For his protégés, Andropov’s passing was a tragic loss for the USSR. Even the dissenter Roy Medvedev felt that great changes had been in prospect under Andropov.18 This was excessive optimism. It is true that Andropov had succeeded in sacking one fifth of province-level party first secretaries – a vital process of replacement if ever the Brezhnevite complacency was to be dispelled.19 Furthermore, industrial output was five per cent higher in 1983 than in the previous year; and the value of agricultural production rose by seven per cent.20 Yet although the duration of Andropov’s tenure had not been enough for him to take a grip on economic policies, he was far too traditionalist to be able to do much more than he had already accomplished.
After kidney-patient Andropov it was Chernenko, already debilitated by emphysema, who became General Secretary. Gorbachëv had to be content with being his informal deputy. Chernenko was not the most highly qualified of General Secretaries. Flimsily-educated and uninspiring, he had served in lowly party ranks until he met Brezhnev in Moldavia in the early 1950s. After years of service as Brezhnev’s personal aide, he was rewarded by being made a Central Committee Secretary in 1976 and a full Politburo member two years later. His talents had never stretched beyond those of a competent office manager and his General Secretaryship was notable for woeful conservatism. The sole change to the composition of the Politburo occurred with the death of Ustinov in December 1984 – and such was the disarray of the central party leadership that Ustinov was not replaced. Chernenko’s single innovation in policy was his approval of an ecologically pernicious scheme to turn several north-flowing Siberian rivers down south towards the Soviet republics of central Asia.
His Politburo colleagues had chosen Chernenko as their General Secretary because his frailty would enable them to keep their own posts and to end Andropov’s anti-corruption campaign. The Central Committee, being packed with persons promoted by Brezhnev, did not object to this objective. But the choice of Chernenko caused concern. Chernenko was left in no doubt about the contempt felt for him by members of the Central Committee when they refrained from giving him the conventional ovation after his promotion to General Secretary.21 But Chernenko was old, infirm and losing the will to live, much less to avenge himself for such humiliation.
It was Gorbachëv who led the Politburo and the Secretariat during Chernenko’s incapacitation. Behind the scenes, moreover, Gorbachëv and Ryzhkov continued to elaborate those measures for economic regeneration demanded of them by Andropov.22 Other Politburo members were disconcerted by Gorbachëv’s status and influence. Tikhonov persistently tried to organize opposition to him; and Viktor Grishin decided to enhance his own chances of succeeding Chernenko by arranging for a TV film to be made of Chernenko and himself. Chernenko was so ill that he lacked the presence of mind to shoo Grishin away. Another of Gorbachëv’s rivals was Politburo member and former Leningrad party first secretary Grigori Romanov; and, unlike the septuagenarian Grishin, Romanov was a fit politician in his late fifties. Both Grishin and Romanov were hostile to proposals of reform and wished to prevent Gorbachëv from becoming General Secretary.
Chernenko died on 10 March 1985. If Brezhnev’s funeral had been distinguished by farce when the coffin slipped out of the bearers’ grasp at the last moment, Chernenko’s was not memorable even for this. Opinion in the party, in the country and around the world sighed for a Soviet leader who was not physically incapacitated.
Yet it was not the world nor even the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a whole but the Politburo that would be deciding the matter at 2 p.m. on 11 March.23 Behind the scenes Ligachëv was organizing provincial party secretaries to speak in Gorbachëv’s favour at the Central Committee. In the event Gorbachëv was unopposed. Even Tikhonov and Grishin spoke in his favour. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was chairing the session and was unstinting in his praise of Gorbachëv. There were the usual rumours of conspiracy. It was noted, for example, that Volodymyr Shcherbytskiy, who was not among Gorbachëv’s admirers, had found it impossible to find an Aeroflot jet to fly him back from the USA for the Politburo meeting. But the reality was that no one in the Politburo was willing to stand against Gorbachëv. The Politburo’s unanimous choice was to be announced to the Central Committee plenum in the early evening.
At the plenum, Gromyko paid tribute to Gorbachëv’s talent and dependability: little did he know that Gorbachëv would soon want rid of him.24 Whatever else he was, Gorbachëv was a brilliant dissimulator: he had attended the court of Leonid Brezhnev and managed to avoid seeming to be an unsettling reformer. Only under Andropov and Chernenko had he allowed his mask to slip a little. In a speech in December 1984 he used several words soon to be associated with radicalism: ‘acceleration’, ‘the human factor’, ‘stagnation’ and even ‘glasnost’ and ‘democratization’.25 But nobody in the Politburo, not even Gorbachëv himself, had a presentiment of the momentous consequences of the decision to select him as General Secretary.
Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachëv had been born in 1931 and brought up in Privolnoe, a small village of Stavropol region in southern Russia. His family had been peasants for generations. Relatives of Gorbachëv had been persecuted in the course of mass agricultural collectivization. One of his grandfathers, who was a rural official, was arrested; the other was exiled for a time. He had a straitened childhood on the new kolkhoz, especially under the Nazi occupation in 1942–3; his memory of his early life was far from sentimental: ‘Mud huts, earthen floor, no beds.’26 But he survived. During and after the war Gorbachëv worked in the fields like the other village youths, and in 1949 his industriousness was rewarded with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. He was highly intelligent, receiving a silver medal for his academic achievements at the local school and gained a place in the Faculty of Jurisprudence at Moscow State University.
He graduated in 1955 with first-class marks, but recently-introduced rules prevented him from working for the USSR Procuracy in Moscow.27 He therefore dropped his plans for a career in the law and opted to enter politics. Returning to Stavropol, he joined the apparatus of the Komsomol and then the party. Two decades of solid organizational work followed for Gorbachëv and his wife Raisa. He enjoyed rapid promotion. By 1966 he was heading the City Party Committee and four years later was entrusted with the leadership of the entire Stavropol Region. He was not yet forty years old and had joined an élite whose main characteristic was its advanced age. Both he and his wife were ambitious. A story is told that they had the same dream one night. Both had a vision of him clambering up out of a deep, dark well and striding out along a broad highway under a bright sky. Gorbachëv was perplexed as to its significance. Raisa unhesitatingly affirmed that it meant that her husband was destined to be ‘a great man’.28
Khrushchëv’s closed-session speech to the Twentieth Party Congress had given him hope that reform was possible in the USSR.29 But he kept quiet about these thoughts except amidst his family and with his most trusted friends. In any case, he was vague in his own mind about the country’s needs. Like many of his contemporaries, he wanted reform but had yet to identify its desirable ingredients for himself.30
In the meantime he set out to impress the central leaders who visited the holiday resorts adjacent to Stavropol; and he was making a name for himself by his attempts to introduce just a little novelty to the organization of the region’s kolkhozes. By virtue of his post in the regional party committee in 1971 he was awarded Central Committee membership. In 1978 he was summoned to the capital to lead the Agricultural Department in the Secretariat. Next year he became a Politburo candidate member and in 1980 a full member. Two years later he was confident enough to propose the establishment of a State Agro-Industrial Committee. This was a cumbersome scheme to facilitate the expansion of farm output mainly by means of institutional reorganization. It was hardly a radical reform. But it was criticized by Tikhonov, Kosygin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, as an attempt to form ‘a second government’, and the Politburo rejected it. Gorbachëv
was learning the hard way about the strength of vested interests at the summit of Soviet politics.31
His career anyway did not suffer: the preferment he enjoyed under Brezhnev was strengthened by Andropov. Word had got around that Gorbachëv was a man of outstanding talent. He was not a theorist, but his openness to argument was attractive to the intellectual consultants who had advised Andropov. So, too, was Gorbachëv’s reputation as a decisive boss. He had not in fact achieved much for agriculture either in Stavropol or in Moscow; but he was given the benefit of the doubt: he could not do what Brezhnev would not have allowed.
Gorbachëv’s practical ideas in 1985 were as yet very limited in scope. He resumed the economic and disciplinary orientation set by Andropov; he also gave priority to changes of personnel.32 But already he had certain assumptions that went beyond Andropovism. In the 1970s he had visited Italy, Belgium and West Germany in official delegations and taken a three-week car-touring holiday in France with Raisa. The impression on him was profound. He learned that capitalism was not a moribund economic system and that, despite many defects, it offered many sections of its societies a breadth of material goods unrivalled in the USSR.33 He had also been rethinking his attitude to the Soviet order since 1983, when he had studied Lenin’s last works on bureaucracy and had come to understand that the bureaucratic problems of the 1920s had not disappeared.34 His private assumptions and understandings would at last have room to develop into policies when Gorbachëv became General Secretary.
By temperament he was a gambler, and the very fact that he had not elaborated his strategy left him open to suggestions to take ever larger risks. The night before going to the Politburo meeting which selected him as General Secretary, he stated: ‘Life can’t be lived like this any longer.’35 But he said this solely to his wife Raisa, in the garden of their dacha where he could be confident of not being bugged.36 He could not afford to be too frank about his intention to repudiate Brezhnev’s heritage: on 11 March 1985 he soothed the Central Committee with his statement that policies did not need changing.37 Yet on the quiet he was looking for substantial changes. He had no detailed objectives, but he was impatient to achieve something fast.
His first task was to assemble a group of influential supporters. At the next Central Committee plenum, on 23 April 1985, he gave favour to fellow protégés of Andropov: Central Committee Secretaries Ryzhkov and Ligachëv were promoted to full membership of the Politburo, and KGB chairman Viktor Chebrikov rose from being candidate to full member of the Politburo. When the Central Committee met again in July, two local party leaders, Lev Zaikov of Leningrad and Boris Yeltsin of Sverdlovsk, were appointed to the Secretariat. Romanov, Gorbachëv’s chief rival of pre-pensionable age, was sacked from the Politburo; and Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgian communist party leader and a friend of Gorbachëv, was raised from candidate to full Politburo membership. These were persons who shared his sense of urgency. A year before, in conversation with Gorbachëv on Pitsunda beach in Crimea, Shevardnadze had put their common approach into a few blunt words: ‘Everything’s rotten. There must be change.’38
Shevardnadze was then appointed Soviet Foreign Minister in place of Gromyko. For Gromyko at the age of seventy-six there was the consolation of being made Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium and thereby becoming head of state; but Gorbachëv was not so generous towards the eighty-year-old Nikolai Tikhonov, who was compelled to retire and whose job was taken by Nikolai Ryzhkov. In October the leadership of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) passed from Nikolai Baibakov, who had held the post for two decades, to Nikolai Talyzin.
Already Gorbachëv had removed the most powerful of Brezhnev’s cronies, got rid of Romanov and installed a group of experienced administrators at the centre who were dedicated to the regeneration of the Soviet economy. Within months he had accomplished a turnover of personnel that Stalin, Khrushchëv and Brezhnev had taken years to carry out. The average age of the Politburo fell from sixty-nine years at the end of 1980 to sixty-four by the end of 1985.39 Another aspect of change was the background of the supreme party leadership. All the newcomers, unlike many leaders in Brezhnev’s generation, had completed at least their secondary education. Most of them also had until recently lived in ‘the localities’. Yeltsin had worked for most of his career in the Urals, Ligachëv in mid-Siberia, Shevardnadze in Georgia. They brought to the capital an awareness of day-to-day provincial actuality. They were confident that collectively they could solve the country’s problems.
Gorbachëv was the most worldly-wise of all of them. His ability to adjust his style to unfamiliar surroundings astonished foreign politicians. In 1984 the British Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher declared: ‘I like Mr Gorbachëv. We can do business together.’40 Gorbachëv and his wife were a vivacious couple, and Raisa’s wardrobe excited interest in Western newspapers. The new General Secretary transparently wanted to govern a USSR which no longer invited hatred and ridicule beyond its frontiers.
But how were he and his colleagues in the Kremlin going to achieve this? Initially they followed Andropov’s general line and concentrated efforts upon the economy. Discipline and order also returned to the agenda. The Politburo, persuaded by Ligachëv, even took the risk of discouraging alcohol consumption. Threefold increases in the price of vodka were decreed and vineyards were hacked down in Georgia, Moldavia and Ukraine. This was not the last time that Gorbachëv fell out of touch with social opinion: on this occasion he was nicknamed the Mineral Secretary for asserting the superiority of mineral water over booze. Yet he was mocked more than resented. Nearly all Soviet citizens were delighted by his unceremonial dumping of the Brezhnevite time-servers. He was also admired for his visits to cities outside Moscow and his willingness to engage bystanders in conversation. Pravda editorials became as compulsive reading as the sport, chess and quizzes at the back of the newspaper.
Gorbachëv, whose main economic slogan was ‘acceleration’, looked like a man in a hurry. But actual measures were slower to emerge. His first move was made in November 1985, when a super-ministry for the cultivation and processing of foodstuffs was formed along the lines unsuccessfully proposed by Gorbachëv in Brezhnev’s time. Named as the State Committee for the Agro-Industrial Complex (Gosagroprom), it was to be led by one of Gorbachëv’s political clients, Vsevolod Murakhovski. This had been one of Gorbachëv’s pet projects in Brezhnev’s lifetime, but until he became General Secretary he encountered resistance from the Council of Ministers.41 Now he could realize his wishes.
But this meant he was aiming to renovate Soviet agriculture chiefly by reorganizing its central governmental institutions. As he should have known from Zaslavskaya’s Novosibirsk Report in 1983, the regeneration of the economy required much more than administrative measures. Kolkhozniks and sovkhozniks remained subject to a system of peremptory orders and of weak material incentives; and they had no positive influence over the running of the collective farm: they were bossed by farm chairmen and the chairmen themselves were bossed by Moscow. Gosagroprom was not going to dislodge a single brick in this bureaucratic wall. Quite the opposite: by giving additional authority to a central body such as Gosagroprom, Gorbachëv would increase the wall’s solidity. The General Secretary acted as if a group of new officials, a structural experiment and a campaign of public exhortation would do the trick; his orientation was centralist, hierarchical, administrative and command-based.
If agriculture was the economy’s Achilles’ heel, industry was its lacerated knee. In Gorbachëv’s first months there was no equivalent reorganization of the manufacturing sector. Nevertheless a re-jigging of budgetary aims took place. The Twelfth Five-Year Plan was scheduled to begin in 1986, and the Politburo declared that an increase in the quantity and quality of industrial output required the maximizing of investment in the machine-building sector. Ryzhkov and Gorbachëv were the principal advocates of this strategy. They were putting into effect the ideas elaborated by the two of them under Andropov’s encouragement.
Increasingly,
however, Gorbachëv recognized that such calculations were inadequate to the solution of the country’s problems. On his various tours to the provinces he spoke off the cuff and tagged new priorities to the formally-agreed economic agenda. By late 1985 there was scarcely an industrial sector not mentioned by the General Secretary as deserving of large, additional investment.42 Ryzhkov, a former deputy chairman of Gosplan, perceived that such promises were a budgetary impossibility: Gorbachëv had simply not done his sums. Yet Ryzhkov, too, lacked a workable strategy and continued to advocate an unrealizably rapid expansion in the output of industrial consumer goods; for his diversion of vast revenues into machine-construction could not yield results until after several years, perhaps even decades. The draft Twelfth Five-Year Plan presented by Ryzhkov to the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 was based upon false economic premisses.
The central communist leadership would be frustrated until the ideas on economic reform underwent more basic revision. Gorbachëv sometimes hinted that he was considering this option. In Leningrad in May 1985 he announced to fellow communists: ‘Obviously, we all of us must undergo reconstruction, all of us … Everyone must adopt new approaches and understand that no other path is available to us.’43 Within a year the notion of reconstruction (or perestroika, as it became known in all languages) was the condiment in every dish of policy served up by the General Secretary.
Gorbachëv was fighting harder than any of his colleagues to radicalize the regime’s policies. As his ideas changed, he left several of Andropov’s appointees bemused; and inside the Politburo he could initially count only upon Shevardnadze as an unconditional ally. Gorbachëv remained unclear as to what he wanted. But although he took time to discover a positive set of aims, at least he knew what he was against. He hated the obstacles being put in his way by upholders of the ideas and practices of the Brezhnev period. Debate was lively among the central party leaders and Gorbachëv was in his element. In November 1985 he briskly persuaded the Politburo to sack Grishin, giving his place to Yeltsin in both the Politburo and in the Moscow City Party Committee. Yeltsin declared war on corruption and indolence throughout the capital’s administration, and sacked Grishin’s placemen as opponents of perestroika. Gorbachëv had promoted someone he hoped would be a permanent supporter in the Politburo.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 51