An Earnest, Conservative Society'

When the 35-nation European Security Conference convenes in Helsinki --possibly at the end of July--it will mark the fulfillment of one of Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev's major foreign policy goals. The conference mil not only put the stamp of legitimacy on Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe, but will also be visible evidence of the detente between East and West on which Brezhnev has staked his reputation. TIME Correspondent John Shaw's three-year residence in the Soviet Union as Moscow bureau chief has spanned nearly the entire era of detente. Shortly before leaving the Russian capital for reassignment, he cabled the following summing-up of the U.S.S.R. in the mid-70s:

As the Brezhnev era draws to a close --the Party Chief is expected to retire next year--the prospects for the Kremlin have rarely looked so promising. In the eleven years of Brezhnev's reign, Moscow has achieved nuclear and hence political parity with the U.S., improved its image in the world, and extended trade and influence in Western Europe while maintaining political and economic control of Eastern Europe. The launching of Spyuz this week (see SCIENCE) is a particular source of pride. To be sure, the dispute with China remains an obsessive fact of life that Brezhnev's successors will have to endure, and in the Middle East the Soviets have lost some ground. But if the U.S. has suffered through the worst decade since its Civil War, for the Soviet Union the Brezhnev era has been the best decade since the Revolution.

In general, the Soviets have recovered from the international opprobrium that followed their 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the major foreign policy crisis of Brezhnev's tenure. It is not often today that Moscow's diplomats have thrown in their faces the challenge, "What about Czechoslovakia?" Somehow, the long, vain American attempt to prop up an unpopular government in Saigon made much of the world forget the swift Soviet crushing of a popular government in Prague. One by one in the Brezhnev years, Soviet-aided North Viet Nam, East Germany and Cuba have gained international acceptance. True, Moscow was a loser in Chile, but the Kremlin has reason to be pleased about Communist gains in Italy and Portugal.

Flickering Images. Economically, the Brezhnev era has seen--after the eccentric years of changing plans and sudden policy switches under Nikita Khrushchev--steady progress in building national strength. There has been some progress in providing consumer amenities, even though the variety and quality of food, clothes, appliances and services are primitive by Western standards. The Soviets are now the world's largest producers of coal, oil, iron ore, steel, tractors and mineral fertilizers, and are engaged in massive energy, transportation, metals and agricultural projects. They are spending billions on public housing and subway systems. The basic self-sufficiency of their economy and its planned priorities have enabled them thus far to escape inflation and unemployment.

The Soviet Union is currently getting Western technology--notably computers, petrochemical processes, energy equipment, consumer plants--at about the pace it can absorb. The credits for these imports, although limited in the U.S. by congressional demands for free emigration from Russia, are usually available from Europe, Japan and Canada. Western unemployment, spiraling prices, crime and drug problems are appalling to Soviet citizens, who are informed of them, gleefully, by the official press, television and radio. Although some broadcasting from the West is no longer jammed, the Soviet view of realities outside their censored world is dim and nickering, like the images on an untuned television screen.

The Soviet elite is enjoying the biggest slice of the steady growth in national wealth. "There's more pie and more fat flies to share it," notes a Leningrad sociologist. On the woody outskirts of Moscow, the birch-shaded grounds of Khrushchev's old dacha at Petrovo-Dalneye are being torn up to make room for rows of mini-dachas, which look like motel cabins, for middle-rung apparatchiks. The system of special stores for top people, stocked with Western goods and local caviar, is expanding.

Soviet styles at the top are changing, visually at least. Premier Aleksei Kosygin has taken to striped ties, President Nikolai Podgorny sometimes appears in patterned shirts, TV anchormen wear checked blazers with wide lapels, and sports heroes and young Communist Leaguers are allowed long hair and two-tone shoes. Such tolerance of Western ways is strictly sartorial.

Separate Armies. After a generation of recovering from Stalin and Hitler, today's Soviet leaders may be able to perceive the contours of their national future. Still, it's far from certain that this generation of leaders, or perhaps the next, will lead the Soviet police state into social democracy. They are cynical, philistine power brokers whose world is measured in terms of economic statistics and Communist Party control. There is no sign of the oft-predicted clash between the party bureaucrats and the industrial and scientific technocrats. Although it is rotten at the edges--as provincial political scandals reveal--the party network retains a tenacious monopoly of authority.

The country is like a Gulh'ver permanently tied down by not one but two armies of officials belonging to the separate state and Communist Party bureaucracies. In everyday life a Soviet citizen needs written permission for everything, from changing a job or apartment to getting a hotel room. Industry and agriculture are similarly stifled. Professional middlemen and grafters, adept at short-cutting the paper work and expediting anything from steel supplies to beefsteak, flourish illegally in the crevices of this creaking structure. But for most Soviet citizens there is no short cut through the numbing, frustrating maze of controls. The majority simply endure with apathy, and often, self-contempt.

For Soviet citizens, the tanks that rumbled through Prague had their equivalent at home in the police's storming of Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn's apartment, in the bulldozers crushing an unofficial art exhibition, in the new flow of political prisoners into the concentration camps that Khrushchev had virtually emptied. Some of the country's most talented dancers, musicians, writers and scholars are retreating in despair from neo-Stalinism and from cultural stagnation. Many are emigrating and defecting to the opportunities--and the pains--of exile. The remaining dissenters are depressed. Physicist Andrei Sakharov, the hero of those who cherish civil rights, insists that there have been no reforms since Khrushchev's modest relaxations more than 15 years ago. Sakharov patiently conducts his lost cause from a bleak Moscow apartment that is a mecca for Soviets in trouble with the KGB--and for Westerners whose respectful visits help the scientist stay out of jail. No students, not even a one-man demonstration, speak up for Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov, or even against pollution.

The Soviet Union is an earnest, intensely conservative society, convinced of the virtues of industrial growth. There are so many shortages, so much catching up to be done, that advocacy of zero growth would be heresy. Freedom is daily defined as freedom from want, and democracy is seen in terms of economic rights and Communist Party duties. The Western insistence on individuality is regarded as weakness and its passion for expression as a delusion. In a recent speech, Secret Police Chief Yuri Andropov expressed his contempt for the Western version of democracy: "How can one speak of civil rights for the masses in capitalist countries where people live in fear of losing their jobs?" The picture of the West in the Soviet press is uniformly black--a nightmare of unemployment, strikes, inflation, crime and drug problems.

For the foreigner who lives among them for a while, the durable Soviet people are the most compelling part of the country. Their historic hardships, the sheer human cost in suffering and struggle, give a moving dimension, a unique quality to their achievements. Nothing has come easily, everything has cost so much.

Hopes for Peace. Now, more than half a century after the Revolution, this is the era of what the party calls "the new Soviet man." The Bolsheviks would hardly recognize him. He is not a liberal democrat, but he would like to be a consumer. He is a patriot, even a chauvinist, but he is friendlier to foreigners than his police force appreciates. He probably does not want to read The Gulag Archipelago even if he could, but he thought Arthur Hailey's Airport, a bestseller in the Soviet Union, was fascinating. He drinks too much, his government says, and watches hockey on TV, his wife says, when he should be helping her with household tasks. He is impatient with nonconformists but contemptuous of the stukachi, the neighborhood secret police informers. His main questions about the West are about unemployment, and his main personal concern right now is whether his son will get into a university next year, or have to join him at the factory. He almost certainly will not get to read this article, and if he did, he would probably say it did not say enough about his hopes for peace.

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