(6 of 10)
Russians remain at the mercy of the party's pervasive presence—and its caprices. The secret police are still a powerful institution, even if their more brutal techniques have been curbed. In the courts, the regime lately takes more care to keep an outward show of legality, but it easily ignores the law when convenient; the party, after all, is above the law. Some dissenters against the regime have been classed as "parasites" and sent to prison under broad vagrancy laws. Others have been diagnosed as mentally ill and ordered confined in psychiatric hospitals.
The most restive Russians are the intellectuals, who find increasingly unbearable a society in which creativity has been so consistently sacrificed to patriotic duty. For the most part, the regime continues to cosset compliant and unadventurous writers and artists, and to censor and chastise those whose work strays far from the official art form known as "socialist realism." For those who may ever have doubted it, Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furtseva recently gave assurances that the party is not about to reverse its literary policy and publish books that contain "unjust generalizations," such as Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Last week the regime amnestied tens of thousands of petty criminals, but it did not free Writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who are serving long sentences in hard-labor colonies for publishing abroad works critical of the government.
Few people are any longer executed for political crimes, but the legacy of Stalinism has made an enduring impression on the everyday lives of most Russians. In the fourth volume of his memoirs, entitled Post-War Years: 1945-54, Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote that "it is far easier to change policy and the economic system than to alter human consciousness." Russians, said Ehrenburg, who died in September, "have been unable to divest themselves of a sense of constriction, of fear, of casuistry, of survivals from the past." Today, most Russians long only for a quiet life, a little more freedom, a few more privileges, a bit more self-respect. Despite all the anniversary hoopla, the fund of enthusiasm produced by the revolution is almost bankrupt.
Effectiveness of the Present Leadership
"Even a cook can rule a state," Lenin once proclaimed in his dogmatic fashion. Today, Russia is ruled by committee rather than by a single man—and thus is afflicted with too many cooks in the kitchen. They are an elite of highly trained and sophisticated technical managers, who call themselves a kollektivnost rukovodstva, (collectivity of leadership). Though they continue to follow the general policies set down by Khrushchev, they have replaced the lush disorder and impulsiveness of his personalized government with more deliberate, rational procedures. They move only after elaborate consultations, try to be not only secretive but faceless as well, and generally appear cautious, bureaucratic and dull.