By late 1988 the optimism of even Gorbachëv had been dented. As a full member of the Politburo since 1980 he had been privy to many statistics denied to the general public. But not even the Politburo had been given reliable information. Reports were automatically pruned of anything very discouraging, and anyway every local branch of administration misled the centre about the real situation.1
There had been a constant official prescription that crises were the exclusive characteristic of capitalism and that they could not occur under ‘developed socialism’. In reality practically every index of economic performance was depressing. The technological gap between the USSR and industrially-advanced capitalist countries was widening in every sector except the development of armaments: the Soviet Union had been left far behind in both information technology and biotechnology. The state budget in the last years of Brezhnev would have been massively insolvent if the government had not been able to derive revenues from domestic sales of vodka. The Ministry of Finance depended heavily on popular consumption of alcohol. It relied to an even greater extent on the export of petrochemical fuels at high prices. Oil and gas constituted eighteen per cent of exports in 1972 and fifty-four per cent by 1984.2
The USSR resembled a Third World ex-colony in these and other respects. Agriculture remained so inefficient that two fifths of hard-currency expenditure on imports were for food.3 By the early 1980s, revenues earned by exports to the West could no longer be used mainly to buy advanced industrial technology and equipment: two fifths of the USSR’s hard-currency purchases abroad were of animal feed; and the purchase of energy by the countries of Eastern Europe at lower than the world-market prices deprived the USSR of the full value of its trade. Its very industrial achievements had occurred at grievous ecological expense. Large areas became unfit for human habitation. The Caspian Sea, Lake Baikal and the river Volga had been poisoned and the air in major cities such as Chelyabinsk was dangerous to breathe.
Yet while fighting the cause of economic reforms, Gorbachëv had made many mistakes. First the anti-alcohol campaign and then the excessive investment in the machine-tool industry in 1985–6 had depleted state revenues without producing long-term gains in output. Nor was this the end of his mismanagement. The openness of the debate conducted by the authorities in 1987–8 on the need to raise retail prices had the undesired effect of inducing consumers into buying up and hoarding all manner of goods. Shortages in the shops were increasing. And the Law on the State Enterprise, by empowering workers to elect their own managers, led to a steep rise in wages. Payments to urban work-forces increased by nine per cent in 1988 and thirteen per cent in 1989.4 The Soviet budget was massively in deficit. Foreign indebtment and domestic inflation increased sharply; a decline in industrial output set in. The USSR was entering a state of economic emergency.
Gorbachëv’s choice of collaborators, too, was far from ideal. Ryzhkov, his Chairman of the Council of Ministers, was a reformer, but a reformer who wanted ‘to go to the market’ at a snail’s pace. And whereas Ryzhkov at least believed in a further movement to reform, Ligachëv did not. Gorbachëv erred, when demoting Ligachëv in the party leadership in September 1988, in putting him in charge of agriculture. This was like trusting the fox to guard the hen-house. Under Ligachëv’s guidance not even the size of the private plots was increased.
Even if Gorbachëv had avoided such errors, however, he would also have needed a much better run of luck than he received. On 8 December 1988, a day after he had made his triumphant address to the United Nations Assembly, the cities of Leninakan and Spitak in Armenia were devastated by an earthquake. More than 25,000 people died. Ryzhkov phoned to New York to relay the news to Gorbachëv. Projected diplomatic negotiations were abandoned. Gorbachëv left the USA for Moscow next day and straightway hurried to Armenia. He and his wife talked to ordinary Armenians near the rubble of their former homes. The Gorbachëvs shed tears over the plight of the population. But they were totally unprepared for one thing: the fact that Armenians to a man and woman were agitated more about the politics of Karabakh than about the effects of the earthquake.5
Radical economic reform was therefore being attempted in a very unpropitious situation. The war in Afghanistan continued to involve massive expenditure until the last Soviet soldier returned home in February 1989. The Chernobyl nuclear explosion was a financial as well as a human and ecological disaster. Now the USSR’s resources, already stretched to breaking point, had to cope with the task of recovery from the Armenian earthquake. Gorbachëv could have been forgiven for cursing his misfortune.
It must be mentioned that there had been a rise in the USSR’s net material product by eleven per cent in the half-decade after 1983; but this had been obtained primarily through the tightening of labour discipline and the sacking of incompetent, corrupt officials. Such a strategy had been initiated by Andropov and resumed by Gorbachëv. It had a distinctly limited potential for the permanent enhancement of economic performance; and certainly it was unsustainable once the decentralizing decrees of 1987–8 started to have an impact. Between 1988 and 1990 net material product tumbled by nine per cent. The per capita consumption of factory-produced goods rose annually by less than 2.5 per cent in the five years after 1985. For food, the increase was 1.4 per cent; and – admittedly, mainly because of the anti-alcohol campaign – there was a decrease by 1.2 per cent for beverages and tobacco. Urban housing space per person rose merely by twelve per cent to a pitiful 13.1 square metres in the 1980s.6
The reorientation of the industrial sector towards the needs of civilian consumers was an unattained goal. Gorbachëv had promised much material improvement, but delivered deterioration. Instead of an advance to universal material well-being there was a reversion to food-rationing. Soviet queues, already legendary for their length, became longer and angrier in the course of 1989.
A rationing system had existed for food products in certain provincial cities even before 1985: it was one of Ligachëv’s taunts at Yeltsin that, during his tenure of the local party secretaryship, he had issued the inhabitants of Sverdlovsk with ration-cards to do their shopping. Steadily the system was geographically extended. Already at the end of 1988, meat was rationed in twenty-six out of fifty-five regions of the RSFSR. Sugar was even scarcer: only two regions managed to get by without rationing.7 At the same time the hospitals were reporting shortages of medicines and there was no end in sight to inadequate provision of housing and everyday services. It is true that the annual growth in the output of agriculture rose from one per cent in the first half of the decade to just under two per cent in the second.8 But production remained inadequate for the needs of consumers. Throughout the 1980s, agricultural imports constituted a fifth of the population’s calorific intake.
To the stupefaction of the Politburo (and nearly all commentators in the USSR and the West), a full-scale economic crisis had occurred. Its abruptness was as impressive as its depth. Suddenly Gorbachëv was faced with two life-or-death alternatives: either to abandon the reforms or to make them yet more radical. He never gave serious consideration to the former; his experience in his Stavropol days and subsequently had proved to him that Brezhnev’s policies would lead only to a widening of the gap in technology and organization between the USSR and the capitalist West.
Boldness therefore seemed to him the only realistic choice. When the Law on the State Enterprise and other measures failed to produce the desired results, Gorbachëv talked about the need to go further and create a ‘socialist market economy’ – and while he refrained from defining the term, several of his advisers suggested that it should involve more market than socialism. Perhaps Gorbachëv was at his most relaxed when speaking about agriculture. Already in 1986, for instance, he had authoritatively proposed that each sovkhoz and kolkhoz should be run on the basis of ‘family contracts’.9 By this he meant that a family or household would take over a particular function on the farm and be rewarded for any increase in productivity. As his critics noted, this would involve a reversion to peasant forms of farming; but Gorbachëv faced them down by openly advocating the need to turn the peasant into ‘master of the land’.10
But this change in ideas was not yet realized in policy, far less in practice. Basic positive changes in agriculture did not occur, and the situation in industry and commerce was no more inspiring. On the contrary, officials in every republic, region and province implemented only such aspects of legislation as did not damage their immediate interests. Initially their inclination was to show outward enthusiasm for Gorbachëv while disobeying his instructions. But in some localities the attitude was sterner and officials engaged in blatant sabotage. For example, the Leningrad city administration gave orders to withdraw sausages from the fridges in its warehouses and bury them in a specially-dug trench on the city’s outskirts. These were the politics of criminal provocation. Life without beef and chicken was bad enough for ordinary citizens; without sausages it became intolerable, and Gorbachëv got the blame.
Even so, the central party and governmental bodies remained powerful enough to secure the establishment of a rising number of small private-sector co-operatives in most major cities. The trouble was that these new enterprises were distrusted by the rest of society, especially by people on low fixed incomes: the pensioners, the war invalids, the poorly-paid unskilled workers. The co-ops had a reputation as scams for speculation, and certainly they did little to expand manufacturing output. This was not exclusively their fault since the local political authorities usually withheld licences for private industrial enterprises. Co-ops operated mainly in the economy’s service and retail sectors and flourished in the form of private restaurants and clothes-kiosks which bought up goods in supply and put a large mark-up on them.
The consequence was that these same goods were not being sold in state-owned enterprises. The co-ops aggravated the shortages in the shops and raised the cost of living. They also added to the problems of law-breaking since their owners had to bribe local government officials in order to be allowed to trade; and often it was impossible for them to obtain raw materials and equipment except by colluding with venal factory directors. The Kremlin reformers called ineffectually for honesty. But the reality was that they would have found it even more difficult to install co-ops if the members of local administrative élites had not benefited materially from them. Illegality had to be accepted as companion to the re-emergence of private economic activity.
By the approach of winter 1989–90, all this brought notoriety to the Politburo’s reforms. Milk, tea, coffee, soap and meat had vanished from state retail outlets even in Moscow. The dairy-product shops were hit particularly badly. They often had to function for days at a time without anything to sell: cartons of milk had ceased to reach them, and the staff had nothing to do but explain to an ill-tempered public that they had nothing to sell.
Not all citizens were willing to tolerate their plight. A great strike was organized by coal-miners in Kemerovo in the Kuz Basin and their example was followed by the work-force of the mines in the Don Basin – and the miners in Karaganda in Kazakhstan also struck in the first half of 1989. A further strike occurred in November in the mines around Norilsk in the Siberian far north.11 All these strikes were settled in favour of the strikers, who demanded higher wages and improved living conditions; and in contrast with Soviet political practice since the Civil War no repressive sanctions were applied against the strike leaders.12 Independently-elected strike committees were in operation. The Council of Ministers under Ryzhkov did little else in these months but try to effect a reconciliation with those segments of the working class which threatened to do it damage. The government feared that a Soviet equivalent of Poland’s Solidarity was in the making.13
But the Soviet authorities weathered the storm. The strikers lived in far-flung areas, and Ryzhkov and his fellow ministers managed to isolate them from the rest of society by quickly offering them higher wages. Yet the government was faced by a society embittered against it. Elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies had duly occurred in March 1989, and the result administered the greatest electoral shock to the communists since the Constituent Assembly polls in 1917–18. Across the country thirty-eight province-level party secretaries were defeated.14 So, too, were city secretaries in the republican capitals in Kiev, Minsk and Alma-Ata. Even Yuri Soloviev, Politburo candidate member and Leningrad communist party boss, was rejected by voters. Unlike Lenin, Gorbachëv did not overturn the elections. To those of his party comrades who had incurred the people’s disapproval he signalled that they should step down from their posts in the party and other institutions.
None the less the Congress was not without its problems for Gorbachëv. Eighty-eight per cent of the delegates were full or candidate members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and most of these disliked proposals for further reforms.15 Yuri Afanasev, who was committed to just such reforms, denounced the Congress as a ‘Stalinist-Brezhnevite’ body with ‘an aggressively obedient majority’.16 Gorbachëv thought him ungrateful and irresponsible; for Afanasev had needed his protection to consolidate himself in public life.
Gorbachëv also felt betrayed by criticisms he suffered in the non-Russian republics. In November 1988 the Estonian Supreme Soviet declared its right to veto laws passed in Moscow; in January 1989 Lithuanian nationalists held a demonstration against the continued location of Soviet Army garrisons in Lithuania. The official authorities in these countries decided to drop Russian as the state language. Latvia was not far behind: in the course of the elections there was a protest rally in Riga against the Latvian Communist Party Central Committee’s repudiation of ‘anti-Soviet and separatist’ trends of thought in Latvia. The mood of the majority nationalities in the Baltic republics was shared in the Transcaucasus, but with fatal consequences. A demonstration in favour of national independence was held in the Georgian capital Tbilisi in April 1989. Gorbachëv returned from abroad in the course of the crisis, but his efforts to prevent bloodshed were frustrated by Georgian communist leaders and Soviet Army commanders. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed.17
There was further trouble in the republics before the Congress of People’s Deputies convened. The Soviet Army was dispatched to Uzbekistan, Estonia and Latvia in reaction to the possibility of protests on the Georgian model. The Soviet ‘empire’ was going to be maintained by force. Such actions were not guided primarily by Russian nationalism: the Politburo would have done the same in Leningrad or Saratov or Kursk. But this is not the way it appeared to the republican protesters. In June, Estonia proclaimed its economic autonomy and Lithuania declared its right to overrule the USSR’s legislation. Even quiet Moldavia had a popular front that rejected the area’s annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940.
So that the Congress, whose first session lasted from 25 May to 9 June, reflected the political divisiveness in the country. What once had been said privately in living-rooms was given full-throated public utterance. The proceedings were transmitted live on television and work stopped in factories and offices when sensitive issues were debated. Every citizen wanted to enjoy the spectacle. Most deputies were neither radicals nor out-and-out conservatives (in the sense of Soviet politicians wishing to avoid radical reforms). It was the middle-ranking politicians, administrators, managers and scholars who occupied a majority of the Congress seats. Such people were willing, on the whole, to support the General Secretary; but they would no longer offer automatic obedience. Shrugging off the tight discipline of previous years, they spoke passionately about the policies that bothered them. Gorbachëv had to deploy much charm, guile and patience to hold them on his side in the elaboration of reforms.
He got his way. The specific form of this vast Congress had been of Gorbachëv’s own making: it appealed to his sense of Russian traditions, notably the mass political gatherings of Lenin’s time. He was looking back to the October Revolution with rose-tinted glasses; in particular, he did not perceive that the soviets in 1917–18 had been a forum for endless, chaotic disputes as workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals discussed the issues of the day.
The turbulence of the Congress of People’s Deputies surprised him. But once created, the Congress had to be made to function. Having arranged that he should be elected Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Gorbachëv chaired most sessions of the Congress; for he rightly judged that only he had the personal authority and mental agility to prevent debates from running out of control. The fact that a Congress of People’s Deputies had been elected at all was a massive achievement even though the elections were marred by gerrymandering by central and local political élites. But this was not an end in itself. Gorbachëv needed to use the Congress as an institution for the ratification of his strategy for political and economic reform; he had to pre-empt its becoming simply a verbal battleground between conservatives and radicals.
Yeltsin again caused trouble. Standing as a candidate in Moscow, he had run a brilliant campaign against the sleazy lifestyle of the nomenklatura and had won nine tenths of the city’s vote. But this victory did not endear him to the Congress; and when it came to the Congress’s internal elections to the 542 seats of the new USSR Supreme Soviet, a majority rejected him. He obtained a seat only when an elected member of the Supreme Soviet voluntarily yielded his own seat to him. Gorbachëv went along with this improvised compromise; he wanted to show that his own slogan of democratization was sincere: Yeltsin had to be seen to be treated decently.
Yeltsin and the Congress radicals showed Gorbachëv no gratitude; they were determined to use the Congress as a means of constituting a formal opposition to the communist regime despite the fact that most of them were still communist party members. Around 300 of them gathered together in an Inter-Regional Group led by Yeltsin, Sakharov, Afanasev and the economist Gavril Popov. It included liberals, social-democrats, greens and even some communists; its unifying purpose was to push Gorbachëv into making further moves against his conservative central and local party comrades. But the Inter-Regional Group itself could not throw off all caution. Its members were outnumbered by the conservative-communist rump at the Congress; and if they had seriously tried to undermine Gorbachëv’s dominance, the only result would have been to destabilize his control over the communist party and to wreck the cause of reform.
The Inter-Regional Group also faced problems outside the Congress. Active popular opposition to communist conservatism was strongest in the non-Russian Soviet republics. It is true that political associations had been formed in Moscow and other Russian cities since 1987. These associations were known as the ‘informals’ (neformaly) since the USSR Constitution gave formal public recognition solely to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Some ‘informals’ had local and ecological interests; others were motivated primarily by particular credos: patriotism, anti-Stalinism, democracy, civil rights and socialism. In 1988 there were attempts to co-ordinate such activities and a ‘Klub Perestroika’ was created. Another such oppositionist organization was the Democratic Union. But neither the Club nor the Union had many branches in other cities of the RSFSR.18 Rivalries of ideology, region, class and personality inhibited the birth of a unified Russian radical movement.
This was a disadvantage not only for the Inter-Regional Group but also for Gorbachëv. The various reformers in Russia were unable to stimulate much popular participation in their projects, and the neformaly had only a few thousand members. In such a situation it would not be impossible for Ligachëv, were he ever to oust Gorbachëv from the communist party leadership, to close down the Congress of People’s Deputies and re-establish the traditional structures of the communist regime.
Not that Russians were untouched by the excitement of the times. A religious and cultural renaissance had begun. The millenium of the Russian Orthodox Church was celebrated in 1988 and Gorbachëv met Patriarch Pimen and transferred several churches and monasteries out of state control. The Church hierarchy had not covered itself in glory in earlier years and had regularly been castigated by the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well as by parish priests such as Dmitri Dudko and Gleb Yakunin for its failure to stand up to the Politburo. But this sorry history started to be forgotten, and cathedrals and churches were packed out with the believing few and the inquisitive many. Old ladies could safely stand by the kerb with ecclesiastical collecting boxes; clerics began to be invited on to TV and radio discussion programmes. Christian philosophical literature was produced in abundance. The Bible was put on open sale.
Not all developments were so high minded. Salacious booklets such as The Lovers of Catherine II were sold from stalls at Moscow metro stations; and publishing houses increasingly preferred to invest in Agatha Christie and John Le Carré than in the Russian literary classics. Russia was also acquiring a paperback trade in works on astrology, pet-rearing, horticulture, crossword puzzles and tarot cards. Pop music was broadcast on TV stations, and Paul McCartney recorded a special album for the Soviet market. Meanwhile Russian rock stars showed greater willingness to comment on issues of the day than their Western models. Youth did not revolt against authority; it despised and ignored it. Indeed citizens, both young and old, treated politics as a spectator sport but not a process deserving their participation. The quest for private pleasure outdid the zeal for public service.
This dispiriting situation was readily explicable. People were exhausted by queues, food shortages and administrative chaos. Life was getting more arduous day by day. Despite this, Gorbachëv was still the country’s most popular politician (and it was not until mid-1990 that Yeltsin overtook him in this respect).19 Yet politicians generally were not respected. Gorbachëv inadvertently added to the effect by his tactics: he held no trials of oppressive rulers of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; even the torturers, false delators and political killers of the 1930s and 1940s escaped with only verbal criticism. The pensions and honours of the victimizers remained untouched, and Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich lived out their old age without interference: Molotov even had his party membership restored to him. The result was that while the mass media blared out their critique of past abuses in general terms, little was changed in the lives of the surviving victims. Historical unfairness remained in place. The practical and mental catharsis of Soviet society had been only half accomplished.
No wonder that most people remained quietly cynical. They had their own quiet, private aspirations. After years of being bored by stuffy Marxism-Leninism, their ideal of Freedom was not the freedom to join a political party and attend open meetings on city squares. They wanted to stay at home and enjoy the freedom to be frivolous, apolitical, unmobilized.
Such a desire was especially prevalent in Russia; but things stood somewhat differently in the other Soviet republics. Middle-aged citizens in the Baltic region could remember a time when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been independent states. This was the case only for the very elderly in the Transcaucasus. Nevertheless there was trouble in store for the Kremlin in all republics. Each of them had been territorially demarcated according to ethnic demography; each of them had enhanced its sense of individuality by emphasizing the importance of the local national language and culture. The Leninist mode of organizing a state of many nations was at last displaying its basic practical weakness. Everywhere nationalist dissent was on the rise. Its leaders were succeeding in convincing their local electorates that the problems of their respective nation were insoluble unless accompanied by economic and administrative reforms.
Few Russians felt similarly uncomfortable to be living in the USSR; and, to a greater extent than non-Russians, they tended to worry lest a further reform of the economy might deprive them of such state-provided welfare as was currently available. Moreover, ethnic Russians were numerically predominant throughout the traditional institutions of the Soviet state. In party, government and armed forces they held most of the key positions. In the newer institutions, by contrasts, they were beginning to lose out. Only forty-six per cent of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, and indeed only a third of the members of the Politburo itself when it underwent reform in 1990, were ethnic Russians.20
A further peculiarity of Russians, in comparison with the other nations of the Soviet Union, was the highly contradictory mélange of ideas that came from their cultural figures. Gorbachëv’s supporters no longer went unchallenged in their propagation of reformist communism. Several artistic and political works also appeared which attacked communism of whatever type. For example, Vasili Grossmann’s novel on the Soviet past, Forever Flowing, was serialized in a literary journal. So, too, was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s history of the labour-camp system, The Gulag Archipelago. Both works assailed Lenin and Stalin with equal intensity. A film was made of the labour camp on the White Sea island of Solovki, which was filled with political prisoners from the 1920s. A sensation was caused, too, by Vladimir Soloukhin’s Reading Lenin. By analysing volume thirty-eight of the fifth edition of Lenin’s collected works, Soloukhin showed Lenin to have been a state terrorist from the first year of Soviet government.
An attempt was made by officially-approved professional historians to repulse the assault on Leninism. But most of such historians before 1985 had put political subservience before service to historical truth. Even those among them who had experienced official disfavour under Brezhnev obtained little popularity with the reading public. Communism in general was falling into ever greater disrepute, and the official fanfares for Lenin, Bukharin and the New Economic Policy were treated as fantasias on a tired theme.
Gorbachëv’s measures of political democratization inevitably added to his difficulties. The Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet had the right to supervise and veto the activities of government – and he encouraged them to use the right. High politics came under open critical scrutiny. The Tbilisi massacre was the first subject of several exhaustive investigations. Hardly a day passed without ministers and other high-ranking state officials, including even Ryzhkov, being harangued when they spoke to the Congress; and, to their chagrin, Gorbachëv did little to protect them. The result was less happy than he assumed. Unified central executive authority was steadily weakened and traditional structures were dismantled without the creation of robust substitutes. Policies were sanctioned with no bodies ready and able to impose them.21
Furthermore, the reorganizations were unaccompanied by a clear demarcation of powers. By 1989 Gorbachëv was talking a lot about the need for a ‘law-based state’, and universal civil rights were added to his set of objectives. But as yet there was no law on press freedom. Far from it: when in May 1989 Arguments and Facts published an inaccurate opinion poll indicating that his popularity had plummeted, Gorbachëv summoned editor Vladislav Starkov and threatened to have him sacked. The fact that Gorbachëv left Starkov in post was a credit to his self-restraint, not a sign of the practical limits of his power.22
Others displayed no such caution. Public organizations had never had greater latitude to press for their interests. Local party secretaries, republican chiefs, factory managers, generals, scholars and KGB chiefs had belonged to the USSR’s representative state organs since the Civil War. But previously they had had little autonomy from the central political leadership. The Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet gave these various figures a chance to speak their mind. In particular, Colonel Viktor Alksnis complained about the deterioration in the prestige and material conditions of Soviet armed forces after the final, humiliating withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan. Alksnis addressed the Congress as an individual, but he rightly claimed that other officers in the Soviet Army shared his feelings. Such tirades at least had the merit of frankness. Above all, they increased political awareness amidst a population that had been starved of information judged injurious to the regime.
The old élites were rallying to defend themselves. The humiliation of the communist party in the Congress elections was only partial: local communist apparatuses remained largely in place and aimed to retain their authority. Other public institutions, too, had scarcely been touched by the campaign of propaganda to make them more responsive to society’s demands. The personnel and structures of communism had survived the storms of perestroika largely intact.
Of course, important additions had been made to the wings of the USSR’s political edifice. The KGB, while not dismantling its great network of informers, was no longer arresting citizens for lawful acts of political dissent. An independent press of sorts had been constructed. Whereas Arguments and Facts and Ogonëk had been established by the Soviet state, the journal Glasnost arose from the initiative of Sergei Grigoryants. Moreover, the cultural intelligentsia was writing, painting and composing in a liberated mood; and its organizations reflected the diversity of its objectives. Thus the Union of Writers of the RSFSR acted more or less as a megaphone for Russian nationalism. Similarly, the party and governmental machines in the non-Russian republics were consolidating themselves as instruments of the aspirations of the local majority nationality. All this constituted a menace to Gorbachëv’s ultimate purposes. Interest groups, organizations and territorial administrations functioned with scant interference; and most of them either disliked reform or wanted a type of reform different from Gorbachëv’s vision.
The trend had an arithmetical precision. The greater the distance from Moscow, the bolder were nations in repudiating the Kremlin’s overlordship. The communist regimes of Eastern Europe had been put on notice that they would have to fend politically for themselves without reliance on the Soviet Army. This knowledge had been kept secret from the populations of the same states. If the news had got out, there would have been instantaneous revolts against the existing communist regimes. No wonder the Soviet General Secretary was seen by his foreign Marxist-Leninist counterparts as a dangerous subversive.
This was also the viewpoint on him taken by fellow central leaders in the USSR. Rebelliousness and inter-ethnic conflict were on the rise in non-Russian republics. In June 1989 there were riots between Uzbeks and Meshketian Turks in Uzbekistan. In the following months there was violence among other national groups in Georgia, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Gorbachëv appeared on television to declare that the stability of the state was under threat. In the Georgian Soviet republic there was violence between Georgians and Abkhazians as well as marches in Tbilisi in favour of Georgian national independence. In August a dramatic protest occurred in the three Baltic republics when a human chain was formed by one million people joining hands across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in commemorative protest against the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Yet Gorbachëv refused to contemplate the possibility of the Baltic republics seceding from the USSR. Ultimately, he assumed, their citizens would perceive their economic interests as being best served by their republics remaining within the Union.23
In September 1989 the Ukrainian giant stirred at last with the inauguration of Rukh. At this Gorbachëv panicked, flew to Kiev and replaced Shcherbytskiy with the more flexible Vladimir Ivashko. Evidently Gorbachëv recognized that the clamp-down on Ukrainian national self-expression had begun to cause more problems than it solved. At this moment of choice he preferred concession to confrontation; but thereby he also took another step towards the disintegration of the USSR. Neither of the alternatives offered Gorbachëv a congenial prospect.
Movement occurred in the same direction for the rest of the year. In October the Latvian Popular Front demanded state independence; in November the Lithuanian government itself decided to hold a referendum on the question. Next month the Communist Party of Lithuania, concerned lest it might lose every vestige of popularity, declared its exodus from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Tensions increased between resident Russians and the majority nationalities in the Baltic republics: the Estonian proposals for a linguistic qualification for citizenship of Estonia were especially contentious. In Estonia and Latvia, furthermore, the nationalist groupings won elections by a handsome margin. The situation was even graver for Gorbachëv in the Transcaucasus. In December 1989 the Armenian Supreme Soviet voted to incorporate Nagorny Karabakh into the Armenian republic. In January 1990 fighting broke out in the Azerbaijani capital Baku. The Soviet Army was sent to restore order, and attacked the premises of the Azerbaijani Popular Front.
But the deployment of the armed forces did not deter trouble elsewhere: inter-ethnic carnage was already being reported from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in February. The possibility that the USSR might implode under these pressures began to be discussed in the press. The more rhetorical of politicians warned against any actions that might lead eventually to civil war across the USSR.
This worry distracted the minds of Soviet citizens from foreign affairs. If it had not been for the preoccupations of the domestic economic, political and national environment, attention would have been paid to events of epochal importance in Eastern Europe. Since the defeat of Hitler in 1945 the Soviet Army had maintained a vast zone of political and economic dominion and military security in the countries to the east of the river Elbe. Every VE-Day after 1945 had been celebrated on the assumption that this zone was an inviolable feature of the European map. Over the years of his power Gorbachëv had indicated, in language that became ever more explicit, that the peoples of the Warsaw Pact countries should be empowered to choose their political system for themselves. But even he was astonished by the rapidity with which communist governments collapsed in country after country in the second half of 1989.
The process began in Poland. After an agreement to submit themselves to contested elections, the communists had been soundly defeated in June, and in August meekly joined a coalition under the anti-communist Tadeusz Mazowiecki. In September the Hungarian communist government allowed tens of thousands of East Germans to cross its frontiers and seek asylum in Austria; in October the ageing Erich Honecker was sacked as party boss in the German Democratic Republic. Within weeks the reformed communist leadership was permitting its citizens unimpeded transit to the Federal Republic of Germany. Meanwhile Todor Zhivkov retired in Bulgaria. The Czechoslovak government, too, was replaced. In the last month of this remarkable year, President Gustáv Husák resigned and the dissenting dramatist Vacláv Havel was elected by parliament to take his place (while the communist leader of the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 Alexander Dubček returned to head the Federal Assembly).
The dominoes were tumbling fast. The fall of any communist regime made the surviving ones more susceptible to collapse. And yet Pravda noted the succession of events with studied calmness. Such reportage was the sharpest sign to date that Gorbachëv was predominantly engaged with Soviet internal affairs and would pull no chestnuts out of the fire for the USSR’s post-war allies. Gorbachëv had not intended to preside over the end of communism in Eastern Europe; but he did not act to prevent the last scenes in the drama from being enacted.
Events in Romania took a dramatic turn in December 1989, when Nicolae Ceauşescu appeared on his palace balcony to address a loyal Bucharest crowd. Ceauşescu was challenged in a scene akin to a spaghetti Western movie: he was catcalled. When he failed to intimidate the assembled crowd, he leapt into a helicopter before trying to flee the country in a fast-driven limousine; but he was captured and summarily tried and executed. Gorbachëv had often confidentially expressed his horror of the Romanian terror-regime; indeed he had tried, just a few days earlier in a Moscow meeting with Ceauşescu, to persuade him that his regime would eventually incur the people’s wrath. But Ceauşescu had spurned him, making little attempt to hide his disapproval of the USSR’s perestroika. The grotesque finale to communism in Romania was thought by Gorbachëv to settle their argument in his own favour.
It was a remarkable denouement. At the beginning of 1989 most countries in Europe east of the river Elbe were ruled by communists. At the year’s end the sole remaining European communist state to the west of the USSR was Albania – and Albania had been hostile to the USSR since Khrushchëv’s period of office.
Gorbachëv could have sent the Soviet Army to suppress the anti-communist movements earlier in the year. He would, needless to emphasize, have paid a great price. In particular, he would have forfeited the diplomatic support he had from Western countries; certainly he would have reinstigated tensions with the USA, which would have led to yet another race to construct new forms of nuclear weaponry. And yet any one of Gorbachëv’s predecessors would not have blanched at a resumption of the Cold War. That he chose to avoid such a course was among his momentous choices. It took exceptional determination to stand by policies involving the minimum of violence when this resulted in the demise not only of old-style communism but even of those communist leaders in Eastern Europe who were his political allies. He had not set out to achieve this end; rather it was the unwilled result of his activity as it developed. But great was the work of his hands.