At the end of the opera, as the dead Godunov lies on the floor, the chorus implores the people to weep. And much to my surprise, the audience began to weep. Every Russian knows that the Time of Troubles is about to begin. Many years of civil war, in which the country is plunged into chaos at home and devoured by foreign powers, are upon them. And they take it personally.
They know that a young boyar will finally emerge in 1613 to establish the Romanov dynasty in the Kremlin. He and his heirs will expand the Russian Empire through wars abroad and brutal suppression of dissent at home. In doing so, the Russian identity and a sense of security will be built through conquest, religious orthodoxy, and authoritarian rule.
The vast landscape with no natural boundaries and certainly no oceans to protect it will eventually incorporate large parts of the Eurasian landmass. It will survive for three hundred years, until too many lost wars and internal revolt destroy tsarist rule and bring Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power. There will be more repression and more hardship. Yet the vast empire will be rebuilt, and within a few decades the Soviet Union will occupy essentially the same territory as the Russian Empire that it had destroyed.
Then twenty-five million Russians will die in World War II as another foreign power seeks to conquer. The Russian nation will rally and defeat the Nazis, extending Soviet power deep into Eastern Europe and establishing a “ring of socialist brother states” to protect its borders.1 And it will stand astride Europe and Asia as a nuclear superpower, feared across the globe, until on one December night in 1991, the flag of the Soviet Union will come down from the Kremlin for the last time. Fifteen republics of the old Soviet Union will become independent states. And Russia’s borders will be pushed back almost to those of Peter the Great.
The Russian language has a word, vopros, which means “question,” “issue,” or “problem.” Those who study Russia know that the country’s history has been characterized by a series of questions: Lenin’s famous challenge to his Bolshevik comrades, “What is to be Done?” A constant obsession among the people with “Who is to Blame?” And terrible geography and a troubled history that cause Russians to ask, “Who are we?” and “What is Russia?” These questions have defied answers throughout the centuries and provoke another: Can democracy ever take hold in this rough and vast land?
Every country has some aspect of its history that could be used to explain why democracy can’t succeed. Russia’s modern story has a familiar theme in failed democratic transitions around the world: weak institutions that never took hold against a backdrop of economic decline and social instability. Russia is not Mars and the Russians are not endowed with some unique, antidemocratic DNA.
Yet there is a facet of this story that is unique to Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union occurred contemporaneously with the birth of the new Russian state, which added a dimension of complexity and turmoil that was indeed different. The borders of the state, the identity of its people, and the system of economic and political governance were all in play at the same time. That is where the long, tortured history does matter and helps to explain why the transition to democracy was not a transition at all: It was the collapse of the Russian state within the collapse of the Soviet Empire. And in the end, it was too much to overcome.
The First Opening: “I Want the Soviet Union to Be a Normal Country”
Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to change the course of history by changing the Soviet Union. When he became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in March 1985, the political and economic systems were in deep crisis, and Moscow was mired in a costly war in Afghanistan, with America challenging Soviet power there and across the globe. President Ronald Reagan had launched huge defense budget increases and military-technological programs that Moscow could not match.2
And the country had seen three leadership changes in four years. The succession of aging Soviet leaders, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, dying one after another was a metaphor for the state of the Soviet Union itself.
The Russians used black humor to good effect to highlight the circumstances. A man tries to attend Brezhnev’s funeral, an old joke went.
“You need a ticket,” the guard tells him.
He returns for Andropov’s.
“Where’s your ticket?” the guard asks.
When the man comes for Chernenko’s service, he tells the guard, “It’s okay—I bought the season pass.”
The people and even their leaders referred to zastoi, stagnation, to describe their circumstances.
Gorbachev was a breath of fresh air. And the next four years produced surprise after surprise as he endeavored to throw off the yoke of Soviet zastoi. The term that he chose, perestroika, encompassed a host of new ideas, all intended to shake up the central planning of the economy and introduce, carefully at first, competition, price reform, and market forces.
Though the reforms were cautious, they were in fact pretty radical when one remembers the tenets of central planning on which the Soviet economy had rested for sixty-five years. Inputs and outputs were determined not by supply and demand but by a series of plans, adopted every five years by the government. Remarkably, the plan was intended to lay out every transaction within an economy serving nearly three hundred million people over eleven different time zones.
One year the plans for forks and towel racks got mixed up. Workers produced, nonetheless, according to the plans. No one stopped to notice that the towel racks were incredibly light and the forks unbelievably heavy. They were shipped to the stores, where Soviet consumers presumably made do with what they got. This was the nature of central planning, and it governed everything from the production of shoes, refrigerators, and automobiles to the provision of machine tools for heavy industry and armaments for the military.
One of the first reforms allowed for small, privately owned restaurants, which were called “cooperatives” to give them socialist cover. Sitting in one of them during a visit to Moscow in 1988, I was struck by how good the food was and the care with which it had been prepared. I had never seen pasta in the USSR or vegetables so fresh. When I was a graduate student there in 1979, it was common to enter a state-owned restaurant (they were all state-owned) and be told that there were no tables, this despite the fact that the place was absolutely empty.
If you were seated, the food was barely edible stale bread, chicken that was mostly skin, and whatever vegetables happened to be around—usually cucumbers and the occasional tomato. The staff mostly didn’t bother to try since there was no reward for good service or good food.
Gorbachev’s new entrepreneurs could not have been more different. They wanted customers, they needed customers, and they treated them well. I asked one of the owners about the freshness of the food. He drove every morning, he said, to a farm on the outskirts of the city, paid the farmer twice what the state would offer, and therefore got the very best produce available. Then he drove back to Moscow and he and his wife prepared the evening meal. They had to charge a little more, he explained, but customers kept coming.
There were other signs that a rudimentary form of capitalism was starting to take hold. In the past, every Soviet grocery store looked like every other grocery store: dingy, poorly lit, and with few products on the shelves. But when under perestroika the managers could “lease” the store and were allowed to keep some of what they made (though it wasn’t called profit), they began to work to gain customers. Window displays competed with one another to draw buyers in.
The reforms of perestroika were accompanied by glasnost, a series of political changes that were intended to reduce resistance to the economic overhaul. Gorbachev seemed to believe that he could safely remove the key constraints of the political system—propaganda and fear. He wanted, he told many people, including me, to make the Soviet Union a “normal country.”
Like the economic reforms, glasnost (roughly meaning “transparency”) started modestly. The Communist Party took the lead, publishing revisions of the whitewashe
d history of the country. For example, there had long been a debate about how many people perished in the purges of the 1930s under Josef Stalin. The British-American historian Robert Conquest was excoriated by academics for claiming in 1968 that twenty million had been killed. As late as the mid-1980s, some scholars described the number of victims as only “many thousands.”3 Yet when the official story was told, we learned that Conquest’s numbers were gruesomely accurate. Approximately one in three party members (and many ordinary citizens) were branded as traitors and purged during Stalin’s reign. Many were executed outright, while others were sent to Siberia and similar detention camps, where they died under the harsh labor conditions and a few, very few, lived to tell the story when glasnost made it safe to do so. Under glasnost, great dissident writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn who had chronicled the brutality of the Stalinist years (and beyond) were welcomed back into the good graces of their country.
The Soviets’ intention, though, had been to control the narrative—careful and selective in what was to be criticized and thrown aside and what was not. But that strategy would prove unsustainable, and criticism began to reach beyond history’s confines to the modern leadership.
During a monthlong visit to Moscow in 1988, I walked along the Old Arbat, a street not too far from the American ambassador’s residence. The cobblestoned pathway was filled as it had always been with people selling artifacts. I picked up a matryoshka (the little nesting dolls that contain ever smaller versions of themselves). This one was in Gorbachev’s likeness, and he held inside him each of his predecessors until one arrived finally at a tiny little Lenin. That’s odd, I thought. It seemed, well, disrespectful.
I continued down the pathway to a place where a street theater performance had drawn a large crowd. Struggling at first with the colloquial Russian, I soon realized that the comic was making fun of Gorbachev, his anti-alcohol campaign, and the Kremlin’s general incompetence.
Yet Russia had almost always (Stalin would have been an exception) allowed a little mild satirical criticism of the government. During tsarist times, writers like Nikolai Gogol made fun of stupid bureaucrats in satires like The Inspector General.4
This was different, though. Underneath, something more fundamental was taking place. The people of the Soviet Union were losing their fear of their rulers. Gorbachev believed that stripped of fear and the lies about history, the population would rally to the goodness of the country and embrace a new and vibrant future.
Instead, the political landscape kept shifting. What many assumed would simply be a loosening of constraints within the existing system soon became an attack on the system itself. Intellectual debate (and even television commentary) started to turn to forbidden subjects like whether the party could and should maintain a monopoly on power.
Gorbachev himself had an interesting view that I had a chance to discuss with him when he visited the United States in 1990. The Soviet Union, he thought, was not ready for a multiparty system. That wasn’t surprising. But then he noted that “factionalism” was already growing within the Soviet Communist Party and that would eventually be the basis for new parties. Well informed about the political histories of other countries, he reminded me that some of America’s greatest leaders (like George Washington) never belonged to a party. Japan had been ruled by one party (the LDP), but factions had provided turnover in the political leadership through elections, he said.
Moreover, Gorbachev said that eventually he saw a day when the Soviet Union’s political system would be the far-left part of a European spectrum of parties—communist, social democrat, conservative. This, he said, should have been the outcome of the Russian Revolution. The problem was that the political system had been hijacked by Josef Stalin and separated from Europe. I thought his was an interesting if flawed take on Soviet history. Yet it revealed that Gorbachev’s faith in a reformed Soviet Union was real.
Already in 1987, just two years after becoming party secretary, he had proposed plans for democratization of local government and the CPSU. That year, for the first time, local elections would feature more than one candidate in some constituencies. And though only about 4 percent of the elected deputies were from contested elections, some well-known people actually lost in their election bids. This carefully orchestrated change nonetheless began to stimulate others to push the envelope of reform. In May of the next year, a group of pro-democracy activists formed the Democratic Union. They “declared their organization to be a political party, the first opposition party to the CPSU in seventy years.”5
The pace of change accelerated throughout 1988 with the Gorbachev reforms targeting the role of the party itself in governance. There had always been parallel structures in the Soviet Union—the party and the government. For instance, Pravda (Truth) was the party’s newspaper and Izvestiya (the News) belonged to the government. Still, any high-ranking member of the government was also a member of the party, and there was little doubt that real authority rested in the Politburo of the CPSU and its general secretary.
Gorbachev proposed a presidential system for the USSR, changing the institutional basis for leading the country. Power would now rest in the president, not in the general secretary. The 1977 constitution was amended as well, creating a bicameral legislature with the Congress of People’s Deputies as the lower house and the Supreme Soviet as the upper house. This was an early attempt to create a legislature, theoretically independent of the party. (“Soviet” is the Russian word for “council,” so the name of this organization did not mean that it was a part of the Communist Party.)
The new rules also set “a freer and fairer process for elections.” As scholars have noted, “They were only partially free and competitive.”6 Yet in the elections the next year, dozens of independent and reform-minded candidates defeated party regulars. Then, in 1989, the Supreme Soviet banned censorship of the press.
Gorbachev took the subordination of the party to the government seriously—though in never standing for election to the newly empowered Soviet presidency, he forfeited a chance to create a popular mandate for the position and for himself. Nonetheless, he valued the trappings of the office. In planning the U.S.-Soviet summit for the summer of 1990, we were told that Gorbachev should no longer be referred to as “General Secretary of the Communist Party” but as “President Gorbachev.” And to prove the point, he arrived in Washington in 1990 in an Aeroflot plane proudly carrying the flag of the Soviet Union and the letters CCCP (the Russian abbreviation for the USSR).
He wanted to act like a president too. Standing in the office of George H. W. Bush at Camp David, Gorbachev expressed interest in the calendar that the president pulled out of his pocket. “That’s a smaller version of my schedule,” the president said. Apparently, Gorbachev asked who produced the schedule. “Well,” President Bush replied, “my scheduler who works with my chief of staff.” “I don’t have one of those,” Gorbachev said, not making clear whether he meant a scheduler or a chief of staff. Those of us on the White House staff had always wondered, because scheduling a call with Gorbachev was a nightmare. No one ever seemed to know where he was or what he was doing. He didn’t use the Communist Party apparatus, apparently not trusting it, and he didn’t yet have a presidential one.
President Bush dutifully asked if he should send some people to show the Soviet president how to run an office. Gorbachev readily accepted. And in the fall of 1990, Chief of Staff John Sununu led a delegation of American staffers to Moscow to help set up the Gorbachev presidency.
These changes were not intended to destroy the CPSU’s hold on power. Gorbachev intended to democratize and modernize the Communist Party, giving it greater legitimacy among the Soviet people. He seemed to believe that it could gain the trust of the people, no longer needing coercion and repression to command their loyalty. Yet by creating and allowing new institutional arrangements, he provided space for other forces that he could not control. And in short order these seemingly breathtaking changes were revealed to be to
o little too late. Pressures from the left (conservatives in Russian political parlance) and from the right (liberals) left little room for Gorbachev’s middle ground.
On the left, powerful figures like Politburo member Yegor Ligachev feared (correctly, it turns out) that the CPSU was committing suicide. Ligachev was stripped of responsibility for ideological matters as a result of his views and put in charge of agriculture. Everyone understood the significance of that, since the portfolio had often been a sign of political exile. Still, open criticism in the Soviet press and the appearance of reactionary factions within the Party itself grew more urgent and more common. But Gorbachev pushed ahead, declaring at the 28th Party Congress in July 1990 that the Politburo of the Party would have no role in governing the country. Earlier that year, Gorbachev engineered an amendment to Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution that eliminated the CPSU’s monopoly on power and allowed the creation of multiple parties.
While these decisions terrified conservatives, they were not radical enough for the liberals, led by Boris Yeltsin. He had been expelled from the Politburo three years earlier and in July 1990 abruptly resigned his membership in the CPSU.
From that time on, he would lead the pro-democratic forces and he would do so in a way that created another, ultimately fatal fissure in the political landscape. Yeltsin would begin to advocate for loosening the ties of the republics within the Soviet Union itself, insisting on something closer to confederation than a unitary state. Ironically, Yeltsin used a provision of the Soviet constitution that gave the republics the right to secede. No one had ever thought it important, but it shows that sometimes a law on the books can suddenly have new resonance in changed circumstances.
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