In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action by L.K. Samuels

Author:L.K. Samuels [Samuels, L.K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cobden Press
Published: 2015-08-19T15:00:00+00:00

The Soviet Colossus

When a system is small and simple, with few people dependent on its performance, fiascos are merely inconvenient, the butt of humorous anecdotes. But when a system is large and intricate, constipated with a sticky diet of heavy regimentation, failures no longer incite howls of laughter.

The legacy of the Soviet colossus is replete with nightmarish ordeals that only a killjoy could appreciate. With its total dependency on statism, the Soviet system dehumanized individuals as if they were interchangeable parts of a machine, insignificant and ephemeral. Stalin’s “revolution from above” crafted a totalitarian archetype so finely carved that it marred every fragment of society. The old Soviet Union’s centralization of functions is felt even today, in the elusiveness of the simple pleasure of a hot shower. During summer months, Moscow residents are left with few options other than to take cold showers and let the dinner dishes pile up in the sink. It all started back in the late 1940s, with a city–wide system of central heating for hot water and steam–heating radiators. Forget about controlling and maintaining your own private heating unit. Instead, Russian authorities constructed a labyrinthine network of large boilers, connected by 5,600 miles of underground pipes.

Naturally, quality was sacrificed for quantity, which is why both housing and heating systems in Moscow are decaying rapidly. In an attempt to repair decrepit pipes, rolling cutoffs of hot water have become an annual summer ritual.12 A few residents have tried to buck the system and install shoe carton-sized water heaters to provide some relief.

But even though motivated residents will wake up an hour early to boil water for their shower, the central heating system has other shortcomings that have Muscovites shivering with goose bumps every season. Without individual heating units, the central system can’t entertain individual requests, exemptions, or alterations. Believing that they are getting the cold shoulder, Muscovites have increasingly groused that the city government is acting like a selfish landlord, carefully watching the energy meter and clenching the thermostat with a skinflint hand. The problem is obvious. Whether the outside weather is cold or warm, the state has strict timetables for switching the heat on. The situation is worse in other Moscow suburbs, like Pushkino, where hot water is often turned off in the middle of Siberia–like winters.

In a nation that had once withheld local street maps and phone books from public view, the Soviet Union was plagued by phony prices, statistics, and data. The lack of accurate information endangered its economy and caused resources to be misallocated. Russian factories routinely under-produced consumer goods in demand, while overproducing bombers and tanks. With technocrats running the system, output had only to satisfy the top–level statisticians measuring it. In an attempt to save socialism, Mikhail Gorbachev opened the information–monopoly spigot, by an amount meant to be just enough to allow “managed freedom” to spill out, in a plan to catch up with American information technology. Instead he opened the floodgates.

A correspondent in Moscow for the Baltimore Sun, Scott Shane experienced firsthand the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

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