RUSSIA: The Inscrutable Soviets

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Exotic Wines. The Soviet elite enjoys opulent privileges. Writes Smith: "An entire department of the Party Central Committee known by the innocuous title of Upravleniye Delami—the Administration of Affairs—and with a secret budget, operates and equips an extensive stable of choice apartment houses, country dachas, government guest houses, special rest homes, fleets of car pools and squads of security-trained servants for the power-elite." Politburo members and national secretaries of the Communist Party use black Zil limousines, hand-tooled and worth about $75,000 each. A network of unmarked stores caters to the Soviet aristocracy. Its stock: rare czarist delicacies like caviar, smoked salmon, export vodka and exotic wines, choice meats. Those stores also carry foreign goods the proletariat never sees: French cognac, American cigarettes, Japanese tape recorders—all at discounts. Including relatives, Smith estimates, these indulged shoppers amount to several million. Everything is maskirovannoye (masked) —the guilty secrets of privilege.

All of it works by blat—influence, clout. Military families intermarry—so do scientific families, party families, writers' families. A Soviet old-boy network promotes its children's careers. Teachers can be intimidated to give better grades to sons of the powerful. According to Smith, "Russians themselves comment that the upper-class feeling today increasingly seems like Russia before the Revolution."

The unprivileged get along with what for Americans seems an odd docility. But both Kaiser and Smith point out that for the majority of Soviet citizens, the minimal comforts of housing —however cramped (10 ft. sq. per person, by Lenin's edict)—and a regular diet—however spare (sausage, potatoes, cabbage)—are better than they had before. Especially to those older Russians who lived through the hunger of the war. conditions now seem acceptable. There are even hints of affluence —a few self-service stores, prepackaged goods. Some citizens feel rich enough to afford wigs, pets and facelifts. The wait for a car, however, is one to five years.

On the Left. For Russians, shopping is an endless, degrading and sometimes adventurous experience. The rule is that if you see a line forming, you immediately join it and only inquire then what is being sold—choice items go too quickly to hesitate. The KGB is sullenly omnipresent, of course, though Soviets no longer fear so much the knock in the middle of the night. The people possess a highly developed, anarchic talent for beating the system. They arrange paper marriages so that a man or woman can get legal-residency documents for Moscow, widely considered the most desirable place in the Soviet Union to live. (The capital gets top priority on all consumer goods, for one thing.) They contrive incredibly complicated apartment swaps in a country where housing is still disastrously scarce. When they have babies, they circumvent rigid hospital rules: new mothers dangle strings out of their windows, and their husbands tie parcels of food to them. Hustling na levo (on the left) is a way of life. It encompasses using government limousines as gypsy cabs and a thousand other winked-at subterfuges.