Books: Dead Souls Live Again

U.S.S.R.: THE CORRUPT SOCIETY by Konstantin Simis Simon & Schuster; 316 pages; $14.95

The scene is Kuibyshev, a Russian industrial city on the Volga. Enter stage left the Soviet version of Gogol’s greedy Inspector General. The inspector is put up in a luxurious little hotel on the picturesque banks of the Volga, especially built for the pleasure of inspectors and other snoopy officials from Moscow. It stands in a gracious park surrounded by a barbed-wire-topped fence and guarded by burly professional wrestlers. The hotel staff includes a cook who serves up the local delicacy, sterlet fish from the Volga, and a team of maids who provide sex. The high point of the visitor’s tour of inspection is the traditional orgy in the hotel sauna in which Kuibyshev schoolgirls participate, together with a wide range of dignitaries, including regional Communist Party leaders, police officers and officials from the Kuibyshev public prosecutor’s office.

Gogoliana abound in this mesmerizing catalogue of corruption by Konstantin Simis, a former Soviet trial lawyer. One reprise from Dead Souls takes place in the ancient town of Ruza, near Moscow. The manager of a construction outfit, in need of ready cash for his business’s bribery fund, resorts to a common practice: putting nonexistent workers on the payroll and then collecting their salaries. Simis writes: “To ensure that his ‘dead souls’ really were dead, [the Ruza manager] went out to the municipal cemetery and meticulously copied down the names of dead people from the gravestones and entered them on his list. These names included some people who had been buried even before Napoleon’s invasion, to which Ruza fell victim in 1812.”

In spite of its moments of high comedy, this is the most sobering and illuminating book to be written about Soviet society in decades. Nothing else in print gives so persuasive a picture of moral squalor in everyday life. It is an insider’s book, written by a keen observer with special access to legal records and 17 years of experience as a defense attorney and professor of law. Indeed, so great is Simis’ expertise that in 1976 KGB men raided his apartment and confiscated an early manuscript version of the book. He was obliged to leave the Soviet Union and now lives in Virginia. No angry, polemicizing emigre, he is saddened by the debasement of a nation that was once built on Utopian principles, albeit by terror and violence. “Year after year since childhood,” he writes, “I watched as corruption ate more deeply into society until it turned the Soviet regime in the ’60s and ’70s into a land of corrupt rulers, ruling over a corrupted people.”

Simis attributes the nationwide crookedness in the Soviet Union to the untrammeled power and unbridled venality of the party elite, combined with material inequality. The Kremlin leaders’ extravagant way of life, dependent on a network of special shops and other perks, has already been well documented. Less well known are the hushed-up scandals involving Soviet leaders on the take. Simis cites the case of the late Politburo member Frol Kozlov, Nikita Khrushchev’s second-in-command, who was caught In the late 1960s with a fortune in rubles and gems. He had accepted them in exchange for appointments and promotions, and for halting prosecution of wealthy black marketeers. Yet Kozlov was never demoted, and in 1965 was buried with full state honors.

Simis also describes how the vast and cumbersome Soviet industrial system is made to work on the basis of widescale corruption. He states categorically that it is impossible for a factory manager to conduct an efficient business without payIng bribes for raw materials, equipment and authorizations to ship merchandise. Though Moscow authorities periodically launch anticorruption campaigns, the rot cannot be easily extirpated because it starts at the top.

According to U.S.S.R.: The Corrupt Society, virtually no need in everyday life can be met without recourse to under-the-table transactions, from passing the butcher a ten-ruble bill, to paying off the local housing commission for a room of one’s own, to giving a physician a bottle of French cognac (available on the black market) for a bed in a hospital. Still, the Soviet people are not exceptionally immoral. “It is simply that the mass of the population does not look upon theft from the state as real theft, as stealing someone else’s property,” Simis says. “Of the tens of millions of people who do not think twice about lifting nails, light bulbs and equipment from their factories, construction sites or offices, the overwhehning majority would never steal a kopek from another person.” That distinction is both a devastating indictment of the Soviet regime and a tribute to its long-suffering people. —By Patricia Blake

Excerpt

“A group of employees [of the Moscow Crematorium] were on trial for thefts … When a coffin was lowered down the hatchway to the tones of a funeral dirge, the crematorium staff would open the lid of the coffin and toss the body onto a nearby table. Deft fingers would strip the clothes from the corpse while others set to work with special dental instruments, ripping out gold teeth and crowns. After that they would dispatch the stripped, coffinless remains into the blazing oven.

Everything in this business generated profit. The coffins and wreaths were returned to the funeral supplier, who would resell them twice or even three times. The proceeds were divided thus: two-thirds to the crematorium employees and one-third to the funeral supplier. The clothing would be sent on consignment to a secondhand shop, and the gold was sold to one of several black market currency dealers with whom they did business regularly. Healing all these details one was struck by the callous efficiency and matter-of-factness prevalent — in the grave trade.”