54
PARTISAN REVIEW
result of' 'excessive pressure" exerted by an" insignificant" tiny group
of intellectuals and their allies abroad-he demonstrates a short–
sightedness astounding in a historian. Intelligentsia live not only in
cities, but at factories as well and, besides, there are the workers and
peasants. They do not as a rule write letters ofprotest, nor do they meet
with foreign correspondents; they have no opportunity for that, nor do
they know how
to
go about it. This allows Medvedev to speak of them
as apathetic. In actual fact, however, they inflict heavy daily losses on
the regime which are not easily discerned. They refuse to labour ' 'self–
lessly" any longer for the Moloch of heavy industry as they did in the
early years of the Five Year Plans. As they say among the people: "As
long as the government pretends that we live well, we will pretend that
we work well." And this resistance does not always remain passive.
"Quiet" strikes flare up from time
to
time and sometimes even
rebellions such as those of the early sixties which passed over the
country like a wave . Nor should the "noisy" uprising of the Polish
workers in 1970 be forgotten: these workers belong to the same camp
and live under an identical system. The Soviet leaders were terrified by
these events which for a time impeded their attempts to extort capital
from Poland and to pocket money from their own workers by means of
a routine price rise on consumer goods. The rise had
to
be cancelled.
Finally, we should bear in mind the almost catastrophic personnel
turnover in Soviet industry which encompasses up to 50
%
of the work
force yearly .
Medvedev admits that the Soviet people are dissatisfied with a
great deal and particularly with the
slow tempo
of economic, social ,
and cultural progress . But what they really are dissatisfied with is that
the
conditions oftheir lives are temMe
and cripple them daily in body
and soul. During the construction of the Volga-Baltic Canal for
example, where I worked as a correspondent for
Izvestia,
engineers and
workers lived under conditions difficult for a Westerner even to
conceive. No adequate warm clothing was issued to them; their dilapi–
dated houses and makeshift boxcars were so leaky and so penetrated by
the frost that sometimes toward morning when the stove had cooled,
people's hair would freeze to their pillows. The communal bathhouses
and drying rooms were out of order for weeks, and just as often there
was no hot food in the messhalls. Schoolchildren had to wear their
overcoats in the classrooms and were constantly ill. And the roof of the
