSR in 1959, wrote: "Forty-two years of bitter propaganda poured into the minds of the Soviet people have not produced hatred or malice against the United States or the West generally."

       Adlai Stevenson declared himself "baffled" by the fervent demonstrations of friendship with which his party was greeted wherever it went in Soviet Russia. They were clearly spontaneous. The Stevenson tour coincided with the landing of U.S. forces in Lebanon and the normal anti-American propaganda was at a pitch of frenzy. Moscow just then had more reason to stir up hostility toward prominent Americans than the outbursts of affection they actually witnessed.

       The visit to the USSR by Richard M. Nixon as Vice-President, similarly, produced an unscheduled pro-American demonstration, in Novosibirsk, where his party drew tremendous and enthusiastic crowds. Again, it was unplanned, unexpected, and embarrassing to Krushchev, who had been unfriendly, even rude, to Nixon. Had the authorities wished to stage a warm, popular demonstration, they would have done so in Moscow or Leningrad, not in Siberia.

       It has usually been said that the Soviet people were eager to show their friendly sentiments for Americans despite their government's anti-American tirades. More likely it was because of it. Was it perhaps a safe and convenient occasion to indicate contempt for the anti-American rantings and a vague but abiding sense of America as a symbol of freedom? In any event, the Kremlin's anti-American propaganda obviously has been far from suc-115cessful. In the face of failure in this conspicuous area, it would be illogical to assume that internal propaganda has been any more successful with respect to other issues.

• Voting with Their Feet

       Those who profess to see unity between the Red dictatorships and their citizenry cannot evade the obligation to account for the constant streams of fugitives from communist countries. It has been and remains a one-way flow: in Europe from the communist East to the free West; in Asia from the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao; from North Korea to the south, from North Vietnam (when it was still possible) to South Vietnam.

       Several million Russians fled in the first Soviet years—to Europe, China, Iran, Turkey. After World War II, millions of Soviet citizens fought (often in the literal physical sense) against repatriation to their victorious homeland, and about half a million succeeded in remaining as displaced persons. In all there are today more than seven million fugitives from communism in Europe. Following the Korean armistice, 24,440 Chinese "volunteers" in prisoner-of-war camps had a free choice of returning to their country and families or remaining as emigrants. More than half of them, 14,200, chose not to return. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, in a book published in 1962, said of the communist bloc: "From 1945 until 1962 some ten million persons, denied a meaningful ballot, voted in the only possible way—with their feet—and fled." Other estimates are close to fifteen million. The figure would have been many times greater if the opportunities for escape had been greater.

       The monstrous Berlin Wall, raised by Khrushchev and Ulbricht to stem the flood of East Germans fleeing westward, stands as the repulsive symbol of the anxiety of people under communism to throw off its yoke. In August, 1966, the East German bosses had the effrontery to "celebrate" the fifth anniversary of the wall. They didn't say that during those years 3,510 of their subjects managed, notwithstanding, to climb or crash or dig under the wall to freedom; 69 others were known to have died in the attempt. (116)

       Since the Soviet Union captured East Europe, melodramatic escapes from the Sovietized nations have become a familiar ingredient in the daily news. Fugitives have come by truck, by purloined planes and trains and boats; they have swum across rivers and tunneled under mined frontiers. The world has heard only of the more daring successful escapes; it could only guess about how many failed in their bid for freedom and paid for it with imprisonment or their lives.

       A substantial number of the Soviet and East European participants in the Olympics in Australia chose, not to return to their homelands. Sportsmen from communist countries taking part in contests in non-communist cities regularly seek asylum in the West. In late March, 1967 nearly 100 fans who had come from Soviet-bloc nations for hockey championship games in Vienna—100 out of the 600 who had wangled permission for the trip>—defected. The nights to freedom among actors, ballet dancers, and other members of Soviet-bloc cultural missions abroad have become almost routine. By now, it takes a defection as conspicuous as that of Stalin's only surviving child, his daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, to make big headlines.

       Wherever the communists take over, people try to run away. More than 300,000 Cubans have abandoned their homes and possessions to escape communism since Fidel Castro came to power; hundreds more perished in the attempt, but the desperate flights have not ceased. Soviet escapees and non-returners are among us in every country of the non-communist world, and their numbers keep growing. We hear less about escapes from the USSR only because they are more difficult—the Soviets have a much longer experience in policing frontiers. If the Iron Curtain around Soviet Russia were lifted, we would see an exodus that would make the Biblical flight of the Israelites from Egypt look trivial by comparison.

       Tensions, deep-running grievances and hatreds, open and secret resistance to the regime, have been the hallmarks of the fifty Soviet years. (117) Communists on the lower levels, being closer to people, are overwhelmingly among the discontented. A study of Soviet attitudes, based on systematic interviews with hundreds of defectors and written by Dr. A. Inkeles, was published in London in 1959 as The Soviet Citizen. It divides the population, as reflected in the judgment of those questioned, into believers and non-believers. "It is striking," Dr. Inkeles noted, "that the great majority of party members are seen as non-believers. A frequently quoted estimate was that only 10 per cent... believed in the party ideology." Even after discounts are made for the likely bias of escaped men and women, the basic picture remains credible and significant.

• "Disorder and Panic"

       No one is more sharply conscious of the great gulf separating them from the people and from the ordinary communists than the rulers themselves. This is implicit, where it is not explicit, in everything they say or do. When Hitler struck at their country, an offensive against the "inner enemy" had the priority in the Kremlin reaction over the offensive against the invaders—and with good reason, as we shall see. At no time, however, was this chronic fear more vividly dramatized than in the first week of March 1953, when Stalin died.

       The official myth had been that the populace loved the dictator and was loyal to his works. But his associates and heirs were too frightened to hide their fears. From the first bulletin reporting Stalin's brain hemorrhage to the orations from the Lenin mausoleum in Red Square, their pronouncements were all filled with unabashed exhortations for "unity" and "vigilance" in the face of "internal enemies" and frenzied appeals to the nation to "rally around the party."

       The Romanoff autocracy, upon the death of a tsar, had never felt it necessary to beg for loyalty to his successor; that was something which, perhaps mistakenly, it took for granted. But the Kremlin made no such assumptions. Its announcements in connection with Stalin's illness and demise will one day be recognized as among the most amazing state papers extant. (118) The most powerful governing clique on earth, in its hour of presumptive heartbreak, could not afford to restrict itself to weeping over and eulogizing the lost leader, but felt itself compelled to load medical bulletins with propaganda urging popular backing, as if it were a fledgling government scared of being booted out.

       The very first announcement, along with the report of the stroke, called on party members and the masses to "display the greatest unity and cohesion, staunchness of spirit and vigilance." Vigilance against whom, against what? The Soviet public would know, even if some foreign reporters on the scene didn't.

       One expected the death bulletin, at least, to be a solemn and sorrowful statement of fact without political commercials. Instead, it not only hammered away at the theme of "monolithic unity"—protesting too much—but explained why the people should trust and follow the surviving bosses. It was "sales copy" in support of the "tested leadership," braced with promises of "further improvement" to meet "the material and cultural needs" of all sections of the populace. Not in all history has there been such a fantastic death notice.

       Far from concealing its apprehensions, the ruling coterie explained that the speed in setting up a succession government within twenty-four hours was aimed to prevent "razbrod i panika"—disorder and panic. The phrase was not tossed off casually, being repeated pointedly in the editorials in the following days. What kind of "disorder and panic" were they so anxious to head off? Why the eagerness to show at once a united front at the top against any challenge? Who was being warned not to take advantage of confusion and rivalry? With millions of agents spying on everybody everywhere, the Kremlin surely had its finger on the pulse of national sentiment. It would hardly have made such a spectacle of trepidation before the world and its own country unless it thought them well founded.

       "The word 'panic' escaping the lips of the rulers of the world's most powerful government," Bertram D. Wolfe would comment, "betrays a fear that is ineradicably in their hearts: they fear the prostrate people over whom they rule, they fear the outside world which they plan to conquer, and they fear each other. . . . (119) The first words of the orphaned heirs on the death of the dictator are not human words of sorrow but ominous words about 'disorder and panic' and vigilance and uncompromising struggle 'against the inner and outer foe.'"

       There we had the essence of the missing legitimacy—a virtual admission that their rule was still tentative, without roots in popular acceptance, threatened and on the defensive. The Bolshevik masters have often and rightly been described as "the frightened men in the Kremlin." Apparently the passing of Stalin raised the chronic fear to panic dimensions.

       Nothing since 1953 suggests any moderation of these feelings. Their fears are manifold. Besides those common to all tyrants, they labor under dreads unique to new, revolutionary ruling groups. They know that their authority has no sanction in tradition or long-time convention, none of the aura of legitimacy that sustains the inner assurance of hereditary monarchs, for instance. Themselves masters of the coup d'etat, the stab in the back, they cannot for a moment escape the shadow of such threats to their own survival.

       As individuals, Soviet leaders live in a climate of intrigue and duplicity. They dread the frown of more powerful colleagues. They are nervously alert to shifts in the unstable balance of competing egos. Without exception they have climbed to the heights over too many corpses of friends and allies to trust anyone or to sleep peacefully. And collectively they dread the vengeance of the amorphous masses upon whom they have inflicted hurts and woes. The stench of festering resentment and hatred is ever in their nostrils, no matter how many guards they set to guard other guards in an endless progression.

• The Mood of Defiance

       Khrushchev turned on the departed master whom he had served so diligently, not because of a change of heart, but because of pressures from below, both in the party and in the populace. (120) What became even more evident, how- ever, was that the people could not be reconciled with the regime. They refused to be bought off. The so-called de-Stalinization, partial and ambiguous though it was, was welcome, but generally accepted as a sign of weakening at the top. More significant than the "improvements" exacted from the Kremlin has been the new boldness, the new mood of defiance, generated in all sectors of Soviet society.

       The sum-total of fears is constant, but a new balance has been established. The people used to be more afraid of the vlast, or power—now the vlast is more afraid of the people. Force, it would seem, has lost its old efficacy, certainly among young people without a personal memory of the Stalin era. The whole population is slowly, fumblingly, learning the most difficult of human arts: not to be afraid.

       Khrushchev, at a writers' conference in 1957, threatens to shoot literary trouble-makers, but they continue to make trouble. In 1962 he fumes against "decadent" art, poetry, movies; for a while apprehensive artists and writers lie low, and a few confess their sins; but before long, they are again writing and painting as they prefer.

       The defiance spreads. Young economists ask publicly for access to all vital statistics. Leading jurists press for more independence in the courts and curbs on the police and prosecutors to assure fair trials. A Professor Strogovich defends the Western principle that a man is innocent until proven guilty. A rash of non-Marxist ideas breaks out on the face of the technical and even the general press: biologists, sociologists, political scientists demand more leeway in their various disciplines. Long ignored or forbidden philosophers, Russian and Western, are "rediscovered" and quoted respectfully. Writers ask publicly for an end to literary censorship.

       All of it is cautious, wrapped in the cellophane of party language, but portentous in reflecting a new, almost forgotten courage. Physicists and chemists, among them Nobel Prize winners, speak up in defense of persecuted, artists; artists join in appeals for more autonomous scientific research. On the eve of the Party Congress, in the spring of 1966, a petition signed by many leaders in Soviet science and culture warns Brezhnev and Kosygin against the feared "rehabilitation" of Stalin.(121)

       Other petitions, in the same period, from groups of writers and individual literary celebrities, protest the trial and severe sentences meted out to two of their colleagues, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. A round robin, signed by sixty-two Moscow and Leningrad writers, urges the party to obtain the release of the convicted men and offers to stand surety for their good behavior. At the same time, eighteen members of the philosophical faculty of Moscow University protest the dismissal from his teaching post of one of the witnesses in the defense of the two writers. A professor at the same university who signed a statement against Sinyavsky and Daniel, is asked by his students whether he did so voluntarily; when he admits that he did, the entire class walks out.

       The trial of these two authors, in February 1966, in itself offers significantly novel features: The defendants plead innocent and prominent citizens appear to defend them. Students try to picket the court; about two hundred young people gather in a public square to demonstrate against the prosecution, and are dispersed of course. Everyone understands that far more than the fate of two erring authors is involved; that the case is being used to impress the Kremlin with the sentiment for freedom of the word and greater legal protection for the individual. Then, despite the rising toll of arrest and cautions from high quarters, the "literary underground" swings into action. Key documents in the case—excerpts from the court proceedings, copies of various petitions and open letters denied legal publication—are circulated in the country in an illicit "white book" and it is also smuggled out to the West.

       Meanwhile, nonconformist novels, poems, plays continue to appear. A few are suppressed, numerous arrests are made, but the dictators dare not crack down on the defiant writers and distributors in any decisive manner. The feeling grows that the masters are uncertain of their ability to enforce their will, hesitant about testing their strength at this point.(122)

       Precisely as in the old pre-Bolshevik Russia, the intelligentsia takes the lead, expressing aloud what the masses feel or say in private. Small discussion circles, kruzhki, multiply not only in the capital cities, but in the provinces—all reminiscent of the romantic kruzhki that flourished under the tsars. Highly secret, camouflaged as poetry readings or social gatherings, moving from one apartment to another, they are hotbeds of political freethinking. For every "circle" that is raided, its leaders shipped to Siberia, a dozen others spring up.

       Clandestine little magazines and news bulletins, usually crude mimeographed affairs, appear on the college and university campuses. Illegal copies of prohibited Russian or foreign books, handwritten or multigraphed, pass from hand to hand. Few self-respecting, educated Russians would admit that they have not read Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, though it is still among the forbidden works. Few works even by well-known and officially tolerated writers, after having been barred by the government, soon mysteriously begin to circulate.

       Party-line lecturers in schools and workers' clubs are heckled and sometimes jeered. Students walk out on party-line teachers. In the bigger universities, discussion sessions, organized by students under innocent-sounding titles, turn into excited debates that alarm the authorities. Frequently the press, by way of intimidating rebellious elements, carries reports of trials in which instigators of secret literary, political, or religious organizations have been given stiff sentences.

       The restiveness, as is to be expected, is especially evident among the young. Their alienation from communist society takes the form, at one extreme, of what the Russians call "hooliganism," juvenile delinquency, alcoholism, a passion for Western rock-and-roll and exotic clothing. At the other extreme it is manifest in open contempt for regime spokesmen, the study of forbidden literature, demonstrations of sympathy for persecuted writers and editors, myriad other signs of intellectual liberation. The youth press and politicians constantly complain that students boycott the Marxist-Leninist courses, or attend classes only enough to get passing marks. (123)

       At a congress of the Komsomol (Communist Youth) League in May 1966, party stalwarts demanded firm measures against young people who ignore and defy Marxist-Leninist "ideals." Brezhnev himself, in a message to the delegates, charged that too many youngsters hold "parasitic and undisciplined views" and have "a weakly developed sense of public duty." He called for their reeducation. To divert blame from themselves, speakers blamed the West. Its propagandists, the head of the Komsomol • organization charged, seek to promote an "ideological degeneration of our young people, undermining their faith in communist ideals." The admission that such "degeneration" was gaining ground was clearly implied in the charge. At the following congress, a year later, the same kind of complaints, warnings, demands for re-education were repeated. The regime's alarm over the alienation of younger citizens today echoes through virtually all party invocations. It has become standard procedure.

       The intensified anti-God campaigns in recent years are a direct reaction to the growth of religious faith. Tourists routinely report that "only the old" crowd the churches, which is not true. Besides, they should stop to think that in the fiftieth year of Soviet power even the old believers have been raised in an atheist society, educated in atheist schools, subjected all their lives to atheist propaganda and social pressures. Their attendance at religious services, perhaps even more than the presence of younger people, gives testimony to the long-term failure of die anti-religious drives.

       The defiance spreads. The discontent and soul-searching is not new. It has existed throughout the Soviet half-century. What is new is its growing assertion in public. The permanent civil war assuredly is entering a new phase, in which overt opposition begins to outweigh the convert variety. The confrontation between They and We, between the older conformist generation and its sons and daughters, is increasingly in the open. However it may end, talk of perfect harmony between the rulers and their subjects is so much gibberish.(124)