Leaders of the communist world in Moscow, 1986.
Muscovites attending an Eastern Orthodox Christmas procession in Red Square, 1991.
Patriarch Aleksy II of the Russian Orthodox Church blessing Yeltsin, the first freely elected president of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.
Yeltsin being inaugurated as president of the Russian republic, July 10, 1991. Speaker of the legislature Khasbulatov stands to the left.
Ethiopian youths standing on the toppled statue of Lenin, May 23, 1991, two days after the end of the Soviet-backed Ethiopian regime.
Demonstrators pulling down the statue of Dzerzhinsky in front of the KGB headquarters, August 1991.
Children playing on a toppled statue of Lenin in Lithuania following the failed Kremlin coup, August 1991.
Gorbachev and Yeltsin at the Extraordinary Congress of People's Deputies, September
Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov greets Patriarch Aleksy II during the 1st public worship in Moscow's reconstructed Christ Savior Cathedral, August 19, 1995.
Evgeny Primakov
Aleksandr Lebed
the case of the earthquake in Armenia in December 1988, which killed some 25,000 people and left another 500,000 homeless, or in that of the train collision and gas explosion near Asha in the Urals in June 1989, with 190 persons listed as dead, 270 as missing, and 720 as hospitalized, served to underline the manifold deficiencies, including the incompetence, of the Soviet system. Ecological issues loomed ever larger as the nature and extent of the ecological damage in the country became better known. Perhaps even more damaging to the government and system were repeated discoveries of mass graves: some 102,000 bodies found near Minsk in Belorussia in October 1988; between 200,000 and 300,000 burials outside Kiev which a special commission determined in March 1989 to contain victims of Stalin, not of the Nazis; about 300,000 more bodies in mass graves near Cheliabinsk and Sverdlovsk in the Urals, uncovered on October 2, 1989; and still others. Glasnost not only provided information about all these matters and contributed to the rehabilitation of many communists executed in the purges of the 1930's as well as of Russian cultural figures abroad, such as the distinguished musician Mstislav Rastropovich and the brilliant satirist Vladimir Voinovich, but also led to a great diversity of opinion and variety of criticism. Gorbachev and his policies were attacked from the right, from the left, and from every direction.
Like his predecessors, Gorbachev began his career as the supreme Soviet leader when he attained the post of Party secretary as voted by the Politburo. Characteristically, as already mentioned, his initial main concern was to strengthen his position in the Politburo and, more broadly, in the upper echelons of the Party, a personnel policy that was on the whole successful, although never to the extent of giving the new leader complete control. But before long, great complications arose. The policies of perestroika and glasnost produced strong and continual opposition both by the Right, which felt fundamentally threatened by them, and by the Left, as in the case of Yeltsin, which complained that the reforming activity was not sufficiently efficacious or expeditious.
Furthermore, the position of the Party itself was changing. Gorbachev introduced competitive elections within the Communist Party to fight stagnation and obtain supporters against the entrenched traditionalists. On January 13, 1990, he reversed his earlier stand by declaring his willingness to accept the existence of other political parties in the U.S.S.R. Following a demonstration in February of some 250,000 people in Moscow and other gatherings elsewhere, on March 13, 1990, the legislature repealed Article 6 of the constitution, which had guaranteed 'the leading role' of the Communist Party, that is, its monopoly of political power in the Soviet Union. Although the reformers have been slow in creating a comprehensive political organization outside the Party, there emerged in July 1991 the Democratic Reform Movement, led by such prominent former associates of Gorbachev as Shevardnadze and Yakovlev as well as other notable liberals. And the Party itself, once absolutely monolithic, came to be under the con-
stant threat of a major split, and thus pluralism, in the summer of 1991, most obviously in its huge Russian branch.
The same day that Article 6 was abolished, Gorbachev, as president of the country, received the right to rule when necessary by executive decree. Combining Party and state offices was nothing new for Soviet leaders; the novelty of the latest arrangement consisted in the fact that the state position could now be used against the Party. Gorbachev had prepared his state base of power well, succeeding Gromyko to the title of president in October 1988, obtaining election to that office by the 2,250-member Congress of People's Deputies on April 25, 1989, and greatly enhancing its prominence. As the sway of the Politburo and the Party declined, close advisory bodies to the president, such as the eighteen-member Presidential Council, which lasted from March to December 1990, and especially the eight-member Security Council of the U.S.S.R., which succeeded it, acquired greater significance. The latter was composed mainly of the more important ministers of state. In the summer of 1991, speculation was rife that Gorbachev might abandon the Party altogether and stake everything on the state administration and reform. Actually, he turned in the opposite direction, winning once more sufficient Party support and apparently determined to carry it with him on his wayward way.
It is not easy to evaluate or even simply present Gorbachev's policy. Often it seems impossible to distinguish his own projects, plans, and aims from the political and other tactical concessions and compromises he had to make, and even from extraneous elements imposed on him by other political forces in the Soviet Union. The net result was a tortuous course most notable for its meandering between reform and restraint. To mention only some of his last turnings, in October 1990 Gorbachev endorsed the so-called Shatalin plan, associated with the economist Stanislav Shatalin and meant to establish within five hundred days a market economy in the U.S.S.R. But at the last moment he held back and in the subsequent weeks and months adopted instead a conservative and even reactionary policy, characterized by hard-line key governmental appointments and the granting of new powers to the police and the army acting as police. It was at that time that Shevardnadze resigned as foreign minister in protest and warning and was replaced by the former ambassador to the United States, Alexander Bessmertnykh, apparently without any change in the nature of Soviet foreign policy. Yet spring and summer brought another turning, with Gorbachev more enthusiastic than ever in the cause of economic and general reform, ready to condemn even Marxism as such on occasion and full of promising plans for the Soviet Union, although still without specifics or a timetable.
However, it may be most appropriate to end this brief discussion of pere-stroika where it began, that is, with the economic crisis, and for that to turn to Gregory Grossman's compelling presentation of the nature and the problem of
the Soviet economic collapse in his testimony to congressional committees on June 25, 1991.*
One can hardly recall an instance in modern history in which - major war or its effects apart - the economic condition of an important country plunged so deep so fast as has that of the Soviet Union in the last few years. Less
