It must be mentioned that there had been a rise in the USSR’s net material product by eleven per cent in the half-decade after 1983; but this had been obtained primarily through the tightening of labour discipline and the sacking of incompetent, corrupt officials. Such a strategy had been initiated by Andropov and resumed by Gorbachev. It had a distinctly limited potential for the permanent enhancement of economic performance; and certainly it was unsustainable once the decentralizing decrees of 1987–8 started to have an impact. Between 1988 and 1990 net material product tumbled by nine per cent. The per capita consumption of factory-produced goods rose annually by less than 2.5 per cent in the five years after 1985. For food, the increase was 1.4 per cent; and — admittedly, mainly because of the anti-alcohol campaign — there was a decrease by 1.2 per cent for beverages and tobacco. Urban housing space per person rose merely by twelve per cent to a pitiful 13.1 square metres in the 1980s.6
The reorientation of the industrial sector towards the needs of civilian consumers was an unattained goal. Gorbachev had promised much material improvement, but delivered deterioration. Instead of an advance to universal material well-being there was a reversion to food-rationing. Soviet queues, already legendary for their length, became longer and angrier in the course of 1989.
A rationing system had existed for food products in certain provincial cities even before 1985: it was one of Ligachev’s taunts at Yeltsin that, during his tenure of the local party secretaryship, he had issued the inhabitants of Sverdlovsk with ration-cards to do their shopping. Steadily the system was geographically extended. Already at the end of 1988, meat was rationed in twenty-six out of fifty-five regions of the RSFSR. Sugar was even scarcer: only two regions managed to get by without rationing.7 At the same time the hospitals were reporting shortages of medicines and there was no end in sight to inadequate provision of housing and everyday services. It is true that the annual growth in the output of agriculture rose from one per cent in the first half of the decade to just under two per cent in the second.8 But production remained inadequate for the needs of consumers. Throughout the 1980s, agricultural imports constituted a fifth of the population’s calorific intake.
To the stupefaction of the Politburo (and nearly all commentators in the USSR and the West), a full-scale economic crisis had occurred. Its abruptness was as impressive as its depth. Suddenly Gorbachev was faced with two life-or-death alternatives: either to abandon the reforms or to make them yet more radical. He never gave serious consideration to the former; his experience in his Stavropol days and subsequently had proved to him that Brezhnev’s policies would lead only to a widening of the gap in technology and organization between the USSR and the capitalist West.
Boldness therefore seemed to him the only realistic choice. When the Law on the State Enterprise and other measures failed to produce the desired results, Gorbachev talked about the need to go further and create a ‘socialist market economy’ — and while he refrained from defining the term, several of his advisers suggested that it should involve more market than socialism. Perhaps Gorbachev was at his most relaxed when speaking about agriculture. Already in 1986, for instance, he had authoritatively proposed that each sovkhoz and kolkhoz should be run on the basis of ‘family contracts’.9 By this he meant that a family or household would take over a particular function on the farm and be rewarded for any increase in productivity. As his critics noted, this would involve a reversion to peasant forms of farming; but Gorbachev faced them down by openly advocating the need to turn the peasant into ‘master of the land’.10
But this change in ideas was not yet realized in policy, far less in practice. Basic positive changes in agriculture did not occur, and the situation in industry and commerce was no more inspiring. On the contrary, officials in every republic, region and province implemented only such aspects of legislation as did not damage their immediate interests. Initially their inclination was to show outward enthusiasm for Gorbachev while disobeying his instructions. But in some localities the attitude was sterner and officials engaged in blatant sabotage. For example, the Leningrad city administration gave orders to withdraw sausages from the fridges in its warehouses and bury them in a specially-dug trench on the city’s outskirts. These were the politics of criminal provocation. Life without beef and chicken was bad enough for ordinary citizens; without sausages it became intolerable, and Gorbachev got the blame.
Even so, the central party and governmental bodies remained powerful enough to secure the establishment of a rising number of small private-sector co-operatives in most major cities. The trouble was that these new enterprises were distrusted by the rest of society, especially by people on low fixed incomes: the pensioners, the war invalids, the poorly-paid unskilled workers. The co-ops had a reputation as scams for speculation, and certainly they did little to expand manufacturing output. This was not exclusively their fault since the local political authorities usually withheld licences for private industrial enterprises. Co-ops operated mainly in the economy’s service and retail sectors and flourished in the form of private restaurants and clothes-kiosks which bought up goods in supply and put a large mark-up on them.
The consequence was that these same goods were not being sold in state-owned enterprises. The co-ops aggravated the shortages in the shops and raised the cost of living. They also added to the problems of law- breaking since their owners had to bribe local government officials in order to be allowed to trade; and often it was impossible for them to obtain raw materials and equipment except by colluding with venal factory directors. The Kremlin reformers called ineffectually for honesty. But the reality was that they would have found it even more difficult to install co-ops if the members of local administrative elites had not benefited materially from them. Illegality had to be accepted as companion to the re-emergence of private economic activity.
By the approach of winter 1989–90, all this brought notoriety to the Politburo’s reforms. Milk, tea, coffee, soap and meat had vanished from state retail outlets even in Moscow. The dairy-product shops were hit particularly badly. They often had to function for days at a time without anything to sell: cartons of milk had ceased to reach them, and the staff had nothing to do but explain to an ill-tempered public that they had nothing to sell.
Not all citizens were willing to tolerate their plight. A great strike was organized by coal-miners in Kemerovo in the Kuz Basin and their example was followed by the work-force of the mines in the Don Basin — and the miners in Karaganda in Kazakhstan also struck in the first half of 1989. A further strike occurred in November in the mines around Norilsk in the Siberian far north.11 All these strikes were settled in favour of the strikers, who demanded higher wages and improved living conditions; and in contrast with Soviet political practice since the Civil War no repressive sanctions were applied against the strike leaders.12 Independently-elected strike committees were in operation. The Council of Ministers under Ryzhkov did little else in these months but try to effect a reconciliation with those segments of the working class which threatened to do it damage. The government feared that a Soviet equivalent of Poland’s Solidarity was in the making.13
But the Soviet authorities weathered the storm. The strikers lived in far-flung areas, and Ryzhkov and his fellow ministers managed to isolate them from the rest of society by quickly offering them higher wages. Yet the government was faced by a society embittered against it. Elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies had duly occurred in March 1989, and the result administered the greatest electoral shock to the communists since the Constituent Assembly polls in 1917–18. Across the country thirty-eight province-level party secretaries were defeated.14 So, too, were city secretaries in the republican capitals in Kiev, Minsk and Alma-Ata. Even Yuri Soloviev, Politburo candidate member and Leningrad communist party boss, was rejected by voters. Unlike Lenin, Gorbachev did not overturn the elections. To those of his party comrades who had incurred the people’s disapproval he signalled that they should step down from their posts in the party and other institutions.
None the less the Congress was not without its problems for Gorbachev. Eighty-eight per cent of the delegates were full or candidate members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and most of these disliked proposals for further reforms.15 Yuri Afanasev, who was committed to just such reforms, denounced the Congress as a ‘Stalinist-Brezhnevite’ body with ‘an aggressively obedient majority’.16 Gorbachev thought him ungrateful and irresponsible; for Afanasev had needed his protection to consolidate himself in public life.
Gorbachev also felt betrayed by criticisms he suffered in the non-Russian republics. In November 1988 the Estonian Supreme Soviet declared its right to veto laws passed in Moscow; in January 1989 Lithuanian nationalists held a demonstration against the continued location of Soviet Army garrisons in Lithuania. The official authorities in these countries decided to drop Russian as the state language. Latvia was not far behind: in the course of the elections there was a protest rally in Riga against the Latvian Communist Party Central Committee’s repudiation of ‘anti-Soviet and separatist’ trends of thought in Latvia. The mood of the majority nationalities in the Baltic republics was shared in the Transcaucasus, but with fatal consequences. A demonstration in favour of national independence was held in the Georgian capital Tbilisi in April 1989. Gorbachev returned from abroad in the course of the crisis, but
