Grishin, giving his place to Yeltsin in both the Politburo and in the Moscow City Party Committee. Yeltsin declared war on corruption and indolence throughout the capital’s administration, and sacked Grishin’s placemen as opponents of perestroika. Gorbachev had promoted someone he hoped would be a permanent supporter in the Politburo.
Yet the struggle for reform had only just begun. At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 Gorbachev had to tread carefully in recommending fresh policy initiatives. The new Party Programme accepted at the Congress would hardly have discomfited Gorbachev’s predecessors in office: the ‘perfecting’ of ‘developed socialism’ was set to remain the main political slogan.44 Yet immediately after the Congress he showed that he would not permanently be denied. Local officialdom was to be brought into line with his thinking: by the middle of 1986 two thirds of province-level party secretaries had not had the same jobs a half-decade earlier.45 He was convinced that the vigorous support of such appointees would guarantee his success.
He was equally optimistic in his conduct of international relations in 1985–6. He had set his mind on sorting out Soviet domestic affairs, and had used the occasion of Chernenko’s funeral to call a meeting of leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries and to announce his commitment to non-interference in their political life. According to Gorbachev, these countries were thenceforward to have independent control of their internal development.46 This was already a striking contrast with Soviet foreign policy since 1945. Even Andropov had offered to relax the USSR’s grip on Eastern Europe solely on condition that the USA made analogous concessions in its regional spheres of influence.47 Gorbachev’s statement was not tied to a public bargaining position with the USA: it was delivered exclusively to an audience of the USSR’s allies in Eastern Europe. He wanted them to know that they were responsible for their own fate.
This was not a sign that Gorbachev thought that communism was doomed in the USSR and Eastern Europe. The exact opposite was true. Gorbachev was still at that time a Marxist-Leninist believer: he contended that the Soviet communist order was in many ways already superior to capitalism; he was unshaken in his opinion that the Soviet type of state provided its citizens with better health care, education and transport. The task in the USSR and Eastern Europe was consequently to renovate communism so as to match capitalism in other areas of public life. Gorbachev assumed that he would be able to persuade fellow communist leaders in Eastern Europe to follow his example. There was to be no repetition of the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Renovation had to occur voluntarily. Despite Gorbachev’s eloquence, however, the Warsaw Pact leaders did not take him seriously and treated his speech as ceremonial rhetoric.48
The Politburo was learning to take his words more literally. In October 1985 he was already suggesting to its members that a way had to be found for the Soviet Army to be withdrawn from the war in Afghanistan.49 Presumably he wished to have freedom to alter conditions in the USSR without international distractions. The material and human costs of the Afghan war were running out of control. Gorbachev felt he could build the kind of socialism in his country that would cause the rest of the world to marvel.
He therefore refused to be downcast by the attitude taken by US President Reagan, who had secured a second term of office in 1984 and persisted with the development of his Strategic Defence Initiative. Gorbachev continued to believe that Soviet science and industry would cope with the challenge and match the USA’s technology. To the despair of his own more sceptical advisers, he even convinced himself that he could undertake major economic reform while supplying the Ministry of Defence with the immense additional resources needed to develop and deploy the USSR’s equivalent to Reagan’s project.50 Since the end of the Second World War, Soviet scientists had always succeeded in emulating American military technology. Gorbachev felt that there was no reason to doubt that they could do the same in the mid-1980s. Gorbachev began his reforms as a buoyant optimist.
Yet the Strategic Defence Initiative, while not instigating Gorbachev’s domestic perestroika, was indisputably going to make a tough task tougher, and Gorbachev was not so stupid as to think that a vast new programme of military research would not divert expenditure from the civilian industrial sector. It would obviously therefore be far better for the USSR if the USA could be persuaded to abandon its Initiative altogether in return for firm and binding agreements on nuclear disarmament.
Although Gorbachev had no experience as a diplomat, he intuitively sensed that personal contact with the American President might produce a transformation in relations between the superpowers. He was certainly lucky in his choice of moment to make the attempt. For Reagan himself, influenced by both Margaret Thatcher and his wife Nancy, was starting to look for signs that Soviet foreign policy might be more amenable to American political overtures. Gorbachev and Reagan were therefore pleased to be able to arrange to meet each other in Geneva in November 1985. Their fireside conversations were courteous, even congenial. The two men liked each other and a rising degree of trust was noticeable between them. Nevertheless Reagan remained on his guard. While talking reassuringly to Gorbachev, he licensed subordinates such as Caspar Weinberger and Richard Perle to make whatever menacing remarks they wanted about the USSR. The patience of Soviet negotiators was tested severely.
Yet Gorbachev continued his line of reconciliation. At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 he stressed that his country was ‘ready to do everything it could to change the international situation radically’.51 While asserting that Soviet defences would be strengthened to meet any foreign threat, Gorbachev went out of his way to plead the case for global peace and for a process of disarmament.
Like most politicians in East and West, he assumed that the danger of nuclear technology was confined to bombs. His concentration on the military risks was understandable, but misplaced. There had been several explosions in Soviet civilian nuclear power stations since they had first been built under Khrushchev. The lessons had not been learned: supervision and training of staff remained lamentable and no mention of past explosions was allowed in the USSR’s press. The astute dissenting scientist, Zhores Medvedev, had deduced that there had been a nuclear disaster in the Urals from the indirect data on fauna and flora available in recondite Soviet academic journals; but he was living in emigration in London.52 Discussion of his warnings was prohibited and his book was banned from publication. Consequently Gorbachev was barely any better informed about the situation than his ordinary fellow citizens.
On 26 April 1986 a horrific jolt was delivered to official Soviet complacency when an accident occurred at the nuclear power station near the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl. The core of the reactor had overheated and the station’s staff, instead of instantly shutting down the reactor, tried out various cooling measures. Their incompetence caused an explosion.
The result was catastrophic radiation. The local politicians panicked, and some of them secretly moved their families out of Ukraine. But the winds carried the radioactive particles northwards and westwards. Belorussia and eastern Poland were affected and Scandinavian newspapers revealed that a nuclear disaster had taken place somewhere in the USSR. As the clamour of public opinion grew around the world, the assumption was that the Politburo was deliberately pretending that nothing untoward had happened. This had been conventional Soviet practice to date whenever a nuclear accident or even an airplane crash had occurred. But in this instance, the Politburo itself had difficulty in getting rapid, accurate information. As the enormity of the event started to become evident, Gorbachev announced the dispatch to the area of an investigative team from Moscow. Ryzhkov, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, courageously visited Chernobyl in person.
For Gorbachev, their reports were almost as appalling as the human and natural devastation wrought by the accident. A long chain of negligence, incompetence and disorganization was to blame. Workers were careless; technicians were ill-trained; local politicians were ignorant; and central ministers and scientific consultants had omitted to put a reasonable set of safeguards into operation.
In 1921 Lenin had declared that the Kronstadt mutiny was the flash that led to the New Economic Policy. Gorbachev made no similar statement. But the Chernobyl nuclear explosion undoubtedly had a deep impact on him. He could no longer fail to understand that the defects of the regime could not be corrected by administrative tinkering.53 Misinformation, indiscipline and organizational manipulation were intrinsic to its workings. The lethal atmosphere over Chernobyl was a metaphor for the conditions in Soviet public life. A ventilation of the country’s problems was no longer merely desirable; it was crucial for the medium-term survival of the USSR as a superpower. People were not protesting out on the streets. The declining economy was not already battered to the ground and the governing elites had not yet been demoralized into acceptance of fundamental reform. Yet Gorbachev had had enough. Reform was going to be basic and fast, and the General Secretary was readying himself for a historic contest.
