1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

MILLER: Yes. Survival was very much at stake for individuals. “How can we live? How
do we eat?” And because state stores – all stores were state stores – as the state broke
down, weren’t supplying fundamental goods. So the shadow market, the underground
markets, that had always existed in the time of collective farms, where the surpluses that
were grown on homegrown in the home plots were brought by peasants and the farm
workers to the city and sold in the open markets and at the entrances to metro stops,
became the staples. The state stores had supplies but the shelves were so bare they
vanished.
Q: They withered away.
MILLER: They withered away. The state had withered away in the Marxist sense, and
what was left was a hand-to-mouth individualistic economy. That was the moment of the
real free-market economy, because it was person to person and the most permitted form
was barter, in order to survive. People from the villages and the collective farms would
bring produce and they would get shoes and clothing, and those who were in severe
difficulty would be selling off their shoes and clothing in order to eat. Everyone had to
survive, everyone, and that was a way of investiture in the new state. They were on the
street, bartering, outside the metro stations in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
People at the higher levels of Soviet life even at the higher levels of the bureaucracy were
forced to do this like everyone else. It was a kind of democratization. They said, “We’ve
got to do something about this, we can’t – how can we live like this?” which is the name
of a very good perestroika film, by the way. We Cannot Live Like This was the title of
the film, and it had great resonance among the people of the time. In fact –this is a sidebar
– but the perestroika films, as they were known then, of which there are about – I think I
saw 30 or 40 of them. Remarkable in quality, they remind me of the Iranian films that are
being produced now. They were just so full of the immediate sense of what the people
were undergoing, their sense of reality. It was wonderfully portrayed, usually with ironic
humor, the Soviets at that point, and the new Russians-to-be didn’t have a stomach for the
tough stuff. The Cold Summer of 1953 was as much as they could bear. They needed
some humor in their existence, and they got it, of course. By the time Burnt By the Sun
appeared in 1994 a film about the Purges that won the best foreign film Academy award
and the Cannes award, popular taste could no longer stomach such critiques of Soviet life.
It was a great day for the arts, a great time for the arts, particularly performing arts. It was
remarkable, it stimulated quality in not only the performance of classical music and
theater, but new music, including rock and popular music. Vysotsky, who was the great
singer of protest in Soviet times, sang in an argot of prison slang. There were five or six
very popular folk singers, sort of Joan Baez guitar style but in the end Russian. I have a
large collection of Melodya recordings. I love the music from this time. It was
remarkable, all of it.
They had rock bands that had names like Black Coffee and Time Machine and all manner
of bizarre groups that were extraordinarily good. Many of them were sort of take-offs on
the Beatles. The closest to the Beatles was a group called Quartet Sekret, the Secret
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