"Cast your mind back to another world"

By: Lawrence Sherwin Deputy Director of Communications

As we reach the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism, Larry Sherwin reflects on the events of 1989

It was Russian business executive Alexei Mordashov who put it succinctly, jarring my own memory of the bad old days. At the Bank’s 2007 Business Forum in Kazan, he reminded the audience just how much had changed in Russia in a mere 20 years as he recounted the story of a young “comrade teacher” who had come up to him at his university in 1988. The teacher had apparently been devastated by an article in Izvestia asserting that the collectivisation of agriculture in the USSR had caused tremendous suffering and ultimately damaged the agricultural capacity of the country. “Imagine,” said Mr Mordashov, “having a conversation about this today!”

Imagine, I thought to myself, completing university courses on scientific Marxism-Leninism only to watch the Soviet state unscientifically crumble – and then go on to become a senior executive in a private steel corporation listed on the Russian stock exchange.

The musings of a former Sovietologist

Cast your mind back to another world. I remember it well, not 20, but over 30 years ago when in 1975 I landed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from LA (via Paris) for a semester’s study at Leningrad State University. A university student of Soviet politics and economics, still vaguely sympathetic to the achievements of central planning (free medicine for everyone after all), I was now on my way to dormitory no 6 on Dobrolyubov Street where I would share a small, smelly room with five Soviet roommates and enjoy a Leningrad winter with no hot water, yet full use of scores of dank public bath houses (though the military had priority use of shower facilities, meaning a very cinematic, long wait in the snow).

Lack of freedom, palpable fear, meaningless, pretentious ideological drivel screaming out from banners and newspaper (not to mention the never-silent Orwellian “radiotochka”, or single-channel wired radio, in our dorm room) – all of this weaned me quickly from whatever ideological sympathies I might have had. For a lad from the US at the height of the Cold War, there was the shocking realisation that Soviet might was nothing more than a paper tiger, empty at that. The shortcomings of central planning were there for all to see – the lack of goods, of food, the queues. It’s one thing to read about, quite another to make one’s way on a daily basis, which is why perhaps we really did have the consummate Soviet experience. Having sold my extra pairs of jeans for hard cash, I was reduced to frequenting dollar stores and bars, reselling goods and (forgive me, since I had trouble using torn sheets of Pravda and Izvestia) stealing toilet paper from the fancy tourist hotels (Astoria and Evropeiskaya were my favourites), which I was miraculously allowed to enter thanks to my foreign passport.

Yet it was the smell that really did it. The smell of my roommate, reading his volume of Marx in his synthetic black jumpsuit made in Vietnam, sporting one of his two pairs of unwashed socks. The smell of socialism, the smell of public buildings, of university cafeteria no 2 (Академическая столовая) – that indescribable mixture of grease, cabbage, dust and bodily odours emanating from the basement, the kitchen, the nineteen layers of cracking paint and moist plaster, and your neighbour. And the crass smell of social inequity at every step in a society that screamed the opposite. “The American delegation is coming!” Nina Petrovna the cook would bellow, commanding us to jump the queue in front of hordes of hungry rural tourists, to be served a bowl of congealed soup out of a Solzhenitsyn novel, with an especially large lump of lard in it “…especially for our American friends”.

What did you do in the war, Daddy?

Not that war, the Cold War. Having recovered from my student experience, on my return to the US I went from one political extreme to the other, becoming a champion of the free market, changing my political views to rabid anti-Sovietism, strolling the aisles of my local supermarket, gazing at the wonder that is the banana in winter, and proclaiming the lie and pretence that was the USSR to anyone who would listen.

It was the height of “zastoi” (the period of stagnation under Brezhnev) and, as the two superpowers tangoed delicately away from a period of détente, I went off under the auspices of the State Department for a year to Kiev, Tselinograd (now Astana) and Dushanbe, on the last American cultural exhibit in the Soviet Union. “Agriculture USA” was its name and, as fate would have it, I landed in front of a mock-up of an Iowa pig stall (really), at a stand with a colourful plastic sow (свиноматка!) and eight calico piglets, responding to questions from the proletarian masses about everything but pork production. The horrors of capitalism and the inequities of life in the USA were the subject of most questions – the fate of minorities (lynching, concentration camps), the unemployed (starvation), the elderly (eating dog food), the sick (no medical care) and the homeless, every possible cliché that the Soviet media served up to the public was discussed ad nauseum, mostly ad absurdum. I was honest, often critical of my own society, yet most people were convinced that I was lying – and most would walk away muttering loudly that life in the USSR was in any case much, much better: “У нас, молодой человек, лучше.”

1989 and the defeat of the ideological adversary

After Leningrad came Munich and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, an American-funded, anti-Soviet radio station. My knowledge of Russian and two master’s degrees in politics landed me first in what was called the “Red Archive”, where I had the pleasure of reading every article in Pravda and Izvestia daily (here is a good point to recall what I did with these publications as a student – see paragraph 4). Articles were cut out by hand and Xeroxed (no computers!), then classified by subject for the archive. More important was the Sisyphus-like activity of my colleagues who were underlining and filing the surnames of Communist Party officials that appeared in these illustrious publications (and there were lots), the better to be able to track their careers over the years. This was, you see, the science of Kremlinology: the progression of an agricultural worker from heroine-milkmaid (знатная доярка) to minor Party official to Omsk Party Secretary to the Central Committee of the CPSU was documented for posterity.

Over just a few years, after the deaths of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko and the advent of Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika, things unravelled across the empire and across eastern Europe and Yugoslavia with increasing speed. No one had foreseen the depth and breadth of the dramatic change that was coming – and once it began no one thought that it would proceed as quickly as it did. 20 years ago exactly, I was working in the Russian Broadcasting Department of an anti-Soviet American radio station in West Germany when, in short order, time and politics accelerated and the course of history was altered.

1989-2009: A mere 20 years

It helps to look back to see how unimaginably, impossibly far we have come. Back in old, crumbling Tselinograd, KazSSR of the 1980s, the idea of young bankers, lawyers and economists from independent Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Germany and France working in an international financial institution in London would have been greeted with incredulity and disbelief. Whatever the shortcomings of transition have been, however painful the current crisis is, it is worth remembering and pondering the point from which this unbelievable journey began.

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