by Tony Judt
Much of the belligerence in Washington was just rhetoric—when Ronald Reagandemanded that ‘Poland be Poland’, or dubbed Moscow an ‘evil empire’ (in March 1983) he was playing to a domestic audience. The same president, after all, was initiating talks on nuclear arms reduction and offering to withdraw his own intermediate-range missiles if the Soviets dismantled theirs. But the United States was indeed embarking upon a major program of rearmament. In August 1981 Reagan announced that the US would stockpile neutron bombs. The MX missile system, in breach of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties, was announced in November 1982, followed five months later by the Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’), prompting a Soviet protest on the credible grounds that it breached the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Official military aid and clandestine support to Afghanistan and Central America was steadily augmented. In 1985 US defense spending rose by 6 percent, an unprecedented peacetime increase.276
Back in September 1981 Reagan had warned that without a verifiable nuclear arms agreement there would be an arms race and that if there were an arms race the US would win it. And so it proved. In retrospect, the American defense build-up would come to be seen as the cunningly crafted lever that bankrupted and ultimately broke the Soviet system. This, however, is not quite accurate. The Soviet Union could ill afford the armaments race upon which it had begun to embark as early as 1974. But bankruptcy alone would not have brought Communism to its knees.
The Second Cold War, and America’s public belligerence, undoubtedly increased the strains on a creaking and dysfunctional system. The Soviet Union had built a military machine that defeated Hitler, occupied half of Europe and matched the West weapon for weapon for forty years—but at a terrible price. At their peak, somewhere between 30-40 percent of Soviet resources were diverted to military spending, four to five times the American share. It was already obvious to many Soviet experts that their country could not indefinitely maintain such a burden. In the long run the economic bill for this generations-long military build-up must come due.
But in the short run at least, foreign tensions probably helped shore up the regime. The Soviet Union might be a continent-size Potemkin village—‘Upper Volta with missiles’ in Helmut Schmidt’s pithy description—but it did, after all, have those missiles and they conferred a certain status and respect upon their owners. Moreover the ageing Soviet leaders, KGB director Yuri Andropov in particular, took the American threat very seriously. Like their counterparts in Washington they really believed the other side was contemplating pre-emptive nuclear war. Reagan’s hard line, and in particular his Strategic Defense Initiative, made the old Soviet leadership even less disposed to compromise.
The real military dilemma facing the Soviet leaders was neither in Europe nor in Washington, but rather in Kabul. Pace Jimmy Carter’s late-found sensitivity to Soviet strategic ambitions, the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan did not open a new front in Communism’s strategic struggle with the free world. It was born, rather, of domestic anxiety. The 1979 Soviet census revealed an unprecedented increase in the (largely Muslim) population of Soviet Central Asia. In Soviet Kazakhstan and the republics abutting the Afghan frontier—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—the numbers were up by over 25 percent since 1970. Over the course of the following decade, whereas the Ukrainian population would grow by just 4 percent, that of Tajikistan increased by nearly half. European Russia, as it seemed to its leaders, was under demographic threat from its internal minorities: as the ailing Leonid Brezhnev acknowledged to his Party’s 26th Congress in February 1981, there were still ‘nationality questions’ that needed addressing.
Had the occupation of Afghanistan succeeded in installing a secure, friendly regime in Kabul, the Soviet leaders could have chalked up a double success. They would have re-affirmed Moscow’s faltering presence in the Middle East while sending a ‘clear message’ to a new generation of Soviet Muslims tempted by dreams of independence. But the Soviets, of course, failed in Afghanistan. Brezhnev, Gromyko and their generals ignored not just the lessons of Vietnam, repeating many of the Americans’ errors; they also forgot czarist Russia’s own failures in the same region eighty years earlier. Instead, the USSR’s disastrous attempt to sustain a puppet regime in unfamiliar, hostile territory aroused an intransigent opposition of guerrillas and zealots (mujahidin), armed and financed from abroad. And rather than ‘addressing’ the empire’s own nationality questions, it served only to inflame them: the Soviet-backed ‘Marxist’ authorities in Kabul did little for Moscow’s standing in the Islamic world, at home or abroad.
Afghanistan, in short, was a catastrophe for the Soviet Union. Its traumatic impact upon a generation of conscripted soldiers would emerge only later. By the early-1990s it was estimated that one in five veterans of the Afghan wars were confirmed alcoholics; in post-Soviet Russia many of the others, unable to find regular work, drifted into far-right nationalist organizations. But long before then even the Soviet leaders themselves could see the scale of their mis-step. In addition to the cost in men and matériel, the decade-long war of attrition in the Afghan mountains constituted an extended international humiliation. It excluded for the foreseeable future any further deployment of the Red Army beyond its frontiers: as Politburo member Yegor Ligachev would later acknowledge to the American journalist David Remnick, after Afghanistan there could no longer be any question of applying force in Eastern Europe.
It says something about the underlying fragility of the Soviet Union that it was so vulnerable to the impact of one—albeit spectacularly unsuccessful—neo-colonial adventure. But the disaster in Afghanistan, like the cost of the accelerating arms race of the early ‘80s, would not in itself have induced the collapse of the system. Sustained by, fear, inertia and the self-interest of the old men who ran it, Brezhnev’s ‘era of stagnation’ might have lasted indefinitely. Certainly there was no countervailing authority, no dissident movement—whether in the Soviet Union or its client states—that could have brought it low. Only a Communist could do that. And it was a Communist who did.
The guiding premise of the Communist project was its faith in the laws of history and the interests of the collectivity, which would always trump the motives and actions of individuals. It was thus ironically appropriate that its destiny should in the end have been determined by the fate of men. On November 10th 1982, at the age of 76, Leonid Brezhnev finally gave up the ghost, having long since come to resemble it. His successor, Andropov, was already 68 and not in good health. In just over a year, before he could implement any of the reforms that he planned, Andropov died and was replaced as General Secretary by Konstantin Chernenko, himself aged 72 and in such poor health that he could hardly complete his speech at Andropov’s funeral in February 1984. Thirteen months later he, too, was dead.
The death in quick succession of three old Communists, all of them born before World War One, was somehow symptomatic: the generation of Party leaders with first-hand memories of the Soviet Union’s Bolshevik origins, and whose lives and careers had been blighted by Stalin, was now disappearing. They had inherited and overseen an authoritarian, gerontocratic bureaucracy, whose overwhelming priority was its own survival: in the world that Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko had grown up in, merely dying in your bed was no insignificant accomplishment. Henceforth, however, that world would be run by younger men: no less instinctively authoritarian, but who would have little option but to address the problems of corruption, stagnation and inefficiency that plagued the Soviet system from top to bottom.
Chernenko’s successor, duly promoted to Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on March 11th 1985, was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Born in a village of the southern Stavropol region in 1931, he had been elected to the Central Committee at the age of 41. Now, just thirteen years later, he was at the head of the Party. Gorbachev was not only twenty years younger than his Soviet precursors: he was also younger than every American president until Bill Clinton. His rapid rise had been encourag
ed and facilitated by Andropov and he was widely seen as a likely reformer.
A reformer: but hardly a radical. Mikhail Gorbachev was very much an apparatchik . He had risen through the Party, from First Secretary of the Stavropol district Young Communists in 1956 through secretary of the regional state farms committee to member of the Supreme Soviet (elected in 1970). The new leader incarnated many of the sentiments of his Communist generation: never openly critical of the Party or its policies, he was nonetheless deeply affected and excited by the revelations of 1956, only to be let down by the mistakes of the Khrushchev era and disappointed at the repression and inertia of the Brezhnev decades that followed.
Mikhail Gorbachev was in this sense a classic reform Communist—it is no coincidence that he was close friends at the Moscow University Law Faculty in the early Fifties with Zdeněk Mlynář, who would go on to play a central role in the Prague Spring of 1968. But like all the reform Communists of his generation, Gorbachev was first a Communist and only then a reformer. As he explained to the French Communist newspaper L’Humanité in a February 1986 interview, the Communism of Lenin remained for him a fine and unsullied ideal. Stalinism? ‘A concept made up by opponents of Communism and used on a large scale to smear the Soviet Union and socialism as a whole’.277
No doubt that is what a Secretary General of the Soviet Party would say, even in 1986. But Gorbachev certainly believed it, and the reforms he initiated were quite consciously Leninist—or ‘Socialist’—in intent. Indeed Gorbachev may well have been more ideologically serious than some of his Soviet predecessors: it is not by chance that whereas Nikita Khrushchev had once famously declared that, were he British, he would vote Tory, Mikhail Gorbachev’s favorite foreign statesman was Felipe González of Spain, whose brand of social democracy the Soviet leader came in time to think of as closest to his own.
To the extent that hopes were vested in Gorbachev, this reflected more than anything the absence of any domestic opposition in the Soviet Union. Only the Party could clean up the mess it had made, and by good fortune the Party had elected as its leader a man with both the energy and the administrative experience to make the effort. For in addition to being unusually well educated and widely read for a senior Soviet bureaucrat, Gorbachev displayed a distinctively Leninist quality: he was willing to compromise his ideals in order to secure his goals.
There was nothing mysterious about the difficulties that Gorbachev had inherited as General Secretary of the CPSU. Impressed by what he saw during travels in Western Europe during the seventies, the new leader intended from the outset to devote his main efforts to an overhaul of the Soviet Union’s moribund economy and the intertwined inefficiencies and corruption of its top-heavy institutional apparatus. Foreign debt was rising steadily, as the international price of oil, the Soviet Union’s major export, fell from its late ‘70s peak: $30.7 billion by 1986, the debt would reach $54 billion by 1989. The economy, which had hardly grown through the course of the 1970s, was now actually shrinking: always qualitatively lagging, Soviet output was now quantatively inadequate as well. Arbitrarily-set central planningtargets, endemic shortages, supply bottlenecks and the absence of price or market indicators effectively paralyzed all initiative.
The starting point for ‘reform’ in such a system, as Hungarian and other Communist economists had long appreciated, was decentralization of pricing and decision-making. But this encountered near-insuperable obstacles. Outside of the Baltics almost no-one in the Soviet Union had any first-hand experience of independent farming or a market economy: of how to make something, to price it or find a buyer. Even after a 1986 Law on Individual Labour Activity authorized limited (small-scale) private enterprise, there were surprisingly few takers. Three years later there were still just 300,000 businesspeople in the whole Soviet Union, in a population of 290 million.
Moreover, any would-be economic reformer faced a chicken-egg dilemma. If economic reform began with decentralization of decision-making, or the granting of autonomy to local businesses and the abandoning of directives from afar, how were producers, managers or businessmen to function without a market? In the short-run there would be more shortages and bottlenecks, not fewer, as everyone retreated to regional self-sufficiency and even to a local barter economy. On the other hand a ‘market’ could not just be announced. The very word posed serious political risks in a society where ‘capitalism’ had been officially excoriated and abhorred for decades (Gorbachev himself avoided all mention of a market economy until late in 1987, and even then only ever spoke of a ‘socialist market’).
The reforming instinct was to compromise: to experiment with the creation—from above—of a few favored enterprises freed from bureaucratic encumbrances and assured a reliable supply of raw materials and skilled labor. These, it was reasoned, would serve as successful and even profitable models for other, similar, enterprises: the goal was controlled modernization and progressive adaptation to pricing and production in response to demand. But such an approach was foredoomed by its operating premise—that the authorities could create efficient businesses by administrative fiat.
By pumping scarce resources into a few model farms, mills, factories or services the Party was indeed able to forge temporarily viable and even notionally profitable units—but only with heavy subsidies and by starving less-favored operations elsewhere. The result was even more distortion and frustration. Meanwhile farm managers and local directors, uncertain of the way the wind was blowing, hedged their bets against the return of planned norms and stockpiled anything they could lay their hands on lest centralized controls tighten up again.
To Gorbachev’s conservative critics this was an old story. Every Soviet reform program since 1921 began the same way and ran out of steam for the same reasons, starting with Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Serious economic reforms implied the relaxation or abandonment of controls. Not only did this initially exacerbate the problems it was designed to solve, it meant just what it said: a loss of control. But Communism depended upon control—indeed Communism was control: control of the economy, control of knowledge, control of movement and opinion and people. Everything else was dialectics, and dialectics—as a veteran Communist explained to the young Jorge Semprún in Buchenwald—‘is the art and technique of always landing on your feet’.278
It soon became obvious to Gorbachev that to land on his feet as he wrestled with the Soviet economy he must accept that the Soviet economic conundrum could not be addressed in isolation. It was but a symptom of a larger problem. The Soviet Union was run by men who had a vested interest in the political and institutional levers of a command economy; its endemic minor absurdities and quotidian corruption were the very source of their authority and power. In order for the Party to reform the economy it would first have to reform itself.
This, too, was hardly a new idea—the periodic purges under Lenin and his successors had typically proclaimed similar objectives. But times had changed. The Soviet Union, however repressive and backward, was no longer a murderous totalitarian tyranny. Thanks to Khrushchev’s monumental housing projects most Soviet families now lived in their own apartments. Ugly and inefficient, these low-rent flats nonetheless afforded ordinary people a degree of privacy and security unknown to earlier generations: they were no longer so exposed to informers or likely to be betrayed to the authorities by their neighbors or their in-laws. The age of terror was over for most people and, for Gorbachev’s generation at least, a return to the time of mass arrests and party purges was unthinkable.
In order to break the stranglehold of the Party apparat and drive forward his plans for economic restructuring, then, the General Secretary resorted instead to ‘glasnost’—‘openness’: official encouragement for public discussion of a carefully restricted range of topics. By making people more aware of impending changes and heightening public expectation, Gorbachev would forge a lever with which he and his supporters might pry loose official opposition to his plans. This too was a vintage ploy, familiar to reforming
czars among others. But for Gorbachev the urgency of the need for official openness was brought home to him by the catastrophic events of April 26th 1986.
On that day, at 1.23 am, one of the four huge graphite reactors at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl (Ukraine) exploded, releasing into the atmosphere 120 million curies of radioactive matériel—more than one hundred times the radiation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The plume of atomic fallout was carried north-west into Western Europe and Scandinavia, reaching as far as Wales and Sweden and exposing an estimated five million people to its effects. In addition to the 30 emergency workers killed on the spot, some 30,000 people have since died from complications caused by exposure to radiation from Chernobyl, including more than 2,000 cases of thyroid cancer among residents in the immediate vicinity.
Chernobyl was not the Soviet Union’s first environmental disaster. At Cheliabinsk-40, a secret research site near Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, a nuclear waste tank exploded in 1957, severely polluting an area 8 km wide and 100 km long. 76 million cubic metres of radioactive waste poured into the Urals river system, contaminating it for decades. 10,000 people were eventually evacuated and 23 villages bulldozed. The reactor at Cheliabinsk was from the first generation of Soviet atomic constructions and had been built by slave labour in 1948-51.279
Other man-made environmental calamities on a comparable scale included the pollution of Lake Baikal; the destruction of the Aral Sea; the dumping in the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea of hundreds of thousands of tons of defunct atomic naval vessels and their radioactive contents; and the contamination by sulphur dioxide from nickel production of an area the size of Italy around Norilsk in Siberia. These and other ecological disasters were all the direct result of indifference, bad management and the Soviet ‘slash and burn’ approach to natural resources. They were born of a culture of secrecy. The Cheliabinsk-40 explosion was not officially acknowledged for many decades, even though it occurred within a few kilometers of a large city—the same city where, in 1979, several hundred people died of anthrax leaked from a biological weapons plant in the town centre.
