ot;The main task of the Five Year Plan," proclaims this 1971 poster, "is to ensure a significant rise in the material and cultural standard of living. . . ." Since the mid-1970s, the Soviet GNP-which grew at an average annual rate of nearly five percent from 1960 to 1975-has stagnated, rising in 1980 by only 1.4 percent.
TheWil.wn QuarterlyIAutumn 1985
46
Why is the Soviet system, with so many problems, as stable as it is? Princeton University's Stephen F. Cohen argues that the...
y W. Morton
In "The Exchange," a story by the late Yuri Trifonov, a pop- ular Russian writer who often dealt with the stratagems of the Soviet urban middle class, a Moscow woman changes her offi- cial apartment registration and legally moves in with her hus- band's dying mother-whom she hates.
She makes the shift for one important reason: to prevent the old lady's precious single room from reverting, upon her death, to the state. The woman reckons that, through the bartering sys- tem...
In August 1978, while visiting the Soviet Union, I decided to take the local train from Moscow to Vladimir, the capital of a former princedom some 100 miles to the east.
At Moscow's Kursk station, a rather disheveled man in his mid-30s boarded the crowded car and proceeded to address his fellow riders. "Comrades," he began, "would you help me?" He then went on to relate how, as an epileptic, he could find no steady work and was surviving on a pension of a mere 25 rubles a...
shortages of reli- able information, a secretive politi- cal system, and a history and culture that present a tangle of Western and Oriental influences.
Enigma number one, writes Ox- ford's Ronald Hingley, is The Rus- sian Mind (Scribner's, 1977). Ivan the Terrible, the great 16th-century tsar, was imperious enough to order the slaughter of an elephant that failed to bow to him, yet too supersti- tious to order the arrest of a "lunatic naked monk" who wandered the countryside denouncing...
A technological age-especially an extremely brilliant and suc- cessful one-has difficulty in finding a proper role for literature. Such a society sees literature as a diversion, as a mere amuse- ment at best; and so it is classed as a luxury, perhaps an added grace to adorn the high culture that the technology itself has built. Yet such homage obscures the real importance of litera- ture and all of the humanities. It classes them as decorative lux- uries, whereas in truth they are the necessary...
scholars than the 1829-1837 Presidency of Andrew Jackson. The craggy Tennessee general was the first man out- side the colonial gentry to reach the White House. His life was tumultuous. (How many Chief Executives had once fought duels and even killed a man?) But so were his times. Modern political parties, corporations, and a vigorous press all emerged, as did something called Jacksonian Democracy. Yet what was that ex- actly? During the 1920s, historian Carl Russell Fish christened the era the...
rly 150 years after his Presidency, Andrew Jackson remains a model of the "strong" Chief Executive. Alonso Chappel's painting of the victor of the Battle of New Orleans hints at the "native strength" Nathaniel Hawthorne saw in the general. It "compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cun- ning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool."
The Wilson Quarterly/Autumn 1985
100
Perhaps no American period has...
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., whose portrayal of Jackson as a 19th- century FDR stirred scholarly de- bates for years. While all agree that the age was (as Daniel Webster said) "full of excitement," historians have differed in their measurements of the general himself.
Few have been as underwhelmed as Samuel Eliot Morison: In The Ox- ford History of the American People,
vol. 2 (Oxford, 1965, cloth; Mentor, 1972, paper), he argues that Jackson "catered to mediocrity" and was so...
public agencies and private institutions
Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard Univ., 1737 Cambridge St., Cam-
bridge, Mass. 02138.36 pp. $4.95. Authors: Mark Heller and Nadav Safran
The history of Middle Eastern politics since World War I1 has shown that tra- ditional monarchies fall when a res- tive, secular middle class reaches a "critical mass." That has happened in Egypt (1952)- Iraq (1958), Yemen (1962), Syria (1963), and Libya (1969). Saudi Arabia could well be next, ac-...