Published on November 6, 2019. From Hiroshi Furuta’s essay serialized in the monthly magazine WiLL under the title “Epicurus Fighting,” Part 5. Beginning with the author’s 1979 experience of seeing unemployed people and job-placement notices in the supposedly fully employed Soviet Union, the essay depicts the landscapes of socialist cities, the absence of public-mindedness and modern rationality, distrust of Marxian economics, and the intuition that the Soviet Union would inevitably collapse.

November 6, 2019.
When I ordered a steak at a restaurant on the main street, what came out was meat like the sole of a shoe, probably from a cow that had been worked to exhaustion on a kolkhoz; it was so sinewy that the knife would not go through it.
The following is from an essay by Furuta Hiroshi, serialized in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine WiLL under the title “Epicurus Fighting.”
Part 5, The Apocalyptic Prophecy of the Fall of the Soviet Union.
Reducing pain and increasing pleasure.
In 1979, in the back streets of the Soviet Union, where there was supposed to be full employment, I saw a herd of unemployed people and advertisements from the employment office, and I was utterly at a loss.
“For example, the method taken by the Russian Bolshevik government in order to carry through the ideological element that there must be no unemployment under socialism was not to deceive people about the obvious fact of unemployment by means of propaganda and persuade them that there were no unemployed people, but rather to abolish unemployment benefits altogether without using propaganda or anything of the sort at all” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Volume 3, Misuzu Shobo, 1981, p. 64), Hannah Arendt’s translated book tells us, but that was several years later.
At that point, I did not know such a thing.
It was much later that the anger of having been deceived spread within me.
The method I, as a hedonist, took was first to abandon the study of Russian with a single blow and forget it.
For an unhappy person, rather than the precious dream of happiness for all people, it was urgent to reduce the things that might produce immediate pain.
Of course, I did not think in the slightest that it was a waste.
In fact, even the explanation above came later.
At the time, I intuitively thought that “instinctively avoiding danger” was my own constitution.
At the same time, I also threw away the “discipline” called Marxian economics.
I still did not understand what relation there was between the deception of the Soviet economy and Marxian economics, but I instantly knew that all of these things were fictional through some sort of causal connection, so “before the poison smeared on the pen could circulate,” I decided first to detoxify myself.
However, this played a role like what Tsurumi Shunsuke called “conversion.”
After that, whatever “theory” by Westerners I saw, I could no longer believe it.
Whether I saw it or read it, it flew away from the edge of my eye.
It was a feeling as if the employment-office advertisements pasted in Leningrad were peeling off one after another from the concrete walls and flying away; from the thin Northern European-style sauna chimney that stood behind the dirty crowd of unemployed people, black smoke, like that of a ghost, rose dimly.
The next time I saw such ominous chimney smoke was twenty-three years later, when I visited the thermal power plant in Chongjin, North Korea.
Socialist countries, vast and desolate.
Here I would like to leave a brief record of the scenery of socialist countries.
That is because, to the best of my knowledge, it has not been written anywhere, and I think that if, in the future, someone tries to adopt the principle of seeing things on the ground, it will be difficult to connect it with visual images.
The landscapes of socialist cities, in a word, are vast and desolate.
The public roads in Moscow, for example, have six lanes in each direction, twelve lanes in all.
Not a single car is passing through them.
The roadway was just like a park, so I stood in the middle of the road and took photographs.
I later came to understand through the principle of panoramic vision that the problem here lay in the labor theory of value in Marxian economics.
In that economics, it is labor that produces value, while distribution was neglected as producing nothing.
Therefore, there was no reason for freight trucks to be running.
In North Korea, the Rodong Sinmun was transported by railways laid during the Japanese period and unloaded at the stations.
Furthermore, the whole city was filled with idols and huge buildings.
In the Soviet Union, Lenin; in the North, Kim Il-sung; and in Albania and elsewhere, Mr. Hoxha――their idols were erected here and there.
In the lobby of Kiev Airport, a huge bronze head of Lenin placed in the center obstructed the passage of people.
On the huge buildings along the vast main streets, pictures and slogans were written.
In Moscow, there were slogans such as “Our Pride, Our Strength, Our Power,” “Long Live Advanced Science,” and “Communism Will Win”; in Wonsan, there were slogans such as “One-Hearted Loyalty（sincerity）” and “Speed Battle.”
The buildings were not crowded together; there were empty spaces between them.
Because of that, in winter the wind blew through, and it was terribly cold.
I thought that Pyongyang was like Heijō-kyō, the ancient capital of Nara.
The huge Tōdai-ji and the Rushana Buddha, a city with sparse buildings, and the feeling that time had stopped.
In the morning commute, people disappeared as if being sucked into the buildings, and during the day there were almost no pedestrians.
The back streets were different.
There, there was the smell of life, and the voices of children.
Unlike the main streets, there were dirty walls, cracked glass windows, and employment-office advertisements.
In the back streets of Moscow, even the windows of poor greengrocers were packed only with fresh green gourds.
This was a greengrocer made by people who did not know the balance between demand and supply.
When I ordered a steak at a restaurant on the main street, what came out was meat like the sole of a shoe, probably from a cow that had been worked to exhaustion on a kolkhoz; it was so sinewy that the knife would not go through it.
By contrast, Ukraine was rich, and even sour cream appeared on the table.
That made me understand very well why it was targeted by Russia and Germany.
Meanwhile, the beef served in Chongjin, North Korea, melted as soon as it was placed on a charcoal brazier and turned into burnt scraps.
The meat itself probably had no nutrition.
Toilets in socialist countries are interesting.
The toilet in the People’s Grand Study House in the North was about twenty tatami mats in size.
On the wall at the far right, just one urinal was embedded, standing alone.
There was a mirror at the washbasin, but it was above my face.
When I jumped up and looked into it, the mirror surface was distorted, and my face was distorted as well.
There was no public-mindedness of making something for people, and it also lacked modern rationality.
Later, when I studied the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, I saw on the internet that the Taechon power plants and dams supplying electricity to the facilities had been built, four or five of them, on the Taeryong River, which was not such a rapid river.
I immediately noticed the absence of modern rationality and was able to transform an experience of thought into an experience of perception.
In 1976, during the Cold War, Soviet military officer Viktor Belenko flew a MIG-25（Foxbat）and landed in Hakodate, Japan, seeking asylum.
Because the airframe was made of stainless steel and vacuum tubes were used extensively in its equipment, it greatly surprised the West.
The problem lay in believing that Marxian economics, which had no technological innovation, was a universal science.
In addition to that, there was the absence of modern rationality.
Three years after this, I saw the Soviet Union for the first time.
Therefore, there was no way I could have understood all the above at the time.
The only thing I understood was that the Soviet Union would surely collapse.
This article continues.