The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  Yet the struggle for reform had only just begun. At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 Gorbachëv had to tread carefully in recommending fresh policy initiatives. The new Party Programme accepted at the Congress would hardly have discomfited Gorbachëv’s predecessors in office: the ‘perfecting’ of ‘developed socialism’ was set to remain the main political slogan.44 Yet immediately after the Congress he showed that he would not permanently be denied. Local officialdom was to be brought into line with his thinking: by the middle of 1986 two thirds of province-level party secretaries had not had the same jobs a half-decade earlier.45 He was convinced that the vigorous support of such appointees would guarantee his success.

  He was equally optimistic in his conduct of international relations in 1985–6. He had set his mind on sorting out Soviet domestic affairs, and had used the occasion of Chernenko’s funeral to call a meeting of leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries and to announce his commitment to non-interference in their political life. According to Gorbachëv, these countries were thenceforward to have independent control of their internal development.46 This was already a striking contrast with Soviet foreign policy since 1945. Even Andropov had offered to relax the USSR’s grip on Eastern Europe solely on condition that the USA made analogous concessions in its regional spheres of influence.47 Gorbachëv’s statement was not tied to a public bargaining position with the USA: it was delivered exclusively to an audience of the USSR’s allies in Eastern Europe. He wanted them to know that they were responsible for their own fate.

  This was not a sign that Gorbachëv thought that communism was doomed in the USSR and Eastern Europe. The exact opposite was true. Gorbachëv was still at that time a Marxist-Leninist believer: he contended that the Soviet communist order was in many ways already superior to capitalism; he was unshaken in his opinion that the Soviet type of state provided its citizens with better health care, education and transport. The task in the USSR and Eastern Europe was consequently to renovate communism so as to match capitalism in other areas of public life. Gorbachëv assumed that he would be able to persuade fellow communist leaders in Eastern Europe to follow his example. There was to be no repetition of the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Renovation had to occur voluntarily. Despite Gorbachëv’s eloquence, however, the Warsaw Pact leaders did not take him seriously and treated his speech as ceremonial rhetoric.48

  The Politburo was learning to take his words more literally. In October 1985 he was already suggesting to its members that a way had to be found for the Soviet Army to be withdrawn from the war in Afghanistan.49 Presumably he wished to have freedom to alter conditions in the USSR without international distractions. The material and human costs of the Afghan war were running out of control. Gorbachëv felt he could build the kind of socialism in his country that would cause the rest of the world to marvel.

  He therefore refused to be downcast by the attitude taken by US President Reagan, who had secured a second term of office in 1984 and persisted with the development of his Strategic Defence Initiative. Gorbachëv continued to believe that Soviet science and industry would cope with the challenge and match the USA’s technology. To the despair of his own more sceptical advisers, he even convinced himself that he could undertake major economic reform while supplying the Ministry of Defence with the immense additional resources needed to develop and deploy the USSR’s equivalent to Reagan’s project.50 Since the end of the Second World War, Soviet scientists had always succeeded in emulating American military technology. Gorbachëv felt that there was no reason to doubt that they could do the same in the mid-1980s. Gorbachëv began his reforms as a buoyant optimist.

  Yet the Strategic Defence Initiative, while not instigating Gorbachëv’s domestic perestroika, was indisputably going to make a tough task tougher, and Gorbachëv was not so stupid as to think that a vast new programme of military research would not divert expenditure from the civilian industrial sector. It would obviously therefore be far better for the USSR if the USA could be persuaded to abandon its initiative altogether in return for firm and binding agreements on nuclear disarmament.

  Although Gorbachëv had no experience as a diplomat, he intuitively sensed that personal contact with the American President might produce a transformation in relations between the superpowers. He was certainly lucky in his choice of moment to make the attempt. For Reagan himself had always shuddered at the thought of a nuclear holocaust and was looking for any signs that Soviet foreign policy might become more amenable to American political overtures. Gorbachëv and Reagan were therefore pleased to be able to arrange to meet each other in Geneva in November 1985. Their fireside conversation was courteous, even congenial. The two men liked each other and a rising degree of trust was noticeable between them. Nevertheless Reagan remained on his guard. While talking reassuringly to Gorbachëv, he licensed subordinates such as Caspar Weinberger and Richard Perle to make whatever menacing remarks they wanted about the USSR. The patience of Soviet negotiators was tested severely.

  In January 1986 Gorbachëv issued a plan for total nuclear disarmament. At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 he stressed that his country was ‘ready to do everything it could to change the international situation radically’.51 While asserting that Soviet defences would be strengthened to meet any foreign threat, Gorbachëv went out of his way to plead the case for global peace and for a process of disarmament.

  Like most politicians in East and West, he assumed that the danger of nuclear technology was confined to bombs. His concentration on the military risks was understandable, but misplaced. There had been several explosions in Soviet civilian nuclear power stations since they had first been built under Khrushchëv. The lessons had not been learned: supervision and training of staff remained lamentable and no mention of past explosions was allowed in the USSR’s press. The astute dissenting scientist, Zhores Medvedev, had deduced that there had been a nuclear disaster in the Urals from the indirect data on fauna and flora available in recondite Soviet academic journals; but he was living in emigration in London.52 Discussion of his warnings was prohibited and his book was banned from publication. Consequently Gorbachëv was barely any better informed about the situation than his ordinary fellow citizens.

  On 26 April 1986 a horrific jolt was delivered to official Soviet complacency when an accident occurred at the nuclear power station near the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl. The core of the reactor had overheated and the station’s staff, instead of instantly shutting down the reactor, tried out various cooling measures. Their incompetence caused an explosion.

  The result was catastrophic radiation. The local politicians panicked, and some of them secretly moved their families out of Ukraine. But the winds carried the radioactive particles northwards and westwards. Belorussia and eastern Poland were affected and Scandinavian newspapers revealed that a nuclear disaster had taken place somewhere in the USSR. As the clamour of public opinion grew around the world, the assumption was that the Politburo was deliberately pretending that nothing untoward had happened. This had been conventional Soviet practice to date whenever a nuclear accident or even an airplane crash had occurred. But in this instance, the Politburo itself had difficulty in getting rapid, accurate information. As the enormity of the event started to become evident, Gorbachëv announced the dispatch to the area of an investigative team from Moscow. Ryzhkov, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, courageously visited Chernobyl in person.

  For Gorbachëv, their reports were almost as appalling as the human and natural devastation wrought by the accident. A long chain of negligence, incompetence and disorganization was to blame. Workers were careless; technicians were ill-trained; local politicians were ignorant; and central ministers and scientific consultants had omitted to put a reasonable set of safeguards into operation.

  In 1921 Lenin had declared that the Kronstadt mutiny was the flash that led to the New Economic Policy. Gorbachëv made no similar statement. But the Chernobyl nuclear expl
osion undoubtedly had a deep impact on him. He could no longer fail to understand that the defects of the regime could not be corrected by administrative tinkering.53 Misinformation, indiscipline and organizational manipulation were intrinsic to its workings. The lethal atmosphere over Chernobyl was a metaphor for the conditions in Soviet public life. A ventilation of the country’s problems was no longer merely desirable; it was crucial for the medium-term survival of the USSR as a superpower. People were not protesting out on the streets. The declining economy was not already battered to the ground and the governing élites had not yet been demoralized into acceptance of fundamental reform. Yet Gorbachëv had had enough. Reform was going to be basic and fast, and the General Secretary was readying himself for a historic contest.

  He and his group of supportive colleagues and advisers were embarrassed about the ineffectual, drifting methods of recent leadership. There was also confidence that the situation could be reversed. As General Secretary, Gorbachëv had no intention of presiding over the dissolution of the USSR or over the dismantlement of the communist political system. The economic, social and cultural problems were dire. But he was confident they could be solved.

  The Politburo in 1985–6 agreed that new methods had to be formulated. Its members recognized their fundamental difficulties in achieving economic development, social acquiescence, ideological commitment, administrative efficiency, inter-ethnic harmony, control over Eastern Europe and peace between the superpowers. Each difficulty aggravated the others. The leadership from Brezhnev to Chernenko had continually pondered its difficulties. Discussions in the quiet of the Politburo and Secretariat were premised on the need for drastic action. On diagnostics, there was often agreement. Party leaders could see that Eastern Europe was bankrupt and that they could not bail it out. They knew that the Afghan war was disastrous for the USSR. They understood that America was succeeding in widening the technological gap. They were nervous about the flimsy appeal of Marxism-Leninism to Soviet society. This had been conventional wisdom in the Kremlin as the leadership sought to plan for the future in ever worsening circumstances.54 Only under Gorbachëv did the Politburo decide to move beyond the limits of Andropovite policy. External pressures played a part, especially the aggressive diplomacy of President Reagan and his Strategic Defence Initiative. Unpredictable events, particularly the Chernobyl explosion, were also important. Even so, the movement towards basic reforms was not inevitable. Gorbachëv would not have lost power if he had opted to conserve the heritage of Andropov. The collective outlook of his Politburo and Secretariat colleagues was not as open minded as his own, and the impact of this single individual over the course of Soviet politics was decisive.

  He had no grand plan and no predetermined policies; but if Gorbachëv had not been Party General Secretary, the decisions of summer 1986 would have been different. The USSR’s long-lasting order would have endured for many more years, and almost certainly the eventual collapse of the order would have been much bloodier than it was to be in 1991. The irony was that Gorbachëv, in trying to prevent the descent of the system into general crisis, proved instrumental in bringing forward that crisis and destroying the USSR.

  23

  Glasnost and Perestroika (1986–1988)

  By mid-1986 Gorbachëv had concluded that his early economic and disciplinary measures offered no basic solution; he was also coming to recognize that it would not be enough merely to replace Brezhnev’s personnel with younger, more energetic officials. The attitudes and practices of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union needed changing. The problem was that most party officials refused to recognize the acuteness of the problems faced by the USSR. This was a reflection of their self-interest; but it also derived from their ignorance. And this ignorance was not confined to officialdom. Soviet society had for decades been prevented from acquiring comprehensive knowledge of the country’s past and current problems.

  It was for this reason that Gorbachëv initiated a series of public debates. The policy was encapsulated in the slogan of glasnost. This is a difficult word to translate, broadly connoting ‘openness’, ‘a voicing’ and ‘a making public’. Gorbachëv’s choice of vocabulary was not accidental. Glasnost, for all its vagueness, does not mean freedom of information. He had no intention of relinquishing the Politburo’s capacity to decide the limits of public discussion. Moreover, his assumption was that if Soviet society were to examine its problems within a framework of guidance, a renaissance of Leninist ideals would occur. Gorbachëv was not a political liberal. At the time, however, it was not so much his reservation of communist party power as his liberating initiative that was impressive. Gorbachëv was freeing debate in the USSR to an extent that no Soviet leader had attempted, not even Khrushchëv and certainly not Lenin.

  Glavlit, which censored all printed materials prior to publication, was instructed from June 1986 to relax its rules. The USSR Union of Writers held a Congress in the same month and welcomed the relaxation of rules on the press. But new novels took time to be written. Consequently the leading edge of glasnost was sharpened mainly by weekly newspapers and magazines. Chief among these were Moscow News, Ogonëk (‘Little Spark’) and Arguments and Facts. None of them had been characterized by radicalism until, in 1986, they acquired new editors – Yegor Yakovlev, Vitali Korotich and Vladislav Starkov respectively – on recommendation from Gorbachëv’s Party Secretariat. The incumbents were told to shake the press out of its torpor.1

  Gorbachëv had to discover a large number of like-minded radicals able to help him refashion public opinion. Yeltsin was already doing this as Moscow Party City Committee First Secretary: from time to time he travelled, in company with a photographer, to his office by bus rather than chauffeur-driven limousine; he also sacked hundreds of corrupt or idle functionaries in the party and in local government, and his harassment of metropolitan bureaucracy was acclaimed by the ordinary residents of the capital. Another radical was Alexander Yakovlev, who served as a department chief in the Secretariat from 1985 and became a Central Committee Secretary in 1986. The problem for Gorbachëv was that such figures were rarities in the party apparatus. Most communist officials wanted only minimal reforms and were horrified at the thought of changing their methods of rule. Gorbachëv therefore turned for help to the intelligentsia. He was placing a wager on their loyalty and skills in communication in his struggle to win support from fellow party leaders and Soviet society as a whole.

  His preference was for those who, like him, believed that Marxism-Leninism had been distorted since Lenin’s time. He did not have to look very far. Since the 1960s there had been several scholars, writers and administrators whose careers had been blighted by their commitment to reforming the Soviet order. While sympathizing with Roy Medvedev, few of them had joined the overt dissenters. Instead they had lived a life of dispiriting frustration under Brezhnev, trusting that basic reform could not be delayed forever.

  Yegor Yakovlev and others had worked as jobbing journalists. Others had found sanctuary in research academies such as the Institute of the World Economic System under Oleg Bogomolov and the Novosibirsk Institute of Economics under Abel Aganbegyan. A few had bitten their tongues hard and continued to work as advisers to Politburo members: among these were Georgi Shakhnazarov and Alexander Bovin. By the mid-1980s this was a late middle-aged generation; most of them were in their fifties and sixties. They had been young adults when Khrushchëv had made his assault upon Stalin and referred to themselves as ‘Children of the Twentieth Congress’. But although they were admirers of Khrushchëv, they were by no means uncritical of him: they felt that he had failed because his reforms had been too timid. Without the zeal of such supporters, Gorbachëv’s cause would already have been lost.

  They were better acquainted with developments in the rest of the world than any Soviet generation in the previous half-century. Most had travelled in tourist groups to non-communist countries, and Western scholarly literature had been available to several of them in their working capacities.
They were also avid listeners to foreign radio stations and so were not entirely dependent on the Soviet mass media for their news of the day.

  This was a generation awaiting its saviour; and they found him when Gorbachëv, like Superman pulling off his Clark Kent suit, revealed himself as a Child of the Twentieth Congress. Quickly he indicated that his urgent priority was to subject Soviet history to public reconsideration. Permission was given for the release of the phantasmagoric film Repentance, whose Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze satirized the Stalin years. The playwright Mikhail Shatrov’s drama Onward! Onward! Onward! portrayed the parlousness of Lenin in the face of Stalin’s machinations. Gorbachëv felt that until there was comprehension of the past, little could be done by him in the present. He saw a brilliant way to highlight his attitude: on 16 December 1986 he lifted the phone and spoke to the dissenting physicist Andrei Sakharov and invited him to return from exile in Gorki.2 One of the regime’s most uncompromising opponents was to return to liberty.

  Economic measures were not forgotten by Gorbachëv and Ryzhkov. A Law on the State Enterprise was being drafted to restrict the authority of the central planning authorities. There were simultaneous deliberations on the old proposal to introduce the ‘link’ system to agriculture. A commission was also set up to draft a Law on Co-operatives. But Gorbachëv himself, while pushing Ryzhkov to hurry forward with proposals, put his greatest effort into ideological and political measures. He did this in the knowledge that substantial progress on the economic front would be impeded until he had broken the spine of opposition to his policies in the party, including the Politburo. It took months of persuasion in 1986 before Gorbachëv could cajole the Politburo into agreeing to hold a Central Committee plenum in order to strengthen the process of reform.