Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (8 page)

reviving the dream

out of wedlock, as women unable to find husbands took initiative. Even so, the 1941 pre-invasion population of 200 million was not reached again until 1956. The war was an enduring catastrophe.

Politically, the war broke the regime-imposed isolation.

Millions of Red Army soldiers advanced beyond Soviet borders, and most were stunned by what they saw. ‘I was a member of the Communist party, I was an officer in the Red Army,’ wrote Peter Gornev. But ‘in Finland, Poland, and Germany, I saw that most people were better off than we were. Soviet propaganda had told us just the reverse.

The Soviet government had always lied to us. Now I had a chance to escape from the lies.’
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Here was the classic disillusionment story, better known from the anthology ‘the God that failed’.
2
Among displaced Soviet subjects like Gornev, a few hundred thousand avoided return. But more than three million were repatriated from the US, French, and British occupation zones of Germany. This substantial population with first-hand experience of the outside world frightened the Soviet leadership. Even returning POWs and slave labourers, who somehow managed to survive German captivity, were made to pass through special screening; many disappeared in the Soviet camp complex colloquially known as the Gulag.

Western annexations, following the Red Army advance, meant that several million people who had not lived under the Soviet regime during the ‘heroic’ 1930s mobilizations to build socialism found themselves incorporated into the USSR. Mass deportations sought to quell opposition 33

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among them, but in the Baltic republics and western Ukraine partisans sustained guerrilla wars through the late 1940s and early 1950s. By this time, large-scale mutinies rocked the Gulag, which held close to three million convicts in labour camps alone, more than one-third incarcerated for political crimes, the rest for so-called common crimes (theft, drunkenness, rape, murder). Protesting camp inmates had engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the defence of Stalingrad; now serving twenty-five-year terms, they were not afraid of much. Shouting slogans such as ‘Long Live the Soviet Constitution!’, they demanded an eight-hour work day, unrestricted correspondence with family members, periodic visits, and judicial review of cases. They were strafed by Soviet warplanes.

Few inhabitants inside the Soviet Union learned of the revolts in the Gulag or of the forest-dwelling anti-Soviet partisans. What they did know was that the country had withstood the Nazi war machine. Many hoped changes and a better life would follow. Unsolicited reform proposals poured forth, advocating competition among enterprises and private trade, but they were relegated to the archives.
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Victorious, the Soviet dictatorship felt no imperative to change, and fell back upon familiar patterns of bureaucratic hyper-centralization and economics by command. Propagandists exhorted the weary populace to rebuild the country, which they did, brick by brick, despite the harangues. The state media revived the pre-war theme of hostile capitalist encirclement, and relentlessly demon-ized the West, casting Soviet deprivation, once again, as a 34

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matter of heroic sacrifice. Heavy industry, as in the 1930s, received the bulk of investment, and the country regained—and, by 1950, surpassed—its pre-war Fordist-style industrial base. It also exploded its own atomic bomb.

Stalin’s death in 1953 was a psychological blow, but Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign, launched in 1956, seemed to reinvigorate the system. The dream of the socialist revolution—to ‘catch and overtake’ the most advanced countries and, in the process, build a better, more just world—rose from the ashes for a new generation.

The education of a true believer

Born in 1931 in a village in Stavropol province, a fertile land of Russia’s multi-ethnic North Caucasus, Mikhail Gorbachev experienced a life trajectory resembling that of millions of his compatriots: a middling-peasant family background; the somersault of the rural social order with collectivization; the (brief ) deportation to Siberia of his grandfather; the arrest (and release) in the Great Terror of his other grandfather, the local collective-farm chairman; the Second World War front for his father (who was wounded but survived); and the Nazi occupation for the elderly, women, and children, like young Mikhail, left behind in the village. After the war, Gorbachev might have become a farmer, like his father and grandfather, but Stalin’s upheavals—besides arrests and famine—brought 35

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educational opportunities. Graduating from high school in 1950, Gorbachev set his sights not on the provincial university but on Moscow. With a peasant-worker background, a pupil’s silver medal for a nearly perfect record, and a very high state award—the Order of the Red Banner—for helping bring in the 1948 bumper harvest, he was accepted, and made the leap to the Soviet capital.

That late Stalin-era Moscow University could have opened a youth’s mind may appear implausible. During his five years at Moscow State University’s law faculty, then located across from the Kremlin, the Stavropol hayseed came into contact with a handful of erudite professors, some educated before the revolution, married a fetching philosophy student whom he had met at a class on ball-room dancing, and joined the Communist Party. Acknowledging his personal anguish midway through his college years over Stalin’s death, Gorbachev explains that, immersed as he was in the leaden Stalinist atmosphere, poring over the lively, polemical works of Marx and Lenin proved liberating, and taught him critical analytical skills. He also recalls the heady access to Moscow’s cultural elite, and the backbreaking summers at home on the collective farm. Inevitably, yet no doubt with theoretical conviction, his senior thesis argued the advantages of socialism over capitalism.

As a law-faculty graduate (1955), Gorbachev was assigned to the public prosecutor’s office in Stavropol, which, although a provincial capital, lacked a central water supply or sewage system. He found a tiny room to rent 36

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only after a colleague let him in on what all the prosecutors did: use their rap sheets to contact an illegal apartment broker. Having immediately been compelled to violate the law for his own benefit, and become acquainted with the Stalin-era personnel who dominated the provincial ‘law’

agencies, the Moscow-educated Gorbachev soon abandoned the prosecutor’s office for an organization that offered career advancement and a chance to realize himself: the Communist Youth League (Komsomol). He set about travelling to remote settlements and organizing discussion groups ‘to fling open a window onto the world’.
4

The next year, Khrushchev delivered his ‘secret speech’ at the Twentieth Party Congress, enumerating Stalin’s crimes. The revelations divided the country into those who defended Stalin and those who condemned him, often because their families, like Gorbachev’s, had been victimized, but also because the anti-Stalin campaign promised a fresh start on the path to the bright future.

Gorbachev was 25 when shown a copy of Khrushchev’s unpublished text, and on the verge of being named first secretary of the local Komsomol. Tanks were sent to quell a revolt in socialist Hungary, but the Soviet press cited a threat of counter-revolution and capitalist intervention.

The stunning October 1957 launch of Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite, confirmed the Soviet post-war resurrection, and its commitment to science and education. The tropical crowds of the surprise 1959

Cuban revolution evoked for a visiting Soviet delegation their own revolution in 1917.
5 In September of
1960, 37

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Khrushchev thundered from the podium of the United Nations, ‘History is on our side. We will bury you.’ In 1961

another Soviet rocket lifted cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space, and he returned to earth safely. The Twenty-Second Party Congress—attended by Gorbachev—approved a new party programme heralding a transition from socialism to history’s next and final stage, Communism by 1980, within the lifetimes of his generation.
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Back in Stavropol, pressure to bring home a bigger harvest only intensified, yet Khrushchev’s multiple administrative reorganizations and campaigns caused disruption and brought mixed results. In Moscow, his proposal of term limits for apparatchiks stiffened some backs, and in October 1964 he was ‘retired’ in a conspiracy. No tanks, no riots, no executions—and no let-up in the imperious demands to fulfil plan targets for local officials, such as Gorbachev, who in 1962 had been transferred from the youth league to the party apparat. Just eight years later, he became—at age 39—party chief for the entire province.

Though still a provincial, he had joined the top elite, and took his first trips to ‘bourgeois’ countries, driving with his wife through much of France and Italy—a world away from the Soviet Union. Taken aback by the standard of living and civic freedoms, Gorbachev writes that he returned still convinced public education and medical services were organized ‘more fairly in our country’. At the same time, the staggering wealth gap brought home the urgency to ‘catch up’.
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Just as eye opening, Gorbachev was sent to Czecho-38

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slovakia for an ‘exchange of views’ on youth issues in 1969, right after the Soviet crackdown. He was able to see that, contrary to the Kremlin line, the Soviet presence amounted to an occupation, since his ‘fraternal’ delegation required round-the-clock guards. That same year, also as if by fate, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, visited an elite spa town of Stavropol province for kidney treatment, and Gorbachev played host. The two struck up a relationship that deepened on Andropov’s subsequent rest cures. It was the KGB chief who engineered both the pulverization of the Prague Spring and the promotion, in November 1978, of the earnest provincial to Moscow as the Central Committee (CC) secretary for agriculture.

Unexpectedly, the country’s top post in Gorbachev’s speciality had become vacant only because its occupant, Fyodor Kulakov—also from Stavropol, and considered a possible successor to Brezhnev—died at age 60 of an alcohol overdose while recovering from stomach surgery.
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Just 47, Gorbachev became by far the youngest member of the Kremlin leadership, most of whom had been born around 1910. The generation in between—that of 1920—had been largely decimated in the war.

Creeping invasion of the West

During the twenty-three years (1955–78) that Gorbachev had worked his way up and commanded the province of Stavropol, Soviet society had changed profoundly.

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Two-thirds of the population had lived in villages when Gorbachev was born, but by the late 1970s townspeople outnumbered country folk by almost two to one. And whereas, towards the end of Stalin’s time, most urbanites still lived in barracks or ‘communal apartments’, sharing kitchen and bath with other tenants, under Brezhnev more than half the growing city population lived in apartments with private baths and kitchens. Millions of families were also able to build modest country retreats (dachas) with vegetable gardens. Between 1970 and 1978

the number of domestic vacationers at sanatoria and resorts jumped from 16 million to 35 million, while another one million per year travelled to Eastern Europe.

By this time, more than 90 per cent of Soviet families owned refrigerators, more than 60 per cent owned washing machines.

There were significantly more goods than before, yet much of the Soviet population queued for hours to obtain basic necessities and had to turn to the more expensive ‘shadow economy’ of informal production and exchange for children’s clothes, proper-sized adult shoes, and other scarce items. That was because consumer goods production lagged behind military and heavy industry, and central planning empowered producers, not consumers.

Similarly, no matter how joyous people were when moving into a new prefabricated apartment, usually after waiting ten years, their space was invariably insufficient—one, two, or at most three rooms for husband, wife, children, grandparents. The authorities just could not keep up.

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And, although people had more, they were demanding more, on the basis of wider horizons. Back in 1950, the year Gorbachev had entered Moscow University, there were 1.25 million students enrolled in higher education, about 3 per cent of the population, but by the late 1970s, fully 10 per cent of the Soviet population had completed college. About 70 per cent had completed high school, compared with 40 per cent in 1950.

Mass media technologies—motion pictures, radio—had long been important in the Soviet dictatorship’s ability to disseminate the kinds of information and ways of interpreting the world it deemed appropriate. These remained powerful state levers, but over time foreign content increasingly entered the stream of mass culture in the Soviet Union, notwithstanding censorship. Into the 1950s, Soviet radios meant a wire hooked up to a feed bringing one or two stations from Moscow, rather than wave receivers, but, by the late 1960s, wave radios came to exceed wire ones, and the total number of all radios grew to nearly ninety million (from around eighteen million at Stalin’s death). Technical adepts reconfigured Soviet-manufactured radios to receive short wave from abroad, broadcast as part of the cold war. True, a good part of state radio facilities were busy producing static to cover up Radio Liberty, BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Voice of America, which collectively were known as ‘the voices’. Yet lis-teners could escape jamming out in the country and learn the forbidden details of Soviet political life and world events.

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In this creeping post-war cultural invasion of the USSR

by the West, an even more important role was played by images and details of consumerism, some of which were being delivered by a new and quintessential mass medium, television. The number of Soviet TV sets leapt from 400 in 1940, to 2.5 million in 1958, thirty million ten years later, and ninety million in the 1980s, by which time they could be found in 93 per cent of households. Post-war programmes began to focus on home life, and, beginning in the mid-1970s, the authorities permitted translations of family serials from Britain (
The Forsyte Saga
,
David
Copperfield
), France (
Les Thibaults
), and other capitalist countries. Such shows, like the increasingly available foreign films, were watched as much for clues of material life as for entertainment. Soviet audiences would intently observe the characters moving through well-furnished homes from one room to another room and then another room, sometimes eight or more in all. The characters also appeared in different clothes each day, peered into over-stuffed refrigerators, and drove sleek cars. It was all fantasy—or was it?