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Chapter 2. Department of Space Gas Dynamics

Ruderless without a helmsman (pp. 38-42)

The Department of Space Gas Dynamics stood out at IKI in one peculiar way: it did not have a single member of the Communist Party. This made the composition of the department’s staff most unusual, as advancement in any profession and obtaining various benefits in all aspects of life required Party membership. A totalitarian system demands not only conformity and obedience by the subjects but also their participation in its functioning and acts (and crimes, at times), willing or not, sincere or fake.

Approximately 7-8% of the country’s total population, or about 15% of the working-age adults, formally belonged to the Party, the "vanguard of the working class." Article 6 of the USSR Constitution that was adopted in 1977 codified "the leading and guiding role of the Communist Party in Soviet society."[5] In the late 1980s, CPSU counted 19 million members out of 250 million people. Ruling parties of totalitarian socialist regimes, the ideological siblings, show similarities worldwide. For example, the present-day Chinese Communist Party (CCP) consists of more than 90 million members, which represents a similar fraction of the population of the People's Republic of China. At its peak in the 1940s in another country, the membership of the ruling National Socialist German Workers' Party, or NSDAP and commonly referred to as the Nazi Party, reached 10-11% of Germany's population.

Whether one addresses a member of the movement, Die Bewegung, as a comrade, comarada, tovarishch, tong-zhi, or Parteigenosse, they all remain brothers and sisters of the same tight family of radical socialists.

In an exception to the rule, the first IKI director academician Georgii Petrov avoided Party membership. His early scientific contributions of national importance, particularly in supersonic gas dynamics of jet aviation and ballistic bodies entering the atmosphere, allowed him to get away with not being a communist. For others, pressure to conform was relentless.

Both Leonas and Baranov, as well as a few other staff members of Department No. 18, viewed some aspects of the Soviet system critically. One could express these sentiments only among very close and trusted friends. Loose lips could easily sink careers and cost jobs in such a place as IKI. Even more importantly, a politically colored "indiscretion" could close forever any employment in science-related fields.

During my time and in contrast to the earlier days of the Soviet regime,[6] the Marxist-Leninist state had “mellowed” a little bit and stopped physically annihilating millions of not fully conforming people. A human rights activist and prisoner of conscience, physicist Yuri Orlov, described that

[Soviet s]ociety remained totalitarian, but at least had ceased to wallow in blood and vomit. ... [Soviet leader Nikita S.] Khrushchev reorganized the country [in the late 1950s and early 1960s] from a regime of total self-destruction to a moderately totalitarian one, in which the average citizen could at least die peacefully in his own bed.[7]

The Communist Party kept closed, however, many doors in the professional world to doubters, and it promptly imprisoned selected dissidents, including the author of the quote above. A senior Communist Party official who would later serve as a senior adviser to Gorbachev quoted in his diary a memo by Chairman of the Committee for State Security (KGB [8]) Yuri V. Andropov, who summarized in 1976 that

during the last 10 years, about 1500 people were arrested for anti- Soviet activities. There were 850 political prisoners [in the Soviet Union] in 1976, including 261 [sentenced] for anti-Soviet propaganda... 68,000 went through "prophylactic measures" [that year] that is those who had been summoned to the KGB and warned that their actions had been "unacceptable."[9]

In common practice, the state denied jobs, promotions, and opportunities to study in institutions of higher learning to many more thousands of people. With the KGB's watchful eye known to everybody, such routine actions of the authorities forced millions who were less courageous to conform. Communists always considered thoughtcrime unforgivable. These continuing atrocities did not diminish the enthusiasm of many fellow travelers and leftist intellectuals in the West who admired and supported the Soviet state and Marxist ideology.

The Marxist-Leninist lodestar required that workers and peasants (that is members of collective farms in absence of private properties), and not "rotten intellectuals," constituted a majority of the rank and file in the Communist Party. Correspondingly, they accounted for slightly more than one-half of the membership due to incentives and careful filtering and management of admission.

The Kremlin used these Party member workers and peasants as props and extras for the regime window dressing. The real power on all levels of the system rested in the hands of the ruling class. Consequently, career-oriented scientists, engineers, doctors, and other specialists lined up to join the Communist Party ranks. There were also many true believers, as the indoctrination began at an early age and continued through all stages of life. Contradicting the Party line was truly dangerous.

Similar to CPSU, workers, peasants, herders, and fishermen constitute today about 45% of the active members of the Chinese Communist Party. The real rulers of China propagate an ideological fiction that this composition of the CCP reflects the leading role of the working people.

It would be highly educational for assorted neo-Marxist intellectuals packing American university campuses and populating media to spend some time reading the foundational treatises of Proudhon, Engels, Lenin, Mussolini, Goebbels, Stalin, Mao Zedong (Tse-tung), and other socialist luminaries. This could help them better understand how these classics viewed intelligentsia in capitalist countries as well as foresee their inevitable personal destruction, often meaning physical extermination, when a social-justice paradise arrives.

In a letter to a leading Soviet writer, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Lenin famously described intellectuals in capitalist countries as

[bourgeoisie's] accomplices, the petty intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who view themselves as the brains of the nation. In fact, they are not its brains but its sh*t.[10]

To join or not to join (pp. 42-44)

In the Soviet Union, it was straightforward to become a Communist Party member for workers, military and police officers, apparatchiks, and the like. Or for somebody already in a position of authority in science ...

<snip>

For the rank-and-file scientists and engineers, especially in the Academy of Sciences, becoming a Communist Party member involved an effort because of quotas for "intellectuals." They competed against their ilk, against other like-minded scientists and engineers who wanted promotions and other benefits in life or be trusted with travel abroad. The latter constituted a major "carrot" in a closed society. Continuous pressure to conform and join the Party corrupted souls and served as an important tool in controlling the country.

Such an attitude to membership in a ruling communist party extended to all other socialist countries. A Czechoslovakian intelligence officer wrote, for example, that at that time "men join the [Communist] Party because they are ambitious, want to get ahead, and know that the membership of the Party is achieving that aim."[11] As a high-level Soviet functionary put it, "the party's support [for career advancement] can be compared to sugar in water: one couldn't see it but could constantly taste it."[12]

<snip>

The absence of Communist Party members in the department did not make the environment or conversations much more open. After all, this was a country with abundant informers. The Party, media, and popular culture had encouraged, praised, and celebrated denunciations only a few decades ago, with many millions of human beings cheerfully exterminated.

IKI and Department No. 18 did not differ much from other physics establishments in the Academy of Sciences, a relatively well-informed and "free-thinking" part of the society by Soviet standards. However, even those few who felt skeptical about the Soviet system and ideology had been trained from infancy by the totalitarian state to keep their mouth shut and behave to survive. They knew what to say, where, and to whom. In the close circles of their most trusted friends, they could boil with anger about injustices, stupidity, and the cruelty of socialism, but then with their tail between their legs, they acted "as required." Especially, if authorities cleared them to be in senior positions or for travel abroad.

Besides, the overwhelming majority of critically minded Soviet subjects did not have problems with the substance of socialism, a result of centuries of the country's oppressive history and decades-long Marxist-Leninist indoctrination and incessant propaganda brainwashing. The concepts of individual freedoms, representative democracy, and private property sounded abstract, while the ideas of unalienable rights, individual responsibility, a market economy, and limited government looked truly alien.

The people rather felt unhappy about the implementation of the Marxist ideology, obvious inefficiencies, unfairness, and cruelty of the system, and deviations from what they thought true socialism should be. A little more prosperity, openness, and transparency would have satisfied them, not unlike the ideas of Gorbachev when he tried to save the ideology later. Only very few viewed Marxism-Leninism, and more broadly socialism, as inherently destructive, dehumanizing, immoral, and perhaps evil ...

<snip>

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