The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  Gorbachëv had hoped to avoid such a reaction by pensioning off those older politicians who had been prominent under Brezhnev. In his first year in power he had imposed new first secretaries on twenty-four out of seventy-two of the RSFSR’s provincial party committees. Between April 1986 and March 1988 a further nineteen such appointments were made. Hardly any of these appointees came from Stavropol.19 Gorbachëv wanted to break with the Soviet custom whereby a political patron favoured his career-long clients. Most of the appointees had recently been working under his gaze in Moscow and appeared to have the necessary talent. The snag was that the new incumbents of office made little effort to alter local practices and attitudes. On arrival in their localities, Gorbachëv’s newcomers typically went native. The fact that they were younger and better educated than their predecessors made no difference to their behaviour.

  In another way Gorbachëv himself was acting traditionally. Since January 1987 it was official policy that local party organizations should elect their own secretaries; and yet Gorbachëv persisted in making his own appointments through the central party apparatus.

  So why was he infringing his own policy for internal party reform? The answer highlights the scale of the obstacles in his path. He knew that party committees throughout the USSR were blocking the introduction of multi-candidate elections. Only one in every eleven secretaryships at all the various local levels was filled by such competition in 1987–8. Worse still, merely one per cent of province-level secretaries obtained posts in this fashion. And the fresh air ventilating public discussions in Moscow seldom reached the ‘localities’: the provincial press clamped down on the opportunities of glasnost. It is therefore unsurprising that Gorbachëv did not relinquish his powers of appointment in favour of elections. If he had left the local party committees to themselves, he would never have achieved the political and economic goals he had set for the communist party.

  Nor could Gorbachëv lightly overlook the danger posed by Ligachëv and other leaders who opposed further radicalization of reforms. The January 1987 Central Committee plenum had taken the decision to convoke a Party Conference. Gorbachëv hoped that such a Conference, scheduled to meet in mid-1988, would change the composition of the Central Committee. For the Central Committee elected in 1986 still consisted mainly of functionaries appointed in the Brezhnev years. The ‘nests’ had selected anti-perestroika delegates to the Conference; and indeed, while Gorbachëv was meeting President Reagan in Moscow, the communist party rank-and-file in Vladivostock rebelled against their corrupt provincial party secretary. Gorbachëv spoke up for the rebels. He also signed letters of reference for prominent Moscow-based supporters of his policies such as the historian Yuri Afanasev.

  He also made a further advance with economic reform. The Law on the State Enterprise had come into effect in January 1988; and in May the Law on Co-operatives had been passed whereby co-op members could set their own prices and make their own deals both in the USSR and abroad. Certainly the fiscal disincentives were strong, and the local soviets were entitled to deny official registration to the co-ops. Yet the Law’s significance was undeniable. For the first time in six decades it was permitted to set up urban manufacturing and service-sector enterprises that were not owned by the state.

  Gorbachëv confidently opened the Nineteenth Party Conference on 28 June 1988 even though he had only half-succeeded in getting his supporters elected as delegates. His theses called for a strict functional separation between the party and the soviets. At the Conference he defined this more closely. He wanted to disband the economic departments in the Central Committee Secretariat and to reduce the size of the party apparatus in Moscow. At the same time the Supreme Soviet, which had had only an honorific role, was to become a kind of parliament with over 400 members who would be in session most of the year and be chosen from a Congress of People’s Deputies consisting of 2,250 persons. As a sop to the Party Conference, Gorbachëv proposed that while two thirds of the deputies should be elected through universal suffrage, one third should be provided by ‘public organizations’ including the communist party.20

  His assault on the party’s prerogatives was relentless. Among his most startling suggestions was that local party first secretaries should automatically submit themselves for election to the parallel soviet chairmanship. He gave the impression that he expected such secretaries to retain their personal power. Yet privately he hoped that the electorate would use their votes to get rid of his opponents in the party.

  Gorbachëv’s audience consisted of delegations led by precisely the sort of communist party officials he wished to eliminate. The implications of his proposal were understood and resented by them; and whereas Ligachëv received a rapturous reception from the Conference, Gorbachëv was applauded only at the few points where he made comments of a conservative content. And then something unexpected occurred which enraged his critics still further: back from political oblivion came Boris Yeltsin. Uncertain that he would be allowed to address the Conference, he came down to the foot of the platform waving his party card. Gorbachëv made a gesture to him to take a seat in the front row of the hall until there was an opportunity for him to speak; and on this occasion Yeltsin chose his words with care, endorsing practically all Gorbachëv’s proposals and humbly asking to be rehabilitated as a leader.

  Critics were angry that Yeltsin should be picking up the pieces of his political career. After a pause in the Conference proceedings, Ligachëv led the counter-attack.21 Yeltsin’s record was torn to shreds. Even his career as a provincial party secretary in Sverdlovsk was mocked. Summing up the case for the prosecution, Ligachëv asserted: ‘You, Boris, are not right!’ The Conference took Ligachëv’s side and Yeltsin was refused his request to be re-admitted to the supreme party leadership.

  Gorbachëv had already dropped his plan to change the Central Committee’s composition at the Conference; but he would make no further concessions to Ligachëv and insisted that the Conference should ratify his draft theses. And he had a final trick up his sleeve. Or rather he had it in his pocket. At the end of the Conference he pulled out a scrap of paper on which was scribbled his schedule for implementing the constitutional amendments. Without this, the central and local party apparatuses would have engaged in endless procrastination. Gorbachëv wanted the amendments to be in place by autumn 1988 and a general election to be held in spring 1989, followed by republican and local elections in the autumn. The internal reorganization of the party was set to occur by the end of 1988. Gorbachëv resumed his masterful tone: ‘That’s how the draft resolution comes out. It seems to me simply vitally necessary to accept this resolution, comrades.’22 The delegates gave their approval before being given a chance to think about the consequences. Change was coming, and coming fast.

  The Conference decisions embodied an important reorientation of Gorbachëv’s strategy. The party was being dropped as the vanguard of perestroika. Instead Gorbachëv wished to rule through a Congress of People’s Deputies elected by the people. The size and functions of the central party apparatus were sharply diminished at a Central Committee plenum held in September 1988. The same plenum left Vadim Medvedev instead of Ligachëv in charge of ideology and gave Yakovlev a supervisory role on the party’s behalf in international affairs. Gromyko was pushed into retirement in October and replaced as Chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet by Gorbachëv himself (who refrained from redesignating the office as President until March 1990). The Soviet Union remained a one-party state; but the party as such had abruptly lost much of its power.

  The Politburo was preoccupied by this domestic transformation. Not even Ligachëv – nor even, come to mention it, Yeltsin – badgered Gorbachëv about developments in Eastern Europe. The common feeling of Soviet political leaders was that the USSR’s affairs should have priority of attention. Gorbachëv had set down the general line. On coming to power, he had advised the various leaderships of Warsaw Pact countries that the USSR would no longer interfere in their affairs.23 But beyond this
his comments on Eastern Europe were of a general nature. In 1985 he held back from revealing his concerns about the German Democratic Republic and Romania. Subsequently he was to speak more fervently in favour of reforms throughout the region. But his working assumption was that the communist leaderships of each country in the region had to find their own most suitable mode of political and economic transformation. He studiously avoided instructing the Warsaw Pact countries to follow the specific model of the USSR.

  Gorbachëv held to his belief that the Soviet-style compound, once reconstituted, would flourish in Eastern Europe. He showed his priorities by his choice of places to visit and politicians to meet. In November 1985 he travelled to meet President Reagan in Geneva and in October 1986 they met again in Reykjavik. Not until April 1987 did Gorbachëv visit East Berlin and Prague. And in March 1988 he took a trip to Belgrade. In each of these East European capitals he was fêted by crowds. It was obvious to him and his entourage that people were using his public appearances as an opportunity to manifest their resentment of their own communist regimes.

  Nevertheless Gorbachëv, Shevardnadze and Yakovlev continued to shape policy towards Eastern Europe without offering direct criticism of their counterparts in these countries. They even avoided leaning hard on the parties and governments to replace their leaders. When the Bulgarian communist reformer Petar Mladenov approached Gorbachëv for advice as to how to replace the ageing hierarch Todor Zhivkov, Gorbachëv cut short the conversation.24 Gorbachëv would have preferred Mladenov to Zhivkov as Bulgaria’s leader; but the Soviet General Secretary wanted to avoid being seen to intervene. Thus he confirmed that what he had said confidentially to Warsaw Pact leaders in March 1985 had been intended seriously: non-interference was a reality. Even as late as his Prague trip, in April 1987, Gorbachëv fastidiously stated: ‘We are far from intending to call on anyone to imitate us.’25 So glasnost and perestroika were not commodities for obligatory export. But what, then, was meant to happen in Eastern Europe?

  Zhivkov and his fellow veterans in the region asked the same question. They hated Gorbachëv’s perestroika. Erich Honecker in the German Democratic Republic and Gustáv Husák in Czechoslovakia, who was nationally hated for doing the USSR’s dirty business for years, felt betrayed. Even János Kádár in Hungary was troubled by the prospect of the introduction of political and cultural freedoms on the current Soviet paradigm. Yet Gorbachëv still desisted from openly attacking them. He contented himself with destabilizing the political compounds and standing back to observe the consequences. He was like a trainee chemist running amok in a laboratory. He was dealing with ingredients which, once tampered with, became volatile and unpredictable. If there remained doubts that Gorbachëv would go further than Khrushchëv in reforming foreign policy, a glance at the disintegrating communist order in Eastern Europe dispelled them.

  It is mysterious how Gorbachëv persuaded himself that his version of ‘communism’ would emerge in a strengthened condition. The main explanation seems to be that he and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze simply overestimated the inherent attractiveness of their ideas. Probably, too, they were distracted by the cardinal significance they attached to relations with the USA. Negotiations with President Reagan took precedence over all other aspects of foreign policy. As the hidden dimensions of the USSR’s domestic problems became apparent to Gorbachëv, so did his need for a drastic reduction in Soviet military expenditure. In practical terms this could be achieved only if both superpowers agreed to an end to the ‘arms race’ between them.

  In October 1986 a summit meeting was held in Reykjavik, where Gorbachëv and Reagan moved towards an agreement for all nuclear weapons to be destroyed within ten years. But the Strategic Defence Initiative ultimately proved a sticking point when Reagan refused to accept the limits that Gorbachëv sought to place upon the testing programme. The two men parted, unable to look one another in the face. Yet Reagan continued to wish Gorbachëv well. The denunciations of Stalin and Brezhnev; Sakharov’s release from exile; the lightening grip on Eastern Europe: all these things counted in Gorbachëv’s favour among Western governments. So the amicable relations between the USA and the USSR survived the débâcle in Reykjavik. By December 1987 Gorbachëv and Reagan were able to co-sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington whereby all ground-based intermediate nuclear weapons would be destroyed. The Cold War was gradually being ended; it was not yet a full peace, but it was no mere truce either.

  In April 1988 the USSR announced its intention to make a swift, complete withdrawal of its force from Afghanistan. Constantly Gorbachëv emphasized his commitment to ‘new thinking’ in international relations. Despite the primacy of the USSR-USA relationship, moreover, he wanted also to remove tensions from the Soviet Union’s relations with other regions. Feelers were put out to the People’s Republic of China. In an overture to Western Europe he spoke of ‘the common European home’. On a visit to Vladivostok he spoke of the Pacific as ‘our common home’ and asked for friendlier links with Japan. If he had gone to the North Pole, he would no doubt have charmed the polar bears with his commitment to ‘the common Arctic home’.

  On 7 December 1988 Gorbachëv laid out the parameters of his foreign policy in a speech to the United Nations Assembly in New York. Marxist-Leninist concepts were tacitly rejected.26 The need for global peace, Gorbachëv asserted, transcended support for class struggle. The world had become an ‘interdependent’ place. ‘Common human values’ had to triumph. Unlike his book Perestroika, the speech scarcely mentioned Lenin. In order to authenticate his commitment to peace and reconciliation, Gorbachëv announced a unilateral cut in the size of the Soviet Army by a tenth; he also promised the recall of six divisions from Eastern Europe. He ascended to a peak of popularity abroad. Every agreement between Washington and Moscow had made global international relations safer and more controllable. If he had died in New York, he would already have secured a reputation as one of the great figures of the twentieth century.

  In the USSR, too, he had effected what had once been a virtually inconceivable metamorphosis of politics and culture. Citizen talked unto citizen. Dangerous opinions could be shared outside the narrow boundaries of the family or group of friends. Soviet public life had been uplifted. Hidden issues had been dragged into the open air. Institutional complacency had been disturbed. Personnel had been re-appointed, policies redesigned. The entire structure of state had been shaken, and Gorbachëv let it be known that more walls had to be brought down before he could properly rebuild as he wished.

  While battering the system in 1986–8, he hoped to change the Soviet order and secure popular approval and political legitimacy throughout society. He still aimed, in his confused fashion of thought, to preserve the Soviet Union and the one-party state. Lenin and the October Revolution were meant to remain publicly hallowed. Gorbachëv failed to understand that his actions were destabilising communism. Glasnost and perestroika were undermining the political and economic foundations of the Soviet order. Localism, nationalism, corruption, illegal private profiteering and distrust of official authority: all these phenomena, which had grown unchecked under the rule of Brezhnev, had been reinforced by the dismantlement of central controls undertaken by Gorbachëv. He was Russia’s ‘holy fool’, and like the ‘holy fool’ he did not know it.

  24

  Imploding Imperium (1989)

  By late 1988 the optimism of even Gorbachëv had been dented. As a full member of the Politburo since 1980 he had been privy to many statistics denied to the general public. But not even the Politburo had been given reliable information. Reports were automatically pruned of anything very discouraging, and anyway every local branch of administration misled the centre about the real situation.1

  There had been a constant official prescription that crises were the exclusive characteristic of capitalism and that they could not occur under ‘developed socialism’. In reality practically every index of economic performance was depressing. The technological gap between the US
SR and industrially-advanced capitalist countries was widening in every sector except the development of armaments: the Soviet Union had been left far behind in both information technology and biotechnology. The state budget in the last years of Brezhnev would have been massively insolvent if the government had not been able to derive revenues from domestic sales of vodka. The Ministry of Finance depended heavily on popular consumption of alcohol. It relied to an even greater extent on the export of petrochemical fuels at high prices. Oil and gas constituted eighteen per cent of exports in 1972 and fifty-four per cent by 1984.2

  The USSR resembled a Third World ex-colony in these and other respects. Agriculture remained so inefficient that two fifths of hard-currency expenditure on imports were for food.3 By the early 1980s, revenues earned by exports to the West could no longer be used mainly to buy advanced industrial technology and equipment: two fifths of the USSR’s hard-currency purchases abroad were of animal feed; and the purchase of energy by the countries of Eastern Europe at lower than the world-market prices deprived the USSR of the full value of its trade. Its very industrial achievements had occurred at grievous ecological expense. Large areas became unfit for human habitation. The Caspian Sea, Lake Baikal and the river Volga had been poisoned and the air in large cities such as Chelyabinsk was dangerous to breathe.

  Yet while fighting the cause of economic reforms, Gorbachëv had made many mistakes. First the anti-alcohol campaign and then the excessive investment in the machine-tool industry in 1985–6 had depleted state revenues without producing long-term gains in output. Nor was this the end of his mismanagement. The openness of the debate conducted by the authorities in 1987–8 on the need to raise retail prices had the undesired effect of inducing consumers into buying up and hoarding all manner of goods. Shortages in the shops were increasing. And the Law on the State Enterprise, by empowering workers to elect their own managers, led to a steep rise in wages. Payments to urban work-forces increased by nine per cent in 1988 and thirteen per cent in 1989.4 The Soviet budget was massively in deficit. Foreign indebtment and domestic inflation increased sharply; a decline in industrial output set in. The USSR was entering a state of economic emergency.