Divorced From Soviet Reality

As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm reading Norman Mailer's book on Lee Harvey Oswald.  I've loved Norman Mailer ever since I read his books in Montreal in order to avoid working on my master's thesis at McGill University.  Mailer was regarded (and not just by himself) as one of American's best post-war authors, and rightly so.  But although he was a brilliant writer, his fatal flaw was that he was that his versatility meant that he never fully mastered one particular subject or style.  I've loved many of his books, including Executioner's Song, Why Are We in Vietnam?, Tough Guys Don't Dance, The Deer Park, Son of Man, and The Naked and the Dead, but none of them is a perfect book.  In fact, each of these wonderful reads seems to be an imitation of some other, slightly better, book.  For instance, Mailer's Executioner's Song is almost as good as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, but it achieves Steven King-like readability at the expense of Capote's originality and profundity.

Mailer's Lee Harvey Oswald may not even rank among Mailer's best books, but Mailer can't seem to write a truly bad book.  In fact, Mailer does many things right in his Oswald.  First, he has chosen a remarkably interesting hero for the subject of this "American mystery."  While Oswald seemed to hover on the brink of high-functioning autism or some sort of a narcissistic personality disorder, at the tender age of 21 he somehow managed to place himself right in the middle of 1960s global realities by defecting from one superpower, the United States,  to its nemesis and alter ego, the Soviet Union.  Once in the Soviet Union, Oswald encounters and then embraces a hundred signs of Soviet reality. First, the Soviet Union's official tour guides from Intourist guide him around the capital.  Next, the country's ubiquitous security agents arrange for Oswald to remove himself to Minsk, in the hear of Belorussia.  After that, Oswald is allowed to find a job, mingle with Soviet colleagues, and even date a series of Soviet women.

The secret police monitor the potential spy closely, but want to give Oswald enough personal freedom to engender careless behavior that might ultimately betray his clandestine ties to American spy networks.  Oswald, a mixture of bad Russian language skills and political naivete, embraces Soviet reality, at least at first.  As a privileged outsider, Soviet officials want to give him the chance to become acclimated to socialism;  they want him to thrive in that reality.  Accordingly, he's given a modest apartment with a view in a country with a severe housing shortage.  He's also given a small stipend.  Interviewed many years later, Mailer and his researchers uncover a quotidian Soviet reality of propaganda movies, political surveillance, anti-antisemitism, and unhappy memories of the German invasion fifteen years previously.

What Oswald encountered in Minsk was a rapidly recovering Soviet Union that had only recently emerged from the terror of Stalinism.  Oswald didn't seem to mind.  He had already severed his personal ties to home.  Living without almost any contact with countrymen or family members, he sometimes talked to a friend who had studied English or tuned in to the Voice of America to hear even a fragment of his native language.   Oswald professed disgust with American militarism, and seemed to agree with the Soviet Union's official assessment of American inequality.  But even KGB agents agreed (and their testimony, along with Oswald's diary, has been unearthed by Mailer's researchers) that Oswald was politically immature.  Notwithstanding his alienation from American society, he was only tangentially familiar with Marxist-Leninist political economy.

This state of alienation from both East and West must have been devastating, or would have been for a more mentally healthy individual.  How can one imagine such a state of isolation? I can think only of my recent divorce.   Before divorcing, I thought mostly of the loss of my partner.   The reality was much worse than this.  Having gone through the legal separation, I wonder how, once upon a time, a simple breakup could seem so devastating.  In high school, my girlfriend of two years broke up with me and I was a mess.  I could scarcely admit to myself how painful the experience had been, and certainly never said anything to my friends about the feeling of loss.  I guess I imagined that I would be alone forever, or that life would just go downhill from that point on.   With divorce, the experience of loss, alienation, and isolation is magnified many times over.  You lose your partner of many years, but also your friends and family, and ultimately you lose your child as well.  My saddest memory of the divorce is this:  when showing my young son his new home, and new room, he discovered a brand new Star Wars lunch container I had bought him.  He looked at the lunch bag with gratitude and exclaimed:  "Thank you, Daddy!"  It felt like being kicked in the stomach:  tearing my son out of his familiar world and placing him between two opposing worlds, he was thanking me for the ruin I was bringing on him.

Of course, this smacks of hyperbole:  divorce, when it comes, is often the best thing we can do for our children.  And in reality, we all lose our children eventually when they grow up, make friends, and leave for college, and then move out of the home once and for all.  Divorce merely accelerates the process.   I felt many times as if someone had driven a bus off of a cliff with all of my friends, family members, and acquaintances on it.   Where once I could see my child every day, now I see him only on weekends.  Where once I had a right to see my child on Christmas, now I have to check a legal document to see if that's possible or not.  How is it that Lee Harvey Oswald willingly embraced this type of radical isolation from everyone he knew?  The answer, I suspect, lies somewhere on the borderline between insanity and adventure.  But I will have to finish Mailer's book to get his full explanation of Oswald's American tragedy.  Of course, Oswald's story reminds us all that things can always get worse.  One minute Oswald is divorced from his father;  the next minute the whole country is divorced from its patriarch.  As Shakespeare once said, and I only paraphrase him, "when sorrows come they come not as single spies, but as whole brigades."

Volkogonov on Yuri Andropov

Yuri Andropov was sixty-eight years old when Brezhnev died and he ascended to the role of Party Leader. He lived only fifteen months after that, but his short reign as the Soviet boss reveals a great deal about the Soviet political experiment. Andropov’s rise to the top Party job reveals the close ties between the political hierarchy and the security apparatus. The Soviet Union was awash in security officials and paid informers, people who existed at every level of Russian society and regularly received small stipends for their services, so it was only natural for Brezhnev’s Politburo to place its faith in the head of the KGB.

Under Andropov, the KGB had become less brutal but no less efficient or even powerful. Andropov referred to his men as “Chekists” (a term that connoted a certain level of cold-bloodiness to those who had experienced the early years of the Bolshevik regime ) and was sometimes called a “Liberal Chekist,” insofar as he believed that the security organs could often fight heterodoxy at the level of ideas more often than it relied on the naked threat of physical coercion. Volkogonov points out that Andropov spent half his life as a Party apparatchik, and the other half as a KGB leader.

Andropov –calm, secretive, desk-bound, humble, and hard-working-- shared Brezhnev’s basic political outlook. The two men were conservatives who believed wholeheartedly in the basic tenants of the Soviet political system and command economy. Unlike Brezhnev, Andropov was well-read and extremely intelligent, if fairly orthodox in his approach to the growing problems that confronted the Soviet Union, including its troubles in Afghanistan, ailing economy, strained relations with China, and expensive arms race with the United States. According to Volkogonov, Andropov had a powerful intellect but failed to creatively address the basic flaws in the Soviet system. The answer to all pressing problems was greater Party discipline, more police surveillance, and more perfect control over the economy.

While Andropov made cosmetic proposals to alter the formal composition of the Supreme Soviet, took on a few regional bosses on issues related to corruption, and talked about new “brigade contracts” to incentivize work at least one some level, he entertained no thoughts that would have affected the Party’s monopoly of power. Indeed, under Andropov, the Politburo continued to make all decisions, no matter how big or small. In a single day, a few old men (and usually, only one old man, namely Andropov) would decide the future of Soviet foreign policy as well as which pig breeders deserved to be awarded prizes for their accomplishments.

Andropov’s rule was marked by debilitating illness. Volkogonov is impressed with Andropov’s capacity for work in the face of advancing physical infirmity, but notes with sadness that no Soviet leader even considered giving up power, no matter how incapacitated. The darkest moment of Andropov’s reign came in 1985, when the Soviets shot down a commercial Korean airliner, killing 269, and showed no remorse (and some deceit) over the incident.

Terminology of the Soviet Government

Although I've been reading Russian and Soviet history for the past couple of years--and indeed it has become something of a hobby now--I've never really come to grips with Soviet political structures. This is a failure on my part, but I am not exactly sure how it came about. There's really nothing about Soviet history that interests me more. I love politics and even comparative political history. And I read enough traditional Soviet history to hear the terminology of the Soviet state over and over again. In fact, knowing my weakness in terms of the system of Soviet political structures, I try to pay close attention whenever this topic is covered in any of my readings. Still, nothing sticks.

Perhaps I would be able to answer questions about Soviet power on a multiple question exam by choosing the closest answer among different options, but that is as far as I can go. Commisars, soviets, central committees, party congresses, politburos, the KGB, etc. It's still all a bit murky. Things are made harder because some institutions did change radically over the years and decades, especially at first, when these new forms were freshly invented. And the institutional names are linked to Marxist ideology, which is almost a theology, and we all know that theological terminology is--especially in Russia--all a form of Greek. And then there are institutions that seem to mean a lot but are in reality not important in the Soviet system, such as the difference between Premier or Secretary or President, etc. One can only admire those party members such as Trostky and Lenin who spoke with such confidence about new governmental forms, as if they had been around for decades, as if Marxist theory was transparent when it came to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.