by Tony Judt
The problems with the USSR’s nuclear reactors were well known to insiders: two separate KGB reports dated 1982 and 1984 warned of ‘shoddy’ equipment (supplied from Yugoslavia) and serious deficiencies in Chernobyl’s reactors 3 and 4 (it was the latter that exploded in 1986). But just as this information had been kept secret (and no action taken) so the Party leadership’s first, instinctive response to the explosion on April 26th was to keep quiet about it—there were, after all, fourteen Chernobyl-type plants in operation by then all across the country. Moscow’s first acknowledgement that anything untoward had happened came fully four days after the event, and then in a two-sentence official communiqué.
But Chernobyl could not be kept secret: international anxiety and the Soviets’ own inability to contain the damage forced Gorbachev first to make a public statement two weeks later, acknowledging some but not all of what had taken place, and then to call upon foreign aid and expertise. And just as his fellow citizens were thus made publicly aware for the first time of the scale of official incompetence and indifference to life and health, so Gorbachev was forced to acknowledge the extent of his country’s problems. The bungling, the mendacity and the cynicism of the men responsible both for the disaster and the attempt to cover it up could not be dismissed as a regrettable perversion of Soviet values: they were Soviet values, as the Soviet leader began to appreciate.
Beginning in the autumn of 1986 Gorbachev shifted gears. In December of that year Andrei Sakharov, the world’s best-known dissident, was liberated from house arrest in Gorky (Nizhniy Novgorod), a harbinger of the large-scale release of Soviet political prisoners that began the following year. Censorship was relaxed—1987 saw the long-delayed publication of Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate (twenty six years after M.A. Suslov, the Party’s ideological commissar, had predicted that it could not be released for ‘two or three centuries’). The police were instructed to cease jamming foreign radio broadcasts. And the Secretary General of the CPSU chose the occasion of his televised speech to the Party Central Committee in January 1987 to make the case for a more inclusive democracy, over the heads of the Party conservatives and directly to the nation at large.
By 1987 more than nine out of ten Soviet households possessed a television, and Gorbachev’s tactic was initially a striking success: by creating a de facto public sphere for semi-open debate about the country’s woes, and breaking the governing caste’s monopoly of information, he was forcing the Party to follow suit—and making it safe for hitherto silent reformers within the system to speak out and give him their backing. In the course of 1987-88 the General Secretary was, almost despite himself, forging a national constituency for change.
Informal organizations sprang up: notably ‘Club Perestroika’, formed in Moscow’s Mathematical Institute in 1987, which in turn gave birth to ‘Memorial’, whose members devoted themselves to ‘keeping alive the memory of the victims’ of the Stalinist past. Initially taken aback at their own very existence—the Soviet Union, after all, was still a one-party dictatorship—they soon flourished and multiplied. By 1988 Gorbachev’s support came increasingly from outside the Party, from the country’s newly emerging public opinion.
What had happened was that the logic of Gorbachev’s reformist goals, and his decision, in practice, to appeal to the nation against his conservative critics within the apparatus, had transformed the dynamic of perestroika. Having begun as a reformer within the ruling Party, its General Secretary was now increasingly working against it, or at least trying to circumvent the Party’s opposition to change. In October 1987 Gorbachev spoke publicly of Stalinist crimes for the first time and warned that if the Party did not champion reform it would lose its leading role in society.
In the Party conference of June 1988 he reiterated his commitment to reform and to the relaxation of censorship, and called for the preparation of open (i.e. contested) elections to a Congress of People’s Deputies for the following year. In October 1988 he demoted some of his leading opponents—notably Yegor Ligachev, a longstanding critic—and had himself elected President of the Supreme Soviet (i.e. head of state), displacing Andrei Gromyko, last of the dinosaurs. Within the Party he still faced strong rearguard opposition; but in the country at large his popularity was at its peak, which was why he was able to press forward—and indeed had little option but to do so.280
The elections of May/June 1989 were the first more or less free vote in the Soviet Union since 1918. They were not multi-party elections—that would not happen until 1993, by which time the Soviet Union itself was long gone—and the outcome was largely pre-determined by restricting many seats to Party candidates and forbidding internal Party competition for them; but the Congress they elected included many independent and critical voices. Its proceedings were broadcast to an audience of some 100 million spectators, and demands by Sakharov and others for further change—notably the dethroning of the increasingly discredited Party from its privileged position—could not be swept aside, even by an initially reluctant Gorbachev. The Communists’ monopoly of power was slipping away, and with Gorbachev’s encouragement the Congress would duly vote the following February to remove from the Soviet constitution the key clause—Article Six—assigning the Communist Party a ‘leading role’.281
The course of Soviet domestic upheaval from 1985 to 1989 was facilitated by a major shift in Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev and his new Foreign Minister Edvard Shevardnadze. From the outset Gorbachev made clear his determination to unburden the USSR at the very least of its more onerous military encumbrances. Within a month of coming to power he had halted Soviet missile deployments and gone on to offer unconditional negotiations on nuclear forces, starting with a proposal that both superpowers halve their strategic arsenals. By May 1986, after a surprisingly successful ‘summit’ meeting with Reagan in Geneva (the first of an unprecedented five such encounters), Gorbachev agreed to allow US ‘forward-based systems’ to be excluded from strategic arms talks, if that would help get these under way.
There followed a second, Reykjavik, summit in October 1986 where Reagan and Gorbachev, while failing to reach agreement on nuclear disarmament, nonetheless laid the basis for future success. By late 1987 Shevardnadze and US Secretary of State George Schultz had drafted an Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed and ratified the following year. This Treaty, by endorsing Ronald Reagan’s earlier ‘zero option’ proposal, constituted Soviet acceptance that a nuclear war in Europe was un-winnable—and served as the prologue to an even more important treaty, signed in 1990, strictly limiting the presence and operation of conventional forces on the European continent.
Seen from Washington, Gorbachev’s concessions on arms naturally appeared as a victory for Reagan—and thus, in the zero-sum calculus of Cold War strategists, a defeat for Moscow. But for Gorbachev, whose priorities were domestic, securing a more stable international environment was a victory in itself. It bought him time and support for his reforms at home. The true significance of this sequence of meetings and accords lay in the Soviet recognition that military confrontation abroad was not only expensive but also dysfunctional: as Gorbachev expressed it in October 1986 in the course of a visit to France, ‘ideology’ was not an appropriate basis for foreign policy.
These views reflected the advice he was beginning to get from a new generation of Soviet foreign affairs experts, notably his colleague Aleksandr Yakovlev, to whom it had become clear that the USSR could exercise more control over its foreign relations by well-calculated concessions than by fruitless confrontation. In contrast to the intractable problems he faced at home, foreign policy was an arena in which Gorbachev exercised direct control and could thus hope to effect immediate improvements. Moreover the strictly Great-Power dimension of Soviet foreign relations should not be exaggerated: Gorbachev placed at least as much importance on his relations with western Europe as on his dealings with the US—he made frequent visits there and established good relations with González, Kohl and Thatcher (who famously
regarded him as a man with whom she ‘could do business’).282
Indeed, in important respects Gorbachev thought of himself above all as a European statesman, with European priorities. His focus upon ending the arms race and the stockpiling of nuclear weapons was closely tied to a new approach to the Soviet Union’s role as a distinctively European power. ‘Armaments’, he declared in 1987, ‘should be reduced to a level necessary for strictly defensive purposes. It is time for the two military alliances to amend their strategic concepts to gear them more to the aims of defense. Every apartment in the ‘European home’ has the right to protect itself against burglars, but it must do so without destroying its neighbors’ property.’
In a similar spirit and for the same reasons, the Soviet leader understood from the outset the urgent need to extract the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, the ‘bleeding wound’ as he described it to a Party Congress in February 1986. Five months later he announced the withdrawal of some 6,000 Soviet troops, a redeployment completed in November of the same year. In May 1988, following an accord reached at Geneva with Afghanistan and Pakistan and guaranteed by both great powers, Soviet troops began to leave Afghanistan: the last remaining soldiers of the Red Army departed on February 15th 1989.283
Far from addressing the Soviet nationalities question, the Afghan adventure had, as was by now all too clear, exacerbated it. If the USSR faced an intractable set of national minorities, this was in part a problem of its own making: it was Lenin and his successors, after all, who invented the various subject ‘nations’ to whom they duly assigned regions and republics. In an echo of imperial practices elsewhere, Moscow had encouraged the emergence—in places where nationality and nationhood were unheard of fifty years earlier—of institutions and intelligentsias grouped around a national urban center or ‘capital’. Communist Party First Secretaries in the Caucasus, or the central Asian republics, were typically chosen from the dominant local ethnic group. To secure their fiefdom these men were understandably drawn to identify with their ‘own’ people, particularly once fissures began to appear in the central apparatus. The Party was starting to fracture under the centrifugal pull of anxious local administrators protecting their own interests.
Gorbachev seems not fully to have understood this process. ‘Comrades’, he informed the Party in 1987, ‘we can truly say that for our country the nationalities issue has been resolved’. Perhaps he did not altogether believe his own claims; but he certainly thought that some loosening of central control and addressing of long-standing grievances would suffice (in 1989 the Crimean Tartars, for example, were finally allowed to return home after many decades of Asian exile). In a continental empire of over one hundred ethnic groups from the Baltic to the Sea of Okhotsk, most of whom had longstanding grievances that glasnost now encouraged them to air, this was to prove a serious miscalculation.
The inadequacy of Gorbachev’s response to demands for autonomy at the Soviet empire’s far-flung margins should not come as a surprise. Gorbachev was from the outset, as we have seen, a ‘reform Communist’, albeit a very unusual one: sympathetic to the need for change and renewal but reluctant to assault the core tenets of the system under which he had grown up. Like many in his generation in the Soviet Union and elsewhere he genuinely believed that the only path to improvement lay through a return to Leninist ‘principles’. The idea that it was the Leninist project itself that might be at fault remained alien to the Soviet leader until very late—only in 1990 did he finally permit the domestic publication of overtly anti-Leninist writers such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The spirit of Gorbachev’s early goals is exemplified in the inimitable tone of the new-found official tolerance for pop music, as expressed by Pravda in October 1986: ‘Rock and roll has a right to exist but only if it is melodious, meaningful and well-performed.’ That is precisely what Mikhail Gorbachev wanted: a melodious, meaningful and well-performed Communism. Necessary reforms would be undertaken and appropriate freedoms granted, but there was to be no unregulated licence—as late as February 1988 the government was still clamping down firmly on independent publishing houses and printers.
It is one of the curiosities of Communist reformers that they always set out with the quixotic goal of reforming some aspects of their system while keeping others unaffected—introducing market-oriented incentives while maintaining central planning controls, or allowing greater freedom of expression while retaining the Party’s monopoly of truth. But partial reform or reform of one sector in isolation from others was inherently contradictory. ‘Managed pluralism’ or a ‘socialist market’ was doomed from the start. As for the idea that the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party could be sustained while the Party itself shed merely the pathological excrescences of seven decades of absolute power, this suggests a certain political naiveté on Gorbachev’s part. In an authoritarian system power is indivisible—relinquish it in part and you must eventually lose it all. Nearly four centuries earlier, the Stuart monarch James I understood these things much better—as he put it in a succinct rebuff to Scottish Presbyterians protesting at the power vested in his bishops: ‘No Bishop, no King’.
Gorbachev and his controlled revolution were in the end swept aside by the scale of the contradictions they aroused. Looking back, he observed with some regret that ‘naturally, I feel troubled by the fact that I did not succeed in keeping the entire process of perestroika within the framework of my intentions’. But the intentions and the framework were incompatible. Once the sustaining supports of censorship, control and repression were removed, everything of consequence in the Soviet system—the planned economy, the public rhetoric, the monopoly of the Party—just collapsed.
Gorbachev did not achieve his objective, a reformed and efficient Communism, shorn of its dysfunctions. Indeed, he failed utterly. But his achievement was impressive none the less. In the USSR there were no independent or even semi-autonomous institutions for critics and reformers to mobilize on their behalf: the Soviet system could only ever have been dismantled from inside and by initiative coming from above. By introducing first one element of change and then another and then another, Gorbachev progressively eroded the very system through which he had risen. Employing the vast powers of a Party General Secretary, he eviscerated the Party dictatorship from within.
This was a remarkable and unprecedented feat. No-one could have predicted it in 1984, when Chernenko died, and no-one did. Gorbachev, in the view of one of his close advisers, was ‘a genetic error of the system’.284 In retrospect it has become tempting to conclude that his ascent was uncannily timely—as the Soviet system was tottering, so there emerged a leader who understood what was happening and successfully sought an exit strategy from empire. Cometh the hour, cometh the man? Perhaps. And Mikhail Gorbachev certainly was not just another apparatchik.
But he surely had no idea what he was doing and would have been horrified had he known. His critics were more perspicacious. On the one hand, Party hardliners understandably hated Gorbachev—many of them warmly endorsed the notorious letter published in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya on March 13th 1988 in which Nina Andreyeva, a Leningrad schoolteacher, angrily warned (reasonably enough, as it transpired) that the new reforms would inevitably lead the country back to capitalism. On the other hand, Gorbachev never had the unconditional support of radical reformers, who grew increasingly frustrated with his apparent indecisive-ness. It was one of Gorbachev’s weaknesses that in order to keep control of events he felt constrained to occupy the center ground whenever possible, encouraging new ideas but then slipping back into the arms of Party conservatives just as radical reformers like Yakovlev or Boris Yeltsin were pressing him to go much further. These vacillations, Gorbachev’s seeming reluctance to press the logic of his initiatives, and his insistence on not going too far or too fast left many of his early admirers feeling let down.
The trouble was that by relinquishing the Party’s monopoly of power and initiative, Gorbachev commensurately reduced his own influen
ce as well. He was thus obliged to forge tactical alliances and trim between the extreme positions of others. This is a familiar if uncomfortable necessity for democratic politicians; but in the eyes of a nation accustomed to seventy years of dictatorship such maneuverings simply made Gorbachev appear weak. From the early months of 1989 onwards the Soviet President fell steadily in opinion polls. By the autumn of 1990 Gorbachev would have the support of just 21 percent of the public.
Long before his fall from power, then, Gorbachev had decidedly fallen from grace. But only at home: elsewhere, ‘Gorbymania’ flourished. On his increasingly frequent visits abroad Gorbachev was fêted by west European politicians and cheered by enthusiastic crowds. Late in 1988, Margaret Thatcher—one of Gorbachev’s most ardent fans—pronounced the Cold War ‘over’, Seen from Eastern Europe this might have been thought a little premature; but there too Mikhail Gorbachev was wildly popular.
In the ‘peoples’ democracies’ the Soviet leader’s domestic travails, though duly noted, counted for less than his foreign pronouncements, notably a widely reported speech to the United Nations on December 7th 1988. After announcing unilateral cuts in Soviet conventional forces in Europe, Gorbachev went on to advise his audience that ‘Freedom of choice is a universal principle. There should be no exceptions.’ This was more than just a renunciation of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’, an acknowledgement that Moscow would not use force to impose its version of ‘Socialism’ upon fraternal states. What Gorbachev was conceding—and was immediately understood to have conceded—was that the citizens of the satellite states were now at liberty to go their own way, Socialist or not. Eastern Europe was about to re-enter history.