Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union

5. Turning Point, 1987-88

The erosion or disintegration of central authority was unanimously regarded as the primary reason for the crisis. Ellman and Kontorovich.338

At some point in 1987, I personally realized that a society based on violence and fear could not be reformed and that we faced a momentous historical task of dismantling an entire social and economic system with all its ideological, economic and political roots. Alexander Yakovlev.339

Comrades, we have every right to say that the nationality question has been solved in our country. Mikhail Gorbachev.340

The impact of a personality like him [Bukharin] cannot be freely acknowledged, either because of political constraints that are today stronger than those under Khrushchev, or because of the lack of political and historical training among the debaters who sometimes do not know much about such affinities. It is astonishing to discover how many ideas of Bukharin’s anti-Stalinist program of 1928-29 were adopted by current reformers as their own and how much of their critique of past practices followed his strictures and prophecies even in their expression…. Quite obviously in the present situation the question is no longer how to industrialize a peasant country, but how to run an industrial giant. The environment of the 1960s and 1970s is very different from that of the 1920s. Naturally enough the current debates have ramifications beyond those put forward by those originally advocating NEP. However, actual arguments used in both periods coincide astonishingly. Moshe Lewin.341

In 1987 and 1988, the turning-point years of perestroika, the Gorbachev leadership of the CPSU abandoned the reform project of 1985-86. In the name of speeding up perestroika and overcoming “conservative resistance,” Gorbachev and his advisers adopted a new direction at the January 1987 Central Committee Plenum and the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988. These new policies objectively undermined the foundations of Soviet socialism—the leadership of the Communist Party, state property, and economic planning—and shattered the unity of the USSR as a multinational federal state. The turning point was not a discrete moment but an eighteen-month interval from January 1987 through June 1988, when the “radical political reform” and “radical economic reform” policies transformed perestroika from a potentially constructive program into its opposite, a demolition project that destroyed the socialist USSR.

The new policies weakened and dismantled centralized planning in favor of the market, promoted private property, and abandoned international solidarity. Central to all was the weakening of the Party. In the words of a U.S. historian, Robert V. Daniels, Gorbachev unleashed “a sequence of events at the political center, inherently unpredictable, that eviscerated the authority and legitimacy” of the Communist Party. Under the slogans “democratization” and “decentralization,” the process that Gorbachev set in motion in 1988-89 in the name of the Communist Party and its leaders quickly became irrevocable.342

How was this mutation possible? How could a CPSU general secretary embark on such a course? How could he get away with a course that, as early as 1988 led to economic decline and separatist fury? Archie Brown, a leading British analyst, observed, “Gorbachev could have been removed—and surely would have been—at a moment’s notice by the CC [Central Committee] of the CPSU on the advice of the Politburo had he openly criticized either Communism or socialism.”343 Brown was right. The attack on socialism did not come openly, but surreptitiously under the guise of improving socialism.

When the world remembers the Soviet drama of 1985-91 the mind’s eye sees the outward signs of disintegration visible in the 1989-91 endgame: ethnic strife, mass protest rallies, bread lines, and miners’ strikes. The processes and events of the two preceding years 1987 and 1988 are, by comparison, less visible.

In this middle period the class and political content of perestroika changed. In essence, the Soviet leadership replaced a seventy-year-old policy of struggle against capitalism and imperialism with a policy of surrender. The revolutionary movement had long harbored a tendency that favored an accommodation with capitalism at home and abroad. Since the 1950s, this tendency had acquired a new social base in the second, or private, economy that had been developing within socialism. The cost of competing militarily with the West, a competition vastly intensified by Reagan, added to the appeal of those seeking an accommodation with capitalism. In the 1980s, the need to deal with the chronic problems of slowing economic growth, poor consumer goods quality, political stagnation, and the strain of the Cold War, provided an opportunity for this tendency to reassert itself.

Gorbachev did not invent his new direction from thin air. Similar policy ideas had existed for decades in Soviet society and in the CPSU, though they fell out of favor after Khrushchev. Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post noted the history: ”Gorbachev’s brand of reformism caught much of the Western world by surprise, but he is actually part of a reform tradition almost as old as the party itself. Nikolai Bukharin, one of Lenin’s closest comrades, was godfather to this group.”344 In effect, in 1987-88 Gorbachev took off one ideological coat and put on another, though he briefly had an arm in the sleeve of each. Since the Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, Soviet dissidents and a section of the intellectuals kept alive this political trend’s main planks: cultural liberalism; a smaller, more relaxed ideological role for the CPSU; bourgeois liberal notions of democracy; emulation and appeasement of the West; and an antipathy to class struggle. This trend’s analysis of nationalism, Russian and non-Russian, remained faulty or non-existent. Its economic ideology, even when frowned upon in the Kremlin, thrived in corners of Soviet academia that maintained a sneaking regard for Western bourgeois doctrines. As an economic ideology, it stressed the advantages of market relations, not the plan; decentralization, not centralism; evolutionary methods, never coercion. It had a high estimate of “the natural advantages of the system,” a phrase much used early in the Gorbachev era. It stressed a “socialism of the productive forces,”345 which downplayed the need for struggle to perfect the relations of production, that is, ending class divisions. Accordingly, this wing of the CPSU stressed output and growth, but underestimated the need to keep all market relations and private property within strict bounds.

In 1987-88 the new course took three forms. First, Party reform became Party liquidation, and the exclusion of the Party from power. Second, under the banner of glasnost, the Soviet media became increasingly anti-Communist. Third, Gorbachev embraced private entrepreneurial activity.

In 1985 and 1986 the Soviet Communist press had demanded an end to Party abuses. The press railed against corruption, cronyism, patronage, nepotism, bureaucratic departmentalism, protection of loyal toadies by higher-ups, insufficient cadre training, formalism, complacency, and ideological weakness. Responding to such criticism, the Twenty-seventh Congress launched a program of Party reform. The reforms included new Party rules to reinforce criticism and self-criticism, and a new approach to collective leadership emphasizing personal accountability. The Congress also called for close supervision of the performance of Party leaders.346 Gorbachev never implemented the reforms.

Instead, in 1987-88 Gorbachev came to view the CPSU as the main obstacle to perestroika, and he decided to use “radical political reform,” to weaken it. As part of the attack on the Party, Gorbachev initiated a “de-Stalinization” campaign. Twice, in early 1987 and 1988, Gorbachev and Yakovlev waged major campaigns to drive the media to revise Party history. Khrushchev had pioneered this practice against Party opponents in 1956 and in 1961.347 Gorbachev gave his approval to economic exposés claiming Soviet statistics had been systematically falsified to understate economic failure, and that “Stalinist” stagnation was at the root of the crisis, which, Gorbachev alleged, was far worse than people realized. Gorbachev used denunciations of Stalin to weaken Ligachev and his allies. In February 1987, Gorbachev decided to relax even more the restraints on the media and to allow the media to air criticisms of Stalin. This represented an about-face from his warning six months earlier against “digging up the past.”348 An attack on Stalin helped Gorbachev create a coalition against honest socialist forces. As historian Stephen Kotkin said, his coalition joined together “those who denounced Stalin in the name of reforming socialism and those who denounced him in the name of repudiating socialism.”349 Stephen F. Cohen said that anti-Stalinism became the “ideology of Communist reform from above, as it was under Khrushchev.”350

In 1987 anti-Communist control of the mass media began to have other consequences. For example, when the Politburo was debating a highly risky proposal by the Gorbachev team to slash the state orders by 50 percent and force enterprises to sell the rest of their production on the market, Yakovlev’s appointments in the media whipped up a frenzy against the proposal’s opponents with ominous warnings of “conservatism, deceleration, and a return to stagnation.”351 Because of such pressure, the Politburo opted for Gorbachev’s ill-considered leap into the dark, and the economy went into a tailspin from which it never rebounded.

After 1987 no person outside of Gorbachev had more influence than Alexander Yakovlev on Soviet policies, particularly on those that undermined the CPSU and empowered anti-Party and pro-capitalist intellectuals. By his own admission Yakovlev was a social democrat. So were other key Gorbachev advisers. Georgi Shakhnazarov had referred to himself as a social democrat since the 1960s. Archie Brown, a British analyst, described Anatoly Chernyaev as “a longstanding liberal political thinker.” Gorbachev introduced Chernyaev as my “alter ego” to Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, a Social Democrat.352 According to D’Agostino, Chernyaev, Shakhnazarov, and Yakovlev did Gorbachev’s writing.353

Under Yakovlev’s tutelage, the political concepts of perestroika increasingly assumed a new meaning: “socialist pluralism,” became “pluralism of opinion,” and finally “political pluralism.”354 Gorbachev’s phrase, “various forms of the realization of socialist property,” soon lost “realization,” then “socialist,” to become simply “various forms of property.” A “socialist rule-of-law state” became a “state based on the rule of law.” Support for “socialist markets” evolved into “market socialism,” then a “regulated market economy.” As non-Russian republics succumbed to nationalist separatism, Yakovlev’s media allies avoided the words “nationalism” and “separatism.” Archie Brown, a Gorbachev sympathizer, discerned the pattern:

What generally happened was that Gorbachev would introduce or endorse a concept that had previously been banished from Soviet political discourse, but within his first few years as General Secretary he would attach the adjective “socialist” to it. Reform-minded intellectuals would seize on the concepts and elaborate them; by 1988 the more radical among them were dropping the “socialist” qualifier.…What was striking about Gorbachev was not only that, having launched many ideas alien to Marxism-Leninism but with a “socialist” or other qualification, he would take them up two years later in their revised form with all reservations removed.355

By 1987, Yakovlev was consciously working toward anti-socialist goals. The doctrine of peaceful coexistence, originally a form of anti-capitalist struggle by every means except military, changed into “universal human values,” a phrase that would eventually be used to justify an alliance with imperialism.356 Socialist democracy became “democratization,” interpreted as reducing the role of the Party. Socialism became “the socialist choice,” not a stage of development but a mere aspiration for social justice. Security and cooperation between socialist and capitalist Europe became our “Our Common European Home,” suggesting a far-reaching identity of interest going well beyond peace, mutually advantageous trade and other forms of cooperation.357 The words changed slowly, turning slogans and doctrines inside out.358 Ellman and Kontorovich said, “A veritable war on the official ideology was started…apparently before most of the radical policies were decided.”359 In early 1987, still outnumbered by pro-reform but non-revisionist Politburo opponents, Gorbachev and his allies boldly sought to use the glasnost media to fill the idea of perestroika with new “anti-Stalinist” content. Observing the same phenomenon, American journalist Robert Kaiser said, “Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Shevardnadze and their helpers were more resourceful and inventive than their conservative opponents. … By late 1986 and early 1987 he and his allies in the Party and in the intelligentsia were behaving a little like mischievous boys set loose in a china closet shattering taboos, while obviously relishing the sound of the breakage.”360

The sheer frequency with which David Remnick, the New York Times chief correspondent in Moscow, cited Yakovlev in Lenin’s Tomb, suggested constant contact. Having spent a decade in North America, Yakovlev understood the power of The Times to shape American perceptions. Ligachev repeatedly noted the coordination of Western and Soviet media.

Economic conditions were a big factor in shaping mass attitudes. In 1987, the burgeoning second economy began to shift all Soviet politics in the new anti-socialist direction. Anthony Jones and William Moskoff, writing of the “rebirth of entrepreneurship,” noted that trade and consumer co-ops were a lawful and justifiable part of the economy over the whole Soviet era, accounting for about one-fourth of annual Soviet trade. Their character, however, changed radically in 1987.

The co-operatives that developed following the 1987 Law on Individual Labor Activity were quite different from either of these old co-operatives.… The idea of calling these new organizations co-operatives fooled few in the Soviet Union. It was recognized that this was private enterprise dressed up as socialist enterprise. Once the way had been cleared for legal non-state forms of economic activity, what came to be known as the alternative economy expanded rapidly.361

According to economist Victor Perlo, by the end of 1988 these crime-infested362 fake co-ops employed a million hired workers. A year later they employed 5 million workers.363 This unchecked and accelerating growth of the second economy imparted momentum to the drive to marketization, emboldened the anti-Communist opposition, and eroded the CPSU’s confidence. Among other consequences, the second economy was serving, in Gregory Grossman’s words, “as a living example of an alternative to the official centralized–planned-command system.”364 In short, the second economy was the material underpinning of the political collapse.

At the crucial January 1987 CC Plenum, under the slogan “democratization,” the exclusion of the CPSU from political and economic power began. The leadership had postponed the plenum three times, a likely sign of widening differences at the top. At the January 1987 Plenum, Gorbachev broke with the assumptions of the preceding two years and “radiated immense willfulness and self-confidence.”365 At the plenum Gorbachev proposed political reforms, including multi-candidate elections for Party secretary posts from the district level to the Union Republic366 and the appointment of non-Party persons to senior government posts. Gorbachev blamed “serious shortcomings in the functioning of socialist democracy” for putting a brake on his reforms.367 Gorbachev also proposed secret ballot elections for enterprises and assemblies. Ligachev saw these changes as pivotal. After them, “the process of democratization became unmanageable,” Ligachev said. “Society began to lose its stability; the idea that everything was permitted gained the upper hand.”368 Still, Gorbachev did not get all he wanted at the January 1987 Plenum, and, since the next Party Congress was not scheduled until 1990, he proposed a special Party Conference. Though the Central Committee initially rejected the idea, at the June 1987 Plenum, the Central Committee agreed to call a special Party Conference for June 1988.

John Dunlop of Princeton University attributed the democratization program to traditional considerations of Kremlin power politics: Gorbachev needed to isolate and remove Politburo competitors. Within weeks, Gorbachev gave a major speech referring to competitive elections of Party officials. Jerry Hough of Brookings suggested the Plenum signified the coming switch from Party to state rule. “He [Gorbachev] had already surely decided to change his base of power from the Party apparatus to a presidency.”369

Actually, the political change in January 1987 represented something far more significant than a crude struggle for personal power, or a simple foreshadowing of new forms of governance. As defined by Gorbachev at this stage, democratization was tantamount to a shift from Marxism to social democratic notions of Party structure. Gorbachev was rejecting Lenin’s doctrine of the leading role of the Party and democratic centralism as the principle of Party organization. Kotz and Weir, Gorbachev sympathizers, observed that, like social democrats elsewhere, “Gorbachev and his circle came to view democracy as an end in itself. They appeared to view it as an aim nearly equal in importance to their traditional goal of building socialism.”370

Those seeking demolition of a Communist Party rarely call the move by its true name. At first, destruction of the CPSU assumed the form of a subtle, stealth attack, because, to most Soviet people, on the surface, the new policies appeared to be part of the effort to tackle long-standing, widely recognized problems of socialist construction. The constructive reform agenda of the CPSU leadership in 1985-1987 aimed to speed up economic growth, to slow the arms race, to raise Party standards, and to deepen socialist democracy. At first, the “democratization” drive of 1987 did not obviously conflict with such goals. Supporters claimed democratization would speed up and guarantee Party reform, make perestroika irreversible, and separate Party and state functions. Moreover, at no time did Gorbachev openly proclaim: “Let us now curb the CPSU’s role, make the CC Secretariat non-functioning, substitute impotent commissions for the CC Secretariat, abandon check-up and control, and relieve the general secretary of responsibilities for implementing decisions. Let us deprive the local Party branches of advice from the center.” Yet, this was precisely what occurred. Such left-sounding phrases as “ever more radical” reform and “truly revolutionary” perestroika cloaked the real pro-capitalist direction. In addition, the idea that a General Secretary of the CPSU would advocate doing away with his own Party seemed preposterous. Lastly, all this was occurring in a confusing context, where the Soviet media used a perplexing, upside down terminology in which genuine Communists who wanted to preserve the Party and socialism were called “conservatives,” and those who worked for capitalist restoration were called “democrats,” a terminology knowingly shared by the Western capitalist media.

In warfare, when an army surrenders one stronghold and retreats, its other positions are harder to defend. In politics, similarly, a retreat on one battleground often leads to retreats elsewhere. For example, Gorbachev’s use of the media to weaken his Politburo opponents undermined collective leadership and deepened splits within the CPSU. Splits thwarted decisive and unified action on the economy and the national question. Similarly, the strident anti-Stalin campaigns and the rehabilitation of Bukharin and his economic ideas represented no balanced search for the truth about Party history. Successfully, these campaigns sought to throw the anti-revisionists on the defensive and to ready the doctrinal ground for ending CPSU management of the economy.

In March and April of 1988, a serious confrontation within the Party leadership occurred. Participants and commentators both offered widely differing accounts of what happened and its meaning. The variation in existing accounts makes it impossible to construct an exact and fully coherent chronology of events. Still, the basic outlines and significance are beyond dispute.

All commentators agree on these elements. First, the approach of the special Party Conference in June at which Gorbachev would seek approval of far-reaching political reforms increased the tensions in the top leadership and, no doubt, precipitated the crisis. Second, the affair began on March 13, 1988, when Sovietskaya Rossiya published a letter by Nina Andreyeva, a chemistry teacher at the Leningrad Soviet Technological Institute, entitled “I Cannot Renounce My Principles.”371 The letter sharply criticized some of the ideological consequences of glasnost. Third, when the Andreyeva crisis ended a month later, Gorbachev had routed and discredited his left wing opponents on the PB. Hence, the Nina Andreyeva crisis constituted the decisive turning point in the transformation of perestroika from an Andropov-inspired reform effort within the traditional context of Soviet socialism to an open attack on the major pillars of socialism—the Communist Party, socialized property, and central planning.

Gorbachev, his apologists, and many Western commentators, have propagated a one-sided interpretation of the events of March and April 1988. They characterized Andreyeva’s letter as a “neo-Stalinist,” anti-Semitic, Russian nationalist, anti-perestroika manifesto and asserted or implied that its publication resulted from a conspiracy headed by Ligachev intent on derailing perestroika.372 Some even suggested the whole affair was a “micro-model for a coup d’etat.”373 These views, however, rested entirely on hearsay, rumors, and a tendentious reading of events. More plausibly, Gorbachev and Yakovlev deliberately used the occasion of this letter and Ligachev’s support of it as a pretext to strike at Ligachev and throw their opponents into disarray before the upcoming Party conference. In any case, that was what happened.

Andreyeva’s letter fell far short of a “rabidly anti-Semitic,” “frontal attack” on perestroika from a “neo-Stalinist nationalist point of view.”374 Its title, which an American journalist called “provocative,”375 actually came from a Gorbachev speech, and the letter closed with a quotation from Gorbachev on the importance of Marxist-Leninist principles. The letter contained no discussion of Gorbachev’s economic, political or foreign policies. Instead, it confined its criticism to ideological matters, about which it warned of the ideological “confusion” and “one-sidedness” being sown by certain glasnost writers, confusion that was affecting her students. Andreyeva criticized the historical treatments of the playwright, M. Shatrov, and the novelist, A. Rybakov, for their distortions of history, particularly of Stalin’s place in history. She also criticized two anti-socialist tendencies, the “neo-liberals” or “left-liberals” and “neo-Slavophiles” or Russian nationalists. She assailed the former for favoring a humanist socialism devoid of class partisanship, for favoring individualism over collectivism, for “modernistic quests in the field of culture, God-seeking, technocratic idols, the preaching of the ‘democratic’ charms of present-day capitalism and fawning over its achievements.” She scored the neo-Slavophiles for romanticizing pre-revolutionary Russia and the peasantry, while ignoring the terrible oppression of the peasants and the revolutionary role of the working class.376

Belying the controversy that soon swirled around it, the letter exuded moderation, balance and reasonableness. The notion that Andreyeva simply spouted neo-Stalinism or in the words of journalist Robert Kaiser, “fiercely defended Stalin,”377 represented a preposterous misreading. Andreyeva said she shared the “anger and indignation” of all Soviet people over the repression of the 1930s and 1940s, from which, she said, her own family had suffered. Moreover, she said the Party’s 1956 resolution on the cult of personality and Gorbachev’s speech on the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution remained “the scientific guidelines to this day.”378 The charge of anti-Semitism came from American journalists who saw a hidden meaning in her use of the word “cosmopolitan” to criticize “nationality-less ‘internationalism.’”379 She clearly aimed her criticism, however, at those who idealized the West, including “refuseniks” who would turn their backs on their country and socialism and emigrate to the West.380 Even the Politburo’s official rebuttal failed to charge Andreyeva with anti-Semitism. The notion that the letter represented Russian nationalism rested on nothing more than her crediting the nationalists with drawing attention to such problems as corruption, ecological decline, and alcoholism. But she also castigated the nationalists’ romantic and distorted views of Russian history.

The idea that the letter represented an anti-perestroika manifesto crafted by the Ligachev camp lacked any foundation. Andreyeva and Ligachev denied any such thing. Historian Joseph Gibbs said interviews with the Sovietskaya Rossiya’s staff could not verify Ligachev’s involvement in the letter’s publication.381 Historian Stephen F. Cohen said that Ligachev was not an “intriguer” by nature and that the evidence of Ligachev’s involvement in the Andreyeva letter was “highly inconclusive.”382 In his memoirs, Gorbachev gave only one reason for suspecting a conspiracy, that the letter “contained information known only to a relatively small circle,”383 an unsupported claim, dubious on its face. Moreover, the letter’s moderation, eccentricities and inaccuracies made it a highly unlikely candidate for a manifesto hatched at the highest levels. The letter, for example, incorrectly attributed an Isaac Deutscher remark to Winston Churchill.384 Moreover, for an allegedly anti-perestroika manifesto, the letter oddly called for backtracking on neither glasnost nor perestroika. Instead, Andreyeva merely argued for recognition in the ongoing debates that the “main and cardinal question” was “the leading role of the Party and the working class.”385 Nevertheless, Gorbachev and Yakovlev soon mounted a campaign transmogrifying this letter into a dangerous threat to the whole reform effort.

The day after the letter appeared, Ligachev held a meeting with certain heads of the mass media. Though one advocate of the conspiracy theory asserted that this was an “unscheduled”386 meeting at which Ligachev ordered the reprinting of the letter, Ligachev himself said that the meeting had been scheduled a week before the publication of the letter, that the meeting dealt with many matters, that he mentioned the letter favorably in the context of a discussion of the media’s treatment of history, and that he gave no instructions to reprint it.387 Gorbachev, who first saw the letter while on a plane to Yugoslavia for an official four-day visit, initially told his chief of staff that it was “all right.”388

After returning to Moscow, meeting with Yakovlev, and learning that Ligachev and some other members of the PB supported the letter and that the letter was being reprinted by the provincial press and was being circulated in Leningrad, Gorbachev’s attitude changed. He ordered an investigation of the letter’s origins, and he decided to make an issue of the letter and to use the letter as a pretext for a pre-emptive strike on his opponents in the Politburo. Gorbachev agreed with Yakovlev that he should strike back “from the highest level.”389 Soon, Gorbachev met with representatives of the mass media and denounced Sovietskaya Rossiya.390 Then, according to Ligachev, rumors began to circulate about a “conspiracy” concocted by the “enemies of perestroika” who had timed the publication of the Andreyeva “manifesto” to appear when Gorbachev was out of the country.391

In March and April, the Politburo took up the Andreyeva letter on at least three occasions. One of these turned out to be an extraordinary session. For two days, six or seven hours a day, the Politburo took up one issue—the Nina Andreyeva letter. The PB had never before devoted itself to a newspaper article, let alone for two days. Ligachev said that a mood descended on the meeting totally different than the “democratic and free and easy” style that usually prevailed. “The mood was very tense and nervous, even oppressive.” Yakovlev set the tone. He denounced the Andreyeva letter as a “manifesto of anti-perestroika forces.” According to Ligachev, “Yakovlev acted like the master of the situation. Medvedev echoed Yakovlev. They wanted to impose on the entire Politburo their opinion that Andreyeva’s letter was no ordinary statement: it was a recurrence of Stalinism, the chief threat to perestroika.”

Though Yakovlev did not mention Ligachev by name, Ligachev said that Yakovlev implied that someone, presumably Ligachev, was behind this letter and was plotting a coup. According to Ligachev the meeting turned into a “witch hunt” reminiscent of the worst days of Stalin. Gorbachev came out “unequivocally on the side of Yakovlev.” According to Ligachev, even PB members who had previously supported the letter “were forced to change their point of view.” Moreover, “Gorbachev literally ‘broke’ those who, in his view, failed to condemn Nina Andreyeva’s letter sufficiently.”392

The witch-hunt continued for weeks. At one point, a Central Committee commission raided the offices of Sovietskaya Rossiya looking for evidence of a conspiracy.393 On or about March 30, while Ligachev was on a three-day trip to the provinces, Gorbachev called another PB meeting at which he made a denunciation of the letter a loyalty test, allegedly saying, “I am asking all of you to declare yourselves.” According to some accounts, Gorbachev threatened to resign “unless a clear choice” was made. Everyone present criticized the article and Sovietskaya Rossiya. The PB also passed a resolution condemning Valentin Chikin, the editor of Sovietskaya Rossiya and “warning” Ligachev. Finally, the PB voted unanimously to have Yakovlev draft an official rebuttal to the Andreyeva letter.394 Thus, Gorbachev divided his opponents and threw them on the defensive, most of all Ligachev, whom Gorbachev had isolated and humiliated.

On April 5, Pravda carried the PB’s rebuttal. Among other things, the rebuttal said, “For the first time the readers have been able to read in a highly concentrated form…the intolerance of the elementary idea of renewal, the brutal exposition of fixed positions that are in essence conservative and dogmatic.” The rebuttal asserted that “by defending Stalin” those behind the letter were defending “the right to use power arbitrarily.” The following day, Sovietskaya Rossiya was forced to print the rebuttal, and on April 15 the paper printed a retraction of the original letter and self-criticism. Newspapers began printing a flood of supposedly spontaneous letters from readers attacking the Andreyeva piece.395 On April 8 in Tashkent, Gorbachev declared that “the destiny of our country and socialism are in question” and indicated that someone besides Ligachev should handle ideology.396 At a PB meeting, on April 15 and 16, Gorbachev said that an investigation of the Andreyeva letter proved it “started inside here.”397 Yakovlev made a long speech attacking the letter that ended with “It’s an anti-perestroika manifesto.”398 At the same meeting, Ryzhkov attacked Ligachev for stepping into areas “outside his competence.”399 According to Robert Kaiser, by the end of the meeting “Ligachev was isolated.”400 The meeting relieved Ligachev of some of his duties and transferred ideological responsibilities to Yakovlev.

In the end, Gorbachev and Yakovlev had turned Andreyeva’s letter, one of scores that appeared critical of perestroika, into a pretext to ambush their leading PB opponent, Yegor Ligachev, and intimidate anti-revisionist opponents generally. In the ensuing assault they stripped Ligachev of his allies and his authority, and turned the control of ideology and the media over to Yakovlev, the most extreme revisionist in the leadership. The rough handling of Sovietskaya Rossiya and the rest of the media sent a clear message, in the words of historian Gibbs: “the only acceptable use of glasnost was in promoting restructuring as Gorbachev directed it.”401 In the afterglow, Yakovlev told a friend, “We have crossed the Rubicon,”402 and Gorbachev mused that the Andreyeva letter may have been “a good thing.” With Ligachev dispatched and the media chastened, “an avalanche of anti-Stalinism” ensued. Chernyaev recalled thinking at the time, “if there had been no Nina Andreyeva, we would have had to invent her.”403

The Gorbachev victory in the Nina Andreyeva affair signified the triumph of his brand of revisionism. Gorbachev’s victory over Ligachev in this confrontation prepared the way for his domination of the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988. Meanwhile, Yakovlev and Medvedev assumed Ligachev’s responsibility for ideology, and in September 1988, Ligachev was demoted to agriculture. Gorbachev eventually removed all the Politburo leaders who supported the Andreyeva letter, except Anatoly Lukyanov, Gorbachev’s friend from student days.

If the January 1987 CC Plenum was a tremor, the June 1988 Nineteenth Party Conference was an earthquake. The ten theses distributed a month in advance of the Party Conference resembled the existing Soviet leadership consensus. When Gorbachev opened the conference, however, he went well beyond anything in the theses. He proposed the creation of a Congress of People’s Deputies, a new supreme body of state power. The people would elect fifteen hundred deputies to five-year terms, with 750 reserved for the Party and related organizations. These deputies would elect from their number a small Supreme Soviet in two houses, a permanent body accountable to the Congress. The Congress would elect an executive president, the post that Gorbachev envisioned for himself. The proposal, introduced in the final minutes in a surprise resolution by Gorbachev in the chair, amounted to the overthrow of the Central Committee. According to one commentator, “As they sang the Internationale many delegates began to wonder what they had done.”404

The Nineteenth Party Conference’s decisions departed from past political practice in astonishing ways. Whereas the Party exercised the leading role in Soviet society and government, at a stroke the Nineteenth Party Conference reversed the roles by declaring that the state, rather than the Party, should lead. The Nineteenth Party Conference thus dramatically shrunk the role of the CPSU and turned it into a parliamentary party. It legalized non-Communist parties. As the CPSU faded in importance, the newly created executive presidency gave Gorbachev a platform from which to rule. Other steps soon followed. In September 1988, Gorbachev outlined a plan to replace the CC Secretariat with commissions, depriving Party leaders of an operating staff. This move weakened his opponents on the CC and, above all, weakened the allies of Ligachev for whom the CC Secretariat served as a political base. Each weakening and marginalizing of the CPSU had far-reaching consequences. Turning back became progressively more difficult. By April 1989, while chairing a Politburo meeting, Ligachev discerned a “strangely weak”405 governing party.

At some point, Gorbachev’s commitment to Party liquidation—indeed to dismantling the central government406—must have become fully conscious. One intriguing clue about the timing of Gorbachev’s conversion to revisionism occurred in his response to a Yakovlev memo in 1985 calling for splitting the CPSU into two parties, a Socialist Party and a People’s Democratic Party, an echo of Khrushchev’s decision to divide the CPSU along urban and rural lines.407 According to Yakovlev, Gorbachev simply replied, “Too soon!” After this incident Yakovlev ascended in the hierarchy. If Yakovlev’s account is correct, Gorbachev had in mind far-reaching political changes from the beginning of his tenure.408

Other evidence for the nature and timing of his political conversion varied. Gorbachev’s own Memoirs, conflated early and later attitudes into a mess of contradictions. Fondness, pity, and disdain for the CPSU simultaneously filled the pages. Still, if he is to be believed, from the early days Gorbachev saw the CPSU as the main obstacle, and the Party apparatus as his main enemy, not as an instrument to carry the struggle for reform forward. He had to outmaneuver the Party, not struggle within it. He always appealed to intellectuals and the public over the Party’s head. Everywhere, his Memoirs contain such sentiments as “Party structures are applying the brakes.”409

Nevertheless, Gorbachev’s final views stood out clearly. According to Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev had only contempt for the CPSU. When Chernyaev, one of his most loyal aides, pleaded with Gorbachev to leave the Party, Gorbachev replied: “You know Tolya, do you think I don’t see? I see and I read your memo. [Georgy] Arbatov, [Nikolai] Shmelev … also say the same, they try to persuade me to abandon the general secretary post. But remember: that mangy dog can’t be let off the leash. If I do that, the whole enormous thing will be against me.”410 The organization that had made him what he was he viewed as a mangy dog.

Outsiders viewed changes in 1987-88 through a glass darkly, but even insiders had trouble seeing things clearly. Possibly Gorbachev himself lacked an awareness of the full implications of what he was doing. At this time he wanted something like Western European social democracy without capitalist restoration. He told those critics who accused him of “social democratizing” the Party that the distinction between social reformism and Marxism-Leninism no longer had validity.411 In capitalist society, of course, left-center coalitions are routine and make perfect sense. In a socialist society, they represent backsliding. In any case, he was pursuing a mirage, for social democracy’s fundamental loyalty, in the last analysis, is to capitalism.412

The Gorbachev regime became a “transmission belt”413 for ideas that repudiated the theoretical foundations of Marxism-Leninism. Gorbachev’s speeches transmitted such ideas as “new thinking,” “universal human values,” bourgeois notions of democracy, and “market socialism” to the Party and the media. Then, the glasnost media expanded on the new ideas, setting the stage for new Gorbachev speeches embracing further shifts in an anti-socialist direction.

In essence, Gorbachev’s new thinking amounted to substituting surrender to capitalism for the struggle against it. Substituting surrender for struggle has a psychological as well as a political dimension. To stop struggling produces relief. Certain recurrent phrases in the perestroika years evinced the opportunist psychology of the Gorbachev circle and its readiness to yield to rewards and pressure. Gorbachev knew that his concessions won him adulation in the West. Gorbachev once exclaimed, “We cannot go on living this way!” but, by any reasonable measure, no unbearable crisis existed. Similarly, perestroika promised to produce “a normal country.” In a world where socialism must struggle to survive against a dominant capitalism which tries to strangle socialism, normality could only mean accommodating to capitalism. The CPSU leaders in Gorbachev’s camp abandoned the notion of socialism as a system that working people consciously build, a desertion they would eventually regard with smug complacency. The lengths to which Gorbachev went to please the U.S. stunned American diplomats. No statesman surrenders a long-held bargaining position unless he gets something equivalent or better in return. Yet, Gorbachev did so in February 1987, when he accepted the “zero option,” an utterly asymmetric deal to remove existing Soviet missiles in exchange for a U.S. decision not to build such missiles in the future. The move made sense only if Gorbachev aimed not to win the struggle, but to call it off.

Personal experience and qualities helped Gorbachev to assume a destructive role. Far more than earlier Soviet leaders, except Lenin, Gorbachev had traveled widely. As “Eurocommunism” was peaking, he visited Belgium and Holland in 1972, France in 1966, 1975, 1976, and 1978, and Germany in 1975.414 He visited Canada in 1983. Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, a Social Democrat, beguiled Gorbachev. Gorbachev admired the West German “social market economy,” comparing USSR economic performance not with its own backward Czarist past or with the contemporary Third World but with Germany, France, and Britain. From his student days through the 1990s Gorbachev maintained a friendship with Czech “Prague Spring” dissident, Zdenek Mlynar. He thought of himself as a “Sixties” man. His weaknesses as a personality also contributed to his weakness as a political leader. Even friendly analysts observed shallowness. William Odom, a U.S. observer, stated Gorbachev had no firm convictions.415

Gorbachev’s revisionist policies could have taken hold only if organizational conditions were ripe. The corrosive effects of the policies of Khrushchev and Brezhnev had a cumulative impact on the caliber of the Soviet leadership. As Ligachev confessed, only a ruling party with an inadequate level of theoretical development and political skill among its leaders could have allowed such a fiasco.416 Only a party with a weak tradition of collective leadership could have countenanced a party leader who repudiated basic party theory and policies. In 1964 Brezhnev and Suslov had ousted Khrushchev from office for lesser sins than Gorbachev’s.

Moreover, Party theory had suffered before Gorbachev and helped prepare the way for him. The theoretical weaknesses included a rosy view of the national question, over-optimistic estimates both of socialism’s strength and imperialism’s weakness, and a Communist Party program with an overly upbeat assessment of the stage of socialist construction achieved. Yuri Andropov made a start toward correcting these organizational and theoretical shortcomings, but his life ended before he could finish the task.

Because of the slowing of the USSR’s pace of economic growth, new burdens imposed by Reagan’s dramatic escalation of the arms race, and a buildup of domestic problems, the Soviet Union needed a period of reform, rejuvenation, and renewal. Under these circumstances, some kind of retreat may have been needed. Lenin knew how to retreat if necessary, in difficult moments such as in 1918, with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, or in 1921, with NEP. Later Soviet leaders did so, too: Stalin, in 1939, with the Nazi-USSR pact; Khrushchev in 1962, in the Cuban missile crisis. For Leninists, however, a retreat was a particular phase of struggle, when an unfavorable balance of forces required a backward step. Retreats were acknowledged as such, and a retreat was never the abandonment of struggle. Gorbachev’s retreats in foreign policy assumed an entirely different character. His foreign policy rested on the notion that the Soviet Union’s problems required an adaptation to the capitalist world.417 Gorbachev portrayed his retreats as tremendous advances for mankind.

Gorbachev’s failure to achieve anything at the Reykjavik Summit set the stage for the 180-degree turn in 1987-88. Soviet peace diplomacy then assumed a different character. What started as Soviet concessions in return for a better Soviet image became concessions in return for nothing at all. The USSR began to make concessions unilaterally without regard to the consequences. In the immediate aftermath of Reykjavik, the Soviet position on the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) issue repeated Andropov’s in 1983. That is, the Soviet negotiators would not allow one more missile than what was already in the British and French arsenals. Early in 1987, however, Gorbachev changed. D’Agostino wrote that “instead of continuing to seek U.S. acceptance of the linkage between an agreement on missiles in Europe and the American SDI program,” Gorbachev made a “sharp break” with the past and accepted essentially the Reagan formula to eliminate all INF missiles in Europe.418

In 1987-88 the Communist Party of Italy (CPI), began to influence Soviet thinkers and writers on foreign policy.419 For years, in West European Communist politics the Italian Party had spearheaded thinking conciliatory to capitalism. It had, for example, defended Czech leader Alexander Dubcek and had condemned the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The CPI urged the Soviets to take a benign view of NATO as a “defensive and geographically limited alliance.”420 The CPI also hailed Gorbachev’s universal human values slogan as vindication of the ideas of its leaders Enrico Berlinguer and Achille Ochetto. On intermediate range weapons, the Italians had obtained the idea of supporting the zero option from the German Social Democrats, and had pressed this on the Soviets.

In mid-1988, after weakening the CPSU, Gorbachev made nuclear weapons the centerpiece of his revisions in foreign policy.421 To make way for unilateral Soviet nuclear cuts, Gorbachev needed to undermine the Brezhnev-era arms doctrine, the idea that the Soviet achievement of nuclear parity with the U.S. formed the basis of détente. The leap to revisionist positions on arms policy, as with so much else, came at the June 1988 Nineteenth Party Conference, where Gorbachev drew a distinction between political and military means to protect USSR security. Gorbachev actually blamed the nuclear arms race on the Soviet leadership and the idea of strategic parity. Gorbachev said, “As a result [of the idea of parity] we let ourselves be drawn into an arms race which was bound to affect the socioeconomic development of the country and its international position.” In November 1988, the Politburo authorized drastic arms cuts. In December, Gorbachev announced the cuts at the UN in New York.422 Increasingly, Soviet foreign policy consisted of unilateral disarmament without regard for the military, political, and economic consequences.

In November 1987, the keynote speech by Gorbachev on the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, “October and Perestroika: the Revolution Continues,” like a freeze frame in a video, captured the fierce rivalry in the CPSU leadership over Soviet foreign policy. Most Western commentators stressed the speech’s attempt to straddle warring views of Party history, but the speech’s new formulations on foreign policy had far more significance. The speech tried to bridge more than one chasm: with representatives of both Communist and social democratic parties in Moscow, Gorbachev sought to foster a reconciliation of the Communist and social democratic left. After noting that diplomats had accomplished little to rid the world of intermediate and long-range nuclear weapons, Gorbachev “examined the theoretical aspects of the prospects for advancement toward a durable peace.” Certainly, he declared, imperialism was warlike and had militarism and neocolonialism as essential characteristics. What, then, was the basis for optimism that the Soviet peace offensive could succeed? New phrases entered his answer. Gorbachev proclaimed: “Contradictions can be modified,” and “we are facing a historic choice based on our largely interconnected and integral world.”423 He stated, “The class struggle and other manifestations of social contradictions will influence the objective processes favoring peace.” This approach revised the traditional Soviet view that the class struggle was itself an objective process favoring peace, that peace was the result of a struggle to impose peaceful relations on a reluctant and bellicose imperialism. Instead, Gorbachev was proposing “a joint quest for a new economic order which takes into account the interests of all on an equal basis.” In the final analysis, the speech represented Gorbachev’s opportunism straining against orthodox Marxist-Leninist formulations. He was seeking to retain the vocabulary of orthodoxy while evading its implications. The speech was less a call for a Soviet peace struggle than a call for Soviet reconciliation and integration with imperialism.

Nowhere were unilateral Soviet foreign policy concessions more apparent than in Afghanistan. Since 1979 the Afghan revolutionary government and its Soviet allies had been pitted against the U.S., Pakistan, and China. At first Gorbachev favored intensifying the war,424 a noble struggle against barbarism and reaction, not entirely unlike the fight for a democratic Spanish Republic in 1936-39. In early 1987, the new Afghan Communist leader, Najibullah, having taken over from Karmal in May 1986 with the blessing—and some believe, the connivance—of the Gorbachev leadership,425 called for “national reconciliation,” implying openness to negotiation, coalition, and eventual Soviet withdrawal. The uncompromising Karmal had always referred to the mujahadin counterrevolutionary opposition as “bandits.” A more critical tone about the war had entered Gorbachev’s public comments as early as 1986. In 1987 Gorbachev, Yakovlev and Shevardnadze began to use the glasnost media to build up Soviet domestic support for withdrawal. In 1987 Artyom Borovik, the correspondent of Ogonyok, a revisionist media stronghold, filed reports from Afghanistan critical of the Soviet war effort. His battlefield reports graphically described the casualties. At the December 1987 Washington Summit, Gorbachev announced that the Soviets would withdraw from Afghanistan. In February 1988 he proposed a timetable for the withdrawal of Soviet troops by early 1989. In 1988, letters critical of the war “spontaneously” began to pour into the glasnost press from mothers of soldiers. In mid-1988, Ogonyok published the first article in which a top Soviet military man criticized the war.

To the end, Najibullah, anti-revisionists in the CPSU leadership and military, and such Soviet allies as Cuba and Angola opposed an unconditional Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Despite Western claims of a Soviet “Vietnam quagmire,” and rising domestic opposition to the war—much of the latter orchestrated from above—Soviet casualties were lower than at the start of the intervention. According to an American scholar on the Afghan conflict, “The outcome of this war was ultimately determined at home in Moscow.”426 The withdrawal occurred with no agreement on Soviet demands for an end to U.S. military aid to the mujahadin, and no American guarantees for the safety of Afghan Communist leaders or for a non-aligned Afghanistan. On February 15, 1989 the last Soviet troops left, with nothing to show for their years of sacrifice.427 The Afghans were left to the mercy of murderous warlords first, and then to the Islamic fundamentalists of the Taliban, as all of the economic, political, and educational progress of the erstwhile revolutionary regime was destroyed.

Gorbachev’s betrayals of other liberation movements and socialist states came in the final three years of perestroika. Until December 1988, the USSR still largely supported the African National Congress (ANC) and other African freedom movements. In late 1988, however, came the first sign of a change in Soviet policy. The advancing liberation movements in Southwest Africa, aided by Cuba and the USSR, had compelled an election in Namibia whose fairness would be guaranteed by UN troops. Without consulting the liberation movement, the Southwest African People’s Organization (SWAPO), or its ally Cuba, Shevardnadze suddenly agreed to an American proposal to cut down the presence of UN troops in Namibia.428

In 1987-88, other foreign policy concessions followed in rapid succession. In May 1988, Reagan visited Moscow. In June 1988, the Nineteenth Party Conference discarded the doctrine of nuclear parity. In September-October 1988, the next CC Plenum affirmed the priority of universal human values over class struggle. The Plenum, thus, “de-ideologized” Soviet foreign policy. This Plenum also retired Gromyko and demoted Ligachev. In December 1988 at the UN in New York, Gorbachev announced a cut of 500,000 in Soviet troops, including the removal of six tank divisions from Eastern Europe. In 1989 counterrevolution swept Eastern Europe.

Gorbachev abandoned the so-called “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which held that the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states had a right and a duty to defend socialism in any member state of the Warsaw Pact. This doctrine was consistent with Lenin’s classic writings that considerations of the class struggle take precedence over considerations of national sovereignty.429 The doctrine expressed a form of class solidarity extended to interstate relations, the solidarity of one socialist state with another. According to David Lane, “In 1989 it was made clear that the USSR would not intervene in the affairs of other states, even if members of the same alliance.”430 In Eastern Europe where Communist governments had always been less deeply rooted than in the USSR, Gorbachev’s policy of troop cutbacks and non-interference spelled disaster. In all Eastern European societies, the Communist governments rapidly lost self-confidence, and opposition elements took heart. Gorbachev gave up the Brezhnev Doctrine unilaterally. The fate of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) revealed the catastrophe of yielding something in return for nothing. Instead of a negotiated coming together of two German states with different social systems on the basis of mutual interest and equal rights, the end of the GDR became a humiliating forced annexation and capitalist restoration.

In early 1987 Gorbachev began to push for radical economic reform. Parallel with his political reform program, the radical measures that Gorbachev proposed abandoned earlier incremental efforts and experiments.431 The leadership’s plans and programs were not the only spurs to radical economic change. Three other forces drove economic developments in a pro-capitalist direction: the glasnost media, the weakening of the CPSU, including its withdrawal from economic management, and the unbridled growth of the second economy. In 1987-88, perestroika unleashed new economic forces and processes. Ostensibly, the Law on State Enterprise passed in 1987 at the July CC Plenum neither rejected centralized planning nor endorsed a transition to a full-blooded market economy. Its proponents claimed the law would make planning less rigid and would allow autonomy for the enterprises and experimentation with market mechanisms. It also provided for the election of plant managers, an ill-conceived idea that swiftly led to unacceptable wage increases to workers by managers whose eyes were on the ballot box. After its inflationary implications were understood, this feature of the law was repealed. Ellman and Kontorovich noted that the wording of the Law on State Enterprises bore little resemblance to a conventional economic statute for a planned economy. “It is hard to imagine similar wording, which does not oblige anyone to do anything, in the statutes of another country.”432 To a large degree the statute served as a political rallying cry signaling the direction of change.

The glasnost media pushed the Soviet leadership to implement new economic policies in the riskiest possible way. The media influenced the public policy debate and public sentiment about economic change enormously. The glasnost media, subservient to Yakovlev and Gorbachev until 1988, made sure every economic blunder or failure, even when due to Gorbachev’s policies, strengthened the case for more enterprise autonomy and more marketization, never the case for reinvigorating the central plan. The public debate moved only in an anti-socialist direction. In time, “it became politically feasible to demand the complete liquidation” of the planning institutions.433

Media pressure drove what Ligachev called the “fateful error”434 of December 1987—the drastic reduction of the state purchase of industrial output, a mad leap from a planned to an unplanned economy. Against the better judgment of Prime Minister Ryzhkov and Ligachev, Yakovlev and Gorbachev pushed to shrink the state orders—the guaranteed government purchase of Soviet industrial output at fixed prices—from 100 percent to a mere 50 percent of the whole of industry. Reducing state orders to such a degree meant that, in one leap, half of Soviet industry would gain autonomy to buy and sell its output in a new wholesale market-–trade between enterprises—with prices set by fluctuations in supply and demand. Ligachev and Ryzhkov argued for a cautious experimental plan in which the state would purchase 90 percent of industrial output, leaving only 10 percent of industry to face the uncertainties of supply and demand. The Ligachev-Ryzhkov plan would have gently pushed enterprises to experiment with autonomy and free prices. The Gorbachev plan proved utterly reckless. It plunged the economy into chaos. In 1988, consumer shortages proliferated and, for the first time since World War II, inflation appeared.

The removal of the Party from economic management undermined the economy.435 The sectoral ministries in Moscow were powerful tools of central planning. Through their large central offices in Moscow, the ministries linked enterprises to the highest planning bodies and the CC Secretariat of the CPSU. They oversaw the performance of enterprises, enforced plan discipline and maintained regional and sectoral industry links and balances. Perestroika reduced the ministries’ powers again and again. In 1986, in 1987, and in 1988 these reductions destroyed the main coordinating mechanisms of the planned economy. The dismantling did not take the form of slashing the staff of the ministries. Rather, perestroika redefined the ministries’ relationship to enterprises. New directions forbade the ministries from issuing commands and gave them the new role of developing “enterprise autonomy.”436 Rendering the ministries powerless was foolish enough, but the way that Gorbachev and his advisers implemented this policy achieved the maximum loss of public confidence. According to Ellman and Kontorovich, Gorbachev’s team was “constantly discrediting itself and its policy by repeatedly making erroneous and halfhearted decisions, then quickly reversing and publicly condemning them.”437

The major blow to the planned economy occurred at the Nineteenth Party Conference, which abandoned gradualism and issued a directive compelling the separation of the Party, the Soviet organs, and economic management. This directive played the major role in the Party’s withdrawal from the economy, both on an organizational level and ideological level. New blows rained down on the planning system shortly after the Nineteenth Party Conference. In the fall of 1988 Gorbachev abolished 1,064 departments and 465 sectors in the Central Committees of Union Republics and regional and district Party committees. He slashed the number of departments by 44 percent. Ideologically, the Party’s withdrawal from economic management undermined the willingness of leaders of state economic entities to obey directives from a single center in Moscow. Centrifugal forces began to gain the upper hand in the economy.

Gorbachev also tried to harness the second economy. A U.S. academic, S. Frederick Starr, noted that this decision represented a basic change in course. In effect Gorbachev rolled out a welcome mat for nascent capitalist forces in Soviet “civil society.” “Gorbachev faced a momentous choice,” Starr asserted. Either he could have improved the economy through tightened “controls” and better planning, or he could have sought to win to his side “the new economic and social forces that had brought themselves to life through autonomous action and intellectual contact with Russia’s long suppressed tradition of liberal reform.” He rejected the first and chose the second. He tried “to co-opt the second economy (and tax its profits) with his new law allowing private—nominally co-operative—businesses.” He blessed the voluntary associations (“the informals”) by claiming they had a legitimate place in Soviet society. “Gorbachev’s genius,” Starr declared, “is not to have created the elements of perestroika but to have taken them from the society around him.”438 British analyst Anne White confirmed Starr’s opinion. The “informals” denoted “any kind of activity not directly organized by the Party.” Many were non-political cultural entities, especially among the young, and many dated back to the Khrushchev Thaw. The oft-cited number, 30,000 informals in existence by February 1988, included both pressure groups and non-pressure groups, and over time, especially in the perestroika era, the former became ever more significant.439

Thus, the laws on Co-operatives and the law on Leases passed in 1988 contributed to the rapid expansion of the capitalist elements in the USSR. While slyly quoting Lenin —out of context—on the acceptability of co-operatives under socialism as a form of socialist property,440 the law actually allowed private property in the guise of a co-op. Soon the remaining state enterprises developed economic relationships with privately owned co-ops, which were less regulated and less taxed than the state sector. The leasing of industrial property to co-ops became a way of privatizing assets while maintaining the fiction of public ownership.

The restoration of capitalism and the triumph of separatism were distinct processes. The USSR could have fractured with the pieces remaining socialist. The USSR could have restored capitalism without breaking up. In actuality, the two occurred together, and shared a similar lineage. The pro-market and pro-private enterprise trend also had a dubious analysis of nationalism, Russian and non-Russian. The differences between this trend and Lenin were fundamental, systematic and long-standing.441 Lenin and those who followed in his footsteps saw the two sides of nationalism, progressive and reactionary. More importantly, from 1917 to 1991, they stressed the need to struggle with nationalism, if possible, to replace nationalism with internationalism, or at least to strengthen nationalism’s democratic and progressive manifestations and to weaken its reactionary side. Those in the Party who leaned the most in the direction of blind markets, private enterprise, and liberalism, also consistently failed to come to grips with nationalism.

Nationalism had a special hold on the peasantry, and on the vast sections of the Soviet working class within a generation of the countryside. Even after collectivization, the attitudes of country folk toward land, property ownership, and the homeland made them susceptible to nationalist rhetoric. By and large, urban workers uprooted from the countryside long ago were more class-conscious. They found nationalism less attractive. Nationalism also had a hold on a section of the literary intelligentsia that identified with the Soviet peasantry and pre-1917 Russian history.

The Party trend with which Gorbachev identified had as its social base the large social classes and class fragments most inclined to nationalism: the peasantry, and sections of the working class with social ties to the countryside. Accordingly, this CPSU trend did not struggle with nationalism, ideologically and politically. It accommodated, ignored, or underestimated nationalism, Russian and non-Russian. It also overestimated the USSR’s progress in the struggle against national inequality. Its premature claims of success influenced many, though by no means all, observers of Soviet life.442

Examples of the Gorbachev team’s incomprehension of nationalism and the national question abound. In his 1987 Revolution Day speech Gorbachev declared that the Soviet Union had solved the national question. Well into the perestroika era, Gorbachev’s top adviser Yakovlev defended his 1972 broadside against Russian nationalism. That article, “Against Anti-Historicism” assailed the inclusionary policies of Brezhnev and Suslov toward Russian nationalism, policies they hoped would limit the damage done to the Soviet state’s legitimacy by Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinization” campaigns, which the young Yakovlev had supported and an older Yakovlev revived under Gorbachev.443 In 1972, Yakovlev had worried that an alliance of Russian nationalists (who shared some ideas with Marxism-Leninism, for example, a disdain for the capitalist West) and anti-Khrushchevites in the CPSU would threaten key policies of the Khrushchev era such as emulation of the West. In 1985-91 Yakovlev remained worried about such an alliance. To oppose Russian nationalism, therefore, was consistent with his defense of the policies of Khrushchev and Gorbachev.

Gorbachev proved utterly inept at handling the national question. When nationalist ferment arose in the Baltics, he first ignored it. Then, he used economic repression against Lithuania, and later changed course to a weak and hopeless re-negotiation of the Union Treaty that, by degrees, caved in to ever more extreme nationalist and separatist demands.

As the possibility of state fragmentation grew—in July 1988 mass demonstrations in the Baltic states protested their annexation to the Soviet Union444—the key allies of Gorbachev in the Politburo acted like ostriches. Nationalists increasingly dominated the “informal” perestroika groups that formed in outlying republics. Such nationalists increasingly spoke of separation from Russia and increasingly raised their cause even within the republican Communist Parties. In September 1988 when Yakovlev came back from a trip to the Baltics and reported to the Politburo: “There is no problem; perestroika is developing normally,” Ligachev reacted with fury because he correctly saw a situation about to spin out of control. Yakovlev, however, counseled doing nothing, and he prevailed. Within several months the Lithuanian CP had split, Party organizations ceased to function, and emboldened separatists were on the verge of power.445

By contrast, orthodox Marxist-Leninists favored the self-determination of nations, including the right of secession, a right they hoped would never need to be exercised, as well as the development of national languages and culture, guarantees of minority representation in political leadership, and “affirmative-action-style” socioeconomic development in the case of the non-Russian regions. Even some bourgeois Sovietologists favorably compare Soviet nationality policy and U.S. affirmative action. For example, a recent American study that credited the Soviet Union with elevating previously oppressed nationalities, stressed how much its policies broke the mold of historical instances in which a large, more advanced nation embraced smaller, less advanced ones, by calling the USSR “the world’s first Affirmative Action Empire.” The author of the study, Terry Martin, said, the Soviet Union was the first state to respond to rising nationalism “by systematically promoting national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the characteristic institutional forms of the nation state.”446

Gorbachev ignored national inequality, or utterly overstated progress against it. On his six-year watch he underestimated and misunderstood the depth of the national sentiment of specific peoples almost everywhere, including the way his other reform policies fanned national sentiment. Eleven months after the Alma Ata riots of December 1986, Gorbachev boasted the Soviet Union had solved the national question.

In the case of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Gorbachev, when not ignoring problems or claiming to have solved them, indulged in cynical manipulation of national strife to improve his position in the Politburo, a blatant example of sacrificing principle for short-term gain. In April 1987, Gorbachev encouraged a rebellion of the Armenians in the Azeri province of Nagorno-Karabahk because doing so created an embarrassment for Gaidar Aliev, an Azeri Politburo member and Gorbachev opponent. Aliev came under fire from many quarters, including Ligachev, and his career went into eclipse in mid-1987. By the fall, he was off the Politburo.

Encouraging the Armenian claims in Karabakh formed part of a pattern of Gorbachev behavior. The pattern was to cheer “national fronts for perestroika” against local officials, usually the Party first secretaries who had put obstacles in Gorbachev’s path. In April 1988, activists in the Baltic Republics began forming national fronts to support perestroika447 and to affirm their nationalist aspirations. These fronts rapidly took on a separatist and pro-capitalist character. Yet, for Gorbachev, ethnic clashes had certain advantages. Each disturbance handed Gorbachev, if he did anything at all, an opportunity to oust local Party leaders if they happened to be his opponents. Each time the Gorbachev Politburo sided with the fronts or did nothing, it encouraged more extreme expressions of nationalism. In the words of Anthony D’Agostino,448 Gorbachev played “sorcerer’s apprentice,” promoting nationalist resentments for his own purposes until they spun out of control.

As perestroika failed in one sphere, the damage rippled in all directions. Starting in 1988, economic hardship and separatism reinforced each other. As consumer shortages worsened in 1988, the tendency for various republics to hoard production and to go it alone increased. The USSR planned economy had developed as a single grid with a precise division of labor and specialization among republics. For example, one industrial complex in the Baltic region supplied paper cups for the whole USSR. As the economic authority of the center in Moscow grew feeble, barter between republics replaced planning, and economic disruption grew. The economic disorder and uncertainty fueled separatist fires, as each union republic sought to protect its economic interests as best it could.

Several of Gorbachev’s moves strengthened outlying localities against the center. The CC Plenum of January 1987 launched a public attack on the nomenklatura system, the practice of selecting state and republican officials from a list developed by the CC Secretariat in Moscow. Beginning in 1987, Gorbachev and other Party leaders denounced this appointment system and refused to defend local officials from attacks in their regions and districts. Consequently, local officials became more preoccupied with accommodating local views rather than the views of Moscow leaders. When local and all-Union interests conflicted, survival required local leaders to favor local interests. Gorbachev’s foreign policy also encouraged local interests, particularly in the Baltic states. Ellman and Kontorovich said that Gorbachev’s policy of ending the Cold War and seeking close co-operation with the West “made him open to pressure from the West to recognize the rights of the Baltic states, especially Lithuania, to self-determination.”449

As the 1987-1988 period closed out, Gorbachev and his circle had all but routed Ligachev and their other opponents. The rout transformed the nature of perestroika. The growing disarray in the Party, its removal from the economy, led to economic difficulties that became obvious in 1988. This took the form of inflation, shortages, budget deficits and disintegration of key economic institutions of the planned economy. In 1988, for the first time in forty years, prices began rising throughout the economy. A year later, inflation galloped at a yearly rate of 20 percent. As consumer goods vanished from shelves, hoarding proliferated. Gorbachev’s edicts crippled the formerly powerful industrial ministries in Moscow.450 In 1988, Soviet economist T. Koriagana calculated illicitly obtained personal wealth at 200 to 240 billion rubles, perhaps representing 20 to 25 percent of all personal wealth in the Soviet Union.451 Economic crisis, in turn, strengthened reactionary nationalist separatism. Gorbachev’s encouragement of “popular fronts” and “national fronts”—motivated by a desire to put pressure on his Party opponents in the union republics—handed power to separatists. A year later, in 1989, economic decline— caused by the failure of perestroika, not by a long-term growth slowdown—set in motion mass hostility to Gorbachev and the CPSU, and growing support for Boris Yeltsin’s anti-Communist populism. In 1987 and 1988, Gorbachev made the turn. The unraveling had begun.