Thievery as Public Service: Understanding Communism

Something to consider when assessing the Communist experience is whether thievery exists in gradations. We generally identify thieves as petty, common criminals, seeking material wealth and a quick improvement in their social lot. Modern society has seen the term “robber baron” enter its lexicon, where a corporate executive and his majority shareholders manipulate international markets to distort economic realities. What tie the common criminal and the deceitful executive together, in a liberal democracy, are laws that mete out punishment and restore accountability. A legal system is meaningless unless the public has access to physical assets with which to protect their rights (i.e. private property). The farce of Communism, stripping away the assets individuals use to act on their rights and calling it equality, transformed the state into an omnipotent thief. Millions perished for temporary progress and once great nations reduced to confused soul-searching. The greatest casualty, however, lay in the manufactured belief that the individual was of little to no value.

Many failed experiments have a habit of dying physically, but surviving spiritually. If the political temperature on America’s campuses is any indication, such is the case with Communism. What explains the ideology’s modern appeal, especially among students and young intellectuals, has to do less with Communism itself and more with personal guilt. Living a comfortable existence and enjoying the myriad of opportunities at hand is far less satisfying than fighting on the front-lines of a revolutionary movement. Lenin himself echoed this distress when he wrote in the summer of 1918, “it is better to take part in the revolution than to write about it.” Perhaps the man most able to tap into this youthful exuberance was ComIntern chief Grigory Zinoviev, who remarked that “against the bourgeois black army we are organizing our own red army, and the working youth shall fight on the foremost barricade for the victory of the Soviet system.” Could one resist such a passionate appeal? Unfortunately for the campus activists, who seek genuine change, blind idealism has replaced pragmatism. When something doesn’t work, as many felt capitalism didn’t in the early 20th century, the gut reaction is to replace it with something new instead of going through an arduous reform process. That easy road cost innumerable lives, the total number still to be confirmed.

My family emigrated from Russia a year before the Soviet collapse. My great-grandfather was one of twenty million who perished during the Stalinist Purges of the 1930’s. There was the midnight knock at the door by the NKVD and he was never heard from again, a fate shared by millions of intellectuals, students, and professionals across the country. Zinoviev himself faced a firing squad in 1936. Millions of Ukrainian Kulaks, daring to cling to whatever little property they had, were sent to labor colonies or executed by NKVD detachments. Forced collectivization in the Ukraine resulted in the Great Famine of 1932 and seven million deaths. Hundreds of thousands more died in the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal, one of several projects holding more symbolism than practicality. Stalin’s stroke in 1953, timely for the over one million Soviet Jews slated to be forcibly resettled in the Far East, ended what Russians term the “Great Breakdown.” A successive softening of the iron fist, far from producing a leap forward, resulted in near perpetual stagnation.

One famous Soviet joke, with a great deal of truth, involves an interrogation led by a KGB officer. He poses a challenge to the accused: prove that you are not a camel! Stunned, the accused replies that he has neither a tail nor humps. The officer, unshaken, demands proof the accused is not a camel without both. For my parents’ generation, innocence and guilt remained blurred. Legal help was difficult to obtain and the limited assets people could turn to created financial problems. A common phenomenon was imprisonment for violation of a statute few read or even heard of, but were expected to know.

The 174 articles of the Soviet constitution are replete with guarantees of everything from healthcare to housing. As is the case with most paper guarantees, practice reveals a different truth. Due to massive deficits in syringes, x-rays, medicines, and surgical equipment, the timeliness and quality of examinations fell. Waits for advanced operations could last years and bribery became increasingly pervasive. Life expectancy was ten years below most of the west. The reality with housing was even trickier. People waited in line for years, sometimes even a decade, to get a personal apartment and move out of communals. After getting the apartment, it took another year to get better furniture. Added to this was a different approach to service and maintenance. Instead of the resident paying a private company to repair the power outage or the leak, all problems had to be directed to the housing manager. Don’t expect that individual, having zero financial incentive or threat of unemployment, to fix anything promptly. In perhaps the best proof of the principle that the whole is larger than the sum of its parts, service shifted from creating a quality product to fulfilling strict component guidelines.

One of my grandfather’s closest friends, Andrei, lives in a meager Moscow flat. When I went to Russia last year, he made a point of sharing his life story with me. A WWII veteran, he escaped a German POW camp and lived for over a year behind enemy lines. Completing an advanced three-year engineering and economics program in two, he became a senior engineer in charge of large bridge and tunnel construction projects. He and his wife waited for 15 years to get a stand alone apartment, which looked as if it had not changed for three decades, a hand-pumped toilet juxtaposed with a rotary phone. Had he been in the states, the private pension he would have amassed could have placed him at ease. Yet this man’s eyes revealed no happiness, but intense sorrow. Sorrow at a mass deception that robbed him of his life and destroyed his dreams, understanding that time cannot be turned back.

When the USSR collapsed, it was living on 20 years borrowed time. The discovery of large oil deposits in Central Asia and the Far East propped up an economy decades behind the west. The Socialist dream of economic self-sufficiency was falling fast, as were oil prices in the late 1980s. Yegor Gaidar, the first Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, commented that the Soviet Union was receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign loans to sustain its economy and had cleared out its gold reserves in a desperate bid to keep up with payments. “The country was bankrupt. The grain reserves could last only until February 1992. No grain, no credits, no working system of grain distribution. This reality was very well felt in the country.” In an economy where 25% of GDP went toward producing tanks and ICBMs, it is no surprise that people rushed to buy chicken at 4 AM and begged their neighbors to bring back jackets from foreign business trips.

The Communist experience for millions in the Soviet Union and across the globe saw systematic thievery practiced as public service. Men and women had their lives stolen from them and experienced rigid limits to hard-earned prosperity. Added to this was a shift in mindset where the individual meant nothing, the political apparatus operated in an untouchable 5th dimension, and life was highly uncertain. This tragic farce makes me ask what might have been in those corners of the world stained by the Communist epidemic. The millions who died for temporary progress can never be brought back and the freedoms destroyed by the benefactors at scores of Party Congresses will take generations to restore. I hope the world has taken note.