Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (12 page)

Their appeals reached few people, but indicated the suicidal dynamic of openness for the system.

Whatever the cleavages among the children of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization,
their
children had come of age in a different time. Most people under the age of 30—one-quarter of the Soviet population—were simply not interested in reforming socialism. Glasnost afforded them unprecedented access to the commercial culture and ‘values’ of capitalism. Their alienation was captured in such derogatory slang for their parents and elders as
Sovok
, for
Sovetskii chelovek
—a Soviet person.
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Ligachev, appalled by the comments of the youth shown on Soviet television, visited the station, and asked the programming executive whether he had found the featured adolescents in a jail.
10
But attitudes among youth, like the demands to abolish the Soviet system, preoccupied the top leadership far less than did battling with the public defences of Stalinism. ‘We [
sic
] were too long under the illusion’, Gorbachev later explained, ‘that the problem was simply the difficulty of winning support for perestroika’.
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But it was unclear what, besides denouncing Stalin, ‘support’

entailed. Worse, the common enemy, Stalinist socialism, obscured the chasm between those who denounced Stalin 71

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in the name of reforming socialism, and those who denounced him in the name of repudiating socialism.

National movements also emerged in connection with ‘support for perestroika’. At first, they were narrow and tentative. But in February 1988, the inhabitants of Karabakh, a predominantly ethnic Armenian ‘autonomous province’ that Stalin had placed inside neighbouring Azerbaijan, interpreted Gorbachev’s policies to signify the ‘righting’ of historical wrongs and called for ‘reunification’ with Armenia. Thousands of people, many carrying Gorbachev portraits, packed the central square of the Armenian capital in solidarity. The local authorities in Karabakh unilaterally declared themselves part of Armenia. Mass protests ensued in Azerbaijan in November 1988. Some Azerbaijanis in an ethnically mixed industrial town searched buses, hospitals, and apartment buildings for Armenians; thirty-one people were killed and hundreds wounded. Karabakh was placed under direct rule by Moscow, but tensions only escalated. Hundreds of thousands of people became refugees. The population of both countries was permanently mobilized, but not as Gorbachev had envisioned. Verbal condemnations of nationalists did nothing to stop them.

What were called ‘popular fronts for the support of perestroika’ also appeared in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and, with cross-border copying, in Ukraine and Belarus as well. Organized by the party and the KGB at Gorbachev’s command, to outflank opponents of ‘reform’, the fronts brought together disparate groups, 72

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including reformist party officials, and advocated first economic and then political ‘sovereignty’—a term that seemed consonant with Gorbachev’s emphasis on self-actualization. Undercover KGB operatives sought to keep these ever-growing movements within ‘acceptable’

bounds, but no one was sure what those bounds were, and events moved quickly. Street demonstrations in which some speakers, claiming to be supporting ‘reform’, demanded independence were broadcast on regional state television. Some leaders in the movements also came around to embracing demands for a multiparty political order and private property, both of which meant an end to the Soviet system.

There seemed to be no one ready to defend socialism and the Union, except those castigated as ‘Stalinists’

opposed to ‘reform’! But the defenders of the system, in the CC and elsewhere, Gorbachev boxed in brilliantly, beating back their challenges at every party forum.

Virtuoso tactician

Gorbachev knew that far from all party officials shared his commitment to democratizing socialism, and, from the outset, he had been wary of an apparat revanche. Behind the scenes there was widespread foot-dragging, of course, but, at a February 1988 CC plenum, Yegor Ligachev, the number two official, openly argued for an end to glasnost’s wholesale blackening of the Soviet past and, by 73

the drama of reform

implication, of the status quo. The mood in the hall was supportive of Ligachev and his call to rein in glasnost. The next month, as if in response, a firestorm broke over a Leningrad schoolteacher’s letter to the editor of a rear-guard newspaper. Nina Andreeva’s ‘I Cannot Compromise Principles’ attacked ‘left-liberals’, who ‘falsify the history of socialism’ and ‘try to make us believe that the country’s past was nothing but mistakes and crimes, keeping silent about the greatest achievements of the past and the present’.
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The letter appeared in print the day Gorbachev left on a trip to Yugoslavia, and, as was party custom, his place was temporarily assumed by Ligachev. After Gorbachev’s return, at the next politburo meeting, the general secretary casually brought the letter up, and, as pre-arranged, Alexander Yakovlev condemned it as an ‘anti-perestroika manifesto’. Aspersions were cast on Ligachev and the Secretariat for overseeing the letter’s publication.

Analysts at the time misperceived this important turn of events as evidence of determined apparat resistance rather than of Gorbachev manipulation. Gorbachev writes obliquely in his memoirs that the letter ‘contained information known only to a relatively narrow circle’. Ligachev writes that Gorbachev had the circumstances of publication investigated and
privately
exonerated him of responsibility. Gorbachev never made a public disavowal of the suspicions. On the contrary, with the avid assistance of the Soviet and foreign media Ligachev was made into an unwitting instrument in the general secretary’s efforts to cultivate society’s sympathies and to pressure the 74

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apparat publicly to demonstrate that it was not anti-perestroika. Gorbachev also fashioned himself a scapegoat for economic failures: the Ligachev-led conservatives were strangling the reforms. To top it all off, he continued to enjoy Ligachev’s loyalty, owing to party discipline and to the insincere private exculpation. ‘Without knowing it,’

Gorbachev writes with evident satisfaction, ‘Nina Andreeva actually helped us’.
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But his clever manipulation simply stirred up even greater popular fury at the party, without magically transforming the behaviour of apparatchiks, let alone the economy.

The general secretary expended extraordinary effort urging all levels of the apparat that
not
to take the risks of political reform would be even more dangerous. In 1987–8, he had managed to coax the politburo into agreeing to ‘democratize’ the party with competitive elections.

Accustomed to lifetime appointments and perquisites in exchange for following orders, most party officials, even those who had reformist inclinations, did not know how to address a public reconfigured as voters. Nor did functionaries appreciate being held personally accountable for Stalin’s crimes. The courageous types who heeded the call for the vanguard to lead ‘perestroika’ discovered that, in the absence of anticipated economic improvements, they were ‘leading’ little more than angry public ventilations over heretofore unmentionable problems, for which the party was being blamed. And, while party members among Moscow’s intelligentsia were consumed in debates on history and freedom, wrote one
New York Times
reporter of a 75

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July 1988 party conference, ‘the delegates from the provinces want[ed] to talk about empty stores, dirty rivers, hospitals without water, and factories with deteriorating assembly lines’.
14

Somehow, the Communist Party was supposed to be both the instrument and the object of perestroika, but, at that same July conference, Gorbachev, still seeking a reliable political base and levers of power, unveiled a plan to revive the soviets. Power had been seized in the names of the soviets in October 1917, yet these councils embodying a vision, like Jacobin clubs, of radical, direct democracy (rather than representative democracy) had long since atrophied. Now, local soviets were to be revived by means of contested elections, and these were to be accompanied by elections to a new all-union body, a Congress of People’s Deputies, which would in turn choose representatives to a thoroughly revamped USSR Supreme Soviet, or working parliament. This plan, nominally only a refurbishment of existing institutions, meant moving beyond the party’s hereditary power and acquiring a popular mandate—a test that the vast majority of sitting party officials who stood for election in early 1989 to the Congress failed miserably. Gorbachev exempted himself and the rest of the leadership from the competitive elections, but the new political situation was evident from the seating in the Congress hall: except for Gorbachev, politburo members sat not in the presidium, but in a gallery off to the side.

Reinvigoration of the soviets was accompanied by a 76

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further, behind-the-scenes weakening of the party apparat’s power. Acutely aware that the top echelon had turned on a previous reformer, Khrushchev, compelling his ‘request to retire’ in October 1964, and evidently not content with the results of his manipulation of the Nina Andreeva affair, Gorbachev went after Ligachev’s power base. In September 1988, prior to the election campaign for the Congress of People’s Deputies, he pulled off a ‘reorganization’ of the party Secretariat. Citing a need to improve the work of the CC, Gorbachev created a series of separate, labour-intensive party commissions, each headed by a politburo member. Suddenly, there was no time for collective Secretariat meetings, or for its Union-wide supervisory functions of the still intact Union-wide party committees, whether for coordinating the elections to the Congress or for a conspiracy against the general secretary. Thus, while still holding to his Leninist faith in the potential of the party mass, Gorbachev
deliberately
broke the might of the apparat fifteen months before he relented (February 1990) on the demands formally to abolish the Communist Party’s monopoly. But, strange as it might seem, he failed to grasp that by undermining the party Secretariat and enhancing the state (the Supreme Soviets of the Union and of the republics) he was exchanging a unitary structure for a federalized one.

In the Russian empire of the tsars there had been no national republics, just non-ethnic provinces. National republics formed when the empire broke apart in the First World War, and, though the Red Army reconquered most 77

the drama of reform

of these territories, resistance by the new republics helped prevent their dissolution and absorption into Soviet Russia. Instead, an innovative compromise—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)—was reached in December 1922. Eventually, the Union came to have fifteen nationally designated republics, each with a state border, constitution, parliament, and (after 1944) a ministry of foreign affairs. In the similarly polyglot US, there were many Poles in Chicago but no Autonomous Polish Republic of Illinois—or Mexican Republic of California.

Rather, the US was a single ‘nation of nations’ comprising fifty non-ethnic ‘states’ that were really provinces. The Soviet Union was a kind of ‘empire of nations’, since fifteen of its nations had statehood. To keep this nationally structured federation of states together, the Soviet leadership relied on the pyramid-like hierarchy of the Communist Party.

What was the Communist Party? It was not a political party in the Western sense, but a conspiracy to take power, which it did in 1917, after which a new revolutionary government was formed, and there were a few calls to abolish the party. Instead, the party found a role in power. That took place during the Civil War (1918–21), when the former Russian empire territories were reconquered, tsarist officers were recruited to the Red Army, and ‘political commissars’ were introduced alongside the military experts to guarantee their loyalty. Such, haphazardly, became the model for the whole country: in every institution, from schools to ministries, party members, or 78

the drama of reform

commissars, were called upon to act as guarantors of loyalty and correct politics. But soon Soviet army officers, bureaucrats, teachers, and engineers ceased to be hold-overs from the tsarist period. The country trained its own ‘Red’, or party-member, experts, yet the separate party organizations shadowing the experts were not removed.

On the contrary, the bureaucracy of the party continued to grow alongside the bureaucracy of the state, and both performed essentially the same functions: management of society and the economy. Thus, the Soviet Union acquired two parallel, overlapping administrative structures: party and state. Of course, if the redundant party were removed, one would be left not just with the Soviet central state bureaucracy, but also with a voluntary association of national republics, each of which could legally choose to withdraw from the Union. In sum, the Communist Party, administratively redundant to the Soviet state and yet critical to its integrity, was like a bomb inside the core of the Union.

In this light, the proposals immediately after Stalin’s death made by Lavrenti Beria stand out as a potentially fateful moment. A supremely skilled and murderous organizer, Beria was the kingpin of the state’s military-industrial complex, which beginning with the 1930s industrialization and continuing through the Second World War and the onset of the cold war, had got the upper hand over the party apparat in the dualist party– state system. In 1953, Beria proposed eliminating the administrative role of the party in favour of the state and 79

the drama of reform

enhancing the position of native elites in the Union republics (his other power base). Whether these proposals would have better secured the Soviet Union’s nationally federalized, party-dependent integrity will never be known.
15
The rest of the Soviet leaders pounced on Beria before he pounced on them. Nikita Khrushchev, with the backing of the apparatchiks whom the technocratic Beria disdained, won the ensuing power struggle. Khrushchev deepened the re-assertion (launched in 1952 at the 19th Party Congress) of the party’s role vis-à-vis the state.