BOOKS
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The leader is supposed to make new men, disciplined and eager, of
those in his charge, and the Soviet politicization of all of life forbids
his retreating into a functional role as a leader only with regard to
specific workaday tasks. It follows that the leader, if he takes seriously
these cumulative ideals, must feel endlessly guilty: where he is, in spite
of all obstacles, administratively resourceful and successful, he becomes
too ruthless to be the model father, teacher, guide, and friend he is
also supposed to be-quite apart from all anxieties lest a careerist
enemy or simply the blundering labor procurement network of the MVD
result in his supersession (Dr. Mead states that, as a reaction to the
near-destruction worked by the great purges, little physical liquidation
now goes on in the USSR-the satellites, not yet as traumatized, are
another story).
One consequence of these contradictions-ironical ones for self–
proclaimed Marxists since they assert the omnipotence of dedicated
individuals over all mere material factors---can be glimpsed between
the lines of the Soviet press and novels, namely the emergence of a new
type of hero-leader who is a kind of black marketeer, explicitly on the
procurement front where he resorts to shady methods to fill his quotas,
and implicitly on the propaganda front where his agitprop work is
something less than sanctified. And this is in turn related to the wide–
spread practices of falsifying figures and establishing self-protective
cliques in order to meet the heavy demands which the politicization of
all economic and social life accentuates.
It
is as if people who constantly
had to give each other pep talks had also to resort to bootleg benzedrine.
(For the Calvinist in a somewhat similar plight, success becomes a
not wholly satisfactory and certainly not permanent solace against anxiety
and guilt.)
The human being in the USSR appears to fight back and to find in
apathy and petty deception the sovereign remedies against the great
deceptions and impressiveness of ideology. It is noteworthy that the
optimum recruits for the MVD are said to be orphans brought up in
the state homes, and Dr. Mead interprets the unrelenting ferocity of
the political police as the result of a desperate and perhaps losing battle
against doubts and lassitude within the police themselves and within the
population at large. This lassitude is a threat to the system on two
counts. First, as L. H. Haimson explains in an appendix on Soviet
industry, mass enthusiasm of the Stakhanovite sort is repeatedly called
upon to save the situation when the leaders, caught in the contradictions
indicated above, have made a mess of it-somewhat as volunteers are
called on in our Community Fund drives to fill the gaps in the profes-
