The art of Kremlinology was never a precise one; to deduce who was moving up the Kremlin pecking order and who was falling from favour meant reading barely scrutable signs, such as who stood where in official politburo photographs, who was closest to the General Secretary at Red Square parades, and who got the most mentions in Pravda. The façade of unanimity that the leadership maintained made it harder to discern who might harbour reservations about the party line. Private lives, hobbies, families – sometimes even who was married and who was not – were opaque subjects.
So when a member of the politburo arrived in Britain for an official visit in December 1984 and took his attractive young wife on a very public sightseeing tour, it raised eyebrows and expectations. Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev went together to pay homage at the London haunts of Lenin and Marx; then, while he was meeting the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, she went shopping in Oxford Street. It seemed a tacit acknowledgement that the bourgeois materialist society Moscow had long ridiculed and condemned might have something to offer after all. Mrs Thatcher, an astute judge of character, was quick to spot the significance of her visitors’ behaviour, as she recalled in her memoirs:
Raisa Gorbachev was1 making her first visit to Western Europe and she knew only a little English – as far as I could tell her husband knew none; but she was dressed in a smart Western style outfit, a well tailored grey suit with a white stripe – just the sort I could have worn myself, I thought. Our advice at this time was that Mrs Gorbachev was a committed, hardline Marxist … But I later learned from her – after I had left office – that her grandfather had been one of those millions of kulaks killed during the forced collectivisation of agriculture under Stalin. Her family had no good reason for illusions about Communism.
As for Raisa’s husband, Mrs Thatcher discerned a similarly nuanced hinterland behind his orthodox, even hardline, Communism:
Mr Gorbachev insisted2 on the superiority of the Soviet system. Not only did it produce higher growth rates, but if I came to the USSR I would see how the Soviet people lived – ‘joyfully’ … If I had paid attention only to the content of Mr Gorbachev’s remarks, I would have to conclude that he was cast in the usual Communist mould. But his personality could not have been more different … He smiled, laughed, used his hands for emphasis, modulated his voice, followed an argument through and was a sharp debater. He was self-confident and though he larded his remarks with respectful references to Mr Chernenko, he did not seem in the least uneasy about entering into controversial areas of high politics. His line was no different from what I would have expected; his style was. I found myself liking him. As he took his leave, I hoped that I had been talking to the next Soviet leader. For, as I subsequently told the press, this was a man with whom I could do business.
Margaret Thatcher had uncovered a little of the complexity that underpinned Mikhail Gorbachev’s character and would determine many of his actions in the years ahead. She had spotted, correctly, that he was a true believer in the communist system (‘We both believe in3 our own political systems,’ she confirmed. ‘He firmly believes in his; I firmly believe in mine …’), but she hinted that his ‘respect’ for the Brezhnevite dinosaurs in the Kremlin was somewhat forced. And she identified two of the key factors that were already persuading him that big changes would be needed to save and strengthen the communist system: his ‘distrust of the Reagan administration’s intentions in general and of their plans for a Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) in particular’.
Mrs Thatcher told the BBC that the reason Gorbachev was so set against SDI was that it was ratcheting up a military spending race that was ruining the Soviet economy. Successive Kremlin leaders had felt compelled to match every new generation of US weaponry; but Gorbachev saw it was strangling the civilian economy, driving down living standards and threatening to bankrupt the state. He told Raisa and his close comrades, ‘We cannot go on4 living like this.’ Breaking the spiral of decline would require tough decisions, and Mikhail Gorbachev would be faced with the challenge of implementing them.
When Konstantin Chernenko died on 10 March 1985, an extraordinary plenum of the Central Committee was convened within 24 hours to appoint his successor. The choice was between more of the same – Viktor Grishin, an elderly conservative and very much in the mould of the three previous leaders – or a more youthful candidate. Mikhail Gorbachev had just celebrated his fifty-fourth birthday and he had energy in spades. He was not, however, regarded as a radical reformer. He was proposed by one of the Kremlin’s arch conservatives, the veteran foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, who spoke of the strength of Gorbachev’s ‘party-mindedness’. And when the vote went unanimously in his favour, Gorbachev responded with a speech that made him sound like a Communist hardliner: ‘Our party has5 vast potential … We must not change our policy. It is a true, correct, genuinely Leninist policy!’ Gromyko commented approvingly, ‘This man has a nice smile, but he has teeth of iron.’ It was the obverse of Margaret Thatcher’s conclusion that the smiling personality was more important than the professions of orthodox Communism.
The notion of an underlying duality in Gorbachev’s character is an important one. While there is no argument about the trajectory the country travelled on his watch – from a tightly controlled one-party state to a chaotic, quasi democratic free-for-all; from a centralised command economy to the raging capitalism of an unregulated market; from a multinational, multi-ethnic union held together with unrelenting discipline to a centripetal collection of competing states and would-be states – there is genuine disagreement about how it got from A to B. Some Western historians have argued that Gorbachev was a liberal reformer ab initio, that he came to power with a reformist goal in his mind and that he proceeded to oversee the transformation of his country, if not according to a predetermined master plan, then at least in accord with his own liberal democratic convictions. That explanation echoes Mrs Thatcher’s hunch that Gorbachev’s expression of loyalty to the tenets of orthodox Communism was a dissemblance, a smokescreen that concealed the instincts of a social democrat. Russian writers, on the other hand, tend to favour the Gromyko line, that Gorbachev was a Communist and stayed a Communist, and while some of his actions may have facilitated the forces of change, he never intended to do anything more than modernise and strengthen the Soviet Communist system.fn1
Having lived through the Gorbachev years in Russia, it seems to me that Gorbachev was obliged to embark on a policy of change because of the Soviet Union’s parlous economy, but that he intended this to be only ‘within system’ change, revitalising the one-party state by unleashing a measure of initiative, energy and enterprise. In a political culture that refused to acknowledge its shortcomings, he was unwilling even to use the word ‘reform’, referring instead to uskorenie (acceleration) or perestroika (restructuring).
When his policies met resistance from vested interests in the party hierarchy, he appealed over their heads to public opinion: his policy of glasnost (openness) was intended to give the Soviet people access to the information they needed to see that what he was proposing was a good thing, and to denounce those who opposed perestroika. His aim was to mobilise society’s support for his measures of economic and organisational modernisation; but, contrary to Gorbachev’s intentions, the people used their new empowerment to demand more radical and more rapid reform than he had contemplated.
From this point onwards, Gorbachev was no longer leading the process of change; he was being dragged along behind the speeding locomotive of public opinion, which he himself had fuelled. The intoxication of discovering that the hated autocracy could be changed spread through society until the whole edifice was brought crashing down, very much against the intentions of the man who first set things in motion and who would – given his wish – have remained at the helm of a strengthened and reinvigorated, united and Communist USSR.
There has been much post facto rationalisation of what happened in the years between 1985 and 1991, not least by the men – including Gorbachev himself – who led the country. By going back to the daily chronicle of those times, however, it is possible to trace how plans, strategies and commands were pre-empted by those Tolstoyan movers of history: people and events.
Gorbachev’s reign began with little hint of the tectonic shocks to come. Three weeks after the new6 leader’s election, the US ambassador in Moscow, Arthur Hartman, briefed President Reagan that ‘Gorbachev is a narrow fellow, of set views’ whose main concern would be to consolidate his own power. With hindsight that judgement sounds ludicrous, but few of us in 1985 knew we were embarking on one of the great ‘moments of unruly destiny’ that have peppered Russia’s thousand-year history with the chance for lasting change.
Mikhail Gorbachev had been born7 into a peasant family in 1931 in the Stavropol region of southern Russia. He retained the distinctive accent of the region, with its soft Gs (he pronounces his own name ‘Horbachov’) and the southern warmth of character with its ready smile and open humour. As a child, he was remarkably bright and unwaveringly conformist. At school he was praised for his ‘political awareness’, and he was a model member of the Young Communist organisation, the Komsomol. He was admitted to full membership of the party at the unusually early age of 18. His father and grandfather had both been collective farm activists, and young Mikhail earned the Order of the Red Banner for his work in the fields during school vacations. In 1950, he enrolled on a law degree at Moscow State University, where Raisa was already writing her thesis on the life of the peasantry under collectivisation. After they married in 1953, she became a lecturer in Marxist theory and he began his party career. Posts in the leadership of the Stavropol Komsomol allowed him to demonstrate his talent for administration and won him influential friends. By the age of 35, he was the region’s first secretary, with special responsibility for agriculture; a year later he was a member of the Soviet Central Committee, travelling regularly for meetings in Moscow. He met Yuri Andropov, then the KGB chief, who took the rising young star under his wing. Andropov’s aim of modernising the Soviet economy found a ready disciple in Gorbachev; in 1984, with death approaching, Andropov, now Soviet leader, tried unsuccessfully to have his protégé named as his successor.
When he did become leader, a year later, Gorbachev’s rhetoric betrayed little evidence of reformist tendencies: his speech at his first Central Committee plenum in April 19858 was the epitome of orthodox – and patently sincere – Marxism–Leninism. ‘The whole of life and the entire course of history,’ he told the assembled delegates, ‘confirm the truth of Leninist teaching. It remains the guiding principle behind all our actions, our inspiration and the true compass for our strategy and tactics as we move forward now.’ He was explicitly endorsing the principles of the state that Lenin had created: a one-party system, a command economy and a dedication to class struggle, with the goal of instituting global Communism.fn2
Gorbachev, though, began his time as General Secretary with a signal that the party would be run differently. He wanted to show that he was not a Brezhnev or a Chernenko, and he did so by attacking the style of their rule. In April 1985, he told the politburo that there must be an end to the ‘ostentation, arrogance, eulogies and bootlicking’ that had characterised the behaviour of the party leadership in recent times. Fawning flattery and glorification of the leader were to become things of the past. Gorbachev declared war on corruption within the party nomenklatura, and announced the curtailment of undeserved perks and privileges for party officials. The turnover in party personnel in his first years in power was substantial.
Perestroika at this early stage was very much trial and error. Gorbachev made no secret of his aim – he wanted to reinvigorate the Soviet economy and Soviet society; it was just that he did not know exactly how to do it. In a speech to party officials in April 1985, he endorsed Andropov’s unimplemented plans for greater financial independence for factories, but explicitly maintained the centralised economic and planning controls inherited from Stalinist times. He made clear that he did not favour the mechanisms of an unchecked market economy, telling the representatives of Moscow’s ‘fraternal’ countries in Eastern Europe:
Many of you see the solution9 to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should stop thinking about lifesavers and think about the ship: the ship is socialism.
Gorbachev quite quickly introduced a limited amount of free enterprise within the framework of the centralised command economy. In 1987, his Law on State Enterprise gave more freedom to factory managers, devolving decision-making and allowing them some leeway in fixing prices and production quotas with the aim of increasing efficiency. But the overarching structure of the centrally planned economy remained in place, and the profit motive that drives the capitalist system remained absent. Results were patchy.
In 1988, Gorbachev went further. His Law on Cooperatives specified that in certain areas of economic activity, largely the service industries, the private ownership of small businesses would be tolerated. There were considerable restrictions on size and turnover; the number of employees was strictly limited, and they were all to be co-owners. In addition, the ‘cooperatives’ were to be heavily taxed, but it was immediately evident that a new entrepreneurial spirit had been unleashed. The streets of Moscow and other cities saw new restaurants opening; private bakeries, hairdressers and taxi firms sprang into existence. Like the rest of the foreign press corps, I was fascinated by the cooperatives. At every new business I visited, I found something I had never seen in the Soviet Union: people who were determined to work hard and do well.fn3 It was the first time since Lenin’s New Economic Policy of 1921–8 that capitalism had raised its head, and it all seemed remarkably hopeful.
There was an expectation that economic restrictions would be progressively eased and free enterprise given its head. But Gorbachev had other ideas. He announced that central planning would remain, as would state ownership of the means of production. His aim was not a market economy but the rejuvenation of the sluggish command economy through discreetly capitalist methods. It seemed an unlikely hybrid.
Even this limited flirtation with ‘capitalist’ methods, however, had aroused fierce opposition from the conservative wing of the party, just as Lenin’s NEP had done in the 1920 (see here). Gorbachev’s reforms in military and foreign policy met the same resistance. As the first Soviet leader seriously to tackle the crippling arms spending (more than a third of the country’s resources was going on the military), he faced a daunting task. The more he negotiated with the Americans about limiting and then reducing arms production, the more he was opposed by the powerful representatives of the Soviet military-industrial complex.
Their criticism of Gorbachev increased after he decided to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The USSR was spending billions of roubles and suffering thousands of casualties in a foreign adventure that had gone on longer than the Second World War. As early as 1986, Gorbachev issued instructions for a plan of disengagement to be drawn up, but opposition from the hardliners in the defence and security ministries meant it was not until February 1989 that the last Soviet troops were withdrawn, and even then there was barely concealed anger in sections of the military.fn4
In the face of conservative resistance to his reforms, Gorbachev took an unprecedented step: he appealed directly to public opinion to back his policies. Even more than uskorenie or perestroika, both of which had precedents under Khrushchev and Andropov, glasnost was a radical departure from Soviet tradition. The Bolsheviks had long regarded the control of information as a mainstay of power; the people could not be trusted with the facts about their history or the present because it might inspire them to oppose the regime. From the early days of the revolution, the media were rigidly censored; newspapers printed only the news the Kremlin deemed ‘useful’; literature and the arts were forced to serve the cause of Soviet power, and history was brazenly rewritten to remove inconvenient truths. Mikhail Gorbachev wasted little time in loosening the informational straitjacket. He allowed the publication of previously banned works, including Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Grossman’s Life and Fate. But that was the easy part: those books dealt with the crimes of the Stalinist past, from which the party had already distanced itself. More problematical were issues of current politics. In previous times, the Communist monopoly on information meant that difficult facts, problems with industrial or agricultural production, news of disasters, failures, political discontent or state crimes and corruption, would never find their way into the public domain. Information about the successes of the West was concealed by a ban on foreign publications and the jamming of the BBC Russian Service, the US Radio Liberty and the Voice of America.
After a period of initial hesitation, Gorbachev began to relax many of those restrictions. He had spoken bitterly about the forces of opposition to his policies within the party – ‘a new clan of people10 who resort to endless phrase-mongering in order to avoid having to act’ – and he saw glasnost as a way to bypass that resistance. ‘The widening of glasnost11 is a key measure,’ he told the Twenty-seventh Party Congress. ‘It is a political question. Glasnost will create democratic awareness and political creativity among the masses and encourage their participation in the process of government.’ He knew what he was doing: stirring up the public was intended to break down resistance to reform in the party. What he did not foresee was that, once unmuzzled, public opinion would be a difficult force to control.
Two unexpected events boosted Gorbachev in his struggle. On 26 April 1986, the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power station exploded, killing several workers and sending a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. The authorities reacted as they always had done in the past: they imposed a news blackout. It was two days before any mention of the explosion was made on Soviet television, by which time thousands of people had been fatally contaminated and foreign monitoring stations had detected radiation drifting over the Soviet border. Chernobyl highlighted many of the structural weaknesses in the Soviet system that Gorbachev had been railing against. He used the tragedy – and the embarrassment it had caused the Kremlin – to press home the need for greater transparency. Chernobyl, he said12, had ‘shed light on many of the sicknesses of our system as a whole. Everything that has built up over the years had converged in this drama: the concealing or hushing up of accidents and other bad news, irresponsibility and carelessness, slipshod work and wholesale drunkenness.’
Then, on 28 May 1987, a young German named Mathias Rust flew a Cessna 172 light aircraft from Helsinki to the centre of Moscow, landing on the Vasilievsky Spusk at the bottom of Red Square. Rust had flown hundreds of miles through Soviet air space and buzzed the Kremlin itself without being detected or challenged. For the West it seemed a Boy’s Own adventure story, but for the Soviet leadership the breaching of the country’s air defences was a source of shame. Gorbachev called in the country’s military commanders. ‘How could you fail to13 detect the offending aircraft when it was in the zone of the Sixth Army for two and a half hours?’ he asked General Pyotr Lushev. ‘Was this reported to you?’ ‘No,’ answered the general. ‘I knew about it only when the plane landed in Moscow.’ ‘And I suppose it was the traffic cops who told you!’ Gorbachev shot back. Before the meeting ended, the head of the Moscow Air Defence District had been fired, along with the defence minister and the commander-in-chief of the Soviet Border Troops. The purge would continue. By 1990, more than a hundred generals and colonels had been replaced, allowing Gorbachev to bring in officers sympathetic to the aims of perestroika.
In the months after his appointment as General Secretary, Gorbachev had begun advancing liberal allies to positions of influence. Dinosaurs like Gromyko and Grishin were eased out of office. Trusted lieutenants, men who had helped Gorbachev formulate the principles of perestroika and glasnost, were brought into the central leadership. Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian party chief and a confidant of Gorbachev’s, succeeded Gromyko as foreign minister in July 1985, despite having little or no experience of foreign policy. In August Alexander Yakovlev, the former Soviet ambassador in Canada and a convinced Westerniser, became a senior adviser on ideology and foreign policy. Grishin’s replacement as Moscow party boss was Boris Yeltsin, a charismatic politician from the Urals city of Sverdlovsk (later to revert to its former name of Yekaterinburg). Gorbachev had had dealings with Yeltsin since the mid 1970s and thought him energetic, sometimes unpredictable, but on the side of change. In 1985, he seemed a natural ally for the forces of perestroika.
Yakovlev, Shevardnadze and Yeltsin, along with advisers Georgy Shakhnazarov, Abel Aganbegyan, Tatyana Zaslavskaya and Anatoly Chernyaev made up the vanguard of reform in the Kremlin leadership. But other, less liberal figures also wielded influence. Yegor Ligachev, a silver-haired, blue-eyed Siberian ten years older than Gorbachev, was appointed second secretary of the CPSU, effectively becoming deputy leader of the party and the country. With a friendly smile and an unusual willingness to talk to foreign reporters, Ligachev was avuncular, but his politics were distinctly hardline. While supporting Gorbachev’s efforts to combat corruption and paying lip service to the ideals of perestroika, he came increasingly to be seen as the leader of the forces of conservative Communism. Ligachev opposed even the limited private enterprise allowed under Gorbachev’s Law on Cooperatives, as he would make clear in a speech two years later:
Public ownership unites14. Private ownership divides people’s interests. It causes social stratification of society … For what purpose was perestroika started? For the purpose of unleashing the full potential of socialism! Does private enterprise promote the development of socialist potential? It does not. The only way to move forward on the path of socialist renewal is with the party in the lead. Without the Communist Party, perestroika is a lost cause … There are forces in our country fighting against the socialist system, against the Communist Party. They act energetically and they use the mass media. They applaud efforts to undermine socialism and undermine the party. They present this as ‘perestroika’.
Such open anti-perestroika rhetoric emerged only in the late 1980s. In the early years, the battle between reformers and hardliners was carried on behind the scenes, but it was no less intense. With Boris Yeltsin leading the liberal voices calling for acceleration in the pace of radical reform, and Ligachev and other conservatives opposing them at every step, Gorbachev was forced to reckon with competing demands from both ends of the political spectrum. His own ‘middle course’ seemed to satisfy no one.
In 1986, Andrei Sakharov was in his sixth year of internal exile in the closed town of Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow. Sakharov and his wife Yelena Bonner had become symbols of resistance to Soviet despotism, attracting international support and rallying domestic opposition. Gorbachev had initially justified Sakharov’s punishment in language redolent of old-style Communist intransigence. In February 1986, he told the French Communist newspaper L’Humanité, ‘Dr Sakharov has15 committed illegal acts. Normal measures of justice were taken in his case. He has been properly punished.’ But by the end of the year, after months of vacillation between the radicals and the conservatives in his entourage, Gorbachev was ready to make a dramatic gesture. On 15 December 1986, an electrician appeared at Sakharov’s apartment and announced he had orders to install a telephone. When it rang the next morning the voice on the end of the line was Gorbachev’s, informing him that his exile was over. Sakharov raised the cases of other political prisoners and asked for their release. When Gorbachev was non-committal, Sakharov put down the receiver. He would return to Moscow in the New Year and immediately resume his political activities, eventually allying himself with Boris Yeltsin and the other radicals to press for full democracy and liberty in the Soviet Union.
The release of Andrei Sakharov brought a backlash from the conservatives. Reports grew of the deliberate obstruction of Gorbachev’s policies by hardline members of the apparat – the party bureaucracy that controlled all areas of Soviet life and could foil policy initiatives simply by failing to act on them. He complained to the Central Committee that perestroika was being slowed down, and named individual ministries that were hampering the reforms. By the beginning of 1987, he was publicly calling on workers to support his initiatives against party bureaucrats who tried to oppose them. In a speech to trade unions in Moscow, he talked openly of disputes within the top party leadership over the pace of reform.
Yegor Ligachev responded with a speech in the city of Saratov that contained a barely coded call for a brake on the perestroika process. Instead of condemning the old style of Communist leadership as a ‘period of stagnation’, he said, modern politicians should recognise its positive achievements. At the January plenum, Gorbachev proposed multi-candidate elections with secret ballots for the directors of factories, but the measure was opposed by the conservatives and Gorbachev backed down.
Now the liberals, led by Boris Yeltsin, turned on him. At a closed-door Central Committee plenum in October 1987, the two men quarrelled furiously. Yeltsin claimed Gorbachev had not responded to his ideas for intensifying the perestroika campaign, and launched a scathing personal attack on the Soviet leader’s character. ‘Recently,’ he said16, ‘there has been a noticeable increase in what I can only call the adulation of the General Secretary by certain members of the politburo … this tendency to adulation is absolutely unacceptable … to develop a taste for adulation can lead to a new “cult of personality”. This must not be allowed.’ Gorbachev’s response was equally vicious. ‘Boris Nikolaevich,’ he said, ‘you have reached such a level of vanity and self-regard that you put your ambitions higher than the interests of the party. At a time when perestroika has reached such a critical stage, I consider this highly irresponsible.’ Yeltsin took umbrage, claimed he no longer felt at home in the politburo, and resigned.
Gorbachev did not banish Yeltsin from the political arena, but offered him the post of deputy chairman of the State Construction Committee with the rank of a junior minister. Yeltsin accepted, but the humiliation he felt after the clash at the plenum ripened into a personal hatred. Over the next three years, his attacks on Gorbachev and his demands for immediate radical change would become increasingly extreme. The battle lines were set. The showdown would not be long in coming.
Liberals and hardliners were both dissatisfied with perestroika, and each camp was manoeuvring to pull Gorbachev in their direction. In March 198817, with the Soviet leader away on a visit to Yugoslavia, the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya published what amounted to a manifesto for hardline resistance to perestroika. Presented as a letter from a teacher in Leningrad by the name of Nina Andreeva, but almost certainly published at the behest of Ligachev and his allies, it was titled ‘I cannot forsake my principles’. The letter summed up the discontent felt by millions of Communists who regarded perestroika as an abomination:
Perestroika … and glasnost are inciting emotions in the masses (especially in our young people) about issues that are concocted by the voices of Western radio stations or by our own compatriots who do not understand the true nature of socialism: a multiparty system, freedom of religious propaganda, emigration to live abroad, the right to broad discussion of sexual problems in the press, the need to decentralise the leadership of culture, abolition of compulsory military service. Controversies are raised among students about the facts of our country’s past … I am puzzled to be told that ‘class struggle’ is now an obsolete term, as is ‘the leading role of the proletariat’ … Does the international working class no longer oppose world capital as embodied in its [capitalist] state and political organs?
It took three weeks before Pravda published a response to the Nina Andreeva letter, and there was much speculation that the hardliners had gained the upper hand in the Kremlin power struggle. Gorbachev decided he must seize the initiative. He was ruling the USSR as General Secretary of the Communist Party, a position to which the party had appointed him and from which it could equally remove him. To stave off a potential challenge from the hardliners he needed to widen his power base, to win a mandate to rule from a source that would be less likely or less able to cast him off. At the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988 he proposed that the old ‘rubber stamp’ parliament, the Supreme Soviet, should be replaced with a new body, to be known as the Congress of People’s Deputies. The Congress would elect a chairman, who would serve as head of the Soviet state and be referred to as president. To give the new system a measure of democratic legitimacy, the Congress of People’s Deputies would be chosen in a partially free national election; it would meet for two sessions each year, between which a smaller body, appointed from members of the Congress, would sit as a semi-permanent national parliament.
The new state president would take over many of the powers previously held by the leader of the CPSU, including control of foreign policy, security and defence, overall responsibility for the adoption of new legislation, economic strategy and the right to nominate the prime minister. The chosen candidate – whom everyone assumed would be Gorbachev – could hold the office of Communist Party General Secretary concurrently, but could now be removed from office only by the whole parliament. He would no longer be threatened by the same fate as Khrushchev, who was sacked as Communist leader (and hence as leader of the country) by a small clique within the party elite.
Despite some misgivings, Gorbachev’s proposal ‘On the Democratisation of Soviet Society and the Reform of the Political System’ was approved in principle by the conference. Conservative delegates continued to hope they could later nullify the proposals by the usual methods of red tape and delay. But Gorbachev pulled off a master stroke: at the very end of the conference, as everyone was preparing to go home, he pulled from his pocket a crumpled piece of paper. In a matter-of-fact tone he said, ‘By the way, comrades18, I have a timetable for my proposals here. Shall we vote to accept it?’ Seemingly without fully understanding what they were letting themselves in for, the delegates raised their hands in favour. Gorbachev thanked them and declared the conference closed. The first multi-candidate elections in the history of the Soviet Union would take place in March 1989, and the resulting parliament would meet to elect a new president immediately afterwards.
The rules laid down for the elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies made clear that this was not Western-style democracy. No political parties other than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would be allowed to field candidates, and one-third of the seats would be reserved for organisations officially sanctioned by the CPSU. Gorbachev stressed that his aim was ‘socialist pluralism’, the development of different political platforms within the Communist community,fn5 and not pluralism tout court (the right to establish a multiparty system, in which the CPSU would be just one party among many).
His deft footwork at the party conference gave the impression that Gorbachev was still leading and controlling the process of reform. But the 1989 elections would mark the point at which he lost control, and the forces of popular opinion took over.fn6 The election campaign in the months running up to polling day was marked by the most startling outpouring of energy, passion and anger from a previously cowed population. As I attended the massive public rallies in Moscow’s squares, fields and car parks, addressed by Sakharov, Yeltsin, Sergei Stankevich, Gavriil Popov and all the future stars of the liberal movement, I felt that a form of popular democracy was dawning in the Soviet Union. Every activist who had a pile of political tracts to distribute was surrounded by hundreds of hands fighting to read his views; every speaker, no matter how esoteric, was carefully listened to, discussed, applauded or booed with the enthusiasm of a nation that was discovering the right to an unfettered civic existence. The tide of popular revolution would soon be lapping at the Kremlin.
If Gorbachev had viewed the elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies as a means to strengthen his and the party’s legitimacy, he got more than he bargained for. In Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and Minsk, scores of party nominees were humiliated. Even in seats where the Communists had barred independent candidates from standing against their man, the electorate frequently crossed out the single name on the ballot paper, denying the candidate the 50 per cent he or she needed to get elected. In independence-minded republics, separatist candidates had a field day. Followers of the Lithuanian20 Sajudis movement won 31 of the republic’s 42 seats; in Latvia, Popular Front sympathisers won 25 out of 29; and in Estonia, they picked up 15 out of 21. In Moscow, Gorbachev’s most prominent critic, Boris Yeltsin, swept the board with 90 per cent of the votes cast.
From now on, Gorbachev’s most powerful opponents would no longer be the hardliners in the Communist Party, but the radicals who wanted to take reform further and faster than he was prepared to allow. The radicals’ demands for freedom and democracy had been heard by the Soviet people and they were rallying to the cause.
Gorbachev reacted slowly to the results. Three days after the elections, he was still trying to defend the party and justify its poor showing. He still believed in the reformability of the Communist system, and he ruled out the possibility of political pluralism. A multiparty system21 in the Soviet Union, he said, would be ‘absurd under our conditions’.
In May 1989, the newly elected Congress of People’s Deputies met in the Kremlin for its inaugural session. It was a more diverse and more powerful parliament than any in the Soviet Union’s history, but a large number of the deputies were nonetheless from the old guard. Eighty-six per cent22 of them were members of the Communist Party; only 300 or so of the 2,250 delegates were genuine supporters of liberal reform.
The vote by the Congress to name Gorbachev as chairman (that is, to make him state president) went according to plan. But in the minds of many liberals doubts remained. The reason Gorbachev had given for the introduction of the new parliamentary and presidential system was to create a law-governed state ruled by authorities that were responsible to the people. The Congress was elected by the people in a way the old Communist apparatchiks never had been. But Gorbachev himself had faced no democratic scrutiny: he had been one of the party’s guaranteed nominees to the Congress of People’s Deputies, which had in turn nominated him as President. The liberals were beginning to ask why the man who spoke of democracy wouldn’t face a popular election.
The Congress selected 542 deputies to form the smaller, standing parliament (which was to inherit the name of its discredited predecessor, the Supreme Soviet). Like its parent body, it too was dominated by Communists. Boris Yeltsin failed to win enough votes, and got through only when another deputy relinquished his place in Yeltsin’s favour.
The sessions of the Congress were electric. Its first meeting lasted for two weeks and was shown live on national television. There was mass absenteeism from the workplace as people stayed home to watch the unheard of spectacle of free speech. Deputies from around the country were suddenly putting into words what ordinary folk had long felt but been too scared to say. Speaker after speaker railed against the iniquities and failings of the Soviet system, attacking the KGB, the military, the censors, the falsifiers of history, and even Gorbachev himself. For a Western observer, those days spent in the Palace of Congresses listening to the debates, wandering the corridors, meeting openly with former dissidents – Sakharov, Yeltsin, Roy Medvedev – as well as with previously inaccessible Kremlin insiders, were a source of marvel. It seemed inconceivable that the repressive, totalitarian system we had reported on for so many years could suddenly have opened the floodgates. The genie of liberty was out of the bottle and, we thought, no amount of repression could force it back in again.
Despite the ban on opposition parties, radical delegates led by Yeltsin, Sakharov and the liberal historian Yuri Afanasyev formed a bloc of reformers known as the Interregional Group of Deputies (IRGD). Its founding conference in July attracted 316 of the Congress’s 2,250 members, men and women united in their support for fundamental democratisation. They agreed that political pluralism, the abolition of the one-party state and the granting of self-determination to the separatist-minded Soviet republics would be the main planks of their programme, together with the creation of a market economy and the right to own private property.
Gorbachev feared the IRGD. Their statements, he said23, were ‘irresponsible and inflammatory’, their leaders ‘little more than a band of gangsters’. He made clear that he would not tolerate the formation of any political party other than the CPSU. When I spoke to Boris Yeltsin in 1989, as he was emerging as the opposition’s most visible spokesman, he was cagey about admitting his real aims. ‘Some people say24 I am not trying to improve the system, but to abolish it,’ he told me. ‘Well, I cannot confirm that. But I can say that I am in favour of a whole series of things that are – in all senses of the word – revolutionary.’ As with most of the conversations I had had with him in the past, this one again had Yeltsin speaking in the coded language that dissidents had been forced to use by fear of the state. Now, though, the state had lost its omnipotence. Tens of thousands of people were demonstrating their support for Yeltsin on the streets of Moscow; coalminers were striking in Vorkuta and the Don Basin, demanding political as well as economic concessions. When asked if he was ready to answer their call for an end to Communism, he replied cautiously:
Multiparty democracy25 is such a serious thing that we need to listen to the views not only of Gorbachev and Yeltsin – that’s not so important – but to the views of the people. And if the whole of society wants it [multiparty democracy], then that is a serious matter. Multiparty democracy shouldn’t be a taboo: the people must be allowed to talk about it; then we can draw the necessary conclusions …
Multiparty democracy, championed by Yeltsin and the radicals, but steadfastly refused by Gorbachev, Ligachev and the Kremlin apparat, was about to become the decisive battleground for the country’s future. The Communist monopoly on power had been enshrined in the Soviet Constitution since the 1930s. Article Six of the current constitution stated:
The leading and guiding26 force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organisations and public organisations, is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Armed with Marxism–Leninism, the CPSU determines the direction of society and the course of its domestic and foreign policy. It directs and controls … the struggle for the victory of Communism.
The campaign to repeal Article Six was led by Andrei Sakharov. His petition for abolition gathered support from all over the country and, on 12 December 1989, he rose to address the Congress of People’s Deputies. In a piece of political theatre, Sakharov produced the petition with 60,000 signatures and telegrams in cardboard boxes, challenging Gorbachev to deny the legitimacy of the request. ‘The Soviet Union must decide27,’ he said, ‘if it wants to be an empire or a democracy.’ The Congress was being televised live, and Gorbachev looked aghast at such a public ambush. ‘Come over here,’ he called to Sakharov, ‘and I’ll show you thousands of other telegrams [supporting the retention of Article Six]. Let’s not try to intimidate each other, Andrei Dmitrievich; let’s not stoop to manipulating public opinion.’ There were slow handclaps from the floor as Gorbachev struggled to silence the challenge from Sakharov. But with Gorbachev arguing fiercely to preserve the one-party system, the Congress’s inbuilt conservative majority carried the day – the motion to repeal Article Six was defeated by 1,138 votes to 839. In the corridor after the vote, Sakharov told reporters, ‘If necessary, we shall28 have to defend perestroika from the founders of perestroika if their position becomes reactionary or if they drag their heels unjustifiably.’
Two days later, Andrei Sakharov was dead. On the evening of 14 December, while he was preparing a speech responding to Gorbachev’s intransigence, he suffered a fatal heart attack at his desk. Along with 80,000 mourners, I stood by Sakharov’s coffin as tributes were read to the ‘voice of the nation’s conscience’. Yevgeny Yevtushenko compared him to the great humanitarians of Russian history, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. ‘He was,’ he said29, ‘the embodiment of all that is best in the great tradition of the Russian intelligentsia.’ Muscovites carried handwritten placards with the words, ‘Sakharov, forgive us’ for not having had the courage to support his stand on behalf of civil rights. A copy of his speech demanding multiparty democracy was laid on the top of his coffin.
It was an intensely emotional moment, and Gorbachev seems to have been personally affected by it. He came to pay his respects to Sakharov’s widow, Yelena Bonner, and praised the former dissident’s contribution to reform. With demonstrations growing in support of the repeal of Article Six – including a rally of a quarter of a million people outside the Kremlin in February 1990 – he accepted the inevitable. On 14 March, the constitution was altered to read, ‘The Communist Party of the Soviet Union30 and other political parties, labour, youth and other public organisations and mass movements may participate in the policy-making of the Soviet state …’ After more than 70 years, the Soviet Union had become a multiparty state.
By the spring of 1990, Gorbachev’s loss of control of the political process was plain to see. We had gathered as always for the annual May Day parade in Red Square. The country’s leaders had climbed the steps to the review-stand on top of Lenin’s mausoleum, and we correspondents were penned in by its side, in front of the Kremlin wall. The march past began unremarkably, with the usual happy children and floats celebrating the joys of Soviet life. But as the parade continued, we became aware of a commotion in the ranks. Shouts of ‘Down with Gorbachev’ began to ring out, and we heard the sound of organised chanting calling for democracy and freedom. Reports reached us that a contingent of Yeltsin supporters had joined the end of the official workers’ procession; they had, astoundingly, been allowed to march right into Red Square, literally under the noses of the politburo. Up above us we could see Gorbachev’s fingers tapping agitatedly on the parapet of the mausoleum, and then – in a flash – he stormed down the steps with his colleagues in tow to disappear in humiliating retreat back into the Kremlin.
From now on, Gorbachev was barely able to keep up with events. He proposed a further strengthening of the presidency: the new rules would grant the officeholder powers comparable to those enjoyed by the US and French presidents. But he refused again to hold an election for the enhanced post. Instead, Gorbachev had himself reappointed as president by a session of the Congress of People’s Deputies. In retrospect, it was his last chance to stand for election and to gain a genuine mandate from the country. Such a demonstration of popular approval would have made it impossible for Boris Yeltsin or any other rivals to challenge his right to rule; but, as it was, he remained an unelected politician tarred with the brush of the old-style Communism he had struggled to reform.
Gorbachev had progressively surrounded himself with a government made up of conservatives and hardliners. The Supreme Soviet had voted to refuse several of his ministerial nominees, including Marshal Dmitry Yazov as defence minister and Gennady Yanayev as deputy president, but Gorbachev insisted on further votes until he got his way. Interior Minister Boris Pugo, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov and the Speaker of the Supreme Soviet, Anatoly Lukyanov, also owed their advancement to Gorbachev’s personal recommendation. In virtually every instance there had been prominent liberal voices warning against giving such men access to the levers of power; some deputies had spoken of the dangers of a military coup with them in the Kremlin.
Torn between criticism from the radicals that he was standing in the way of reform and threats from the hardliners that he was betraying the USSR and the CPSU, Gorbachev vacillated and stalled. He was trying to placate both camps and failed to satisfy either. He began to switch his teams of advisers with alarming frequency.
Yeltsin, by contrast, was demonstrating political insight. At the end of May, he got himself nominated as chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet. Under Gorbachev’s reforms of 1989, each of the 15 Soviet republics had been granted its own parliamentary body with limited but real powers. While Gorbachev himself would run the national parliament (the union-wide Supreme Soviet), certain responsibilities were devolved to the individual republics. Yeltsin was now the de facto leader of Russia, while Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union. Nominally, the Soviet president was the senior figure – he ruled all 15 republics, while Yeltsin ruled only one of them. But the system was a new one, no one really understood the demarcation lines, and politics was developing through trial and error. Russia was the dominant force within the Union – bigger and more populous than any of the other republics – and Yeltsin sensed he could push the boundaries of his authority. A new period of dual power was in the offing, similar to the dvoevlastie of 1917 (see here), and both Yeltsin and Gorbachev would do their utmost to come out on top.
Yeltsin’s greatest weapon was his political dexterity, allied to the fact that the Soviet people knew he had defied the Communist authorities as early as his quarrel at the October 1987 plenum. Since then he had reinvented himself as a populist politician, ostentatiously travelling by public transport, appearing in bread queues to ask ordinary folk about their hopes and concerns, and railing against the abuses and corruption of the Communist apparat. While Gorbachev was still defending the CPSU, clinging to the belief that the party could be reformed and revived, Yeltsin was condemning it. At the Twenty-Eighth Communist Party Congress in July 1990, he announced that he could no longer remain a member of the party. ‘Having been elected31 as chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet,’ he told a hushed hall, ‘and in light of my responsibility to the peoples of Russia, taking into account the country’s transition to a multiparty system, I can no longer submit myself to carrying out the commands of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I therefore submit my resignation …’ As murmurs rose from the floor, Yeltsin left the podium and walked slowly up the long aisle of the Palace of Congresses, through the rows of delegates to the exit at the back of the hall. Jeers, whistles and cries of ‘Shame!’ accompanied him on his way. His future, and the country’s, no longer lay with the CPSU.
Yeltsin stepped up the battle with Gorbachev by adopting a (largely symbolic) declaration of Russian sovereignty. The two men argued over which laws, Soviet or Russian, should take priority on the territory of the Russian Republic. But they agreed to work together on a strategy to rescue the disintegrating economy. In August 1990, a combined team of economists nominated by Gorbachev and Yeltsin produced a radical reform plan designed to lay the foundations of a modern market economy in 500 days. The ‘500 Days Programme’ proposed mass privatisation, the end of state subsidies, prices determined by the market instead of by the state, a rapid integration into the world economic system and the devolution of many economic powers from the Union to the individual republics. Yeltsin accepted the programme enthusiastically and announced that Russia would implement it. But Gorbachev equivocated. His conservative advisers condemned the plan as capitalism by the back door and Gorbachev abandoned it. Yeltsin wanted radical reform and he wanted it immediately; Gorbachev also wanted change, but his approach was much more gradualist. Their failure to cooperate left the door open for the revanchist forces of hardline Communism, and their enemies were now planning to take dramatic action.
In late November, Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov appeared on national television to announce an extension of the powers of the military. Because of recent incidents of harassment of Soviet troops, particularly in the Baltic states where separatist demonstrations were growing more boisterous, Yazov said soldiers were being granted the right to defend themselves and the property of the Soviet state by using their weapons. Political tensions were high, and the prospect of Soviet troops firing on Soviet civilians raised the stakes another notch. In early December, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov made a long, televised speech using Cold War rhetoric rarely heard since the Brezhnev years. There was, Kryuchkov claimed, an imminent danger to the Soviet motherland: anti-Communist elements, at the instigation of sinister forces from abroad, were stirring up unrest and violence. The nation should be aware that the KGB was prepared to use all the powers at its disposal to defeat these ‘enemy forces’ and to send their ‘foreign masters’ packing. As a first step, joint patrols of militiamen and soldiers would be deployed on the streets of major cities to prevent crime and disorder. The implication was clear: demonstrators and protesters would be considered legitimate targets.
Hints of a coming crackdown were hard to ignore, yet Gorbachev did. In mid December, the president’s liberal adviser Alexander Yakovlev wrote an article for the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets in which he warned, ‘The conservative and32 reactionary forces are mercilessly seeking revenge. They are preparing to mount an offensive. I am deeply disturbed by the inertia that is being shown by the forces of democracy.’
Eduard Shevardnadze’s appearance before the Congress of People’s Deputies on 20 December was even more dramatic. ‘The reformers have gone into hiding33,’ he said. ‘A dictatorship is approaching. I tell you this with full responsibility. No one can say what this dictatorship will be like, or what kind of dictator will come to power … I have come here to tell you that I am resigning from the government … I want this warning to be my contribution, my protest against the dictatorship that is about to come into being …’ Shevardnadze made no direct criticism of the Soviet president – the two men were long-time friends and colleagues – but he hinted that Gorbachev should have acted more decisively to oppose the rise of the hardliners: ‘I express my sincere gratitude to Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. I am his friend and fellow thinker. But I have no choice but to resign … I cannot reconcile myself to what is happening in my country and to the trials that await our nation.’
At the time, when I asked Alexander Yakovlev if he felt the rumours of a military coup against Gorbachev were credible, he showed me a pamphlet that he said was being circulated among soldiers of the Soviet army. ‘We need a new Hitler34, not Gorbachev,’ the pamphlet declared. ‘A military takeover is urgently required to save our country. There is plenty of room in Siberia for the people who brought us this cursed perestroika …’ The liberal commentator Alès Adamovich added that the hardliners were ‘surrounding the president with35 colonels and generals … surrounding him and making him a hostage’.
The first sign that Yakovlev and Shevardnadze were right came in January 1991, and the Baltic states were the chosen battleground. The hardliners were alarmed and angry at the threat to Soviet unity posed by the growth of separatist movements in the republics. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – which had all been incorporated into the USSR only after the Second World War – had declared their independence. Nationalist sentiments, once stifled by the threat of force, had been unleashed under glasnost.
The spectre of disorder and violence was used to demand action. In an article in the army newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda, the former chief of the general staff, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev called on the armed forces ‘to act to protect the unity36 of our homeland … The time has come,’ he wrote, ‘to defend our state with courage and resolution.’ The Soviet interior minister, Boris Pugo, was himself a Latvian; in his former post as head of the KGB in his native republic he had won a reputation for the suppression of nationalist sentiment. Now he had nearly half a million special forces soldiers at his disposal. With the world’s attention distracted by the impending war in the Gulf, Moscow sent in the troops. In the Latvian capital, Riga, a printing works that had been used to publish separatist newspapers was stormed and occupied. Clashes broke out around the Lithuanian parliament in Vilnius, forcing the nationalist government to barricade itself inside. The special forces seized more buildings, including the headquarters of Lithuanian television, and 13 civilians were killed. Only a week after he had received the Nobel Peace Prize, Gorbachev was presiding over a massacre of his own citizens. Boris Yeltsin denounced him as a murderer. ‘I warned in 1987 that37 Gorbachev was addicted to power,’ he said on national television. ‘Now he has a dictatorship with a pretty name … we demand his immediate resignation.’
The violence finally provoked Gorbachev into action. A week after the killings, Moscow ordered its troops to pull out. Gorbachev apologised for the violence in Vilnius and Riga, telling the Supreme Soviet, ‘We never wanted this to38 happen,’ but he failed to remove the men who had ordered the attacks. Pugo, Yazov, Yanayev, Pavlov and Akhromeyev remained in their jobs and continued to blame the separatists for the bloodshed. The consequences of their next attempt to seize power would be far more serious.
fn1 The historian Archie Brown argues that Gorbachev consciously fostered transformational change of the Soviet system and concludes that he was a ‘systemic transformer’. By contrast, Dmitry Volkogonov argues that Gorbachev was, and always remained, an orthodox Communist, who inadvertently set off processes that resulted in changes he never intended to bring about.
fn2 Throughout his political career, Gorbachev stressed repeatedly that he remained a Communist and a Leninist. The first time he met Ronald Reagan, he told his colleagues that the American president was ‘the class enemy with whom we are fighting’. In October 1987, he told the politburo that ‘Lenin’s dialectics is the key to how we must solve the problems of our own age.’ Two years later he marked the anniversary of Lenin’s birth by denouncing the growing revelations of the first Soviet leader’s crimes and failures. ‘To turn away from Lenin,’ he said in a speech in April 1990, ‘would be to hack away the roots of our society and our state, to devastate the hearts and minds of whole generations.’ Even in August 1991, after he had been imprisoned and humiliated by the forces of orthodox Communism, he still refused to condemn the Communist Party, warning Boris Yeltsin against ‘anti-Communist hysteria and a witch hunt’. His professions of Communist faith were not deliberate play-acting. His aim as a reformer was to revitalise and strengthen Communism, not to destroy it.
fn3 I also discovered evidence of the growing menace of organised crime. The Soviet Union had always had powerful crime groups, but now the mafiozniki flourished by demanding protection money from the new small businesses. Those who refused to pay found themselves targeted for reprisals. One cooperative bakery I had visited in its early days was subsequently fire-bombed, and the owner of another business had to sell up in order to raise the ransom the criminals were demanding for the release of his kidnapped daughter.
fn4 I have vivid memories of travelling on the last Soviet convoy to leave Afghanistan. The Mujahidin had celebrated victory by shelling the convoys that had gone before us, and the young conscripts were overcome with relief when we reached the Soviet frontier town of Termez. As the army commander Boris Gromov walked over the border to be the last man to leave Afghan territory, I asked one of his senior aides how it felt to be coming home. ‘It is a humiliation,’ I was told with a bitter grimace. ‘The traitor Gorbachev has sold us out.’ Like everyone, I had been aware of opposition to Gorbachev’s reforms, but it was not until that moment that I realised the deep-seated, visceral contempt in which he was held by some sectors of the Soviet establishment.
fn5 Thus putting an end to the ban on ‘factionalism’ imposed by Lenin at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921.
fn6 Gorbachev himself understood the veracity of Alexis de Tocqueville’s maxim that any concessions by an autocratic regime will be seized upon by the people as a reason to demand ever greater change. ‘I am doomed to go19 forward and only forward,’ he told his adviser Anatoly Chernyaev at the height of perestroika in 1989. ‘For me, the path backwards is closed. If I retreat, I will perish …’ But when the pace of reform accelerated, Gorbachev forgot his own words. Instead of going forward, he tried to hold back the tide of change with vacillations and equivocations.