Travels With a Hungry Bear:
A Journey to the Russian Heartland
By Mark Kramer
Houghton Mifflin, 320 pages, $24.95
Waking the Tempests:
Ordinary Life in the New Russia
By Eleanor Randolph
Simon and Schuster, 431 pages, $26
One comic and revealing scene shows why Mark Kramer’s new book about Russian agriculture is so valuable. During the last years of the Soviet Union, Kramer was being guided through southern Russia, near the home farm of the Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev, when he suddenly came down with a “troubled stomach.” He pushed past an annoyingly suspicious police guard and plunged into a roadside cornfield. Despite his discomfort, he made use of his time: “I inspected the crop that grew all around me. I counted just one ear of corn for every fifty pale green stems–evidence of prior chronic misapplication of fertilizer.”
Kramer is a rarity among writers, a genuine, perceptive expert on agriculture who has written books and articles about farming in America and who has actually farmed himself. But his new book about Russia is tremendously important because he uses his considerable expertise to illuminate a larger question, one of the great puzzles of the 20th Century: Why did the Soviet Union, a genuine superpower, collapse from within?
Starting in 1988, Kramer spent months over a period of several years visiting farms across the Soviet heartland. He is a skilled writer, able to make an unfamiliar world come alive. The land itself seemed not unlike the American Midwest or West, fields of corn or wheat sweeping to the horizon. But, he notes, “houses were missing from nearly all the pleasant sites where houses sat in most other countries . . . cottages did not sit by the ponds or face the beautiful broad prospects. . . . We’d emerge from deep country suddenly, into some rural community that always looked like an industrial slum, not a farm village.”
Soviet agriculture was based on the collective farm, and Kramer’s inquiry into this peculiar institution is patient and brilliant. Decisions were made not on the farms but at the ministry in Moscow, where zakaz –The Plan–was drawn up. Central planners not only dictated acreage devoted to each crop, they even specified planting dates, required barns built to the same specifications across the vast country and used red tape to choke managers who needed parts and inputs.
Kramer has genuine respect for many of the farm managers he met, and he describes them vividly and affectionately. They were caught in an impossible dilemma: to fulfill the plan and get work done. They fed the higher-ups paperwork that proved they had met the spring planting deadline, while actually waiting for dry weather or spare parts. They requested equipment through channels, but actually made informal contacts with suppliers in other branches of industry and bartered, using farm products they had kept off their books.
But it was a losing battle. In any bureaucracy, East or West, avoiding blame is the primary objective, and managers hesitated to take risks. Kramer noted that “Soviet farms did things so primitively that sweeping technical improvements were just waiting in the West–not even in laboratories but right on the dusty shelves of feed stores and in the garages of equipment dealers in any Iowa town.” He includes specific instances of how the bureaucracy suffocated innovation.
The result was the chronic weakness at the heart of the Soviet economy. About 20 percent of Soviet citizens–10 times the American farm population–worked in agriculture, yet output stagnated. Reading this vivid and detailed account, you start to understand how frustration and breakdown in such a key sector made change on a national level probable, even necessary.
Eleanor Randolph has a different focus: the Russia that is emerging since the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. Randolph worked in Moscow for The Washington Post from 1991 to 1993, and she provides a useful picture by looking carefully and thoroughly at the changes in various areas of Russian life, including the new private real estate market, health and medicine, education, religion, sex and crime.
She also helps with the central mystery: How did a superpower disintegrate with scarcely a shot being fired? She suggests that the old Communist ruling class has to a great extent become the new privileged semicapitalist class, so the ex-apparatchiks did not resist change that did not threaten them.
Naive young Western economists recommended “shock therapy,” including the sudden privatization of state-owned enterprises, to inject competition and efficiency into the system. In practice, privatization has meant widespread corruption, in which those who profited already belonged to what one of Randolph’s informants called “the power culture.” “Russia was for sale,” she explains, “and anyone who could claim control over an asset could try to sell it. From icons to oil, timber, and antiques, the laws were weak and contradictory; the officials who enforced them could be bought.” It sounds as if the Russian economy is still largely guided by the same kinds of unimaginative senior bureaucrats who ruled under communism, now personally enriched by selling off enterprises that at least theoretically had belonged to the entire population.
People who were a little lower down in the old hierarchy have also landed on their feet, even if they had to do some scrambling. Randolph includes a memorable portrait of Olga Romashko, a tall, vigorous woman who is developing and successfully marketing her own face cream. Randolph gets to know this remarkable woman, and learns that she had been “a respected medical researcher who had published more than sixty works on the influence of radiation on blood and the workings of the cell in human skin.” But with the breakdown in the old Soviet economy, there was no more money for research. Randolph’s account raises doubts that Romashko’s career change (in a country where, as she documents, life expectancy has been dropping) can be regarded as an unqualified good.
Randolph’s book helps us to see how communism has experienced something of a resurgence. She has a revealing conversation with Igor Muzurov, chief of ecology for the industrial city of Chapayevsk, a polluted disaster area with a high rate of sickness among children. She notes, “In the Soviet days, many workers felt that even though they were struggling it was for a good and decent cause. It would enrich the many, not just the few as in the West. . . . Even the young often believed somewhere deep inside that they were somehow more moral and righteous than the greedy West.”
Muzurov, who took his job in ecology because his own children were often sick, told her: “People have no goals, nothing to work for now. We are still empty. Religion is not enough. I supported Yeltsin but now I have some doubts. I don’t see the goals to work for.”
Most of the Russians in both these important books come across as likable and decent people, with a degree of patience astonishing to an American. They are living through a time of economic and social upheaval that has meant near-catastrophe for many among them, but they seem to survive with little nastiness. Contrary to the fearful expectations of a few years ago, the country has not broken apart in vicious ethnic fighting; Boris Yeltsin’s war against the breakaway southern region of Chechnya is thoroughly unpopular, and he is being forced to seek a diplomatic solution. Nor–so far–do many Russians want to restore dictatorship or threaten their neighbors. Under trying circumstances, they are earning the world’s respect.
