Stalinism and alcoholism in the Soviet Union (7)

Mistaking alcoholism for a sign of prosperity: Yalçın Küçük’s fantasies (1)

Yalçın Küçük, one of the most prominent - and by far the most eccentric - representatives of the Kremlin-aligned Stalinist political and intellectual tradition in Turkey, interprets the problem of alcoholism in the Soviet Union - or, more precisely, the fact that this immense crisis was recognised as a problem by the Gorbachev leadership - in his 1991 book Sovyetler Birliği’nde Sosyalizmin Çözülüşü (The Dissolution of Socialism in the Soviet Union) from a perspective that is not merely mistaken, but at times bizarre, fantastical and even absurd, straining the very limits of ordinary common sense.

In short, Küçük does not see the alcohol problem in the Soviet Union - eating away at society from within, shortening life expectancy and crippling production - as either a structural symptom or an integral part of the Stalinist regime’s economic and social crisis. On the contrary, he presents it almost as a kind of “luxury” by-product of the success of “socialism”, job security, low basic living costs and rising disposable income.

According to Küçük, Mikhail Gorbachev and his team started from the premise that work discipline among the Soviet working class had declined. “Drinking instead of working” and, as a consequence, drunkenness - pyanstvo - were among the new general secretary’s earliest points of emphasis. [*] Küçük does not accept this emphasis, nor Gorbachev’s accusation that workers were guilty of laziness and drunkenness. For us, too, this attitude reduces the problem to a matter of individual behavioural disorder, and is therefore an approach that must be opposed and criticised. Yet Küçük’s starting point is entirely different from ours. He denies that there was any objective crisis at all, and criticises the treatment as a problem of a development that he regarded as natural, and even consistent with the aim of socialism. Indeed, referring to an article of his that had previously appeared in Playboy magazine, he recalls that the purpose of socialism was “not that people should work more and more, but that they should work less and less, and ultimately not at all.” [**]

The aim of socialism is, of course, to reduce the burden of compulsory labour, to expand free time, and to transform labour into a creative activity freed from alienation. Yet the picture that emerged in the Soviet Union between the 1970s and the mid-1980s was very different. What was at issue was not the organisation of free time through democratic planning based on the participation of the working class, but rather a reality defined by alienation from a process of production and distribution shaped by the material interests of a privileged bureaucratic caste, social aimlessness, demoralisation, the constrictions of everyday life, bottlenecks in the supply of consumer goods, and an increasingly severe public health crisis. Küçük’s claim therefore remains entirely groundless: under conditions in which labour productivity in the Soviet Union remained extremely low compared with the imperialist countries, there were simply no adequate material or social foundations for reducing the burden of compulsory labour, expanding free time, or transforming labour into a creative activity.

According to Küçük, when Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, there was “no sign of any malaise coming to the surface” within the Soviet order; there was no significant opposition to the system, nor were there any shortages. On the contrary, the Soviet Union’s main problems were “ailments peculiar to excessively trouble-free countries” - namely excessive drinking and shirking work. [***]

This statement lays bare Küçük’s theoretical blindness and detachment from reality. In his narrative, alcoholism ceases to be an economic and social crisis; instead, it becomes the affliction of an “excessively problem-free” society, of people whose circumstances are comfortably secure. It is as if the Soviet citizen had already achieved job security, low housing and energy costs, free health care and education, and a reasonable level of consumption; as if, for this reason, the passion for work had declined, and as if alcoholism had become widespread because disposable incomes had outstripped the available possibilities for consumption.

Küçük openly defends this claim in his book - a claim which, were it to become known in the international literature, would surely invite ridicule: that the emergence of alcoholism and similar maladies in the Soviet Union, caused by the decline of interest in work and the failure to develop “communist-style” methods for making use of free time, stemmed “directly from disposable incomes exceeding the possibilities of consumption.” In his view, during the Brezhnev era the Soviet citizen had attained “a reasonable level of consumption”; job security, free health care and education, and very low housing and energy costs had, in turn, pushed “the passion for work” into the background. [****]

Yalçın Küçük

Yalçın Küçük attached great importance to producing new, different and striking analyses, and often boasted of his productivity in this regard. He believed that his assessments of the 1985 anti-alcohol campaign were likewise original contributions of this kind. Yet what we encounter here is not so much an original analysis as a very familiar Stalinist ideological reflex: an attempt to transform the symptoms of the system’s crisis into proofs of the system’s success through a kind of pseudo-theoretical sleight of hand.

Let us recall: in 1930, Stalin likewise sought to explain the acute shortage of consumer goods and the endless queues in the Soviet Union not as a failure of the bureaucratic regime he headed, but as the result of the rapid increase in the purchasing power of the population. In capitalist economies, the purchasing power of the masses lagged behind production, leading to crises [an under-consumptionist approach in its crudest form]; in the “socialist” Soviet Union, by contrast, demand running ahead of industrial output was supposedly forcing production to develop continuously. Thus empty shelves, inadequate supplies of consumer goods and interminable queues were stripped of their character as warning signs of the distortions of bureaucratic planning, and presented instead as evidence of socialist development and prosperity. (See: Shortages of consumer goods in Stalinist regimes: Stalin’s “theoretical contribution”.)

What Yalçın Küçük offers is nothing other than a belated repetition of this Stalinist mechanism of whitewashing. In 1930, and later in his 1952 pamphlet Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, Stalin sought to justify shortages by claiming that “the purchasing power of the population had increased.” Küçük, in much the same way, puts a favourable gloss on alcoholism and indifference to work by asserting that “the Soviet citizen had attained a reasonable level of consumption, and disposable incomes had exceeded the possibilities of consumption.” In one case, the inability to find goods, and in the other, the social and demographic devastation caused by alcohol, are almost turned into by-products of prosperity. Moreover, even as Küçük himself admits in later pages of the book that average life expectancy in the Soviet Union failed to rise for twenty years and lagged behind that of the developed countries, he never raises the question of how such a deadly picture could possibly belong to an “excessively trouble-free country.”

Yet the real picture was very different. In the Soviet Union, the alcohol problem was not merely a matter of people “failing to make good use of their free time” or having too much money in their pockets. It was, rather, a steadily deepening crisis that affected the production process, work discipline, family life, crime rates, public health, average life expectancy, the state budget, the national economy, and the overall social fabric.

Moreover, this crisis was the direct product of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s long-standing fiscal and economic policies, which were reliant on the easy revenues generated by the state alcohol monopoly. These revenues absorbed a considerable portion of disposable income, partly alleviating shortages of consumer goods, while at the same time deepening social decay. The same crisis was also fuelled by the bureaucracy’s tendency to suppress social problems not through democratic means, but by administrative methods. When Gorbachev launched the anti-alcohol campaign in an attempt to resolve this crisis, he was not, as Küçük claimed, “trying to increase interest in work by imposing a ban on alcohol like the mad sultans of the Ottoman Empire”; on the contrary, he was displaying a desperate bureaucratic reflex, hastily trying to patch up the rotting foundations of the system - especially labour productivity - while in fact further aggravating the fiscal crisis.

[*] Küçük is mistaken on this point as well. As Stephen White has shown, there was no clear indication in Gorbachev’s initial speeches that the struggle against alcoholism would become the new general secretary’s first major public priority. In his acceptance speech to the Central Committee on 11 March 1985, Gorbachev emphasised the continuation of the strategy set during the Brezhnev era; and in his first comprehensive Central Committee speech in April 1985, he focused primarily on familiar themes such as economic growth, technological innovation, labour productivity and the “acceleration of socio-economic development”. The alcohol problem was touched upon only in passing, as part of a general reference to “negative phenomena”. See Stephen White, Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 64.

[**] Yalçın Küçük, Sovyetler Birliği’nde Sosyalizmin Çözülüşü, Istanbul: Tekin Yayınevi, 1st edn, 1991, p. 109. The article cited by Küçük is “Garbaçov’un İşi Zor” [“Gorbachev’s Job Is Difficult”], Playboy, December 1988.

[***] Ibid., p. 176. Küçük’s assessment here is also inaccurate. By the late 1970s, discontent within the Soviet working class had become markedly more pronounced, and work stoppages and strikes had come to be watched with concern at the upper levels of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Anatoly Chernyaev, a senior Kremlin official, relays detailed information on this subject from a Central Committee meeting in his diary entry of 1 October 1980: work stoppages were reported in numerous workplaces due to wages being paid incorrectly or late, poor working conditions, complaints being ignored, collective agreement obligations not being fulfilled, excessive overtime and weekend work. In the same entry, he also records that in 1979 alone there were 300 “registered strikes” involving more than 9,000 participants. Chernyaev’s own comment is even more striking: he wrote that the Soviet leadership lacked any real means of bringing strikes to an end, because there was “neither meat, nor order, nor justice”. See Anatoly Chernyaev, The Diary of Anatoly S. Chernyaev (1980), trans. Anna Melyakova, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya, pp. 49-50.

[****] Yalçın Küçük, Sovyetler Birliği’nde Sosyalizmin Çözülüşü, p. 346.

To be continued