The Penguin History of Modern Russia

development’.³ Implicitly he was suggesting that socialism had not yet been built in the USSR. Democratization was now proclaimed as a crucial objective. This meant that the Soviet Union was no longer touted as the world’s greatest democracy — and it was the General Secretary who was saying so. Gorbachev called for the ‘blank spots’ in the central party textbooks to be filled. He denounced Stalin and the lasting effects of his policies. Despite not naming Brezhnev, Gorbachev dismissed his rule as a period of ‘stagnation’ and declared that the leaving of cadres in post had been taken to the extremes of absurdity.⁴

Gorbachev gained assent to several political proposals: the election rather than appointment of party committee secretaries; the holding of multi-candidate elections to the soviets; the assignation of non-party members to high public office. He succeeded, too, with an economic proposal when he insisted that the draft Law on the State Enterprise should enshrine the right of each factory labour-force to elect its own director. Gorbachev aimed at industrial as well as political democratization.⁵ This was not a leader who thought he merely had to learn from capitalist countries. Gorbachev still assumed he could reconstruct the Soviet compound so that his country would patent a new model of political democracy, economic efficiency and social justice.

In June 1987 he presented the detailed economic measures at the next Central Committee plenum, which adopted the draft Law on the State Enterprise. Apart from introducing the elective principle to the choice of managers, the Law gave the right to factories and mines to decide what to produce after satisfying the basic requirements of the state planning authorities. Enterprises were to be permitted to set their own wholesale prices. Central controls over wage levels were to be relaxed. The reform envisaged the establishment of five state-owned banks, which would operate without day-to-day intervention by the Central State Bank.⁶ As under Lenin’s NEP, moreover, there was to be allowance for a private sector in services and small-scale industry. The reintroduction of a mixed economy was projected. Although there would still be a predominance of state ownership and regulation in the economy, this was the greatest projected reform since 1921.

Gorbachev’s argument was that the country was in a ‘pre-crisis’ condition.⁷ If the USSR wished to remain a great military and industrial power, he asserted, then the over-centralized methods of planning and management had to be abandoned. He persuaded the plenum that the proposed Law on the State Enterprise was the prerequisite for ‘the creation of an efficient, flexible system of managing the economy’. The plenum laid down that it should come into effect in January 1988.⁸

But Central Committee resolutions were one thing, their implementation quite another. Whereas communist intellectuals were attracted to the General Secretary, communist party functionaries were not. Gorbachev’s own second secretary and ally Ligachev was covertly trying to undermine Gorbachev’s authority. Gorbachev also had problems from the other side. Yeltsin in the Moscow Party City Committee was urging a faster pace of reform and a broader dimension for glasnost. Gorbachev found it useful to play off Yeltsin and Ligachev against each other. Of the two of them, Ligachev was the more problematical on a regular basis; for he was in charge of ideological matters in the Secretariat and acted as a brake upon historical and political debate. But the more immediate problem was Yeltsin. His sackings of Moscow personnel left scarcely anyone in a responsible job who had held it for more than a year.

Ligachev talked to Politburo colleagues about Yeltsin’s domineering propensities; but Gorbachev tried to protect Yeltsin. For a while Gorbachev succeeded. But Yeltsin made things hard for himself by stressing his desire to remove the privileges of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev. In his justified criticisms of the status quo, he lacked tactical finesse. Indeed he lacked all tact. He was a troubled, angry, impulsive individual. He also had no coherent programme. As an intuitive politician, he was only beginning to discover his purpose in politics, and his explorations were exhausting the patience of the General Secretary.

In October 1987 Gorbachev accepted Yeltsin’s resignation as a candidate member of the Politburo. Yeltsin had threatened to leave on several occasions, and this time Ligachev made sure that he was not allowed to withdraw his resignation. And so the supreme party leadership lost Yeltsin. A few days later a conference of the Moscow City Party Organization was called. Although Yeltsin was in hospital recovering from illness,⁹ he was pumped full of drugs and dragged along to attend: on a personal level it was one of the most disgraceful of Gorbachev’s actions. Yeltsin acknowledged his faults, but the decision had already been taken: a succession of speakers denounced his arrogance and he was sacked as party secretary of the capital. Only at this point did Gorbachev take him sympathetically by the arm. He also showed mercy by appointing Yeltsin as Deputy Chairman of the State Construction Committee. But both of them assumed that Yeltsin’s career at the centre of Soviet politics had ended.

Gorbachev was more than ever the solitary fore-rider of reform. During his summer holiday in Crimea, he had edited the typescript for his book Perestroika; he began, too, to prepare a speech to celebrate the October Revolution’s seventieth anniversary. In the weeks after the Central Committee plenum a large number of journalists, novelists, film-makers, poets — and yes, at last, historians — filled the media of public communication with accounts of the terror of the Stalin era and the injurious consequences of Brezhnev’s rule. Gorbachev sought to encourage and direct the process.

In November he published his book and delivered his speech. In both of them he denounced the regime’s ‘command-administrative system’, which he described as having emerged under Stalin and having lasted through to the mid-1980s. He hymned the people more than the party. He treated not only the October Revolution but also the February Revolution as truly popular political movements. He also expressed admiration for the mixed economy and cultural effervescence of the New Economic Policy. He praised Lenin as a humanitarian, representing him as having been a much less violent politician than had been true. Despite lauding the NEP, moreover, Gorbachev continued to profess the benefits of agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s. For Gorbachev still equivocated about Stalin. In particular, the industrial achievements of the First Five-Year Plan and the military triumph of the Second World War were counted unto him for virtue.¹⁰

Certainly he had set out a stall of general objectives; but he had not clarified the details of strategy, tactics and policies. And he still regarded the objectives themselves as attainable without the disbandment of the one- party, one-ideology state. As previously, he refused to consider that the party and the people might not voluntarily rally to the cause of renovating Marxism-Leninism and the entire Soviet order. Nor did he take cognizance of the role of the Soviet Union as an imperial power both within its own boundaries and across Eastern Europe. The most he would concede was that ‘mistakes’ had been made in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 — and he coyly blamed them on the ‘contemporary ruling parties’.¹¹ No accusation was levelled at Kremlin leaders of the time. And Gorbachev declined to reject the traditional class-based analysis of international affairs of the world as a whole.

These contradictions stemmed both from the pressures of his Politburo colleagues and from ambivalence in the mind of the General Secretary. Yet the general direction of his thought was evident. He required a yet deeper process of democratization. He declared that a new political culture and an insistence on the rule of law were required in the Soviet Union. He called for a fresh agenda for Eastern Europe. He also asserted that his country’s foreign policy throughout the world should be based on ‘common human values’.¹²

This was extraordinary language for a Soviet leader. Gorbachev was diminishing the significance accorded to class-based analysis, and his emphasis on ‘common human values’ clashed with the Leninist tradition. Lenin had contended that every political culture, legal framework, foreign policy and philosophy had roots in class struggle. Leninists had traditionally been unembarrassed about advocating dictatorship, lawlessness and war. Gorbachev hugely misconceived his idol. He was not alone: the reform communists, including well-read intellectuals, had persuaded themselves of the same interpretation to a greater or lesser extent and were transmitting their ideas to the General Secretary. Politics were being transformed on the basis of a faulty historiography. But what a transformation was involved! If it were to be accomplished, the USSR would adhere to legal, democratic procedures at home and pacific intentions abroad. Such changes were nothing short of revolutionary.

Much as he rethought his policies, however, Gorbachev was also a disorganized thinker. His knowledge of his country’s history was patchy. His sociological understandings may have been more impressive since his wife, who was his political as well as marital partner, had written a dissertation on contemporary rural relationships;¹³ even so, his public statements continued to treat Soviet society as an inchoate whole and to make little allowance for the different interests of the multifarious groups in an increasingly complex society. His comprehension of economic principles was rudimentary in the extreme.

Nowhere was his complacency more baleful than in relation to the ‘national question’. Superficially he seemed to understand the sensitivities of the non-Russians: for example, he excluded favourable mention of the Russians from the 1986 Party Programme and affirmed the ‘full unity of nations’ in the USSR to be a task of ‘the