The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  When the plenum began on 27 January 1987, Gorbachëv went on to the offensive and called for changes in the party’s official ideas. ‘Developed socialism’ was no longer a topic for boasting; it was not even mentioned: instead Gorbachëv described the country’s condition as ‘socialism in the process of self-development’.3 Implicitly he was suggesting that socialism had not yet been built in the USSR. Democratization was now proclaimed as a crucial objective. This meant that the Soviet Union was no longer touted as the world’s greatest democracy – and it was the General Secretary who was saying so. Gorbachëv called for the ‘blank spots’ in the central party textbooks to be filled. He denounced Stalin and the lasting effects of his policies. Despite not naming Brezhnev, Gorbachëv dismissed his rule as a period of ‘stagnation’ and declared that the leaving of cadres in post had been taken to the extremes of absurdity.4

  Gorbachëv gained assent to several political proposals: the election rather than appointment of party committee secretaries; the holding of multi-candidate elections to the soviets; the assignation of non-party members to high public office. He succeeded, too, with an economic proposal when he insisted that the draft Law on the State Enterprise should enshrine the right of each factory labour-force to elect its own director. Gorbachëv aimed at industrial as well as political democratization.5 This was not a leader who thought he merely had to learn from capitalist countries. Gorbachëv still assumed he could reconstruct the Soviet compound so that his country would patent a new model of political democracy, economic efficiency and social justice.

  In June 1987 he presented the detailed economic measures at the next Central Committee plenum, which adopted the draft Law on the State Enterprise. Apart from introducing the elective principle to the choice of managers, the Law gave the right to factories and mines to decide what to produce after satisfying the basic requirements of the state planning authorities. Enterprises were to be permitted to set their own wholesale prices. Central controls over wage levels were to be relaxed. The reform envisaged the establishment of five state-owned banks, which would operate without day-to-day intervention by the Central State Bank.6 As under Lenin’s NEP, moreover, there was to be allowance for a private sector in services and small-scale industry. The reintroduction of a mixed economy was projected. Although there would still be a predominance of state ownership and regulation in the economy, this was the greatest projected reform since 1921.

  Gorbachëv’s argument was that the country was in a ‘pre-crisis’ condition.7 If the USSR wished to remain a great military and industrial power, he asserted, then the over-centralized methods of planning and management had to be abandoned. He persuaded the plenum that the proposed Law on the State Enterprise was the prerequisite for ‘the creation of an efficient, flexible system of managing the economy’. The plenum laid down that it should come into effect in January 1988.8

  But Central Committee resolutions were one thing, their implementation quite another. Whereas communist intellectuals were attracted to the General Secretary, communist party functionaries were not. Gorbachëv’s own second secretary and ally Ligachëv was covertly trying to undermine Gorbachëv’s authority. Gorbachëv also had problems from the other side. Yeltsin in the Moscow Party City Committee was urging a faster pace of reform and a broader dimension for glasnost. Gorbachëv found it useful to play off Yeltsin and Ligachëv against each other. Of the two of them, Ligachëv was the more problematical on a regular basis; for he was in charge of ideological matters in the Secretariat and acted as a brake upon historical and political debate. But the more immediate problem was Yeltsin. His sackings of Moscow personnel left scarcely anyone in a responsible job who had held it for more than a year.

  Ligachëv talked to Politburo colleagues about Yeltsin’s domineering propensities; but Gorbachëv tried to protect Yeltsin. For a while Gorbachëv succeeded. But Yeltsin made things hard for himself by stressing his desire to remove the privileges of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachëv. In his justified criticisms of the status quo, he lacked tactical finesse. Indeed he lacked all tact. He was a troubled, angry, impulsive individual. He also had no coherent programme. As an intuitive politician, he was only beginning to discover his purpose in politics, and his explorations were exhausting the patience of the General Secretary.

  In October 1987 Gorbachëv accepted Yeltsin’s resignation as a candidate member of the Politburo. Yeltsin had threatened to leave on several occasions, and this time Ligachëv made sure that he was not allowed to withdraw his resignation. And so the supreme party leadership lost Yeltsin. A few days later a conference of the Moscow City Party Organization was called. Although Yeltsin was in hospital recovering from illness,9 he was pumped full of drugs and dragged along to attend: on a personal level it was one of the most disgraceful of Gorbachëv’s actions. Yeltsin acknowledged his faults, but the decision had already been taken: a succession of speakers denounced his arrogance and he was sacked as party secretary of the capital. Only at this point did Gorbachëv take him sympathetically by the arm. He also showed mercy by appointing Yeltsin as Deputy Chairman of the State Construction Committee. But both of them assumed that Yeltsin’s career at the centre of Soviet politics had ended.

  Gorbachëv was more than ever the solitary fore-rider of reform. During his summer holiday in Crimea, he had edited the typescript for his book Perestroika; he began, too, to prepare a speech to celebrate the October Revolution’s seventieth anniversary. In the weeks after the Central Committee plenum a large number of journalists, novelists, film-makers, poets – and yes, at last, historians – filled the media of public communication with accounts of the terror of the Stalin era and the injurious consequences of Brezhnev’s rule. Gorbachëv sought to encourage and direct the process.

  In November he published his book and delivered his speech. In both of them he denounced the regime’s ‘command-administrative system’, which he described as having emerged under Stalin and having lasted through to the mid-1980s. He hymned the people more than the party. He treated not only the October Revolution but also the February Revolution as truly popular political movements. He also expressed admiration for the mixed economy and cultural effervescence of the New Economic Policy. He praised Lenin as a humanitarian, representing him as having been a much less violent politician than had been true. Despite lauding the NEP, moreover, Gorbachëv continued to profess the benefits of agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s. For Gorbachëv still equivocated about Stalin. In particular, the industrial achievements of the First Five-Year Plan and the military triumph of the Second World War were counted unto him for virtue.10

  Certainly he had set out a stall of general objectives; but he had not clarified the details of strategy, tactics and policies. And he still regarded the objectives themselves as attainable without the disbandment of the one-party, one-ideology state. As previously, he refused to consider that the party and the people might not voluntarily rally to the cause of renovating Marxism-Leninism and the entire Soviet order. Nor did he take cognizance of the role of the Soviet Union as an imperial power both within its own boundaries and across Eastern Europe. The most he would concede was that ‘mistakes’ had been made in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 – and he coyly blamed them on the ‘contemporary ruling parties’.11 No accusation was levelled at Kremlin leaders of the time. And Gorbachëv declined to reject the traditional class-based analysis of international affairs of the world as a whole.

  These contradictions stemmed both from the pressures of his Politburo colleagues and from ambivalence in the mind of the General Secretary. Yet the general direction of his thought was evident. He required a yet deeper process of democratization. He declared that a new political culture and an insistence on the rule of law were required in the Soviet Union. He called for a fresh agenda for Eastern Europe. He also asserted that his country’s foreign policy throughout the world should be based on ‘common human values’.12

  This was extraordinary language for a Soviet leader.
Gorbachëv was diminishing the significance accorded to class-based analysis, and his emphasis on ‘common human values’ clashed with the Leninist tradition. Lenin had contended that every political culture, legal framework, foreign policy and philosophy had roots in class struggle. Leninists had traditionally been unembarrassed about advocating dictatorship, lawlessness and war. Gorbachëv hugely misconceived his idol. He was not alone: the reform communists, including well-read intellectuals, had persuaded themselves of the same interpretation to a greater or lesser extent and were transmitting their ideas to the General Secretary. Politics were being transformed on the basis of a faulty historiography. But what a transformation was involved! If it were to be accomplished, the USSR would adhere to legal, democratic procedures at home and pacific intentions abroad. Such changes were nothing short of revolutionary.

  Much as he rethought his policies, however, Gorbachëv was also a disorganized thinker. His knowledge of his country’s history was patchy. His sociological understandings may have been more impressive since his wife, who was his political as well as marital partner, had written a dissertation on contemporary rural relationships;13 even so, his public statements continued to treat Soviet society as an inchoate whole and to make little allowance for the different interests of the multifarious groups in an increasingly complex society. His comprehension of economic principles was rudimentary in the extreme.

  Nowhere was his complacency more baleful than in relation to the ‘national question’. Superficially he seemed to understand the sensitivities of the non-Russians: for example, he excluded favourable mention of the Russians from the 1986 Party Programme and affirmed the ‘full unity of nations’ in the USSR to be a task of ‘the remote historical future’.14 This gave reassurance to the non-Russian peoples that there would be no Russification campaign under his leadership. But no other practical changes of a positive kind followed. Gorbachëv himself was not a pure Russian; like his wife Raisa, he was born to a couple consisting of a Russian and a Ukrainian.15 But this mixed ancestry, far from keeping him alert to national tensions in the USSR, had dulled his understanding of them. He was comfortable with his dual identity as a Russian and as a Soviet citizen; and this produced casualness that gave much offence. For example, when he visited Ukraine for the first time as General Secretary in 1986, he spoke about Russia and the USSR as if they were coextensive. Ukrainian national sensitivities were outraged.

  The problem was exacerbated by the fact that non-Russians had been prevented from expressing their grievances. Inter-ethnic difficulties were the hatred that dared not speak its name. Gorbachëv and other central party leaders were slow to perceive the inherent risks involved in campaigning against corruption in the republics while also granting freedom of the press and of assembly. Much resentment arose over the appointment of Russian functionaries in place of cadres drawn from the local nationalities. In addition, more scandals were exposed in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan than in Russia. The Kazakhstan party first secretary Dinmukhammed Kunaev, one of Brezhnev’s group, had been compelled to retire in December 1986; even Geidar Aliev, brought from Azerbaijan to Moscow by Andropov, was dropped from the Politburo in October 1987. Eduard Shevardnadze was the sole remaining non-Slav in its membership. The Politburo was virtually a Slavic men’s club.

  An early sign of future trouble was given in Kazakhstan, where violent protests in Alma-Ata were organized against the imposition of a Russian, Gennadi Kolbin, as Kunaev’s successor. The Kazakh functionaries in the republican nomenklatura connived in the trouble on the streets; and the intelligentsia of Kazakhstan were unrestrained in condemning the horrors perpetrated upon the Kazakh people in the name of communism. The nationalist resurgence had been quieter but still more defiant in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The titular nationalities in these countries had a living memory of independence. Bilateral treaties had been signed in 1920 with the RSFSR and Stalin’s forcible incorporation of the Baltic states in the USSR in 1940 had never obtained official recognition in the West. Demonstrations had started in Latvia in June 1986. Cultural, ecological and political demands were to the fore. A victory was won by the environmental protest against the hydro-electric station proposed for Daugavpils.

  Then the dissenters in Lithuania and Estonia joined in the protest movement. Not all their leaders were calling for outright independence, but the degree of autonomy demanded by them was rising. In August 1987, demonstrations were held to mark the anniversary of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty. The example of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia stimulated national movements elsewhere. Discontent intensified in Ukraine after Chernobyl and Gorbachëv was so concerned about the political destabilization that might be produced by Ukrainian cultural, religious and environmental activists that he retained Shcherbytskiy, friend of Brezhnev, as the republican party first secretary. Ukraine was held firmly under Shcherbytskiy’s control.

  The USSR, furthermore, contained many inter-ethnic rivalries which did not predominantly involve Russians. Over the winter of 1987–8, disturbances occurred between Armenians and Azeris in the Armenian-inhabited area of Nagorny Karabakh in Azerbaijan. In February 1988 the two nationalities clashed in Sumgait, and dozens of Armenians were killed. Threats to the Politburo’s control existed even in places that experienced no such violence. In June 1988 the Lithuanian nationalists took a further step by forming Sajudis; other ‘popular fronts’ of this kind were formed also in Latvia and Estonia. The Belorussian Communist Party Central Committee tried to suppress the popular front in Minsk, but the founding members simply decamped to neighbouring Lithuania and held their founding congress in Vilnius.

  The tranquillity in Russia and Ukraine gave some grounds for official optimism since these two republics contained nearly seven tenths of the USSR’s population. Most Soviet citizens were not marching, shouting and demanding in 1988. Not only that: a considerable number of people in the Baltic, Transcaucasian and Central Asian regions did not belong to the titular nationality of each Soviet republic. Around twenty-five million Russians lived outside the RSFSR. They constituted thirty-seven per cent of the population in Kazakhstan, thirty-four per cent in Latvia and thirty per cent in Estonia.16 In all three Baltic Soviet republics so-called ‘Interfronts’ were being formed that consisted mainly of Russian inhabitants who felt menaced by the local nationalisms and who were committed to the maintenance of the Soviet Union.

  Shcherbytskiy prevented Rukh, the Ukrainian popular front, from holding its founding congress until September 1989. In Russia there was no analogous front; for there was no country from which, according to Russian nationalists, Russia needed to be separated in order to protect her interests. There was, however, much nationalist talk. An organization called Pamyat, which had been created with the professed aim of preserving Russian traditional culture, exhibited anti-Semitic tendencies; unlike the popular fronts in the non-Russian republics, it had no commitment to democracy. But Gorbachëv reasonably judged that the situation was containable. What he underestimated was the possibility that Ligachëv and his associates, too, might play the linked cards of Soviet state pride and of Russian nationalism. Ligachëv was affronted by the relentless public criticism of the Stalin years, and he was looking for an opportunity to reassert official pride in the Russian nation’s role during the First Five-Year Plan and the Second World War. Many other party leaders felt sympathy with him.

  Ligachëv bided his time until March 1988, when Gorbachëv was about to leave for a trip to Yugoslavia. A letter had reached the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya from an obscure Leningrad communist named Nina Andreeva, who demanded the rehabilitation of Stalin’s reputation and implied that the country’s woes after the October Revolution had been chiefly the fault of the Jewish element in the party leadership’s composition. Despite this anti-Semitism, Ligachëv facilitated the letter’s publication and organized a meeting of newspaper editors to impress on them that the season of free-fire shooting at communism past and present was at an end.

  Gorbachëv co
nducted an enquiry on his return; but Ligachëv lied about his actions, and Gorbachëv accepted him at his word and resumed his own policy of glasnost.17 Yet he also took precautions against any repetition of the event. Most importantly, he enhanced the position of Alexander Yakovlev, who had been a Politburo member since mid-1987 and became the radical-reformer counter-weight to Ligachëv in the central party apparatus after Yeltsin’s departure. Yakovlev supervised the publication of material about abuses under Brezhnev as well as under Stalin. A number of articles also appeared about Bukharin, who was depicted as the politician who had deserved to succeed Lenin.18 The image of Bukharin as harmless dreamer was at variance with historical reality; but Gorbachëv believed in it – and, for both pragmatic and psychological purposes, he needed positive stories about Soviet communism to balance the exposés of the terroristic practices of the 1930s.

  The problem for him was that the new journalism excited the reading public without managing to enlist its active political participation. The reformist magazines were inadvertently bringing all existing Soviet politicians, with the notable exception of Gorbachëv, into disrepute. If only the first decade of the USSR’s history was officially deemed to have been beneficial, how could the Politburo justify its continuing rule?