It soon became obvious to Gorbachev that to land on his feet as he wrestled with the Soviet economy he must accept that the Soviet economic conundrum could not be addressed in isolation. It was but a symptom of a larger problem. The Soviet Union was run by men who had a vested interest in the political and institutional levers of a command economy; its endemic minor absurdities and quotidian corruption were the very source of their authority and power. In order for the Party to reform the economy it would first have to reform itself.
This, too, was hardly a new idea—the periodic purges under Lenin and his successors had typically proclaimed similar objectives. But times had changed. The Soviet Union, however repressive and backward, was no longer a murderous totalitarian tyranny. Thanks to Khrushchev’s monumental housing projects most Soviet families now lived in their own apartments. Ugly and inefficient, these low-rent flats nonetheless afforded ordinary people a degree of privacy and security unknown to earlier generations: they were no longer so exposed to informers or likely to be betrayed to the authorities by their neighbors or their in-laws. The age of terror was over for most people and, for Gorbachev’s generation at least, a return to the time of mass arrests and party purges was unthinkable.
In order to break the stranglehold of the Party
On that day, at 1.23 am, one of the four huge graphite reactors at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl (Ukraine) exploded, releasing into the atmosphere 120 million curies of radioactive materiel—more than one hundred times the radiation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Chernobyl was not the Soviet Union’s first environmental disaster. At Cheliabinsk-40, a secret research site near Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, a nuclear waste tank exploded in 1957, severely polluting an area 8 km wide and 100 km long. 76 million cubic metres of radioactive waste poured into the Urals river system, contaminating it for decades. 10,000 people were eventually evacuated and 23 villages bulldozed. The reactor at Cheliabinsk was from the first generation of Soviet atomic constructions and had been built by slave labour in 1948-51.[289]
Other man-made environmental calamities on a comparable scale included the pollution of Lake Baikal; the destruction of the Aral Sea; the dumping in the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea of hundreds of thousands of tons of defunct atomic naval vessels and their radioactive contents; and the contamination by sulphur dioxide from nickel production of an area the size of Italy around Norilsk in Siberia. These and other ecological disasters were all the direct result of indifference, bad management and the Soviet ‘slash and burn’ approach to natural resources. They were born of a culture of secrecy. The Cheliabinsk-40 explosion was not officially acknowledged for many decades, even though it occurred within a few kilometers of a large city—the same city where, in 1979, several hundred people died of anthrax leaked from a biological weapons plant in the town centre.
The problems with the USSR’s nuclear reactors were well known to insiders: two separate KGB reports dated 1982 and 1984 warned of ‘shoddy’ equipment (supplied from Yugoslavia) and serious deficiencies in Chernobyl’s reactors 3 and 4 (it was the latter that exploded in 1986). But just as this information had been kept secret (and no action taken) so the Party leadership’s first, instinctive response to the explosion on April 26th was to keep quiet about it—there were, after all, fourteen Chernobyl-type plants in operation by then all across the country. Moscow’s first acknowledgement that anything untoward had happened came fully four days after the event, and then in a two-sentence official communique.
But Chernobyl could not be kept secret: international anxiety and the Soviets’ own inability to contain the damage forced Gorbachev first to make a public statement two weeks later, acknowledging some but not all of what had taken place, and then to call upon foreign aid and expertise. And just as his fellow citizens were thus made publicly aware for the first time of the scale of official incompetence and indifference to life and health, so Gorbachev was forced to acknowledge the extent of his country’s problems. The bungling, the mendacity and the cynicism of the men responsible both for the disaster and the attempt to cover it up could not be dismissed as a regrettable perversion of Soviet values: they
Beginning in the autumn of 1986 Gorbachev shifted gears. In December of that year Andrei Sakharov, the world’s best-known dissident, was liberated from house arrest in Gorky (Nizhniy Novgorod), a harbinger of the large-scale release of Soviet political prisoners that began the following year. Censorship was relaxed—1987 saw the long-delayed publication of Vassily Grossman’s
By 1987 more than nine out of ten Soviet households possessed a television, and Gorbachev’s tactic was initially a striking success: by creating a
Informal organizations sprang up: notably ‘Club Perestroika’, formed in Moscow’s Mathematical Institute in 1987, which in turn gave birth to ‘Memorial’, whose members devoted themselves to ‘keeping alive the memory of the victims’ of the Stalinist past. Initially taken aback at their own very existence—the Soviet Union, after all, was still a one-party dictatorship—they soon flourished and multiplied. By 1988 Gorbachev’s support came increasingly from outside the Party, from the country’s newly emerging public opinion.
What had happened was that the logic of Gorbachev’s reformist goals, and his decision, in practice, to appeal to the nation against his conservative critics within the apparatus, had transformed the dynamic of
In the Party conference of June 1988 he reiterated his commitment to reform and to the relaxation of censorship, and called for the preparation of open (i.e. contested) elections to a Congress of People’s Deputies for the following year. In October 1988 he demoted some of his leading opponents—notably Yegor Ligachev, a longstanding critic—and had himself elected President of the Supreme Soviet (i.e. head of state), displacing Andrei Gromyko, last of the dinosaurs. Within the Party he still faced strong rearguard opposition; but in the country at large his popularity was at its peak, which was why he was able to press forward—and indeed had little option but to do so.[290]
The elections of May/June 1989 were the first more or less free vote in the Soviet Union since 1918. They were not multi-party elections—that would not happen until 1993, by which time the Soviet Union itself was long gone—and the outcome was largely pre-determined by restricting many seats to Party candidates and forbidding internal Party competition for them; but the Congress they elected included many independent and critical voices. Its proceedings were broadcast to an audience of some 100 million spectators, and demands by Sakharov and others for further change—notably the dethroning of the increasingly discredited Party from its privileged position —could not be swept aside, even by an initially reluctant Gorbachev. The Communists’ monopoly of power was slipping away, and with Gorbachev’s encouragement the Congress would duly vote the following February to remove from the Soviet constitution the key clause—Article Six—assigning the Communist Party a ‘leading role’.[291]
