By mid-1986 Gorbachëv had concluded that his early economic and disciplinary measures offered no basic solution; he was also coming to recognize that it would not be enough merely to replace Brezhnev’s personnel with younger, more energetic officials. The attitudes and practices of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union needed changing. The problem was that most party officials refused to recognize the acuteness of the problems faced by the USSR. This was a reflection of their self-interest; but it also derived from their ignorance. And this ignorance was not confined to officialdom. Soviet society had for decades been prevented from acquiring comprehensive knowledge of the country’s past and current problems.
It was for this reason that Gorbachëv initiated a series of public debates. The policy was encapsulated in the slogan of glasnost. This is a difficult word to translate, broadly connoting ‘openness’, ‘a voicing’ and ‘a making public’. Gorbachëv’s choice of vocabulary was not accidental. Glasnost, for all its vagueness, does not mean freedom of information. He had no intention of relinquishing the Politburo’s capacity to decide the limits of public discussion. Moreover, his assumption was that if Soviet society were to examine its problems within a framework of guidance, a renaissance of Leninist ideals would occur. Gorbachëv was not a political liberal. At the time, however, it was not so much his reservation of communist party power as his liberating initiative that was impressive. Gorbachëv was freeing debate in the USSR to an extent that no Soviet leader had attempted, not even Khrushchëv and certainly not Lenin.
Glavlit, which censored all printed materials prior to publication, was instructed from June 1986 to relax its rules. The USSR Union of Writers held a Congress in the same month and welcomed the relaxation of rules on the press. But new novels took time to be written. Consequently the leading edge of glasnost was sharpened mainly by weekly newspapers and magazines. Chief among these were Moscow News, Ogonëk (‘Little Spark’) and Arguments and Facts. None of them had been characterized by radicalism until, in 1986, they acquired new editors – Yegor Yakovlev, Vitali Korotich and Vladislav Starkov respectively – on recommendation from Gorbachëv’s Party Secretariat. The incumbents were told to shake the press out of its torpor.1
Gorbachëv had to discover a large number of like-minded radicals able to help him refashion public opinion. Yeltsin was already doing this as Moscow Party City Committee First Secretary: from time to time he travelled, in company with a photographer, to his office by bus rather than chauffeur-driven limousine; he also sacked hundreds of corrupt or idle functionaries in the party and in local government, and his harassment of metropolitan bureaucracy was acclaimed by the ordinary residents of the capital. Another radical was Alexander Yakovlev, who served as a department chief in the Secretariat from 1985 and became a Central Committee Secretary in 1986. The problem for Gorbachëv was that such figures were rarities in the party apparatus. Most communist officials wanted only minimal reforms and were horrified at the thought of changing their methods of rule. Gorbachëv therefore turned for help to the intelligentsia. He was placing a wager on their loyalty and skills in communication in his struggle to win support from fellow party leaders and Soviet society as a whole.
His preference was for those who, like him, believed that Marxism-Leninism had been distorted since Lenin’s time. He did not have to look very far. Since the 1960s there had been several scholars, writers and administrators whose careers had been blighted by their commitment to reforming the Soviet order. While sympathizing with Roy Medvedev, few of them had joined the overt dissenters. Instead they had lived a life of dispiriting frustration under Brezhnev, trusting that basic reform could not be delayed forever.
Yegor Yakovlev and others had worked as jobbing journalists. Others had found sanctuary in research academies such as the Institute of the World Economic System under Oleg Bogomolov and the Novosibirsk Institute of Economics under Abel Aganbegyan. A few had bitten their tongues hard and continued to work as advisers to Politburo members: among these were Georgi Shakhnazarov and Alexander Bovin. By the mid-1980s this was a late middle-aged generation; most of them were persons in their fifties and sixties. They had been young adults when Khrushchëv had made his assault upon Stalin and referred to themselves as ‘Children of the Twentieth Congress’. But although they were admirers of Khrushchëv, they were by no means uncritical of him: they felt that he had failed because his reforms had been too timid. Without the zeal of such supporters, Gorbachëv’s cause would already have been lost.
They were better acquainted with developments in the rest of the world than any Soviet generation in the previous half-century. Most had travelled in tourist groups to non-communist countries, and Western scholarly literature had been available to several of them in their working capacities. They were also avid listeners to foreign radio stations and so were not entirely dependent on the Soviet mass media for their news of the day.
This was a generation awaiting its saviour; and they found him when Gorbachëv, like Superman pulling off his Clark Kent suit, revealed himself as a Child of the Twentieth Congress. Quickly he indicated that his urgent priority was to subject Soviet history to public reconsideration. Permission was given for the release of the phantasmagoric film Repentance, whose Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze satirized the Stalin years. The playwright Mikhail Shatrov’s drama Onward! Onward! Onward! portrayed the parlousness of Lenin in the face of Stalin’s machinations. Gorbachëv felt that until there was comprehension of the past, little could be done by him in the present. He saw a brilliant way to highlight his attitude: on 16 December 1986 he lifted the phone and spoke to the dissenting physicist Andrei Sakharov and invited him to return from exile in Gorki.2 One of the regime’s most uncompromising opponents was to return to liberty.
Economic measures were not forgotten by Gorbachëv and Ryzhkov. A Law on the State Enterprise was being drafted to restrict the authority of the central planning authorities. There were simultaneous deliberations on the old proposal to introduce the ‘link’ system to agriculture. A commission was also set up to draft a Law on Co-operatives. But Gorbachëv himself, while pushing Ryzhkov to hurry forward with proposals, put his greatest effort into ideological and political measures. He did this in the knowledge that substantial progress on the economic front would be impeded until he had broken the spine of opposition to his policies in the party, including the Politburo. It took months of persuasion in 1986 before Gorbachëv could cajole the Politburo into agreeing to hold a Central Committee plenum in order to strengthen the process of reform.
When the plenum began on 27 January 1987, Gorbachëv went on to the offensive and called for changes in the party’s official ideas. ‘Developed socialism’ was no longer a topic for boasting; it was not even mentioned: instead Gorbachëv described the country’s condition as ‘socialism in the process of self-development’.3 Implicitly he was suggesting that socialism had not yet been built in the USSR. Democratization was now proclaimed as a crucial objective. This meant that the Soviet Union was no longer touted as the world’s greatest democracy – and it was the General Secretary who was saying so. Gorbachëv called for the ‘blank spots’ in the central party textbooks to be filled. He denounced Stalin and the lasting effects of his policies. Despite not naming Brezhnev, Gorbachëv dismissed his rule as a period of ‘stagnation’ and declared that the leaving of cadres in post had been taken to the extremes of absurdity.4
Gorbachëv gained assent to several political proposals: the election rather than appointment of party committee secretaries; the holding of multi-candidate elections to the soviets; the assignation of non-party members to high public office. He succeeded, too, with an economic proposal when he insisted that the draft Law on the State Enterprise should enshrine the right of each factory labour-force to elect its own director. Gorbachëv aimed at industrial as well as political democratization.5 This was not a leader who thought he merely had to learn from capitalist countries. Gorbachëv still assumed he could reconstruct the Soviet compound so that his country would patent a new model of political democracy, economic efficiency and social justice.
In June 1987 he presented the detailed economic measures at the next Central Committee plenum, which adopted the draft Law on the State Enterprise. Apart from introducing the elective principle to the choice of managers, the Law gave the right to factories and mines to decide what to produce after satisfying the basic requirements of the state planning authorities. Enterprises were to be permitted to set their own wholesale prices. Central controls over wage levels were to be relaxed. The reform envisaged the establishment of five state-owned banks, which would operate without day-to-day intervention by the Central State Bank.6 As under Lenin’s NEP, moreover, there was to be allowance for a private sector in services and small-scale industry. The reintroduction of a mixed economy was projected. Although there would still be a predominance of state ownership and regulation in the economy, this was the greatest projected reform since 1921.
Gorbachëv’s argument was that the country was in a ‘pre-crisis’ condition.7 If the USSR wished to remain a great military and industrial power, he asserted, then the over-centralized methods of planning and management had to be abandoned. He persuaded the plenum that the proposed Law on the State Enterprise was the prerequisite for ‘the creation of an efficient, flexible system of managing the economy’. The plenum laid down that it should come into effect in January 1988.8
But Central Committee resolutions were one thing, their implementation quite another. Whereas communist intellectuals were attracted to the General Secretary, communist party functionaries were not. Gorbachëv’s own second secretary and ally Ligachëv was covertly trying to undermine Gorbachëv’s authority. Gorbachëv also had problems from the other side. Yeltsin in the Moscow Party City Committee was urging a faster pace of reform and a broader dimension for glasnost. Gorbachëv found it useful to play off Yeltsin and Ligachëv against each other. Of the two of them, Ligachëv was the more problematical on a regular basis; for he was in charge of ideological matters in the Secretariat and acted as a brake upon historical and political debate. But the more immediate problem was Yeltsin. His sackings of Moscow personnel left scarcely anyone in a responsible job who had held it for more than a year.
Ligachëv talked to Politburo colleagues about Yeltsin’s domineering propensities; but Gorbachëv tried to protect Yeltsin. For a while Gorbachëv succeeded. But Yeltsin made things hard for himself by stressing his desire to remove the privileges of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachëv. In his justified criticisms of the status quo, he lacked tactical finesse. Indeed he lacked all tact. He was a troubled, angry, impulsive individual. He also had no coherent programme. As an intuitive politician, he was only beginning to discover his purpose in politics, and his explorations were exhausting the patience of the General Secretary.
In October 1987 Gorbachëv accepted Yeltsin’s resignation as a candidate member of the Politburo. Yeltsin had threatened to leave on several occasions, and this time Ligachëv made sure that he was not allowed to withdraw his resignation. And so the supreme party leadership lost Yeltsin. A few days later a conference of the Moscow City Party Organization was called. Although Yeltsin was in hospital recovering from illness,9 he was pumped full of drugs and dragged along to attend: on a personal level it was one of the most disgraceful of Gorbachëv’s actions. Yeltsin acknowledged his faults, but the decision had already been taken: a succession of speakers denounced his arrogance and he was sacked as party secretary of the capital. Only at this point did Gorbachëv take him sympathetically by the arm. He also showed mercy by appointing Yeltsin as Deputy Chairman of the State Construction Committee. But both of them assumed that Yeltsin’s career at the centre of Soviet politics had ended.
Gorbachëv was more than ever the solitary fore-rider of reform. During his summer holiday in Crimea, he had edited the typescript for his book Perestroika; he began, too, to prepare a speech to celebrate the October Revolution’s seventieth anniversary. In the weeks after the Central Committee plenum a large number of journalists, novelists, film-makers, poets – and yes, at last, historians – filled the media of public communication with accounts of the terror of the Stalin era and the injurious consequences of Brezhnev’s rule. Gorbachëv sought to encourage and direct the process.
In November he published his book and delivered his speech. In both of them he denounced the regime’s ‘command-administrative system’, which he described as having emerged under Stalin and having lasted through to the mid-1980s. He hymned the people more than the party. He treated not only the October Revolution but also the February Revolution as truly popular political movements. He also expressed admiration for the mixed economy and cultural effervescence of the New Economic Policy. He praised Lenin as a humanitarian, representing him as having been a much less violent politician than had been true. Despite lauding the NEP, moreover, Gorbachëv continued to profess the benefits of agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s. For Gorbachëv still equivocated about Stalin. In particular, the industrial achievements of the First Five-Year Plan and the military triumph of the Second World War were counted unto him for virtue.10
Certainly he had set out a stall of general objectives; but he had not clarified the details of strategy, tactics and policies. And he still regarded the objectives themselves as attainable without the disbandment of the one-party, one-ideology state. As previously, he refused to consider that the party and the people might not voluntarily rally to the cause of renovating Marxism-Leninism and the entire Soviet order. Nor did he take cognizance of the role of the Soviet Union as an imperial power both within its own boundaries and across Eastern Europe. The most he would concede was that ‘mistakes’ had been made in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 – and he coyly blamed them on the ‘contemporary ruling parties’.11 No accusation was levelled at Kremlin leaders of the time. And Gorbachëv declined to reject the traditional class-based analysis of international affairs of the world as a whole.
These contradictions stemmed both from the pressures of his Politburo colleagues and from ambivalence in the mind of the General Secretary. Yet the general direction of his thought was evident. He required a yet deeper process of democratization. He declared that a new political culture and an insistence on the rule of law were required in the Soviet Union. He called for a fresh agenda for Eastern Europe. He also asserted that his country’s foreign policy throughout the world should be based on ‘common human values’.12
This was extraordinary language for a Soviet leader. Gorbachëv was diminishing the significance accorded to class-based analysis, and his emphasis on ‘common human values’ clashed with the Leninist tradition. Lenin had contended that every political culture, legal framework, foreign policy and philosophy had roots in class struggle. Leninists had traditionally been unembarrassed about advocating dictatorship, lawlessness and war. Gorbachëv hugely misconceived his idol. He was not alone: the reform communists, including well-read intellectuals, had persuaded themselves of the same interpretation to a greater or lesser extent and were transmitting their ideas to the General Secretary. Politics were being transformed on the basis of a faulty historiography. But what a transformation was involved! If it were to be accomplished, the USSR would adhere to legal, democratic procedures at home and pacific intentions abroad. Such changes were nothing short of revolutionary.
Much as he rethought his policies, however, Gorbachëv was also a disorganized thinker. His knowledge of his country’s history was patchy. His sociological understandings may have been more impressive since his wife, who was his political as well as marital partner, had written a dissertation on contemporary rural relationships;13 even so, his public statements continued to treat Soviet society as an inchoate whole and to make little allowance for the different interests of the multifarious groups in an increasingly complex society. His comprehension of economic principles was rudimentary in the extreme.
Nowhere was his complacency more baleful than in relation to the ‘national question’. Superficially he seemed to understand the sensitivities of the non-Russians: for example, he excluded favourable mention of the Russians from the 1986 Party Programme and affirmed the ‘full unity of nations’ in the USSR to be a task of ‘the remote historical future’.14 This gave reassurance to the non-Russian peoples that there would be no Russification campaign under his leadership. But no other practical changes of a positive kind followed. Gorbachëv himself was not a pure Russian; like his wife Raisa, he was born to a couple consisting of a Russian and a Ukrainian.15 But this mixed ancestry, far from keeping him alert to national tensions in the USSR, had dulled his understanding of them. He was comfortable with his dual identity as a Russian and as a Soviet citizen; and this produced casualness that gave much offence. For example, when he visited Ukraine for the first time as General Secretary in 1986, he spoke about Russia and the USSR as if they were coextensive. Ukrainian national sensitivities were outraged.
The problem was exacerbated by the fact that non-Russians had been prevented from expressing their grievances. Inter-ethnic difficulties were the hatred that dared not speak its name. Gorbachëv and other central party leaders were slow to perceive the inherent risks involved in campaigning against corruption in the republics while also granting freedom of the press and of assembly. Much resentment arose over the appointment of Russian functionaries in place of cadres drawn from the local nationalities. In addition, more scandals were exposed in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan than in Russia. The Kazakhstan party first secretary Dinmukhammed Kunaev, one of Brezhnev’s group, had been compelled to retire in December 1986; even Geidar Aliev, brought from Azerbaijan to Moscow by Andropov, was dropped from the Politburo in October 1987. Eduard Shevardnadze was the sole remaining non-Slav in its membership. The Politburo was virtually a Slavic men’s club.
An early sign of future trouble was given in Kazakhstan, where violent protests in Alma-Ata were organized against the imposition of a Russian, Gennadi Kolbin, as Kunaev’s successor. The Kazakh functionaries in the republican nomenklatura connived in the trouble on the streets; and the intelligentsia of Kazakhstan were unrestrained in condemning the horrors perpetrated upon the Kazakh people in the name of communism. The nationalist resurgence had been quieter but still more defiant in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The titular nationalities in these countries had a living memory of independence. Bilateral treaties had been signed in 1920 with the RSFSR and Stalin’s forcible incorporation of the Baltic states in the USSR in 1940 had never obtained official recognition in the West. Demonstrations had started in Latvia in June 1986. Cultural, ecological and political demands were to the fore. A victory was won by the environmental protest against the hydro-electric station proposed for Daugavpils.
Then the dissenters in Lithuania and Estonia joined in the protest movement. Not all their leaders were calling for outright independence, but the degree of autonomy demanded by them was rising. In August 1987, demonstrations were held to mark the anniversary of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty. The example of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia stimulated national movements elsewhere. Discontent intensified in Ukraine after Chernobyl and Gorbachëv was so concerned about the political destabilization that might be produced by Ukrainian cultural, religious and environmental activists that he retained Shcherbytskiy, friend of Brezhnev, as the republican party first secretary. Ukraine was held firmly under Shcherbytskiy’s control.
The USSR, furthermore, contained many inter-ethnic rivalries which did not predominantly involve Russians. Over the winter of 1987–8, disturbances occurred between Armenians and Azeris in the Armenian-inhabited area of Nagorny Karabakh in Azerbaijan. In February 1988 the two nationalities clashed in Sumgait, and dozens of Armenians were killed. Threats to the Politburo’s control existed even in places that experienced no such violence. In June 1988 the Lithuanian nationalists took a further step by forming Sajudis; other ‘popular fronts’ of this kind were formed also in Latvia and Estonia. The Belorussian Communist Party Central Committee tried to suppress the popular front in Minsk, but the founding members simply decamped to neighbouring Lithuania and held their founding congress in Vilnius.
The tranquillity in Russia and Ukraine gave grounds for official optimism since these two republics contained nearly seven tenths of the USSR’s population. Most Soviet citizens were not marching, shouting and demanding in 1988. Not only that: a considerable number of people in the Baltic, Transcaucasian and Central Asian regions did not belong to the titular nationality of each Soviet republic. Around twenty-five million Russians lived outside the RSFSR. They constituted thirty-seven per cent of the population in Kazakhstan, thirty-four per cent in Latvia and thirty per cent in Estonia.16 In all three Baltic Soviet republics so-called ‘Interfronts’ were being formed that consisted mainly of Russian inhabitants who felt menaced by the local nationalisms and who were committed to the maintenance of the Soviet Union.
Shcherbytskiy prevented Rukh, the Ukrainian popular front, from holding its founding congress until September 1989. In Russia there was no analogous front; for there was no country from which, according to Russian nationalists, Russia needed to be separated in order to protect her interests. There was, however, much nationalist talk. An organization called Pamyat, which had been created with the professed aim of preserving Russian traditional culture, exhibited anti-Semitic tendencies; unlike the popular fronts in the non-Russian republics, it had no commitment to democracy. But Gorbachëv reasonably judged that the situation was containable. What he underestimated was the possibility that Ligachëv and his associates, too, might play the linked cards of Soviet state pride and of Russian nationalism. Ligachëv was affronted by the relentless public criticism of the Stalin years, and he was looking for an opportunity to reassert official pride in the Russian nation’s role during the First Five-Year Plan and the Second World War. Many other party leaders felt sympathy with him.
Ligachëv bided his time until March 1988, when Gorbachëv was about to leave for a trip to Yugoslavia. A letter had reached the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya from an obscure Leningrad communist named Nina Andreeva, who demanded the rehabilitation of Stalin’s reputation and implied that the country’s woes after the October Revolution had been chiefly the fault of the Jewish element in the party leadership’s composition. Despite this anti-Semitism, Ligachëv facilitated the letter’s publication and organized a meeting of newspaper editors to impress on them that the season of free-fire shooting at communism past and present was at an end.
Gorbachëv conducted an enquiry on his return; but Ligachëv lied about his actions, and Gorbachëv accepted him at his word and resumed his own policy of glasnost.17 Yet he also took precautions against any repetition of the event. Most importantly, he enhanced the position of Alexander Yakovlev, who had been a Politburo member since mid-1987 and became the radical-reformer counter-weight to Ligachëv in the central party apparatus after Yeltsin’s departure. Yakovlev supervised the publication of material about abuses under Brezhnev as well as under Stalin. A number of articles also appeared about Bukharin, who was depicted as the politician who had deserved to succeed Lenin.18 The image of Bukharin as harmless dreamer was at variance with historical reality; but Gorbachëv believed in it – and, for both pragmatic and psychological purposes, he needed positive stories about Soviet communism to balance the exposés of the terroristic practices of the 1930s.
The problem for him was that the new journalism excited the reading public without managing to enlist its active political participation. The reformist magazines were inadvertently bringing all existing Soviet politicians, with the notable exception of Gorbachëv, into disrepute. If only the first decade of the USSR’s history was officially deemed to have been beneficial, how could the Politburo justify its continuing rule?
Gorbachëv had hoped to avoid such a reaction by pensioning off those older politicians who had been prominent under Brezhnev. In his first year in power he had imposed new first secretaries on twenty-four out of seventy-two of the RSFSR’s provincial party committees. Between April 1986 and March 1988 a further nineteen such appointments were made. Hardly any of these appointees came from Stavropol.19 Gorbachëv wanted to break with the Soviet custom whereby a political patron favoured his career-long clients. Most of the appointees had recently been working under his gaze in Moscow and appeared to have the necessary talent. The snag was that the new incumbents of office made little effort to alter local practices and attitudes. On arrival in their localities, Gorbachëv’s newcomers typically went native. The fact that they were younger and better educated than their predecessors made no difference to their behaviour.
In another way Gorbachëv himself was acting traditionally. Since January 1987 it was official policy that local party organizations should elect their own secretaries; and yet Gorbachëv persisted in making his own appointments through the central party apparatus.
So why was he infringing his own policy for internal party reform? The answer highlights the scale of the obstacles in his path. He knew that party committees throughout the USSR were blocking the introduction of multi-candidate elections. Only one in every eleven secretaryships at all the various local levels was filled by such competition in 1987–8. Worse still, merely one per cent of province-level secretaries obtained posts in this fashion. And the fresh air ventilating public discussions in Moscow seldom reached the ‘localities’: the provincial press clamped down on the opportunities of glasnost. It is therefore unsurprising that Gorbachëv did not relinquish his powers of appointment in favour of elections. If he had left the local party committees to themselves, he would never have achieved the political and economic goals he had set for the communist party.
Nor could Gorbachëv lightly overlook the danger posed by Ligachëv and other leaders who opposed further radicalization of reforms. The January 1987 Central Committee plenum had taken the decision to convoke a Party Conference. Gorbachëv hoped that such a Conference, scheduled to meet in mid-1988, would change the composition of the Central Committee. For the Central Committee elected in 1986 still consisted mainly of functionaries appointed in the Brezhnev years. The ‘nests’ had selected anti-perestroika delegates to the Conference; and indeed, while Gorbachëv was meeting President Reagan in Vladivostok, the communist party rank-and-file in the same city rebelled against their corrupt provincial party secretary. Gorbachëv spoke up for the rebels. He also signed letters of reference for prominent Moscow-based supporters of his policies such as the historian Yuri Afanasev.
He also made a further advance with economic reform. The Law on the State Enterprise had come into effect in January 1988; and in May the Law on Co-operatives had been passed whereby co-op members could set their own prices and make their own deals both in the USSR and abroad. Certainly the fiscal disincentives were strong, and the local soviets were entitled to deny official registration to the co-ops. Yet the Law’s significance was undeniable. For the first time in six decades it was permitted to set up urban manufacturing and service-sector enterprises that were not owned by the state.
Gorbachëv confidently opened the Nineteenth Party Conference on 28 June 1988 even though he had only half-succeeded in getting his supporters elected as delegates. His theses called for a strict functional separation between the party and the soviets. At the Conference he defined this more closely. He wanted to disband the economic departments in the Central Committee Secretariat and to reduce the size of the party apparatus in Moscow. At the same time the Supreme Soviet, which had had only an honorific role, was to become a kind of parliament with over 400 members who would be in session most of the year and be chosen from a Congress of People’s Deputies consisting of 2,250 persons. As a sop to the Party Conference, Gorbachëv proposed that while two thirds of the deputies should be elected through universal suffrage, one third should be provided by ‘public organizations’ including the communist party.20
His assault on the party’s prerogatives was relentless. Among his most startling suggestions was that local party first secretaries should automatically submit themselves for election to the parallel soviet chairmanship. He gave the impression that he expected such secretaries to retain their personal power. Yet privately he hoped that the electorate would use their votes to get rid of his opponents in the party.
Gorbachëv’s audience consisted of delegations led by precisely the sort of communist party officials he wished to eliminate. The implications of his proposal were understood and resented by them; and whereas Ligachëv received a rapturous reception from the Conference, Gorbachëv was applauded only at the few points where he made comments of a conservative content. And then something unexpected occurred which enraged his critics still further: back from political oblivion came Boris Yeltsin. Uncertain that he would be allowed to address the Conference, he came down to the foot of the platform waving his party card. Gorbachëv made a gesture to him to take a seat in the front row of the hall until there was an opportunity for him to speak; and on this occasion Yeltsin chose his words with care, endorsing practically all Gorbachëv’s proposals and humbly asking to be rehabilitated as a leader.
Critics were angry that Yeltsin should be picking up the pieces of his political career. After a pause in the Conference proceedings, Ligachëv led the counter-attack.21 Yeltsin’s record was torn to shreds. Even his career as a provincial party secretary in Sverdlovsk was mocked. Summing up the case for the prosecution, Ligachëv asserted: ‘You, Boris, are not right!’ The Conference took Ligachëv’s side and Yeltsin was refused his request to be re-admitted to the supreme party leadership.
Gorbachëv had already dropped his plan to change the Central Committee’s composition at the Conference; but he would make no further concessions to Ligachëv and insisted that the Conference should ratify his draft theses. And he had a final trick up his sleeve. Or rather he had it in his pocket. At the end of the Conference he pulled out a scrap of paper on which was scribbled his schedule for implementing the constitutional amendments. Without this, the central and local party apparatuses would have engaged in endless procrastination. Gorbachëv wanted the amendments to be in place by autumn 1988 and a general election to be held in spring 1989, followed by republican and local elections in the autumn. The internal reorganization of the party was set to occur by the end of 1988. Gorbachëv resumed his masterful tone: ‘That’s how the draft resolution comes out. It seems to me simply vitally necessary to accept this resolution, comrades.’22 The delegates gave their approval before being given a chance to think about the consequences. Change was coming, and coming fast.
The Conference decisions embodied an important reorientation of Gorbachëv’s strategy. The party was being dropped as the vanguard of perestroika. Instead Gorbachëv wished to rule through a Congress of People’s Deputies elected by the people. The size and functions of the central party apparatus were sharply diminished at a Central Committee plenum held in September 1988. The same plenum left Vadim Medvedev instead of Ligachëv in charge of ideology and gave Yakovlev a supervisory role on the party’s behalf in international affairs. Gromyko was pushed into retirement in October and replaced as Chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet by Gorbachëv himself (who refrained from redesignating the office as President until March 1990). The Soviet Union remained a one-party state; but the party as such had abruptly lost much of its power.
The Politburo was preoccupied by this domestic transformation. Not even Ligachëv – nor even, come to mention it, Yeltsin – badgered Gorbachëv about developments in Eastern Europe. The common feeling of Soviet political leaders was that the USSR’s affairs should have priority of attention. Gorbachëv had set down the general line. On coming to power, he had advised the various leaderships of Warsaw Pact countries that the USSR would no longer interfere in their affairs.23 But beyond this his comments on Eastern Europe were of a general nature. In 1985 he was still not averse to praising the anti-reform economic policies of the German Democratic Republic. Thereafter he spoke more fervently in favour of reforms in Eastern Europe. But his working assumption was that the communist leaderships of each country in the region had to find their own most suitable mode of political and economic transformation. He studiously avoided instructing the Warsaw Pact countries to follow the specific model of the USSR.
Gorbachëv held to his belief that the Soviet-style compound, once reconstituted, would flourish in Eastern Europe. He showed his priorities by his choice of places to visit and politicians to meet. In November 1985 he travelled to meet President Reagan in Geneva and in October 1986 they met again in Reykjavik. Not until April 1987 did Gorbachëv visit East Berlin and Prague. And in March 1988 he took a trip to Belgrade. In each of these East European capitals he was fêted by crowds. It was obvious to him and his entourage that people were using his public appearances as an opportunity to manifest their resentment of their own communist regimes.
Nevertheless Gorbachëv, Shevardnadze and Yakovlev continued to shape policy towards Eastern Europe without offering direct criticism of their counterparts in these countries. They even avoided leaning very hard on the parties and governments to replace their leaders. When the Bulgarian communist reformer Petar Mladenov approached Gorbachëv for advice as to how to replace the ageing hierarch Todor Zhivkov, Gorbachëv cut short the conversation.24 Gorbachëv would have preferred Mladenov to Zhivkov as Bulgaria’s leader; but the Soviet General Secretary wanted to avoid being seen to intervene. Thus he confirmed that what he had said confidentially to Warsaw Pact leaders in March 1985 had been intended seriously: non-interference was a reality. Even as late as his Prague trip, in April 1987, Gorbachëv fastidiously stated: ‘We are far from intending to call on anyone to imitate us.’25 So glasnost and perestroika were not commodities for obligatory export. But what, then, was meant to happen in Eastern Europe?
Zhivkov and his fellow veterans in the region asked the same question. They hated Gorbachëv’s perestroika. Erich Honecker in the German Democratic Republic and Gustáv Husák in Czechoslovakia, who was nationally hated for doing the USSR’s dirty business for years, felt betrayed. Even János Kádár in Hungary was troubled by the prospect of the introduction of political and cultural freedoms on the current Soviet paradigm. Yet Gorbachëv still desisted from openly attacking them. He contented himself with destabilizing the political compounds and standing back to observe the consequences. This was like a trainee chemist running amok in a laboratory. He was dealing with ingredients which, once tampered with, became volatile and unpredictable. If there remained doubts that Gorbachëv would go further than Khrushchëv in reforming foreign policy, a glance at the disintegrating communist order in Eastern Europe dispelled them.
It is mysterious how Gorbachëv persuaded himself that his version of ‘communism’ would emerge in a strengthened condition. The main explanation seems to be that he and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze simply overestimated the inherent attractiveness of their ideas. Probably, too, they were distracted by the cardinal significance they attached to relations with the USA. Negotiations with President Reagan took precedence over all other aspects of foreign policy. As the hidden dimensions of the USSR’s domestic problems became apparent to Gorbachëv, so did his need for a drastic reduction in Soviet military expenditure. In practical terms this could be achieved only if both superpowers agreed to an end to the ‘arms race’ between them.
In October 1986 a summit meeting was held in Reykjavik, where Gorbachëv won over Reagan to a proposal for all nuclear weapons to be destroyed within ten years. But at the last moment Reagan’s aides, who wished to bargain from a position of military superiority, dissuaded him from signing the preliminary agreement. The two men parted, unable to look one another in the face. Yet Reagan continued to wish Gorbachëv well. The denunciations of Stalin and Brezhnev; Sakharov’s release from exile; the lightening grip on Eastern Europe: all these things counted in Gorbachëv’s favour among Western governments. So that the amicable relations between the USA and the USSR survived the débâcle in Reykjavik. By December 1987 Gorbachëv and Reagan were able to co-sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington whereby all ground-based intermediate nuclear weapons would be destroyed. The Cold War was gradually being ended; it was not yet a full peace, but it was no mere truce either.
In April 1988 the USSR announced its intention to make a swift, complete withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan. Constantly Gorbachëv emphasized his commitment to ‘new thinking’ in international relations. Despite the primacy of the USSR-USA relationship, moreover, he wanted also to remove tensions from the Soviet Union’s relations with other regions. Feelers were put out to the People’s Republic of China. In an overture to Western Europe he spoke of ‘the common European home’. On a visit to Vladivostok he spoke of the Pacific as ‘our common home’ and asked for friendlier links with Japan. If he had gone to the North Pole, he would no doubt have charmed the polar bears with his commitment to ‘the common Arctic home’.
On 7 December 1988 Gorbachëv laid out the parameters of his foreign policy in a speech to the United Nations Assembly in New York. Marxist-Leninist concepts were tacitly rejected.26 The need for global peace, Gorbachëv asserted, transcended support for class struggle. The world had become an ‘interdependent’ place. ‘Common human values’ had to triumph. Unlike his book Perestroika, the speech scarcely mentioned Lenin. In order to authenticate his commitment to peace and reconciliation, Gorbachëv announced a unilateral cut in the size of the Soviet Army by a tenth; he also promised the recall of six divisions from Eastern Europe. Mikhail Gorbachëv mounted to a peak of popularity abroad. Every agreement between Washington and Moscow had made global international relations safer and more controllable. If he had died in New York, he would already have secured a reputation as one of the great figures of the twentieth century.
In the USSR, too, he had effected what had once been a virtually inconceivable metamorphosis of politics and culture. Citizen talked unto citizen. Dangerous opinions could be shared outside the narrow boundaries of the family or group of friends. Soviet public life had been uplifted. Hidden issues had been dragged into the open air. Institutional complacency had been disturbed. Personnel had been re-appointed, policies redesigned. The entire structure of state had been shaken, and Gorbachëv let it be known that more walls had to be brought down before he could properly rebuild as he wished.
While battering the system in 1986–8, he hoped to change the Soviet order and secure popular approval and political legitimacy throughout society. He still aimed, in his confused fashion of thought, to preserve the Soviet Union and the one-party state. Lenin and the October Revolution were meant to remain publicly hallowed. But he failed to understand that his actions were strengthening the very phenomena which he was trying to eliminate. Glasnost and perestroika were undermining the political and economic foundations of the Soviet order. Localism, nationalism, corruption, illegal private profiteering and distrust of official authority: all these phenomena, which had grown unchecked under the rule of Brezhnev, had been reinforced by the dismantlement of central controls undertaken by Gorbachëv. He was Russia’s ‘holy fool’, and like the ‘holy fool’ he did not know it.