The Books: “Down with Big Brother : The Fall of the Soviet Empire” (Michael Dobbs)

My history bookshelf. Onward.

DownWithBB.gifNext book on this shelf is called Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Michael Dobbs. This is a great book – even if you already know half of the stories in it. I love the set-up of the book, and I love his writing. He uses the totalitarian language from 1984 as the structure of his book – It has four parts: Revolt of the Proles, Revolt of the Machines, Revolt of the Nations, and Revolt of the Party. This is 1984 language. In this book, I discovered one of my favorite anecdotes – that I use all the time – the one about Boris Yeltsin walking into a supermarket in Houston, or something – I think it was somewhere in Texas – this was in 1989 or 90, I believe – and what he saw there – the convenience, the abundance, the cake-makers, the choices – not only blew his mind, but gave him an epiphany. A horrible soul-shaking epiphany. He had been taught that capitalism was evil. But he knew what supermarkets were like in the Soviet Union. And this? Being able to pick and choose, being able to have choices to feed your family? I guess on the plane ride home, he was totally silent, staring out the window. One of the people with him, an assistant or something, asked him if he was all right. He said, with tears on his face, “They had to fool the people … They couldn’t let people travel. They were afraid that people’s eyes would open.” He realized he had been fooled. That generations of people had been fooled by communist propaganda. Yeltsin never looked back from that Houston supermarket – it was the end of the road for him. He left the Party shortly thereafter. He was disillusioned. He had been lied to. No more Party loyalty. He would throw his hat into the ring and join the struggle for who would be the next leader of Russia.

There are idiots who still believe that communism was a good idea, in theory, only badly executed by evil leaders. People still cling to the idea that socialism is some happy lollipop land where poverty will be eradicated, and the world will all hold hands as one. People who believe in socialism do not understand human nature, pure and simple. It’s not that the people running the show were bad – it’s that the system ITSELF IS BAD.

Maybe you prefer to live in a world where Utopia is possible, and the streams will run with bubbly champagne, and a unicorn will graze in your backyard, and there will be food and hope and sunshine and rainbows! Okay – fine – I get fantasies. Believe me, I understand fantasies. Sometimes I fantasize that Cary Grant has come back to life and takes me dancing at Coconut Grove. But just GET that you are choosing to live in a FANTASY WORLD and not the REAL world and do not be surprised when I, and many many others like me, refuse to take you seriously.

Obviously I feel strongly about this. Millions and millions died under the Soviet system – and certain people STILL hold onto the fact that socialism was a good idea, in theory. It makes my blood boil.

Even if you’re a history buff and you know the story of the events of the late 1980s, early 1990s – pick this book up.

I’m going to excerpt a bit of the section on Chernobyl. Chernobyl is, of course, the biggest and most horrible example of a Revolt of the Machines in Soviet Union history. The cracks it revealed in the monolithic edifice of the Communist Party … unprecedented. The damage control attempted by the Party made things worse. Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark and now everybody knew.


From Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Michael Dobbs

Nuclear accidents can occur anywhere, but Chernobyl was a uniquely Soviet catastrophe. It was the almost inevitable consequence of the rapacious attitude toward nature that was an inherent part of the Soviet system of economic development. In the revolutionary mind-set, nature was subordinate to man. “We cannot wait for favors from nature,” Soviet propagandists liked to proclaim. “Our task is to take them from her.” In the end nature was bound to take its revenge, one way or another.

“The Russian soil was able to support the Communists for fifty years. It can’t put up with them much longer,” said Adam Michnik, one of the intellectual forces behind the Polish Solidarity movement, referring to Chernobyl and a host of other man-made disasters. “In Poland, in August 1980, it was human beings who went on strike. In the Soviet Union we are witnessing a strike of inanimate objects.”

In the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl, the government blamed the disaster on Bryukhanov, Dyatlov, and their subordinates. It was true that they had ignored safety rules and made serious errors of judgment. The investigation showed that the operators had switched off the emergency cooling system to Reactor No. 4 so that it would not interfere with the turbine experiment. They had failed to observe proper shutdown procedures. At a secret trial in July 1987 both Dyatlov and Bryukhanov were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for “violations of discipline.” Four other operators received prison sentences ranging from two to ten years. The prosecution described the defendants as “nuclear hooligans”.

By producing a few scapegoats, the court neatly absolved everybody else of responsibility. The verdict deflected attention away from a series of major design flaws in the Chernobyl type of reactor, such as the lack of a containment structure to prevent leaks of radioactivitiy. It turned out that such reactors were chronically unstable at low levels of power, but no one had bothered to inform the operators about this defect. The operators were also unaware that under certain circumstances, the emergency shutdown mechanism could trigger a fatal surge of power. This is precisely what happened at Chernobyl. To have admitted all this at the time would have rarised questions about the whole future of the nuclear power industry. It was much easier to blame “operator error”.

The real villain of Chernobyl was not the operators or even the designers of the flawed reactor, but the Soviet system itself. It was a system that valued conformity over individual responsibility, concerned with today rather than tomorrow, a system that treated both man and nautre as “factors of produciton” that could be mercilessly exploited. Eventually something had to break.

The violation of safety procedures was the norm, rather than the exception, in Soviet factories. So too was the obsession with secrecy that deprived the operators of the Chernobyl plant of basic information about the design of the reactor and previous nuclear accidents. But perhaps the gravest shortcoming of the system was the way it suppressed the notion of individual responsibility. The physical bravery displayed by many of the sic hundred thousand “liquidators” who took part in the Chernobyl cleanup efforts – beginning with the operators themselves and the firemen who fought the blaze on the roof of the turbine hall — was remarkable. Equally remarkable was the moral cowardice that caused otherwise decent individuals to go along with senseless and reprehensible decisions, including a fatal delay in the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from heavily contaminated areas. When the Ukrainian Communist Party chief insisted that May Day parades go ahead in Kiev despite the fact that radioactive winds were blowing in the direction of the capital, hardly anyone stood up to protest.

The moral failing was eventually recognized by one of the leaders of the Soviet nuclear industry, academician Valery Legasov, who committed suicide on the second anniversary of the disaster. Shortly before his death he gave an interview in which he complained that technology had been permitted to outpace morality. He explained that the previous generation of Soviet scientists — men like Sakharov, Kurchatov, and Kapitsa — had stood “on the shoulders of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky”. They had been educated in the spirit of beautiful literature, great art, and a “correct moral sense”. But somewhere along the line the connection with Russia’s prerevolutionary traditions had been broken. “Soviet man” was technically developed but morally stunted.

“We will not cope with anything if we do not renew our moral attitude to work,” Legasov concluded.

The Soviet system made a catastrophe like Chernobyl unavoidable. It then compounded the tragedy by an insistence on secrecy so absurd that it was ultimately self-defeating. The attempted cover-up was all the more grotesque because it came when the rest of the world was in the throes of an information revolution that rapidly revealed the magnitude of the disaster.

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6 Responses to The Books: “Down with Big Brother : The Fall of the Soviet Empire” (Michael Dobbs)

  1. Paul says:

    Have you read ‘voices from Chernobyl’? Interviews with all the different sorts of people affected by the disaster – including liquidators and people who to this day live in ‘the zone’. One of the saddest books I’ve ever read. It gives a true sense of the tragedy.

  2. red says:

    Paul – I haven’t! I will definitely look for it – sounds terrific.

  3. red says:

    There’s a story of two fishermen who happened to be out fishing that night and saw the roof blow off the reactor – it’s absolutely terrifying to read of it (that anecdote is in this Big Brother book)

  4. Sheila – I *may* or may not have learned about this site from you, but then ive been into the blogosphere long enough to where this sort of thing gets passed around so much one kind of loses track of its origins…but I thought of the motorcycle ride through Chernobyl when you started talking about that disaster.

    And the anecdote of Yeltsin (and subsequent condemnation of communism/socialism) – THANK YOU. It cant be said enough.

  5. red says:

    sharon – I love that motorcycle tour!! so amazing, right?? You should pick up this book – down with big brother – to read in detail about the Yeltsin supermarket visit. it brings tears to my eyes reading it!

  6. noted and marked in my amazon list :D

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