The Penguin History of Modern Russia

overestimated the inherent attractiveness of their ideas. Probably, too, they were distracted by the cardinal significance they attached to relations with the USA. Negotiations with President Reagan took precedence over all other aspects of foreign policy. As the hidden dimensions of the USSR’s domestic problems became apparent to Gorbachev, so did his need for a drastic reduction in Soviet military expenditure. In practical terms this could be achieved only if both superpowers agreed to an end to the ‘arms race’ between them.

In October 1986 a summit meeting was held in Reykjavik, where Gorbachev won over Reagan to a proposal for all nuclear weapons to be destroyed within ten years. But at the last moment Reagan’s aides, who wished to bargain from a position of military superiority, dissuaded him from signing the preliminary agreement. The two men parted, unable to look one another in the face. Yet Reagan continued to wish Gorbachev well. The denunciations of Stalin and Brezhnev; Sakharov’s release from exile; the lightening grip on Eastern Europe: all these things counted in Gorbachev’s favour among Western governments. So that the amicable relations between the USA and the USSR survived the debacle in Reykjavik. By December 1987 Gorbachev and Reagan were able to co-sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington whereby all ground-based intermediate nuclear weapons would be destroyed. The Cold War was gradually being ended; it was not yet a full peace, but it was no mere truce either.

In April 1988 the USSR announced its intention to make a swift, complete withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan. Constantly Gorbachev emphasized his commitment to ‘new thinking’ in international relations. Despite the primacy of the USSR-USA relationship, moreover, he wanted also to remove tensions from the Soviet Union’s relations with other regions. Feelers were put out to the People’s Republic of China. In an overture to Western Europe he spoke of ‘the common European home’. On a visit to Vladivostok he spoke of the Pacific as ‘our common home’ and asked for friendlier links with Japan. If he had gone to the North Pole, he would no doubt have charmed the polar bears with his commitment to ‘the common Arctic home’.

On 7 December 1988 Gorbachev laid out the parameters of his foreign policy in a speech to the United Nations Assembly in New York. Marxist-Leninist concepts were tacitly rejected.²⁶ The need for global peace, Gorbachev asserted, transcended support for class struggle. The world had become an ‘interdependent’ place. ‘Common human values’ had to triumph. Unlike his book Perestroika, the speech scarcely mentioned Lenin. In order to authenticate his commitment to peace and reconciliation, Gorbachev announced a unilateral cut in the size of the Soviet Army by a tenth; he also promised the recall of six divisions from Eastern Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev mounted to a peak of popularity abroad. Every agreement between Washington and Moscow had made global international relations safer and more controllable. If he had died in New York, he would already have secured a reputation as one of the great figures of the twentieth century.

In the USSR, too, he had effected what had once been a virtually inconceivable metamorphosis of politics and culture. Citizen talked unto citizen. Dangerous opinions could be shared outside the narrow boundaries of the family or group of friends. Soviet public life had been uplifted. Hidden issues had been dragged into the open air. Institutional complacency had been disturbed. Personnel had been re-appointed, policies redesigned. The entire structure of state had been shaken, and Gorbachev let it be known that more walls had to be brought down before he could properly rebuild as he wished.

While battering the system in 1986–8, he hoped to change the Soviet order and secure popular approval and political legitimacy throughout society. He still aimed, in his confused fashion of thought, to preserve the Soviet Union and the one-party state. Lenin and the October Revolution were meant to remain publicly hallowed. But he failed to understand that his actions were strengthening the very phenomena which he was trying to eliminate. Glasnost and perestroika were undermining the political and economic foundations of the Soviet order. Localism, nationalism, corruption, illegal private profiteering and distrust of official authority: all these phenomena, which had grown unchecked under the rule of Brezhnev, had been reinforced by the dismantlement of central controls undertaken by Gorbachev. He was Russia’s ‘holy fool’, and like the ‘holy fool’ he did not know it.

24 Imploding Imperium (1989)

By late 1988 the optimism of even Gorbachev had been dented. As a full member of the Politburo since 1980 he had been privy to many statistics denied to the general public. But not even the Politburo had been given reliable information. Reports were automatically pruned of anything very discouraging, and anyway every local branch of administration misled the centre about the real situation.¹

There had been a constant official prescription that crises were the exclusive characteristic of capitalism and that they could not occur under ‘developed socialism’. In reality practically every index of economic performance was depressing. The technological gap between the USSR and industrially-advanced capitalist countries was widening in every sector except the development of armaments: the Soviet Union had been left far behind in both information technology and biotechnology. The state budget in the last years of Brezhnev would have been massively insolvent if the government had not been able to derive revenues from domestic sales of vodka. The Ministry of Finance depended heavily on popular consumption of alcohol. It relied to an even greater extent on the export of petrochemical fuels at high prices. Oil and gas constituted eighteen per cent of exports in 1972 and fifty- four per cent by 1984.²

The USSR resembled a Third World ex-colony in these and other respects. Agriculture remained so inefficient that two fifths of hard-currency expenditure on imports were for food.³ By the early 1980s, revenues earned by exports to the West could no longer be used mainly to buy advanced industrial technology and equipment: two fifths of the USSR’s hard-currency purchases abroad were of animal feed; and the purchase of energy by the countries of Eastern Europe at lower than the world-market prices deprived the USSR of the full value of its trade. Its very industrial achievements had occurred at grievous ecological expense. Large areas became unfit for human habitation. The Caspian Sea, Lake Baikal and the river Volga had been poisoned and the air in major cities such as Chelyabinsk was dangerous to breathe.

Yet while fighting the cause of economic reforms, Gorbachev had made many mistakes. First the anti-alcohol campaign and then the excessive investment in the machine-tool industry in 1985–6 had depleted state revenues without producing long-term gains in output. Nor was this the end of his mismanagement. The openness of the debate conducted by the authorities in 1987–8 on the need to raise retail prices had the undesired effect of inducing consumers into buying up and hoarding all manner of goods. Shortages in the shops were increasing. And the Law on the State Enterprise, by empowering workers to elect their own managers, led to a steep rise in wages. Payments to urban work-forces increased by nine per cent in 1988 and thirteen per cent in 1989.⁴ The Soviet budget was massively in deficit. Foreign indebtment and domestic inflation increased sharply; a decline in industrial output set in. The USSR was entering a state of economic emergency.

Gorbachev’s choice of collaborators, too, was far from ideal. Ryzhkov, his Chairman of the Council of Ministers, was a reformer, but a reformer who wanted ‘to go to the market’ at a snail’s pace. And whereas Ryzhkov at least believed in a further movement to reform, Ligachev did not. Gorbachev erred, when demoting Ligachev in the party leadership in September 1988, in putting him in charge of agriculture. This was like trusting the fox to guard the hen-house. Under Ligachev’s guidance not even the size of the private plots was increased.

Even if Gorbachev had avoided such errors, however, he would also have needed a much better run of luck than he received. On 8 December 1988, a day after he had made his triumphant address to the United Nations Assembly, the cities of Leninakan and Spitak in Armenia were devastated by an earthquake. More than 25,000 people died. Ryzhkov phoned to New York to relay the news to Gorbachev. Projected diplomatic negotiations were abandoned. Gorbachev left the USA for Moscow next day and straightway hurried to Armenia. He and his wife talked to ordinary Armenians near the rubble of their former homes. The Gorbachevs shed tears over the plight of the population. But they were totally unprepared for one thing: the fact that Armenians to a man and woman were agitated more about the politics of Karabakh than about the effects of the earthquake.⁵

Radical economic reform was therefore being attempted in a very unpropitious situation. The war in Afghanistan continued to involve massive expenditure until the last Soviet soldier returned home in February 1989. The Chernobyl nuclear explosion was a financial as well as a human and ecological disaster. Now the USSR’s resources, already stretched to breaking point, had to cope with the task of recovery from the Armenian earthquake. Gorbachev could have been forgiven for cursing his misfortune.