SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC RIGHTS IN THE SOVIET BLOC
A Documentary Review Seventy Years after the Bolshevik revolution
George R. Urban, Ed.
New Brunswick (USA) and Oxford (UK): Transaction Books, 1998
250 pp., $34.95
Twenty years after the famous "kitchen debate" between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon about comparative standards of living in the two superpowers, it is time for the Soviets to throw in the towel.
Not only do Soviet standards consistently lag behind those in the West, but the lag has been obviously increasing, exposing a dangerous deterioration of living conditions in the USSR. Indeed, Soviet economist Nikolai Shmelev has spoken about the prevalence among his countrymen of apathy and indifference, thievery, disrespect for honest labor and aggressive envy of those who earn much even by honest work, signs of physical degradation because of alcoholism, and idleness. Such statements have been corroborated by numerous materials published under glasnost.
Since the 1970s, when Soviet human rights abuses became a subject of international attention, the Kremlin has tried to put the democracies on the defensive by scoring them for homelessness, poverty, unemployment, and other alleged failures to provide for their citizens' "socioeconomic rights." This has been in line with the traditional Marxist-Leninist argument that the communist state concludes a unique social contract with its subjects, who surrender their rights to freedom of speech, movement, conscience, and participation in government in exchange for a cradle-to-grave security. Soviet strategists have tried to revive among the Western public a vague image of the "welfare" Soviet sympathizers in the West in the 1930s and '40s. Mikhail Gorbachev himself, when confronted with questions about the Soviet human rights record, has invariably attacked the West for failing to provide for the "social and economic rights" of its citizens.
The Soviet tactic, designed to confuse the Western public regarding the distinction between the fundamental liberties of democratic societies and policies in housing, employment, and health care, is nothing but pure bluff, which the Soviets risk only in the belief that the Western public is ignorant of the social and economic conditions in the Soviet Union. Now comes a comprehensive volume, Social and Economic Rights in the Soviet Bloc, which combines professional analyses by Soviet and East European specialists from the Munich-based Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe with revealing selections from Soviet and East European mass media, samizdat materials, and interviews with recent émigrés. It provides an exhaustive testimony to the failure of the Soviet social contract.
The myth of socioeconomic security
Job security is quickly becoming one of the most explosive political issues of perestroika. While the "right" to work is written into the Soviet constitution, there is no law guaranteeing that persons will be provided with a job that suits their education and interests at a location of their choice. According to the contributors, the practical lack of unemployment so far has been the result of a deliberate
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