The Rublerousers

THE RED EXECUTIVE (334 pp.)--David Granick--Doubleday ($4.50).

It is 112 years since Marx promised his Communist apocalypse, when a new and superior kind of nonbourgeois man would be born, and 30 years or so since Poet W. B. Yeats warned against a possibly similar event--"the blood-dimmed tide," when a "rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born." But things, it seems, are neither so bad, nor so good, nor so interesting. According to the researches of U.S. Economist David Granick, Soviet Russia's new man is a devoutly respectable, ulcer-prone businessman with a close resemblance to George F. Babbitt, of Zenith, U.S.A.

Vladimir F. Babbitt of Nadir, U.S.S.R., clings to status by his clean fingernails with a tenacity that makes many of his U.S. counterparts seem like beatniks by comparison. In Author Granick's "study of the organization man in Russian industry," it almost seems as if the Bolsheviks, having failed to lick the bourgeoisie, had decided to join them.

Although this may be taken as a joke against both sides, Author Granick (who has taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and is now at the University of Glasgow on a Fulbright grant) has catalogued the Soviet Org Man's habits and habitat with stern scholarship; his book has more graphs than laughs. But the irony is still there--the rublerouser in his square suit by Hart Schaffner and especially Marx, concerned about work schedules, procurement, and the problem of keeping down with the Joneses.

A Wheel Is a Wheel. Granick's typical top-organization man has a family income of about 65,000 rubles a year, roughly $6,500 a year in U.S. purchasing power. (His U.S. equivalent makes about $25,000; but as the purchasing power of the ruble varies for different commodities and since education and medical care are virtually free, the figures tell only part of the story.) The Red executive earns his ulcer by worry over matters strangely similar to those that furrow the balding brow of the U.S. junior tycoon. One significant difference: not the stockholders' meeting but the Communist Party plant meetings must be kept happy.

Vladimir Babbitt is not a compulsive but a compulsory joiner: his party card is his badge of acceptability. But whatever the country and whomever it profits, a wheel is a wheel is a wheel. Production quotas must be met. Fear and pride make the Red executive an adept at the fine but dangerous art of cooking the books; thus there is more Potemkin fakery than socialist realism in Soviet statistics.

But the Red Org Man has little worry about labor (safety devices are at a cynical minimum in Soviet factories) and none about sales: the consumer is a captive of universal shortage. Also, he must learn the art of inconspicuous consumption. A house might cause the sort of talk --or even worse, an investigation--that would be provoked in Larchmont if a junior executive invested a windfall in a Rolls-Royce. Not long ago, Sometskaya Rossia launched a campaign against luxury-loving dachniks (TIME, Jan. 18).

Marxist Monastery. No one learns earlier than the Russian executive the grim tasks of stooging for the state, of apple polishing, buck passing, of loading ledgers and unloading responsibility, finding loopholes in Parkinson's Law and keeping ahead by one whisker in the career race. Marx wrote: "The Communists seek to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class," but any bright boy of the commissar caste should have a good laugh over this. If he fails to make a grade, he disappears without appeal into the grey unprivileged proletarian mass below. Inch by inch, his nose ever clean, he works through the Comsomols (Communist youth groups) and elementary science instruction, through the barracks and blackboards of his Marxist monastery to emerge at last a card-carrying member of the managerial class.

Throughout, he must belong. Probably not since the sway of the ancient theocracies has a ruling class had such influence over the child mind. A well-flogged lordling of Dr. Keate's Eton, a Dickens character sniveling in Dotheboys Hall, or even that refugee from the U.S. prep school, Holden Caulfield, would shed a tear for the winners in the Russian school system. It is a system destined to convert the countenance of a child into the Gromyko mask of panslavery.

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