The author of this book was working on behalf of a magazine called Regardie when it was written - thus it is written from the standpoint of a journalist rather than a historian. Journalists and historians do not write the same way - journalists' work has to be readable by people who don't have college degrees, for one thing, and there don't have to be lots of references to other people's books and ideas. I like books like this, since bone-dry blather with oodles of footnotes puts me to sleep and a lot of books by professional historians could cure insomnia in rocks.
With that in mind, however, it isn't easy to read Bear Hunting with the Politburo all the way through at once. At the time of writing, Gorbachev was loosening some of the overweening state control that was the Soviet Union's defining characteristic. An important feature of this was the emergence of a sort of free market economy conducted by a group of people called cooperators, working in cooperatives. Thus there are a lot of economic words and concepts in this book that I didn't really understand. There are several anecdotes and morbidly funny asides in the book relating to the insanity of life in the USSR, but these do not make up the majority of the material.
As usual, most of the West was deluding itself in thinking that all the poor benighted foreigners had to do was embrace American capitalism and be lifted out of their pathetic squalor and into the limelight, led nationwide by those famously altruistic sorts known in the United States as "the captains of industry." The apparently common perception was that this was what perestroika was supposed to do. These people did not exist in Russia. Mindless idealism was and probably still is a very good way to wind up poor, hungry and dead over there. There were a few upstanding cooperators, but most of them quickly learned that they had to restrict their focus to a very small area. The rest were what Americans would think of as crooks. In practical terms they were doing what was necessary to survive - high-handed gibberish about Right and Wrong doesn't matter when there's no food in the stores and medical care is hard to come by.
"Fact's single most important bureaucrat seemed to be Bela Petravitus, a Lithuanian in charge of advising the Council of Ministers and the Central Committee on cooperative policy. Petravitus, who many believed actually fashioned the cooperative laws and decrees of the government was, concurrently, Fact's most welcomed and feared visitor. The only insight Fact's employees ever had into his motivations occurred when akovlev returned to the office one afternoon in a panic, asking everyone if they had access to women's nylon stockings. Petravitus' ulcer had reached such critical mass that he had been taken to the hospital, where nurses allegedly refused to attend to his needs without first being given hosiery." - Page 191. "Fact" was the name of one of the cooperatives, which sold semi-accurate information - an extremely valuable commodity in the secrecy-obsessed USSR. Cooperators were not known for their originality - there apparently was a cooperative known as "A Bunch Of Guys Who Do Things".
Copetas also goes into detail about how Soviet citizens and cooperators dealt with the infamously nonsensical government bureaucracy. Various forms of corruption and thievery are detailed, as well as the actions of certain government officials. The leader of Fact, a man named Yakovlev, decided to start the first Soviet newspaper with American backing - as one might imagine, this was complicated. I'm not going to go into all the particulars, but there are a lot of them. Some of his motivations, and the motivations of other cooperators, are discussed.
Some of the key bits in the book where Paranoia fans are concerned are the insane actions that occur in the country, mostly where the government is concerned. About the best words to use to describe them are "tragically comical". "One of my chores while working at Fact in 1988 was to help unpack and set up new office equipment. When I started to uncrate a small photocopier that had been collecting dust in a corner, I was stopped by Roman Kudriavstev, Fact's twenty-three-year-old computer technician. 'No!' he screamed. 'We haven't yet taken care of the bureaucrat in charge!' Kudriavstev said we would all go to jail if the machine were unpacked prematurely, and his explanation, delivered in a nonstop staccato, was an anthem to the Soviet bureaucracy. 'For us to use that machine we need to build a room with a special metal door that has a specifically sized window that only opens on an approved set of hinges.' Brief pause. 'The state must sanction the door and the window and the person who will run the machine with special state documents that allow him and him alone to operate the machine, but only when the door is locked and the copy person is sitting in the room alone.' Another pause. 'The door must always be locked and what we wanted copied must be handed to him through the window and an official record of what's being copied must be made to prevent the machine from distributing subversive material.'" - Page 93.
On the scale available I have to list this as a 3 for readability, as its easy accessibility is offset by the density of some of the material. The substance is excellent, however, as it goes into the sort-of free market around the time of the failed coup and gives a fly-on-the-wall perspective of the cooperator movement in the perpetually-crumbling Soviet Union.
