(^496) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
of mobilizing resources for specific projects, technique was generally
backward and overall performance shoddy The impressive production
data were intrinsically and deliberately exaggerated. They should have
been heavily discounted for propaganda; also for deterioration and un
sold (unsalable) commodities. (Except for caviar, vodka, and folkloric
mementoes, nothing Russia made could compete on the world mar
ket.) Apartment buildings hung nets around the perimeter to protect
pedestrians from falling tiles or stones. Thrifty consumers paid a small
fortune for tiny, primitive motor vehicles and then waited years for de
livery. Even after they got a car, they found replacement parts unob
tainable, and motorists routinely took their windshield wipers with
them when they parked their automobiles. Electrical appliances were at
the mercy of fluctuating house current. National income data excluded
services, for reasons of economic doctrine—only real product counted.
But in fact, the less said about services the better: inconveniences bal
anced advantages. No friend like a good plumber. Or someone in the
nomenklatura, the privileged elite, with their special stores and clubs,
their access to foreign imports, their quasi-exemption from dregs and
dross.
Some see this endemic mess as a dirty secret of the system: rulers
nourished privation by way of rewarding favorites, building desire in
the ambitious, and dulling the rest in the tedium of endless queues.
The capitalist economies stimulated labor by the prospect of reward:
"ya pays yer money an ya takes yer choice." Communism offered
"singing tomorrows." But waiting had to be paid for, and tomorrow
never came. When did the people in the queues work? The joke had it,
they made believe they worked, and the state made believe it paid
them.
The worst aspect of the system, however, was its indifference to,
nay, its contempt for, good housekeeping and human decency. Pros
perity forgone was bad enough. In a world that had once created and
still preserved some beautiful things, the new system mass-produced
ugliness: buildings and windows out of true; stained and pocked exte
riors, raw cement block; equipment out of order, rusting machinery,
abandoned metal corpses—in short, raging squalor.
Necessarily, what the system did to things, it did to people. How to
survive in a wasteland dotted with junkheaps? In a world of systematic
contempt for humanity? "White coal," they called the people shipped
in jammed, fetid freight cars to useless labor and oblivion in frigid
wastes. (The USSR anticipated here the death trains and marches of
Nazi Germany.) Some, spared or overlooked, heroically maintained
nora
(Nora)
#1