The Russian Problem

The most unexpected reason for the downfall of the Soviet Union was the Russian problem—one which is still not widely understood in the West, even though the English (especially) suffer from a similar problem.

Collective agriculture had proved particularly unsuccessful in the RSFSR. Since the 1930s most young men had left the villages, which had become home to women, old men, and unqualified younger men who had not been able to hold down a job in the towns. Their labor did not suffice to bring in the harvest, and each August and September students had to be mobilized and sent out to the countryside to do the hard work for them. Many villages had died out altogether. One Russian, who visited the northern village of his childhood in 1984, found that all the homes had been abandoned. ”The village streets were covered with grass, and the former garden plots were wildly overgrown with nettles and burdock. The field where 28 kolkhozniki had sown oats after ploughing up the virgin soil was now overgrown with trees and bushes.... The magnificent meadows on which four villages used to mow hay the year round was waterlogged and covered with sedge.”^[2766]

The Orthodox Church, bearer of the religious traditions of the Russian people, had at least survived, but in a reduced and humiliated condition. The post-Stalin leaders had resumed the persecution which Stalin had suspended. Between 1959 and 1965, nearly half of all parish churches and quite a few cathedrals were closed, a process sometimes deliberately carried out in a crude and insulting manner. Three- quarters of monasteries suffered the same fate.^[2767] In the parishes which remained open, priests were classified as mere employees of the parish council, and were sub­ject to monitoring by the state-run Council of Religious Affairs, which awarded high marks to supporters of Soviet international peace policies, and low ones to those seen as over-zealous in performing their pastoral and liturgical duties.

The Russian population was beginning to fall, especially in relation to the less urbanized peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus region. Not only was the birth rate decreasing, but also the death rate was rising, especially that of men, among whom heavy drinking, smoking, environmental pollution, and uncertain health care took a heavy toll. In 1972 the demographer Viktor Perevedentsev warned that the Russian population was not reproducing itself because couples were having too few children.^[2769] This was in part a response to the way of life. In most urban families, both men and women took full-time jobs to make ends meet. Besides, life in a cramped apartment on the fifteenth floor did not encourage the creation of large families. Divorce was becoming much more common: it increased tenfold between 1950 and 1973.^[2770] In Central Asia and the Caucasus, by contrast, dwellings were less modernized but more spacious and closer to the open air, and marriage was seen as part of the long-term relationship of extended families.^[2771] One consequence of these developments was that the composition of the Soviet Army was changing, as relatively more young Muslim men joined it. In 1981 one Russian sociologist, Galina Litvinova, criticized the regime's policy of subsidizing large families as a co­vert form of support for Central Asians at the expense of Russians.^[2772]

Under Brezhnev, Russian nationalists protested semi-publicly about these matters and received some cautious support from the regime, which did not care to alienate the supporters of the largest ethnos. On the other hand, it could not af­ford to support them wholeheartedly and give in to their demands, or the Soviet Union would have broken up into its ethnically named constituents. As Brezhnev's health and power waned, however, the head of the KGB, Iurii Andropov, arrested one or two of their leaders and had others dismissed from influential posts in the media, warning that “some members of the intelligentsia, pretending to be con­cerned about the preservation of Russian national traditions, are carrying on active anti-Soviet activity.”^[2773]