Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams (Revised Edition) by David K. Shipler

Author:David K. Shipler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780812917888
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2016-02-17T04:30:00+00:00

Crime and Social Conscience

In the scramble for advancement and comfort, in the bending of unreasonable rules and the ignoring of impossible laws, an easy drift is attained, a state of moral weightlessness where there is no up or down, right or wrong. It is illegal, but is it wrong for private speculators to bring essential drugs for sale to cardiac patients in the Kaunas Hospital in Lithuania? It is illegal, but is it wrong for a pediatrician in Tbilisi who is faced with no antibiotics and an epidemic of bacterial infections to advise mothers how to buy streptomycin and penicillin on the black market? “We say directly to them to go to the speculators,” explained one woman doctor in Georgia. “We direct them there: ‘Go buy it on the black market and bring it here, and we’ll administer it.’ ”

Knowing that much of decent living depends on illegality, Russians move always in a diffuse mist of vague guilt and vulnerability, understanding that they have done many things on the dark side of the law for which they can be arrested at any moment. Even if the probability of arrest is obviously low, the sense of perpetual sin is very strong, casting a shadow of uneasiness over all striving. A friend who was no dissident, and as upstanding a citizen as they come, told me of the chills he felt in reading a short story on settling accounts. The hero of the story receives a summons to court, a slip of paper bearing only a case number, no details. He searches his mind frantically, wondering which transgression he has finally been called to answer for, which small infraction in his young adulthood has caught him. My friend also searched his own past while reading, turning out scores upon scores of his illicit acts, examining them in cold tension. Finally the court date ends up as an innocent need for the man’s testimony in some benign civil case. But my friend was haunted by the story, for it spoke to some profound and universal fears.

From the viewpoint of political control, it must be convenient for the authorities to have most Soviet citizens in a constant state of illegality, always arrestable on apolitical grounds. Tangled in webs of indebtedness, the individual feels frail against the massive righteousness of the state and party. Corroded by his own transgressions, the citizen does not blame the system for failing to provide meat, but as Val Turchin observed, blames himself for not living in Moscow, where it is available. And as he schemes and deals and bribes and embezzles, and invents cute idioms such as blat and nalevo to mask his wrongdoing, he also keeps his head down, melts in, complies, and bends.

And often he loses his equilibrium. Because “speculation,” as the private trading of goods is branded, is almost universally outlawed and almost universally tolerated, black-marketeering becomes normal and regular, taking on the illusion of legitimacy. Every Saturday, beginning in the late morning, some fifty or more

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