He and his group of supportive colleagues and advisers were embarrassed about the ineffectual, drifting methods of recent leadership. There was also confidence that the situation could be reversed. As General Secretary, Gorbachev had no intention of presiding over the dissolution of the USSR or over the dismantlement of the communist political system. The economic, social and cultural problems were dire. But he was confident they could be solved.
The Politburo in 1985–6 agreed that new methods had to be formulated. Its members recognized their fundamental difficulties in achieving economic development, social acquiescence, ideological commitment, administrative efficiency, inter-ethnic harmony, control over Eastern Europe and peace between the superpowers. Each difficulty aggravated the others. But why did the Politburo go beyond the limits of Andropovite policy? External pressures played a part, especially the aggressive diplomacy of President Reagan and his Strategic Defence Initiative. Unpredictable events, particularly the Chernobyl explosion, were also important. Even so, the movement towards basic reforms was not inevitable. Gorbachev would not have lost power if he had opted to conserve the heritage of Andropov. The collective outlook of his Politburo and Secretariat colleagues was not as open minded as his own, and the impact of this single individual over the course of Soviet politics was decisive.
He had no grand plan and no predetermined policies; but if Gorbachev had not been Party General Secretary, the decisions of summer 1986 would have been different. The USSR’s long-lasting order would have endured for many more years, and almost certainly the eventual collapse of the order would have been much bloodier than it was to be in 1991. The irony was that Gorbachev, in trying to prevent the descent of the system into general crisis, proved instrumental in bringing forward that crisis and destroying the USSR.
23
Glasnost and Perestroika
(1986–1988)
By mid-1986 Gorbachev 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 Gorbachev 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’. Gorbachev’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. Gorbachev 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. Gorbachev was freeing debate in the USSR to an extent that no Soviet leader had attempted, not even Khrushchev 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
Gorbachev 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 Gorbachev 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. Gorbachev 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 Khrushchev had made his assault upon Stalin and referred to themselves as ‘Children of the Twentieth Congress’. But although they were admirers of Khrushchev, 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, Gorbachev’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 Gorbachev, 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
Economic measures were not forgotten by Gorbachev 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 Gorbachev 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 Gorbachev 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, Gorbachev 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 Gorbachev described the country’s condition as ‘socialism in the process of self-
