The Penguin History of Modern Russia

his efforts to prevent bloodshed were frustrated by Georgian communist leaders and Soviet Army commanders. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed.¹⁷

There was further trouble in the republics before the Congress of People’s Deputies convened. The Soviet Army was dispatched to Uzbekistan, Estonia and Latvia in reaction to the possibility of protests on the Georgian model. The Soviet ‘empire’ was going to be maintained by force. Such actions were not guided primarily by Russian nationalism: the Politburo would have done the same in Leningrad or Saratov or Kursk. But this is not the way it appeared to the republican protesters. In June, Estonia proclaimed its economic autonomy and Lithuania declared its right to overrule the USSR’s legislation. Even quiet Moldavia had a popular front that rejected the area’s annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940.

So that the Congress, whose first session lasted from 25 May to 9 June, reflected the political divisiveness in the country. What once had been said privately in living-rooms was given full-throated public utterance. The proceedings were transmitted live on television and work stopped in factories and offices when sensitive issues were debated. Every citizen wanted to enjoy the spectacle. Most deputies were neither radicals nor out-and-out conservatives (in the sense of Soviet politicians wishing to avoid radical reforms). It was the middle-ranking politicians, administrators, managers and scholars who occupied a majority of the Congress seats. Such people were willing, on the whole, to support the General Secretary; but they would no longer offer automatic obedience. Shrugging off the tight discipline of previous years, they spoke passionately about the policies that bothered them. Gorbachev had to deploy much charm, guile and patience to hold them on his side in the elaboration of reforms.

He got his way. The specific form of this vast Congress had been of Gorbachev’s own making: it appealed to his sense of Russian traditions, notably the mass political gatherings of Lenin’s time. He was looking back to the October Revolution with rose-tinted glasses; in particular, he did not perceive that the soviets in 1917–18 had been a forum for endless, chaotic disputes as workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals discussed the issues of the day.

The turbulence of the Congress of People’s Deputies surprised him. But once created, the Congress had to be made to function. Having arranged that he should be elected Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Gorbachev chaired most sessions of the Congress; for he rightly judged that only he had the personal authority and mental agility to prevent debates from running out of control. The fact that a Congress of People’s Deputies had been elected at all was a massive achievement even though the elections were marred by gerrymandering by central and local political elites. But this was not an end in itself. Gorbachev needed to use the Congress as an institution for the ratification of his strategy for political and economic reform; he had to pre-empt its becoming simply a verbal battleground between conservatives and radicals.

Yeltsin again caused trouble. Standing as a candidate in Moscow, he had run a brilliant campaign against the sleazy lifestyle of the nomenklatura and had won nine tenths of the city’s vote. But this victory did not endear him to the Congress; and when it came to the Congress’s internal elections to the 542 seats of the new USSR Supreme Soviet, a majority rejected him. He obtained a seat only when an elected member of the Supreme Soviet voluntarily yielded his own seat to him. Gorbachev went along with this improvised compromise; he wanted to show that his own slogan of democratization was sincere: Yeltsin had to be seen to be treated decently.

Yeltsin and the Congress radicals showed Gorbachev no gratitude; they were determined to use the Congress as a means of constituting a formal opposition to the communist regime despite the fact that most of them were still communist party members. Around 300 of them gathered together in an Inter-Regional Group led by Yeltsin, Sakharov, Afanasev and the economist Gavril Popov. It included liberals, social-democrats, greens and even some communists; its unifying purpose was to push Gorbachev into making further moves against his conservative central and local party comrades. But the Inter-Regional Group itself could not throw off all caution. Its members were outnumbered by the conservative-communist rump at the Congress; and if they had seriously tried to undermine Gorbachev’s dominance, the only result would have been to destabilize his control over the communist party and to wreck the cause of reform.

The Inter-Regional Group also faced problems outside the Congress. Active popular opposition to communist conservatism was strongest in the non-Russian Soviet republics. It is true that political associations had been formed in Moscow and other Russian cities since 1987. These associations were known as the ‘informals’ (neformaly) since the USSR Constitution gave formal public recognition solely to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Some ‘informals’ had local and ecological interests; others were motivated primarily by particular credos: patriotism, anti-Stalinism, democracy, civil rights and socialism. In 1988 there were attempts to co-ordinate such activities and a ‘Klub Perestroika’ was created. Another such oppositionist organization was the Democratic Union. But neither the Club nor the Union had many branches in other cities of the RSFSR.¹⁸ Rivalries of ideology, region, class and personality inhibited the birth of a unified Russian radical movement.

This was a disadvantage not only for the Inter-Regional Group but also for Gorbachev. The various reformers in Russia were unable to stimulate much popular participation in their projects, and the neformaly had only a few thousand members. In such a situation it would not be impossible for Ligachev, were he ever to oust Gorbachev from the communist party leadership, to close down the Congress of People’s Deputies and re-establish the traditional structures of the communist regime.

Not that Russians were untouched by the excitement of the times. A religious and cultural renaissance had begun. The millenium of the Russian Orthodox Church was celebrated in 1988 and Gorbachev met Patriarch Pimen and transferred several churches and monasteries out of state control. The Church hierarchy had not covered itself in glory in earlier years and had regularly been castigated by the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well as by parish priests such as Dmitri Dudko and Gleb Yakunin for its failure to stand up to the Politburo. But this sorry history started to be forgotten, and cathedrals and churches were packed out with the believing few and the inquisitive many. Old ladies could safely stand by the kerb with ecclesiastical collecting boxes; clerics began to be invited on to TV and radio discussion programmes. Christian philosophical literature was produced in abundance. The Bible was put on open sale.

Not all developments were so high minded. Salacious booklets such as The Lovers of Catherine II were sold from stalls at Moscow metro stations; and publishing houses increasingly preferred to invest in Agatha Christie and John Le Carre than in the Russian literary classics. Russia was also acquiring a paperback trade in works on astrology, pet-rearing, horticulture, crossword puzzles and tarot cards. Pop music was broadcast on TV stations, and Paul McCartney recorded a special album for the Soviet market. Meanwhile Russian rock stars showed greater willingness to comment on issues of the day than their Western models. Youth did not revolt against authority; it despised and ignored it. Indeed citizens, both young and old, treated politics as a spectator sport but not a process deserving their participation. The quest for private pleasure outdid the zeal for public service.

This dispiriting situation was readily explicable. People were exhausted by queues, food shortages and administrative chaos. Life was getting more arduous day by day. Despite this, Gorbachev was still the country’s most popular politician (and it was not until mid-1990 that Yeltsin overtook him in this respect).¹⁹ Yet politicians generally were not respected. Gorbachev inadvertently added to the effect by his tactics: he held no trials of oppressive rulers of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; even the torturers, false delators and political killers of the 1930s and 1940s escaped with only verbal criticism. The pensions and honours of the victimizers remained untouched, and Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich lived out their old age without interference: Molotov even had his party membership restored to him. The result was that while the mass media blared out their critique of past abuses in general terms, little was changed in the lives of the surviving victims. Historical unfairness remained in place. The practical and mental catharsis of Soviet society had been only half accomplished.

No wonder that most people remained quietly cynical. They had their own quiet, private aspirations. After years of being bored by stuffy Marxism-Leninism, their ideal of Freedom was not the freedom to join a political party and attend open meetings on city squares. They wanted to stay at home and enjoy the freedom to be frivolous, apolitical, unmobilized.

Such a desire was especially prevalent in Russia; but things stood somewhat differently in the other Soviet republics. Middle-aged citizens in the Baltic region could remember a time when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been independent states. This was the case only for the very elderly in the Transcaucasus. Nevertheless there was trouble in store for the Kremlin in all republics. Each of them had been territorially demarcated according to ethnic demography; each of them had enhanced its sense of individuality by emphasizing the importance of the local