IN THE EARLY hours of 11 March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, stepped out into the grounds of their dacha or country house outside Moscow and went for a walk. It was a frequent habit of theirs, to get some air and exercise, but also to be able to talk frankly without fear of being monitored by the Soviet KGB, whose listening devices eavesdropped even on members of the Politburo. The previous day, the ailing Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko had died, and Politburo members were due to gather to choose his successor.
It was the third time the country had said goodbye to a sick and ageing Kremlin leader in as many years. First, Leonid Brezhnev – a figure of conservative continuity but also a symbol of the country’s stagnation – had died in 1982, having been in power for nearly two decades. Then in 1984, Yuri Andropov, the former powerful KGB chief and Gorbachev’s patron, had succumbed to the kidney disease that had plagued his final years, after only 15 months at the helm. And now Chernenko had gone, yet another member of the Soviet gerontocracy, whose feeble and bumbling leadership had continued to undermine the country’s standing in the world.
Gorbachev knew there was now an appetite for a new broom, someone to reinvigorate the Communist Party and re-establish the Soviet Union in the eyes of the world as a superpower on a par with its American Cold War rival. He also knew that he was the obvious choice and had done what he could to secure his chances by seeking the support, among others, of the veteran Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko.
This chat with his wife was the last chance to take stock and brace himself for the challenge ahead. ‘We can’t go on living like this,’ he told her, in what would later become a catchphrase to explain what drove the impetus for change. He was referring both to the Soviet economy – so moribund that the state could not even feed itself, let alone keep up with the United States in a newly intensified arms race or maintain the Soviet Union’s costly interventions abroad in such places as Afghanistan – and also to the dysfunctional and corrupt Communist bureaucracy, which had for years stifled the possibility of reform.
Later that day, Gorbachev was indeed chosen as the new Kremlin leader, proposed by the ruling Politburo and endorsed by the larger Central Committee of top party members. He lost little time in starting to implement his programme of reforms. To begin with, the changes ushered in by perestroika, as his reform programme was called, were deliberately limited. In Russian, ‘perestroika’ means ‘restructuring’, and its initial purpose was to refresh the Soviet Communist system, not to do away with it. One new slogan merely called for ‘uskorenie’, or the speeding up of economic production. Another set of new laws sanctioned small-scale cooperatives and joint ventures, while still banning private business. State ownership remained sacrosanct, and any political reforms that might challenge the Communist Party seemed a long way off.
Within a year, though, Gorbachev and his fellow reformers launched a new policy of ‘glasnost’ or ‘openness’. This signal from above, giving a green light to free expression, had a dramatic impact on Soviet society. Political prisoners, including the Soviet Union’s most famous dissident, Andrei Sakharov, were released from prison or brought back from exile. Censorship was lifted, generating an explosion of activity in journalism and the arts. Subjects once taboo could now be aired. Books previously circulated only in underground hand-typed samizdat copies were now available in print, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s mammoth chronicle of the Soviet forced labour camp system, The Gulag Archipelago. New investigations into the repressions of the Stalin era began. No longer afraid to speak out, people began to gather in public for the first time in decades to debate, challenge and argue. It was an extraordinarily heady atmosphere and exactly the sort of grassroots political engagement that Gorbachev believed would secure his reform programme from below and fend off the objections from more conservative Politburo colleagues.
Abroad, Gorbachev’s enlightened approach brought equally dramatic results. A tentative ‘getting to know you’ summit with President Ronald Reagan in Geneva at the end of 1985 was followed by a more ambitious meeting in Reykjavik in Iceland at the end of 1986. Though this produced no breakthroughs, it forged a new understanding between the two Cold War protagonists, resulting in an arms control agreement to slash nuclear arsenals in 1987. An historic visit by President Reagan to Moscow followed in 1988. The conservative US President, who just a few years before had denounced the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’, was now on first-name terms with the Kremlin leader, and amiably chatting to Soviet citizens on walkabout in Red Square.
By now, the pace of perestroika was quickening. Inevitably, this alarmed prominent conservatives in the Communist Party. They began to coalesce into an anti-reform camp, led by Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, and started to speak out, warning that the reforms were going too far and yielding too much ground both abroad and at home. But at the other end of the spectrum there were impatient demands for a more radical agenda. Some groups wanted to challenge the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. Others wanted a more complete economic overhaul to abolish central planning, reintroduce private property and transform the country into a proper market economy. And voices from other Soviet republics were calling for a serious discussion about the ‘Nationalities Problem’ and the relationship of the constituent republics to the centre, something that for decades the Soviet Communist Party leadership had considered too dangerous to be aired.
Gorbachev’s way of handling these competing pressures was to play them off against each other. For a while, his masterful manipulation worked. In June 1988 he summoned top Communists from around the country for a special meeting in Moscow known as the ‘19th Party Conference’. It was a pivotal event, which not only exposed the deep split in the party between radicals and hard-liners, but was also used by Gorbachev to push through an astonishing political reform: the creation of a new legislative body called the Congress of People’s Deputies, whose members were both hand-picked top Communists and elected representatives from around the country. When its sessions began in May 1989, the often-fiery debates were broadcast live on Soviet television and the entire country was gripped.
But by 1990, as demands from different groups grew more radical, Gorbachev’s deft juggling act was becoming hard to sustain, and it began to look as though the process he had initiated was no longer under his control. Where once he had been able to play off hard-liners in the party and KGB against radical reformers seeking faster change, thereby enhancing his own role as final arbiter and ultimate leader, now the two sides were pulling so hard in different directions that he risked looking hesitant and unsure of what to do.
Nationalists from the Baltics and from Ukraine, outspoken academics, former prominent political prisoners, plus former Moscow party chief Boris Yeltsin, who had allied himself with Russian liberals, were all beginning to demand a deeper political transformation incompatible with traditional Soviet Communist rule. Gorbachev’s gamble had rested on the assumption that he could exploit his status as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party to dictate policy from above and expect others to follow suit. It was becoming clear that this was no longer the case. The reforms he had unleashed had encouraged plain speaking, in the media, in Parliament and on the streets. Famously, he had declared that ‘no one, not even the General Secretary of the Communist Party, is above criticism.’ But an increasingly pluralistic press was now taking him at his word and regularly criticising his leadership. No longer was it so clear that where he led, others would follow without question.
In March 1990 Gorbachev created a new post of executive Soviet President – a move designed to augment his authority. But he decided not to risk a ballot where the Soviet people would be asked to vote for him directly. Instead, he staged an indirect election by the Congress of People’s Deputies and made himself the sole candidate on the ballot. The election gave him the extra title of Soviet President as well as head of the Soviet Communist Party, but it did little to enhance his domestic prestige. His political power was ebbing away.
All the while, the crumbling and chaotic Soviet economy was slowly grinding to a halt. Across the country, a sense of crisis intensified as shop shelves emptied and queues for basic goods lengthened. No longer were all Soviet citizens enamoured of perestroika. Many were beginning to tire of the turmoil it was causing and the strain it placed on their daily lives.
Ironically, the more Gorbachev came under pressure at home, the more his star rose abroad. In the United States and Western Europe, he was applauded for the transformations he had brought about, which looked as though they would bring the Cold War to a close. In particular, they cheered his willingness to engage in meaningful international arms control deals and to withdraw Soviet troops from the long-running war in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s policy of disengagement from client states in the developing world was mirrored by his instruction to Communist leaders in Eastern Europe that he was no longer prepared to use force to keep them in power, and that instead of relying on Moscow they should look for local solutions to their problems. It soon became evident that without the threat of a possible Soviet intervention to back them up, local Communist parties in the Eastern Bloc were extremely exposed, as they commanded little or no public support. With that realisation, there was little to hold the Soviet Bloc together. First, the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, the demolition of a potent symbol of Europe’s division, then one by one Eastern Europe’s Communist governments lost power, most of them eased out peacefully, although in Romania President Nicolae Ceauescu was overthrown more violently. All the while, their populations applauded Gorbachev in Moscow for giving them the opportunity to break free.
But inside the Soviet Union, exhilaration was giving way to a darker mood. At the end of 1990 one of Gorbachev’s closest allies, his Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, abruptly submitted his resignation, delivering a dramatic warning that reformers were in retreat and ‘a dictatorship is coming.’
Gorbachev remained in power, but to consolidate his hold he filled his government with a mix of bureaucratic nonentities and die-hard Communists who were openly hostile to reform. At the start of 1991 it looked as though perestroika was in trouble and the old guard were intent on taking back control. Few could imagine that by the end of the year, the whole Soviet edifice would have come crumbling down.
Pavel Palazhchenko was born in 1949 near Moscow. He was the chief English interpreter for Mikhail Gorbachev between 1985 and 1991.
After three General Secretaries – Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko – died in succession, it was obvious that someone younger was to be elected. Everyone expected Gorbachev to be elected because he was, under Chernenko, the number-two person in the country. And everyone expected him to undertake some kind of change. No one really had any idea what kind of change that could be. People were considering different possibilities – change that could be similar to what was happening under Andropov for example, putting the house in order, greater discipline in all areas, more responsibility, etc. Some people, however, were expecting a different kind of change, but there was no consensus about what kind of change it could be. But everyone wanted change, there was a consensus on that.
The journalist and editor Vitali Tretyakov began writing for Moscow News in 1988. He describes the newspaper during these years as ‘the pulpit of glasnost’. One of his early articles was an exposé of the privileges of Communist Party officials.
This article played a big role in my professional career. It was my idea. But Yegor Yakovlev [editor of Moscow News] didn’t print everything. They say that he was the bravest editor, but that’s not quite right. Still, it came out on the first or second day of the 19th Party Conference [in June 1988]. And Yegor Ligachev criticised this article directly from the podium of the conference. After that Yegor Yakovlev was proud! The Moscow News was directly criticised by a member of the Politburo, from the podium of the 19th Party Conference – Yegor was happy! After that he made me a political columnist for the Moscow News.
Lev Ponomarev is a physicist and political activist. He was born in 1941 and grew up during Khrushchev’s thaw. In 1987 he was one of the founders of Memorial, which began as a campaign for a monument to the victims of Stalin’s terror.
I was lucky because the Institute of Experimental Physics was a sort of oasis. We all spoke freely about everything and discussed any topics with our colleagues. I understood that everything’s bad in the country, but didn’t understand what I could do. I was waiting for a calling. That calling came when I found out that Gorbachev had called Andrei Sakharov and suggested he leave his exile. Initially, I observed Gorbachev. He says a lot, and maybe says a lot of the right things, but I could see that he’s inconsistent and I didn’t see any real change. But when he started talking about the release of political prisoners I understood and I began believing him. I realised that my time had come and I started to think about what I could do. I understood that any public service should first of all begin with commemorating the millions of people who perished in Stalin’s camps.
In January or February of 1987, I read about a group that had proclaimed the same aim as me. And so, for two months we were debating with each other, creating a document about the founding [of Memorial] and the necessity of memorialising the memory of a million of those who died. And when we wrote it, we decided to collect signatures under this call, to demand of Gorbachev that he create a permanent memorial and archive. So, the aim was narrow to begin with.
How can we build a democratic state without having told the truth about the monstrous repressions? Many millions died, and we’re the descendants of those people. Some people’s parents survived, some people’s didn’t. In order to build democracy, we need to understand why it happened, so as not to make a mistake the next time. All this remains true today – we’re still saying the same things.
One of Pavel Palazhchenko’s first international summits was Mikhail Gorbachev’s initial meeting with President Ronald Reagan, in Geneva in November 1985.
The negotiations were difficult because they happened after a six-year break in the normal routine of summits, so a number of problems had piled up. At that time, President Reagan was seen in the Soviet Union as a very conservative, very right-wing, very anti-Communist politician, and many Soviet experts and diplomats believed that nothing could change while Reagan was President because he was so ideologically minded. And, indeed he was. Nevertheless, he and Gorbachev were able to develop a rapport and that started there in Geneva.
They started with a general overview. They committed to trying to improve the relationship, but both outlined in very strong terms their differences on the various issues, in particular Afghanistan, arms controls, INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] missiles, and the various regional issues that at that time were quite acute. Another thing they discussed was whether it was possible to work out some joint statement. Before the summit, the Americans told us they were not happy with the practice of issuing long joint statements that were, as they said, long on rhetoric but short on substance. We thought that it would be a good idea to try to put on paper the areas of agreement and the areas that needed work. Despite what they had been saying before, Reagan surprisingly said that he would consider a joint statement. They instructed their diplomats to work on that joint statement, and ultimately it was adopted the next day. That was a big step forward. It was in that statement that Reagan and Gorbachev proclaimed that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought and that they would not seek military superiority. That was a very important statement that set the tone for the relationship. But it was a difficult discussion, because [in] most of the areas that were discussed, the positions of the two leaders were very much apart.
There was initially a lot of mistrust on the part of Reagan. But also, surprisingly, mistrust on the part of Bush, who became President in 1988. One would’ve expected that, given the fact that he had been the Vice President under Reagan and he was very much in the loop on all of the things that were happening in the negotiations and at the previous summits, he would just pick up where Reagan had left off and they would start interacting and moving forward. But apparently there was some mistrust even then and it took Bush and his administration some time to restart the relationship. You shouldn’t think that this was an easy prospect. At all times, it was a combination of the legacy of the Cold War and the new thinking, the new relationship, the new approaches to problems. But it was difficult.
The first real arms-reduction agreement was signed in December 1987. So, it took more than two years to develop that first, ultimately rather modest, step in the arms-control area. Then it took another three and a half years to sign the START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty], which was a huge reduction in the amount of nuclear weapons, but that took rather a long time to prepare. Those were difficult times. It was not a totally smooth relationship. It was interrupted by things that unfortunately happen from time to time, such as spy scandals, misunderstandings at various levels. But I think the great merit of the leaders of the Soviet Union and the US was that they did not allow themselves to be distracted from the main goal – that is normalising and improving the relationship, moving towards cooperation – by those obstacles and difficulties and even scandals that happened from time to time.
After the proposed monument to the victims of repression was half-heartedly endorsed by Gorbachev in 1988, Memorial broadened and transformed into a nationwide movement that saw Lev Ponomarev campaigning for democracy and civil rights.
It was clear that an alternative to the Communist Party was unprecedented and needed some preparation. We decided that the founders of the national movement should be creative unions. They should become the founders, not us individuals, but specifically already registered creative unions. And with the creative unions it was clear that many were already heading that way, through their publications. The first creative union I approached was the union of cinematographers of the USSR. Then I went to the Union of Artists, then the Union of Architects of the USSR, then the Union of Designers.
We started preparing a founding congress. We were told, ‘Yes, yes, everyone is coming.’ But suddenly the other founders [of the initial incarnation of Memorial] told us that they’re not ready, they won’t support it. They’re the founders! And here we’d already made an agreement with the Dom Kino [House of Cinema, the venue for the congress]. So, I went to Andrei Sakharov and I told him the situation. Then he in front of me said, ‘Well, I’ve got the phone number, I’ll call the Central Committee.’ He wasn’t a party member or anything. So, he phoned up the Central Committee and said, ‘We know it’s the Central Committee forbidding our founding congress. People are already coming for it. Keep in mind, we are going to hold it whatever happens, either on the street or at my home, but the congress will be held.’ And we were given permission.
In 1990, a new law was passed, stating that ‘the press and other forms of mass information are free.’ At this time, Vitali Tretyakov left Moscow News in order to establish his own newspaper. Called Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper), it would be one of the first truly independent newspapers in the Soviet Union.
Firstly, I asked my friends who were journalists whether they wanted to [write for Nezavisimaya Gazeta], and none of them accepted my offer. Everybody was discussing freedom of speech, democracy, new possibilities for publishing, but everybody was sitting still. For example, I invited people from Izvestia [a long-running daily newspaper]. But what did Izvestia look like at that time? They had special phones for dialling the government buildings in downtown Moscow. The employees had country houses and cars. And all those democratic journalists who had nice workplaces did not accept our offer ‘for some reason’.
I was stating openly that we were creating a newspaper guided by Western norms. I already knew which qualities distinguish good publishing from the one existent in the Soviet Union at that time. I took Western newspapers as a model. I thought the text should be organised differently – a certain type of headline should be used, a summary has to be added, describing the main theme of the story. This all was non-existent in the newspapers by that time. We initiated a lot of changes. However, I always appreciated Russian journalism was always more literary; we did not aim to get rid of this trait. Another thing was that our journalists love discussions, which are not always preferable. I tried to fix this by giving rules: ‘First describe the facts, later provide your thoughts.’ Nobody was interfering with the Nezavisimaya’s affairs, a daily quality newspaper distributed nationwide. And we were criticising Gorbachev hard.
Initially, there was very little opposition [to perestroika], because people in the Communist Party bureaucracy, people in the Politburo at that time, understood the need for change but they did not realise how far Gorbachev was prepared to go in that change, so they initially supported him. It was after Gorbachev moved toward more than just glasnost, towards the democratisation of the system, it was after he moved to relatively free elections, that the real differences of opinion began to emerge, and that the real opposition began to emerge. They felt that what was happening was moving toward a system where they, the Communist Party bureaucracy in particular, would become irrelevant, and they did not like that. They disagreed with many aspects of the foreign policy as well. When Gorbachev decided that he would not use force to stop change in Eastern Europe, they disagreed with that. When he took a similar position on German reunification, there were quite a few people that disagreed with that. They believed that by agreeing to German unification we were losing the fruit of victory in the Second World War. There were real differences, but they emerged as perestroika progressed and evolved and as Gorbachev’s thinking evolved, and as the problems and the difficulties that were part of perestroika began to emerge and became more evident. They were real differences but they did not manifest themselves during the first couple of years of perestroika.
I was writing in my articles that Gorbachev is destroying the Soviet Union. The demise began in 1989, when the First Congress of People’s Deputies took place, and it was streamed live on TV. Gorbachev thought: ‘I put [the Congress] together and they will support me.’ But later everybody started to criticise him, denounce him effectively. I wrote that May 24th 1989, the first day of the Congress, was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. One could still have changed things, had Gorbachev conducted clever politics, but it was not so, therefore everything crashed.
Glasnost and freedom of speech, the publication of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the publication of previously banned or restricted Soviet and Russian literature, that was a big change with the pre-Gorbachev era. But there was more than that. There was criticism of Gorbachev. Political competition and political struggles became a norm. As soon as the first free elections were held and the First Congress of People’s Deputies was broadcast live on television, it became obvious that this is no longer the same country. I wasn’t uncomfortable with the fact that Gorbachev was being criticised. I felt that a lot of that criticism was unfair, but I think it was normal that people were allowed to express their opinion and give their views about anyone, including the leader of the country.
I got to know Gorbachev in person only in December 1991 when the Belovezhskaya Pushcha [the location in Belarus where the signing of the ‘Belavezha Accords’ established the Commonwealth of Independent States on 8 December 1991, effectively dissolving the Soviet Union] took place. He gave me an interview and he was talking as if we had been acquainted for a long time. I don’t know what he believed in: his genius or his luck. For sure, he lost his luck and, regarding genius, we are all arrogant. I also think of myself as a smart person, but to claim that I am a genius, to think that I am going to outwit everybody in this world, this is idiocy. At that time, we started to criticise Yeltsin and his politics, and a lot of readers abandoned us. Later, some scandals happened but we maintained our publishing tradition. Yeltsin or Gorbachev, it didn’t matter, one minister or another. I tried to uphold this attitude, and on one hand this was the basis of our authority, but on the other we lost a lot of readers because it was clear what the big bosses and bureaucrats wanted from our newspaper.
Gorbachev was isolated, essentially saying some things all on his own, but he didn’t have many concrete actions. The release of political prisoners is a concrete action, he did that. And later endless discussions, the fracturing of the party. There was a ferocious battle in the Central Committee and Politburo, and he drowned in that battle. The only thing that was a great achievement was the freedom of speech, freedom of the press: Ogoniok, the Moscow News, and many other newspapers and books began to be published. Gorbachev gave people the opportunity to talk about the past and discuss the future. That is his huge achievement. But the Central Committee was cracking and it was obvious that he was not winning there, which effectively was demonstrated by the later events of 1991.
Gorbachev was doing something that was necessary but it was his persistence in moving along that path rather than going back, rather than backtracking on the main promises of democracy and change. That was a possibility. The coup in August 1991 was precisely about that and the fact that Gorbachev said, ‘No,’ to the coup organisers who came to him and basically asked him to declare an emergency and to put a stop to the entire process of democratisation. That fact, I think, says it all. It was Gorbachev, it was his determination to continue to move along the path of change that made all the difference.
At some point, when I started to heavily criticise the government in my articles, to criticise Yeltsin and everything happening around him, people started to ask me: ‘You seemed to be supporting Yeltsin, Gorbachev and democracy, but now you are apparently against democracy!’ My personal life is something different from the life of my country. As for me personally, I benefited from glasnost and perestroika. But ask a regular person whether they benefited from those events! Also, where is my country now? The Soviet Union was not an empire of evil for me. I regret that my homeland does not exist any more. I am saying this taking into account all the drawbacks which we had then.
My attitude to Gorbachev changed gradually. We maintained a friendship for some time, at conferences in the Gorbachev Foundation and trips, celebrations. Once we flew together for a celebration of the tenth anniversary of perestroika. Nobody celebrated here [in Russia]. It was celebrated in Italy and I flew there, together with the Gorbachevs. Then I saw that he absolutely lacks self-criticism. We had a quarrel and I said, ‘You lost everything. You lost your personal power as a USSR President, and transferred the power to a person who you thought to be below yourself, worthless. Socialism with a human face? There is no socialism with a human face. We lost the Soviet Union. Just please don’t say you are a winner in this situation, that you saved the world from threats. You lost everything and you are a loser.’ He continued to argue with me. But there were people who were maybe more cynical and had more experience, who said almost right away that this person is a complete failure and will harm the country. A lot of people were saying that, but their voices were ignored.
As Gorbachev said in his farewell address, the changes that had happened under him were so enormous that they really transformed the country for decades to come, and we’re still digesting the changes that happened under Gorbachev.
Gorbachev used glasnost and perestroika to lead the country to a dead end. I cannot admire glasnost and perestroika, despite the fact that I personally benefited from it. Yeltsin was absolutely indifferent to the country’s destiny; he bought power at the expense of a country. He needed power and didn’t care what would happen to the Soviet Union and the people living there. When Gorbachev issued the book Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World [in 1987], I was really horrified. Everything was collapsing at once. I even thought to write an answer to this book: ‘Where is your conscience? What right do you have to make such global and ungrounded statements? Your country is suffering because of this new way of thinking, and you want to address it to the whole world!’ A failed, catastrophic politics for tens of millions of people, the majority of the citizens of the Soviet Union. Could things have been done otherwise? Yes, they could. We could have reformed our country, to promote democracy differently. Nobody says that the monopoly of the Communist Party was a great thing. But a lot of people just don’t care about the Communist Party: they simply lived better then than they do now. Knowing everything that I know now, having analysed, having read and having lived through this, I can confidently say that a completely different politics could have been carried out, achieving better democracy, and a better glasnost, without demolishing the country and the lives of people. This is the only way I can assess it.