Washington Post - 12.25.2001

 

The Washington Post

The Walls Could Not Hold

By David Hoffman

Ten years ago tonight, the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered at the Kremlin for the last time. Looking back, many of the reasons for the swift demise of the Soviet state now seem clear: the collapse of the Communist Party, the revolt of the republics, the strain of the arms race, the implosion of central planning and the amazing forces Mikhail Gorbachev unleashed in glasnost and perestroika, which only accelerated the final denouement.

There was another reason, too, perhaps not crucial to the final collapse but worth remembering. It is that the Soviet leadership could not preserve the walls it had built around a dissatisfied society. The outside world was seeping in, and society yearned to get out. The protective barriers that the party erected -- and the KGB enforced -- were breached by ideas, trade, culture and technology.

There's a useful lesson here for those regimes still striving to erect and fortify such walls.

In the 1980s, one of many ways the world could be seen from a Moscow apartment was through the VCR. When VCRs first appeared, bootleg Hollywood movies were hugely popular, passed hand to hand. A friend told me how they would gather round and watch three or four films in a row, until dawn. They observed closely: the clothes, the manners, the talk, and the meaning of money and wealth. They were in awe when a Hollywood film character casually opened the refrigerator in his apartment: It was always full! It was a stark contrast to the economy of shortage that gripped the stagnating Soviet Union.

Words and thoughts breached the prison walls despite the ever-watchful KGB. A literature professor recalled once listening to the BBC, when it was not being jammed, and hearing President Reagan's June 1982 address to the British Parliament. In that speech, Reagan said the Soviet Union "runs against the tide of history by denying freedom and human dignity to its citizens." The Soviet news agency Tass blustered in reply that Reagan had "slandered the Soviet Union." But what really happened was that Reagan had breached the wall -- the professor ran out on the street to find friends to tell them the remarkable thing he had just heard on the radio.

A circle of young economists at a Leningrad institute was avidly reading a dog-eared copy of "The Use of Knowledge in Society," by the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, a work that extolled the virtue of free prices. It was a heresy in the Soviet system of state-controlled prices. But the walls could not keep that knowledge out.

It may be hard to imagine today, but the Soviet authorities tried to lock out the world. They strictly controlled travel abroad, monitored mail from outside, and put overseas publications under lock and key. They saw danger in copy machines, too, which were also locked up, because they could make one smuggled book into hundreds.

But in the end, all these efforts failed.

Gorbachev's achievements in this are large, including the opening up of forbidden history, the rise of political pluralism, and the momentous end of the Cold War. One of his less remembered contributions was permitting the first private businesses, the cooperatives. These firms spawned a generation of smart young hustlers who also breached the walls of the ailing Soviet state. A favorite scheme was smuggling in personal computers, which were good as gold. A scientist told me he brought a computer home from a trip abroad, just as things were loosening up in the 1980s. He sold it in Moscow for 70,000 rubles, or the equivalent of his official salary for the next 40 years. He decided not to get another, but the young hustlers soon were importing them by the truckload.

The climax came with the August 1991 coup, which brought tens of thousands of people into the streets against the coup plotters, protests that were a spontaneous demonstration of civil society at work.

Today autocrats and authoritarian regimes still try to pull off what the Soviet leadership could not sustain. They snuff out civil society, keep a choke hold on information and trample on the rule of law. Yet, their societies are struggling for fresh air, often against great odds and at considerable sacrifice. They are listening, just as in the Soviet days.

In the decade since the Soviet flag came down, the world has undergone a technology revolution; the bandwidth for global communication is larger than ever. One can only imagine the headaches of today's thought police. Lock up the copy machines? That was simple. Now, just try to lock out the Internet.

The writer, a former Moscow correspondent, is foreign editor of The Post.