4 WAS THE SOVIET SYSTEM REFORMABLE? There are no unreformable social systems; otherwise there would not be any progress in history. MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

OF all Russia’s “accursed” twentieth-century questions, one will continue to torment the nation more than any other in the twenty-first century: Why did the Soviet Union, or “Great Russia,” as its former citizens sometimes call it, perish? Russian scholars, politicians, and public opinion have been bitterly divided over the question ever since that state disappeared in December 1991, but most Western commentators think they know the answer: The Soviet system was not reformable and thus was doomed by its inherent, irremediable defects.

Considering the historic prodemocratic and promarket changes that took place under Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985 to 1991, all of them far exceeding the mere liberalization thought possible by even the most “optimistic” Western Sovietologists, was the system really unreformable? Certainly there was no such consensus at the time. Virtually to the end, Western governments, including the United States, thought and indeed hoped that a reformed Soviet Union might result from Gorbachev’s leadership. (The primary issue here is not, however, his role as a reform leader but the system’s capacity for fundamental change.) And while scholarly “pessimists” maintained, as most Sovietologists always had, that the system could not be reformed and that Gorbachev would therefore fail, many studies conducted during the perestroika years took it for granted that “systematic change was possible in the Soviet context.” An American economist soon to be the top Soviet expert at the White House of the first President George Bush was even more emphatic: “Is Soviet socialism reformable? Yes, it is reformable, and it is already being reformed.”¹

WHY, then, have so many specialists of different generations and scholarly persuasions, with few exceptions, maintained since 1991 that the “USSR could not be reformed,” that it was “fundamentally, structurally unreformable,” indeed, that Soviet reform was a “contradiction in terms, like fried snowballs,” and therefore that Gorbachev merely “failed to reform the unreformable”? Still more, why do they insist, as though to preclude any reconsideration, that this towering historical question “has been answered”?²

Understanding their reasoning is not always easy because the “intrinsic irreformability of Communism” is one of the worst formulated axioms in the literature. In some cases, it is mere tautology, as with the French Sovietologist who could “not see the Soviet system reforming itself into something really different without ceasing to be the Soviet system,” or the New York Times columnist who insisted that “fundamental changes… would make it totally un-Soviet.”³ Apart from that kind of pseudoanalysis, four somewhat different reasons are usually given by different specialists for the assertion that the system could not be reformed.

One is that an “original sin” in the history of the Soviet Union—its aberrant founding ideology, the illegitimate way it came into being, or the crimes it then committed—made it forever an “absolute evil” without redemptive, alternative possibilities of development and thus “too fatally flawed to be reformed.” Through seven decades of Soviet history, according to this view, nothing essential ever changed or could change; the system never produced any real reformers or reforms just, as with Gorbachev’s perestroika, the “illusion of reformability.” The Soviet evil could end only with the system’s total destruction into “economic and social rubble,” a “victim of its own illegitimacy… its own murderousness.” Despite pretenses of scholarly objectivity, this is essentially a theological kind of argument, and like most sacred ideological beliefs, it crams history into Manichean interpretations and stubbornly rejects all evidence and logical arguments that do not fit.⁴

This view can be challenged, however, on its own terms. Most world theologies offer no such certitude about the role, duration, or resolution of evil and allow more room for alternatives and human choice than we find in this rigidly deterministic sermon on the Soviet experience. Moreover, if original sin forever disqualifies a political or economic system from redemption, how did slave-holding America eventually become a leading example of democracy?

Can it be plausibly or morally argued that an original Soviet evil was greater, more formative, or more at odds with the state’s professed values than was slavery in the United States, that “accursed thing,” which John Adams called “an evil of colossal magnitude” and which a contemporary American historian and a modern-day U.S. president rank as “one of history’s greatest crimes”? Eight to twelve million souls were held in absolute bondage over two hundred years, while perhaps another twelve million died in transit from Africa. And, we are told, “slaves represented more capital than any other asset in the nation, with the exception of land.” Nations and systems, it seems, can change. And in fact, the leading American crusader against the Soviet “evil empire,” President Ronald Reagan, decided that it had ceased to be malevolent after only three years of Gorbachev’s reforms.⁵

A second and more commonly held view is that the end of the Soviet Union was proof of its unreformability—on the assumption, evidently, that death is always caused by incurable disease. It is Sovietology’s longstanding habit of reading, or rereading, history backward in light of a known outcome: “With hindsight, of course, it is now clear that Gorbachev’s historical mission was not to succeed, but to fail.” According to another veteran specialist, “After the implosion of the Soviet Union, the outcome now appears to have been inevitable all along.” Even worldly scholars and journalists, it seems, need to believe that epochal events are predetermined by some inexorable logic.⁶ But such assertions are an abdication of real analysis and explanation. For outcomes to seem inevitable, historical complexities, alternatives, contingencies, and other possible results have to be minimized, rescripted, or expunged from the story.

Even apart from the anomaly that the Soviet breakup, as Tocqueville remarked of the French revolution, may have been the least foreseen “inevitable” major event in modern times, the “fallacy of retrospective determinism,” or “hindsight bias,” can also be exposed on its own terms.⁷ Many of its practitioners emphasize Gorbachev’s “mistakes” while proffering their own prescriptive policies, thereby implying that Soviet reform would have succeeded had he acted differently or had it been led by someone else. Such criticisms of Gorbachev are contradictory. Some specialists say he should have reformed faster, others slower; some say he should have been more democratic, others more authoritarian. But all these coulda-woulda-shoulda analyses tacitly concede the existence of alternatives and thus implicitly raise what-if or counterfactual questions that undermine their own conclusions about an unreformable Soviet system and its inevitable collapse.

Consider a few counterfactual questions about alternatives and contingencies, a form of analysis well-established in other fields of historical interpretation but rarely undertaken seriously in Sovietology.⁸ Most writers agree that Gorbachev’s fast-track democratization policies made his leadership vulnerable to growing economic hardships and nationalist unrest; that his failure to stand in a popular election for the Soviet presidency in 1990—like another first president, George Washington, he was elected by a congress—later deprived him of legitimacy, especially in 1990 and 1991 when confronted by Yeltsin’s electoral rise to the presidency of the Russian Republic; and that the combination of Yeltsin’s anti-Kremlin politics and the August 1991 putsch did much to doom Gorbachev’s efforts to hold the Soviet Union together.

But what if Gorbachev had tried to introduce market reforms before or without democratization, in some version of the Chinese model that many Russian reformers still think would have been the best approach, or if the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident and 1988 Armenian earthquake had not devastated the federal budget, or if world prices for Soviet oil had not fallen sharply or had risen as sharply as they did during Vladimir Putin’s presidency? Even later, popularly elected or not, what if Gorbachev had used force early, as he could have easily done, to discourage secessionist activities in one or two republics? And what if he had sent Yeltsin into remote ambassadorial exile after the future oppositionist’s ouster from the leadership in 1987 or denied him access to state-controlled television in 1990 and 1991, as Yeltsin later denied his Communist rival, Gennady Zyuganov, during the 1996 Russian presidential campaign?

Alternately, would Yeltsin ever have challenged the Union government if he had become president of the Soviet Union instead of its Russian Republic, as was conceivable in 1990 and as he considered doing after the failed coup in August 1991? And when he and two other Soviet leaders did stealthily abolish the Union in December 1991, what if the Soviet military or other security forces had moved against them, as Yeltsin worried they might? As for the fateful putsch attempt in August, would it have taken place if Gorbachev had removed those ringleaders from their high-level positions when they first conspired against him a few months earlier? Indeed, if the United States and other G-7 nations had committed large-scale financial assistance to Gorbachev’s reforms in mid-1991, as he requested, would any Soviet opponent have dared to move against him?

Those are only some of the legitimate questions disregarded by yet another standard explanation of why the Soviet system purportedly could not change: “The system simply would not accept reform.” Derived from the old totalitarian model, which portrayed the system as immutable, the argument that the Soviet Union was structurally unreformable comes in several versions but evidently rests on two basic assumptions: first, the monolithic Communist ruling class, or bureaucratic nomenklatura, would never permit any changes that actually threatened its monopolistic hold on power and would therefore “oppose all types of reform”; and second because “the political system had been constructed along totalitarian lines… its institutions could not be retooled to serve pluralist goals.”⁹

But these, too, turned out to be false assumptions. All of Gorbachev’s major domestic reforms during the decisive period from 1985 to 1990 were introduced, discussed, and ratified in the highest Communist nomenklatura assemblies—the Politburo, Central Committee, a national Party conference, and two Party congresses. Those bodies even voted to abolish the practice underlying their own bureaucratic domination, appointment to all-important political offices, in favor of elections. And in the process of enacting these “pluralist” reforms, those institutions became deeply divided, factionalized, and thus themselves pluralist, as did the constitutional bedrock of the system, the legislative councils called soviets.

That remarkable development brings us to the argument most favored by writers who insist that the Soviet Union could not be reformed: the system was “mutually exclusive with democracy” and therefore could only die from it.¹⁰ Even if true, however, this would not mean that the system was completely unreformable but that it was un-democratizable, which is also questionable. The argument assumes that once Gorbachev permitted relatively free speech, political activity, and elections, as he did by 1989, mass anti-Soviet sentiments—long suppressed and usually attributed to an insurgent “civil society”—were bound to “delegitimize” and sweep away the system in favor of a radically non-Soviet one.

Not surprisingly, this explanation of both the unreformability and the end of the Soviet Union was seized upon by Yeltsin and his allies in late 1991 when they were jettisoning Gorbachev’s gradualist perestroika and dismantling the Union. In the writings of many Western scholars and other commentators, particularly American ones, it has since become an axiom that the last years of the Soviet Union brought forth “an accelerating revolution from below,” a “genuinely popular revolution,” a “popular democratic revolution.” In this telling, ordinary citizens rejected socialism, “like a mass internal defection,” and “mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.”¹¹

In reality, no anti-Soviet revolution from below ever took place, certainly not in Russia itself, which is the focus of most of these assertions. In 1989 through 1991, popular support for democratization and marketization was growing, as were protests against Communist Party rule, corrupt elites, bureaucratic abuses, and economic shortages. But the evidence, particularly public opinion surveys, clearly showed that large majorities of Soviet citizens, ranging up to 80 percent and even more on some issues, continued to oppose free-market capitalism and to support fundamental economic-social features of the Soviet system—among them, public ownership of large-scale economic assets, a state-regulated market, guaranteed employment, controlled consumer prices and other standard-of-living subsidies, and free education and health care. Or as a nonpartisan Russian historian of the period has concluded, the “overwhelming majority of the population shared the idea of the ‘socialist choice.’” (It was still the preference of the majority twenty years later.)¹²

Evidence of public support for the multinational Soviet state itself is even clearer and more precise. In a March 1991 referendum held in Russia and eight other republics, which included 93 percent of the entire Soviet population, 76.4 percent of the large turnout voted to preserve the Union—only nine months before it was abolished. The validity of that democratic voting result as an expression of public opinion in Russia, where the popular anti-Soviet revolution is alleged to have been centered, is confirmed by two developments. Even Yeltsin rose to electoral power in the Russian Republic on the widespread aspiration for a reformed Soviet system, not its overthrow. And after 1991, public regret over the Union’s abolition remained high, between 65 and 80 percent of those surveyed, in the early twenty-first century before beginning to decline.¹³

Nor is it true that a mass anti-Soviet “August Revolution” in 1991 thwarted the attempted coup by hard-line officials seeking to restore order throughout the country a few months after the referendum. Contrary to this equally widespread myth, there was no “national resistance” to the putsch. As heroic and determined as they were, barely 1 percent of Soviet citizens actively opposed the three-day tank occupation even in pro-Yeltsin Moscow, and considerably fewer resisted in provincial cities, the countryside, and outside the Russian Republic. The other 99 percent, according to an authoritative observer, “were feverishly buying up macaroni and pretending that nothing was going on” or, as the British ambassador reported, waiting “to see which way the cat would jump.” Whatever the exact percentages, even opponents of the coup knew “how few people” had come out to oppose it.¹⁴ (There was, for example, little if any response to Yeltsin’s call for a general strike against the putsch.)

We are left, then, without any theoretical or conceptual reason to think that the Soviet system was unreformable and thus, as is so often said, “doomed” from the beginning of Gorbachev’s reforms. Indeed, if the question is formulated properly, without the customary ideological slant, and examined empirically in light of the changes actually introduced under Gorbachev, particularly in the years 1985 through 1990, before crises destabilized the country, we might reasonably conclude that it turned out to be remarkably reformable. But in order to ask the question correctly, we need exact rather than cavalier understandings both of reform and of the Soviet system.

The universal meaning of reform is not merely change but change that betters people’s lives, usually by expanding their political freedom, economic freedom, or both. Nor is it revolution or total transformation of an existing order but normally piecemeal, gradualist improvements within a system’s broad historical, institutional, cultural dimensions. Insisting that “real reform” must be rapid and complete, as does so much commentary on the Soviet system, would disqualify, for example, historic but incremental expansions of voting, civil, and welfare rights over decades in Great Britain and the United States, including the New Deal of the American 1930s. It should also be remembered that reform has not always or necessarily meant democratization and marketization, though that has increasingly been the case in modern times.

In those plain terms, it is not true historically that the Soviet system was unreformable—that it had experienced only “failed attempts at reform.” NEP greatly expanded the economic and, to a lesser degree, political freedom of most citizens in the 1920s, and Khrushchev’s policies also benefited them in several important and lasting ways in the 1950s and 1960s. Most Western specialists evidently believe those were the limits of possible Soviet reform, arguing that even Gorbachev’s professed democratic socialism was incompatible with the system’s more legitimizing, antidemocratic historical icons—the October Revolution and Lenin.

But this assumption too lacks comparative perspective. French and American generations later reimagined their national revolutions to accommodate latter-day values. Why could not Lenin and other Soviet founders, who had professed democracy while suppressing it, eventually be viewed and forgiven by a democratic nation as products of their times, which were shaped by the unprecedented violence of World War I, much as American founding fathers—among them Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—were forgiven their slaves? (The United States had slave-owning presidents for almost fifty years and proslavery ones for even longer; slave labor was used to build the nation’s Capitol and the White House; and many textbooks still obscured or portrayed slavery as a benign institution nearly a hundred years after its abolition.)¹⁵ In fact, such reconsiderations of October and Lenin were well under way by the late 1980s as part of the larger process of public “repentance” inspired by Gorbachev’s reforms.

Arbitrary definitions of “the Soviet system” must also be set aside. Equating it with “Communism” is the most widespread, as in the ubiquitous axiom “Communism was unreformable.” In this usage, Communism is a nonobservable and meaningless analytical notion.¹⁶ No Soviet leaders ever said it existed in their country or anywhere else, only socialism, and the last Soviet leader, Gorbachev, doubted even that. “Communist” was merely the name given to the official ideology, ruling Party, and professed goal; and its meaning depended on the current leadership and varied so greatly over the years that it could mean almost anything. Thus, by 1990, Gorbachev decided it meant “to be consistently democratic and put universal values above everything else.” Western observers may not understand the difference between the abstraction “Communism” and the fullness of the actual Soviet system, or Sovietism, but the Soviet (and later Russian) people made it clear that about this at least they agreed with Gorbachev: “Communism is not the Soviet Union.”¹⁷

Instead, the Soviet system, like any other, has to be defined and evaluated not as an abstraction or ideological artifact but in terms of its functioning components, particularly its basic institutions and practices. Six of these had always been emphasized in Western Sovietological literature: the official and obligatory ideology; the especially authoritarian nature of the ruling Communist Party; the Party’s dictatorship over everything related to politics, buttressed by the political police; the nationwide pyramid of pseudodemocratic soviets; the state’s monopolistic control of the economy and all substantive property; and the multinational federation, or Union, of republics that was really a unitary state dominated by Moscow.

To ask if the Soviet system was reformable means asking if any or all of those basic components could be reformed. Contrary to the view that the system was an indivisible “monolith” or that the Communist Party was its only essential element, it makes no sense to assume that if any components were transformed, supplemented by new ones, or eliminated, the result would no longer be the Soviet system.¹⁸ Such reasoning is not applied to reform in other systems, and there are no grounds for it in Soviet history. The system’s original foundations, the soviets of 1917, were popularly elected, multiparty institutions, only later becoming something else. There was no monopolistic control of the economy or absence of a market until the 1930s. And when the Stalinist mass terror, which had been a fundamental feature for twenty-five years, ended in the 1950s, no one doubted that the system was still Soviet.

By 1990, Soviet conceptions of legitimate reforms within the system varied considerably, but many Gorbachev and Yeltsin supporters had come to believe they should and could include multiparty democracy, a marketized economy with both state and private property, and an authentic federation of republics.¹⁹ Those contemporary beliefs and the country’s political history suggest that for a reformed system still to have been Soviet, or to be regarded as such, four general elements had to be preserved in some form: a national (though not necessarily well-defined or unanimous) socialist idea that continued to memorialize antecedents in 1917 and the original Leninist movement, which had called itself social democratic until 1918; the network of soviets as the institutional continuity with 1917 and constitutional source of political sovereignty; a “mixed” economy with enough social entitlements to be called socialist, however much it might resemble a Western-style welfare state; and a union of Russia with at least several of the Soviet republics, whose number had grown over the years from four to fifteen.

WITH those well-defined and unbiased understandings of the question of the Soviet system’s reformability, we can now ask which, if any, basic components of the old system were actually reformed under Gorbachev. There can hardly be any doubt about the official ideology, which in the minds of many members of the elite underwent a significant “evolution.” By 1990, decades of Stalinist and then Leninist punitive dogmas had been largely replaced by Western-style social democratic and other “universal” tenets that differed little from liberal-democratic ones. What had been heresy for generations now became official Soviet ideology, ratified by the newly elected Congress of People’s Deputies and even by an at least semiconverted Communist Party congress.²⁰ Still more, the government’s ideology was no longer obligatory, even in once thoroughly proscribed realms such as education and official Communist publications. “Pluralism” of thought, including religious belief, was the new official watchword and growing reality.²¹

Nor was this a superficial or inconsequential reform. Western specialists had always stressed the role of ideology in the Soviet system, many even arguing that it was the most important factor. That was an exaggeration, but ideology did matter. Just as Gorbachev’s radical “New Thinking” about international affairs paved the way for his reformation in Soviet foreign policy in the late 1980s, disestablishing old ideological strictures about Soviet socialism was imperative for carrying out far-reaching reforms at home.²²

The next and larger reform was dismantling the Communist Party monopoly on politics, particularly on public discourse, the selection of office holders, and policymaking. The magnitude of this change was already so great by 1990 as a result of Gorbachev’s policies virtually ending censorship, permitting freedom of political organization, promoting increasingly free elections, and creating an authentic parliament that some Western scholars called it a “revolution” within the system.²³ Party dictatorship and the primacy of Communist officials at every level, established during the Leninist era seventy years before, had always been (with the arguable exception of the Stalin terror years) the bedrock of Soviet politics. In the “command-administrative system” inherited by Gorbachev, the nationwide Party apparatus was commander in chief and overriding administrator. In only five years, a fundamental change had therefore taken place: The Soviet political system had ceased to be Leninist or, as some writers would say, Communist.²⁴

That generalization requires qualification. In a country so vast and culturally diverse, political reforms legislated in Moscow were bound to have disparate results, from fast-paced democratization in Russia’s capital cities and the Western Baltic republics to less substantial changes in the Central Asian party dictatorships. In addition, the Communist Party’s exit from power, even where democratization had progressed, was still far from complete. With millions of members, units in almost every institution and workplace, longstanding controls over military and other security forces, large financial resources, and the deference exacted from citizens for decades, the Party remained the most formidable political organization in the country. And though political prisoners had been released, human rights were rapidly being established, and security forces were exposed to growing public scrutiny, the KGB remained intact and under uncertain control.

Nonetheless, the redistribution of the Communist Party’s long-held powers—to the reconstituted parliament, to the new presidency, and now to the popularly elected soviets in the regions and republics—was already far along. Gorbachev did not exaggerate when he told its congress in 1990, “The Communist Party’s monopoly on power and government has come to an end.” The demonopolization process abruptly terminated another longtime feature of the Soviet system—pseudodemocratic politics. A broad and clamorous political spectrum, exercising almost complete freedom of speech, emerged from decades of subterranean banishment. Organized opposition, scores of would-be parties, mass demonstrations, strikes, and uncensored publications, repressed for nearly seventy years, were rapidly developing across the country and being legalized by the reformist legislature. Gorbachev was also close to the truth when he remarked with pride that the Soviet Union had suddenly become the “most politicized society in the world.”²⁵

Russia had been intensely politicized before, fatefully so in 1917, but never under the auspices of an established regime or in the cause of constitutional government. Indeed, constitutionalism and legal procedures were the watchwords of Gorbachev’s political reformation. The country had a long history of laws and even constitutions, before and after 1917, but almost never any real constitutional order or lawful constraints on power, which had traditionally been concentrated in a supreme leadership and exercised through bureaucratic edicts. (An estimated one million ministerial decrees were still in force in 1988.)²⁶

Therein lay the unprecedented nature of Gorbachev’s political reforms. The entire Soviet transition from a dictatorship to a fledgling republic based on a separation of the Communist Party’s former powers and a “socialist system of checks and balances” was carried out through existing and amended constitutional procedures. The legal culture and political habits necessary for rule-of-law government could not be engendered so quickly, but it was a remarkable beginning. By September 1990, for example, the nascent constitutional court had struck down one of Gorbachev’s first presidential decrees, and he complied with the ruling.²⁷

Considering those achievements, why is it so often said that even Gorbachev’s political reforms failed? The answer usually given is that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or CPSU as the pivot of the old system was called, turned out to be unreformable. The inadequacy of this generalization is twofold. First, it equates the entire Soviet system with the CPSU in ways that assume the former could not exist without the latter. And second, it treats the Party as a single, undifferentiated organization.

As a result of its long and complex history, the CPSU had grown by the 1980s into a vast realm inhabited by four related but significantly different entities: the notorious but relatively small apparat that dictatorially controlled the rest of the Party and, though to a decreasing extent, the bureaucratic state itself;²⁸ the apparat-appointed but much larger and more diverse nomenklatura class that held all important positions in the Soviet system; 19 to 20 million rank-and-file members, many of whom had joined for reasons of conformity and career; and, lurking in the shadows, as I explained in the preceding chapter, at least two crypto-political parties—reformist and conservative—that had been developing in the “monolithic” one-party system since the 1950s. Not surprisingly, these components of the CPSU reacted to Gorbachev’s reforms in different ways.

Whether or not the Party apparatus—traditionally some 1,800 functionaries at its Moscow headquarters and several hundred thousand at other echelons of the system—was reformable hardly mattered because by 1990 it had been largely disfranchised by Gorbachev’s policies. (In this connection, the growing opposition of Ligachev, the Party apparat’s chief representative, was particularly indicative.) The Moscow nerve center of apparat operations, the Secretariat, had been all but dismantled, its Party committees in state economic ministries withdrawn or marginalized, and the authority of their counterparts at lower government levels assumed by elected soviets. The process lagged in the provinces, but the dethronement of the CPSU apparatus was formalized when powers exercised for decades by its Central Committee and Politburo were ceremoniously transferred to the new Soviet parliament and presidency. The apparat’s control even over its own Party had been substantially diminished, and in 1990 its head, the general secretary, previously selected in secret by the Communist oligarchy, was elected for the first time by a national Party congress.²⁹

Gorbachev may have continued to fear “this mangy, rabid dog,” but the CPSU apparatus turned out to be something of a bureaucratic paper tiger. Confronted by his electoral reforms, it fell into a “state of psychological shock” and “complete confusion.”³⁰ As its role in the system shrank and its organizations disintegrated, apparat representatives stepped up their anti-Gorbachev activities, but to little effect. Muscular antireform forces were now effectively based elsewhere—in the state economic ministries, military, KGB, and even parliament. How little the Communist Party apparatus still mattered was dramatized in August 1991. A majority of its central and regional officials evidently supported the coup against Gorbachev, but, contrary to many Western accounts, the Party apparatus did not organize or probably even know about it beforehand.³¹ (Nor did the apparatus have the power or will to resist the dissolution and banning of the Party after the coup failed, when it was easily dispersed.)

Unlike the Communist apparat that created it, large segments of the nomenklatura class survived the Soviet Union. That alone invalidates any simple generalization about its adaptability. Broadly understood, the millions of nomenklatura appointees throughout the system included many of the nation’s administrative, economic, cultural, and other professional elites, and thus significant parts of its middle class. As is the case elsewhere, this large stratum of Soviet society, though nominally composed solely of Communist Party members and indiscriminately vilified in Western accounts, was divided internally by privilege, occupation, education, generation, geographic location, and political attitudes.³²

It therefore makes no sense to characterize the Party-state nomenklatura as unreformable. Even its high-level officials reacted to Gorbachev’s reforms in conflicting ways and went in different directions.³³ By 1990, they could be found almost everywhere along the emerging political spectrum, from left to right. Many were in the forefront of opposition to perestroika. But virtually all the leading Soviet and post-Soviet reformers of the 1980s and 1990s also came from the nomenklatura class, foremost among them Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and their ranking supporters. And after 1991, large segments of the old Soviet nomenklatura reemerged as mainstays of post-Communist Russia’s political, administrative, and property-owning elites, some of them in the ranks of what would now be called “radical reform.”³⁴ Indeed, one of its younger members, Vladimir Putin, would become Russia’s first president in the twenty-first century.

Still less is it correct to characterize the Communist Party’s almost 20 million rank-and-file members as unreformable. Most of them differed little in actual power, privilege, or political attitudes from other ordinary Soviet citizens, and they behaved in similarly diverse ways during the Gorbachev years. By early 1991, approximately 2 million had left the Party, mostly because membership was no longer worth the time or dues required. Among those who stayed, there was a “silent majority,” but many supported Gorbachev’s policies, as they had done from the beginning, and waged a grassroots struggle against the apparat.³⁵ Many others became a social base for anti-perestroika movements forming inside and outside the Party.

The real question about the Communist Party’s reformability, given Gorbachev’s democratization policies, was whether a competitive electoral parliamentary Party could emerge from it as part of a reformed Soviet system. What we loosely call “the Party” had actually been different things during its eighty-year history—an underground movement in tsarist Russia, a successful vote-getting organization in revolutionary 1917, a dictatorship but with factions openly struggling over policy and power in the NEP 1920s, a decimated and terrorized officialdom in the Stalinist 1930s, a militarized instrument of war against the German invader in the 1940s, a resurgent institution of oligarchical rule in the post-Stalin 1950s and 1960s, and by the 1980s an integral part of the bureaucratic statist system.³⁶

After all of those transformations, Gorbachev now wanted the Party, or a significant segment of it, to undergo yet another metamorphosis by becoming a “normal political organization” capable of winning elections “strictly within the framework of a democratic process.”³⁷ Pursuing that goal involved ramifications he may not have fully foreseen but eventually came to accept. It meant politicizing, or repoliticizing, the Soviet Communist Party, as Gorbachev began to do when he called for its own democratization in 1987, which meant permitting its several embryonic parties to emerge, develop, and possibly go their separate ways. It meant ending the fiction of “monolithic unity” and risking an “era of schism.”³⁸ Though cut short by the events of late 1991, the process unfolded inexorably and quickly.

By early 1988, the schism in the Party was already so far along that it erupted in unprecedented polemics between the Central Committee’s two most authoritative newspapers. Defending fundamentalist, including neo-Stalinist, “principles,” Sovetskaya Rossiya published a long, defiant protest against Gorbachev’s perestroika; Pravda replied with an equally adamant defense of anti-Stalinist and democratic reform.³⁹ At the national Party conference two months later, delegates spoke publicly in strongly opposing voices for the first time since the 1920s. Central Committee meetings were now a “battlefield between reformers and conservatives.” In March 1989, Communists ran against Communists across the country for seats in the Congress of People’s Deputies. Though 87 percent of the winners were members of the same Party, their political views were so unlike that Gorbachev announced they were no longer bound by a Party line.⁴⁰

By 1990, the growing schism had taken territorial and organizational forms, as parties began tumbling out of the CPSU like Russian nestling dolls. The three Baltic Communist parties left the Union Party to try to compete in their native and increasingly nationalistic republics. At the center, apparat and other nomenklatura conservatives compelled Gorbachev to allow the formation of a Communist Party of the Russian Republic, initially headed by Ivan Polozkov, nominally within the CPSU but under the conservatives’ control. Formally embracing more than 60 percent of all Soviet Communists, it, too, almost immediately split when reformers formed a rival organization, the Democratic Party of Communists of Russia.⁴¹

All sides now understood that the “CPSU is ‘pregnant’ with multiparty-ness” and that its political spectrum ranged “from anarchists to monarchists.”⁴² No one knew how many parties might spring from its womb—Gorbachev thought in 1991 there were “two, three, or four” just among the 412 Central Committee members⁴³—but only the two largest mattered: the pro-reform or radical perestroika wing of the CPSU led by Gorbachev and now all but social democratic; and the amalgam of conservative and neo-Stalinist forces that opposed fundamental changes in the name of traditional Communist beliefs and practices.

A formal “dividing up” and “parting of the ways” was already being widely discussed in 1990, but neither side was ready.⁴⁴ Conservatives still lacked a compelling national leader and feared the ascending Yeltsin, who quit the CPSU in mid-1990, almost (though not quite) as much as they hated Gorbachev. Several Gorbachev advisers urged him to lead his followers out of the CPSU or drive out his opponents and thereby create an avowedly social democratic movement, but he still feared losing the national apparatus, with its ties to the security forces, to his enemies, perhaps even his presidency to opponents in the Congress, and, like any politician, was reluctant to split his own party. Only in the summer of 1991 were both sides ready for a formal “divorce.” It was to take place at a special national congress later that year but became another casualty of the attempted coup in August.⁴⁵

Splitting the enormous Communist Party into its polarized wings, as Gorbachev’s close associate Aleksandr Yakovlev had proposed privately in 1985 and still believed in, would have been the surest and quickest way to create a real multiparty system in the Soviet Union, and indeed one more authentic and substantial than existed in post-Soviet Russia in the early twenty-first century.⁴⁶ In a “civilized divorce” that involved voting on opposing principles, framed by Gorbachev’s social-democratic program, both sides would have walked away with a sizable proportion of the CPSU’s membership, local organizations, printing presses, and other assets. Both would have immediately been the largest and only nationwide Soviet parties, far overshadowing the dozen of “pygmy parties,” as they were called, that were to dot the political landscape for years to come, some of them barely larger than the Moscow apartments in which they were conceived. (Based on a secret survey, Gorbachev believed that at least 5 to 7 million party members would remain with him in a new or recast party.)⁴⁷

Nor is there any reason to doubt that both wings of the CPSU would have been formidable vote-getting parties in ongoing local, regional, and eventually national elections. Although a majority of Soviet citizens now held the existing Communist Party responsible for past and present ills, both divorcees could have escaped some of the onus by blaming the other, as they were already doing. Both would have had considerable electoral advantages of organization, experienced activists, media, campaign funds, and even voter deference. In surveys done in 1990, 56 percent of Soviet citizens distrusted the CPSU. But 81 percent distrusted all the other parties on the scene, and 34 percent still preferred the Communist Party over any other.⁴⁸ Given the growing polarization in the country, both offshoots of the old Communist Party would have been in a position to expand their electorate.

Constituencies for a social democratic party led by Gorbachev included those millions of Soviet citizens who now wanted political liberties but also a mixed or regulated market economy that preserved welfare and other elements of the old state system. In all likelihood, it would have been strongest among professional and other middle classes, skilled workers, pro-Western intellectuals, and generally people who remained socialists but not Communists.⁴⁹ As Soviet and Russian electoral results showed in the late 1980s and 1990s, as well as those in Eastern Europe, the kind of democratic Communists and former Communists who would have been the core of a social democratic party were fully capable of organizing campaigns and winning elections.

In this case, analytical hindsight can tell us something important about real possibilities. Gorbachev’s failure to carve out of the CPSU what in effect would have been a presidential party may have been his biggest political mistake.⁵⁰ If he had done so at the already deeply polarized (and essentially multiparty) Twenty-eighth Communist Party Congress in July 1990, to take a beckoning moment, he would not have been isolated politically when crises swept the country later in 1990 and 1991, and his personal popularity fell precipitously. In particular, if he had seized the initiative by taking such a bold step, which would have redefined and realigned the Soviet political landscape, many of his original supporters, perhaps even Yeltsin, might not have deserted him.⁵¹

Gorbachev’s orthodox Communist opponents, contrary to most Western accounts, also had plenty of potential as a Soviet electoral party. As proponents of “healthy conservatism,” they had an expanding base of support in the millions of officials, factory workers, collective farmers, anti-Western intellectuals, and other traditionalists aggrieved by Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms.⁵² As change eroded the social guarantees and other certainties of the old order, the number of “newly discontented,” which had been steadily growing since 1985, was bound to increase. Conservative Communists had another growing appeal. The militant statist, or “patriotic,” nationalism that had characterized their “Communism” since the Stalin era was becoming a powerful ideological force in the country, especially in Russia.⁵³ (Indeed, both anti-Gorbachev Communists and the now anti-Communist Yeltsin were already seizing on it.)

Nor should it be thought that the antireform wing of the Soviet Communist Party was incapable of adapting to democratic politics. After their shocked petulance over the defeat of a few dozen apparat candidates in the March 1989 elections, conservative Communists began to identify and organize their own constituents.⁵⁴ By 1990, they were a large electoral and parliamentary party in the Soviet Russian Republic. Whatever their private ambitions, they behaved in a generally constitutional manner, even after Yeltsin won executive power in the republic and Communists suddenly became an opposition party for the first time in Soviet history.

The electoral potential of the Gorbachev wing of the CPSU, which dispersed after the end of the Soviet Union, can only be surmised, but his conservative enemies soon demonstrated their own capabilities. In opposition, as a Russian observer remarked several years later, they “got a second wind.” In 1993, they reemerged as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and quickly became the largest and most successful electoral party in post-Soviet Russia. By 1996, it governed many regions and cities, had more deputies by far than any other party in the national parliament, and officially won 40 percent of the vote (some analysts thought even more) in Zyuganov’s losing presidential campaign against Yeltsin, who still had not been able to form a mass party.⁵⁵ Indeed, until 2003, it won more votes in each parliamentary election than it had in the preceding one. In short, if the reformability of the old Soviet Communist Party is to be judged by its electoral capacities, both of its wings were reformable.

Two major components of the Soviet system still need to be reconsidered—the statist economy and the Union. On close examination, no real case can be found in the specialized literature that the Soviet economy was unreformable. There is a near consensus that Gorbachev’s economic reforms “failed miserably,” but even if this is true, it speaks to his leadership and policies, not the economic system itself.⁵⁶ As noted earlier, many Western specialists not only assumed that the economy could be reformed but proffered their own prescriptions for reforming it.⁵⁷ Assertions that the Soviet economy had been unreformable were yet another afterthought inspired by Russian politicians (and their Western patrons) who later decided to launch an all-out, “shock-therapy” assault on the old system.

Once again we must ask what is meant by “reform.” In the Soviet case, if it meant the advent of a fully privatized, entirely free-market capitalism, the economy was, of course, not reformable; it could only have been replaced in its entirety. By 1991, some self-appointed Western advisers were already urging that outcome and never forgave Gorbachev for disregarding them.⁵⁸ But few Soviet politicians or policy intellectuals, including radical reformers at that time, advocated such an economic system. Overwhelmingly, they shared Gorbachev’s often and by 1990 emphatically stated goal of a “mixed economy” with a “regulated” but “modern full-blooded market” that would give “economic freedom” to people and “equal rights” to all forms of property ownership and still be called socialist.⁵⁹ Most of the disagreements among Soviet reformers, and with Gorbachev, continued to be over the methods and pace of the change.

Gorbachev’s proposed mixed economy has been the subject of much Western derision, and Yeltsin’s retort that the Soviet leader “wanted to combine things that cannot be combined”—or as a Western historian put it, “like mating a rabbit with a donkey”—found much applause.⁶⁰ But this, too, is unjustified. All modern capitalist economies have been mixed and regulated to various degrees, the combination of private and state ownership, market and nonmarket regulation, changing repeatedly over time—the U.S. government’s response to the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis being only a recent example. None of them have chosen actually to practice the fully “free market” their ideologues often preach. Moreover, it should again be emphasized, economies with large state and private sectors had been the tsarist and Soviet Russian tradition, except during the years since the end of NEP in 1929.

Introducing “capitalist” elements into a reformed Soviet system was more difficult politically and economically than had been adding “socialist” elements to, for instance, American capitalism in the 1930s. But there was no inherent reason why nonstate, market elements could not have been added to the Soviet economy—private manufacturing firms, banks, service industries, shops, and farms alongside state and collective ones—and encouraged to compete and grow. Something similar had been done under far greater political constraints in Communist Eastern Europe and China. It would have required adhering to Gorbachev’s principle of gradualism and refusal to impose a way of life on people, even a reformed life. The reasons it did not happen in Soviet or post-Soviet Russia were primarily political, not economic, as were the causes of the country’s growing economic crisis in 1990 and 1991, a subject examined in the next chapter.

We must also ask if Gorbachev’s economic policies really “failed miserably” because this suggests that the Soviet economy did not respond to his reform initiatives. As often as not, this, too, is an afterthought in scholarly and media commentary. Even as late as 1990, when Gorbachev’s policies were already generating an ominous combination of growing budget deficits, inflation, consumer shortages, and falling production, a number of Western economists nonetheless thought he was moving in the right direction. One wrote, for example, that the “sequencing of the economic reforms is sensible: Gorbachev has a fine strategic sense.”⁶¹ In this case, however, we are interested in larger and more long-term questions.

If economic reform is a “transition” composed of necessary stages, Gorbachev had launched the entire process by 1990 in four essential respects. He had pushed through almost all the legislation needed for a comprehensive economic reformation.⁶² He had converted large segments of the Soviet elite to market thinking to the extent that even the most neo-Stalinist candidate in the 1991 Russian presidential election conceded, “Today, only a crazy person can deny the need for market relations.” Indeed, by discrediting longstanding ideological dogmas, legalizing private enterprises and property, and thus market relations, and personally lauding “lively and fair competition” for “each form of property,”⁶³ Gorbachev had largely freed the economy from the clutches of the proscriptive Communist Party apparatus. And as a direct result of these changes, the actual marketization, privatization, and commercialization of the Soviet economy were under way.

These developments require special attention because later they would usually be attributed to Yeltsin and post-Soviet Russia. By 1990, the private businesses called cooperatives already numbered about 200,000, employed almost 5 million people, and accounted for 5 to 6 percent of GNP. For better or worse, state property was already in effect being privatized by nomenklatura officials and others. Commercial banks were springing up in many cities, and the first stock exchanges had appeared. New entrepreneurial and financial elites, including a soon-to-be formed “Young Millionaires Club,” were rapidly developing along with these market institutions. By mid-1991, an American correspondent was filing a series of reports on “Soviet capitalism.”⁶⁴ Western commentators may dismiss Gorbachev’s policies as failed half-measures, but many post-Soviet Russian economists knew better: “It was during his years in power that all the basic forms of economic activity in modern Russia were born.”⁶⁵ The larger point is that they were born within the Soviet economy and thus were evidence of its reformability.

Finally, there is the question of the largest and most essential component of the old Soviet system—the Union or multinational state itself. Gorbachev was slow to recognize that Moscow’s hold on the fifteen republics was vulnerable to his political and economic policies, but by 1990 he knew that the fate of the Union would decide the outcome of all his reforms and “my own fate.”⁶⁶ During his final two years in office, he became a Lincolnesque figure determined to “preserve the Union”—in his case, however, not by force but by negotiating a transformation of the discredited “super-centralized unitary state” into an authentic, voluntary federation. When the Soviet Union ended in December 1991 and all of the republics became separate and independent states, so ended the evolutionary reformation Gorbachev called perestroika.⁶⁷

Was the Union reformable, as Gorbachev and many Russian politicians and intellectuals insisted before and after 1991? Two biases afflict Western writing on this enormous “question of all questions.”⁶⁸ The anti-Sovietism of most Western accounts, particularly American ones, inclines them to believe, with however much “hindsight bias,” that the Soviet Union was a doomed state. The other bias, probably unwitting, is again the language or formulation of the question. It is almost always said, perhaps in a tacit analogy with the end of the tsarist state in 1917, that the Union “collapsed” or “imploded,” words that imply inherently terminal causes and thus seem to rule out the possibility of a reformed Soviet state. But if we ask instead how and why the Union was “abolished,” “destroyed,” “dissolved,” “disbanded,” or simply “ended,” the formulation leaves open the possibility that contingencies or subjective factors may have been the primary cause and therefore that a different outcome was possible.⁶⁹

The standard Western thesis that the Union was unreformable is based largely on a ramifying misconception. It assumes that the nationwide Communist Party apparatus, with its vertical organizational discipline imposing authority from above and compliance from below, “alone held the federal union together.” Therefore, once the dictatorial Party was disfranchised by Gorbachev’s reforms, there were no other integrative factors to offset centrifugal forces and the “disintegration of the Soviet Union was a foregone conclusion.” In short, “No party, no Union.”⁷⁰

The role of the Party should not be minimized, but other factors also bound the Union together, including other Soviet institutions. In significant respects, the Moscow state economic ministries, with their branches throughout the country, had become as important as Party organizations.⁷¹ And the integrative role of the all-Union military, with its own kind of discipline and assimilation, should not be underestimated. The state economy itself was even more important. Over many decades, the economies of the fifteen republics had become virtually one, sharing and depending upon the same natural resources, energy grids and pipelines, transportation, suppliers, producers, consumers, and subsidies. The result, as was commonly acknowledged, was a “single Soviet economic space.”

Nor should compelling human elements of integration be discounted. Official formulas boasting of a “Soviet people” and “Soviet nation” were overstated, but they were not, reliable sources assure us, merely an “ideological artifact.”⁷² Though the Soviet Union was composed of scores of different ethnic groups, there were many millions of mixed families and some 75 million citizens, nearly a third of the population, lived outside their ethnic territories, including 25 million Russians. Shared historical experiences were also a unifying factor, such as the terrible losses and ultimate victory in World War II, or “Great Patriotic War,” as was the language of the Moscow center. More than 60 percent of non-Russians spoke Russian fluently, and most of the others had assimilated some of Russia’s language and culture though the all-Union educational system and media.⁷³

Given the right reform policies and other circumstances, these multiple integrative elements, along with a history of living with Russia and one another for centuries before and since 1917, were enough to hold most of the Soviet republics together without the Communist Party dictatorship. Indeed, a decade after the end of the Soviet Communist state, an American historian traveling through its former territories still found “Sovietness at almost every turn.”⁷⁴ If nothing else, tens of millions of Soviet citizens had much to lose in the event of a breakup of the Union. That understanding no doubt helps explain the result of the March 1991 referendum, which was, an American specialist confirmed, an “overwhelming vote for the Union.”⁷⁵

It is also true that the voluntary Soviet federation proposed by Gorbachev would have meant fewer than the fourteen non-Russian republics. He hoped otherwise but acknowledged the prospect by enacting a new Law on Secession in April 1990. The tiny Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, annexed by Stalin’s Red Army in 1940, were almost certain to choose renewed independence, and Western Moldova reunion with Romania (though it changed its mind after 1991).⁷⁶ One or two of the three small Transcaucasian republics also might have seceded depending on whether the bitter enemies Armenia and Azerbaijan sought Russia’s protection against the other and whether Georgia decided it needed Moscow’s help in preserving its own multiethnic state. (Its decision eventually contributed to the Georgian-Russian war in August 2008.)

Even so, all of these small nationalities were on the Soviet periphery, and the remaining eight to ten republics constituted more than 90 percent of the old Union’s territory, population, and resources. They were more than enough to form and sustain a new Soviet Union. Even fewer grouped around Russia would have been adequate. Indeed, according to a non-Russian leader who participated in the abolition of the Soviet state a few months later, a new Union could “consist of four republics.” (Presumably he meant Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan with its large number of ethnic Russians, as indeed Solzhenitsyn and others had already proposed.)⁷⁷

Popular opinion may have been overwhelmingly pro-Union, but after early 1990, when regional parliamentary elections devolved considerable power from the Moscow center, it was the leaders and elites of the republics who would decide their future. There is strong evidence that a majority of them also wanted to preserve the Union, at least until late 1991. This preference was clearly expressed in negotiations for a new Union Treaty that Gorbachev began directly with the willing leaders of nine Soviet republics—Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, the five Central Asian republics, and Azerbaijan—in April 1991, a crisis-ridden time somewhat beyond the period analyzed here but therefore all the more significant.

The negotiations, known as the Novo-Ogarevo process, resulted in an agreement to form a new “Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics.” Scheduled to be signed formally on August 20, 1991, the treaty was initialed by all nine republic leaders, including the three who would abolish the Soviet Union only a few months later—Yeltsin of Russia, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine, and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belorussia.⁷⁸ Gorbachev had to cede more power than he wanted to the republics, but the treaty preserved an all-Union state, elected presidency and parliament, military, and economy. It was so finalized that even disputes over seating at the signing ceremony and the order of signatures—Yeltsin insisted that his appear near the top, not alphabetically—which were to be followed by a new constitution and elections, had been resolved and special paper for the text and souvenir stamps agreed upon.⁷⁹

The familiar argument that Novo-Ogarevo’s failure to save the Soviet Union proved its unreformability therefore makes no sense. Those negotiations were successful, and, like Gorbachev’s other reforms, they developed within the Soviet system, legitimized by the popular mandate of the March referendum and conducted by the established multinational leaderships of most of the country. Instead, the Novo-Ogarevo process should be seen as the kind of elite consensus, or “pact-making,” that many political scientists say is necessary for the successful democratic reformation of a political system.⁸⁰ That is how even a leading pro-Yeltsin democrat anticipated the signing of the new treaty—as a “historic event” that could be “as long-lived as the American Declaration of Independence, and serve as the same reliable political and legal basis of the renovated Union.”⁸¹

In other words, the treaty did not fail because the Union was unreformable but because a small group of high-level Moscow officials staged an armed coup on August 19 to stop its successful reform. (Nor was the coup inevitable, but that is another story.)⁸² Though the putsch quickly collapsed, primarily because its leaders lacked the resolve to use the military force they had amassed in Moscow, its fallout dealt a heavy blow to the Novo-Ogarevo process. It profoundly weakened Gorbachev and his central government, emboldened the political ambitions of Yeltsin and Kravchuk, and made other republic leaders wary of Moscow’s unpredictable behavior. According to most Western accounts, it eliminated any remaining possibility of saving the Union.

In fact, not even the failed but calamitous August coup extinguished the political impulse to preserve the Union or expectations by leading Soviet reformers that it would still be saved. In September, some 1,900 deputies from twelve Soviet republics resumed their participation in sessions of the Union Congress. In October, an agreement on a new economic union was signed. And as late as November 1991, Yeltsin assured the public, “The Union will live!”⁸³ Seven republics, including Russia, continued to negotiate with Soviet President Gorbachev—a majority, not counting the now independent Baltic states—and, on November 25, they seemed to agree on yet another treaty. It was more confederal than federative but still provided for a Union state, presidency, parliament, economy, and military.⁸⁴ Two weeks later, it, too, was aborted by a coup, this one carried out by Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich, fewer conspirators but men with greater resolve.

We must conclude, then, that just as there are no conceptual reasons for believing the Soviet system was unreformable, nor are there any empirical ones. As the historical developments reconsidered here show, by 1991 most of the system was in a process of far-reaching democratic and market reformation. The Soviet Union under Gorbachev was, of course, not yet fully reformed, but it was in full “transition,” a term usually reserved for the post-Soviet period. All that remains of the unreformability axiom is the insistence that because Gorbachev’s reforms were avowedly pro-Soviet and prosocialist, they were merely a “fantasy” or “chimera.”⁸⁵ This is, of course, ideological bias, not historical analysis.

WHY, contrary to the assertions of so many specialists for so many years, did the Soviet system turn out to be remarkably reformable? Was it really some kind of “political miracle,” as an American historian later wrote?⁸⁶ Important elements of a full explanation include the enduring power of anti-Stalinist ideas dating back to the 1920s and even to 1917; the legacies of Khrushchev’s policies, among them the birth of a proto-reform party inside the Communist Party; the Soviet elite’s increasing exposure to the West and thus awareness of alternative ways of life (both socialist and capitalist); profound changes in society that were eroding Party-state controls and de-Stalinizing the system from below; growing social and economic problems that further promoted proreform sentiments in the high nomenklatura; and, not to be minimized, Gorbachev’s exceptional leadership. But there was an equally crucial factor.

Most Western specialists had long believed that the Soviet system’s basic institutions were too “totalitarian” or otherwise rigged to be fundamentally reformed. In fact, the system had been constructed all along in a dualistic way that made it potentially reformable, even, so to speak, reform-ready. Formally, it had most of the institutions of a representative democracy—a constitution that included provisions for civil liberties, a legislature, elections, a judiciary, a federation. But inside or alongside each of those components were “counterweights” that nullified their democratic content, most importantly the Communist Party’s political monopoly, single-candidate ballots, censorship, and police repression.⁸⁷ To begin a process of democratic reform, all that was needed was a will and a way to remove the counterweights.

Gorbachev and his closest aides understood the duality, which he characterized as “democratic principles in words and authoritarianism in reality.” To democratize the system, he later observed, “it wasn’t necessary to invent anything new,” only, as an adviser remarked, to transform the democratic components of the Soviet Union “from decoration into reality.” This was true of almost all of Gorbachev’s reforms, though the most ramifying example was, as he emphasized, the “transfer of power from the hands of the Communist Party, which had monopolized it, into the hands of those to whom it should have belonged according to the Constitution—to the soviets through free elections.”⁸⁸ Not only did its dualistic institutions make the Soviet system highly reformable, but without them the peaceful democratization and other transformations of the Gorbachev years probably would not have been possible, and certainly would not have been as rapid or historic.