Russia’s chaotic, wartime 1917 revolution was propelled by a desire to remake the world, to overcome what was perceived to be the country’s false and hideous life, and achieve a just and beautiful life, through mass violence if necessary. By the 1930s, under Stalin, the revolutionary dream for a world of abundance without exploitation had become an enslavement of the peasantry and a forced, headlong expansion of heavy industry, with millions of people called upon to sacrifice whatever it took to ‘catch and overtake’ the capitalists. Alongside the roar of heavy industry, there was also the stamping of jackboots: the Imperial Japanese over-running Manchuria; the Italian fascists marching through Abyssinia (Ethiopia); the Nazis annexing Austria and the Czech lands. The Soviet regime consumed the country and itself in terror, but also girded itself in the armour of advanced modernity—blast furnaces, turbines, tanks, airplanes—and mobilized its hardened factory workers, collective farmers, camp inmates, and commissars for war.

The Second World War was a defining moment for the Soviet Union. No other industrial country has ever experienced the devastation that befell the USSR in victory. The Nazi onslaught of 1941–5 levelled more than 1,700 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages, and obliterated about one-third of the USSR’s wealth. Soviet military deaths numbered at least seven million, about half the total for all combatants (the Germans lost 3.5 million soldiers; the Americans about 300,000). Soviet civilian deaths probably numbered between seventeen and twenty million, making its combined human losses near twenty-seven million. Almost an equal number of people were left homeless. Another two million perished from famine between 1946 and 1948. Each year of the first post-war decade, approximately one million children were born out of wedlock, as women unable to find husbands took initiative. Even so, the 1941 pre-invasion population of 200 million was not reached again until 1956. The war was an enduring catastrophe.

Politically, the war broke the regime-imposed isolation. Millions of Red Army soldiers advanced beyond Soviet borders, and most were stunned by what they saw. ‘I was a member of the Communist party, I was an officer in the Red Army,’ wrote Peter Gornev. But ‘in Finland, Poland, and Germany, I saw that most people were better off than we were. Soviet propaganda had told us just the reverse. The Soviet government had always lied to us. Now I had a chance to escape from the lies.’ Here was the classic disillusionment story, better known from the anthology ‘the God that failed’. Among displaced Soviet subjects like Gornev, a few hundred thousand avoided return. But more than three million were repatriated from the US, French, and British occupation zones of Germany. This substantial population with first-hand experience of the outside world frightened the Soviet leadership. Even returning POWs and slave labourers, who somehow managed to survive German captivity, were made to pass through special screening; many disappeared in the Soviet camp complex colloquially known as the Gulag.

Western annexations, following the Red Army advance, meant that several million people who had not lived under the Soviet regime during the ‘heroic’ 1930s mobilizations to build socialism found themselves incorporated into the USSR. Mass deportations sought to quell opposition among them, but in the Baltic republics and western Ukraine partisans sustained guerrilla wars through the late 1940s and early 1950s. By this time, large-scale mutinies rocked the Gulag, which held close to three million convicts in labour camps alone, more than one-third incarcerated for political crimes, the rest for so-called common crimes (theft, drunkenness, rape, murder). Protesting camp inmates had engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the defence of Stalingrad; now serving twenty-five-year terms, they were not afraid of much. Shouting slogans such as ‘Long Live the Soviet Constitution!’, they demanded an eight-hour work day, unrestricted correspondence with family members, periodic visits, and judicial review of cases. They were strafed by Soviet warplanes.

Few inhabitants inside the Soviet Union learned of the revolts in the Gulag or of the forest-dwelling anti-Soviet partisans. What they did know was that the country had withstood the Nazi war machine. Many hoped changes and a better life would follow. Unsolicited reform proposals poured forth, advocating competition among enterprises and private trade, but they were relegated to the archives. Victorious, the Soviet dictatorship felt no imperative to change, and fell back upon familiar patterns of bureaucratic hyper-centralization and economics by command. Propagandists exhorted the weary populace to rebuild the country, which they did, brick by brick, despite the harangues. The state media revived the pre-war theme of hostile capitalist encirclement, and relentlessly demonized the West, casting Soviet deprivation, once again, as a matter of heroic sacrifice. Heavy industry, as in the 1930s, received the bulk of investment, and the country regained—and, by 1950, surpassed—its pre-war Fordist-style industrial base. It also exploded its own atomic bomb. Stalin’s death in 1953 was a psychological blow, but Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign, launched in 1956, seemed to reinvigorate the system. The dream of the socialist revolution—to ‘catch and overtake’ the most advanced countries and, in the process, build a better, more just world—rose from the ashes for a new generation.

Creeping invasion of the West

During the twenty-three years (1955–78) that Gorbachev had worked his way up and commanded the province of Stavropol, Soviet society had changed profoundly. Two-thirds of the population had lived in villages when Gorbachev was born, but by the late 1970s townspeople outnumbered country folk by almost two to one. And whereas, towards the end of Stalin’s time, most urbanites still lived in barracks or ‘communal apartments’, sharing kitchen and bath with other tenants, under Brezhnev more than half the growing city population lived in apartments with private baths and kitchens. Millions of families were also able to build modest country retreats (dachas) with vegetable gardens. Between 1970 and 1978 the number of domestic vacationers at sanatoria and resorts jumped from 16 million to 35 million, while another one million per year travelled to Eastern Europe. By this time, more than 90 per cent of Soviet families owned refrigerators, more than 60 per cent owned washing machines.

There were significantly more goods than before, yet much of the Soviet population queued for hours to obtain basic necessities and had to turn to the more expensive ‘shadow economy’ of informal production and exchange for children’s clothes, proper-sized adult shoes, and other scarce items. That was because consumer goods production lagged behind military and heavy industry, and central planning empowered producers, not consumers. Similarly, no matter how joyous people were when moving into a new prefabricated apartment, usually after waiting ten years, their space was invariably insufficient—one, two, or at most three rooms for husband, wife, children, grandparents. The authorities just could not keep up. And, although people had more, they were demanding more, on the basis of wider horizons. Back in 1950, the year Gorbachev had entered Moscow University, there were 1.25 million students enrolled in higher education, about 3 per cent of the population, but by the late 1970s, fully 10 per cent of the Soviet population had completed college. About 70 per cent had completed high school, compared with 40 per cent in 1950.

Mass media technologies—motion pictures, radio—had long been important in the Soviet dictatorship’s ability to disseminate the kinds of information and ways of interpreting the world it deemed appropriate. These remained powerful state levers, but over time foreign content increasingly entered the stream of mass culture in the Soviet Union, notwithstanding censorship. Into the 1950s, Soviet radios meant a wire hooked up to a feed bringing one or two stations from Moscow, rather than wave receivers, but, by the late 1960s, wave radios came to exceed wire ones, and the total number of all radios grew to nearly ninety million (from around eighteen million at Stalin’s death). Technical adepts reconfigured Soviet manufactured radios to receive short wave from abroad, broadcast as part of the cold war. True, a good part of state radio facilities were busy producing static to cover up Radio Liberty, BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Voice of America, which collectively were known as ‘the voices’. Yet listeners could escape jamming out in the country and learn the forbidden details of Soviet political life and world events.

In this creeping post-war cultural invasion of the USSR by the West, an even more important role was played by images and details of consumerism, some of which were being delivered by a new and quintessential mass medium, television. The number of Soviet TV sets leapt from 400 in 1940, to 2.5 million in 1958, thirty million ten years later, and ninety million in the 1980s, by which time they could be found in 93 per cent of households. Post-war programmes began to focus on home life, and, beginning in the mid-1970s, the authorities permitted translations of family serials from Britain (The Forsyte Saga, David Copperfield), France (Les Thibaults), and other capitalist countries. Such shows, like the increasingly available foreign films, were watched as much for clues of material life as for entertainment. Soviet audiences would intently observe the characters moving through well-furnished homes from one room to another room and then another room, sometimes eight or more in all. The characters also appeared in different clothes each day, peered into over-stuffed refrigerators, and drove sleek cars. It was all fantasy—or was it?

Certainly, Soviet television was dominated by official views, and in general control over communications remained very tight. Private telephones were kept to a minimum—twenty-five million, fewer than one for every ten people—and typewriters had to be registered with the police. Access to photocopiers was tightly restricted. But tape recorders, owned by about one-third of the population, as well as cheap X-ray plates (pressed as LPs), facilitated the circulation of forbidden Soviet popular ballads as well as smuggled rock and roll. In 1968, ostensibly to combat worrisome trends in youth culture, Komsomol officials gathered at a retreat to watch the officially banned film Easy Rider. Soon, almost every Soviet high school and factory acquired its own rock-and-roll band, which the Komsomol hired to perform at official events. By the late Brezhnev era, Soviet public spaces were decorated not just with official slogans but also with graffiti about sports teams, rock music, sex, and the merits of punk music versus heavy metal. Schoolchildren ‘ranked’ each other by their jeans, with Western brands being the highest. This infatuation with the Western consumer culture was a far cry from the heroic October revolution and Civil War, the 1930s building of socialism, or the Second World War, which had shaped earlier generations. Despite prominent post-war campaigns to settle ‘virgin lands’ and build a second railroad through Siberia, it was clear that the mobilizational style of political participation and socialization was losing much of its force. Equally important, the party’s grand historical teleology had to be abandoned. As the predicted date of 1980 for the transition to Communism passed, ideologues replaced Khrushchev’s utopian promise with the here and now of ‘developed’ socialism. Was life simply a question of washing machines, refrigerators, private cars, TVs, popular music, and jeans, and, if so, what did that portend for socialism’s struggle against capitalism?