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During the Stalin period, most Russians managed to acquire an official self that they presented to all but their closest friends: they were Bolshevized into becoming suspicious, stilted and somber in their dealings with others. Today's less cruel but still existing repression, says Princeton Historian James Billington, "breeds exasperation and contempt more than terror." But if the Russian is somewhat more open now, he is still burdened by what University of Toronto Sociologist Lewis Feuer calls "socialist pessimism": the feeling that frustration, pain and deprivation are in the nature of things and that nothing can be done about them. This attitude, conditioned by the endless bureaucracy and the regimentation of life, may be partly responsible for Russia's declining birth rate.
Still, Feuer, who recently spent half a year in Russia doing research, believes that another philosophy is struggling to emerge. Freed of the terror, encouraged by the thought that liberalization may continue, unburdened of at least some of the Marxist mythology, today's Russia is witnessing the gradual reassertion of "the values of individualism, of questioning, of the religious spirit, of the ethical personality, of human relations transcending party comradeship." It is difficult to guess just how far the Kremlin will allow this trend to go. But its existence nonetheless proves that the Russian character has survived Communism with a small corner still devoted to the independent perception of the truth.
The Quality of Russian Life It has become a Western cliche to say that the Russians are better off today than ever before. Yet, despite its industrial muscle, Russia generally lags behind not only the Western European countries but also behind most of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe in the quality and variety of the goods—and the divertissements—that it offers its people. Marx foresaw a turning point in the evolution of socialism when quantity of output would be transmuted into quality. Like so many other of his predictions, that has not come to pass.
For all its productive power, for all its feats in space, the Soviet economy seems unable to produce a doorknob that always turns, a door that closes properly, a light fixture that works on the first try, a toilet that flushes consistently. The average Russian's clothes are shabby, ill-fitting and expensive; it takes half a month's wages to buy a pair of shoes. His diet is dependent on the seasons and painfully monotonous. On the average, the Russian has only nine square yards of space in which to live, and young newlyweds normally stay with their parents for the first few years of their marriage. Only one Russian in 228 has a car, compared with one out of 2.5 people in the U.S. Even when the Soviet Union triples its output of autos to 600,000 in the early 1970s, when a new plant to be set up by Fiat in Russia will be running, it will make fewer cars than the U.S. produced in 1917.