THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406010454
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: C3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHRISTOPHER LEE PHILIPS
DATELINE: 940605 LENGTH: Medium
How Information Ended the Soviet Union
{REST} SCOTT SHANE
Ivan R. Dee. 324 pp. $25.
\ \ SCOTT SHANE, who spent three years (1988-91) as The Baltimore Sun's Moscow correspondent, has returned from his assignment in utopia to write a fascinating and timely study, Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union. His subtitle describes both a thoroughly original perspective and an easily sustainable thesis. With a balanced mix of statistics, anecdote and personal opinion, Shane reveals how information became the nemesis of Soviet totalitarianism and the force that brought down socialism.
The former Soviet Union was never really lacking in information. As Shane observes, the KGB kept tabs on everyone and everything in the Soviet era. But the espionage agency kept most of the information to itself, sharing it only with Soviet leadership. What information was parceled out had to be purified for consumption by the proletariat and then transfused via state-controlled media. Hence the ``Party'' line.
Information about the West was censored during the Soviet period. Religion was taboo. The Soviet leadership adopted a cult of personality and rewrote history to support socialism's situational ethics. A once panoramic and monumental Russian literature was displaced by Socialist Realism, a genre once referred to as a sort of ``boy meets tractor'' mythology for the proletariat. Soviet lands, among the richest on the planet, were not properly harnessed to feed the population.
Restrictions on the free flow of information proved incompatible with cultural and political freedom, and the Soviet Union bore the stigma of having more best-selling authors living in exile than perhaps any other country. Literary and political dissidence surely had its impact, but as Shane points out, the restriction of information also proved incompatible with economic growth and development, producing dissidence not only of literature and politics, but of economics and free markets as well.
In a huge country of many different ethnic groups spread across 12 time zones, the Soviet leadership and the KGB toiled for 70 years to keep Soviet citizens beholden to the Party line for information concerning acceptable artistic expression, proletarian moral values, economic determinism and other illusions of the socialist utopia. Meanwhile the old believers of the Communist Party were dying out, and the Soviet economy was in shambles.
When it seemed that the Soviet system could no longer sustain itself, Mikhail Gorbachev took the unprecedented step of lifting restrictions on the control of communications and information. In doing so, he put himself in the position of the little boy with his finger in the dike, trying desperately to hold back the swelling tide of a citizenry hungry for information. But instead of saving communism, as he hoped it would, Gorbachev's glasnost swiftly unbridled an information-starved culture at a time when the world was experiencing a revolution in information technology.
Citizens who were now thrilled to buy Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago at the local bookstore and read or listen to differing opinions in the media also sought information that could help them prosper. Indeed the subsequent availability of more consumer goods in Russia has led to what Shane calls a sense of hypermaterialism, especially among the young.
There are few instances in history when so monolithic a nation has been so visibly transformed in such a short period because of changes in communications and the availability of information. Dismantling Utopia is a textbook study of what to consider when loosening the lid on a Pandora's box. by CNB