This was the fundamental flaw in Gorbachev’s position. To encourage greater initiative and therefore greater productivity from the workers, while simultaneously defending the privileges and perks of the bureaucracy, was to attempt to square the circle. In order to get the Soviet economy moving again, in order to eliminate corruption and motivate the working class, it would have been necessary to grant freedom to the workers to organise, discuss and criticise. But this was impossible. The very first point the workers would have raised would be the parasitic nature of the privileges of the millions of officials, their wives, dependants and hangers-on. From an economic point of view, this argument remains unanswerable. But Gorbachev could not allow this question to be put, for the simple reason that he represented the material interests of the ruling caste.
The big majority of the 19 million or so officials who made up the bureaucracy were now the children and grandchildren of bureaucrats. They now had all the attributes of a special ruling caste, like the dominant caste in ancient India, increasingly divorced from the life and thought of ordinary workers. The bureaucracy itself, despite the new Gorbachev image, was profoundly demoralised, divided and pessimistic. After more than 70 years, all links with the ideas and traditions of October had been severed. In his famous satire, Animal Farm, George Orwell depicts the pigs and farmers in a meeting where it is impossible to distinguish one group from the other. Two generations of bureaucratic rule produced a layer of privileged functionaries utterly divorced from the working class and the ideas of the October Revolution.
Apart from their inflated salaries and privileges, they lived a life totally apart from the masses, with special shops, restaurants, clinics, rest-homes, and even beaches. Their wives did not have to queue in the cold. Unlike their fellow citizens, they could travel abroad and had access to foreign currency and all the luxury items denied to the rest. Although not officially admitted, there were even the equivalent of private schools under the thin disguise of special foreign language schools, where the children of the bureaucracy had a virtual monopoly. The outlook of this group had nothing to do with the working class or socialism, as the following quotations point out:
The jet-set are what one would expect: the sons and daughters of the very rich and the very privileged, who have no intention of working, believe in nothing at all (not even in revolt), and do their best to turn their fathers’ Sochi villas into imitations of Palm Beach. They dress in imported European clothes; they drink themselves silly; they philander and fornicate; they gamble and they dance. Regarding the mass of the people as cattle and the intelligentsia as prigs and bores, they live almost entirely to themselves, in and out of each other’s houses, and are thus rarely seen. (Crankshaw, op. cit., p. 134.)
And again, in The Guardian, (19/2/86):
But there have been so many of these children of the party elite that even out of mainstream politics they constitute a new class of their own. And their children are now also going to the privileged schools. There is today a Soviet middle class, urbane and sophisticated with its own old-boy network and that is entirely separated from the nomenklatura. (My emphasis.)
The luxurious living conditions of the elite were no secret. The special Kremlin supermarket in Granovsky Street was conveniently situated next door to the special Kremlin clinic:
The special hospitals for top Party officials are unique in their access to Western drugs and they have the use of country estates and lavish flats that go with their jobs.
…He [Brezhnev] lived well, he agreed, but earned no more than a top factory manager, who could expect, with bonuses, about £200 a week. Even the Soviet press found it difficult to keep a straight face at that statement. (Ibid.)
For the bureaucracy, the revolution had served the purpose of giving it unheard-of power and privileges. In the words of Kirpichev in Zorin’s play, they were “white collar aristocrats, greedy and conceited, far from the people”. The old Stalinist officials were corrupt gangsters, but at least had some link with the old traditions. Here we had a new generation of aristocrats ‘born in the purple’, used to French perfume, expensive foreign suits and Cadillacs. Raisa Gorbachev was a classical specimen of these creatures. Pierre Cardin described Raisa as “one of the most charming wives of foreign dignitaries that has ever visited my salon”. By some strange irony, Mrs Gorbachev had been a lecturer in Marxism-Leninism at Moscow University, though what kind of Marxism that would have been defies the imagination.
In the 1920s, the Left Oppositionist Sosnovsky coined the phrase ‘the automobile-harem factor’ in relation to the rise of the bureaucracy. Aspiring bureaucrats would marry the daughters of bourgeois and aristocrats and imitate their outlook and habits. The big cars of the officials and their ‘painted ladies’ recalled the protest of Gracchus Babeuf at a similar phenomenon in the period of Thermidorian reaction of the French Revolution, when former Jacobins took to wining and dining with aristocrats, and marrying their daughters: “What are you doing, small-hearted plebeian? Today they are embracing you and tomorrow they will strangle you.” Nothing expressed more graphically the reactionary petty bourgeois character of the new clique of sleek bureaucrats represented by Gorbachev than their wives.
The rulers of the Soviet Union were, in fact, even more remote from the population than the ruling class in the West. This fact was expressed in an outburst from one of the delegates at the special conference of the CPSU held in 1988. (Incidentally, this was the first such conference since 1941):
We know more about the position of President Reagan and the Queen of England than we know about our own leaders. (Quoted in The Wall Street Journal, 5/7/88, my emphasis.)
The ruling elite fell more and more under the influence of capitalism, the more alienated and remote they became from Soviet society. Here we have a graphic example of what Engels meant when he referred to the state as a “power standing above society and increasingly alienating itself from it”. In particular, the elite of the diplomatic corps got used to hobnobbing with bourgeois circles in the West, and clearly enjoyed the experience. Eduard Shevardnadze was typical of this layer. Unlike the old crude and ignorant bureaucrats who could not even speak a foreign language, the new layer was educated, sleek, cosmopolitan – and with the mentality of petty bourgeois upstarts, which is the hallmark of reformist leaders in their dealings with the big bourgeois, where fear and envy struggle with a secret and slavish admiration.
Nowhere was the rottenness of the bureaucracy more evident than in the period of so-called perestroika (or katastroika, as the Soviet workers soon dubbed it). Gorbachev was smart enough to realise that, unless drastic measures were taken by the leadership, the whole thing would seize up. At this point, there is no reason to suppose that he intended to return to capitalism. The pro-capitalist elements in the bureaucracy were almost certainly in a minority at this time. But Gorbachev had set in motion processes which had a logic of their own.