by Ron Unz, Lew Rockwell:
The Soviet Union and Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Decades ago when I was in college and grad school I had a strong side-interest in the Soviet Union and its history. During those years I may have read as many as one hundred books on those subjects.
At that point, my views on most historical matters were almost entirely mainstream and conventional, closely conforming to what I had absorbed from our major media outlets and standard history textbooks.
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During the last couple of decades my understanding of the world and its history has undergone the radical transformation that I have documented in my lengthy American Pravda series. But this tidal wave of revelations has left intact my view of the USSR, which has scarcely changed since the late 1970s. Indeed, the very title of my series drew upon the name of the leading Soviet newspaper, which then and now has been a watchword for dishonest government propaganda.
Much of my initial perspective on Soviet society was shaped by Pulitzer Prize-winner Hedrick Smith, the longtime Moscow bureau chief of New York Times, and his thick bestseller on the subject. Published a half-century ago in 1976, The Russians immediately attracted great critical acclaim and huge national sales, and I had read it a few years later.
I recently reread Smith’s book for the first time since my freshman year in college, and its portrayal of the Soviet Union still closely matched my current beliefs.
His 700 pages of text depicted a bizarre, dysfunctional society, irrational and very poorly designed. Soviet citizens had to spend endless hours waiting in lines to purchase ordinary products that any Westerner could so easily obtain within minutes at a local grocery or department store. Soviets carried string bags with them wherever they went so that they could scoop up any good shoes or good sausages if they chanced upon a sudden supply, thereby reducing highly-educated urban professionals to the existence of primitive hunter-gatherers. Even the impoverished Third Worlders of that era seemed to live lives free from the ridiculous daily inconveniences of the supposedly far wealthier and more advanced Soviets.
An economic system so strange and poorly functioning hardly seemed likely to permanently endure. Across our dining hall table my friends and I generally agreed that the USSR would eventually collapse though the date was uncertain. Predicting the likely trajectory of future events is usually far easier than determining the precise timing. In 1970 the prominent dissident Andrei Amalrik had famously published Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, but his boldly predictive timeline was off by a few years.
When the collapse finally came, I was hardly surprised except that it was almost entirely peaceful. As the Soviet Bloc and the USSR itself disintegrated I found it quite remarkable that such a vast ideological empire would fall with so little bloodshed. At the end, almost no one believed in the system enough to defend it.
