How to Succeed by Really Trying

Caviar and limousines for a Communist nobility

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

--George Orwell, Animal Farm

Like the inmates of Orwell's barnyard, citizens of the Soviet Union enjoy vastly different degrees of power, privilege and material comfort, despite the country's egalitarian ideals. Soviet Communism has theoretically abolished hereditary classes, but it has neither uprooted the ladder of success nor stifled the urge to scale it. While there are obstacles to social mobility in the Soviet Union, those who make it to the top rely on the same factors that lead to success in the West: education, hard work, talent, connections--even corruption.

At the peak of the social hierarchy is an elite, known as the nachalstvo (roughly, the Establishment), which includes perhaps a million people. This privileged group consists of a ruling class --those wielding power in state, party and military circles--and an upper class, comprising party-favored intellectuals, artists and top athletes. Whether they enter this exclusive club via the committee room, the Bolshoi stage or the hockey rink, members of the nachalstvo are assured of hidden perks denied to ordinary citizens.

Politburo members and other top political officials, for example, live in exclusive apartment enclaves and speed to work in chauffeur-driven ZIL limousines. Although their salaries are relatively modest, they have little need for money: not only are they housed by the government, they also receive a special Kremlin ration that allows them to feed their families well for a nominal monthly fee of 50 to 70 rubles. (An average family of four in Moscow might spend 180 to 200 rubles a month on food).

These political leaders, along with other Soviet elitists, enjoy the use of country dachas, yachts and Black Sea vacation resorts. While ordinary Soviet citizens queue up for scarce consumer goods, members of what one Soviet journalist calls the "Communist nobility" shop in special stores for caviar, French cognac, Swiss chocolates and Japanese stereo sets. They patronize tailors, hairdressers and cleaners who serve them exclusively. Lesser privileges are enjoyed by thousands of middle-level managers, local party cadres and other important citizens.

One key to advancement is education.

By age 15, all Soviet students are slotted into distinct scholastic groups; only one of every five applicants wins entry into one of the country's 63 universities or 800 technical institutes. Competition is especially stiff for the top universities of Moscow and Leningrad and the Institute of Foreign Relations. To help get their children through the rigorous entrance exams, many parents hire private tutors at five rubles ($7.65) an hour. Others bribe admissions officers. In a case reported by Izvestiya last month, the woman in charge of a scientific prep school in Tomsk got an eight-year prison sentence for selling admissions. According to Izvestiya, she "accepted almost anything as a bribe, from mink coats to pails of berries."

The ambitious young Soviet must also be careful to choose the right profession. Engineers, once revered as the guardians of Soviet technological might, now glut the market. Nuclear physics remains one of the most respected and best-compensated fields. Journalism is another sought-after career; top Soviet reporters can boost their incomes by writing freelance articles and often are able to travel abroad.

For those who aspire to political power, membership in the Communist Party is a must. But the party card alone is no guarantee of success: few of the party's 16.5 million members ever make it into the elite class, just as many privileged citizens in the scientific and cultural fields never join the party. Moreover, party responsibilities are demanding and promotions are slow in coming, since top officials tend to remain at their posts into their 70s or 80s. In general, the aspiring apparatchik must rely on patience, hard work and diligence, plus a certain Dale Carnegie-like skill for flattering and impressing his bosses.

As in most other countries, success in the Soviet Union can depend on family and personal connections. With the right contacts, one has a lot less trouble getting into a top school, landing a good job and winning advancement. Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev's elder son Yuri, for example, was named First Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade last year at the relatively tender age of 47. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko's son Anatoli, 48, was appointed director of the African Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1976. Influence peddling--called blat in Russian--prevails at all levels of Soviet society, from the Kremlin down to the local butcher, who can set aside a choice cut of beef for a friend or perhaps his plumber--who will then come and fix his leaking pipes.

The social stratification that exists in the Soviet Union obviously conflicts with the ideal of equality, which Marx called "the groundwork of Communism." Such an inconsistency was denounced by Yugoslav Dissident Milovan Djilas in his 1957 classic The New Class, and elitism ranks high among the ideological sins for which the Chinese condemn the Soviets. Soviet theorists inscrutably justify such inequality as a "non-antagonistic contradiction." Others, including some Marxist dissidents, claim that the system has not really created an elite class, since political power and its direct perquisites cannot be inherited. But there is one flaw in that argument: the ease with which the nachalstvo can arrange good educations and careers for their offspring tends to perpetuate their privileged status. Despite the historical gulf that separates them from the pre-revolutionary regime, the Communist elitists enjoy their prerogatives as unabashedly--and guard them as jealously--as their tsarist predecessors ever did.

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