The Return of Brezhnev's Stability

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A friend recently sent me a RuTube link to two Soviet-era television documentaries by journalist Valentin Zorin, titled "America in the 1970s." Perhaps because many Soviet Jews were already living in the United States -- and writing home about American life -- those programs were unusually sophisticated. They included street footage from New York and San Francisco and acknowledged the United States' economic prowess, breathtaking skyscrapers and natural wonders. Still, their real point, driven home by Zorin, who had made his mark with books such as "America's Uncrowned Kings" was to convince viewers that behind the glittering facade, life for ordinary Americans was no bowl of cherries.

But rather than harp on the old canards about the exploited and downtrodden U.S. working class and a clique of greedy capitalists who had all the money and power, Zorin talked more about the uncertainty of life in the United States. Time and again he returned to the theme that a U.S. worker could lose his job or home at any moment.

The unspoken contrast with the predictability of Soviet life was obvious. If your cousin sends you a photo of his new car six months after arriving to New York, don't be tempted to follow him. Here, your life is stable and your right to work is guaranteed by the Soviet Constitution.

Curiously, stability has been claimed by the current regime as its main achievement. While Soviet propaganda contrasted communist stability with the unpredictable perils of the United States, now the contrast is drawn with the lawless '90s. Just like Zorin's documentaries, the implicit message from today's Kremlin is: In the 1990s, you may have had freedom, but now you've got law and order.

The similarity is not surprising, perhaps. As a foreign correspondent with a highly sensitive assignment, Zorin probably worked closely with the KGB, the agency where Prime Minister Vladimir Putin began his career.

When the current economic crisis began in early 2008, Russian officials kept repeating that Russia would remain an island of stability. Once the crisis hit home, the chant was changed to: "OK, we have a little crisis on our hands -- caused by the United States, incidentally -- but it is not going to be as bad as 1998." The current ruble drop, we were told, doesn't even come close to the 75 percent devaluation we saw in 1998.

Soviet -- and now Russian -- propagandists make two mistakes. First, they confuse stability with stasis. The U.S. economic system may have its problems, but it is dynamic, mobile and vibrant, offering opportunities to its own people as well as immigrants. Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union may have avoided political and economic shocks, but its "stability" was more like the stillness of death.

Russia has gone through a period of social turmoil in the 1990s, but now a new stagnation is setting in. A decade ago, children in Russia sometimes answered the usual question of what they were going to do when they grew up by answering, "Gangsters." Now, the children of the privileged lean toward careers in the security apparatus.

The second mistake is even more serious. Over the past century, Russia has suffered severe shocks unknown to other nations. As a result, its society has become restless and even lumpenized. Few Russians are middle-class in the Western sense. Of greater concern is that more Russians are eager to leave the county to try their luck elsewhere. Over the past five years -- during the peak of Putin's oil-fueled stability -- at least 440,000 Russians have emigrated, according to data from the Institute of Demographic Studies.

Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.