The rivalry with America moved more and more to the center of Cold War politics. Khrushchev continued to make attempts at promoting understanding, symbolized by his trip to the United States in 1959. The Soviet leader saw more than farms, for he toured the country extensively, meeting with Hollywood stars (though he was prevented from seeing Disneyland) and speaking with Eisenhower and other American officials. In spite of the ongoing Berlin problem, there seemed to be some progress, and more meetings were scheduled in Europe. Then in 1960 the Soviet air defense tracked a U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk and shot it down, ending any hope of talks on arms control or easing of tensions for the time being. The construction of the Berlin Wall the next year did not help either, but Khrushchev had much riskier plans in mind.
The Cuban revolution of 1959 had found a lukewarm reception in Moscow. Fidel Castro was not a member of the Cuban Communist Party, which had in fact opposed his movement until the last minute. Castro’s orientation was nevertheless both against American dominance and toward socialism. The many US moves against Cuba, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, covert operations, and threatening talk in the US Congress, convinced the Soviets that they should support him. Khrushchev thought that he could solve two problems at once by placing Soviet missiles in Cuba. One was that he had only a half dozen ICBMs, and the rest of his missiles were not yet big enough to reach the United States from the Soviet Union, leaving his country at a serious disadvantage. The other aim was to provide Castro with a serious defense against a possible invasion. Khrushchev made the decision largely on his own, with little consultation with the Soviet elite. Once the United States detected the missiles by U-2 overflights, Kennedy decided that they had to be removed. The outcome was inevitable, given that the USSR lacked a nuclear arsenal with the size and range of US equipment. Khrushchev had to withdraw, and to make matters worse the one US concession (removing US missiles from Turkey) remained secret. The humiliation was complete, and the internal repercussions were the beginning of Khrushchev’s ultimate fall.
With the arrival of Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader, the bluff and risk-taking came to an end, and the USSR concentrated on building up its military so that the Cuban debacle could never be repeated. Its foreign relations with the United States remained central, but as the Americans were increasingly preoccupied with Vietnam, Brezhnev had a bit of breathing room. He certainly needed it, for the descent of China into the Cultural Revolution was followed in 1968 by crisis in Czechoslovakia. In many ways the “Prague Spring” was a repeat of Hungary with the same outcome: Soviet troops restored the rule of the Communist party in a spirit in accord with Soviet conceptions of socialism. Ultimately it was not Eastern Europe but Vietnam that became the main focus of the Cold War for a decade.
The Soviet leadership had never seen Vietnam as an important front of the Cold War, and regarded the United States as too powerful in Southeast Asia to challenge. To make things worse, the Vietnamese Communists generally supported China after 1956, in part because the policy of peaceful coexistence undermined their desires for a war in the south to reunify their country. Khrushchev largely ignored them. He scarcely had the time to react to the Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964, for he was soon out of office, but Brezhnev quickly decided to respond to American escalation of the war by sending large quantities of Soviet aid, including anti-aircraft missiles capable of hitting American bombers, even B-52s, over North Vietnam. Unlike Khrushchev’s quixotic pursuit of Third World nationalist leaders like Nasser or Patrice Lumumba to almost universal failure, the support of North Vietnam led to the biggest defeat for the United States in the Cold War. By 1975, the last Americans had fled from the roof of the US embassy and the Vietnamese Communists ruled in the whole country, even if one devastated by war with a million and a half dead.
The victory of the Vietnamese Communists and the continued alliance with Cuba were certainly successes, even if neither country was large enough to make much difference in the geopolitical balance. In Europe the Soviet position seemed stable. The increasing economic problems in Poland were balanced by the restoration of normal relations with West Germany, the result of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the early 1970s. This rapprochement defused the European Cold War’s most serious conflict – the German problem. Brandt’s new turn was possible because Communism was no longer an issue in Western Europe. The post-war economic boom combined with a solid welfare system produced a generation of satisfied consumers, so far from the desperate masses of the first half of the twentieth century. The West European Communist parties ceased to grow, and the smaller ones faded into obscurity and the larger ones, such as the Italian Communist Party, grew increasingly critical of the Soviets, if more so of China.
Though no one knew it then, the Vietnamese victory was the last Communist success. No Communist revolution materialized from Che Guevara’s attempts in Latin America, and the mildly reformist Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup most contemporaries believed to have been masterminded by the CIA. In Africa, the radical regime of Colonel Mengistu of Ethiopa (1974–1991) was a Soviet ally, but its land reform hardly made it a socialist country in the Soviet sense, and in any case was too poor and small to make much of a difference. Africa, like most of the Third World, evolved in various ways, some countries becoming relatively prosperous capitalist economies, others moving toward even more desperate poverty, but none of them toward socialism as Moscow understood it. The rhetoric of people’s liberation that came from the Soviets rang increasingly hollow.
The first American response to its defeat in Vietnam was to move toward some sort of accommodation, the policy that was known as détente. The Nixon administration, knowing that the Soviets had rough parity in nuclear weapons and weakened by the war in Vietnam, decided to respond to Soviet overtures on arms limitations, the result being the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) limiting strategic weapons. The next stage was the 1975 Helsinki accord that recognized the post-World War II boundaries for the first time and also included generalities about mutual consultations and human rights, the latter soon to become a bone of contention. Discussions continued through the decade, ending finally with SALT II in 1979, limiting the number of delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons.
While limiting the hitherto frenetic pace of construction of nuclear arsenals and thus reducing the risks of annihilation, these moves did not end the Cold War, nor were they intended to. In many ways the more important move was the rapprochement with China that Nixon and Henry Kissinger inaugurated in 1971. With Nixon’s visit to China the next year the Soviet Union found itself facing both China and the United States as rivals. China, of course, was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, with all its murderous effects and political and economic chaos. The US-Chinese arrangement coincided with the rise of the Gang of Four, who ruled China with terror until Mao’s death in 1976. Only then was Deng Xiaoping able to restore some sort of normalcy, so that China was able to provide the United States with important support. During these years the United States and China traded intelligence on the Soviet Union. In public, the United States denounced the exile of Soviet dissidents and restrictions on Jewish emigration in the USSR while remaining silent about the thousands of people who perished in China during the last phases of the Cultural Revolution. The Soviets lambasted US imperialism while allying with Third World countries whose socialism or even nationalism was strictly nominal. Once the United States had played its “China card,” the US-Soviet contest gradually ceased to be a struggle for socialism or democratic capitalism and turned into yet another superpower rivalry.
The aging leadership around Brezhnev did not perceive these deeper shifts in society and politics in the world. It still lived in the world of revolutionary struggles and the building of socialism, even if their tactical orientation meant that revolutions abroad were rarely a priority. Their last move in that struggle was to be fatal, the involvement in Afganistan. The USSR had always had relations with its Afghan neighbor and occasionally provided aid and
considered various schemes of meddling in Afghan politics, but the country was too poor, too traditional, and too marginal to the great power conflicts, especially after the end of British India. Then in 1973 a military coup overthrew the monarchy, and five years later it, in turn, fell to another group of army officers with more or less Marxist views. The new rulers passed various measures to destroy “feudalism,” the many traditional customs which they viewed as oppressive, provoking massive discontent. The Soviet leadership took the Afghan government seriously, as Communists moving toward a society on the Soviet model, and the challenge to the regime as another US-sponsored revolt. The latter belief was correct, as the CIA had started to aid the rebels by mid-1979, in part in the hope that the Soviets would be forced to intervene. To make matters worse, the Soviets feared that the Afghan leaders at the moment might go over to the United States or China. Thus on December 27, 1979, Soviet troops seized Kabul, placed a more loyal government in charge, and the invasion began. The United States provided aid for the rebels through Pakistan, thus laying a foundation for the rise of Islamic extremism. This fighting led to massive destruction and casualties in Afghanistan, and the death of some fourteen thousand Soviet soldiers. For the next six years, until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Afghan war was the main issue of the Cold War as well as being an enormous drain on the resources and morale of the USSR. It also speeded up the collapse of the Soviet order.
Epilogue The End of the USSR
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the reappearance of Russia were momentous events, but events that are difficult to describe in any depth. The main outlines are clear, as much of its fall took place in public under intense scrutiny by the Soviet population, Russian and foreign journalists, and the governments of the world. Yet many of the crucial decisions took place behind closed doors and are too recent to be the object of study by historians. Many of the major events of the time have already fallen from memory, and others have been probably exaggerated in popular accounts as well as in the few academic attempts at analysis. Real sources scarcely exist, and sensational memoirs and fragments of information do not make good history. To complicate matters, perceptions of the events outside Russia and among the Russian and most former Soviet populations differ profoundly. All that is possible is a sketch of the events and of some of the more obvious social, political, and economic trends of a quarter of a century of upheaval, with some attention to the understanding of these events and trends by the Russians who lived through them.
Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party in March of 1985, just a few hours after the death of Chernenko. He brought with him a new team – among others, Aleksandr Iakovlev as an adviser and Boris Yeltsin, whom he put in charge of the Moscow party organization. Gorbachev belonged to a new generation: born in 1931, he graduated from Moscow University in law in 1955. The last Soviet leader with a university education had been Lenin. After university Gorbachev soon became the party boss of his native Stavropol’, an agricultural district in the plains north of the Caucasus. In 1979 he entered the Politburo. Iakovlev was older, born in 1923, and had risen through the party propaganda network in the 1950s. He spent 1958 at Columbia University in New York on an exchange, and was ambassador to Canada from 1973 to 1983. These two men would lead the attempt to reform the Soviet order. Their nemesis was another party boss from the provinces, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin, born the same year as Gorbachev, graduated from the Technical University in Sverdlovsk, also in 1955, and went on to become the party boss of the Sverdlovsk region, one of the USSR’s key industrial regions. He remained at that post from 1976 until Gorbachev brought him to Moscow.
The first year or so after the appearance of Gorbachev brought little change on the surface. Indeed the most spectacular event of his first year in office was the explosion of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in April 1986. The country that had sent the first man into space could not maintain the safety of its reactors. Gorbachev called for a radical improvement in the economy at the 1986 party conference, but got nowhere. Andrei Sakharov was allowed to return to Moscow late in the year, but most of the policy discussion still remained behind the closed doors of party meetings. In 1987 Gorbachev began to call for “restructuring” (perestroika in Russian), publishing a whole book to promote his vision. He soon added to this glasnost’, which meant something like “openness” or perhaps even “transparency.” The idea was simply that major issues should be part of public debate, not just discussion behind closed doors within the party elite. At the same time a whole series of measures began to open the economic structure to non-governmental enterprise. The first important example was the law that permitted “cooperatives” to function, which were, in fact, small private businesses such as restaurants. Largely unnoticed at the time, the leadership also took steps to speed up the economy by making use of the Komsomol, the Communist League of Youth. Founded in the Civil War as a means of mobilizing the young behind the party’s goals, it had become an essentially bureaucratic organization, a lifeless adjunct to the party. Now it was encouraged to set up “Youth Scientific-Technical Groups,” which were allowed to engage in tax-free entrepreneurial activities, mainly with electronics and automobiles. In these groups the later oligarchs took their first steps.
Just as important as these changes in attitude and policy was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Gorbachev seems to have decided on this move almost immediately, but he did not announce the withdrawal until 1988. Within a year, the Soviets were out of Afghanistan, which then fell into civil war. The ensuing years of Perestroika were politically exciting, as new publications sprang up in Moscow and Leningrad and many other parts of the country. Issues from the Stalin era and other dark parts of Soviet history were the objects of intense discussion. Former dissidents like Sakharov for a moment were national heroes. Not all of this ferment was the result of newly found freedom: the first article to appear critical of Lenin was written on command from the authorities, and historians who questioned its nationalistic conclusions were told it was not for discussion. In parts of the country, such as the Ukraine or Central Asia, the press continued in the Soviet mode. Nevertheless in most of the central press, in film, in literature, at the theater, and at the dinner tables of ordinary people, intense arguments raged and no one any longer took account of what the authorities thought or did. The excitement of political debate, the first such debate in seventy years, went along with a rapidly deteriorating economy. Gorbachev’s first economic reforms removed many of the mechanisms of the Soviet economy but put nothing in their place. A real market did not yet exist. The supply of consumer goods, already very poor in the early 1980s, fell catastrophically. The state also began to lose control of the periphery. In 1988 Armenia began to make claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in neighboring Azerbaidzhan. Moscow was unable to resolve the dispute, and Armenia began to reject the authority of the Soviet state.
The pace of change quickened. Behind the scenes, the Komsomol entrepreneurs had accumulated vast sums, and were soon joined by Soviet banks and industrial ministries, which converted themselves into “firms” oriented toward the growing market. In 1989 the Ministry of Natural Gas Industry became Gazprom, and it was only one of many such organizations. Essentially, a kind of privatization was taking place behind closed doors. Other changes were public. Everywhere in the country Gorbachev’s policy was to replace the hierarchy of party offices with “Soviet,” that is to say, government, offices. In many cases the local party boss simply moved across the street to head the local government, but the change meant that the party suddenly was becoming irrelevant. Inside the party opposition to Perestroika was growing. Then Gorbachev announced that the old Supreme Soviet, the nominal legislature of the USSR, would be replaced with a “Congress of People’s Deputies.” Elections to the new Congress would be real and open: there was to be more than one candidate for each seat. The result was a more or less free election, the first since 1917, but the results were mixed. Gorb
achev wanted the new Congress as a vehicle to move ahead the process of economic liberalization as well as “democratization,” newly included in the agenda of reform. Unfortunately the composition of the new Congress meant a stalemate. Moscow and Leningrad predictably elected strongly reformist deputies, most of them from the intelligentsia, as did many Russian provincial cities and districts. The Ukraine, however, still firmly under party boss Leonid Kravchuk, and the Central Asian republics elected conservative deputies opposed to reform. The Baltic republics, swept by a wave of nationalism, were more interested in separation than reform, and the Transcaucasian republics were focused on their mutual quarrels. The elections also brought Boris Yeltsin into the public eye. In 1987 he had fallen afoul of Gorbachev, who had then removed him from his Moscow post. Now as a deputy to the Congress, he used the platform to criticize the pace and scope of reform. He also began to affirm the need for the Russian republic to look after its own rights and needs, and not defer to the central, or Soviet, authorities. The year 1989 also saw the collapse of Communist power everywhere in Eastern Europe, climaxed by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November. Even anti-Soviet Communists in Rumania were overthrown. Gorbachev accepted all this, apparently hoping it would lead to better relations with the West.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 53