Feridun Gürgöz’s political memoirs (2)

Shopping at the special shop for CC members

PART 1 | PART 2

Feridun Gürgöz

In his memoirs, Feridun Gürgöz recounts that he travelled to the Soviet Union in July 1987 and saw Moscow for the first time in his life. [*]

On the second day of his visit, while they were touring the city, his interpreter tells him that he could go shopping at a special shop on Red Square reserved for Central Committee members, repeating the suggestion several times. From this insistence, Gürgöz realises that the interpreter wishes to take advantage of the opportunity to gain access to the shop and do some shopping there. Eventually he agrees to the suggestion, and they go to the shop together.

We can let Gürgöz tell the rest in his own words:

However, the goods on sale in this shop -items unavailable on the Soviet market and reserved exclusively for CC members- were, in my view, the sort of things that could hardly have been sold in any shop in West Germany, where I was living at the time. Everything on offer was second-rate, even third-rate, by Western standards. What caught my attention were the Lenin badges. I selected fifteen or twenty of them, in various designs and at different prices, placing them in the basket I was carrying, intending to give them as gifts to friends. I then made my way to the checkout area. There I encountered yet another of the Soviet Union’s problems. The checkout area was a space of about twelve square metres. Throughout the time we had been shopping, we had been the only customers in the shop. Yet behind tables arranged in an inverted U-shape stood four attendants who, from long hours of sitting, had become noticeably overweight. Starting from what I took to be the left end of the inverted U, I placed the Lenin badges from my basket in front of the first woman. She began entering them, one by one, into the ledger before her -in duplicate- noting their numbers and prices. Recording them and carrying out her own second check took three or five minutes. Then, together with the sheet she had filled in, she passed the badges on to the second woman. Following the same ingrained routine, the second woman checked each badge one by one against what the first had written. That, too, took several minutes. Once the second woman had confirmed the accuracy of the entry, she passed the badges, together with the approved sheet, to the third woman. The third glanced briefly at the paper and began wrapping my badges. She then handed the package, along with the calculated and approved sheet, to the cashier. I had now reached the fourth and final woman, positioned at the right end of the inverted U. In front of her stood an electronic till, and beside it an old bead abacus that had once been used for calculations. She first worked out the total on the abacus and noted it down, handling the beads with remarkable speed. She then turned back to the electronic till and entered the Lenin badges one by one, checking the result on the screen. Immediately afterwards she compared it with the total she had obtained from the abacus. The two figures matched. As far as I can remember, I paid something like one and a half roubles. At that moment, I bitterly regretted ever having gone to the shop. (Feridun Gürgöz, Saat Geri Dönmüyor, Tüstav Yayınları, April 2007, Istanbul, pp. 115-116.)

A collection of Lenin badges

This is, without doubt, a scene that is both comical and at the same time evokes a certain sense of pity. Yet once you move beyond that first impression and reflect on it for a moment, you realise that it is in fact an instructive anecdote, revealing an important feature of the Stalinist system - the effectively caste-like division of consumption and distribution in Soviet society according to status.

The real value of this scene lies in the way a small, everyday incident makes the structural contradictions of the Stalinist system visible, almost as if under a microscope.

The shop Gürgöz entered was one of the special consumption channels reserved for the upper strata of the party and state bureaucracy in the Soviet system. Despite the nominally egalitarian rhetoric of the official ideology, the distribution system in Soviet society operated through different channels for different status groups. Shops reserved for the party elite, closed distribution networks, and hard-currency stores were the institutionalised forms of this system of privilege.

Yet Gürgöz’s observation is striking in another respect. For someone living in West Germany, the goods sold in this shop did not represent any real privilege; on the contrary, they were of rather poor quality. In his own words, these were products that in the West would have been regarded as “second-, even third-rate”.

A shop used by ordinary Soviet citizens. In front of the cashier is an abacus, long widely used in Soviet retail trade.

This situation also reveals how limited the consumption level of the privileged Soviet bureaucracy actually was, owing to the structural weaknesses of the Soviet economy. The Stalinist bureaucracy did not enjoy the kind of world of affluence available to the bourgeoisie in capitalist societies. In many cases, the consumption standards of the Soviet bureaucracy lagged behind even those of the Western middle classes. Yet these goods still functioned as privileges within the system. Under the chronic conditions of scarcity that characterised the Soviet economy, the use-value of the goods that were available was often quite low. Access to the kinds of goods sold in the special shops reserved for the privileged caste was either impossible for ordinary citizens or required them to pay exorbitant prices on the black market.

The uppermost layers of the Soviet bureaucracy, however, were able to compensate for this shortfall in another way. Those at the top of the party and state apparatus enjoyed the privilege of travelling abroad - especially to the advanced imperialist countries. The shopping sprees that accompanied these trips, often bordering on vulgar ostentation, were among the principal means by which the Soviet elite gained access to consumer goods unavailable in their own country.

Bureaucratic irrationality

The second dimension of the anecdote reveals an aspect of the system’s bureaucratic functioning that is almost caricatural.

A state-run shop in Moscow used by ordinary Soviet citizens. Here too, the checkout is handled by a team of four.

Gürgöz has purchased nothing more than a few Lenin badges. Yet even this simple purchase passes through the hands of four different attendants: one records the items, the second checks the entry, the third prepares the package, and the fourth takes the payment after calculating the total twice - once on the abacus and once on the electronic till. All this takes a considerable amount of time, even though there are no other customers in the shop during the entire process.

This scene reflects the culture of mistrust and excessive supervision that dominated the everyday functioning of the Stalinist Soviet bureaucracy. Every procedure is checked again by the next attendant, and responsibility is fragmented as far as possible. The result is not a division of labour that increases productivity but, on the contrary, a bureaucratic mechanism that produces sluggishness, inefficiency, and a pervasive sense of weariness.

According to Lev Trotsky, the Stalinist bureaucracy did not constitute a bourgeois class in the classical sense in the Soviet Union; yet by usurping political power from the working class, it established privileged control over distribution. The everyday manifestations of bureaucratic privilege - scenes of the kind Gürgöz witnessed in the shop on Red Square - were small but highly revealing symptoms of this structure.

[*] Gürgöz is not certain which month his visit to Moscow took place; he notes that it was, “as far as I can remember”.

See also:

Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Production Complex: A microcosm of the structural problems of Soviet industry

Soviet Stalinism and secrecy: Gorbachev's revelations

The poverty of bureaucratic planning

Selling off Siberia to the imperialist powers

The Soviet automotive industry through the eyes of a Renault executive

The Kremlin bureaucracy’s “Potemkin” vehicles

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

Thus spoke Stalin!