The Penguin History of Modern Russia

Germany in official delegations and taken a three-week car-touring holiday in France with Raisa. The impression on him was profound. He learned that capitalism was not a moribund economic system and that, despite many defects, it offered many sections of its societies a breadth of material goods unrivalled in the USSR.³³ He had also been rethinking his attitude to the Soviet order since 1983, when he had studied Lenin’s last works on bureaucracy and had come to understand that the bureaucratic problems of the 1920s had not disappeared.³⁴ His private assumptions and understandings would at last have room to develop into policies when Gorbachev became General Secretary.

By temperament he was a gambler, and the very fact that he had not elaborated his strategy left him open to suggestions to take ever larger risks. The night before going to the Politburo meeting which selected him as General Secretary, he stated: ‘Life can’t be lived like this any longer.’³⁵ But he said this solely to his wife Raisa, in the garden of their dacha where he could be confident of not being bugged.³⁶ He could not afford to be too frank about his intention to repudiate Brezhnev’s heritage: on 11 March 1985 he soothed the Central Committee with his statement that policies did not need changing.³⁷ Yet on the quiet he was looking for substantial changes. He had no detailed objectives, but he was impatient to achieve something fast.

His first task was to assemble a group of influential supporters. At the next Central Committee plenum, on 23 April 1985, he gave favour to fellow proteges of Andropov: Central Committee Secretaries Ryzhkov and Ligachev were promoted to full membership of the Politburo, and KGB chairman Viktor Chebrikov rose from being candidate to full member of the Politburo. When the Central Committee met again in July, two local party leaders, Lev Zaikov of Leningrad and Boris Yeltsin of Sverdlovsk, were appointed to the Secretariat. Romanov, Gorbachev’s chief rival of pre-pensionable age, was sacked from the Politburo; and Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgian communist party leader and a friend of Gorbachev, was raised from candidate to full Politburo membership. These were persons who shared his sense of urgency. A year before, in conversation with Gorbachev on Pitsunda beach in Crimea, Shevardnadze had put their common approach into a few blunt words: ‘Everything’s rotten. There must be change.’³⁸

Shevardnadze was then appointed Soviet Foreign Minister in place of Gromyko. For Gromyko at the age of seventy-six there was the consolation of being made Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium and thereby becoming head of state; but Gorbachev was not so generous towards the eighty-year-old Nikolai Tikhonov, who was compelled to retire and whose job was taken by Nikolai Ryzhkov. In October the leadership of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) passed from Nikolai Baibakov, who had held the post for two decades, to Nikolai Talyzin.

Already Gorbachev had removed the most powerful of Brezhnev’s cronies, got rid of Romanov and installed a group of experienced administrators at the centre who were dedicated to the regeneration of the Soviet economy. Within months he had accomplished a turnover of personnel that Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev had taken years to carry out. The average age of the Politburo fell from sixty-nine years at the end of 1980 to sixty-four by the end of 1985.³⁹ Another aspect of change was the background of the supreme party leadership. All the newcomers, unlike many leaders in Brezhnev’s generation, had completed at least their secondary education. Most of them also had until recently lived in ‘the localities’. Yeltsin had worked for most of his career in the Urals, Ligachev in mid-Siberia, Shevardnadze in Georgia. They brought to the capital an awareness of day-to-day provincial actuality. They were confident that collectively they could solve the country’s problems.

Gorbachev was the most worldly-wise of all of them. His ability to adjust his style to unfamiliar surroundings astonished foreign politicians. In 1984 the British Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher declared: ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.’⁴⁰ Gorbachev and his wife were a vivacious couple, and Raisa’s wardrobe excited interest in Western newspapers. The new General Secretary transparently wanted to govern a USSR which no longer invited hatred and ridicule beyond its frontiers.

But how were he and his colleagues in the Kremlin going to achieve this? Initially they followed Andropov’s general line and concentrated efforts upon the economy. Discipline and order also returned to the agenda. The Politburo, persuaded by Ligachev, even took the risk of discouraging alcohol consumption. Threefold increases in the price of vodka were decreed and vineyards were hacked down in Georgia, Moldavia and Ukraine. This was not the last time that Gorbachev fell out of touch with social opinion: on this occasion he was nicknamed the Mineral Secretary for asserting the superiority of mineral water over booze. Yet he was mocked more than resented. Nearly all Soviet citizens were delighted by his unceremonial dumping of the Brezhnevite time-servers. He was also admired for his visits to cities outside Moscow and his willingness to engage bystanders in conversation. Pravda editorials became as compulsive reading as the sport, chess and quizzes at the back of the newspaper.

Gorbachev, whose main economic slogan was ‘acceleration’, looked like a man in a hurry. But actual measures were slower to emerge. His first move was made in November 1985, when a super-ministry for the cultivation and processing of foodstuffs was formed along the lines unsuccessfully proposed by Gorbachevin Brezhnev’s time. Named as the State Committee for the Agro-Industrial Complex (Gosagroprom), it was to be led by one of Gorbachev’s political clients, Vsevolod Murakhovski. This had been one of Gorbachev’s pet projects in Brezhnev’s lifetime, but until he became General Secretary he encountered resistance from the Council of Ministers.⁴¹ Now he could realize his wishes.

But this meant he was aiming to renovate Soviet agriculture chiefly by reorganizing its central governmental institutions. As he should have known from Zaslavskaya’s Novosibirsk Report in 1983, the regeneration of the economy required much more than administrative measures. Kolkhozniki and sovkhozniki remained subject to a system of peremptory orders and of weak material incentives; and they had no positive influence over the running of the collective farm: they were bossed by farm chairmen and the chairmen themselves were bossed by Moscow. Gosagroprom was not going to dislodge a single brick in this bureaucratic wall. Quite the opposite: by giving additional authority to a central body such as Gosagroprom, Gorbachev would increase the wall’s solidity. The General Secretary acted as if a group of new officials, a structural experiment and a campaign of public exhortation would do the trick; his orientation was centralist, hierarchical, administrative and command-based.

If agriculture was the economy’s Achilles’ heel, industry was its severely bruised knee. In Gorbachev’s first months there was no equivalent reorganization of the manufacturing sector. Nevertheless a re-jigging of budgetary aims took place. The Twelfth Five-Year Plan was scheduled to begin in 1986, and the Politburo declared that an increase in the quantity and quality of industrial output required the maximizing of investment in the machine- building sector. Ryzhkov and Gorbachev were the principal advocates of this strategy. They were putting into effect the ideas elaborated by the two of them under Andropov’s encouragement.

Increasingly, however, Gorbachev recognized that such calculations were inadequate to the solution of the country’s problems. On his various tours to the provinces he spoke off the cuff and tagged new priorities to the formally-agreed economic agenda. By late 1985 there was scarcely an industrial sector not mentioned by the General Secretary as deserving of large, additional investment.⁴² Ryzhkov, a former deputy chairman of Gosplan, perceived that such promises were a budgetary impossibility: Gorbachev had simply not done his sums. Yet Ryzhkov, too, lacked a workable strategy and continued to advocate an unrealizably rapid expansion in the output of industrial consumer goods; for his diversion of vast revenues into machine-construction could not yield results until after several years, perhaps even decades. The draft Twelfth Five-Year Plan presented by Ryzhkov to the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 was based upon false economic premisses.

The central communist leadership would be frustrated until the ideas on economic reform underwent more basic revision. Gorbachev sometimes hinted that he was considering this option. In Leningrad in May 1985 he announced to fellow communists: ‘Obviously, we all of us must undergo reconstruction, all of us… Everyone must adopt new approaches and understand that no other path is available to us.’⁴³ Within a year the notion of reconstruction (or perestroika, as it became known in all languages) was the condiment in every dish of policy served up by the General Secretary.

Gorbachev was fighting harder than any of his colleagues to radicalize the regime’s policies. As his ideas changed, he left several of Andropov’s appointees bemused; and inside the Politburo he could initially count only upon Shevardnadze as an unconditional ally. Gorbachev remained unclear as to what he wanted. But although he took time to discover a positive set of aims, at least he knew what he was against. He hated the obstacles being put in his way by upholders of the ideas and practices of the Brezhnev period. Debate was lively among the central party leaders and Gorbachev was in his element. In November 1985 he briskly persuaded the Politburo to sack