28 Temmuz 2025

Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1972 diary (4)

Famine, cholera, and the summer retreats of the Stalinist bureaucracy

In his diary entry dated 8 August 1972, Anatoly Chernayev noted some of the grim developments then unfolding across the Soviet Union.

Yesterday Shishlin told Bovin and me about a letter from the Secretary of the Astrakhan regional committee to the CC CPSU: 100% of the winter crops in the area are burned out and reseeding cost this much; 100% of the spring crops are burned out; this much cattle died of starvation in the spring, and this much dies per day currently; meadows and pastures are all burned, there will be nothing to feed the cattle in the fall. There is practically no drinking water (that meets sanitary-hygenic standards) in Astrakhan. The sewage system is breaking down. Cholera is spreading. And so on. 

Shishlin was in the Crimea and attended Brezhnev’s meeting with leaders of socialist countries. He heard some things there, too: Brezhnev ordered 50,000 military vehicles to be sent to help with agricultural needs, as well as 25,000 vehicles to be taken from industries (no matter what) and also sent to help with the harvest, so in the areas where the harvest survived, every last bit would be collected. (By the way, the street cleaning machines vanished from Moscow – they were sent there as well).

Shortly after conveying this catastrophic news, Chernayev notes in his diary how, while the national economy was unable to cope with its severe, deep-seated structural problems and "natural" disasters like the one in Astrakhan, the privileged bureaucratic caste dominating the regime – specifically its uppermost echelon, the cream of the crop – lived in mind-boggling luxury:

At the same time, at Brezhnev’s dacha in the Crimea (Shishlin told us) there is a pool with sliding walls and a transparent dome that can protect from the wind or turn into a full ceiling. Other dachas were recently built in the vicinity of this “dacha No. 1,” for big-shot ministers and individual deputies and heads of the CC – four-storey mansions with Japanese wallpaper, bars, conditioners, special Hungarian furniture, and balconies overlooking the sea. Each one cost this much.

The swimming pool at Brezhnev's palace in Palanga, Lithuania
Three months before writing the above lines, in his entry dated 9 May, Chernayev observed that certain segments of the Stalinist nomenklatura were becoming increasingly impatient and avaricious in their drive to expand and diversify their privileges:

The apparatus and in the higher echelons of the party are already dividing into “we” (the healthy forces) and “they,” for whom “Moskvich” and “Volga” cars are no longer enough, they want Mercedeses.

Although Chernayev, himself a cog in the Stalinist bureaucratic machine, did not subject these observations to a rigorous analysis based on a coherent Marxist perspective, he nevertheless provides concrete and striking examples of how the Soviet bureaucracy was gnawing away at and corrupting the workers' state while expanding its own privileges. It is in this respect that Chernayev’s notes hold significance.

Exactly 36 years before Chernayev wrote these diary entries, Leon Trotsky had expressed the dangers of bureaucratic degeneration and the perilous consequences arising from the accompanying social inequalities and contradictions in his 1936 work, The Revolution Betrayed, writing:

Limousines for the “activists”, fine perfumes for “our women”, margarine for the workers, stores “de luxe” for the gentry, a look at delicacies through the store windows for the plebs – such socialism cannot but seem to the masses a new re-facing of capitalism, and they are not far wrong. On a basis of “generalized want”, the struggle for the means of subsistence threatens to resurrect “all the old crap”, and is partially resurrecting it at every step. (Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, Labor Publications, Detroit, 1991, p. 103). 
 
A teacher on his way home from work in Ukraine’s Sumy region, early 1980s (Photo: Valeriy Reshetnyak)

See also: 

Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1972 diary (1): The poverty of bureaucratic planning

Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1972 diary (2): Selling off Siberia to the imperialist powers

Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1972 diary (3): The Soviet automotive industry through the eyes of a Renault executive

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