And so it went. For nearly an hour, the meeting seemed like a grass-roots version of Brezhnev’s Central Committee circa 1978, a mix of oleaginous praise and muggy boredom. Through it all, Kirillov relaxed in his seat and smiled his kingly smile.
But in the transitional moment between the last speech and what would have been the call for a voice vote of acclamation, all hell broke loose. A balding engineer named Viktor Oskin asked for the floor.
“You are not on the schedule,” the chairman scolded him.
But after some catcalls and shouted comments about “learning democracy,” Oskin got the microphone.
“I’ve just got one question,” he said. “Yuri Ivanovich already has so many duties. When will he find the time to work as a deputy in the legislature?”
No one could quite believe this display of impudence.
“Get off the stage!” one person shouted.
“Who asked you to speak? Get off!”
“Away with him!”
But Oskin was unafraid. He dipped his face closer to the mike and shouted over the noise.
“You all say Yuri Ivanovich is such a good man,” he said. “You act as if there are no problems at all in our factory. This man has too many duties. He should refuse some. They’ve been telling us all along that we should have two or three candidates, and once again we’ve only got one. We are supposed to be talking about democracy, but we only have one candidate.”
There was some hissing and booing, but just as many workers in the audience were quiet or nodding slightly, as if in agreement. Something had happened; there had been a breakthrough. Oskin plopped down in his chair, and his friends around him eyed him nervously.
Now a younger man asked for the chance to speak. He said his name was Konstantin Yasovsky and he represented a work collective. “Our collective doesn’t want to approve this man Yuri Ivanovich!” he said.
Yuri Ivanovich, for his part, was now squirming in his seat in the front row like a man with the bends.
Yasovsky went on: “We don’t know his program or what he’ll do. What is he for? What is he against? Our opinion is that we need him as a factory director, but only that.”
The boos rolled over Yasovsky like a wave, and the undertow of hostility brought him sliding back to his seat. But then there were some cheers, here and there. Then catcalls, and arguments in patches of the crowd. The meeting had gotten distinctly out of hand. With a nod from one of the assistant directors in the front row, the chairman snatched the microphone off its stand and said, “Well, I guess it’s time for a vote.”
But by now there were enough voters in the hall who knew something was wrong. The present seemed too much like the past. This time they would not be deceived. They would not be fooled or ignored. There were insults from every direction. Of course, no one had any illusions. There would be no alternative candidates, no rebellions, certainly. But there was at least a feeling, an insistence, that the appearance of democracy had to be served.
“A vote?” one man shouted from the back of the hall. “All our lives we’ve been raising our hands. Let the man tell us who he is and what he stands for before he gets our vote.”
And so, finally, Yuri Ivanovich Kirillov spoke. This was his magnificent concession to the democratic process. He said he didn’t mind the criticism, “though it wasn’t very pleasant to sit through it.” He made no mention of a platform in his long, rambling speech. His only idea for reform at the national level was his “firm intention to build a recreation center for the workers of the Red Proletariat machine-tools factory.”
The applause was polite. The chairman got his way, and there was, at last, a vote: 308 for Kirillov, 10 against, and 7 abstentions. The hands went up slowly, more in concession than affirmation. After all, what choice did they have? No one was prepared to rebel. The idea did not yet exist. At least not here, and not yet. The catcalls, the insistence on hearing the candidate, had been rebellion enough. The electors filed out of the auditorium in silence, guilty and downcast, as if they knew they had not gotten things right and did not yet know what it was they had to do.
The Communist Party, of course, wrote the election laws for the 1989 elections to ensure that it would have the vast majority of seats, and that is the way it turned out. More than 80 percent of the 2,250 deputies were Party members, the vast majority of them local secretaries, military officers, and other loyalists. The reason was simple. Every imaginable Party front group, from the Komsomol to the Union of Stamp Collectors, was guaranteed a raft of seats. Only one third of the deputies would come from open races. In conservative regions, especially Central Asia, single-candidate races were the rule, not the exception. “This was not a democratic election,” Sakharov told me. “It was rigged quasi-democracy. The only oases of democracy were where the system was somehow imperfect.” In those few spots where the elections were imperfect—meaning open—the establishment Party candidates invariably lost. Central Committee members, admirals, generals, apparatchiks of every sort suffered the humiliation of public rejection.
Such was the case in the October Region when Comrade Kirillov was one of a half-dozen apparatchiks who didn’t even come close. The runoff came down to a popular, and not very intelligent, television commentator and Ilya Zaslavsky, a textiles engineer, not quite thirty years old, who walked on canes and spoke in a barely audible mumble. Zaslavsky, running on a platform of general reform with an emphasis on the rights of the disabled, won easily.
When the Congress opened in May, Zaslavsky was one of dozens of young liberals who had gotten into politics only because they had finally seen a leader they thought they could trust. Zaslavsky, Arkady Murashev, and Sergei Stankevich of Moscow, nationalists from the Baltic states, Armenia, and Georgia, environmentalists from Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Siberia—they all had seen the elections as an opening. That period just before and after the first Congress was a time of euphoria. These were days when radical democrats thought that reform of the Party was not only possible, but the only route to change. Somehow the chance of a reactionary counterrevolution seemed academic, remote.
That first session of the Congress was an endless series of astonishments. In the opening minutes of the Congress, Sakharov ambled to the podium to make the first speech. Later on, Sakharov would make specific proposals about the creation of a multiparty system and a “decree on power” that would lead to constitutional democracy, but now he kept his remarks general, trying, it seemed, to serve simply as a model of patience and openness. But the Congress quickly became something hotter, as if the crises of seventy years could wait no more; what followed was an explosion of public debate and revelation. A former Olympic weightlifter, Yuri Vlasov, blasted the KGB, saying that the secret police ran an “underground empire” in the Soviet Union and had not reformed at all. A law professor from Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak, attacked the generals and Party officials who had sanctioned and led the assault in Tbilisi against a peaceful demonstration in April 1989 which left at least nineteen people dead. Yuri Karyakin, the Dostoevsky scholar, called for the removal of Lenin’s remains from the mausoleum on Red Square and for their “decent burial.” The liberals in the Congress also were beginning to make clear they would criticize Gorbachev, even oppose him, when they thought it necessary. When Gorbachev was put up for election by the Congress as chairman of the legislature, an obscure and slightly woolly delegate from northern Russia, Aleksandr Obolensky, nominated himself. “It’s not a question of winning,” he said. “It’s a matter of creating a tradition of political opposition and competition.”
The action in the hallways during the frequent recesses was almost as dramatic as the speeches inside. At first, the young Soviet reporters watched with amazement as the Westerners walked up to the most powerful men in the country and pestered them with cameras, tape recorders, and notebooks. Within a few days, the Soviets were getting the hang of it. For the first time in their careers, members of the Politburo and leaders of the military and the KGB were subjected to em
barrassing questions. For decades, no one had dared ask them about the weather, much less the erosion of the Communist Party. Now they were being chased to the bathrooms and the buffet tables for their opinions, for accountings of themselves.
Gorbachev quickly mastered the art of spin control. Accidentally on purpose, he would wander into a huge crowd of journalists just after the lunch breaks, make his case, and disappear. Vremya, of course, would run his comments in full, giving him the role as both chairman and media commentator over his political creation.
Sakharov, for his part, endured interviews with a wistful patience. The camera lights, he must have understood, were part of modern democracy. Everyone talked, and talked. Or almost everyone. Day after day I stalked Viktor Chebrikov, the head of the KGB until 1988, a man with a gnarled face and the posture of a Roman emperor. As he paced the halls, very few deputies dared approach him. Those who did say hello were grasped by the elbow and taken off to a private corner. Chebrikov would not talk where other deputies or foreigners could overhear him. I kept after Chebrikov, and at first he shooed me away as if I were a small cloud of gnats. When I would not go away, he said, “We’ll talk tomorrow.” Or “after the next break.” Finally, toward the end of the session, he said, “Mr. Remnick, there will be no interview.” Strange, but I had never told him my name.
No one in the country could tear himself away from these televised sessions of the Congress of People’s Deputies. No newspaper, no film, book, or play had ever had such an immediate political effect on the people of the Soviet Union. The sessions were broadcast live for two weeks, and factories and collective farms reported that no work was getting done. Everyone was gathered around television sets and transistor radios. People simply could not believe what they were hearing. Though the reform-minded deputies were in a distinct minority—no more than three or four hundred out of 2,250—they were much more savvy about getting to the microphone, and Gorbachev was usually eager to hear from them. It was only when someone went beyond the barriers of the official conception of perestroika—most famously, Sakharov’s demand for a repeal of the Party’s hold on power—did Gorbachev grow impatient and call for the next speaker. Gorbachev ruled his Congress with the swiftness and guile of Sam Rayburn in his House of Representatives. When Sakharov’s criticism exceeded Gorbachev’s tolerance, he dropped all pretense of democracy; he switched off the microphone and sent Andrei Dmitriyevich to his seat.
The reformers were overcome with a sense of triumph and possibility. While the session was on they had seen the Chinese leadership order the slaughter of hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in Beijing, and they had the sense that for once, the leader of the Soviet Union was not the same sort of butcher. Vitaly Korotich, the sly editor of Ogonyok, walked with me toward the Kremlin gates talking of how the conservatives were in for a “crash,” how the country had changed in just two weeks. “The people in this country have always been afraid of power,” Korotich said. “Now, maybe, the powerful are becoming a little afraid of the people.” By the end of the session, the conservatives in the Politburo were impossible to find. They were finally embarrassed and tired of all the criticism and challenges. They made liberal use of their private, guarded entrances and exits and were rarely seen on the way from the Hall of Congresses to their waiting limousines.
But for all the exhilaration of the elections and the catharsis of the Congress, no one had any idea what it would lead to. From start to finish, the Gorbachev era was an improvisation, with alternating dull spots and high-wire periods. Until now, the politics of the country had gone unseen. Politics had been a matter of the Kremlin, the closed, untelevised sessions of the Politburo and Central Committee. The gulf between the state and the individual was unbridgeable. Even the huge street demonstrations in Yerevan and the Baltics went nearly unreported in the main Party newspapers.
But now almost everyone had seen the accumulated anguish of seventy years broadcast live. They had become familiar with the ideas and personalities not only of the country’s leaders, but of Sakharov, Zaslavsky, and Afanasyev of Moscow. They had seen a bookish Estonian woman, Marju Lauristan, challenge Gorbachev’s authority as if it were almost … normal. They had even seen a half-articulate cabdriver named Leonid Sukhov take the podium and warn Gorbachev that, “like Napoleon,” he was being led by the nose by his own “Josephine,” his wife, Raisa. Another deputy demanded that Gorbachev answer for his new expensive dacha on the Crimean coast. Until now, Kremlin power had run on mystery as well as might. The Congress had ended all that in one two-week-long television extravaganza. The Congress hinted at something new, a revolution from below. But what form would it take? Who would lead it, and when?
Little more than a month after the Congress closed and Moscow shifted into its mode of summer torpor, perestroika spun out of control, first in the coal mines of Siberia, then in mines all across the country, from Ukraine to Vorkuta to Sakhalin Island. After July 1989, the Kremlin could never again have any confidence at all that it was the master of events. After July 1989, the illusion of a gradual, Gorbachev-directed “revolution from above” was over.
The “revolution from below” began when a group of coal miners in the Siberian town of Mezhdurechensk walked off the job at the Shovikovo mine, led by their shift leader, Valery Kokorin. The main issue was soap. The miners were angry, too, that their equipment was pitiful, that the work was wretched and underpaid, that food supplies were meager and benefits nonexistent. But what galled them most was the grit in every crevice of their bodies, the inability to come home from work and wash themselves clean. There was no soap.
All around the Kuznetsk Basin (the Kuzbass) of Siberia—in Mezhdurechensk, Prokopievsk, Novo-Kuznetsk, and Kemerovo—miners had been grumbling for years among themselves. They had never dared take their protests outside a small circle of friends and family. Their poverty—like the poverty of the farmhands in Turkmenia or the steelworkers of Magnitogorsk—was, simply, the way things were. But within twelve hours of the walkout in Mezhdurechensk, nearly every mine in the Kuzbass was on strike. “You cannot imagine how off-the-cuff this was. It became so enormous so quickly, but it started from almost nothing,” one of the miners at the Severovo mines, Ilya Ostanin, told me. Soon the strike spread to Vorkuta in the far north, to the Don Basin (the Donbass) in Ukraine, to Karaganda in northern Kazakhstan, to Sakhalin in the far east.
Gorbachev went on television looking stricken and exhausted, but still pretending to complete mastery. He had no choice but to try to make the strikes his own, to describe them as a healthy manifestation of a very young democracy and then pray they would end before the railway workers, collective farmers, or oil riggers got any ideas in their heads. He could not control an entire nation in rebellion. Even the conservatives in the leadership could not ignore the miners. The miners had the ability to shut down heavy industry and force the Kremlin to contemplate what a long, cold winter could mean.
After a five-hour flight and a half-hour ride through the Siberian taiga to the city of Kemerovo, I got my first glimpse of the working-class rebellion. In Armenia I had seen hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on the streets and almost as many in Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. But there had never been anything quite so dramatic as this, nothing that had so vividly illustrated the disintegration of the workers’ state and the changing mind of a broad sector of the people.
In a hard afternoon sun, miners dressed in their work gear, tens of thousands of them, sat in the main square of Kemerovo outside the headquarters of the local government and Communist Party. “Get Up and Show Your Anger!” one sign read. “The Kuzbass Is Not a Colony!” said another. When some of the local Party officials took the microphone to tell the miners that the strikes were hurting old people and schoolchildren, they were shouted down and booed off the podium. The local Party press denounced the strikes, but one local television host, Viktor Kolpakov of Kuzbass, Day by Day, read straight, informative reports on the strikes around the country every night at eight.
At first, only a few strike committees called for a Solidarity-style union. The initial demands were economic: more soap, detergent, toothpaste, sausage, shoes, and underwear, more sugar, tea, and bread. Vacations and a regular work week were at stake, not Gorbachev. He still represented, for the miners, a shining possibility, a figure of integrity. Almost everyone was careful to praise him, or at least show a measure of respect. One of the speakers, Pyotr Kongurov, a member of the strike committee in Prokopievsk, said that while ecological conditions and the standard of living remain “a focus of despair” in the mining town, “people are not blaming Gorbachev. They know they are able to strike because of Gorbachev. But on the other hand, they are waiting—and we can’t wait forever.”
There had been strikes before in the Soviet Union: bus drivers in the city of Chekhov, airline pilots who refused to fly until safety standards were improved. But the symbolism of the miners’ strike was extraordinary. The miners embodied the vanguard of the proletariat, a bastion of Bolshevism in the old days. To look out at the great crowd of them in Lenin Square was to see a kind of poster for what had once been called “the masses.” And now the masses were walking off the job and declaring that socialism had not delivered anything—not even a bar of soap.
Soon the word came to Siberia from Moscow that the Coal Ministry was ready to promise more supplies, higher salaries, and other benefits. At a huge public meeting in the Kemerovo city square, the miners gathered to hear the details and vote. They heard promises from Moscow’s emissaries that planes would soon land loaded to the ribs with soap, meat, lard, cooking oil, and detergent. Salaries would be increased, vacations lengthened. Most of the miners were relieved. At least for now they had reached the limit of their daring and were ready to go back to work. They were ready to believe Moscow. Some miners warned that the deal would fall apart, that Moscow was “up to its old tricks,” but when it came time for the vote, nearly everyone agreed to end the strike. Tens of thousands of hands shot into the air to vote yes, to accept the deal.
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