Postwar

further deployment of the Red Army beyond its frontiers: as Politburo member Yegor Ligachev would later acknowledge to the American journalist David Remnick, after Afghanistan there could no longer be any question of applying force in Eastern Europe.

It says something about the underlying fragility of the Soviet Union that it was so vulnerable to the impact of one—albeit spectacularly unsuccessful—neo-colonial adventure. But the disaster in Afghanistan, like the cost of the accelerating arms race of the early ‘80s, would not in itself have induced the collapse of the system. Sustained by, fear, inertia and the self-interest of the old men who ran it, Brezhnev’s ‘era of stagnation’ might have lasted indefinitely. Certainly there was no countervailing authority, no dissident movement—whether in the Soviet Union or its client states—that could have brought it low. Only a Communist could do that. And it was a Communist who did.

The guiding premise of the Communist project was its faith in the laws of history and the interests of the collectivity, which would always trump the motives and actions of individuals. It was thus ironically appropriate that its destiny should in the end have been determined by the fate of men. On November 10th 1982, at the age of 76, Leonid Brezhnev finally gave up the ghost, having long since come to resemble it. His successor, Andropov, was already 68 and not in good health. In just over a year, before he could implement any of the reforms that he planned, Andropov died and was replaced as General Secretary by Konstantin Chernenko, himself aged 72 and in such poor health that he could hardly complete his speech at Andropov’s funeral in February 1984. Thirteen months later he, too, was dead.

The death in quick succession of three old Communists, all of them born before World War One, was somehow symptomatic: the generation of Party leaders with first-hand memories of the Soviet Union’s Bolshevik origins, and whose lives and careers had been blighted by Stalin, was now disappearing. They had inherited and overseen an authoritarian, gerontocratic bureaucracy, whose overwhelming priority was its own survival: in the world that Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko had grown up in, merely dying in your bed was no insignificant accomplishment. Henceforth, however, that world would be run by younger men: no less instinctively authoritarian, but who would have little option but to address the problems of corruption, stagnation and inefficiency that plagued the Soviet system from top to bottom.

Chernenko’s successor, duly promoted to Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on March 11th 1985, was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Born in a village of the southern Stavropol region in 1931, he had been elected to the Central Committee at the age of 41. Now, just thirteen years later, he was at the head of the Party. Gorbachev was not only twenty years younger than his Soviet precursors: he was also younger than every American president until Bill Clinton. His rapid rise had been encouraged and facilitated by Andropov and he was widely seen as a likely reformer.

A reformer: but hardly a radical. Mikhail Gorbachev was very much an apparatchik . He had risen through the Party, from First Secretary of the Stavropol district Young Communists in 1956 through secretary of the regional state farms committee to member of the Supreme Soviet (elected in 1970). The new leader incarnated many of the sentiments of his Communist generation: never openly critical of the Party or its policies, he was nonetheless deeply affected and excited by the revelations of 1956, only to be let down by the mistakes of the Khrushchev era and disappointed at the repression and inertia of the Brezhnev decades that followed.

Mikhail Gorbachev was in this sense a classic reform Communist—it is no coincidence that he was close friends at the Moscow University Law Faculty in the early Fifties with Zdenek Mlynar, who would go on to play a central role in the Prague Spring of 1968. But like all the reform Communists of his generation, Gorbachev was first a Communist and only then a reformer. As he explained to the French Communist newspaper L’Humanite in a February 1986 interview, the Communism of Lenin remained for him a fine and unsullied ideal. Stalinism? ‘A concept made up by opponents of Communism and used on a large scale to smear the Soviet Union and socialism as a whole’.[287]

No doubt that is what a Secretary General of the Soviet Party would say, even in 1986. But Gorbachev certainly believed it, and the reforms he initiated were quite consciously Leninist—or ‘Socialist’—in intent. Indeed Gorbachev may well have been more ideologically serious than some of his Soviet predecessors: it is not by chance that whereas Nikita Khrushchev had once famously declared that, were he British, he would vote Tory, Mikhail Gorbachev’s favorite foreign statesman was Felipe Gonzalez of Spain, whose brand of social democracy the Soviet leader came in time to think of as closest to his own.

To the extent that hopes were vested in Gorbachev, this reflected more than anything the absence of any domestic opposition in the Soviet Union. Only the Party could clean up the mess it had made, and by good fortune the Party had elected as its leader a man with both the energy and the administrative experience to make the effort. For in addition to being unusually well educated and widely read for a senior Soviet bureaucrat, Gorbachev displayed a distinctively Leninist quality: he was willing to compromise his ideals in order to secure his goals.

There was nothing mysterious about the difficulties that Gorbachev had inherited as General Secretary of the CPSU. Impressed by what he saw during travels in Western Europe during the seventies, the new leader intended from the outset to devote his main efforts to an overhaul of the Soviet Union’s moribund economy and the intertwined inefficiencies and corruption of its top-heavy institutional apparatus. Foreign debt was rising steadily, as the international price of oil, the Soviet Union’s major export, fell from its late ‘70s peak: $30.7 billion by 1986, the debt would reach $54 billion by 1989. The economy, which had hardly grown through the course of the 1970s, was now actually shrinking: always qualitatively lagging, Soviet output was now quantatively inadequate as well. Arbitrarily-set central planningtargets, endemic shortages, supply bottlenecks and the absence of price or market indicators effectively paralyzed all initiative.

The starting point for ‘reform’ in such a system, as Hungarian and other Communist economists had long appreciated, was decentralization of pricing and decision-making. But this encountered near-insuperable obstacles. Outside of the Baltics almost no-one in the Soviet Union had any first-hand experience of independent farming or a market economy: of how to make something, to price it or find a buyer. Even after a 1986 Law on Individual Labour Activity authorized limited (small-scale) private enterprise, there were surprisingly few takers. Three years later there were still just 300,000 businesspeople in the whole Soviet Union, in a population of 290 million.

Moreover, any would-be economic reformer faced a chicken-egg dilemma. If economic reform began with decentralization of decision-making, or the granting of autonomy to local businesses and the abandoning of directives from afar, how were producers, managers or businessmen to function without a market? In the short- run there would be more shortages and bottlenecks, not fewer, as everyone retreated to regional self-sufficiency and even to a local barter economy. On the other hand a ‘market’ could not just be announced. The very word posed serious political risks in a society where ‘capitalism’ had been officially excoriated and abhorred for decades (Gorbachev himself avoided all mention of a market economy until late in 1987, and even then only ever spoke of a ‘socialist market’).

The reforming instinct was to compromise: to experiment with the creation—from above—of a few favored enterprises freed from bureaucratic encumbrances and assured a reliable supply of raw materials and skilled labor. These, it was reasoned, would serve as successful and even profitable models for other, similar, enterprises: the goal was controlled modernization and progressive adaptation to pricing and production in response to demand. But such an approach was foredoomed by its operating premise—that the authorities could create efficient businesses by administrative fiat.

By pumping scarce resources into a few model farms, mills, factories or services the Party was indeed able to forge temporarily viable and even notionally profitable units—but only with heavy subsidies and by starving less- favored operations elsewhere. The result was even more distortion and frustration. Meanwhile farm managers and local directors, uncertain of the way the wind was blowing, hedged their bets against the return of planned norms and stockpiled anything they could lay their hands on lest centralized controls tighten up again.

To Gorbachev’s conservative critics this was an old story. Every Soviet reform program since 1921 began the same way and ran out of steam for the same reasons, starting with Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Serious economic reforms implied the relaxation or abandonment of controls. Not only did this initially exacerbate the problems it was designed to solve, it meant just what it said: a loss of control. But Communism depended upon control—indeed Communism was control: control of the economy, control of knowledge, control of movement and opinion and people. Everything else was dialectics, and dialectics—as a veteran Communist explained to the young Jorge Semprun in Buchenwald—‘is the art and technique of always landing on your feet’.[288]