Russia: Conditioning the Comrades

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The Communist ethic forbids private ownership of anything produced through common labor.

— Lenin

The old dogma was certainly specific enough, and many Russians even today have a lingering prejudice against private property. Such an attitude, of course, could put a serious crimp in the Kremlin's ambitious plans to create a consumer-oriented economy. Last week Izvestia attempted through sleight of mind to remove the stigma of ownership from Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

The occasion was a letter to the editor from an obscure party functionary in the Ukrainian city of Chernigov. Complained Comrade Fomenko: "Millions of Soviet citizens who have never in their lives owned private property are now suddenly being slandered as property owners because they own their own homes."

"Comrade Fomenko is right," thundered the editor's reply. "It is high time to stop this nonsense." Though Fomenko had been referring to the large and growing number of Russians who are buying cooperative apartments and building their own homes with government credits, Izvestia's reply presumably extended to the owners of all sorts of worldly possessions.

Lenin's prohibition of private ownership, declared Izvestia, applied only to the bad old days when capitalists were exploiting the workers. But now that there are no longer exploiters and exploited, "whoever thinks personal property means private ownership is in grave error." In fact, explained Izvestia in a wild ideological leap, "there is no gap between private and public ownership. Personal property is just another form of common ownership, both belonging together like the roots and leaves of the trees."

The reasoning may have been muddy, but the message was clear: Comrades, have no qualms about buying those 27 million TV sets, 19.5 million refrigerators and 3,000,000 new Fiats that the Soviet Union hopes to produce under the just-begun Five Year Plan.