The Penguin History of Modern Russia

remote historical future’.¹⁴ This gave reassurance to the non-Russian peoples that there would be no Russification campaign under his leadership. But no other practical changes of a positive kind followed. Gorbachev himself was not a pure Russian; like his wife Raisa, he was born to a couple consisting of a Russian and a Ukrainian.¹⁵ But this mixed ancestry, far from keeping him alert to national tensions in the USSR, had dulled his understanding of them. He was comfortable with his dual identity as a Russian and as a Soviet citizen; and this produced casualness that gave much offence. For example, when he visited Ukraine for the first time as General Secretary in 1986, he spoke about Russia and the USSR as if they were coextensive. Ukrainian national sensitivities were outraged.

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that non-Russians had been prevented from expressing their grievances. Inter-ethnic difficulties were the hatred that dared not speak its name. Gorbachev and other central party leaders were slow to perceive the inherent risks involved in campaigning against corruption in the republics while also granting freedom of the press and of assembly. Much resentment arose over the appointment of Russian functionaries in place of cadres drawn from the local nationalities. In addition, more scandals were exposed in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan than in Russia. The Kazakhstan party first secretary Dinmukhammed Kunaev, one of Brezhnev’s group, had been compelled to retire in December 1986; even Geidar Aliev, brought from Azerbaijan to Moscow by Andropov, was dropped from the Politburo in October 1987. Eduard Shevardnadze was the sole remaining non-Slav in its membership. The Politburo was virtually a Slavic men’s club.

An early sign of future trouble was given in Kazakhstan, where violent protests in Alma-Ata were organized against the imposition of a Russian, Gennadi Kolbin, as Kunaev’s successor. The Kazakh functionaries in the republican nomenklatura connived in the trouble on the streets; and the intelligentsia of Kazakhstan were unrestrained in condemning the horrors perpetrated upon the Kazakh people in the name of communism. The nationalist resurgence had been quieter but still more defiant in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The titular nationalities in these countries had a living memory of independence. Bilateral treaties had been signed in 1920 with the RSFSR and Stalin’s forcible incorporation of the Baltic states in the USSR in 1940 had never obtained official recognition in the West. Demonstrations had started in Latvia in June 1986. Cultural, ecological and political demands were to the fore. A victory was won by the environmental protest against the hydro-electric station proposed for Daugavpils.

Then the dissenters in Lithuania and Estonia joined in the protest movement. Not all their leaders were calling for outright independence, but the degree of autonomy demanded by them was rising. In August 1987, demonstrations were held to mark the anniversary of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty. The example of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia stimulated national movements elsewhere. Discontent intensified in Ukraine after Chernobyl and Gorbachev was so concerned about the political destabilization that might be produced by Ukrainian cultural, religious and environmental activists that he retained Shcherbytskiy, friend of Brezhnev, as the republican party first secretary. Ukraine was held firmly under Shcherbytskiy’s control.

The USSR, furthermore, contained many inter-ethnic rivalries which did not predominantly involve Russians. Over the winter of 1987–8, disturbances occurred between Armenians and Azeris in the Armenian-inhabited area of Nagorny Karabakh in Azerbaijan. In February 1988 the two nationalities clashed in Sumgait, and dozens of Armenians were killed. Threats to the Politburo’s control existed even in places that experienced no such violence. In June 1988 the Lithuanian nationalists took a further step by forming Sajudis; other ‘popular fronts’ of this kind were formed also in Latvia and Estonia. The Belorussian Communist Party Central Committee tried to suppress the popular front in Minsk, but the founding members simply decamped to neighbouring Lithuania and held their founding congress in Vilnius.

The tranquillity in Russia and Ukraine gave grounds for official optimism since these two republics contained nearly seven tenths of the USSR’s population. Most Soviet citizens were not marching, shouting and demanding in 1988. Not only that: a considerable number of people in the Baltic, Transcaucasian and Central Asian regions did not belong to the titular nationality of each Soviet republic. Around twenty-five million Russians lived outside the RSFSR. They constituted thirty-seven per cent of the population in Kazakhstan, thirty-four per cent in Latvia and thirty per cent in Estonia.¹⁶ In all three Baltic Soviet republics so-called ‘Interfronts’ were being formed that consisted mainly of Russian inhabitants who felt menaced by the local nationalisms and who were committed to the maintenance of the Soviet Union.

Shcherbytskiy prevented Rukh, the Ukrainian popular front, from holding its founding congress until September 1989. In Russia there was no analogous front; for there was no country from which, according to Russian nationalists, Russia needed to be separated in order to protect her interests. There was, however, much nationalist talk. An organization called Pamyat, which had been created with the professed aim of preserving Russian traditional culture, exhibited anti-Semitic tendencies; unlike the popular fronts in the non-Russian republics, it had no commitment to democracy. But Gorbachev reasonably judged that the situation was containable. What he underestimated was the possibility that Ligachev and his associates, too, might play the linked cards of Soviet state pride and of Russian nationalism. Ligachev was affronted by the relentless public criticism of the Stalin years, and he was looking for an opportunity to reassert official pride in the Russian nation’s role during the First Five-Year Plan and the Second World War. Many other party leaders felt sympathy with him.

Ligachev bided his time until March 1988, when Gorbachev was about to leave for a trip to Yugoslavia. A letter had reached the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya from an obscure Leningrad communist named Nina Andreeva, who demanded the rehabilitation of Stalin’s reputation and implied that the country’s woes after the October Revolution had been chiefly the fault of the Jewish element in the party leadership’s composition. Despite this anti-Semitism, Ligachev facilitated the letter’s publication and organized a meeting of newspaper editors to impress on them that the season of free-fire shooting at communism past and present was at an end.

Gorbachev conducted an enquiry on his return; but Ligachev lied about his actions, and Gorbachev accepted him at his word and resumed his own policy of glasnost.¹⁷ Yet he also took precautions against any repetition of the event. Most importantly, he enhanced the position of Alexander Yakovlev, who had been a Politburo member since mid-1987 and became the radical-reformer counter-weight to Ligachev in the central party apparatus after Yeltsin’s departure. Yakovlev supervised the publication of material about abuses under Brezhnev as well as under Stalin. A number of articles also appeared about Bukharin, who was depicted as the politician who had deserved to succeed Lenin.¹⁸ The image of Bukharin as harmless dreamer was at variance with historical reality; but Gorbachev believed in it — and, for both pragmatic and psychological purposes, he needed positive stories about Soviet communism to balance the exposes of the terroristic practices of the 1930s.

The problem for him was that the new journalism excited the reading public without managing to enlist its active political participation. The reformist magazines were inadvertently bringing all existing Soviet politicians, with the notable exception of Gorbachev, into disrepute. If only the first decade of the USSR’s history was officially deemed to have been beneficial, how could the Politburo justify its continuing rule?

Gorbachev had hoped to avoid such a reaction by pensioning off those older politicians who had been prominent under Brezhnev. In his first year in power he had imposed new first secretaries on twenty-four out of seventy-two of the RSFSR’s provincial party committees. Between April 1986 and March 1988 a further nineteen such appointments were made. Hardly any of these appointees came from Stavropol.¹⁹ Gorbachev wanted to break with the Soviet custom whereby a political patron favoured his career-long clients. Most of the appointees had recently been working under his gaze in Moscow and appeared to have the necessary talent. The snag was that the new incumbents of office made little effort to alter local practices and attitudes. On arrival in their localities, Gorbachev’s newcomers typically went native. The fact that they were younger and better educated than their predecessors made no difference to their behaviour.

In another way Gorbachev himself was acting traditionally. Since January 1987 it was official policy that local party organizations should elect their own secretaries; and yet Gorbachev persisted in making his own appointments through the central party apparatus.

So why was he infringing his own policy for internal party reform? The answer highlights the scale of the obstacles in his path. He knew that party committees throughout the USSR were blocking the introduction of multi- candidate elections. Only one in every eleven secretaryships at all the various local levels was filled by such competition in 1987–8. Worse still, merely one per cent of province-level secretaries obtained posts in this fashion. And the fresh air ventilating public discussions in Moscow seldom reached the ‘localities’: the provincial press clamped down on the opportunities of glasnost. It is therefore unsurprising that Gorbachev did not relinquish his