Not all developments were so high minded. Salacious booklets such as The Lovers of Catherine II were sold from stalls at Moscow metro stations; and publishing houses increasingly preferred to invest in Agatha Christie and John Le Carré than in the Russian literary classics. Russia was also acquiring a paperback trade in works on astrology, pet-rearing, horticulture, crossword puzzles and tarot cards. Pop music was broadcast on TV stations, and Paul McCartney recorded a special album for the Soviet market. Meanwhile Russian rock stars showed greater willingness to comment on issues of the day than their Western models. Youth did not revolt against authority; it despised and ignored it. Indeed citizens, both young and old, treated politics as a spectator sport but not a process deserving their participation. The quest for private pleasure outdid the zeal for public service.
This dispiriting situation was readily explicable. People were exhausted by queues, food shortages and administrative chaos. Life was getting more arduous day by day. Despite this, Gorbachëv was still the country’s most popular politician (and it was not until mid-1990 that Yeltsin overtook him in this respect).19 Yet politicians generally were not respected. Gorbachëv inadvertently added to the effect by his tactics: he held no trials of oppressive rulers of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; even the torturers, false delators and political killers of the 1930s and 1940s escaped with only verbal criticism. The pensions and honours of the victimizers remained untouched, and Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich lived out their old age without interference: Molotov even had his party membership restored to him. The result was that while the mass media blared out their critique of past abuses in general terms, little was changed in the lives of the surviving victims. Historical unfairness remained in place. The practical and mental catharsis of Soviet society had been only half accomplished.
No wonder that most people remained quietly cynical. They had their own quiet, private aspirations. After years of being bored by stuffy Marxism-Leninism, their ideal of Freedom was not the freedom to join a political party and attend open meetings on city squares. They wanted to stay at home and enjoy the freedom to be frivolous, apolitical, unmobilized.
Such a desire was especially prevalent in Russia; but things stood somewhat differently in the other Soviet republics. Middle-aged citizens in the Baltic region could remember a time when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been independent states. This was the case only for the very elderly in the Transcaucasus. Nevertheless there was trouble in store for the Kremlin in all republics. Each of them had been territorially demarcated according to ethnic demography; each of them had enhanced its sense of individuality by emphasizing the importance of the local national language and culture. The Leninist mode of organizing a state of many nations was at last displaying its basic practical weakness. Everywhere nationalist dissent was on the rise. Its leaders were succeeding in convincing their local electorates that the problems of their respective nation were insoluble unless accompanied by economic and administrative reforms.
Few Russians felt similarly uncomfortable to be living in the USSR; and, to a greater extent than non-Russians, they tended to worry lest a further reform of the economy might deprive them of such state-provided welfare as was currently available. Moreover, ethnic Russians were numerically predominant throughout the traditional institutions of the Soviet state. In party, government and armed forces they held most of the key positions. In the newer institutions, by contrasts, they were beginning to lose out. Only forty-six per cent of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, and indeed only a third of the members of the Politburo itself when it underwent reform in 1990, were ethnic Russians.20
A further peculiarity of Russians, in comparison with the other nations of the Soviet Union, was the highly contradictory mélange of ideas that came from their cultural figures. Gorbachëv’s supporters no longer went unchallenged in their propagation of reformist communism. Several artistic and political works also appeared which attacked communism of whatever type. For example, Vasili Grossmann’s novel on the Soviet past, Forever Flowing, was serialized in a literary journal. So, too, was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s history of the labour-camp system, The Gulag Archipelago. Both works assailed Lenin and Stalin with equal intensity. A film was made of the labour camp on the White Sea island of Solovki, which was filled with political prisoners from the 1920s. A sensation was caused, too, by Vladimir Soloukhin’s Reading Lenin. By analysing volume thirty-eight of the fifth edition of Lenin’s collected works, Soloukhin showed Lenin to have been a state terrorist from the first year of Soviet government.
An attempt was made by officially-approved professional historians to repulse the assault on Leninism. But most of such historians before 1985 had put political subservience before service to historical truth. Even those among them who had experienced official disfavour under Brezhnev obtained little popularity with the reading public. Communism in general was falling into ever greater disrepute, and the official fanfares for Lenin, Bukharin and the New Economic Policy were treated as fantasias on a tired theme.
Gorbachëv’s measures of political democratization inevitably added to his difficulties. The Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet had the right to supervise and veto the activities of government – and he encouraged them to use the right. High politics came under open critical scrutiny. The Tbilisi massacre was the first subject of several exhaustive investigations. Hardly a day passed without ministers and other high-ranking state officials, including even Ryzhkov, being harangued when they spoke to the Congress; and, to their chagrin, Gorbachëv did little to protect them. The result was less happy than he assumed. Unified central executive authority was steadily weakened and traditional structures were dismantled without the creation of robust substitutes. Policies were sanctioned with no bodies ready and able to impose them.21
Furthermore, the reorganizations were unaccompanied by a clear demarcation of powers. By 1989 Gorbachëv was talking a lot about the need for a ‘law-based state’, and universal civil rights were added to his set of objectives. But as yet there was no law on press freedom. Far from it: when in May 1989 Arguments and Facts published an inaccurate opinion poll indicating that his popularity had plummeted, Gorbachëv summoned editor Vladislav Starkov and threatened to have him sacked. The fact that Gorbachëv left Starkov in post was a credit to his self-restraint, not a sign of the practical limits of his power.22
Others displayed no such caution. Public organizations had never had greater latitude to press for their interests. Local party secretaries, republican chiefs, factory managers, generals, scholars and KGB chiefs had belonged to the USSR’s representative state organs since the Civil War. But previously they had had little autonomy from the central political leadership. The Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet gave these various figures a chance to speak their mind. In particular, Colonel Viktor Alksnis complained about the deterioration in the prestige and material conditions of Soviet armed forces after the final, humiliating withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan. Alksnis addressed the Congress as an individual, but he rightly claimed that other officers in the Soviet Army shared his feelings. Such tirades at least had the merit of frankness. Above all, they increased political awareness amidst a population that had been starved of information judged injurious to the regime.
The old élites were rallying to defend themselves. The humiliation of the communist party in the Congress elections was only partial: local communist apparatuses remained largely in place and aimed to retain their authority. Other public institutions, too, had scarcely been touched by the campaign of propaganda to make them more responsive to society’s demands. The personnel and structures of communism had survived the storms of perestroika largely intact.
Of course, important additions had been made to the wings of the USSR’s political edifice. The KGB, while not dismantling its great network of informers, was no longer arresting citizens for lawful acts of political dissent. An independent press of sorts had been constructed. W
hereas Arguments and Facts and Ogonëk had been established by the Soviet state, the journal Glasnost arose from the initiative of Sergei Grigoryants. Moreover, the cultural intelligentsia was writing, painting and composing in a liberated mood; and its organizations reflected the diversity of its objectives. Thus the Union of Writers of the RSFSR acted more or less as a megaphone for Russian nationalism. Similarly, the party and governmental machines in the non-Russian republics were consolidating themselves as instruments of the aspirations of the local majority nationality. All this constituted a menace to Gorbachëv’s ultimate purposes. Interest groups, organizations and territorial administrations functioned with scant interference; and most of them either disliked reform or wanted a type of reform different from Gorbachëv’s vision.
The trend had an arithmetical precision. The greater the distance from Moscow, the bolder were nations in repudiating the Kremlin’s overlordship. The communist regimes of Eastern Europe had been put on notice that they would have to fend politically for themselves without reliance on the Soviet Army. This knowledge had been kept secret from the populations of the same states. If the news had got out, there would have been instantaneous revolts against the existing communist regimes. No wonder the Soviet General Secretary was seen by his foreign Marxist-Leninist counterparts as a dangerous subversive.
This was also the viewpoint on him taken by fellow central leaders in the USSR. Rebelliousness and inter-ethnic conflict were on the rise in non-Russian republics. In June 1989 there were riots between Uzbeks and Meshketian Turks in Uzbekistan. In the following months there was violence among other national groups in Georgia, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Gorbachëv appeared on television to declare that the stability of the state was under threat. In the Georgian Soviet republic there was violence between Georgians and Abkhazians as well as marches in Tbilisi in favour of Georgian national independence. In August a dramatic protest occurred in the three Baltic republics when a human chain was formed by one million people joining hands across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in commemorative protest against the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Yet Gorbachëv refused to contemplate the possibility of the Baltic republics seceding from the USSR. Ultimately, he assumed, their citizens would perceive their economic interests as being best served by their republics remaining within the Union.23
In September 1989 the Ukrainian giant stirred at last with the inauguration of Rukh. At this Gorbachëv panicked, flew to Kiev and replaced Shcherbytskiy with the more flexible Vladimir Ivashko. Evidently Gorbachëv recognized that the clamp-down on Ukrainian national self-expression had begun to cause more problems than it solved. At this moment of choice he preferred concession to confrontation; but thereby he also took another step towards the disintegration of the USSR. Neither of the alternatives offered Gorbachëv a congenial prospect.
Movement occurred in the same direction for the rest of the year. In October the Latvian Popular Front demanded state independence; in November the Lithuanian government itself decided to hold a referendum on the question. Next month the Communist Party of Lithuania, concerned lest it might lose every vestige of popularity, declared its exodus from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Tensions increased between resident Russians and the majority nationalities in the Baltic republics: the Estonian proposals for a linguistic qualification for citizenship of Estonia were especially contentious. In Estonia and Latvia, furthermore, the nationalist groupings won elections by a handsome margin. The situation was even graver for Gorbachëv in the Transcaucasus. In December 1989 the Armenian Supreme Soviet voted to incorporate Nagorny Karabakh into the Armenian republic. In January 1990 fighting broke out in the Azerbaijani capital Baku. The Soviet Army was sent to restore order, and attacked the premises of the Azerbaijani Popular Front.
But the deployment of the armed forces did not deter trouble elsewhere: inter-ethnic carnage was already being reported from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in February. The possibility that the USSR might implode under these pressures began to be discussed in the press. The more rhetorical of politicians warned against any actions that might lead eventually to civil war across the USSR.
This worry distracted the minds of Soviet citizens from foreign affairs. If it had not been for the preoccupations of the domestic economic, political and national environment, attention would have been paid to events of epochal importance in Eastern Europe. Since the defeat of Hitler in 1945 the Soviet Army had maintained a vast zone of political and economic dominion and military security in the countries to the east of the river Elbe. Every VE-Day after 1945 had been celebrated on the assumption that this zone was an inviolable feature of the European map. Over the years of his power Gorbachëv had indicated, in language that became ever more explicit, that the peoples of the Warsaw Pact countries should be empowered to choose their political system for themselves. But even he was astonished by the rapidity with which communist governments collapsed in country after country in the second half of 1989.
The process began in Poland. After an agreement to submit themselves to contested elections, the communists had been soundly defeated in June, and in August meekly joined a coalition under the anti-communist Tadeusz Mazowiecki. In September the Hungarian communist government allowed tens of thousands of East Germans to cross its frontiers and seek asylum in Austria; in October the ageing Erich Honecker was sacked as party boss in the German Democratic Republic. Within weeks the reformed communist leadership was permitting its citizens unimpeded transit to the Federal Republic of Germany. Meanwhile Todor Zhivkov retired in Bulgaria. The Czechoslovak government, too, was replaced. In the last month of this remarkable year, President Gustáv Husák resigned and the dissenting dramatist Vacláv Havel was elected by parliament to take his place (while the communist leader of the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968, Alexander Dubček, returned to head the Federal Assembly).
The dominoes were tumbling fast. The fall of any communist regime made the surviving ones more susceptible to collapse. And yet Pravda noted the succession of events with studied calmness. Such reportage was the sharpest sign to date that Gorbachëv was predominantly engaged with Soviet internal affairs and would pull no chestnuts out of the fire for the USSR’s post-war allies. Gorbachëv had not intended to preside over the end of communism in Eastern Europe; but he did not act to prevent the last scenes in the drama from being enacted.
Events in Romania took a dramatic turn in December 1989, when Nicolae Ceaus¸escu appeared on his palace balcony to address a loyal Bucharest crowd. Ceaus¸escu was challenged in a scene akin to a spaghetti Western movie: he was catcalled. When he failed to intimidate the assembled crowd, he leapt into a helicopter before trying to flee the country in a fast-driven limousine; but he was captured and summarily tried and executed. Gorbachëv had often confidentially expressed his horror of the Romanian terror-regime; indeed he had tried, just a few days earlier in a Moscow meeting with Ceaus¸escu, to persuade him that his regime would eventually incur the people’s wrath. But Ceaus¸escu had spurned him, making little attempt to hide his disapproval of the USSR’s perestroika. The grotesque finale to communism in Romania was thought by Gorbachëv to settle their argument in his own favour.
It was a remarkable denouement. At the beginning of 1989 most countries in Europe east of the river Elbe were ruled by communists. At the year’s end the sole remaining European communist state to the west of the USSR was Albania – and Albania had been hostile to the USSR since Khrushchëv’s period of office.
Gorbachëv could have sent the Soviet Army to suppress the anticommunist movements earlier in the year. He would, needless to emphasize, have paid a great economic price that the USSR could not afford. He would also have forfeited the diplomatic support he had from Western countries; certainly he would have reinstigated tensions with the USA, which would have led to yet another race to construct new forms of nuclear arms. And yet any one of Gorbachëv’s predecessors would not have blanched at a resumption of the Cold War. That he chose to avoid such a course was among his momentous
choices. It took exceptional determination to stand by policies involving the minimum of violence when this resulted in the demise not only of old-style communism but even of those communist leaders in Eastern Europe who were his political allies. He had not set out to achieve this end; rather it was the unwilled result of his activity as it developed. But great was the work of his hands.
25
Hail and Farewell (1990–1991)
Gorbachëv wanted to prevent the disappearance of communist leaderships in Eastern Europe being repeated in the USSR. His willingness to confront problems was undeniable. If he had continued with the official policies in force when he came to power, the Politburo would only have aggravated the problems of economic decline, political conflict, national embitterment, social alienation and environmental degradation. Soviet leaders might well have reverted to a clumsy version of Stalinism or even have stumbled into a clash with the USA and risked the outbreak of a Third World War.
Instead Gorbachëv had been working at the renewal of the Soviet compound by means of reform. But reform implies a series of modifications which leave the basic political, economic and social order intact. In fact Gorbachëv’s rule already involved change of a much greater dimension. Several of the principal features of communism in the USSR were being undermined by his activity: the one-party state, the mono-ideological controls, the militant atheism, the centralized administration, the state economic monopoly and the suspendability of law. Perestroika was no longer a project for partial alterations but for total transformation. It was scarcely surprising that many Soviet leaders, including several who owed him their promotion to the Politburo, were aghast. Gorbachëv was no longer what he had claimed to be. By his actions, if not by his deliberate purpose, he was abetting the disintegration of the existing compound.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 56
