Many people believe that Communism came to an end in the Soviet Union in 1991, either just after the failed August coup or when the Soviet state itself ceased to exist in December. But it does not make much sense to call the Soviet system Communist after the end of 1989. The years 1988–89 saw both the dismantling of the principal defining features of Communism and the simultaneous and interconnected ending of the Cold War. The break-up of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 into fifteen successor states was an unintended consequence of the new freedoms and partial democratization of the Soviet political system. It also owed much to the peaceful transformation of Eastern Europe, itself the most important manifestation of the Cold War’s ending.
While Chapter 27 is concerned with the disintegration of the Soviet state, in the present chapter we shall see how the system was transformed. In the course of 1988–89 there was a huge increase in the number of independent organizations on Soviet territory. In what was an even more remarkable break with the past, contested elections took place for a new legislature with real power. And the most sensitive issues were being publicly debated both within the Communist Party and in the broader society. By the end of 1989, a raft of new freedoms had been introduced. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn (after criticizing Gorbachev for what he termed his ‘thoughtless renunciation of power’) observed: ‘Let us be clear that it was Gorbachev, and not Yeltsin, as is now widely being claimed, who first gave freedom of speech and movement to the citizens of our country.’1
By the end of 1989, not only had Solzhenitsyn’s novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle, previously deemed unsuitable for publication in the Soviet Union, appeared in Moscow, so had his more devastating indictment of the Soviet experience, The Gulag Archipelago. A leading historian of Russia, writing in 2008, said that ‘it is hard to imagine any circumstances in which The Gulag Archipelago, which Solzhenitsyn was secretly writing throughout the 1960s, could have been published in the Soviet Union’.2 This was certainly unimaginable in the Soviet system. Yet devastating as it was for Communist ideology and the official version of Soviet history, this work was legally published in the Soviet Union in 1989. The Soviet state still had more than two years of existence ahead of it, but the fact that such a work as Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag could appear in print was a sure sign that the system had become something different in kind. By that time, other works that had previously been condemned as anti-Communist and anti-Soviet slanders, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, had also appeared. For the small minority of Soviet citizens who had surreptitiously read these works in foreign editions, this was, indeed, unimaginable as recently as the beginning of 1985. Passing on a contraband copy of such a book was then a criminal offence. This transformation did not occur without a struggle. In early 1988 it reached a new phase, with an attempt to turn the political clock back.
Struggle and Breakthrough
What became known as the ‘Nina Andreyeva affair’ began with the publication of an article in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya which, while not attacking perestroika directly, was a neo-Stalinist rejection of the essence of the changes. The article had a significance that did not lie in the person of the author, a chemistry lecturer in a Leningrad technological institute named Nina Andreyeva. Her own draft was worked on by officials of the Central Committee, with the knowledge and support of Ligachev, and published just as Gorbachev was leaving on a foreign trip, as was Yakovlev. The fact that it went unanswered for three weeks led many people to believe that the article represented a new official line. It would have done so had Ligachev and those in the Politburo who thought like him prevailed. The Andreyeva article complained about a new and unhealthy emphasis on terror and repression in discussion of Soviet history. In passages which her Central Committee co-authors doubtless supplied, Andreyeva cited positive statements about Stalin by Winston Churchill and from the memoirs of Charles de Gaulle. The article deplored the new tendency to describe the class struggle and the leading role of the proletariat as obsolete. There was a distinct anti-semitic tinge to the piece. A number of people of Jewish origin are mentioned in it, and the only one who escapes unscathed is Karl Marx. Moreover, Andreyeva revived the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’, in the name of which Stalin conducted an anti-semitic purge at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s. Lest anyone should be in doubt what she meant by the term, she linked it with ‘refusenikism’. The term ‘refuseniks’ had been applied to Soviet Jews who, in the 1970s, wished to emigrate but had been refused permission.3 The Andreyeva article used it differently. It meant ‘refusing socialism’. It inveighed also against ‘a pluralism that is far from socialist’. With more foundation than most of its assertions, the article held that the cardinal question had become ‘recognizing or not recognizing the leading role of the party’.4
The significance of the article was threefold. First, it had powerful backing from within the Central Committee of the CPSU. Second, it was treated as authoritative, with Ligachev recommending it to party organizations. Third, more than half the members of the Politburo initially agreed with it, as Gorbachev was to discover. In an informal discussion among Politburo members on 23 March 1988 (which Yakovlev recounted to Chernyaev), Ligachev raised the subject of the article in Sovetskaya Rossiya. ‘A very good article. Our party line,’ he said. Vitaly Vorotnikov said it had been an absolutely correct and necessary article. Andrey Gromyko and another veteran conservative Communist, Mikhail Solomentsev, added their agreement with those sentiments. The KGB chairman Viktor Chebrikov had his mouth open to join in the praise, but was interrupted before he could do so. The happy mood was disturbed when Gorbachev said: ‘And I have a different opinion.’5 He said that he never objected to someone expressing their views and that they could publish them anywhere they liked, but he had found out that this article was written by directive and was recommended to party organizations.* That was another matter. Gorbachev added that they would need to talk about it in the Politburo.6 In fact, many local newspapers in the Soviet Union, with encouragement from the part of the Central Committee apparatus controlled by Ligachev, had republished the Andreyeva article. So, in East Germany, had Neues Deutschland. The article was music to the ears of Erich Honecker.
After the regular Politburo business had been dealt with the following day, Gorbachev returned to the article. Those who had praised it the previous evening began a retreat to the other side of the fence or perched uneasily on it. Some who had not spoken earlier now had the opportunity to join the discussion on Gorbachev’s side. His allies, Shevardnadze and Vadim Medvedev, did so sincerely and robustly, as did Ryzhkov. But the most telling contribution was a detailed analysis of the text by Yakovlev. He showed how at every point the article had opposed the policies of perestroika which the CPSU had approved, most recently at the previous month’s Central Committee plenum. Since it was clear that Yakovlev was speaking not only for himself but for Gorbachev, others round the table fell into line. Thus, for example, Oleg Baklanov, the secretary of the Central Committee who supervised military industry – and who in August 1991 was a leading member of the group which mounted a coup against Gorbachev – said that he had found the article ‘interesting’, but now, after listening to Yakovlev and Medvedev, he saw it ‘through different eyes’.7 Yakovlev’s contribution to the discussion is not fully recorded in the records of that Politburo meeting, but it was the basis of the authoritative, unsigned article which, at Gorbachev’s behest (and with his participation), was published in Pravda on 5 April. It rebutted point by point the ‘anti-perestroika manifesto’ which a majority of the Politburo, left to themselves, had supported.
This curious episode was important in several different ways. It indicated how much resistance there was to Gorbachev and to the reformist wing of the leadership within the party apparatus. Indeed, one of Gorbachev’s supporters in the Politburo later said that it was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’ of growing conservative opposition to Gorbachev and his policies.8 It had also, however, been an attempt to produce a radical change of course that achieved precisely the opposite effect. Since Ligachev was implicated in the approval of the article and Yakovlev had led the attack on it, with the conservative majority of the Politburo shamefacedly falling into line once Gorbachev had made clear where he stood, it shifted the balance of forces within the leadership in the direction of those who favoured radical change. That was all the more important because the Communist Party was about to start preparing the documents to be presented to the Nineteenth Party Conference, which had been trailed more than a year earlier. Its main purpose, as noted in the previous chapter, was to consider ‘further democratization of the party and society’.
What the Nina Andreyeva affair also abundantly demonstrated was that the power of the general secretary could still be decisive. In 1988, although this was not to be true for much longer, a determined party leader could get his way in Soviet politics, especially in the ideological sphere. The Andreyeva episode was revealing in another respect. Several weeks of uncertainty had seen a return to self-censorship on the part of a great many Soviet intellectuals. They included not a few who just a couple of years later were to criticize Gorbachev for what they called his ‘half-measures’ or ‘indecisiveness’. However, in 1988 they heavily relied on him to turn the tables on conservative and reactionary forces within the political establishment. In March – April 1988, the direction in which the Soviet state was to move was determined, ultimately, by the general secretary, while the overwhelming majority of the intelligentsia preserved a discreet silence throughout the time when it looked as if party policy was going into reverse.*
There was to be more real discussion and clash of opinion at the Nineteenth Party Conference, convened at the end of June 1988, than at any party congress or conference since the 1920s. Yet, as in the past, the policy documents presented to the conference were prepared over a period of several months in advance of the event. It was during this time that Gorbachev, having seen the strength of the opposition to reform of the system, became convinced of the need for more fundamental change. From the spring of 1988 onwards, albeit with some subsequent zig-zags and tactical retreats, he moved from being a within-system reformer to becoming a systemic transformer. Faced by foot-dragging and opposition from a majority within the party apparatus – even more at the regional and local level than in the central organs in Moscow – as well as from within the ministries, the KGB, and the military, Gorbachev and his supporters drew support from public opinion, which was beginning to matter more than in the past.
In particular, 1988 was the year in which pressure groups of various kinds began to spread. Known as the ‘informals’, they became an element of de facto pluralism within the Soviet political system. Their membership was still small, but they included articulate advocates of more radical reform. In many cities, what were called ‘Popular Fronts in support of Perestroika’ were set up, and it was the more radical variant of perestroika they supported. One of the most serious of the independent organizations to become firmly established in 1988 was Memorial, an association set up to honour the victims of Stalin. It became a significant pressure group vis-à-vis the authorities and an influence on public opinion. Most notable among its leading figures was Andrei Sakharov, but the organization united many of the Soviet Union’s prominent reformers, bringing together both party members and non-members. A more specifically anti-Communist but less influential organization, called the Democratic Union, was among other associations to hold a founding conference in 1988.9
Although these independent bodies constituted a breakthrough inasmuch as they were organized from below, their small memberships at this stage meant that their impact on a broader public was much less than that of the more adventurous of the official publications. Mass-circulation weeklies, such as Ogonek (Little Light) and Moskovskie novosti (Moscow News), and the monthly journals, among which Novy mir (New World) was now far from alone in publishing essays and creative literature of a kind unthinkable in the past, had an impact on millions of Soviet citizens. The editors who had been appointed to the two most radical weeklies, under the benevolent eye of Alexander Yakovlev when he was supervising the media, remained in post throughout the perestroika era. It was in the summer of 1986 that the Ukrainian poet and journalist Vitaly Korotich became editor of Ogonek and an anti-Stalinist Russian journalist, Yegor Yakovlev, took over the editorship of Moskovskie novosti. Yakovlev, who was to be protected by Gorbachev as well as his namesake, Alexander Yakovlev, in the Politburo, had been fired from more than one position in the Brezhnev era because of his nonconformism.
HISTORY SPEEDING UP
The boldest of the weeklies and monthlies saw their circulation soar.10 Book publishing also broke down old barriers. Works long banned in the Soviet Union but which had found fame in the West, notably Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and a more devastating indictment of the Soviet past, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, had been published by the time of the Nineteenth Party Conference in the summer of 1988. This was a remarkable turnaround. Pasternak had been reviled by Soviet politicians and literary bureaucrats for his novel, and not allowed to accept the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Grossman, for his part, had been told by Mikhail Suslov, when he was the guardian of Soviet ideology, that his book would not be published in two hundred years.11 History speeded up during perestroika. New books as well as hitherto unpublishable old ones had an undoubted impact on political opinion.
On the eve of the Nineteenth Conference, a collective volume appeared, called There’s No Other Way. It was a rallying cry for perestroika in the radical understanding of the concept.12 A majority of the authors were members of the Communist Party, among them the book’s editor, the historian Yury Afanasiev. They included political analysts such as Yevgeny Ambartsumov and Fedor Burlatsky, who had long advocated reform in the pre-perestroika Soviet Union, sometimes in Aesopian language, while testing the limits of tolerance of the party authorities. The sociologist Tatiana Zaslavskaya, who had earlier in the 1980s received a party reprimand for her gloomy (and leaked) report on the condition of Soviet society, but who had already been consulted by Gorbachev on several occasions, was also one of the contributors. There were several non-party members among the authors. The most distinguished of them was Sakharov. Typically, he did not pull his punches. He wrote, for example, that ‘the Afghanistan adventure embodies in itself all the danger and irrationality of a closed totalitarian society’.13 And this in a book published in 100,000 copies by an official Moscow publishing house in June 1988.
Against these voices calling for faster liberalization and democratization, there were increasingly open demands from a very different part of the political spectrum to put an end to perestroika and to return to ‘traditional values’. In the Brezhnev era, Russian nationalist deviation from Marxist-Leninist norms had been the closest thing to a form of permitted dissent. In a number of editorial boards of journals, especially those which came under the jurisdiction of the Writers’ Union of the Russian republic (RSFSR), a rearguard action was fought against perestroika. Some liberal Russian nationalists, among them a much-respected literary scholar, Dmitry Likhachev, and Sergey Zalygin, a non-party member who was appointed editor of Novy mir in 1986, gave their support to Gorbachev and perestroika. However, a majority of the nationalists were horrified by the developing pluralism which gave their ideological enemies – Westernizers–a platform they had not enjoyed in the past. What was worse, the latter were evidently enjoying support from the highest reaches of the party hierarchy – from Gorbachev himself and from Yakovlev. Accordingly, even some of the nationalist writers who had in the past been critical of the CPSU now looked for allies among Communist Party officials who were alarmed by perestroika. They looked also to the military.
As time went on, especially by 1990–91, there was a real convergence of view between nationalist writers on the one hand, and party bureaucrats and the Ministry of Defence’s Main Political Administration for the Armed Forces on the other. They were in agreement in discarding most Marxist-Leninist ideology and on emphasizing the idea of a strong Russian state and the dangers of democratization. But as glasnost had developed into an ever-greater freedom of speech and publication, open criticism of the party bureaucracy had made officialdom as a social stratum increasingly unpopular. What the nationalist intellectuals gained, therefore, from that alliance, in the form of support from people who still held some institutional power, they lost in their appeal to a wider public.14 Nevertheless, in the last two years of the Soviet Union’s existence, the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism by many of the party conservatives was to come close to matching its abandonment by the radical party reformers. It was what each wanted to put in its place that differed. The central argument of the Russian nationalists, and even many of the party conservatives, became that the world was divided not into antagonistic social classes but into individualistic and collectivist civilizations. They held that to introduce Western-style political and economic institutions into such a collectivist civilization as that of Russia would destroy traditional values, including those preserved by the Orthodox Church, and bring about the destruction of the Russian state. Not surprisingly, this argument has had still more resonance in post-Soviet Russia.15
It was not views such as these which were attacked at virtually every Politburo meeting from 1987 onwards, but the writings of those deemed the common enemies of Russian nationalists and party conservatives alike. Those targeted were the outspoken critics of the Soviet past and of fundamental features of the Soviet political and economic system – people who, in many cases, had been influenced by Western liberal and democratic thought and by what they knew of Western political practice. The waywardness of the mass media was deplored and the attention of Politburo members was drawn to particular articles which for Yakovlev were audacious and welcome but for Ligachev were slanderous and deplorable. The fact that Ligachev was until September 1988 the second secretary of the party, with some responsibility for ideology, which, however, he shared with Yakovlev, meant that mixed signals were being sent out from the highest echelons of the CPSU. In contrast with pre-perestroika times, editors could, according to their dispositions, take their cue from Ligachev or from Yakovlev.
Gorbachev was put under constant pressure from a majority in the Politburo to restore ‘order’ in the mass media, and sometimes responded with criticism of particular publications. Nevertheless, his position remained close to Yakovlev’s and far from that of Ligachev. Indeed, whereas Ligachev had been brought into the top leadership team by Andropov, Yakovlev had moved from being, formally, outside the top five hundred of the Soviet political elite in 1985 (he was not even a candidate member of the Central Committee) to being in the top five (a full member of the Politburo and also a secretary of the Central Committee) from the summer of 1987. That extraordinarily accelerated promotion he owed entirely to Gorbachev. In September 1988, however, Gorbachev attempted to end the mixed signals emanating from the party leadership by removing both Ligachev and Yakovlev from dealing directly with ideology. For Ligachev it was a definite demotion. He became the secretary of the Central Committee overseeing agriculture. For Yakovlev it was more of a sideways move. He became the overseer of international policy. Vadim Medvedev was put in charge of ideology.
Medvedev was a loyal Gorbachev supporter and his views were more like Yakovlev’s than Ligachev’s, but he was much more cautious than Yakovlev and did not always spot an impending radicalization of Gorbachev’s position. Glasnost had increased the appetite of a highly educated Soviet public for important literary and political works they had hitherto been denied, and those monthly journals with pro-perestroika editorial boards competed with one another for the most notable writers. Novy mir, having published the early Solzhenitsyn in Tvardovsky’s time, got in touch with him at his exile in Vermont by telephone and telegram. They believed, not without reason, that they were in pole position to resume where they had left off more than two decades earlier. Solzhenitsyn, though, drove a hard bargain. Novy mir wanted to begin by publishing his novels, The Cancer Ward and The First Circle, but Solzhenitsyn said that The Gulag Archipelago had to be published first. Since that work made clear the culpability not only of Stalin but also of Lenin for the repressive labour camp system, it was a high hurdle for a Soviet literary journal to clear.
In June, the editor of Novy mir, Sergey Zalygin, had an unpleasant meeting with Medvedev which left him thinking that there was no prospect of publishing Solzhenitsyn. Yet the very next day at a Politburo meeting Gorbachev proposed that the Soviet Writers’ Union should decide this matter for themselves. That was a dramatic change of policy. It did not automatically ensure publication, since the Writers’ Union of the USSR was not exactly a hotbed of radicalism (although less conservative than the Writers’ Union of the Russian Republic). However, they clearly sensed the way the political wind was blowing, and the direction in which Gorbachev was leaning, and gave the go-ahead. In July 1989, the text of Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize lecture was published in Novy mir and the journal was able to announce that the first instalment of The Gulag Archipelago would appear in the August issue.16
Throughout the perestroika period, Mikhail Gorbachev was on the radical wing of the Communist Party leadership. When the broader political elite became more openly divided, he sometimes took one step back before moving two steps forward. However, the extent to which the fundamental direction of policy marked a sharp break with the past depended up until the spring of 1989 almost entirely on Gorbachev. What was of decisive importance was a combination of the institutional power and authority of the Gensek (as the general secretary was known) and the reformist disposition, self-assurance and persuasiveness of the particular holder of that office.17 In the spring of 1988, Gorbachev had a series of meetings with different groups of regional party secretaries in order to prepare them for the Nineteenth Conference and the changes ahead. A majority of those who took part viewed with concern radical reform of a political system in which they had possessed unchallenged authority within their own domain. In these meetings Gorbachev emphasized, above all, the need for democratization, by which, though, he did not yet mean a multi-party system. Those who attended the meeting on 11 April 1988 were told that ‘the process of democratization must include separating state and party functions’ and that ‘we need to eliminate the gulf between form and content in our political institutions’.18 Meeting with another group of regional party officials a week later, Gorbachev raised a still thornier issue, saying: ‘You know, it’s not only in the West that the question is posed: on what basis do twenty million [members of the CPSU] rule 200 million? We conferred on ourselves the right to rule the people!’19 He went on to tell the regional officials that the party had not completed the process conceived in 1917: ‘On the contrary, there arose a command-administrative system that contradicted it.’20
In the lead-up to the Nineteenth Conference, Gorbachev had even more important meetings, often late in the evening or at weekends, with a small group of advisers, at which ideas were freely debated, as well as the more formal meetings of the Politburo which had to approve the documents to be presented to the conference. However, the ‘theses’ published in advance of that major party event largely reflected the evolution of Gorbachev’s views, although some of the things he wanted to do, such as bring fresh blood into the Central Committee by co-opting new members at the conference, were vetoed by the Politburo.21 Whereas, when he came to power Gorbachev wished to reform the Soviet system, he now wanted to change its political essence. He told his aides that when he had discussed the ‘theses’ for the Nineteenth Conference with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of the German Social Democrats, Vogel had found in them ‘a social-democratic element’. Gorbachev added: ‘I made no objection.’22
REAGAN IN MOSCOW
The American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, was in Helsinki to brief President Reagan on the eve of his visit to Moscow when the Russian text of the ‘theses’ for the Nineteenth Party Conference was faxed to him. He was astonished to find an entirely new commitment to such principles as the separation of powers, a variety of freedoms, and independence of the judiciary. ‘What the “theses” described’, he concluded, ‘was something closer to European social democracy’ than to Soviet Communism. Matlock summarized the document for the president and told him that ‘if they turned out to be real, the Soviet Union could never again be what it had been in the past’.23
Ronald Reagan, who was visiting Russia for the first time, arrived in Moscow on 29 May 1988 and stayed in the Soviet Union until 2 June. His fourth summit meeting in as many years with Gorbachev had fewer matters of substance to settle than had the Washington summit of the previous year, but it made up for that with its symbolic significance. For Soviet citizens, the sight of an American president, who just a few years ago was perceived as the arch-enemy and a menace to their very existence, strolling amicably in Red Square with the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, was both remarkable and reassuring. They concluded that the threat of nuclear war had been definitively removed. When Reagan was asked by a reporter inside the grounds of the Kremlin whether he still thought the Soviet Union was an ‘evil empire’ – the term he had used in 1983–the president responded: ‘No, I was talking about another time, another era.’24 Reagan gave a speech at Moscow State University – in front of a bust of Lenin – in which he spoke about ‘the technological and information revolution’, about ‘how important it is to institutionalize change – to put guarantees on reform’, and on the need ‘to remove the barriers that keep people apart’, with a specific reference to the Berlin Wall. However, he also told the Moscow students: ‘Your generation is living in one of the most exciting, hopeful times in Soviet history.’25
On 6 June, Gorbachev reported favourably to the Politburo on Reagan’s visit. He said that it showed that a principled and constructive policy, based on realism, could produce a result. (He was talking about Soviet policy, although Reagan and Shultz were, understandably enough, to make quite similar judgements about the policy they had pursued.) Gorbachev noted that television coverage in the United States had enabled the average American to see the ordinary Russian and to witness the friendly reception Reagan received. Furthermore: ‘The President, with all his prejudices, was able to see things realistically and spoke honestly about his impressions. And he was not embarrassed to correct his former odious evaluation.’26 The visit further strengthened Gorbachev at a time when he was about to move to transformative change of the Soviet political system. His foreign policy had led to a dramatic reduction in East – West tension and had enhanced his own popularity both at home and abroad.
Although Gorbachev’s popularity was later to decline rapidly in the Soviet Union, while remaining high in the West, he still had very strong domestic support during 1988–89. As late as December 1989, 81 per cent of citizens of Russia, and 84 per cent of respondents in the Soviet Union as a whole, fully or partly approved of Gorbachev’s activity.27 His ratings were to reach comparable levels in the United States. In mid-1986, 51 per cent of Americans had ‘a favourable impression of Gorbachev’. That rose substantially over the next two years, and after Reagan’s Moscow visit, the figure was as high as 83 per cent.28 Perceptions in the USA of the Soviet Union had also changed (as they had in Europe). At the beginning of Reagan’s second presidential term in 1984, 54 per cent of Americans regarded the Soviet Union as ‘an enemy’, whereas in May 1988–even before Reagan’s Moscow visit – only 30 per cent still held that view.29
From Liberalization to Democratization
The Nineteenth Party Conference was the point at which change in the Soviet political system became much more fundamental, even though a majority of the delegates were far from radical reformers. The Russian nationalist writer Yury Bondarev attacked the policies that had been pursued over the previous three years and compared perestroika to an aeroplane taking off without knowing where it was going to land.30
Gorbachev later remarked that when Bondarev used this analogy, it aroused a feeling of protest in him, ‘but I did not openly show my feeling at the time’. Perestroika was a process that evolved over time. Gorbachev’s own views, in particular, became more radical, not least because of the opposition he faced from conservative forces. Thus, the criticism that there should have been a blueprint at the outset was misplaced. In retrospective reflections of his own, Gorbachev wrote that ‘we strove to be finished with the old Bolshevik tradition: to create an ideological construct and afterwards to strive to introduce it in the society, not taking into consideration the means, not considering the opinions of the citizens’.31 Bondarev, nevertheless, got a more sympathetic reception from the conference delegates than did the liberal editor of Znamya, Georgy Baklanov, who, in a later speech, attacked him. Gorbachev had to intervene several times to insist that Baklanov be allowed to continue with his speech when delegates tried to drown him out, telling them that they were free to agree or disagree with the speaker but that this had to be done democratically.32
Boris Yeltsin also addressed the conference and called for the resignation of members of the Politburo who had spent many years in Brezhnev’s Politburo and were thus responsible for the condition that the party and the country was in. Yeltsin brought into the open his conflict with Ligachev, who responded with a vigorous attack on him. Yeltsin, however, concluded his speech by appealing for his ‘political rehabilitation’, saying that he would rather have it in his lifetime than fifty years after he was dead. This was in spite of the fact that he was still a nominal, though entirely marginalized, member of the party’s Central Committee. He appeared, therefore, to be pleading for a return to the top leadership team. He wanted, he said, to be rehabilitated in the eyes of Communists, adding that such a decision would be ‘in the spirit of perestroika’. As late as the summer of 1988, even Yeltsin could not envisage exercising power other than from and through the higher echelons of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.33
Ligachev was not the only Politburo member to be criticized by name in conference speeches. The Politburo veterans Gromyko and Solomentsev were also singled out for attack in speeches that were reported at length on Soviet television. Gorbachev was not yet criticized explicitly – the authority of the general secretaryship still protected him – but in a number of speeches, not least that of the writer Bondarev, he was implicitly blamed. A number of notable speeches notwithstanding, the key breakthrough measures had been decided in advance by Gorbachev and his advisers – and then somewhat watered down by the Politburo. The conference accepted without overt opposition the principle of greater democratization, including contested elections for a new legislature, and also a reduction in the size of the party apparatus. The expectation was that all this would take at least a decade, if ever, to be put into effect. But at the end of his closing speech to the conference, Gorbachev pulled a surprise. He said that there was one more resolution which he admitted had been ‘formulated quickly’: this was that the new legislature, to be chosen by contested elections, should be up and running by April of the following year, and that the radical reduction in the size of the party apparatus should be carried out before the end of 1988. Having told his audience that it was ‘vitally necessary’ to adopt the resolution, he put it to a vote and got the result he had bounced the delegates into agreeing. Afterwards a Central Committee member, Ivan Laptev (chief editor of the newspaper Izvestiya), heard ‘major party workers’, especially from the regions, saying ‘What have we done?’34
The unreformed Supreme Soviet typically met twice a year for a total of three or four days. There was just one candidate for ‘election’ in each constituency and the deputies were essentially chosen by the party apparatus. Central Committee officials were thus able to decide in advance on the social composition of the legislature – how many women, how many workers, how many military personnel, for example. Membership was very much a part-time occupation, one which conferred honour and some degree of privilege rather than power. It was, therefore, an exceptionally important act of democratization to institute contested elections for a legislature which would be meeting for eight months of the year – four months at a time. The electorate were to choose deputies for a larger outer body called the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR that itself would meet for far longer periods than the old Supreme Soviet. It would, however, elect an inner body, called the Supreme Soviet (though bearing no resemblance to its predecessor), and that would be the legislative organ in session for the greater part of the year. Of the 2,250 members of the Congress of People’s Deputies, 750 were to be elected from constituencies based on population size and 750 from national-territorial units. On that latter slate, Estonia, with its population of a million, gained the same number of seats as Russia with approximately 150 million inhabitants. Controversially, the remaining third of the deputies was to be chosen by ‘public organizations’, ranging from the Communist Party and the Komsomol, through the Writers’, Film-Makers’ and Theatre Workers’ Unions, to the Academy of Sciences.
This was by no means fully fledged democracy, but even in post-Soviet Russia that has not at any point been achieved. It was, however, moving beyond liberalization to democratization, for democratization is a process. In a country with as long an authoritarian tradition as that of Russia, it was intrinsically unlikely that it would become a thoroughgoing democracy in a single leap. But the electoral contest this time was real. There was vigorous debate in meetings and on television. This was not a multi-party election. More than 85 per cent of candidates nominated and over 87 per cent of those elected were members of the Communist Party. The fact, however, that these party members were competing against one another, and advocating very different policies, was of immense significance. It shot to pieces the principle of democratic centralism. In a minority of constituencies a powerful local personality succeeded in becoming the single candidate. That did not ensure election. He (and in such cases it was invariably a he) still had to get more than 50 per cent of the votes cast. That proved to be an obstacle too many for the first secretary of the Leningrad regional party organization and candidate member of the Politburo, Yury Soloviev, who was rejected by more than half of his electorate. This led to his forced retirement in the same year from his party posts. In effect, the electorate as a whole now had a democratic device not only for choosing deputies but also for making untenable the position of unpopular party officials. As many as thirty-eight party first secretaries – at various levels of the hierarchy – were defeated in the elections, as were the prime ministers of Latvia and Lithuania.35
The most dramatic elections, and those of greatest long-term significance, were of a number of deputies determined to defend the national interests of their particular republics (they were not yet demanding outright independence), especially the Baltic states and Georgia, together with Boris Yeltsin’s runaway success. Yeltsin had chosen to stand for a seat which embraced the whole of Moscow, since the capital counted as one of the national-territorial units of the USSR. He was still a member of the Communist Party, but his opponent, the manager of a large car factory in Moscow, was strongly favoured by the party apparatus. However, Yeltsin campaigned vigorously and in his speeches attacked party privileges. He drew huge crowds at his rallies and won the seat with a remarkable 89 per cent of the popular vote.36 What made his election so important was that this was the first time in Soviet history that a prominent politician who had been expelled from the ruling circles was able to make a comeback thanks to public opinion. Thanks, too – although ironically, since Yeltsin was to be his nemesis – to Gorbachev. It was only Gorbachev’s innovation of competitive elections which made such a comeback possible. The American ambassador Jack Matlock aptly observed: ‘I found Yeltsin’s victory less astonishing than the fact that the votes had been counted honestly…An important milestone on the road to Russian democracy had been passed.’37
When the new legislature met, another giant step of democratization was taken. The proceedings were broadcast live on television. Day after day viewers saw deputies criticizing party leaders, the KGB and the military and many other Soviet sacred cows. A majority of the deputies were not radical reformers, but enough of them were to make this the first legislature in Soviet history which would attempt to call its leaders to account. Indeed, it did so a good deal more vigorously than the Russian parliament was to be doing a decade or two later. Nikolay Ryzhkov had to present his ministerial team to the new legislature for approval. So exacting was the confirmation process that Ryzhkov thought he had got off quite lightly when just nine out of his sixty-nine nominations were ‘killed off’ by the legislature.38 That this legislature was going to be very different from its predecessor, which had belonged entirely to the decorative part of the Soviet constitution, became clear on its very first day. Gorbachev was proposed as chairman of the Supreme Soviet – in effect, the speakership, which turned out to be far too onerous an addition to his other duties and which he later gave up. The nomination of Gorbachev alone was immediately challenged by, among others, Andrei Sakharov, who had been elected to the legislature from the most prestigious of the public organizations, the Academy of Sciences. Sakharov said he did ‘not see anyone else who could lead our country’, but his support for Gorbachev was conditional and, as a matter of principle, there should be a competitive election.39 A Leningrad deputy, Alexander Obolensky, who was not a member of the Communist Party, proposed himself, and in a vote as to whether his name should appear on the ballot, as many as 689 voted in favour of that – a significant minority, although 1,415 supported the single name of Gorbachev and in the subsequent vote over 95 per cent of the deputies endorsed him.
The first session of the congress began on 25 May 1989 and lasted until 9 June. In late May some 80 per cent of the Soviet urban population were watching or listening to the congress proceedings, whether at home or at work. Later in the year television stopped live broadcasting of the legislature, screening instead edited highlights in the evening. The reason was that too many working hours were being lost to the novelty of televised political debate. The parliamentary sessions had an estimated audience of between ninety and a hundred million people.40
Was the Soviet System Communist in December 1989?
The dismantling of Soviet Communism was still incomplete at the end of 1989, but enough had changed for the USSR to be no longer a Communist system in the sense outlined in Chapter 6 of this book. Of the three pairs of defining features of Communism discussed there, the two relating to the political system are the most important – the interlinked monopoly of power of the Communist Party and democratic centralism within it. In place of the strict hierarchy and severe discipline connoted by democratic centralism, the party was riven by groups and factions, with a different line being taken by the party organizations of particular republics and with vastly different political orientations to be found within the primary party organizations in the workplace. Thus, not only had democratic centralism ceased to operate, but the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party was already seriously undermined, even at a time when it remained part of Article 6 of the Soviet constitution.
The constitution had never been an accurate guide to political reality in the years of totalitarianism and post-totalitarian authoritarianism. In the first sixty years of Communist rule in Russia, there was no mention of the party’s ‘leading role’ in the Soviet constitution. That entered the constitution only in 1977. Thus, its presence or absence in the constitution could hardly be a criterion for judging when the system was or was not Communist. It was not only in the unreformed Soviet system that the constitution was remarkably unrevealing about the realities of political life. It was also a poor guide to politics on the ground at a time when that very ground was shifting in 1988–89. The elections themselves signified the end of democratic centralism. Conservative Communists found themselves competing against Communists who were, in essence, social democrats. Stalinists found themselves opposed by liberals, even though both were members of the Communist Party. They also pitted deputies from some republics against the central party-state authorities. This nationalities dimension of political change is a theme to be taken up in Chapter 27.
Within the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR in 1989, a new political force called the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies rapidly came into existence. This was an organization of radical democrats who soon acquired renown.41 It brought together such major but disparate figures as Yeltsin and Sakharov. Although almost all its leading members – among them Yeltsin, the historian Yury Afanasiev, and the economist Gavriil Popov – belonged to the CPSU (with Sakharov the major exception in that respect), the Inter-Regional Group became an organization opposing the leadership of the Communist Party. It was not only foot-dragging conservative Communists they attacked, but also Gorbachev, whom Afanasiev, in particular, and Yeltsin castigated for not being willing to make fundamental change in the system. The attacks missed the points that Gorbachev’s own authority within the Communist Party was now declining as a result of attacks from both ends of the political spectrum, and that he could not unilaterally declare an official end to the monopoly of power of the party (which de facto was already well under way). Gorbachev, in fact, raised the issue of removing the ‘leading role of the party’ from the Soviet constitution at a Politburo meeting in June 1989, but only Yakovlev, Shevardnadze and Medvedev supported such a move, and a decision was shelved. Earlier, he had wanted the issue to be addressed in the context of authorizing work on an entirely new Soviet constitution, but a very clear Politburo majority took the view that work on a new constitution should not be initiated at such a time of flux.42
For the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies, removing the constitutionally guaranteed ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party became an increasingly salient issue, affected (as we shall see in the next chapter) by events in Eastern Europe. Although the group was not numerically strong enough in the legislature to win votes there, the deputies who belonged to it constituted a liberal-democratic opposition, one which was very effective in gaining publicity and substantial support in the country. On 12 December 1989, the opening day of a new session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, Sakharov pressed again for the party’s leading role to be removed from the constitution. Although Gorbachev by this time was in agreement with him, he could not concede the point on the floor of the congress without the prior assent of the Central Committee. Two days later, after addressing a ‘stormy caucus’ of the Inter-Regional Group, Sakharov went home to prepare his speech for the next day of the Congress – and died of a heart attack that evening.43 His death added to the emotional impact of the drive for constitutional change.
In February 1990, Gorbachev secured the agreement of the Central Committee to take the Communist Party’s ‘leading role’ out of Article 6, and the following month that constitutional change was formally enacted by the Congress of People’s Deputies. What the whole process revealed, however, was that the party was deeply divided, and that since the creation of the new legislature, the central party organs were now following, not leading, informed opinion within the society. The monopoly of power of the Communist Party was challenged not only by the diversity of the mass media but by organized groups such as the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies in the legislature. Moreover, quite a number of the new political parties which came into formal existence in 1990–91 had their origins in political clubs formed in 1988–89. In a few cases, such as that of the small Democratic Party, they began describing themselves as political parties before the end of 1989.
The two economic criteria of a Communist system – command rather than market economy, and state ownership rather than private or mixed ownership – survived longer than democratic centralism and the leading role of the party. But they did not survive unscathed. By the end of 1989, the command economy was ceasing to work. The Law on the State Enterprise of 1987 had devolved power to factory managers, and the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), the Ministry of Finance and the branch industrial ministries were losing their ability to control economic enterprises. Furthermore, Gorbachev had in September 1988 abolished most of the economic departments of the Central Committee, so that the party had essentially lost its ‘leading role’ in the economy. The changes seriously weakened the top tier of command from what Western economists named a ‘command economy’, what in the Soviet Union had been called a ‘planned economy’, and which Gorbachev himself had, since 1988, pejoratively labelled a ‘command-administrative system’.
Ministries and party officials also found themselves facing workers’ strikes in 1989. Strikes were legalized in that same year. Apart from posing a major challenge to the party authorities, the strikes played havoc with what was left of ‘the plan’.44 State ownership was also reduced in scope by the important Law on Co-operatives of 1988. Indeed, many of the co-operatives quite quickly became thinly disguised private enterprises. Nevertheless, the most that could be claimed for economic transition in the Soviet Union by the end of 1989–indeed, by the end of 1991–was that it had ceased to be a functioning command economy without becoming a market economy. As an increasingly dysfunctional hybrid, it added a new pressure from below for change to the Communist system. Soviet citizens, thanks to the new freedoms, were better aware than ever of the higher standards of living in Western democracies. Both the market and democracy began to be linked in people’s minds with the promise – perhaps panacea – of rapidly rising living standards.
The two ideological defining features of Communism discussed in Chapter 6–the sense of belonging to an international Communist movement and the aspiration to build communism – had disappeared totally by the end of 1989. As is well known, and as the next chapter discusses, Communist systems throughout Eastern Europe came to an end in the course of that year. There was thus no longer an international Communist movement worthy of the name, although a small number of Communist countries survived, including one as important as China. The member states of the Warsaw Pact were no longer Communist, and though as an organization the Warsaw Pact was not wound up until 1 July 1991, it had from December 1989 onwards neither ideology nor a hegemonic power to hold it together. When the East Europeans dispensed with Communist rule, this had a devastating effect also on Western Communist parties. The leadership of the Soviet Communist Party were more concerned with the survival of their own state than with the fate of Western Communist parties, none of which, other than at a local level, had ever come to power in their own countries.
They had also given up even the pretence of being interested in building ‘communism’. Far from wanting the state to wither away, they were desperately trying to prevent it from disintegrating. Most of the defining features of a Communist system had, then, disappeared not only in east-central Europe but in the Soviet Union by the end of 1989. For a substantial part of the Soviet leadership, the task before them appeared to involve revival of the Communist system, as they had understood it, as a way of saving Soviet statehood. Gorbachev took a different view. Since the evolution of his own views had led him to a social democratic conception of socialism,45 he had no wish to put together again the Communist system he had played the leading part in dismantling. He was, however, desperately concerned with preserving Soviet statehood. Later Gorbachev came to accept that since the USSR was a ‘party-state’ – with party and state institutions inextricably intertwined – a weakening of the party automatically led to a weakening of the state.46 The disintegration of the state is, however, a subject for the chapter after next.