The Penguin History of Modern Russia

20 ‘Developed Socialism’ (1970–1982)

The Soviet compound, as it emerged from the successive changes after the Second World War, had only a limited capacity for radical experimentation. Brezhnev and his fellow leaders understood and welcomed this. But the problems about the compound persisted. There was political frustration and resentment throughout the USSR, including its party, government and other public institutions. There were economic set-backs. There was social alienation and national, religious and cultural embitterment. Only when Brezhnev died was there a serious reconsideration of the compound’s problems. At first this was attempted cautiously. But Gorbachëv, coming to power in 1985, overlooked the internal necessities of the compound. Always he assumed that experimentation could be open ended. In the end he developed an audacious programme of comprehensive reforms which led to the dissolution of the Soviet compound and to the emergence of new forms of state and society in Russia and the other former Soviet republics.

But back in 1970, despite its growing problems, the Soviet Union was still a stable entity and was treated by the rest of the world as a permanent feature of the international landscape. Statesmen, scholars and commentators took it for granted that Soviet armed strength and political militance were too great to be ignored. The USSR had nearly reached military parity with the United States, and the Soviet economy had the world’s second greatest industrial capacity and already produced more steel, oil, pig-iron, cement and even tractors than any other country.¹ British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had trembled at the possibility that Russia’s centrally-planned industry might succeed in outmatching advanced capitalist countries in other sectors of industry. The skills and equipment developed for the Soviet Army, he thought, might one day be diffused to the rest of the country’s factories. Not only he but still more sceptical observers of the Soviet economy warned against underestimating the USSR’s capacities.

Not everyone subscribed to this conventional wisdom. The NATO countries continued to refuse to recognize Stalin’s annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940, and émigré groups of various nationalities continued to argue that the USSR was an illegitimate state. They exposed the repressive record from Lenin to Brezhnev. Some thought that the Soviet order would fall apart if only the Western powers would cease to make diplomatic and commercial compromises.

At any rate few people in the West had any affection for the USSR. Too much was known about the brutality and immobilism of Soviet communism for it to shine out as a beacon of political freedom and social justice. Even the Italian and Spanish communist parties abandoned their ideological fealty to Moscow and formulated doctrines hostile to dictatorship. Especially after the USSR-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the number of admirers of Lenin was getting smaller in states not subject to communist leaderships. Moreover, changes in the Third World were steadily diminishing the international appeal of the USSR because most of the world’s colonies had by then been given their independence. Meanwhile the grinding poverty widespread in several European countries, such as Spain, was being overcome: capitalism was found to be more adaptable to welfare economics than had previously been supposed possible.

Nevertheless some optimists contended that the Soviet political system could be softened and that a convergence between communism and capitalism might occur as capitalist states resorted increasingly to central economic planning and governmentally-provided welfare. This was rejected by others who asserted that basic reform was incompatible with the maintenance of the communist order. Supposedly no Politburo leader would attempt such a reform.

Certainly Brezhnev was not of a mind to undermine the party he served as General Secretary, and the development of the relationship between the USSR and the USA for several years appeared to justify his stance. As he took control of Soviet foreign policy he exchanged visits with American presidents. Richard Nixon went to Moscow in 1972 and 1974, Gerald Ford to Vladivostok in 1976. Brezhnev himself was received in New York in 1973. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks after protracted negotiations produced an Anti-Ballistic Missiles Treaty in 1972. The trust between the two superpowers steadily increased. In order to stress that a warmer relationship than Khrushchëv’s ‘peaceful coexistence’ had been attained, a new phrase was coined, ‘détente’ (in Russian, razryadka), which referred to the slackening of the tensions of the Cold War. Brezhnev confidently proposed to American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that the two superpowers could maintain a global condominium if they had the sense to reinforce détente.

Moreover, not all events elsewhere in the world were unfavourable to Soviet interests. The Kremlin’s resolve was strengthened in 1970 when the coalition led by the communist Salvador Allende acceded to power in Chile. When Ethiopia, too, had a revolution in 1974, military equipment was supplied from Moscow; and the Portuguese Empire’s disintegration in Africa gave the USSR and its Cuban ally a further opportunity to intervene in civil wars in Angola and Mozambique. At successive Party Congresses Brezhnev asserted the USSR’s willingness to support struggles for national liberation in Asia, Africa and South America.

The USA meanwhile suffered from the demoralizing effects of its unsuccessful war in Vietnam, even after the withdrawal of its troops in 1973. In the same year the American economy was buffeted by the decision of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) to introduce a massive rise in the price of oil. All advanced capitalist economies suffered from this; but the USSR, despite not having influenced OPEC’s decision, gained enormous revenues from her energy exports outside Eastern Europe. Undoubtedly the USA’s rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s caused a tremor among Soviet policy-makers. Yet even this event had its positive aspect. Politburo members were able to see the Americans’ need for Chinese support as proof of the relative decline of the USA as a superpower. Soviet General Secretary and American President bargained as equals at their summits.

Nevertheless the USA extracted concessions from the USSR. Military and economic deals with Moscow were made dependent on the Politburo allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate if they so desired. Such would-be emigrants became known in the West as the refuseniks on account of their having been refused permission to emigrate on the grounds that they had had previous access to secret information vital to the state’s interests; a quarter of a million of them left the USSR under Brezhnev’s rule. The Western powers also sought to place limits on the regime’s oppression of Soviet citizens in general. In 1975 the Helsinki Final Act was signed as the culmination of several years of negotiations to settle Europe’s post-war territorial boundaries and to make provision for economic and scientific cooperation between West and East. The Final Act’s commitment to the free passage of information was to prove a valuable instrument for dissenters in the Soviet Union to embarrass the Politburo.

For the USA and the USSR, much as they wanted to eliminate the danger of nuclear war, remained rivals. Intensive development of weaponry continued in both countries. In 1977 the Soviet Union stationed its newly-tested SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe, missiles which had a capacity to attack Western Europe. The USA reacted by setting up facilities for the basing of Cruise missiles in the United Kingdom and West Germany and for the introduction of Pershing missiles to West Germany. The danger and costliness of all this were evident to politicians in Moscow and Washington, who simultaneously aimed at achieving agreement in the second stage of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, known by the acronym SALT 2. By 1979 it looked as though the negotiators had elaborated a draft that would be acceptable to both sides.

The expansion of the USSR’s global influence served to enhance Brezhnev’s personal authority in the Politburo. In agricultural policy he reinforced the conventional methods for organizing the collective farms. The central imposition of quotas of output was maintained, and instructions on what to sow and when came to the villages from Moscow. The policy of amalgamating farms was prolonged by Brezhnev, who shared with Khrushchëv a belief that bigger kolkhozes would increase productivity. At the same time Brezhnev insisted that agriculture should have a massive increase in the government’s financial support. Collective farms in the 1970s received twenty-seven per cent of all state investment — and even this figure did not include the revenues being channelled into the production of tractors, chemical fertilizers and other farm equipment. In 1981 the budgetary allocation constituted the ‘highest food-and-agriculture subsidy known in human history’, amounting to 33,000 million dollars at the contemporary official exchange rate.²

Gross agricultural output by 1980 was twenty-one per cent higher than the average for 1966–70. Cereal crops in particular rose by eighteen per cent in the same period.³ This allowed Brezhnev to bask in the praise heaped upon him. On closer inspection, the improved results were not encouraging. The usual criterion for assessing the effectiveness of Soviet agriculture had been and still was the grain harvest. In fact the imports of cereals, which had been started by Khrushchëv, had become a regular phenomenon. When it became difficult to seal commercial deals with the USA in 1974, the USSR’s foreign-trade officials began to make hole-in-the-corner purchases in Argentina and elsewhere. This was necessary because Soviet domestic production was severely deficient in fodder crops. There were also problems in other important sectors; for instance, the sugar-beet harvest, far from rising, declined by two per cent in the decade prior to 1980.

Brezhnev’s attempted solution was to increase state investment. Reform-minded central party functionaries were cowed by the fate of Politburo member G. I. Voronov. For years Voronov had advocated the division of each farm work-force into ‘links’ or teams which would be entrusted with specific functions. A link might, for instance, run a farm’s dairy unit. Voronov’s argument was that work-forces were so vast that individual kolkhozniki felt little sense of responsibility for the work on the farm. Accordingly, the link system, accompanied by suitable material incentives, would introduce conscientiousness and lead to an expansion of output. This proposal had been put to Stalin unsuccessfully by A. A. Andreev in the 1940s and had been opposed by Khrushchëv both before and after Stalin’s death. Voronov was equally ineffective in trying to convince Brezhnev about the need for such a reform. Indeed Brezhnev removed Voronov from the Politburo in April 1973.

Experimentation with agricultural links was not totally disallowed on a local basis (and among the party officials who tried them out was the young Stavropol Region Party Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachëv). Yet central policy was otherwise unimaginative and incompetent. In 1976 the Politburo issued a resolution ‘On the Further Development of Specialization and Concentration of Agricultural Production on the Basis of Inter-Farm Co-operation and Agro-Industrial Integration’. The resolution called for several kolkhozes in a given district to combine their efforts in production; it was therefore not a cure but a prescription for aggravated difficulties by virtue of adding yet another administrative layer to agricultural management. Meanwhile the state’s food-and-agriculture subsidy did not prevent many kolkhozes from operating at a loss; for although the prices paid for farming produce were raised, the costs charged for fuel and machinery also rose. Oil, for example, cost eighty-four per cent more in 1977 than in the late 1960s — and the price of certain types of seed-drills more than doubled.⁴

Agricultural policy was therefore very confused, and in such a situation Khrushchëv would probably have made yet another assault on the private plots of kolkhozniki. Brezhnev was not so misguided, but instead in 1977 and 1981 issued two decrees to expand the maximum size of each plot to half a hectare. These measures removed a large obstacle to the expansion of agricultural output. Under Brezhnev the private plots yielded thirty per cent of total production while constituting only four per cent of the USSR’s cultivated area.

Both ideological tradition and political interests impeded Politburo members from recognizing this as proof that de-collectivization was essential to an expansion of agricultural production. They were so nervous about private plots that the 1977 decree was withheld from publication for a whole year.⁵ The underlying problems therefore lay unresolved: the shortage of skilled labour; the wrecked rural culture; the payment of farmworkers by quantity of work without regard to its quality; the roadless countryside; the central imposition of quotas for planting, harvesting and procurement; the technology and machinery too large for their functions on Soviet farms; the memory of the horrors of collectivization from the late 1920s. Apart from throwing money at the problems, Brezhnev could only propose grandiose schemes of land reclamation, irrigation and of river diversion. He listened to flattering advisers who deflected attention from any endeavour to address those underlying problems.

At the same time he eased his leading opponents out of high office. Not only Voronov but also Shelest were discarded in 1973. Shelepin at last went the same way in 1975. Each had had disagreements about policy with Brezhnev and eventually paid a personal price. The forced retirement of rivals continued. Membership of the Politburo was withdrawn from D. S. Polyanski in 1976, Nikolai Podgorny in 1977 and K. T. Mazurov in 1978. The long-serving Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Aleksei Kosygin, resigned because of ill-health in 1980. Meanwhile Brezhnev had been recruiting associates to fill the empty seats. Dinamukhammed Kunaev and Volodymyr Shcherbytskiy became full members of the Politburo in 1971, Konstantin Chernenko in 1978 and Nikolai Tikhonov in 1979 (and Tikhonov took over the Council of Ministers at Kosygin’s departure). Their claim to preference was the accident of having worked amicably with Brezhnev in Dnepropetrovsk, Moldavia and Kazakhstan between the 1930s and 1950s. The Politburo was being remade in the General Secretary’s image.

Brezhnev was extolled as a dynamic leader and intellectual colossus. The removal of Podgorny enabled him to occupy the additional post of Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet and thereby become head of state. When Kosygin died in December 1980, Pravda postponed the reporting of the news until after the celebration of Brezhnev’s birthday. In May 1976 he had been made Marshal of the Soviet Union. In 1979 he published three volumes of ghost-written memoirs which treated minor battles near Novorossisk as the decisive military theatre of the Second World War; and his account of the virgin lands campaign of the 1950s barely mentioned Khrushchëv.

The growing cult of Brezhnev was outrageously at variance with actuality. His physical condition was deteriorating. He was addicted to sleeping pills; he drank far too much of the Belorussian ‘Zubrovka’ spirit and smoked heavily; to his embarrassment, he was also greatly overweight.⁶ From 1973 his central nervous system underwent chronic deterioration, and he had several serious strokes.⁷ At the successive ceremonies to present him with Orders of Lenin, Brezhnev walked shakily and fumbled his words. Yevgeni Chazov, Minister of Health, had to keep doctors in the vicinity of the General Secretary at all times: Brezhnev was brought back from clinical death on several occasions. The man in the East whose finger was supposed to be on the nuclear-war button inside the Soviet black box was becoming a helpless geriatric case. He was frequently incapable of rudimentary consecutive thought even in those periods when he was not convalescing.

His cronies had cynically decided that it suited them to keep Brezhnev alive and in post. The careers of Chernenko, Tikhonov and others might suffer if Brezhnev were to pass away. Even several Politburo members who were not friends of his — Central Committee Secretary Suslov, Defence Minister Ustinov and Foreign Minister Gromyko — feared the uncertainties of any struggle to succeed him. Such figures also recognized that their unhappiness with the General Secretary’s policies impinged only on secondary matters. Brezhnev’s Lazarus-like returns from physical oblivion allowed them to hold in place the policies agreed in the second half of the previous decade.

The central political leadership had turned into a gerontocracy. By 1980 the average age of the Politburo was sixty-nine years.⁸ Each member, surrounded with toadying assistants, wanted an old age upholstered by material comfort and unimpeded power. The idea of preparing a younger generation of politicians to take over the state leadership was distasteful to them. Fifty-year-old Konstantin Katushev was demoted from the Central Committee Secretariat in 1977 and his promising career was nipped in the bud. Grigori Romanov had become a full member of the Politburo at the age of fifty-three in 1976; Mikhail Gorbachëv did the same when he was forty-nine in 1980. But these were exceptions to the norm. Brezhnev’s Politburo was composed mainly of Stalin’s ageing promotees. Their fundamental attitudes to politics and economics had been formed before 1953. They were proud of the Soviet order and present achievements. Change was anathema to them.

Already in 1969 there had been an attempt by Brezhnev and a majority of Politburo members to rehabilitate Stalin’s reputation. They were not proposing a reversion to the terror of the 1930s and 1940s; but as they grew old in office, their unpleasant memory grew dimmer and they became nostalgic about their own contribution to the glorious past. It would seem that whereas Shelepin had hoped to use Stalin as a symbol for the robust restoration of order, Brezhnev and his friends wanted to use him more as the personification of the USSR’s achievements in industrialization in the early 1930s and in victory in the Second World War. Only strenuous representations to the Politburo by foreign communist parties brought about a last-minute reversal of the decision on Stalin’s rehabilitation.⁹

Nevertheless the Politburo still had to supply citizens with its analysis of the country’s current condition. The favoured terms were ‘really existing socialism’, ‘real socialism’, ‘mature socialism’ and ‘developed socialism’.¹⁰ Really existing socialism was too wordy. Real socialism invited an undesirable comparison with surrealist socialism; mature socialism sounded altogether too decrepit a note. And so from 1966 the propagandists increasingly claimed that the country had entered the stage of ‘developed socialism’. This term, while avoiding the over-optimism of Khrushchëv’s Party Programme, highlighted achievements already made and objectives yet to be attained. The authorities looked back with pride on the October Revolution, the Five-Year Plans and the Second World War; they anticipated a future involving an incremental improvement of living standards, of technology and of social and political integration throughout the USSR.

Developed socialism was a term used in Brezhnev’s opening report to the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in March 1971. In a purple passage he declared: ‘Accounting for its work in this very important direction of activity, the Central Committee of the Party has every justification to say that the Soviet people, having worthily completed the Eighth Five-Year Plan, has taken a new great step forward in the creation of the material-technical base of communism, in the reinforcement of the country’s might and in the raising of the standard of living of the people.’¹¹

His report offered an agenda for step-by-step improvement; and as the concept was elaborated in later years, the Politburo acknowledged that developed socialism would constitute a ‘historically protracted period’. A tacit indication was being given that roughly the same kind of state order would prevail for the duration of the lives of Soviet citizens. In the course of the construction of a communist society as projected by Khrushchëv there was no scheme for the party to become obsolete; the party was even more crucial to Brezhnevite developed socialism. Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which was introduced in 1977, announced: ‘The leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, its state organizations and public organizations is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’ Stalin’s 1936 Constitution had mentioned the party’s authority only in relation to electoral arrangements. The USSR had always been a one-party state; but the new Article 6 gave the most formal validation to this reality to date.¹²

Not even Brezhnev entirely stopped calling for higher levels of participation by ordinary members of society in public life or talking about a future communist society. But his statements on such topics were ritualistic verbiage. He was much more serious when he stressed the need for hierarchy and planning. The party, under the Politburo’s leadership, would formulate the policies and give the guidance. Society’s main duty was to supply the orderly obedience.

A ‘scientific-technical revolution’ would be accomplished, and central state planning would prove its superior rationality. Official theorists stressed that already the USSR outmatched capitalism in bettering the human condition. The Soviet state guaranteed employment, health care, shelter, clothing and pensions; and citizens were brought up to respect the general interests of society and to avoid selfish individualism. Not that the USSR’s leaders wanted to be seen as complacent. There was a recognition that the Soviet economy had fallen behind the advanced capitalist countries in civilian technology. It was also admitted that much needed to be done to meet the material aspirations of ordinary consumers and that the political organs of the Soviet state, including the party, had to become more responsive to the people’s wishes. Indeed there had to be a perfecting of all mechanisms of governance and welfare. ‘Developed socialism’ had to be brought to its triumphant maturity.

No basic novelty in industrial and agricultural measures was contemplated. The options were limited by the Politburo’s diversion of massive resources to the state food-subsidy and to the nuclear arms race. But the very word reform caused most Soviet leaders to shudder. After the defeat of Kosygin’s endeavour to widen managerial freedom in 1965, no one tried to pick up his banner.

Although the 1970s were a lost decade for potential reformers, however, not everything was static. Not quite. The Ninth Five-Year Plan was the first to project a slightly higher rate of increase in the output of industrial consumer products than of industrial capital goods. Watches, furniture and radios were at last meant to be manufactured in abundance. Yet the Plan still left the predominant bulk of investment at the disposal of capital-goods production. And in practice the economic ministries and the rest of the party-police-military-industrial complex managed to prevent the Plan’s consumer-oriented investment projects from being fully realized.¹³ By 1975, for example, consumer goods had expanded at a rate nine per cent slower than capital goods.¹⁴ This thwarting of the Politburo’s policy continued throughout the decade despite Brezhnev’s reaffirmation of his commitment to the rapid shift of investment towards satisfying the needs of Soviet consumers at both the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress in February 1976 and the Twenty-Sixth Congress in February 1981.

And so only the most minuscule steps were taken in the modification of policy. In 1973 a decree was issued to draw factories with complementary activities into ‘associations’ (ob’’edineniya). The idea was that enterprises would be enabled to serve each other’s needs without resort to permission from Gosplan and the ministries in Moscow. Associations were also expected to operate on a self-financing basis and recurrent deficits in their accounts were no longer to be tolerated. By 1980 there were 4,083 associations in the USSR, producing slightly over a half of total industrial output. Yet self-financing was never fully realized. An experiment along these lines had been started at the Shchëkino Chemical Association as early as 1967; yet the reluctance of the central authorities to abandon control over decisions on investment, prices, wages and hiring and firing had condemned it to a fitful performance.

In 1979 another general decree on industry was issued which emphasized the need for scientific planning and for the avoidance of deficits in annual factory accounts. But this yielded miserable results. Soviet economic trends became ever more depressing. The contemporary official statistics gave a different impression: industrial output was still said to have risen by 4.4 per cent per annum in 1976–80. Yet even these statistics indicated a steady decrease in the rate of expansion. The supposed annual rise in 1966–70 had been 8.5 per cent.

In fact the official statistics took no account of the inflation disguised by the trick of slightly altering products and then selling them at higher prices. The statistics also hid the plight of manufacturing industry in comparison with extractive industry. Unwittingly the oil-producing Arab states had rescued the Soviet budget in 1973 by increasing the world-market prices for oil. The USSR was a major exporter of oil, petrol and gas. The reality was that the country, so far from catching up with the advanced capitalist West, was as reliant upon the sales abroad of its natural resources as it had been before 1917; and, in contrast with the tsarist period, it could no longer find a grain surplus for shipment to the rest of Europe. There can as yet be no exact statement of the percentage of industrial growth achieved. The sceptics suggest that no growth at all occurred. Be that as it may, nobody denies that by the end of the 1970s chronic absolute decline was in prospect.

The Politburo’s modifications were still more pathetic in other sectors of the economy. No fresh thinking was applied to banking, insurance, transport, personal services, construction or foreign trade. Policy was so motionless that it was rarely a topic for glancing comment in Pravda or even in the scholarly economic journals. The claims that, by avoiding Khrushchëv’s utopianism, the USSR could make steady economic advance were being tested and found wanting.

Only very dimly were Brezhnev and his colleagues aware that doing nothing was a recipe for political disaster. If they needed proof of the regime’s vulnerability, they had only to look to the country adjacent to the Soviet western border. Poland was seething with working-class opposition. Strikes and demonstrations occurred in the Gdansk shipyards in 1970 under the leadership of Lech Wałesa. Repression worked only briefly: by 1976 the authority of the Polish government was again being challenged. Other countries in Eastern Europe were also restless. Yugoslavia and Romania recurrently criticized the Soviet communist leadership. Albania did the same and reaffirmed her support for the People’s Republic of China. But what could Brezhnev and his colleagues do about anti-Soviet developments in Eastern Europe? The Politburo had no principled objection to the project of a Warsaw Pact invasion, but the experience of Czechoslovakia since 1968 showed that military occupation was not a solution in itself.

Problems also persisted about the potential for working-class unrest in the USSR. Since the Novocherkassk rebellion of 1962 the Politburo had feared lest the ‘party of the workers’ should be challenged by the Russian working class. Central party leaders concluded that timely concessions, if necessary, should always be made; and Brezhnev, while not espousing egalitarianism in wages policy, sanctioned a narrowing of formal differentials. He also ensured that blue-collar workers were paid better than several professional groups. For example, a bus driver in the 1970s earned 230 roubles, a secondary schoolteacher 150 roubles.¹⁵

Brezhnev wanted workers to be materially comfortable; and although the investment in the industrial consumer-goods sector fell behind projections, the expansion in output was enough to improve the conditions of ordinary people. Refrigerators were owned by thirty-two per cent of households in 1970 and by eighty-six per cent in 1980. Ownership of televisions rose from fifty-one to seventy-four per cent in the same decade.¹⁶ Trade unions opened further holiday centres for their members on the Baltic and Black Sea coasts. Trusted workers could travel on officially-organized trips to Eastern Europe and, if they were extremely lucky, to the West. Prices in the shops for staple products such as bread, potatoes, meat and clothing, as well as apartment rents and gas were held low, indeed barely higher than they had been during the First Five-Year Plan. Workers had never known it so good. Nor had the kolkhozniki; for the state pension system had been extended to them in 1964 and they were given internal passports from 1975.¹⁷

The Politburo also had to appeal to the middling groups in society. A persistent source of their dissatisfaction were those remaining aspects of official educational policy which provided sons and daughters of workers with preferential access to university education. The Politburo abolished all such discrimination. In the same spirit, measures were introduced to move away from Khrushchëv’s highly vocational orientation in the schools. The economic ministries and even many factory directors came to feel that the pendulum was swinging too far in the opposite direction; but, after a spirited debate, only a halfway return towards vocational training in schools was sanctioned in 1977.¹⁸

Yet the Politburo was failing to maintain active support in society even at previous levels. It therefore sought to intensify the recruitment of communist party members. In 1966 there had been 12.4 million rank-and-filers; by 1981 this had risen to 17.4 million.¹⁹ Thus nearly one in ten Soviet adults were party members. Their assigned duty was to inspire and mobilize the rest of society. The idea was that the more members, the better the chance to secure universal acquiescence in the status quo. As ever, the result was not a compact political vanguard but a party which reflected the diverse problems of broad social groups. Politburo leaders contrived to overlook the problem. For them, the dangers of further change outweighed the risks of keeping things as they were. Indeed the contemplation of change would have required a concentration of intellectual faculties that hardly any of them any longer possessed. And those few, such as Andropov, who had even mildly unorthodox ideas kept quiet about them.

Despite being inclined towards caution in domestic affairs, they were still tempted to undertake risky operations abroad. In 1978–9 they had been disconcerted by the course of a civil war in Afghanistan across the USSR’s southern frontier. Afghan communists repeatedly asked the Soviet leadership to intervene militarily; but Brezhnev and his associates, sobered by the knowledge of the mauling meted out to the USA in Vietnam, rejected their pleas;²⁰ and Jimmy Carter, who had assumed office as American President in 1977, saw this as evidence that détente was a force for good throughout the world.

In December 1979, however, the Politburo’s inner core decided that failure to support Afghan communist forces would leave the way open for the USA to strengthen the military position of their Islamist adversaries. Soviet Army contingents were sent from Tajikistan to support the communist-led Afghan regime. President Carter felt deceived by the USSR, and ordered a substantial rise in the USA’s military expenditure. The policy of détente collapsed. In 1980, Moscow’s troubles increased when the Polish independent trade union Solidarity led strikes against the government in Warsaw. Poland was becoming virtually ungovernable, and in December 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who was already the Party First Secretary and Prime Minister, obtained the USSR’s sanction to mount a coup d’état to restore order. The eventual alternative, as Jaruzelski understood, would be that Warsaw Pact forces would invade Poland. But Solidarity, though damaged, did not crumble. Deep fissures were beginning to open in the communist order of Eastern Europe.

The Soviet Union’s international position was shaken further when Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party’s right-wing candidate, defeated Carter in the American presidential elections in 1980. The Politburo was put on notice to expect a more challenging attitude on the part of the USA. Domestic and foreign policies which had seemed adequate in the 1970s were about to be put to their stiffest test.

21 Privilege and Alienation

The Soviet political leaders did not feel insecure in power. There were occasional acts of subversion, such as the detonation of a bomb in the Moscow Metro by Armenian nationalists in 1977. But such terrorism was not only rare; it was also usually carried out by nationalists on the territory of their own republics. Russians, however hostile they were to the Politburo, had an abiding horror of political upheaval. Civil war, inter-ethnic struggles and terror were the stuff not of medieval folklore but of stories told by grandparents and even fathers and mothers.

The KGB’s repressive skills remained at the ready. In 1970 the biologist and dissenter Zhores Medvedev was locked up in a lunatic asylum. Only the timely intervention of his twin brother Roy and others, including Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, secured his release.¹ Human-rights activist Viktor Krasin and the Georgian nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia were arrested, and they cracked under the KGB’s pressure on them to renounce their dissenting opinions. Another method was employed against the young poet Iosif Brodski. Since his works were banned from publication and he had no paid occupation, the KGB took him into custody and in 1964 he was tried on a charge of ‘parasitism’. In 1972, after being vilified in the press, he was deported. Solzhenitsyn, too, was subjected to involuntary emigration in 1974. Vladimir Bukovski suffered the same fate a year later in exchange for imprisoned Chilean communist leader Luis Corvalan. In 1980 Sakharov was subjected to an order confining him to residence in Gorki, a city which it was illegal for foreigners to visit.

Yet the members of the various clandestine groups appreciated the uses of publicity. Within a year of the signature of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, informal ‘Helsinki groups’ in the USSR were drawing the world’s attention to the Soviet government’s infringements of its undertakings. Western politicians and diplomats picked up the cause of the dissenters at summit meetings; Western journalists interviewed leading critics of the Politburo — and, to the KGB’s annoyance, several writers let their works appear abroad. The Soviet government did not dare to stop either Solzhenitsyn in 1970 or Sakharov in 1975 from accepting their Nobel Prizes.

Three figures stood out among the dissenters in Russia: Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and Roy Medvedev. Each had achieved prominence after Stalin’s death and had tried to persuade Khrushchëv that basic reforms were essential. Initially they were not recalcitrant rebels; on the contrary, they were persons promoted by the political establishment: they did not seek confrontation. But all eventually concluded that compromise with the Politburo would not work. They were unique and outstanding individuals who could not be broken by the weight of material and psychological pressures that were brought to bear upon them. But they were also typical dissenters of the 1970s. In particular, they shared the characteristic of deriving a spiritual forcefulness from their acceptance of their precarious living and working conditions; they had the advantage of truly believing what they said or wrote, and were willing to endure the punishments inflicted by the state.

They gained also from the country’s traditions of respect for relatives, friends and colleagues. Before 1917, peasants, workers and intellectuals kept a wall of confidentiality between a group’s members and the ‘powers’, as they referred to anyone in official authority over them. Russians were not unique in this. All the peoples of the Russian Empire had coped with oppressive administrators in this way. The informal ties of the group were reinforced in the Soviet period as a defence against the state’s intrusiveness, and the dissenters latched on to the traditions.

What Sakharov, Medvedev and Solzhenitsyn had in common was that they detested Stalin’s legacy and knew that Brezhnev’s Politburo had not entirely abandoned it. But on other matters their ideas diverged. Sakharov had contended in the late 1960s that the world’s communist and capitalist systems were converging into a hybrid of both. But steadily he moved towards a sterner assessment of the USSR and, being committed to the rights of the individual, he saw democracy as the first means to this end.² This attitude was uncongenial to Medvedev, a radical communist reformer who argued that there was nothing inherently wrong with the Leninism enunciated by Lenin himself.³ By contrast, Solzhenitsyn put his faith in specifically Christian values and Russian national customs. Solzhenitsyn’s nuanced anti-Leninism gave way to strident attacks not only on communism but also on virtually every variety of socialism and liberalism. He even rehabilitated the record of the last tsars.⁴ Thus he infuriated Sakharov and Medvedev in equal measure.

By 1973 these disputes were ruining their fellowship, and the situation was not improved by the differential treatment of dissenters by the authorities. Sakharov had once received privileges as a nuclear scientist. The fact that he and his wife had an austere life-style did not save them from Solzhenitsyn’s carping comments, at least until Sakharov and his wife were dispatched into exile to the city of Gorki. Of the three leading dissenters, it was Medvedev who received the lightest persecution. His detractors claimed that although the security police pilfered his manuscripts, he had defenders in the central party leadership who felt that the time might come when his brand of reformist communism would serve the state’s interests.

Yet the efforts of the dissenters at co-ordination were insubstantial. The Moscow-based groups had some contact with the Jewish refuseniks in the capital; but they had little connection with the clandestine national organizations in Ukraine, the Transcaucasus or the Baltic region. And when in 1977 Vladimir Klebanov founded a Free Trade Union Association, he and his fellow unionists conducted their activities almost entirely in isolation from the intellectual dissenters. Few ordinary citizens had copies of their samizdat works. Occasionally it looked as if the KGB, by focusing efforts upon them, unnecessarily increased their significance. This was true to some extent. But the USSR was an authoritarian ideocracy; any failure to extirpate heterodoxy would be taken as a sign of weakness. The snag was that Brezhnev was not Stalin, and understood that persuasion to support the regime would not be effective if persecution were to be increased.

Key ideas of the dissenters continue to leech into the minds of many thousands of citizens. Some heard the ideas on Radio Liberty, the BBC World Service or the Voice of America in the periods when foreign radio stations ceased to be jammed. Others in Estonia could pick up and understand Finnish television. Still others knew people who knew people who had read the original works in samizdat. Having refrained from killing the leaders of dissent, the Politburo had to live with the consequence that their ideas could not be kept wholly in quarantine.

The dissenters probably had less impact on opinion in society than critics of the regime who stayed on the right side of the KGB. In the literary journals a host of writers appeared. In Russia, Vladimir Soloukhin and Valentin Rasputin wrote about the ruination of agriculture and village life. Vasil Bykaw did the same in Belorussia. Despite recurrent disagreements with the party, all of them successfully demanded respect for the pre-revolutionary customs and beliefs. Such writers were known as the ‘ruralists’ (derevenshchiki).⁵ Some of them involved themselves in public debates on ecology. They were joined by the Kyrgyz novelist Chingiz Aitmatov, who described the ravaging of nature and traditional culture in central Asia. Nor was it only living writers whose arguments against the designs of communism had an influence. Classics of Russian literature, such as Fëdor Dostoevski’s novels, continued to provide material for a strong critique of Marxism-Leninism.⁶

In every branch of the arts it was the same. The film directors Andrei Tarkovski and Tengiz Abuladze; the science-fiction writers Arkadi and Boris Strugatski; the musical composer Alfred Schnittke; the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny; the theatre director and performer Vladimir Vysotski: none of them belonged to the groups of overt dissent, but their works offered an alternative way of assessing Soviet reality. And they had a depth of analysis and emotion greater than most of the artists whom Khrushchëv had promoted to eminence.

There was resentment among natural scientists, too, about their working conditions. Distinguished physicists queued up in the Academy of Sciences Library in Leningrad to read copies of the London scientific weekly Nature with the advertisements cut out (which meant that crucial bits of articles on the other side of the excised pages were removed).⁷ Even more strictly supervised were historians, economists and political scientists. Politburo member Suslov kept a sharp eye on them and punished delinquents with demotion: his favourite sanction was to transfer them to a pedagogical institute and stop their books from being published. He also interviewed the novelist Vasili Grossman about the manuscript of his Life and Fate, which exposed both the dictatorial essence of Leninism as well as the anti-Semitism of Stalin’s policies. Suslov predicted that the novel would not be printed for 300 years. (As things turned out, his prophecy was wildly wrong because Life and Fate was published in 1989.)

Although professional people were fed up with the humiliating customs of subordination, they usually complied with the summons to cast their votes in favour of single candidates from a single party in Soviet elections: any failure to do this would attract unpleasant attention from the KGB. For similar reasons it was difficult to refuse to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union if invited. By the late 1970s approximately forty-four per cent of ‘the party’ was constituted by white-collar employees.⁸

Thus the state was regarded with suspicion by practically everybody and lying and cheating remained a popularly approved mode of behaviour. The fish rotted from the head. Brezhnev was a cynic and his family was corrupt. But even if he had been a communist idealist, he would have had no remedy. The old problems remained. In order to fulfil the quotas assigned by the Five-Year Plan, factories still needed to bend regulations. Skilled workers still had to be paid more than was centrally intended. Unskilled sections of the labour-force still had to be indulged in relation to punctuality, conscientiousness and sobriety. The flitting of workers from one job to another was an ineradicable feature in industry; the absence of unemployment meant that the state had no serious counter-measure. Factories, mines and offices were staffed by salaried and waged personnel who put greater effort into the protection of their indolence than into the discharge of their duties. A work-shy attitude was characteristic of both administrators and workers.

The Politburo was given no credit for the material improvements secured in the 1970s, and the cheap provision of food, shelter, clothing, sanitation, health care and transport was taken for granted. Brezhnev’s successes were noted more for their limitations than their progress beyond the performance before 1964. He earned neither affection nor respect.

Soviet citizens concentrated on getting what enjoyment they could out of their private lives. Families operated as collective foragers in an urban wilderness. Turning up at a restaurant was seldom enough unless a booking had been made or a bribe been offered. And so Granny was dispatched to queue for hours in the ill-stocked food shop; young Yevgeni missed a morning at the pedagogical institute to dig the potatoes at the family dacha; and Dad (or ‘Papa’) took a set of spanners he had acquired from the factory and swapped them for an acquaintance’s armchair. The people who carried the greatest burden were the women. Years of propaganda had not bettered their lot even though many had entered occupations once reserved for men. Wives were simply expected to do their new job while also fulfilling the traditional domestic duties. It was not a sexual liberation but a heavier form of patriarchy.

Consequently Soviet citizens, while remaining resolutely slack at work, had to be indefatigable in obtaining alleviation of their living conditions. They had no other option even if they aimed only to semi-prosper. They had to become very enterprising. Each looked after himself or herself and relatives and close friends. On the inside, this collectivistic society fostered extreme individualism.

When all was said and done, however, ordinary Russians could only make the best of a bad situation. They were powerless to effect a general change. Rates of alcoholism, mental illness, divorce and suicide went on rising inexorably. The deterioration of the physical environment continued; diseases were on the increase and hospital services worsened. The living space accorded to the normal urban family remained cramped: just 13.4 square metres per person in 1980.⁹ Thousands of Moscow inhabitants had no resident permits, and many of them inhabited shacks, doorways and parked trams. The diet of most citizens, furthermore, ceased to improve in the late 1970s. Rationing of staple food products returned to Sverdlovsk (which was then under the rule of local party secretary Boris Yeltsin) and several other large cities.¹⁰

Not surprisingly the society of the USSR turned a flinty eye upon the propagandists sent out by party organizations. Attitudes had changed a lot since Stalin had claimed that ‘life is getting gayer’. An anecdote illustrates the point neatly. A young woman was seized by the burly militiamen next to Lenin’s Mausoleum for distributing a pamphlet of protest. The pamphlet was discovered to be full of blank pages. Asked to explain herself, the woman replied: ‘Why bother writing? Everybody knows!’

Marxism-Leninism had never become the world-view of most citizens. The authorities knew this from the reportage on popular opinion delivered by the KGB. In the 1960s they were sufficiently worried that they allowed random-sample social surveys to be undertaken and published despite the ban on sociology as a subject in institutions of higher education. The results were troubling to the Ideological Department of the Party Central Committee Secretariat. In Moscow, according to the results of a questionnaire, only one in eleven propagandists believed that their audiences had absorbed the Marxist-Leninist content of lectures as their personal convictions. Nor did it help that many propagandists carried out their duties with obvious reluctance. For example, forty per cent of those polled in Belorussia gave talks or lectures only as a party obligation.¹¹ This was a problem stretching back to the 1920s. Fifty years on, it had not been solved.

Politburo member Suslov had played a prominent part in the mummification of the notions of Marx, Engels and Lenin; but even Suslov did not stand in the way of Marxism-Leninism’s retreat from earlier standpoints. The natural sciences were freed to a somewhat greater extent from ideological interference. Researchers continued to suffer impediments and indignities since contacts with foreign colleagues remained difficult. Yet at least they were no longer compelled to accept a single official party-approved version of biology, chemistry and physics.

In the social sciences, which in Russia includes philosophy and literature as well as history, party control was tighter. Lenin’s interpretations of the literary classics were compulsory ingredients of scholarship; and, although historical accounts of the Assyrian Empire could be published with merely cursory mention of Marxism, the same was not true about the history of Russia — and especially the decades of Soviet rule. No subject was more jealously guarded from heterodoxy than the theory and practice of the communist party. From one end of the telescope it appeared that extraordinary concessions were being made to non-Marxist opinion. But from the other end things looked different: sceptics were less impressed by the licence gained by Assyriologists than by the unchallengeability of the official party historians who affirmed that, from 1917 to the present day, the party leadership had largely avoided error. Anything new written about Assurbanipal mattered a thousand times less than the fixed catechism about Lenin.

This was indeed a contradictory situation. On the one hand, Marxism-Leninism’s self-restrictions signalled a diminishing official confidence. On the other, Suslov and his subordinate ideologists were eradicating any surviving liveliness in interpretations of Lenin, the October Revolution, Soviet history and current official policies. The authorities had given up ground to its critics, but made a bitter defence of the remaining ideological terrain.

Even Lenin’s books were handled with caution. The fifty-five volumes of the fifth edition of his collected works had been brought to completion in 1965. But in the late 1970s an unpublicized official ban was placed on the sale of the edition in second-hand bookshops.¹² Many of Lenin’s statements were at variance with many of the party’s contemporary doctrines. Consequently the authorities preferred to use excerpts from his writings, carefully chosen to fit in with Brezhnev’s policies. It was a funny old Leninist world where Lenin had become a suspect author. Yet only a few Russians bothered about this paradox since Lenin’s writings were abundantly available at least in some fashion or another. This was not true of thousands of authors who still attracted unconditional disapproval; and the regime had not abandoned its key dogmas on politics, economy and society.

The systematic curtailment of information affected even the pettiest aspects of daily life. KGB operatives were attached to harmless groups of tourists visiting the West, and the card-indexed files of the security organs bulged with reports by its unpaid informers as well as by its own officials. Not even telephone directories were on sale, but were held behind the counter of ‘information kiosks’ — and the employees in these kiosks were not permitted to tell the ordinary enquirer the phone number of foreign embassies. What is more, the Politburo dedicated large financial resources to the development of the technology of control. The KGB’s bugging devices were especially sophisticated. At the same time Soviet citizens were prevented from acquiring equipment that might enable them to pass information among themselves without official permission. Walky-talky radios, photocopiers and word-processing computers were not purchasable in the shops.

These barriers to communication, however, were only partially effective. Citizens had their own direct experience of Soviet history and politics, and were in an excellent position to pass private judgement on the words of party propagandists. Hardly a family existed without relatives who had been killed in Stalin’s time. And everyone could remember the boasts made by successive rulers. After decades in power it was hard for the Politburo to claim that the country’s problems were not the party’s fault to a decisive extent.

And so this most politicizing of states had induced a pervasive political apathy. The messages and the methods of official ideology were deeply unappealing. On Soviet TV, the female continuity announcer’s rigid, bouffant hairdo and humourless mien set the tone; and there was a steam-rolling pomposity about series such as ‘For You, Parents’ and ‘For You, Veterans’. Most TV programmes were heavily didactic. But the public reacted unenthusiastically to them. Sport, crime thrillers, variety shows, science-fiction films and melodramas were much more popular: even Politburo members were scunnered by any media output that was intellectually demanding. Brezhnev liked ‘low-brow’ entertainment as much as did ordinary citizens. Ice-hockey games between the Soviet Union and Canada were much more to his liking than the theory of ‘developed socialism’.

Much leisure in any case was spent outside the home. The Soviet Union, like other communist states, linked its international prestige closely to the performance of its sports teams. The network of facilities was the envy of foreign countries. Soviet youngsters had access to well-funded premises, training and equipment; they knew that, if they had talent, they would be rewarded by privileges which would not fade when they retired: the typical ex-athlete would move into the profession of trainer. The football goalkeeper Lev Yashin and the weightlifter Aleksei Vlasov remained major personalities in Soviet public life.

The state also provided several institutions for daily recreation and annual holidays. Trade unions provided beach vacations in Crimea and Georgia to members who showed a high level of activism and obedience (and children could be sent separately by their parents to summer camps). Workers achieving the monthly production quotas had their names placed on their factory’s Roll of Honour. The state continued to award badges for all manner of public services, and bemedalled war veterans were allowed to go to the head of queues in shops. Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences — who had their own special badge — were each provided with a chauffeur-driven car. The hierarchy of honour and privilege paralleled the hierarchy of job occupations. A large enough minority of citizens benefited sufficiently from these perks to give considerable solidity to the Soviet order.

Yet the long-term dissolvent tendencies in society were unmistakable. The villages went on losing their skilled males to the towns since the improvement in the conditions of kolkhozniki failed to stem the exodus from the countryside. Tractor drivers could nearly always better themselves in the urban work-force. The kolkhozniki, who were typically female and either late middle aged or elderly, had neither the morale nor the energy to organize harvests adequate to feed an industrial country. In the towns and cities a different set of problems prevailed. Workers entering employment in the 1930s and 1940s could reasonably expect promotion to white-collar jobs if they worked and studied hard and obeyed the political authorities. In the 1950s the number of posts in management was ceasing to expand; in the 1970s the holders of these posts hung on to them: mere incompetence was scarcely ever deemed due cause for an individual to be sacked. Social rigidification was setting in: once a worker, always a worker.¹³

Simultaneously the structure of families in many regions of the USSR was causing trepidation. Across Russia, as well as the other Slavic republics and the Baltic region, married couples increasingly limited themselves to having one child. The inadequate living-space and the financial pressure upon wives to stay in the labour-force were the causes. The main birth-control technique was itself a problem: abortion. It was far from unusual for a woman to endure a dozen aborted pregnancies before reaching the menopause. This was terrible enough; but the long-term prospect was equally dispiriting since the proportion of the population supporting their pensioner relatives in Russia and other such regions was going into decline.

In January 1981 Kosygin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Nikolai Tikhonov, acknowledged that ‘demographic policy’ was one of the weakest areas of his government’s activity. In reality he was referring to the ‘national question’; for Tikhonov’s unstated worry was that not enough Russians were being born. Many people, including non-communists, sympathized with him. If current trends continued, the Russian nation would soon constitute a minority in the Soviet Union. The evidence was provided by a census, which revealed that ethnic Russians had dropped from fifty-five per cent of the USSR’s population in 1959 to fifty-two per cent in 1979.¹⁴ For the attitude to family size in the Transcaucasus and central Asia had not followed the pattern of Russia. Tajiks and Uzbeks, who had gained better medical services from the hands of the Soviet state, produced more children than ever who survived to adulthood. The idea circulated among Russians that they would soon be outnumbered and politically downgraded by ‘orientals’.

Such language was racist; it was also rather laughable since several of the supposedly oriental cities, such as the Georgian capital Tbilisi, are located on a line of longitude to the west of cities in central Russia! Nevertheless the feeling behind the words was deep. Russians had for decades been treated as the primary nation of the USSR. Not only did they feel superior to the other peoples but also they considered that their contribution to the development and preservation of the USSR had been the greatest.

The Russian nation’s resentments could no longer be totally ignored, and the Politburo became increasingly frantic to assuage them. Anti-Semitism, which had been approved by Stalin not long before he died, was given semi-official respectability again. Already in 1963 the central party leadership had permitted the Ukrainian writer T. Kichko to publish Judaism without Veneer, an anti-Jewish tract which provoked still more citizens of Jewish origin to apply for exit visas. Brezhnev had let hundreds of thousands leave the country, but solely in order to placate the American administration: on the whole he preferred to reassure Russians that he was on their side. Among the central party leaders in Moscow only Alexander Yakovlev, who served in the Central Committee apparatus, strenuously opposed the condoning of Russian nationalism and demanded a more resolutely internationalist official policy. His position was made so uncomfortable for him that an agreement was made that he should become Soviet ambassador to Canada.¹⁵

None the less there was a still higher standard of living in Georgia and Estonia than across the RSFSR. This naturally caused many Russians to believe that current policies were injurious to the Russian national interest. The policy of elevating personnel of the major local nationality to high office was maintained. Ukrainians administered Ukraine, Uzbeks Uzbekistan and Latvians Latvia. Certainly very severe controls remained: the Politburo continued to position ethnic Russians — or sometimes especially trusted Ukrainians or Belo-russians — as deputy leaders in virtually every republican party, government and the KGB. Yet local ‘national’ functionaries were also prominent; and the policy of ‘stability of cadres’, which had been started in 1964, was prolonged through the 1970s.

The result, as time went on, was that the majority nationalities in each republic were able to augment their dominance over other local national and ethnic groups. Stern campaigns against administrative and financial malpractice were maintained by Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia and Geidar Aliev in Azerbaijan; but neither Shevardnadze nor Aliev did much to protect the position of minorities: in Georgia the Abkhazians and the Adzharians suffered considerable discrimination; in Azerbaijan, the Armenian-inhabited enclave of Nagorny Karabakh was starved of funds. Nor were such tensions absent from the RSFSR. A glaring example was the attempt by Bashkirian communist leaders to ‘Bashkirize’ the education and culture of the Tatar population in their vicinity.¹⁶

Ostensibly these disintegrative trends in other republics were prevented from manifesting themselves in the same fashion in the RSFSR’s Russian provinces. The RSFSR shared a capital with the USSR and was altogether too vast to be permitted to follow a line of action disapproved by the central political authorities. The RSFSR had a formally separate government, but real power was denied it; and the ban on the establishment of a separate communist party remained in force. But there had long been ambivalences in the policies of the Politburo. In particular, Russian intellectuals were accorded greater latitude for cultural self-assertion than were their non-Russian counterparts. Russia’s pride of place among the nations of the USSR continued to be officially affirmed. And whereas Russians had important posts in the local political administrations of the other Soviet republics, ethnic Russians had a monopoly in the administrative apparatus of the RSFSR’s provinces.

The policy of stability of cadres, moreover, encouraged officials in the localities to ignore uncongenial central demands. The province-level party committee (obkom) secretary retained crucial local power and the fact that functionaries from the non-central party apparatus occupied a third of the places at the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress in 1976 was an index of their influence.¹⁷

Thus the local ‘nests’ were also reinforced. For a manager running a factory of national significance could always threaten to appeal to his minister; and a KGB chief in a border area or a commander of a military district might easily cause trouble if the obkom secretary interfered excessively in security affairs. But few local ‘nests’ of officials were very disputatious; for a common local interest existed in keeping the ‘centre’ from prying into the locality. Ordinary Soviet citizens who wrote to the Politburo and the Secretariat exposing an abuse of power in their town or village were sometimes rewarded with a Pravda campaign on their behalf; but such campaigns were ineffectual in transforming general practice — and sometimes such citizens found themselves victimized by the local officials whom they had exposed. At any rate the central authorities remained loyal to the policy of only sacking functionaries in cases of extreme disobedience to the Kremlin’s demands.

The old paradox endured. On the one hand, there was a frantic profusion of official demands for observance of legality, and under Brezhnev — according to one estimate — the number of ‘normative acts’ of legislation in force across the USSR had risen to 600,000;¹⁸ on the other hand, infringements of legality were pervasive. The key common goal of political leaders in the Kremlin was to minimize shifts of policy and avoid damaging internal controversy. Transfers of personnel, if they were on a large scale, would destabilize the relations among central and local public groups in the various institutions. The Soviet compound was entering a stage of degradation.

Nevertheless this is not how it seemed to most wielders of power at either the central or local levels. Even among those of them who were minded to introduce reforms there was little acceptance that basic reform was overdue; instead they tended to believe that it would be enough to modify existing policies, to sack the most incompetent of Brezhnev’s cronies and introduce younger blood. Above all, they felt that Brezhnev himself had served in office too long. The condition of his health was in fact even worse than most of the rumours about it. The handful of officials who came into regular, direct contact with him could see for themselves that he was a dreadfully ill old man. The scribblings in his personal diary showed a lingering interest in television programmes and sport; and his punctuation and spelling would have disgraced a schoolchild.¹⁹

Brezhnev had stayed in office after bowing to pressure from some of his Politburo associates; and this had postponed the jostling among them over the question of the political succession. Essentially Gromyko, Ustinov, Suslov and Andropov were governing the country through a consensus among themselves. Brezhnev’s closest aide and confidant, Politburo member Chernenko, had also acquired an influence. Crucial Politburo decisions were being taken by them in his absence.

But Brezhnev’s health worsened drastically in the winter of 1981–2 and the Politburo pondered who eventually was to take his place as General Secretary. The choice would have been influenced by Suslov, who was a senior Central Committee Secretary. But Suslov died aged seventy-nine in January 1982. KGB chairman Andropov was given Suslov’s place in the Central Committee Secretariat in May, and quickly it became obvious that he would make a strong bid to succeed Brezhnev. Stories about corrupt practices in Brezhnev’s family and entourage started to circulate.²⁰ The stories came from Andropov’s associates in the KGB. Evidently Andropov was trying to create a mood in the Politburo that would ruin the chances of one of Brezhnev’s boon companions emerging as a serious rival to his own candidature.

By his actions Andropov showed that he no longer feared incurring Brezhnev’s hostility. Through spring, summer, autumn 1982 the General Secretary rarely appeared in public. The official pretence was maintained that he was not seriously ill; but his doctors, together with his nurse (who for years had been his mistress), despaired that he would ever recover. Brezhnev was sinking fast. On 10 November 1982, he suffered a final relapse and died.

The Politburo instructed that he should be buried outside the Kremlin Wall on Red Square. Statesmen from all over the world attended. His wife and family were accompanied to the funeral by the central party leadership — and daughter Galina outraged spectators by refraining from wearing sombre garb. Brezhnev had been dressed in his Marshal’s uniform with all his medals. But the careless way the coffin was dropped into his grave was taken as a sign that not all Politburo leaders wished to be seen to regret that at last he had left the political stage. In truth it was hard to feel very sorry for Brezhnev. When he had succeeded Khrushchëv, he was still a vigorous politician who expected to make the party and government work more effectively. He had not been inactive; he had not been entirely inflexible. But his General Secretaryship had turned into a ceremonial reign that had brought communism into its deepest contempt since 1917.

22 Towards Reform (1982–1985)

Yuri Andropov had played an astute hand in the last months of Brezhnev’s life, and it was he who was chosen by the Politburo as the new General Secretary on 12 November 1982. He had waited many years to occupy the supreme party office and had no intention of governing in the fashion of Brezhnev. Andropov believed changes in policy to be vital.

As General Secretary, however, he had to take feelings in the Politburo into account. The Politburo contained a rump of Brezhnev’s promotees who could cause him trouble: Tikhonov, Shcherbytskiy, Grishin and Chernenko had an iron-plated complacency about current policies and disliked virtually any proposal for change. Yet several other influential members of the Politburo, Dmitri Ustinov and Andrei Gromyko, did not stand in Andropov’s way when he demanded a modification of official policies. Ustinov had been Defence Minister since 1976, Gromyko had led the Foreign Affairs Ministry since 1957. With their acquiescence, Andropov intensified his campaign against corruption. Political and social discipline, he argued, were the prerequisites for economic expansion — and economic expansion was needed if the Soviet standard of living was to be raised and military parity with the USA to be retained.

Andropov was the brightest party leader of his generation. Born in 1914, he was of Cossack descent.¹ He had a conventional background except inasmuch as his father had been a railway administrator and not a worker. He quickly rose up the hierarchy of the Komsomol and the party; by the end of the Second World War he was second party secretary for the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Republic. The post-war purges of communist functionaries in Leningrad had repercussions in that republic and many of Andropov’s colleagues were shot.² He counted himself lucky to survive; and in 1954 he was appointed as Soviet ambassador to Hungary. He was in Budapest during the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and stayed there until 1957, when Khrushchëv recalled him to work in the central party apparatus in Moscow. A decade later he was picked by Brezhnev to take over the KGB.

An associate described him as having ‘an enormous forehead, which looked as if it had been specially shaven clean on both sides of his temples, a large, impressive nose, thick lips and a cleft chin’.³ He took little pleasure in food and sport and was a teetotaller. His taste for well-tailored suits was his only sign of self-indulgence, and occasionally he let himself go by penning stanzas of doggerel to his advisers — and his humour could be lavatorial.⁴ But generally he refrained from such ribaldry. Not even fellow Politburo members saw much of his lighter side. He would not even accept an invitation to a supper party unnecessarily.⁵ His ideological severity was emphatic. Andropov believed in Marxism-Leninism and was offended by the laxities permitted by Brezhnev: he could not abide the incompetent gerontocrats in the Kremlin. The problem was that he, too, was old and was troubled by ill-health. A chronic kidney complaint was becoming acute. If he was going to have an impact, action had to be swift.

And so Andropov announced the reimposition of discipline and order as his immediate priority. He instituted judicial proceedings against leading ne’er-do-wells in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He also punished the more mundane misdemeanours of ordinary citizens: the police cleared the streets of drunks; lack of punctuality at work was also penalized and random inspections were made so that people might not leave their place of work in working hours. Conscientious fulfilment of professional duties was demanded of everybody in society, right from the central party leaders down to ordinary citizens. Such measures were stern in general, but they inflicted special hardship on Soviet wives and mothers. Most women in the USSR went out to work and yet had to undertake all the domestic chores; it was difficult for them to cope with the queuing in the shops unless they could take time off in working hours.

Not that Andropov was a complete killjoy. He did not mind if people had a tipple; on the contrary, he permitted the introduction of a cheap new vodka, which was known as ‘Andropovka’.⁶ He also genuinely aimed to improve living conditions. He gave the following summary of his purposes to his physician: ‘First we’ll make enough sausages and then we won’t have any dissidents.’⁷

Such a remark was not made by someone who was bent upon a fundamental revision of Marxism-Leninism. Accordingly, then, the slogan of ‘developed socialism’ was retained. But differences in style quickly appeared. For example, Andropov admitted that the party leadership needed ‘to acquire an understanding of the society in which we live’.⁸ This was a cognitive humility uncharacteristic of previous leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Andropov stressed that he had not come to office with ready-made, easy solutions and that he intended to learn from as many people as he could. Thus in February 1983 he visited a Moscow lathe-making factory and held brief conversations with workers.⁹ It was a mundane event in itself. (It was also highly contrived: the workers knew that they had to say things that would not irritate the General Secretary.) But the contrast with Brezhnev’s later years was unmistakable.

Replacements were being made in the Kremlin’s personnel. Andropov surrounded himself with personal advisers who, by contemporary official standards, were free thinkers. Typically they were academics or journalists. They were loyal communist party members; all for a long time had argued that official policies needed to be altered. Andropov also showed his impatience in his changes of political personnel at the centre. Mikhail Gorbachëv and Yegor Ligachëv were lively party officials from a younger generation for whom he secured further advancement; he also plucked Nikolai Ryzhkov from the State Planning Commission and transferred him to party duties. Gorbachëv, Ligachëv and Ryzhkov were appointed as Central Committee Secretaries so that Andropov could ensure compliance with his wishes throughout the central party apparatus. Gorbachëv retained oversight over agriculture and gained it over the entire economy. Ryzhkov, who headed a new Economic Department, was made responsible specifically for industry. Ligachëv led the Organizational Department.¹⁰

Andropov was aiming — in his secretive way — to explore possible ways to modify the Politburo’s measures; he knew that the economy cried out for regeneration. But he was far from sure about which measures to adopt. He therefore asked Gorbachëv and Ryzhkov to conduct confidential, detailed research on his behalf and to make suitable recommendations.¹¹

Probably Andropov did not wish to venture far along the route of reforms. A decree was passed in July 1983 to provide industrial associations with somewhat greater autonomy from the central planning authorities.¹² Yet the clauses were still not as radical as the proposals of Kosygin in 1965; and the enduring closeness of his friendship with Minister of Defence Ustinov indicated that Andropov hardly wanted to transform the entire system of power.¹³ He kept his more independently-minded advisers well under control. Indeed several scholars outside his entourage felt that he was entirely failing to appreciate the critical nature of the country’s problems. In particular, a group of Novosibirsk sociologists and economists under Tatyana Zaslavskaya produced its own treatise on the need for reform. The authors argued that administrative arbitrariness lay at the centre of the difficulties in Soviet society and its economy. Zaslavskaya’s mild ideas were so audacious in the USSR of the early 1980s that she was in jeopardy of being arrested when the treatise fell into the KGB’s hands.¹⁴

At any rate, Andropov was a naturally cautious man. Certainly he gave no licence to Gorbachëv and Ryzhkov, his adjutants in the quest for economic regeneration, to take up the analysis provided by the Novosibirsk group. In short, he wanted change, but insisted that it should be undertaken at no risk to the existing state order. Domestic policy was to be revised with gradualness and with due appreciation of all possible difficulties.

Andropov showed greater enterprise in foreign policy. On becoming General Secretary, he issued proposals thick and fast. He especially strove to reanimate the international understandings of détente which had been ruined by the Soviet military intervention in the Afghan Civil War in 1979. Andropov called for a summit with American President Reagan, for an arms reduction agreement between the USSR and the USA and for a ban on nuclear tests. At a Warsaw Pact meeting in Prague in January 1983 Andropov made a still more startling suggestion. This was that the USSR and the USA should sign an accord that each should formally undertake not to attack any country belonging to the other’s alliance or even any country within its own alliance.¹⁵ No doubt Andropov deliberately chose to make his suggestion in Prague, capital of the Warsaw Pact country invaded by the USSR in 1968.

But Reagan was as yet of no mind to see anything positive in Soviet overtures. He regarded the USSR as an ‘evil empire’ and former KGB chief Andropov as an emperor as demonic as any of his predecessors in the Kremlin. Far from improving, relations between the superpowers deteriorated after Brezhnev’s death. On 23 March 1983, President Reagan announced he was going to finance research on a Strategic Defence Initiative (or ‘Star Wars’ Initiative, as it quickly became known). According to Reagan, this would serve no offensive purpose whatever but would be an exclusively defensive system for the detection and destruction of nuclear missiles aimed at the USA. Reagan promised that the technological developments would be shared with the USSR. Unsurprisingly Andropov felt unable to accept him at his word: there was no guarantee that the system would indeed be confided to the Soviet Union. The Politburo resolved to subsidize a parallel research programme, and competition in military technology was set to grow fiercer.

Tension between the USSR and the USA increased on 1 September when a South Korean airliner, KAL-007, strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down by the forces of Air-Defense Command. Furious recriminations occurred between Moscow and Washington; the diplomatic strains were intensifying to the point of rupture. Andropov was advised by Sovet intelligence organs abroad that Reagan might be about to order a nuclear strike on the USSR. The suspicion was that the imminent NATO exercise of 2 November might be used as a cover to attack Moscow. Andropov felt he had no alternative but to order his nuclear forces to assume a condition of heightened alert.¹⁶ This emergency, unlike the Cuban missiles crisis, was kept secret from the Soviet and American publics. But the politicians in the two capitals knew how near the world had come to the brink of a Third World War; and it was clear that robust, clear-sighted leadership was required if such incidents were not to recur.

Robustness could no longer be provided by Andropov. The decay of his kidneys could not be slowed and the frequency of his attendance at official meetings was already decreasing in spring and summer 1983: colleagues had to communicate with him by letter as he convalesced at his dacha. Greater authority therefore passed into the hands of the second secretary of the Central Committee, Chernenko, who chaired the Politburo in Andropov’s absence. This job was also sometimes carried out by Gorbachëv. In the discreet struggle for the succession, Andropov’s preference was for Gorbachëv over Chernenko. He appended a note to this effect on one of his last memoranda to the Central Committee. But Chernenko’s supporters excised the note from the version presented to the Central Committee, and Andropov died on 9 February 1984 before he could consolidate Gorbachëv’s chances.¹⁷

For his protégés, Andropov’s passing was a tragic loss for the USSR. Even the dissenter Roy Medvedev felt that great changes had been in prospect under Andropov.¹⁸ This was excessive optimism. It is true that Andropov had succeeded in sacking one fifth of province-level party first secretaries — a vital process of replacement if ever the Brezhnevite complacency was to be dispelled.¹⁹ Furthermore, industrial output was five per cent higher in 1983 than in the previous year; and the value of agricultural production rose by seven per cent.²⁰ Yet although the duration of Andropov’s tenure had not been enough for him to take a grip on economic policies, he was far too traditionalist to be able to do much more than he had already accomplished.

After kidney-patient Andropov it was Chernenko, already debilitated by emphysema, who became General Secretary. Gorbachëv had to be content with being his informal deputy. Chernenko was not the most highly qualified of General Secretaries. Flimsily-educated and uninspiring, he had served in lowly party ranks until he met Brezhnev in Moldavia in the early 1950s. After years of service as Brezhnev’s personal aide, he was rewarded by being made a Central Committee Secretary in 1976 and a full Politburo member two years later. His talents had never stretched beyond those of a competent office manager and his General Secretaryship was notable for woeful conservatism. The sole change to the composition of the Politburo occurred with the death of Ustinov in December 1984 — and such was the disarray of the central party leadership that Ustinov was not replaced. Chernenko’s single innovation in policy was his approval of an ecologically pernicious scheme to turn several north-flowing Siberian rivers down south towards the Soviet republics of central Asia.

His Politburo colleagues had chosen Chernenko as their General Secretary because his frailty would enable them to keep their own posts and to end Andropov’s anti-corruption campaign. The Central Committee, being packed with persons promoted by Brezhnev, did not object to this objective. But the choice of Chernenko caused concern. Chernenko was left in no doubt about the contempt felt for him by members of the Central Committee when they refrained from giving him the conventional ovation after his promotion to General Secretary.²¹ But Chernenko was old, infirm and losing the will to live, much less to avenge himself for such humiliation.

It was Gorbachëv who led the Politburo and the Secretariat during Chernenko’s incapacitation. Behind the scenes, moreover, Gorbachëv and Ryzhkov continued to elaborate those measures for economic regeneration demanded of them by Andropov.²² Other Politburo members were disconcerted by Gorbachëv’s status and influence. Tikhonov persistently tried to organize opposition to him; and Viktor Grishin decided to enhance his own chances of succeeding Chernenko by arranging for a TV film to be made of Chernenko and himself. Chernenko was so ill that he lacked the presence of mind to shoo Grishin away. Another of Gorbachëv’s rivals was Politburo member and former Leningrad party first secretary Grigori Romanov; and, unlike the septuagenarian Grishin, Romanov was a fit politician in his late fifties. Both Grishin and Romanov were hostile to proposals of reform and wished to prevent Gorbachëv from becoming General Secretary.

Chernenko died on 10 March 1985. If Brezhnev’s funeral had been distinguished by farce when the coffin slipped out of the bearers’ grasp at the last moment, Chernenko’s was not memorable even for this. Opinion in the party, in the country and around the world sighed for a Soviet leader who was not physically incapacitated.

Yet it was not the world nor even the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a whole but the Politburo that would be deciding the matter at 2 p.m. on 11 March.²³ Behind the scenes Ligachëv was organizing provincial party secretaries to speak in Gorbachëv’s favour at the Central Committee. In the event Gorbachëv was unopposed. Even Tikhonov and Grishin spoke in his favour. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was chairing the session and was unstinting in his praise of Gorbachëv. There were the usual rumours of conspiracy. It was noted, for example, that Volodymyr Shcherbytskiy, who was not among Gorbachëv’s admirers, had found it impossible to find an Aeroflot jet to fly him back from the USA for the Politburo meeting. But the reality was that no one in the Politburo was willing to stand against Gorbachëv. The Politburo’s unanimous choice was to be announced to the Central Committee plenum in the early evening.

At the plenum, Gromyko paid tribute to Gorbachëv’s talent and dependability: little did he know that Gorbachëv would soon want rid of him.²⁴ Whatever else he was, Gorbachëv was a brilliant dissimulator: he had attended the court of Leonid Brezhnev and managed to avoid seeming to be an unsettling reformer. Only under Andropov and Chernenko had he allowed his mask to slip a little. In a speech in December 1984 he used several words soon to be associated with radicalism: ‘acceleration’, ‘the human factor’, ‘stagnation’ and even ‘glasnost’ and ‘democratization’.²⁵ But nobody in the Politburo, not even Gorbachëv himself, had a presentiment of the momentous consequences of the decision to select him as General Secretary.

Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachëv had been born in 1931 and brought up in Privolnoe, a small village of Stavropol region in southern Russia. His family had been peasants for generations. Relatives of Gorbachëv had been persecuted in the course of mass agricultural collectivization. One of his grandfathers, who was a rural official, was arrested; the other was exiled for a time. He had a straitened childhood on the new kolkhoz, especially under the Nazi occupation in 1942–3; his memory of his early life was far from sentimental: ‘Mud huts, earthen floor, no beds.’²⁶ But he survived. During and after the war Gorbachëv worked in the fields like the other village youths, and in 1949 his industriousness was rewarded with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. He was highly intelligent, receiving a silver medal for his academic achievements at the local school and gained a place in the Faculty of Jurisprudence at Moscow State University.

He graduated in 1955 with first-class marks, but recently-introduced rules prevented him from working for the USSR Procuracy in Moscow.²⁷ He therefore dropped his plans for a career in the law and opted to enter politics. Returning to Stavropol, he joined the apparatus of the Komsomol and then the party. Two decades of solid organizational work followed for Gorbachëv and his wife Raisa. He enjoyed rapid promotion. By 1966 he was heading the City Party Committee and four years later was entrusted with the leadership of the entire Stavropol Region. He was not yet forty years old and had joined an élite whose main characteristic was its advanced age. Both he and his wife were ambitious. A story is told that they had the same dream one night. Both had a vision of him clambering up out of a deep, dark well and striding out along a broad highway under a bright sky. Gorbachëv was perplexed as to its significance. Raisa unhesitatingly affirmed that it meant that her husband was destined to be ‘a great man’.²⁸

Khrushchëv’s closed-session speech to the Twentieth Party Congress had given him hope that reform was possible in the USSR.²⁹ But he kept quiet about these thoughts except amidst his family and with his most trusted friends. In any case, he was vague in his own mind about the country’s needs. Like many of his contemporaries, he wanted reform but had yet to identify its desirable ingredients for himself.³⁰

In the meantime he set out to impress the central leaders who visited the holiday resorts adjacent to Stavropol; and he was making a name for himself by his attempts to introduce just a little novelty to the organization of the region’s kolkhozes. By virtue of his post in the regional party committee in 1971 he was awarded Central Committee membership. In 1978 he was summoned to the capital to lead the Agricultural Department in the Secretariat. Next year he became a Politburo candidate member and in 1980 a full member. Two years later he was confident enough to propose the establishment of a State Agro-Industrial Committee. This was a cumbersome scheme to facilitate the expansion of farm output mainly by means of institutional reorganization. It was hardly a radical reform. But it was criticized by Tikhonov, Kosygin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, as an attempt to form ‘a second government’, and the Politburo rejected it. Gorbachëv was learning the hard way about the strength of vested interests at the summit of Soviet politics.³¹

His career anyway did not suffer: the preferment he enjoyed under Brezhnev was strengthened by Andropov. Word had got around that Gorbachëv was a man of outstanding talent. He was not a theorist, but his openness to argument was attractive to the intellectual consultants who had advised Andropov. So, too, was Gorbachëv’s reputation as a decisive boss. He had not in fact achieved much for agriculture either in Stavropol or in Moscow; but he was given the benefit of the doubt: he could not do what Brezhnev would not have allowed.

Gorbachëv’s practical ideas in 1985 were as yet very limited in scope. He resumed the economic and disciplinary orientation set by Andropov; he also gave priority to changes of personnel.³² But already he had certain assumptions that went beyond Andropovism. In the 1970s he had visited Italy, Belgium and West Germany in official delegations and taken a three-week car-touring holiday in France with Raisa. The impression on him was profound. He learned that capitalism was not a moribund economic system and that, despite many defects, it offered many sections of its societies a breadth of material goods unrivalled in the USSR.³³ He had also been rethinking his attitude to the Soviet order since 1983, when he had studied Lenin’s last works on bureaucracy and had come to understand that the bureaucratic problems of the 1920s had not disappeared.³⁴ His private assumptions and understandings would at last have room to develop into policies when Gorbachëv became General Secretary.

By temperament he was a gambler, and the very fact that he had not elaborated his strategy left him open to suggestions to take ever larger risks. The night before going to the Politburo meeting which selected him as General Secretary, he stated: ‘Life can’t be lived like this any longer.’³⁵ But he said this solely to his wife Raisa, in the garden of their dacha where he could be confident of not being bugged.³⁶ He could not afford to be too frank about his intention to repudiate Brezhnev’s heritage: on 11 March 1985 he soothed the Central Committee with his statement that policies did not need changing.³⁷ Yet on the quiet he was looking for substantial changes. He had no detailed objectives, but he was impatient to achieve something fast.

His first task was to assemble a group of influential supporters. At the next Central Committee plenum, on 23 April 1985, he gave favour to fellow protégés of Andropov: Central Committee Secretaries Ryzhkov and Ligachëv were promoted to full membership of the Politburo, and KGB chairman Viktor Chebrikov rose from being candidate to full member of the Politburo. When the Central Committee met again in July, two local party leaders, Lev Zaikov of Leningrad and Boris Yeltsin of Sverdlovsk, were appointed to the Secretariat. Romanov, Gorbachëv’s chief rival of pre-pensionable age, was sacked from the Politburo; and Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgian communist party leader and a friend of Gorbachëv, was raised from candidate to full Politburo membership. These were persons who shared his sense of urgency. A year before, in conversation with Gorbachëv on Pitsunda beach in Crimea, Shevardnadze had put their common approach into a few blunt words: ‘Everything’s rotten. There must be change.’³⁸

Shevardnadze was then appointed Soviet Foreign Minister in place of Gromyko. For Gromyko at the age of seventy-six there was the consolation of being made Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium and thereby becoming head of state; but Gorbachëv was not so generous towards the eighty-year-old Nikolai Tikhonov, who was compelled to retire and whose job was taken by Nikolai Ryzhkov. In October the leadership of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) passed from Nikolai Baibakov, who had held the post for two decades, to Nikolai Talyzin.

Already Gorbachëv had removed the most powerful of Brezhnev’s cronies, got rid of Romanov and installed a group of experienced administrators at the centre who were dedicated to the regeneration of the Soviet economy. Within months he had accomplished a turnover of personnel that Stalin, Khrushchëv and Brezhnev had taken years to carry out. The average age of the Politburo fell from sixty-nine years at the end of 1980 to sixty-four by the end of 1985.³⁹ Another aspect of change was the background of the supreme party leadership. All the newcomers, unlike many leaders in Brezhnev’s generation, had completed at least their secondary education. Most of them also had until recently lived in ‘the localities’. Yeltsin had worked for most of his career in the Urals, Ligachëv in mid-Siberia, Shevardnadze in Georgia. They brought to the capital an awareness of day-to-day provincial actuality. They were confident that collectively they could solve the country’s problems.

Gorbachëv was the most worldly-wise of all of them. His ability to adjust his style to unfamiliar surroundings astonished foreign politicians. In 1984 the British Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher declared: ‘I like Mr Gorbachëv. We can do business together.’⁴⁰ Gorbachëv and his wife were a vivacious couple, and Raisa’s wardrobe excited interest in Western newspapers. The new General Secretary transparently wanted to govern a USSR which no longer invited hatred and ridicule beyond its frontiers.

But how were he and his colleagues in the Kremlin going to achieve this? Initially they followed Andropov’s general line and concentrated efforts upon the economy. Discipline and order also returned to the agenda. The Politburo, persuaded by Ligachëv, even took the risk of discouraging alcohol consumption. Threefold increases in the price of vodka were decreed and vineyards were hacked down in Georgia, Moldavia and Ukraine. This was not the last time that Gorbachëv fell out of touch with social opinion: on this occasion he was nicknamed the Mineral Secretary for asserting the superiority of mineral water over booze. Yet he was mocked more than resented. Nearly all Soviet citizens were delighted by his unceremonial dumping of the Brezhnevite time-servers. He was also admired for his visits to cities outside Moscow and his willingness to engage bystanders in conversation. Pravda editorials became as compulsive reading as the sport, chess and quizzes at the back of the newspaper.

Gorbachëv, whose main economic slogan was ‘acceleration’, looked like a man in a hurry. But actual measures were slower to emerge. His first move was made in November 1985, when a super-ministry for the cultivation and processing of foodstuffs was formed along the lines unsuccessfully proposed by Gorbachëvin Brezhnev’s time. Named as the State Committee for the Agro-Industrial Complex (Gosagroprom), it was to be led by one of Gorbachëv’s political clients, Vsevolod Murakhovski. This had been one of Gorbachëv’s pet projects in Brezhnev’s lifetime, but until he became General Secretary he encountered resistance from the Council of Ministers.⁴¹ Now he could realize his wishes.

But this meant he was aiming to renovate Soviet agriculture chiefly by reorganizing its central governmental institutions. As he should have known from Zaslavskaya’s Novosibirsk Report in 1983, the regeneration of the economy required much more than administrative measures. Kolkhozniki and sovkhozniki remained subject to a system of peremptory orders and of weak material incentives; and they had no positive influence over the running of the collective farm: they were bossed by farm chairmen and the chairmen themselves were bossed by Moscow. Gosagroprom was not going to dislodge a single brick in this bureaucratic wall. Quite the opposite: by giving additional authority to a central body such as Gosagroprom, Gorbachëv would increase the wall’s solidity. The General Secretary acted as if a group of new officials, a structural experiment and a campaign of public exhortation would do the trick; his orientation was centralist, hierarchical, administrative and command-based.

If agriculture was the economy’s Achilles’ heel, industry was its severely bruised knee. In Gorbachëv’s first months there was no equivalent reorganization of the manufacturing sector. Nevertheless a re-jigging of budgetary aims took place. The Twelfth Five-Year Plan was scheduled to begin in 1986, and the Politburo declared that an increase in the quantity and quality of industrial output required the maximizing of investment in the machine-building sector. Ryzhkov and Gorbachëv were the principal advocates of this strategy. They were putting into effect the ideas elaborated by the two of them under Andropov’s encouragement.

Increasingly, however, Gorbachëv recognized that such calculations were inadequate to the solution of the country’s problems. On his various tours to the provinces he spoke off the cuff and tagged new priorities to the formally-agreed economic agenda. By late 1985 there was scarcely an industrial sector not mentioned by the General Secretary as deserving of large, additional investment.⁴² Ryzhkov, a former deputy chairman of Gosplan, perceived that such promises were a budgetary impossibility: Gorbachëv had simply not done his sums. Yet Ryzhkov, too, lacked a workable strategy and continued to advocate an unrealizably rapid expansion in the output of industrial consumer goods; for his diversion of vast revenues into machine-construction could not yield results until after several years, perhaps even decades. The draft Twelfth Five-Year Plan presented by Ryzhkov to the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 was based upon false economic premisses.

The central communist leadership would be frustrated until the ideas on economic reform underwent more basic revision. Gorbachëv sometimes hinted that he was considering this option. In Leningrad in May 1985 he announced to fellow communists: ‘Obviously, we all of us must undergo reconstruction, all of us… Everyone must adopt new approaches and understand that no other path is available to us.’⁴³ Within a year the notion of reconstruction (or perestroika, as it became known in all languages) was the condiment in every dish of policy served up by the General Secretary.

Gorbachëv was fighting harder than any of his colleagues to radicalize the regime’s policies. As his ideas changed, he left several of Andropov’s appointees bemused; and inside the Politburo he could initially count only upon Shevardnadze as an unconditional ally. Gorbachëv remained unclear as to what he wanted. But although he took time to discover a positive set of aims, at least he knew what he was against. He hated the obstacles being put in his way by upholders of the ideas and practices of the Brezhnev period. Debate was lively among the central party leaders and Gorbachëv was in his element. In November 1985 he briskly persuaded the Politburo to sack Grishin, giving his place to Yeltsin in both the Politburo and in the Moscow City Party Committee. Yeltsin declared war on corruption and indolence throughout the capital’s administration, and sacked Grishin’s placemen as opponents of perestroika. Gorbachëv had promoted someone he hoped would be a permanent supporter in the Politburo.

Yet the struggle for reform had only just begun. At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 Gorbachëv had to tread carefully in recommending fresh policy initiatives. The new Party Programme accepted at the Congress would hardly have discomfited Gorbachëv’s predecessors in office: the ‘perfecting’ of ‘developed socialism’ was set to remain the main political slogan.⁴⁴ Yet immediately after the Congress he showed that he would not permanently be denied. Local officialdom was to be brought into line with his thinking: by the middle of 1986 two thirds of province-level party secretaries had not had the same jobs a half-decade earlier.⁴⁵ He was convinced that the vigorous support of such appointees would guarantee his success.

He was equally optimistic in his conduct of international relations in 1985–6. He had set his mind on sorting out Soviet domestic affairs, and had used the occasion of Chernenko’s funeral to call a meeting of leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries and to announce his commitment to non-interference in their political life. According to Gorbachëv, these countries were thenceforward to have independent control of their internal development.⁴⁶ This was already a striking contrast with Soviet foreign policy since 1945. Even Andropov had offered to relax the USSR’s grip on Eastern Europe solely on condition that the USA made analogous concessions in its regional spheres of influence.⁴⁷ Gorbachëv’s statement was not tied to a public bargaining position with the USA: it was delivered exclusively to an audience of the USSR’s allies in Eastern Europe. He wanted them to know that they were responsible for their own fate.

This was not a sign that Gorbachëv thought that communism was doomed in the USSR and Eastern Europe. The exact opposite was true. Gorbachëv was still at that time a Marxist-Leninist believer: he contended that the Soviet communist order was in many ways already superior to capitalism; he was unshaken in his opinion that the Soviet type of state provided its citizens with better health care, education and transport. The task in the USSR and Eastern Europe was consequently to renovate communism so as to match capitalism in other areas of public life. Gorbachëv assumed that he would be able to persuade fellow communist leaders in Eastern Europe to follow his example. There was to be no repetition of the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Renovation had to occur voluntarily. Despite Gorbachëv’s eloquence, however, the Warsaw Pact leaders did not take him seriously and treated his speech as ceremonial rhetoric.⁴⁸

The Politburo was learning to take his words more literally. In October 1985 he was already suggesting to its members that a way had to be found for the Soviet Army to be withdrawn from the war in Afghanistan.⁴⁹ Presumably he wished to have freedom to alter conditions in the USSR without international distractions. The material and human costs of the Afghan war were running out of control. Gorbachëv felt he could build the kind of socialism in his country that would cause the rest of the world to marvel.

He therefore refused to be downcast by the attitude taken by US President Reagan, who had secured a second term of office in 1984 and persisted with the development of his Strategic Defence Initiative. Gorbachëv continued to believe that Soviet science and industry would cope with the challenge and match the USA’s technology. To the despair of his own more sceptical advisers, he even convinced himself that he could undertake major economic reform while supplying the Ministry of Defence with the immense additional resources needed to develop and deploy the USSR’s equivalent to Reagan’s project.⁵⁰ Since the end of the Second World War, Soviet scientists had always succeeded in emulating American military technology. Gorbachëv felt that there was no reason to doubt that they could do the same in the mid-1980s. Gorbachëv began his reforms as a buoyant optimist.

Yet the Strategic Defence Initiative, while not instigating Gorbachëv’s domestic perestroika, was indisputably going to make a tough task tougher, and Gorbachëv was not so stupid as to think that a vast new programme of military research would not divert expenditure from the civilian industrial sector. It would obviously therefore be far better for the USSR if the USA could be persuaded to abandon its Initiative altogether in return for firm and binding agreements on nuclear disarmament.

Although Gorbachëv had no experience as a diplomat, he intuitively sensed that personal contact with the American President might produce a transformation in relations between the superpowers. He was certainly lucky in his choice of moment to make the attempt. For Reagan himself, influenced by both Margaret Thatcher and his wife Nancy, was starting to look for signs that Soviet foreign policy might be more amenable to American political overtures. Gorbachëv and Reagan were therefore pleased to be able to arrange to meet each other in Geneva in November 1985. Their fireside conversations were courteous, even congenial. The two men liked each other and a rising degree of trust was noticeable between them. Nevertheless Reagan remained on his guard. While talking reassuringly to Gorbachëv, he licensed subordinates such as Caspar Weinberger and Richard Perle to make whatever menacing remarks they wanted about the USSR. The patience of Soviet negotiators was tested severely.

Yet Gorbachëv continued his line of reconciliation. At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 he stressed that his country was ‘ready to do everything it could to change the international situation radically’.⁵¹ While asserting that Soviet defences would be strengthened to meet any foreign threat, Gorbachëv went out of his way to plead the case for global peace and for a process of disarmament.

Like most politicians in East and West, he assumed that the danger of nuclear technology was confined to bombs. His concentration on the military risks was understandable, but misplaced. There had been several explosions in Soviet civilian nuclear power stations since they had first been built under Khrushchëv. The lessons had not been learned: supervision and training of staff remained lamentable and no mention of past explosions was allowed in the USSR’s press. The astute dissenting scientist, Zhores Medvedev, had deduced that there had been a nuclear disaster in the Urals from the indirect data on fauna and flora available in recondite Soviet academic journals; but he was living in emigration in London.⁵² Discussion of his warnings was prohibited and his book was banned from publication. Consequently Gorbachëv was barely any better informed about the situation than his ordinary fellow citizens.

On 26 April 1986 a horrific jolt was delivered to official Soviet complacency when an accident occurred at the nuclear power station near the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl. The core of the reactor had overheated and the station’s staff, instead of instantly shutting down the reactor, tried out various cooling measures. Their incompetence caused an explosion.

The result was catastrophic radiation. The local politicians panicked, and some of them secretly moved their families out of Ukraine. But the winds carried the radioactive particles northwards and westwards. Belorussia and eastern Poland were affected and Scandinavian newspapers revealed that a nuclear disaster had taken place somewhere in the USSR. As the clamour of public opinion grew around the world, the assumption was that the Politburo was deliberately pretending that nothing untoward had happened. This had been conventional Soviet practice to date whenever a nuclear accident or even an airplane crash had occurred. But in this instance, the Politburo itself had difficulty in getting rapid, accurate information. As the enormity of the event started to become evident, Gorbachëv announced the dispatch to the area of an investigative team from Moscow. Ryzhkov, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, courageously visited Chernobyl in person.

For Gorbachëv, their reports were almost as appalling as the human and natural devastation wrought by the accident. A long chain of negligence, incompetence and disorganization was to blame. Workers were careless; technicians were ill-trained; local politicians were ignorant; and central ministers and scientific consultants had omitted to put a reasonable set of safeguards into operation.

In 1921 Lenin had declared that the Kronstadt mutiny was the flash that led to the New Economic Policy. Gorbachëv made no similar statement. But the Chernobyl nuclear explosion undoubtedly had a deep impact on him. He could no longer fail to understand that the defects of the regime could not be corrected by administrative tinkering.⁵³ Misinformation, indiscipline and organizational manipulation were intrinsic to its workings. The lethal atmosphere over Chernobyl was a metaphor for the conditions in Soviet public life. A ventilation of the country’s problems was no longer merely desirable; it was crucial for the medium-term survival of the USSR as a superpower. People were not protesting out on the streets. The declining economy was not already battered to the ground and the governing élites had not yet been demoralized into acceptance of fundamental reform. Yet Gorbachëv had had enough. Reform was going to be basic and fast, and the General Secretary was readying himself for a historic contest.

He and his group of supportive colleagues and advisers were embarrassed about the ineffectual, drifting methods of recent leadership. There was also confidence that the situation could be reversed. As General Secretary, Gorbachëv had no intention of presiding over the dissolution of the USSR or over the dismantlement of the communist political system. The economic, social and cultural problems were dire. But he was confident they could be solved.

The Politburo in 1985–6 agreed that new methods had to be formulated. Its members recognized their fundamental difficulties in achieving economic development, social acquiescence, ideological commitment, administrative efficiency, inter-ethnic harmony, control over Eastern Europe and peace between the superpowers. Each difficulty aggravated the others. But why did the Politburo go beyond the limits of Andropovite policy? External pressures played a part, especially the aggressive diplomacy of President Reagan and his Strategic Defence Initiative. Unpredictable events, particularly the Chernobyl explosion, were also important. Even so, the movement towards basic reforms was not inevitable. Gorbachëv would not have lost power if he had opted to conserve the heritage of Andropov. The collective outlook of his Politburo and Secretariat colleagues was not as open minded as his own, and the impact of this single individual over the course of Soviet politics was decisive.

He had no grand plan and no predetermined policies; but if Gorbachëv had not been Party General Secretary, the decisions of summer 1986 would have been different. The USSR’s long-lasting order would have endured for many more years, and almost certainly the eventual collapse of the order would have been much bloodier than it was to be in 1991. The irony was that Gorbachëv, in trying to prevent the descent of the system into general crisis, proved instrumental in bringing forward that crisis and destroying the USSR.

23 Glasnost and Perestroika (1986–1988)

By mid-1986 Gorbachëv had concluded that his early economic and disciplinary measures offered no basic solution; he was also coming to recognize that it would not be enough merely to replace Brezhnev’s personnel with younger, more energetic officials. The attitudes and practices of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union needed changing. The problem was that most party officials refused to recognize the acuteness of the problems faced by the USSR. This was a reflection of their self-interest; but it also derived from their ignorance. And this ignorance was not confined to officialdom. Soviet society had for decades been prevented from acquiring comprehensive knowledge of the country’s past and current problems.

It was for this reason that Gorbachëv initiated a series of public debates. The policy was encapsulated in the slogan of glasnost. This is a difficult word to translate, broadly connoting ‘openness’, ‘a voicing’ and ‘a making public’. Gorbachëv’s choice of vocabulary was not accidental. Glasnost, for all its vagueness, does not mean freedom of information. He had no intention of relinquishing the Politburo’s capacity to decide the limits of public discussion. Moreover, his assumption was that if Soviet society were to examine its problems within a framework of guidance, a renaissance of Leninist ideals would occur. Gorbachëv was not a political liberal. At the time, however, it was not so much his reservation of communist party power as his liberating initiative that was impressive. Gorbachëv was freeing debate in the USSR to an extent that no Soviet leader had attempted, not even Khrushchëv and certainly not Lenin.

Glavlit, which censored all printed materials prior to publication, was instructed from June 1986 to relax its rules. The USSR Union of Writers held a Congress in the same month and welcomed the relaxation of rules on the press. But new novels took time to be written. Consequently the leading edge of glasnost was sharpened mainly by weekly newspapers and magazines. Chief among these were Moscow News, Ogonëk (‘Little Spark’) and Arguments and Facts. None of them had been characterized by radicalism until, in 1986, they acquired new editors — Yegor Yakovlev, Vitali Korotich and Vladislav Starkov respectively — on recommendation from Gorbachëv’s Party Secretariat. The incumbents were told to shake the press out of its torpor.¹

Gorbachëv had to discover a large number of like-minded radicals able to help him refashion public opinion. Yeltsin was already doing this as Moscow Party City Committee First Secretary: from time to time he travelled, in company with a photographer, to his office by bus rather than chauffeur-driven limousine; he also sacked hundreds of corrupt or idle functionaries in the party and in local government, and his harassment of metropolitan bureaucracy was acclaimed by the ordinary residents of the capital. Another radical was Alexander Yakovlev, who served as a department chief in the Secretariat from 1985 and became a Central Committee Secretary in 1986. The problem for Gorbachëv was that such figures were rarities in the party apparatus. Most communist officials wanted only minimal reforms and were horrified at the thought of changing their methods of rule. Gorbachëv therefore turned for help to the intelligentsia. He was placing a wager on their loyalty and skills in communication in his struggle to win support from fellow party leaders and Soviet society as a whole.

His preference was for those who, like him, believed that Marxism-Leninism had been distorted since Lenin’s time. He did not have to look very far. Since the 1960s there had been several scholars, writers and administrators whose careers had been blighted by their commitment to reforming the Soviet order. While sympathizing with Roy Medvedev, few of them had joined the overt dissenters. Instead they had lived a life of dispiriting frustration under Brezhnev, trusting that basic reform could not be delayed forever.

Yegor Yakovlev and others had worked as jobbing journalists. Others had found sanctuary in research academies such as the Institute of the World Economic System under Oleg Bogomolov and the Novosibirsk Institute of Economics under Abel Aganbegyan. A few had bitten their tongues hard and continued to work as advisers to Politburo members: among these were Georgi Shakhnazarov and Alexander Bovin. By the mid-1980s this was a late middle-aged generation; most of them were persons in their fifties and sixties. They had been young adults when Khrushchëv had made his assault upon Stalin and referred to themselves as ‘Children of the Twentieth Congress’. But although they were admirers of Khrushchëv, they were by no means uncritical of him: they felt that he had failed because his reforms had been too timid. Without the zeal of such supporters, Gorbachëv’s cause would already have been lost.

They were better acquainted with developments in the rest of the world than any Soviet generation in the previous half-century. Most had travelled in tourist groups to non-communist countries, and Western scholarly literature had been available to several of them in their working capacities. They were also avid listeners to foreign radio stations and so were not entirely dependent on the Soviet mass media for their news of the day.

This was a generation awaiting its saviour; and they found him when Gorbachëv, like Superman pulling off his Clark Kent suit, revealed himself as a Child of the Twentieth Congress. Quickly he indicated that his urgent priority was to subject Soviet history to public reconsideration. Permission was given for the release of the phantasmagoric film Repentance, whose Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze satirized the Stalin years. The playwright Mikhail Shatrov’s drama Onward! Onward! Onward! portrayed the parlousness of Lenin in the face of Stalin’s machinations. Gorbachëv felt that until there was comprehension of the past, little could be done by him in the present. He saw a brilliant way to highlight his attitude: on 16 December 1986 he lifted the phone and spoke to the dissenting physicist Andrei Sakharov and invited him to return from exile in Gorki.² One of the regime’s most uncompromising opponents was to return to liberty.

Economic measures were not forgotten by Gorbachëv and Ryzhkov. A Law on the State Enterprise was being drafted to restrict the authority of the central planning authorities. There were simultaneous deliberations on the old proposal to introduce the ‘link’ system to agriculture. A commission was also set up to draft a Law on Co-operatives. But Gorbachëv himself, while pushing Ryzhkov to hurry forward with proposals, put his greatest effort into ideological and political measures. He did this in the knowledge that substantial progress on the economic front would be impeded until he had broken the spine of opposition to his policies in the party, including the Politburo. It took months of persuasion in 1986 before Gorbachëv could cajole the Politburo into agreeing to hold a Central Committee plenum in order to strengthen the process of reform.

When the plenum began on 27 January 1987, Gorbachëv went on to the offensive and called for changes in the party’s official ideas. ‘Developed socialism’ was no longer a topic for boasting; it was not even mentioned: instead Gorbachëv described the country’s condition as ‘socialism in the process of self-development’.³ Implicitly he was suggesting that socialism had not yet been built in the USSR. Democratization was now proclaimed as a crucial objective. This meant that the Soviet Union was no longer touted as the world’s greatest democracy — and it was the General Secretary who was saying so. Gorbachëv called for the ‘blank spots’ in the central party textbooks to be filled. He denounced Stalin and the lasting effects of his policies. Despite not naming Brezhnev, Gorbachëv dismissed his rule as a period of ‘stagnation’ and declared that the leaving of cadres in post had been taken to the extremes of absurdity.⁴

Gorbachëv gained assent to several political proposals: the election rather than appointment of party committee secretaries; the holding of multi-candidate elections to the soviets; the assignation of non-party members to high public office. He succeeded, too, with an economic proposal when he insisted that the draft Law on the State Enterprise should enshrine the right of each factory labour-force to elect its own director. Gorbachëv aimed at industrial as well as political democratization.⁵ This was not a leader who thought he merely had to learn from capitalist countries. Gorbachëv still assumed he could reconstruct the Soviet compound so that his country would patent a new model of political democracy, economic efficiency and social justice.

In June 1987 he presented the detailed economic measures at the next Central Committee plenum, which adopted the draft Law on the State Enterprise. Apart from introducing the elective principle to the choice of managers, the Law gave the right to factories and mines to decide what to produce after satisfying the basic requirements of the state planning authorities. Enterprises were to be permitted to set their own wholesale prices. Central controls over wage levels were to be relaxed. The reform envisaged the establishment of five state-owned banks, which would operate without day-to-day intervention by the Central State Bank.⁶ As under Lenin’s NEP, moreover, there was to be allowance for a private sector in services and small-scale industry. The reintroduction of a mixed economy was projected. Although there would still be a predominance of state ownership and regulation in the economy, this was the greatest projected reform since 1921.

Gorbachëv’s argument was that the country was in a ‘pre-crisis’ condition.⁷ If the USSR wished to remain a great military and industrial power, he asserted, then the over-centralized methods of planning and management had to be abandoned. He persuaded the plenum that the proposed Law on the State Enterprise was the prerequisite for ‘the creation of an efficient, flexible system of managing the economy’. The plenum laid down that it should come into effect in January 1988.⁸

But Central Committee resolutions were one thing, their implementation quite another. Whereas communist intellectuals were attracted to the General Secretary, communist party functionaries were not. Gorbachëv’s own second secretary and ally Ligachëv was covertly trying to undermine Gorbachëv’s authority. Gorbachëv also had problems from the other side. Yeltsin in the Moscow Party City Committee was urging a faster pace of reform and a broader dimension for glasnost. Gorbachëv found it useful to play off Yeltsin and Ligachëv against each other. Of the two of them, Ligachëv was the more problematical on a regular basis; for he was in charge of ideological matters in the Secretariat and acted as a brake upon historical and political debate. But the more immediate problem was Yeltsin. His sackings of Moscow personnel left scarcely anyone in a responsible job who had held it for more than a year.

Ligachëv talked to Politburo colleagues about Yeltsin’s domineering propensities; but Gorbachëv tried to protect Yeltsin. For a while Gorbachëv succeeded. But Yeltsin made things hard for himself by stressing his desire to remove the privileges of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachëv. In his justified criticisms of the status quo, he lacked tactical finesse. Indeed he lacked all tact. He was a troubled, angry, impulsive individual. He also had no coherent programme. As an intuitive politician, he was only beginning to discover his purpose in politics, and his explorations were exhausting the patience of the General Secretary.

In October 1987 Gorbachëv accepted Yeltsin’s resignation as a candidate member of the Politburo. Yeltsin had threatened to leave on several occasions, and this time Ligachëv made sure that he was not allowed to withdraw his resignation. And so the supreme party leadership lost Yeltsin. A few days later a conference of the Moscow City Party Organization was called. Although Yeltsin was in hospital recovering from illness,⁹ he was pumped full of drugs and dragged along to attend: on a personal level it was one of the most disgraceful of Gorbachëv’s actions. Yeltsin acknowledged his faults, but the decision had already been taken: a succession of speakers denounced his arrogance and he was sacked as party secretary of the capital. Only at this point did Gorbachëv take him sympathetically by the arm. He also showed mercy by appointing Yeltsin as Deputy Chairman of the State Construction Committee. But both of them assumed that Yeltsin’s career at the centre of Soviet politics had ended.

Gorbachëv was more than ever the solitary fore-rider of reform. During his summer holiday in Crimea, he had edited the typescript for his book Perestroika; he began, too, to prepare a speech to celebrate the October Revolution’s seventieth anniversary. In the weeks after the Central Committee plenum a large number of journalists, novelists, film-makers, poets — and yes, at last, historians — filled the media of public communication with accounts of the terror of the Stalin era and the injurious consequences of Brezhnev’s rule. Gorbachëv sought to encourage and direct the process.

In November he published his book and delivered his speech. In both of them he denounced the regime’s ‘command-administrative system’, which he described as having emerged under Stalin and having lasted through to the mid-1980s. He hymned the people more than the party. He treated not only the October Revolution but also the February Revolution as truly popular political movements. He also expressed admiration for the mixed economy and cultural effervescence of the New Economic Policy. He praised Lenin as a humanitarian, representing him as having been a much less violent politician than had been true. Despite lauding the NEP, moreover, Gorbachëv continued to profess the benefits of agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s. For Gorbachëv still equivocated about Stalin. In particular, the industrial achievements of the First Five-Year Plan and the military triumph of the Second World War were counted unto him for virtue.¹⁰

Certainly he had set out a stall of general objectives; but he had not clarified the details of strategy, tactics and policies. And he still regarded the objectives themselves as attainable without the disbandment of the one-party, one-ideology state. As previously, he refused to consider that the party and the people might not voluntarily rally to the cause of renovating Marxism-Leninism and the entire Soviet order. Nor did he take cognizance of the role of the Soviet Union as an imperial power both within its own boundaries and across Eastern Europe. The most he would concede was that ‘mistakes’ had been made in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 — and he coyly blamed them on the ‘contemporary ruling parties’.¹¹ No accusation was levelled at Kremlin leaders of the time. And Gorbachëv declined to reject the traditional class-based analysis of international affairs of the world as a whole.

These contradictions stemmed both from the pressures of his Politburo colleagues and from ambivalence in the mind of the General Secretary. Yet the general direction of his thought was evident. He required a yet deeper process of democratization. He declared that a new political culture and an insistence on the rule of law were required in the Soviet Union. He called for a fresh agenda for Eastern Europe. He also asserted that his country’s foreign policy throughout the world should be based on ‘common human values’.¹²

This was extraordinary language for a Soviet leader. Gorbachëv was diminishing the significance accorded to class-based analysis, and his emphasis on ‘common human values’ clashed with the Leninist tradition. Lenin had contended that every political culture, legal framework, foreign policy and philosophy had roots in class struggle. Leninists had traditionally been unembarrassed about advocating dictatorship, lawlessness and war. Gorbachëv hugely misconceived his idol. He was not alone: the reform communists, including well-read intellectuals, had persuaded themselves of the same interpretation to a greater or lesser extent and were transmitting their ideas to the General Secretary. Politics were being transformed on the basis of a faulty historiography. But what a transformation was involved! If it were to be accomplished, the USSR would adhere to legal, democratic procedures at home and pacific intentions abroad. Such changes were nothing short of revolutionary.

Much as he rethought his policies, however, Gorbachëv was also a disorganized thinker. His knowledge of his country’s history was patchy. His sociological understandings may have been more impressive since his wife, who was his political as well as marital partner, had written a dissertation on contemporary rural relationships;¹³ even so, his public statements continued to treat Soviet society as an inchoate whole and to make little allowance for the different interests of the multifarious groups in an increasingly complex society. His comprehension of economic principles was rudimentary in the extreme.

Nowhere was his complacency more baleful than in relation to the ‘national question’. Superficially he seemed to understand the sensitivities of the non-Russians: for example, he excluded favourable mention of the Russians from the 1986 Party Programme and affirmed the ‘full unity of nations’ in the USSR to be a task of ‘the remote historical future’.¹⁴ This gave reassurance to the non-Russian peoples that there would be no Russification campaign under his leadership. But no other practical changes of a positive kind followed. Gorbachëv himself was not a pure Russian; like his wife Raisa, he was born to a couple consisting of a Russian and a Ukrainian.¹⁵ But this mixed ancestry, far from keeping him alert to national tensions in the USSR, had dulled his understanding of them. He was comfortable with his dual identity as a Russian and as a Soviet citizen; and this produced casualness that gave much offence. For example, when he visited Ukraine for the first time as General Secretary in 1986, he spoke about Russia and the USSR as if they were coextensive. Ukrainian national sensitivities were outraged.

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that non-Russians had been prevented from expressing their grievances. Inter-ethnic difficulties were the hatred that dared not speak its name. Gorbachëv and other central party leaders were slow to perceive the inherent risks involved in campaigning against corruption in the republics while also granting freedom of the press and of assembly. Much resentment arose over the appointment of Russian functionaries in place of cadres drawn from the local nationalities. In addition, more scandals were exposed in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan than in Russia. The Kazakhstan party first secretary Dinmukhammed Kunaev, one of Brezhnev’s group, had been compelled to retire in December 1986; even Geidar Aliev, brought from Azerbaijan to Moscow by Andropov, was dropped from the Politburo in October 1987. Eduard Shevardnadze was the sole remaining non-Slav in its membership. The Politburo was virtually a Slavic men’s club.

An early sign of future trouble was given in Kazakhstan, where violent protests in Alma-Ata were organized against the imposition of a Russian, Gennadi Kolbin, as Kunaev’s successor. The Kazakh functionaries in the republican nomenklatura connived in the trouble on the streets; and the intelligentsia of Kazakhstan were unrestrained in condemning the horrors perpetrated upon the Kazakh people in the name of communism. The nationalist resurgence had been quieter but still more defiant in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The titular nationalities in these countries had a living memory of independence. Bilateral treaties had been signed in 1920 with the RSFSR and Stalin’s forcible incorporation of the Baltic states in the USSR in 1940 had never obtained official recognition in the West. Demonstrations had started in Latvia in June 1986. Cultural, ecological and political demands were to the fore. A victory was won by the environmental protest against the hydro-electric station proposed for Daugavpils.

Then the dissenters in Lithuania and Estonia joined in the protest movement. Not all their leaders were calling for outright independence, but the degree of autonomy demanded by them was rising. In August 1987, demonstrations were held to mark the anniversary of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty. The example of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia stimulated national movements elsewhere. Discontent intensified in Ukraine after Chernobyl and Gorbachëv was so concerned about the political destabilization that might be produced by Ukrainian cultural, religious and environmental activists that he retained Shcherbytskiy, friend of Brezhnev, as the republican party first secretary. Ukraine was held firmly under Shcherbytskiy’s control.

The USSR, furthermore, contained many inter-ethnic rivalries which did not predominantly involve Russians. Over the winter of 1987–8, disturbances occurred between Armenians and Azeris in the Armenian-inhabited area of Nagorny Karabakh in Azerbaijan. In February 1988 the two nationalities clashed in Sumgait, and dozens of Armenians were killed. Threats to the Politburo’s control existed even in places that experienced no such violence. In June 1988 the Lithuanian nationalists took a further step by forming Sajudis; other ‘popular fronts’ of this kind were formed also in Latvia and Estonia. The Belorussian Communist Party Central Committee tried to suppress the popular front in Minsk, but the founding members simply decamped to neighbouring Lithuania and held their founding congress in Vilnius.

The tranquillity in Russia and Ukraine gave grounds for official optimism since these two republics contained nearly seven tenths of the USSR’s population. Most Soviet citizens were not marching, shouting and demanding in 1988. Not only that: a considerable number of people in the Baltic, Transcaucasian and Central Asian regions did not belong to the titular nationality of each Soviet republic. Around twenty-five million Russians lived outside the RSFSR. They constituted thirty-seven per cent of the population in Kazakhstan, thirty-four per cent in Latvia and thirty per cent in Estonia.¹⁶ In all three Baltic Soviet republics so-called ‘Interfronts’ were being formed that consisted mainly of Russian inhabitants who felt menaced by the local nationalisms and who were committed to the maintenance of the Soviet Union.

Shcherbytskiy prevented Rukh, the Ukrainian popular front, from holding its founding congress until September 1989. In Russia there was no analogous front; for there was no country from which, according to Russian nationalists, Russia needed to be separated in order to protect her interests. There was, however, much nationalist talk. An organization called Pamyat, which had been created with the professed aim of preserving Russian traditional culture, exhibited anti-Semitic tendencies; unlike the popular fronts in the non-Russian republics, it had no commitment to democracy. But Gorbachëv reasonably judged that the situation was containable. What he underestimated was the possibility that Ligachëv and his associates, too, might play the linked cards of Soviet state pride and of Russian nationalism. Ligachëv was affronted by the relentless public criticism of the Stalin years, and he was looking for an opportunity to reassert official pride in the Russian nation’s role during the First Five-Year Plan and the Second World War. Many other party leaders felt sympathy with him.

Ligachëv bided his time until March 1988, when Gorbachëv was about to leave for a trip to Yugoslavia. A letter had reached the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya from an obscure Leningrad communist named Nina Andreeva, who demanded the rehabilitation of Stalin’s reputation and implied that the country’s woes after the October Revolution had been chiefly the fault of the Jewish element in the party leadership’s composition. Despite this anti-Semitism, Ligachëv facilitated the letter’s publication and organized a meeting of newspaper editors to impress on them that the season of free-fire shooting at communism past and present was at an end.

Gorbachëv conducted an enquiry on his return; but Ligachëv lied about his actions, and Gorbachëv accepted him at his word and resumed his own policy of glasnost.¹⁷ Yet he also took precautions against any repetition of the event. Most importantly, he enhanced the position of Alexander Yakovlev, who had been a Politburo member since mid-1987 and became the radical-reformer counter-weight to Ligachëv in the central party apparatus after Yeltsin’s departure. Yakovlev supervised the publication of material about abuses under Brezhnev as well as under Stalin. A number of articles also appeared about Bukharin, who was depicted as the politician who had deserved to succeed Lenin.¹⁸ The image of Bukharin as harmless dreamer was at variance with historical reality; but Gorbachëv believed in it — and, for both pragmatic and psychological purposes, he needed positive stories about Soviet communism to balance the exposés of the terroristic practices of the 1930s.

The problem for him was that the new journalism excited the reading public without managing to enlist its active political participation. The reformist magazines were inadvertently bringing all existing Soviet politicians, with the notable exception of Gorbachëv, into disrepute. If only the first decade of the USSR’s history was officially deemed to have been beneficial, how could the Politburo justify its continuing rule?

Gorbachëv had hoped to avoid such a reaction by pensioning off those older politicians who had been prominent under Brezhnev. In his first year in power he had imposed new first secretaries on twenty-four out of seventy-two of the RSFSR’s provincial party committees. Between April 1986 and March 1988 a further nineteen such appointments were made. Hardly any of these appointees came from Stavropol.¹⁹ Gorbachëv wanted to break with the Soviet custom whereby a political patron favoured his career-long clients. Most of the appointees had recently been working under his gaze in Moscow and appeared to have the necessary talent. The snag was that the new incumbents of office made little effort to alter local practices and attitudes. On arrival in their localities, Gorbachëv’s newcomers typically went native. The fact that they were younger and better educated than their predecessors made no difference to their behaviour.

In another way Gorbachëv himself was acting traditionally. Since January 1987 it was official policy that local party organizations should elect their own secretaries; and yet Gorbachëv persisted in making his own appointments through the central party apparatus.

So why was he infringing his own policy for internal party reform? The answer highlights the scale of the obstacles in his path. He knew that party committees throughout the USSR were blocking the introduction of multi-candidate elections. Only one in every eleven secretaryships at all the various local levels was filled by such competition in 1987–8. Worse still, merely one per cent of province-level secretaries obtained posts in this fashion. And the fresh air ventilating public discussions in Moscow seldom reached the ‘localities’: the provincial press clamped down on the opportunities of glasnost. It is therefore unsurprising that Gorbachëv did not relinquish his powers of appointment in favour of elections. If he had left the local party committees to themselves, he would never have achieved the political and economic goals he had set for the communist party.

Nor could Gorbachëv lightly overlook the danger posed by Ligachëv and other leaders who opposed further radicalization of reforms. The January 1987 Central Committee plenum had taken the decision to convoke a Party Conference. Gorbachëv hoped that such a Conference, scheduled to meet in mid-1988, would change the composition of the Central Committee. For the Central Committee elected in 1986 still consisted mainly of functionaries appointed in the Brezhnev years. The ‘nests’ had selected anti-perestroika delegates to the Conference; and indeed, while Gorbachëv was meeting President Reagan in Vladivostok, the communist party rank-and-file in the same city rebelled against their corrupt provincial party secretary. Gorbachëv spoke up for the rebels. He also signed letters of reference for prominent Moscow-based supporters of his policies such as the historian Yuri Afanasev.

He also made a further advance with economic reform. The Law on the State Enterprise had come into effect in January 1988; and in May the Law on Co-operatives had been passed whereby co-op members could set their own prices and make their own deals both in the USSR and abroad. Certainly the fiscal disincentives were strong, and the local soviets were entitled to deny official registration to the co-ops. Yet the Law’s significance was undeniable. For the first time in six decades it was permitted to set up urban manufacturing and service-sector enterprises that were not owned by the state.

Gorbachëv confidently opened the Nineteenth Party Conference on 28 June 1988 even though he had only half-succeeded in getting his supporters elected as delegates. His theses called for a strict functional separation between the party and the soviets. At the Conference he defined this more closely. He wanted to disband the economic departments in the Central Committee Secretariat and to reduce the size of the party apparatus in Moscow. At the same time the Supreme Soviet, which had had only an honorific role, was to become a kind of parliament with over 400 members who would be in session most of the year and be chosen from a Congress of People’s Deputies consisting of 2,250 persons. As a sop to the Party Conference, Gorbachëv proposed that while two thirds of the deputies should be elected through universal suffrage, one third should be provided by ‘public organizations’ including the communist party.²⁰

His assault on the party’s prerogatives was relentless. Among his most startling suggestions was that local party first secretaries should automatically submit themselves for election to the parallel soviet chairmanship. He gave the impression that he expected such secretaries to retain their personal power. Yet privately he hoped that the electorate would use their votes to get rid of his opponents in the party.

Gorbachëv’s audience consisted of delegations led by precisely the sort of communist party officials he wished to eliminate. The implications of his proposal were understood and resented by them; and whereas Ligachëv received a rapturous reception from the Conference, Gorbachëv was applauded only at the few points where he made comments of a conservative content. And then something unexpected occurred which enraged his critics still further: back from political oblivion came Boris Yeltsin. Uncertain that he would be allowed to address the Conference, he came down to the foot of the platform waving his party card. Gorbachëv made a gesture to him to take a seat in the front row of the hall until there was an opportunity for him to speak; and on this occasion Yeltsin chose his words with care, endorsing practically all Gorbachëv’s proposals and humbly asking to be rehabilitated as a leader.

Critics were angry that Yeltsin should be picking up the pieces of his political career. After a pause in the Conference proceedings, Ligachëv led the counter-attack.²¹ Yeltsin’s record was torn to shreds. Even his career as a provincial party secretary in Sverdlovsk was mocked. Summing up the case for the prosecution, Ligachëv asserted: ‘You, Boris, are not right!’ The Conference took Ligachëv’s side and Yeltsin was refused his request to be re-admitted to the supreme party leadership.

Gorbachëv had already dropped his plan to change the Central Committee’s composition at the Conference; but he would make no further concessions to Ligachëv and insisted that the Conference should ratify his draft theses. And he had a final trick up his sleeve. Or rather he had it in his pocket. At the end of the Conference he pulled out a scrap of paper on which was scribbled his schedule for implementing the constitutional amendments. Without this, the central and local party apparatuses would have engaged in endless procrastination. Gorbachëv wanted the amendments to be in place by autumn 1988 and a general election to be held in spring 1989, followed by republican and local elections in the autumn. The internal reorganization of the party was set to occur by the end of 1988. Gorbachëv resumed his masterful tone: ‘That’s how the draft resolution comes out. It seems to me simply vitally necessary to accept this resolution, comrades.’²² The delegates gave their approval before being given a chance to think about the consequences. Change was coming, and coming fast.

The Conference decisions embodied an important reorientation of Gorbachëv’s strategy. The party was being dropped as the vanguard of perestroika. Instead Gorbachëv wished to rule through a Congress of People’s Deputies elected by the people. The size and functions of the central party apparatus were sharply diminished at a Central Committee plenum held in September 1988. The same plenum left Vadim Medvedev instead of Ligachëv in charge of ideology and gave Yakovlev a supervisory role on the party’s behalf in international affairs. Gromyko was pushed into retirement in October and replaced as Chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet by Gorbachëv himself (who refrained from redesignating the office as President until March 1990). The Soviet Union remained a one-party state; but the party as such had abruptly lost much of its power.

The Politburo was preoccupied by this domestic transformation. Not even Ligachëv — nor even, come to mention it, Yeltsin — badgered Gorbachëv about developments in Eastern Europe. The common feeling of Soviet political leaders was that the USSR’s affairs should have priority of attention. Gorbachëv had set down the general line. On coming to power, he had advised the various leaderships of Warsaw Pact countries that the USSR would no longer interfere in their affairs.²³ But beyond this his comments on Eastern Europe were of a general nature. In 1985 he was still not averse to praising the anti-reform economic policies of the German Democratic Republic. Thereafter he spoke more fervently in favour of reforms in Eastern Europe. But his working assumption was that the communist leaderships of each country in the region had to find their own most suitable mode of political and economic transformation. He studiously avoided instructing the Warsaw Pact countries to follow the specific model of the USSR.

Gorbachëv held to his belief that the Soviet-style compound, once reconstituted, would flourish in Eastern Europe. He showed his priorities by his choice of places to visit and politicians to meet. In November 1985 he travelled to meet President Reagan in Geneva and in October 1986 they met again in Reykjavik. Not until April 1987 did Gorbachëv visit East Berlin and Prague. And in March 1988 he took a trip to Belgrade. In each of these East European capitals he was fêted by crowds. It was obvious to him and his entourage that people were using his public appearances as an opportunity to manifest their resentment of their own communist regimes.

Nevertheless Gorbachëv, Shevardnadze and Yakovlev continued to shape policy towards Eastern Europe without offering direct criticism of their counterparts in these countries. They even avoided leaning very hard on the parties and governments to replace their leaders. When the Bulgarian communist reformer Petar Mladenov approached Gorbachëv for advice as to how to replace the ageing hierarch Todor Zhivkov, Gorbachëv cut short the conversation.²⁴ Gorbachëv would have preferred Mladenov to Zhivkov as Bulgaria’s leader; but the Soviet General Secretary wanted to avoid being seen to intervene. Thus he confirmed that what he had said confidentially to Warsaw Pact leaders in March 1985 had been intended seriously: non-interference was a reality. Even as late as his Prague trip, in April 1987, Gorbachëv fastidiously stated: ‘We are far from intending to call on anyone to imitate us.’²⁵ So glasnost and perestroika were not commodities for obligatory export. But what, then, was meant to happen in Eastern Europe?

Zhivkov and his fellow veterans in the region asked the same question. They hated Gorbachëv’s perestroika. Erich Honecker in the German Democratic Republic and Gustáv Husák in Czechoslovakia, who was nationally hated for doing the USSR’s dirty business for years, felt betrayed. Even János Kádár in Hungary was troubled by the prospect of the introduction of political and cultural freedoms on the current Soviet paradigm. Yet Gorbachëv still desisted from openly attacking them. He contented himself with destabilizing the political compounds and standing back to observe the consequences. This was like a trainee chemist running amok in a laboratory. He was dealing with ingredients which, once tampered with, became volatile and unpredictable. If there remained doubts that Gorbachëv would go further than Khrushchëv in reforming foreign policy, a glance at the disintegrating communist order in Eastern Europe dispelled them.

It is mysterious how Gorbachëv persuaded himself that his version of ‘communism’ would emerge in a strengthened condition. The main explanation seems to be that he and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze simply overestimated the inherent attractiveness of their ideas. Probably, too, they were distracted by the cardinal significance they attached to relations with the USA. Negotiations with President Reagan took precedence over all other aspects of foreign policy. As the hidden dimensions of the USSR’s domestic problems became apparent to Gorbachëv, so did his need for a drastic reduction in Soviet military expenditure. In practical terms this could be achieved only if both superpowers agreed to an end to the ‘arms race’ between them.

In October 1986 a summit meeting was held in Reykjavik, where Gorbachëv won over Reagan to a proposal for all nuclear weapons to be destroyed within ten years. But at the last moment Reagan’s aides, who wished to bargain from a position of military superiority, dissuaded him from signing the preliminary agreement. The two men parted, unable to look one another in the face. Yet Reagan continued to wish Gorbachëv well. The denunciations of Stalin and Brezhnev; Sakharov’s release from exile; the lightening grip on Eastern Europe: all these things counted in Gorbachëv’s favour among Western governments. So that the amicable relations between the USA and the USSR survived the débâcle in Reykjavik. By December 1987 Gorbachëv and Reagan were able to co-sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington whereby all ground-based intermediate nuclear weapons would be destroyed. The Cold War was gradually being ended; it was not yet a full peace, but it was no mere truce either.

In April 1988 the USSR announced its intention to make a swift, complete withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan. Constantly Gorbachëv emphasized his commitment to ‘new thinking’ in international relations. Despite the primacy of the USSR-USA relationship, moreover, he wanted also to remove tensions from the Soviet Union’s relations with other regions. Feelers were put out to the People’s Republic of China. In an overture to Western Europe he spoke of ‘the common European home’. On a visit to Vladivostok he spoke of the Pacific as ‘our common home’ and asked for friendlier links with Japan. If he had gone to the North Pole, he would no doubt have charmed the polar bears with his commitment to ‘the common Arctic home’.

On 7 December 1988 Gorbachëv laid out the parameters of his foreign policy in a speech to the United Nations Assembly in New York. Marxist-Leninist concepts were tacitly rejected.²⁶ The need for global peace, Gorbachëv asserted, transcended support for class struggle. The world had become an ‘interdependent’ place. ‘Common human values’ had to triumph. Unlike his book Perestroika, the speech scarcely mentioned Lenin. In order to authenticate his commitment to peace and reconciliation, Gorbachëv announced a unilateral cut in the size of the Soviet Army by a tenth; he also promised the recall of six divisions from Eastern Europe. Mikhail Gorbachëv mounted to a peak of popularity abroad. Every agreement between Washington and Moscow had made global international relations safer and more controllable. If he had died in New York, he would already have secured a reputation as one of the great figures of the twentieth century.

In the USSR, too, he had effected what had once been a virtually inconceivable metamorphosis of politics and culture. Citizen talked unto citizen. Dangerous opinions could be shared outside the narrow boundaries of the family or group of friends. Soviet public life had been uplifted. Hidden issues had been dragged into the open air. Institutional complacency had been disturbed. Personnel had been re-appointed, policies redesigned. The entire structure of state had been shaken, and Gorbachëv let it be known that more walls had to be brought down before he could properly rebuild as he wished.

While battering the system in 1986–8, he hoped to change the Soviet order and secure popular approval and political legitimacy throughout society. He still aimed, in his confused fashion of thought, to preserve the Soviet Union and the one-party state. Lenin and the October Revolution were meant to remain publicly hallowed. But he failed to understand that his actions were strengthening the very phenomena which he was trying to eliminate. Glasnost and perestroika were undermining the political and economic foundations of the Soviet order. Localism, nationalism, corruption, illegal private profiteering and distrust of official authority: all these phenomena, which had grown unchecked under the rule of Brezhnev, had been reinforced by the dismantlement of central controls undertaken by Gorbachëv. He was Russia’s ‘holy fool’, and like the ‘holy fool’ he did not know it.

24 Imploding Imperium (1989)

By late 1988 the optimism of even Gorbachëv had been dented. As a full member of the Politburo since 1980 he had been privy to many statistics denied to the general public. But not even the Politburo had been given reliable information. Reports were automatically pruned of anything very discouraging, and anyway every local branch of administration misled the centre about the real situation.¹

There had been a constant official prescription that crises were the exclusive characteristic of capitalism and that they could not occur under ‘developed socialism’. In reality practically every index of economic performance was depressing. The technological gap between the USSR and industrially-advanced capitalist countries was widening in every sector except the development of armaments: the Soviet Union had been left far behind in both information technology and biotechnology. The state budget in the last years of Brezhnev would have been massively insolvent if the government had not been able to derive revenues from domestic sales of vodka. The Ministry of Finance depended heavily on popular consumption of alcohol. It relied to an even greater extent on the export of petrochemical fuels at high prices. Oil and gas constituted eighteen per cent of exports in 1972 and fifty-four per cent by 1984.²

The USSR resembled a Third World ex-colony in these and other respects. Agriculture remained so inefficient that two fifths of hard-currency expenditure on imports were for food.³ By the early 1980s, revenues earned by exports to the West could no longer be used mainly to buy advanced industrial technology and equipment: two fifths of the USSR’s hard-currency purchases abroad were of animal feed; and the purchase of energy by the countries of Eastern Europe at lower than the world-market prices deprived the USSR of the full value of its trade. Its very industrial achievements had occurred at grievous ecological expense. Large areas became unfit for human habitation. The Caspian Sea, Lake Baikal and the river Volga had been poisoned and the air in major cities such as Chelyabinsk was dangerous to breathe.

Yet while fighting the cause of economic reforms, Gorbachëv had made many mistakes. First the anti-alcohol campaign and then the excessive investment in the machine-tool industry in 1985–6 had depleted state revenues without producing long-term gains in output. Nor was this the end of his mismanagement. The openness of the debate conducted by the authorities in 1987–8 on the need to raise retail prices had the undesired effect of inducing consumers into buying up and hoarding all manner of goods. Shortages in the shops were increasing. And the Law on the State Enterprise, by empowering workers to elect their own managers, led to a steep rise in wages. Payments to urban work-forces increased by nine per cent in 1988 and thirteen per cent in 1989.⁴ The Soviet budget was massively in deficit. Foreign indebtment and domestic inflation increased sharply; a decline in industrial output set in. The USSR was entering a state of economic emergency.

Gorbachëv’s choice of collaborators, too, was far from ideal. Ryzhkov, his Chairman of the Council of Ministers, was a reformer, but a reformer who wanted ‘to go to the market’ at a snail’s pace. And whereas Ryzhkov at least believed in a further movement to reform, Ligachëv did not. Gorbachëv erred, when demoting Ligachëv in the party leadership in September 1988, in putting him in charge of agriculture. This was like trusting the fox to guard the hen-house. Under Ligachëv’s guidance not even the size of the private plots was increased.

Even if Gorbachëv had avoided such errors, however, he would also have needed a much better run of luck than he received. On 8 December 1988, a day after he had made his triumphant address to the United Nations Assembly, the cities of Leninakan and Spitak in Armenia were devastated by an earthquake. More than 25,000 people died. Ryzhkov phoned to New York to relay the news to Gorbachëv. Projected diplomatic negotiations were abandoned. Gorbachëv left the USA for Moscow next day and straightway hurried to Armenia. He and his wife talked to ordinary Armenians near the rubble of their former homes. The Gorbachëvs shed tears over the plight of the population. But they were totally unprepared for one thing: the fact that Armenians to a man and woman were agitated more about the politics of Karabakh than about the effects of the earthquake.⁵

Radical economic reform was therefore being attempted in a very unpropitious situation. The war in Afghanistan continued to involve massive expenditure until the last Soviet soldier returned home in February 1989. The Chernobyl nuclear explosion was a financial as well as a human and ecological disaster. Now the USSR’s resources, already stretched to breaking point, had to cope with the task of recovery from the Armenian earthquake. Gorbachëv could have been forgiven for cursing his misfortune.

It must be mentioned that there had been a rise in the USSR’s net material product by eleven per cent in the half-decade after 1983; but this had been obtained primarily through the tightening of labour discipline and the sacking of incompetent, corrupt officials. Such a strategy had been initiated by Andropov and resumed by Gorbachëv. It had a distinctly limited potential for the permanent enhancement of economic performance; and certainly it was unsustainable once the decentralizing decrees of 1987–8 started to have an impact. Between 1988 and 1990 net material product tumbled by nine per cent. The per capita consumption of factory-produced goods rose annually by less than 2.5 per cent in the five years after 1985. For food, the increase was 1.4 per cent; and — admittedly, mainly because of the anti-alcohol campaign — there was a decrease by 1.2 per cent for beverages and tobacco. Urban housing space per person rose merely by twelve per cent to a pitiful 13.1 square metres in the 1980s.⁶

The reorientation of the industrial sector towards the needs of civilian consumers was an unattained goal. Gorbachëv had promised much material improvement, but delivered deterioration. Instead of an advance to universal material well-being there was a reversion to food-rationing. Soviet queues, already legendary for their length, became longer and angrier in the course of 1989.

A rationing system had existed for food products in certain provincial cities even before 1985: it was one of Ligachëv’s taunts at Yeltsin that, during his tenure of the local party secretaryship, he had issued the inhabitants of Sverdlovsk with ration-cards to do their shopping. Steadily the system was geographically extended. Already at the end of 1988, meat was rationed in twenty-six out of fifty-five regions of the RSFSR. Sugar was even scarcer: only two regions managed to get by without rationing.⁷ At the same time the hospitals were reporting shortages of medicines and there was no end in sight to inadequate provision of housing and everyday services. It is true that the annual growth in the output of agriculture rose from one per cent in the first half of the decade to just under two per cent in the second.⁸ But production remained inadequate for the needs of consumers. Throughout the 1980s, agricultural imports constituted a fifth of the population’s calorific intake.

To the stupefaction of the Politburo (and nearly all commentators in the USSR and the West), a full-scale economic crisis had occurred. Its abruptness was as impressive as its depth. Suddenly Gorbachëv was faced with two life-or-death alternatives: either to abandon the reforms or to make them yet more radical. He never gave serious consideration to the former; his experience in his Stavropol days and subsequently had proved to him that Brezhnev’s policies would lead only to a widening of the gap in technology and organization between the USSR and the capitalist West.

Boldness therefore seemed to him the only realistic choice. When the Law on the State Enterprise and other measures failed to produce the desired results, Gorbachëv talked about the need to go further and create a ‘socialist market economy’ — and while he refrained from defining the term, several of his advisers suggested that it should involve more market than socialism. Perhaps Gorbachëv was at his most relaxed when speaking about agriculture. Already in 1986, for instance, he had authoritatively proposed that each sovkhoz and kolkhoz should be run on the basis of ‘family contracts’.⁹ By this he meant that a family or household would take over a particular function on the farm and be rewarded for any increase in productivity. As his critics noted, this would involve a reversion to peasant forms of farming; but Gorbachëv faced them down by openly advocating the need to turn the peasant into ‘master of the land’.¹⁰

But this change in ideas was not yet realized in policy, far less in practice. Basic positive changes in agriculture did not occur, and the situation in industry and commerce was no more inspiring. On the contrary, officials in every republic, region and province implemented only such aspects of legislation as did not damage their immediate interests. Initially their inclination was to show outward enthusiasm for Gorbachëv while disobeying his instructions. But in some localities the attitude was sterner and officials engaged in blatant sabotage. For example, the Leningrad city administration gave orders to withdraw sausages from the fridges in its warehouses and bury them in a specially-dug trench on the city’s outskirts. These were the politics of criminal provocation. Life without beef and chicken was bad enough for ordinary citizens; without sausages it became intolerable, and Gorbachëv got the blame.

Even so, the central party and governmental bodies remained powerful enough to secure the establishment of a rising number of small private-sector co-operatives in most major cities. The trouble was that these new enterprises were distrusted by the rest of society, especially by people on low fixed incomes: the pensioners, the war invalids, the poorly-paid unskilled workers. The co-ops had a reputation as scams for speculation, and certainly they did little to expand manufacturing output. This was not exclusively their fault since the local political authorities usually withheld licences for private industrial enterprises. Co-ops operated mainly in the economy’s service and retail sectors and flourished in the form of private restaurants and clothes-kiosks which bought up goods in supply and put a large mark-up on them.

The consequence was that these same goods were not being sold in state-owned enterprises. The co-ops aggravated the shortages in the shops and raised the cost of living. They also added to the problems of law-breaking since their owners had to bribe local government officials in order to be allowed to trade; and often it was impossible for them to obtain raw materials and equipment except by colluding with venal factory directors. The Kremlin reformers called ineffectually for honesty. But the reality was that they would have found it even more difficult to install co-ops if the members of local administrative élites had not benefited materially from them. Illegality had to be accepted as companion to the re-emergence of private economic activity.

By the approach of winter 1989–90, all this brought notoriety to the Politburo’s reforms. Milk, tea, coffee, soap and meat had vanished from state retail outlets even in Moscow. The dairy-product shops were hit particularly badly. They often had to function for days at a time without anything to sell: cartons of milk had ceased to reach them, and the staff had nothing to do but explain to an ill-tempered public that they had nothing to sell.

Not all citizens were willing to tolerate their plight. A great strike was organized by coal-miners in Kemerovo in the Kuz Basin and their example was followed by the work-force of the mines in the Don Basin — and the miners in Karaganda in Kazakhstan also struck in the first half of 1989. A further strike occurred in November in the mines around Norilsk in the Siberian far north.¹¹ All these strikes were settled in favour of the strikers, who demanded higher wages and improved living conditions; and in contrast with Soviet political practice since the Civil War no repressive sanctions were applied against the strike leaders.¹² Independently-elected strike committees were in operation. The Council of Ministers under Ryzhkov did little else in these months but try to effect a reconciliation with those segments of the working class which threatened to do it damage. The government feared that a Soviet equivalent of Poland’s Solidarity was in the making.¹³

But the Soviet authorities weathered the storm. The strikers lived in far-flung areas, and Ryzhkov and his fellow ministers managed to isolate them from the rest of society by quickly offering them higher wages. Yet the government was faced by a society embittered against it. Elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies had duly occurred in March 1989, and the result administered the greatest electoral shock to the communists since the Constituent Assembly polls in 1917–18. Across the country thirty-eight province-level party secretaries were defeated.¹⁴ So, too, were city secretaries in the republican capitals in Kiev, Minsk and Alma-Ata. Even Yuri Soloviev, Politburo candidate member and Leningrad communist party boss, was rejected by voters. Unlike Lenin, Gorbachëv did not overturn the elections. To those of his party comrades who had incurred the people’s disapproval he signalled that they should step down from their posts in the party and other institutions.

None the less the Congress was not without its problems for Gorbachëv. Eighty-eight per cent of the delegates were full or candidate members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and most of these disliked proposals for further reforms.¹⁵ Yuri Afanasev, who was committed to just such reforms, denounced the Congress as a ‘Stalinist-Brezhnevite’ body with ‘an aggressively obedient majority’.¹⁶ Gorbachëv thought him ungrateful and irresponsible; for Afanasev had needed his protection to consolidate himself in public life.

Gorbachëv also felt betrayed by criticisms he suffered in the non-Russian republics. In November 1988 the Estonian Supreme Soviet declared its right to veto laws passed in Moscow; in January 1989 Lithuanian nationalists held a demonstration against the continued location of Soviet Army garrisons in Lithuania. The official authorities in these countries decided to drop Russian as the state language. Latvia was not far behind: in the course of the elections there was a protest rally in Riga against the Latvian Communist Party Central Committee’s repudiation of ‘anti-Soviet and separatist’ trends of thought in Latvia. The mood of the majority nationalities in the Baltic republics was shared in the Transcaucasus, but with fatal consequences. A demonstration in favour of national independence was held in the Georgian capital Tbilisi in April 1989. Gorbachëv returned from abroad in the course of the crisis, but 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. Gorbachëv 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 Gorbachëv’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, Gorbachëv 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 élites. But this was not an end in itself. Gorbachëv 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. Gorbachëv 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 Gorbachëv 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 Gorbachëv 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 Gorbachëv’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 Gorbachëv. 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 Ligachëv, were he ever to oust Gorbachëv 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 Gorbachëv 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 Carré 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, Gorbachëv 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. Gorbachëv 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 national language and culture. The Leninist mode of organizing a state of many nations was at last displaying its basic practical weakness. Everywhere nationalist dissent was on the rise. Its leaders were succeeding in convincing their local electorates that the problems of their respective nation were insoluble unless accompanied by economic and administrative reforms.

Few Russians felt similarly uncomfortable to be living in the USSR; and, to a greater extent than non-Russians, they tended to worry lest a further reform of the economy might deprive them of such state-provided welfare as was currently available. Moreover, ethnic Russians were numerically predominant throughout the traditional institutions of the Soviet state. In party, government and armed forces they held most of the key positions. In the newer institutions, by contrasts, they were beginning to lose out. Only forty-six per cent of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, and indeed only a third of the members of the Politburo itself when it underwent reform in 1990, were ethnic Russians.²⁰

A further peculiarity of Russians, in comparison with the other nations of the Soviet Union, was the highly contradictory mélange of ideas that came from their cultural figures. Gorbachëv’s supporters no longer went unchallenged in their propagation of reformist communism. Several artistic and political works also appeared which attacked communism of whatever type. For example, Vasili Grossmann’s novel on the Soviet past, Forever Flowing, was serialized in a literary journal. So, too, was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s history of the labour-camp system, The Gulag Archipelago. Both works assailed Lenin and Stalin with equal intensity. A film was made of the labour camp on the White Sea island of Solovki, which was filled with political prisoners from the 1920s. A sensation was caused, too, by Vladimir Soloukhin’s Reading Lenin. By analysing volume thirty-eight of the fifth edition of Lenin’s collected works, Soloukhin showed Lenin to have been a state terrorist from the first year of Soviet government.

An attempt was made by officially-approved professional historians to repulse the assault on Leninism. But most of such historians before 1985 had put political subservience before service to historical truth. Even those among them who had experienced official disfavour under Brezhnev obtained little popularity with the reading public. Communism in general was falling into ever greater disrepute, and the official fanfares for Lenin, Bukharin and the New Economic Policy were treated as fantasias on a tired theme.

Gorbachëv’s measures of political democratization inevitably added to his difficulties. The Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet had the right to supervise and veto the activities of government — and he encouraged them to use the right. High politics came under open critical scrutiny. The Tbilisi massacre was the first subject of several exhaustive investigations. Hardly a day passed without ministers and other high-ranking state officials, including even Ryzhkov, being harangued when they spoke to the Congress; and, to their chagrin, Gorbachëv did little to protect them. The result was less happy than he assumed. Unified central executive authority was steadily weakened and traditional structures were dismantled without the creation of robust substitutes. Policies were sanctioned with no bodies ready and able to impose them.²¹

Furthermore, the reorganizations were unaccompanied by a clear demarcation of powers. By 1989 Gorbachëv was talking a lot about the need for a ‘law-based state’, and universal civil rights were added to his set of objectives. But as yet there was no law on press freedom. Far from it: when in May 1989 Arguments and Facts published an inaccurate opinion poll indicating that his popularity had plummeted, Gorbachëv summoned editor Vladislav Starkov and threatened to have him sacked. The fact that Gorbachëv left Starkov in post was a credit to his self-restraint, not a sign of the practical limits of his power.²²

Others displayed no such caution. Public organizations had never had greater latitude to press for their interests. Local party secretaries, republican chiefs, factory managers, generals, scholars and KGB chiefs had belonged to the USSR’s representative state organs since the Civil War. But previously they had had little autonomy from the central political leadership. The Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet gave these various figures a chance to speak their mind. In particular, Colonel Viktor Alksnis complained about the deterioration in the prestige and material conditions of Soviet armed forces after the final, humiliating withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan. Alksnis addressed the Congress as an individual, but he rightly claimed that other officers in the Soviet Army shared his feelings. Such tirades at least had the merit of frankness. Above all, they increased political awareness amidst a population that had been starved of information judged injurious to the regime.

The old élites were rallying to defend themselves. The humiliation of the communist party in the Congress elections was only partial: local communist apparatuses remained largely in place and aimed to retain their authority. Other public institutions, too, had scarcely been touched by the campaign of propaganda to make them more responsive to society’s demands. The personnel and structures of communism had survived the storms of perestroika largely intact.

Of course, important additions had been made to the wings of the USSR’s political edifice. The KGB, while not dismantling its great network of informers, was no longer arresting citizens for lawful acts of political dissent. An independent press of sorts had been constructed. Whereas Arguments and Facts and Ogonëk had been established by the Soviet state, the journal Glasnost arose from the initiative of Sergei Grigoryants. Moreover, the cultural intelligentsia was writing, painting and composing in a liberated mood; and its organizations reflected the diversity of its objectives. Thus the Union of Writers of the RSFSR acted more or less as a megaphone for Russian nationalism. Similarly, the party and governmental machines in the non-Russian republics were consolidating themselves as instruments of the aspirations of the local majority nationality. All this constituted a menace to Gorbachëv’s ultimate purposes. Interest groups, organizations and territorial administrations functioned with scant interference; and most of them either disliked reform or wanted a type of reform different from Gorbachëv’s vision.

The trend had an arithmetical precision. The greater the distance from Moscow, the bolder were nations in repudiating the Kremlin’s overlordship. The communist regimes of Eastern Europe had been put on notice that they would have to fend politically for themselves without reliance on the Soviet Army. This knowledge had been kept secret from the populations of the same states. If the news had got out, there would have been instantaneous revolts against the existing communist regimes. No wonder the Soviet General Secretary was seen by his foreign Marxist-Leninist counterparts as a dangerous subversive.

This was also the viewpoint on him taken by fellow central leaders in the USSR. Rebelliousness and inter-ethnic conflict were on the rise in non-Russian republics. In June 1989 there were riots between Uzbeks and Meshketian Turks in Uzbekistan. In the following months there was violence among other national groups in Georgia, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Gorbachëv appeared on television to declare that the stability of the state was under threat. In the Georgian Soviet republic there was violence between Georgians and Abkhazians as well as marches in Tbilisi in favour of Georgian national independence. In August a dramatic protest occurred in the three Baltic republics when a human chain was formed by one million people joining hands across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in commemorative protest against the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Yet Gorbachëv refused to contemplate the possibility of the Baltic republics seceding from the USSR. Ultimately, he assumed, their citizens would perceive their economic interests as being best served by their republics remaining within the Union.²³

In September 1989 the Ukrainian giant stirred at last with the inauguration of Rukh. At this Gorbachëv panicked, flew to Kiev and replaced Shcherbytskiy with the more flexible Vladimir Ivashko. Evidently Gorbachëv recognized that the clamp-down on Ukrainian national self-expression had begun to cause more problems than it solved. At this moment of choice he preferred concession to confrontation; but thereby he also took another step towards the disintegration of the USSR. Neither of the alternatives offered Gorbachëv a congenial prospect.

Movement occurred in the same direction for the rest of the year. In October the Latvian Popular Front demanded state independence; in November the Lithuanian government itself decided to hold a referendum on the question. Next month the Communist Party of Lithuania, concerned lest it might lose every vestige of popularity, declared its exodus from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Tensions increased between resident Russians and the majority nationalities in the Baltic republics: the Estonian proposals for a linguistic qualification for citizenship of Estonia were especially contentious. In Estonia and Latvia, furthermore, the nationalist groupings won elections by a handsome margin. The situation was even graver for Gorbachëv in the Transcaucasus. In December 1989 the Armenian Supreme Soviet voted to incorporate Nagorny Karabakh into the Armenian republic. In January 1990 fighting broke out in the Azerbaijani capital Baku. The Soviet Army was sent to restore order, and attacked the premises of the Azerbaijani Popular Front.

But the deployment of the armed forces did not deter trouble elsewhere: inter-ethnic carnage was already being reported from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in February. The possibility that the USSR might implode under these pressures began to be discussed in the press. The more rhetorical of politicians warned against any actions that might lead eventually to civil war across the USSR.

This worry distracted the minds of Soviet citizens from foreign affairs. If it had not been for the preoccupations of the domestic economic, political and national environment, attention would have been paid to events of epochal importance in Eastern Europe. Since the defeat of Hitler in 1945 the Soviet Army had maintained a vast zone of political and economic dominion and military security in the countries to the east of the river Elbe. Every VE-Day after 1945 had been celebrated on the assumption that this zone was an inviolable feature of the European map. Over the years of his power Gorbachëv had indicated, in language that became ever more explicit, that the peoples of the Warsaw Pact countries should be empowered to choose their political system for themselves. But even he was astonished by the rapidity with which communist governments collapsed in country after country in the second half of 1989.

The process began in Poland. After an agreement to submit themselves to contested elections, the communists had been soundly defeated in June, and in August meekly joined a coalition under the anti-communist Tadeusz Mazowiecki. In September the Hungarian communist government allowed tens of thousands of East Germans to cross its frontiers and seek asylum in Austria; in October the ageing Erich Honecker was sacked as party boss in the German Democratic Republic. Within weeks the reformed communist leadership was permitting its citizens unimpeded transit to the Federal Republic of Germany. Meanwhile Todor Zhivkov retired in Bulgaria. The Czechoslovak government, too, was replaced. In the last month of this remarkable year, President Gustáv Husák resigned and the dissenting dramatist Vacláv Havel was elected by parliament to take his place (while the communist leader of the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 Alexander Dubček returned to head the Federal Assembly).

The dominoes were tumbling fast. The fall of any communist regime made the surviving ones more susceptible to collapse. And yet Pravda noted the succession of events with studied calmness. Such reportage was the sharpest sign to date that Gorbachëv was predominantly engaged with Soviet internal affairs and would pull no chestnuts out of the fire for the USSR’s post-war allies. Gorbachëv had not intended to preside over the end of communism in Eastern Europe; but he did not act to prevent the last scenes in the drama from being enacted.

Events in Romania took a dramatic turn in December 1989, when Nicolae Ceauşescu appeared on his palace balcony to address a loyal Bucharest crowd. Ceauşescu was challenged in a scene akin to a spaghetti Western movie: he was catcalled. When he failed to intimidate the assembled crowd, he leapt into a helicopter before trying to flee the country in a fast-driven limousine; but he was captured and summarily tried and executed. Gorbachëv had often confidentially expressed his horror of the Romanian terror-regime; indeed he had tried, just a few days earlier in a Moscow meeting with Ceauşescu, to persuade him that his regime would eventually incur the people’s wrath. But Ceauşescu had spurned him, making little attempt to hide his disapproval of the USSR’s perestroika. The grotesque finale to communism in Romania was thought by Gorbachëv to settle their argument in his own favour.

It was a remarkable denouement. At the beginning of 1989 most countries in Europe east of the river Elbe were ruled by communists. At the year’s end the sole remaining European communist state to the west of the USSR was Albania — and Albania had been hostile to the USSR since Khrushchëv’s period of office.

Gorbachëv could have sent the Soviet Army to suppress the anti-communist movements earlier in the year. He would, needless to emphasize, have paid a great price. In particular, he would have forfeited the diplomatic support he had from Western countries; certainly he would have reinstigated tensions with the USA, which would have led to yet another race to construct new forms of nuclear weaponry. And yet any one of Gorbachëv’s predecessors would not have blanched at a resumption of the Cold War. That he chose to avoid such a course was among his momentous choices. It took exceptional determination to stand by policies involving the minimum of violence when this resulted in the demise not only of old-style communism but even of those communist leaders in Eastern Europe who were his political allies. He had not set out to achieve this end; rather it was the unwilled result of his activity as it developed. But great was the work of his hands.

25 Hail and Farewell (1990–1991)

Gorbachëv wanted to prevent the disappearance of self-styled communist leaderships in Eastern Europe being repeated in the USSR. His domestic achievements were already enormous. Official party policies in the USSR would have been compelled to get nastier if left intact. Economic decline, political conflict, national embitterment, social alienation and environmental degradation: all these would have increased. The communist party apparatus might well have reverted to a clumsy version of Stalinism or might even have stumbled into a clash with the USA at the risk of a Third World War.

Instead Gorbachëv had been working at the renewal of the Soviet compound by means of reform. But reform implies a series of modifications which leave the basic political, economic and social order intact. In fact Gorbachëv’s rule already involved change of a much greater dimension. Several of the principal features of communism in the USSR were being undermined by his activity: the one-party state, the mono-ideological controls, the militant atheism, the centralized administration, the state economic monopoly and the suspendability of law. Perestroika was no longer a project for partial alterations but for total transformation. It was scarcely surprising that many Soviet leaders, including several who owed him their promotion to the Politburo, were aghast. Gorbachëv was no longer what he had claimed to be. By his actions, if not by his deliberate purpose, he was abetting the disintegration of the existing compound.

His intuitive brilliance did him little good; he remained hampered by his background from foreseeing where his path of transformation was leading. While wanting a market economy, he did not think this would involve much capitalism. While approving of national self-expression, he had set his face against any republic seceding from the USSR. While wishing to replace traditional communist functionaries with energetic newcomers, he often chose newcomers who had no commitment to serious reform. While aiming at an institutional division of powers, he induced chaos in governance. His personal confusion had practical consequences. Although he radicalized his proposals, he did this always more slowly than the pace of the deepening crisis over the economy, the republics, the administration and the personnel of the Soviet order. And this made his eventual fall all the more likely.

About Gorbachëv’s dedication there was no doubt: ‘I’m doomed to go forward, and only forward. And if I retreat, I myself will perish and the cause will perish too!’¹ He expected the same self-sacrifice from his associates. His group of intimates included several of his promotees to the Politburo: Alexander Yakovlev, Eduard Shevardnadze, Vadim Medvedev and Vadim Bakatin. Also important to him were aides such as Georgi Shakhnazarov and Anatoli Chernyaev; and he derived indispensable intellectual and emotional support from his wife Raisa despite her unpopularity with politicians and public alike.

But whereas he had once led from the front, by the end of the decade he was operating from the centre. Gorbachëv’s technique was to calm the communist radicals, convince his loyalists and reassure the conservatives. In practical terms he aimed to dissuade as many critics as possible from leaving the party and campaigning against him. For this purpose he opted to remain in the party as its General Secretary; he argued that the alternative was to abandon the party and let his critics use it as an instrument to struggle for the rejection of his reformist measures. It was an uncongenial task. Most central and local functionaries incurred his contempt: ‘They’re careerists; all they want is their hands on power and their snouts in the feeding trough!’² But he said no such thing in public, and hoped that his patience would be rewarded by success in making the process of reform irreversible.

Within his entourage, Yakovlev argued against his refusal to leave the party. Yeltsin agreed with Yakovlev. So, too, did the dissenter Andrei Sakharov from outside the ranks of communism. Better, they all urged, to make a clean break and form a new party. But Gorbachëv spurned the advice. He increasingly thought of Yakovlev as unsound of judgement and Yeltsin as irresponsible. He had a higher estimate of Sakharov, who was widely acclaimed as Russia’s liberal conscience. Gorbachëv was not averse to cutting off Sakharov’s microphone when he did not like what he heard.³ But by and large he ensured that this frail, croaky-voiced scientist should be given a hearing at the Congress of Soviets; and when Sakharov died in mid-December 1989, Gorbachëv paid his respects at his coffin.

Nevertheless Gorbachëv did not alter his mind about the communist party and continued to work for its fundamental reform from within. In February 1990 he produced a ‘platform’ for the Central Committee which was entitled ‘Towards a Humane, Democratic Socialism’ and which used his most extraordinary language to date: ‘The main objective of the transitional period is the spiritual and political liberation of society.’⁴ Gorbachëv’s implication was that the USSR had always been a despotism. His vision of a socialist future, moreover, barely mentioned Lenin and Marxism-Leninism. None too gently Gorbachëv was repudiating most of the Soviet historical experience. Communism was no longer the avowed aim. Since Lenin, socialism had been depicted as merely a first post-capitalist stage towards the ultimate objective: communism. Now socialism itself had become the ultimate objective; and Gorbachëv’s socialism would be a socialism antagonistic to dictatorship, to casual illegality, to a hypertrophied state economy and to cultural and religious intolerance. Indeed the draft platform was strongly reminiscent of Western social-democracy.

This similarity was not lost on Gorbachëv’s critics. Provincial party secretary Vladimir Melnikov had already accused him of sculpting policies so as ‘to appeal to the bourgeoisie and the Pope in Rome’.⁵ Most critics, however, were more restrained. At the February 1990 Central Committee plenum they desisted from undertaking a frontal attack on the draft platform; they even acquiesced in Gorbachëv’s demand for the repeal of Article 6 of the 1977 USSR Constitution, which guaranteed the political monopoly to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. No rival party had been permitted to operate in the country since the early 1920s: Gorbachëv was breaking with the dictatorial heritage of his hero Lenin.

Gorbachëv was still but weakly aware of the implications of his activities; he continued to talk of going off to ‘confer with Lenin’ for inspiration.⁶ But the rupture with Leninism was real. On 27 February 1990 Gorbachëv addressed the USSR Supreme Soviet and obtained its sanction for multi-party politics. The third convocation of the Congress of People’s Deputies ratified the change on 14 April. The one-party state defended by communist apologists since the Civil War was relegating itself to oblivion. Gorbachëv reversed Lenin’s policy as deftly as Lenin had introduced it. And while being innocent in his understanding of essential Leninism, Gorbachëv also needed to display much deviousness in order to get the institutional changes he desired. Otherwise he would never have succeeded in manipulating the central party apparatus, the ministries, the local administrations, the military high command and the security organs into accepting the step-by-step transformation of the Soviet state.

Yet the communist radicals were disgruntled with him. Yeltsin, who was still a Party Central Committee member as well as a leader of the Inter-Regional Group, was the most vociferous in demanding faster and deeper reform; and he grasped an opportunity to press his case when, in March 1990, he stood for election to the RSFSR Supreme Soviet and became its Chairman. Politically he was playing the ‘Russian card’. Unable to challenge Gorbachëv directly at the level of the USSR, he asserted himself in the organs of the RSFSR.

The communist-conservative enemies of perestroika reacted furiously. Wanting to put pressure on Gorbachëv as well as to strike down Yeltsin, they adopted the device of forming a Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Their leader was Ivan Polozkov, Krasnodar Regional Party First Secretary. Why, asked Polozkov, should the RSFSR be denied a party tier long ago given to Ukraine and Uzbekistan? Gorbachëv accepted the validity of the question and assented to the foundation of the Russian party. Its first congress was held in June, and Polozkov became its First Secretary. Polozkov tried to take up the role of leading the party traditionalists, a role lost by Ligachëv after his successive demotions in 1989. Yet Polozkov was a much less prepossessing figure than Ligachëv. Gorbachëv kept him firmly in his place by refusing to intervene on his behalf to secure a suitable apartment for him in Moscow. Polozkov, a grumpy fellow, did little to enhance the popularity of his ideas in his few public appearances.

The dispute between Yeltsin and Polozkov took some of the heat off Gorbachëv. One of Gorbachëv’s devices was to occupy a position above all the country’s politicians and exploit their disagreements to his own advantage. He also had an interest in refraining from protecting any rivals from nasty accusations. Newspapers claimed that Ligachëv had made pecuniary gain from the corruption in Uzbekistan. Similarly it was alleged at the Congress of People’s Deputies that Ryzhkov had been involved in shady industrial deals. Gorbachëv did nothing to help either of them.

Yeltsin, too, complained that dirty tricks were being played against him. In September 1989, when he was touring the USA, Pravda had reported him as having been drunk at Johns Hopkins University. Yeltsin claimed the problem to have been the tablets he was taking for his heart condition;⁷ but he was less convincing about another incident, which happened upon his return to the USSR next month. As he walked late at night towards a dacha in Uspenskoe village near Moscow, he inexplicably tumbled into a river. His supporters claimed that this was an assassination attempt on him. Yet Yeltsin omitted to complain to the authorities. The conclusion of dispassionate observers might have been that there is no smoke without fire, but in Russia Yeltsin’s predilection for vodka was not frowned upon. The Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet continued to be hailed as the people’s champion. If anything, his escapade was regarded as near-martyrdom, and his prestige rose higher.

Speaking on behalf of the RSFSR, he assured Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that he did not seek their forcible retention within the Soviet Union (whereas Gorbachëv’s hostility to secession was the despair of his radical counsellors). In June 1990 Uzbekistan declared its sovereignty. On Yeltsin’s initiative, so did the RSFSR. The disintegrative process affected even the internal affairs of the RSFSR when the autonomous republics of Tatarstan and Karelia demanded recognition as wholly independent states. The USSR’s entire constitutional basis was being undermined. The threat no longer came mainly from defeated émigré nationalists but from active Soviet politicians.

By September, when even obedient Turkmenistan declared its sovereignty, it had become the general trend. Everywhere the republican leaderships were calling for democracy and national self-determination. In some cases, such as Estonia, there was a genuine commitment to liberal political principles. In most, however, the high-falutin terms disguised the fact that local communist party élites were struggling to avoid the loss of their power. The national card had been played by them quietly in the Brezhnev period. Republican assets had been regarded by the respective élites as their own patrimony; and, after they had seen off the anti-corruption campaigns of Andropov in 1982–4 and Gorbachëv in the mid-1980s, they settled down to enjoy their privileges. While detesting Gorbachëv’s perestroika, they used his democratization of public affairs as a means of reinforcing their position and increasing their affluence. By announcing their independence, they aimed to seal off each republic from Moscow’s day-to-day interference.

Gorbachëv held tight to his strategy. The Twenty-Eighth Party Congress met from 2 June 1990 and discussed the de-Leninized party platform approved by the Central Committee in February. This time Gorbachëv’s critics shouted angrily at him, and delegates for the Russian Communist Party led a successful campaign to vote Alexander Yakovlev off the Central Committee. But Gorbachëv was retained as General Secretary by a huge majority and his platform was ratified by the Congress. When the election was held for the new post of his deputy in the party, Ligachëv was defeated by Ukrainian party first secretary Ivashko, whom Gorbachëv favoured, by 3,109 to 776 votes.

The Congress had granted that the Politburo should no longer intervene in day-to-day politics and that the USSR Presidency ought to become the fulcrum of decision-making. But Gorbachëv’s victory did not satisfy Yeltsin and other communist radicals. They were annoyed by the down-grading of Yakovlev and urged Gorbachëv yet again to leave the communist party. When he refused, they walked out. Thus the Soviet President’s support was narrowed at the very moment of his triumph. He repeated that if he left the communist party, its central and local officials would carry out a coup against him and his reforms. Was this plausible? The attempted coup in August 1991 was to show that his fears were not imaginary. But this in itself does not vindicate Gorbachëv’s judgement. For the coup leaders would have had much greater difficulty if they had confronted a Soviet social-democratic party under Gorbachëv that had split from the communist party.

But Gorbachëv had made his political choice to stay with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Among other things, this had the consequence that drastic economic measures would be postponed and that popular living standards would go on falling. The industrial, commercial and financial sectors were on the edge of collapse. Even according to official figures, output from manufacturing and mining enterprises in 1990 fell by one per cent over the previous year.⁸ Retail trade was reduced to pitiful proportions. Massive state loans were contracted with Western banks. Imports of grain and industrial consumer goods increased. Gorbachëv refused to allow any factory or kolkhoz to go to the wall, and there were no bankruptcies. But the general economic condition was dire. Most Soviet citizens could hardly believe that so rapid a deterioration had taken place. Industry was on the verge of collapse. Inflation was rising; banking and commerce were in disorder.

They blamed Gorbachëv. What counted for them was not that the economy had basically been in long-term decline long before 1985 but that they themselves were worse off than for decades. Even if they were unaware of the huge technical flaws in the Law on the State Enterprise, they knew from direct experience that the attempt at reform had not worked and that Gorbachëv’s promises of economic regeneration had not been fulfilled. By 1990, people were wondering whether they would soon be starving. There had not been such fear about the popular living conditions since the end of the Second World War.

At this point of crisis there was danger to Gorbachëv if he was cautious and danger if he was daring. He would have had a somewhat easier time if he had known his mind on the economy. Although he wanted some basic reform, he was unclear about exact measures and schedules. Nor did he recognize the need to dispense with the services of Ryzhkov as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Ryzhkov had voiced his unhappiness about extensive de-nationalization and monetary reform in December 1989.⁹ By June 1990 Ryzhkov yielded somewhat, but still called in opaque terms for a ‘regulated market’; he also announced that he would soon be introducing an increase in food prices so as to correct the gross imbalance in the state budget. Ryzhkov’s position combined the worst of both worlds: a half-hearted, drawn-out privatization programme and a further rise in the cost of living. The most radical among Gorbachëv’s advisers argued that the economy’s collapse was imminent. According to them, measures had to be deep, had to be rapid, had to be consistently imposed.

Even Gorbachëv’s agile mind had failed to assimilate basic economic concepts, and he simply refused to accept that consensus was unobtainable. In August 1990 he got permission from the USSR Supreme Soviet to create a commission to elaborate a plan for industrial, agricultural and commercial recovery — and Yeltsin agreed to co-operate with the commission. The result was the ‘500 Days Plan’, composed chiefly by Stanislav Shatalin. Gorbachëv supported it, but then vacillated under pressure from Ryzhkov. In September he ordered a reworking of the ‘500 Days Plan’ by Abel Aganbegyan to effect a compromise between the positions of Shatalin and Ryzhkov. This was like mating a rabbit with a donkey. Aganbegyan produced a predictably unworkable mixture of radical language and conservative ideas. But he had helped Gorbachëv out of his political complications, and in October the Supreme Soviet gave its assent to the set of ‘Basic Guidelines’ he presented to it.

At the time his angriest adversaries were the conservatives in the Congress of People’s Deputies who formed their own Soyuz (‘Union’) organization in October 1990.¹⁰ Most Soyuz members were Russians, but otherwise they were a diverse group. They included not only communist party members but also Christian believers, nationalist writers and ecological activists, and some of them were simply Russian functionaries who lived outside the RSFSR and were terrified about their personal prospects if ever the Soviet Union fell apart. Soyuz’s unifying belief was that the Soviet Union was the legitimate successor state to the Russian Empire. Its members were proud of the USSR’s industrial and cultural achievements of their country; they gloried in the USSR’s defeat of Nazi Germany. For them, Gorbachëv was the arch-destroyer of a great state, economy and society.

Gorbachëv was more disturbed by Soyuz than by those of his own supporters who wanted him to be still more radical. He knew that Soyuz had many undeclared sympathizers and that these were even to be found among central political and economic post-holders. Having backed down over Shatalin’s ‘500 Days Plan’ for the economy, he was sufficiently worried to give ground also in politics. One by one, he dispensed with prominent reformers in his entourage.

Alexander Yakovlev ceased to be one of Gorbachëv’s regular consultants after his bruising treatment at the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress. Yakovlev and Gorbachëv ceased to appear publicly together. In November, Vadim Bakatin was asked by Gorbachëv to step down as Minister of Internal Affairs. Gorbachëv also lost his close party colleague Vadim Medvedev. Bakatin and Medvedev had been constant proponents of the need to take the reforms further and faster. Then, Eduard Shevardnadze followed. In his case he went without being pushed; but unlike the others he did not go quietly. In an emotional speech to the Congress of People’s Deputies on 20 December he declared that, unless Gorbachëv changed his present course, the country was heading for dictatorship. Thereafter Nikolai Petrakov, Gorbachëv’s economics adviser, also departed. Even Ryzhkov left the political stage, laid low by a heart condition.

Ryzhkov’s job as Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers was taken by Valentin Pavlov, the Minister of Finances. Pavlov was even more suspicious of reform than Ryzhkov; and the new Minister of Internal Affairs was Boris Pugo, who was known as an advocate of repressive measures. Gorbachëv’s choice of Gennadi Yanaev, who agreed with Pavlov and Pugo, as Vice-President of the USSR was another indication that Shevardnadze’s fears were not entirely misplaced. Furthermore, on 13 January 1991, Soviet special forces in Lithuania stormed the Vilnius television tower. Fifteen people were killed in this flagrant attempt to deter separatist movements throughout the USSR. Gorbachëv disclaimed any knowledge of the decision to use force, and the blame was placed upon officials at the local level.

Yet Gorbachëv retained his determination to protect the territorial integrity of the USSR. On 17 March he organized a referendum on the question: ‘Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of the individual of any nationality will be guaranteed?’ Gorbachëv’s phrasing made it difficult for reform-minded citizens to vote against sanctioning the Union. But in other aspects of public life Gorbachëv was beset by trouble. Another Russian miners’ strike had broken out days earlier. In March, furthermore, supporters of Polozkov called an emergency session of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies in a bid to oust Yeltsin; and Gorbachëv, still leaning in the direction of Pavlov and Pugo, allowed 50,000 Ministry of Internal Affairs troops to be introduced to the capital to prevent a demonstration in Yeltsin’s favour. For a brief time Moscow seemed near to upheaval. But Gorbachëv baulked at the potential violence needed to restore direct control. He was also impressed by the 200,000 Muscovites who took the risk of turning out for a rally in support of Yeltsin. At last — alas, far too late! — Gorbachëv definitively reverted to the agenda of reform.

A rapprochement with Yeltsin ensued. Gorbachëv and Yeltsin announced that they would work together with common purpose. On 23 April a meeting of nine republican leaders was arranged at Gorbachëv’s dacha at Novo-Ogarëvo to draft a new Union Treaty that would augment political and economic powers of the governments of the Soviet republics. The final version was to be signed on 20 August. This tried the patience of Polozkov and his supporters beyond their limits, and they vehemently criticized him at the Central Committee of the USSR Communist Party on 24–5 April. Their comments enraged Gorbachëv in turn. At one point he handed in his resignation as General Secretary; only a petition in his favour organized by Bakatin and sixty-nine other Central Committee members persuaded him to stay in office. Polozkov lacked the nerve to push him out.¹¹ The result was victory for Gorbachëv: the terms of the proposed Union Treaty were accepted in principle by the Central Committee. The date of signature was set for 20 August.

A delighted Yeltsin travelled around the RSFSR urging the autonomous republics to ‘take whatever helping of power that you can gobble up by yourselves’.¹² When submitting himself to a presidential election in Russia on 12 June, he won a massive majority. His running-mate Alexander Rutskoi, an army colonel, became Russian vice-president. Other prominent associates were Ivan Silaev and Ruslan Khasbulatov: Silaev was appointed the RSFSR Prime Minister and Khasbulatov the Speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet. On 20 July Yeltsin pressed home his advantage by issuing a decree banning communist party organizations from keeping offices in administrative institutions and economic enterprises in Russia. This so-called ‘de-partization’ was not approved by Gorbachëv; but even he was exasperated by his party’s resistance to self-reform, and he arranged for another Party Congress to be held to determine a permanent strategy.

But Gorbachëv had scarcely any credit left with Soviet society. The economy was collapsing in every sector. Industrial output fell by eighteen per cent in 1991, agriculture by seventeen per cent. Even energy production, whose exports had supplied the backbone of state revenues in previous years, went down by ten per cent. The USSR budget deficit was between twelve and fourteen per cent of gross domestic product whereas it had been only four per cent in 1990. The result was a decline in the government’s ability to sustain the level of imports of consumer goods. The USSR’s towns and villages also experienced a shortage in fuel supplies. Consumers were further troubled by Pavlov’s decision at last to start raising the prices for food products in state shops. The result was highly unpleasant for a population unaccustomed to overt inflation. Across the year, it is reckoned, prices in such shops almost doubled.¹³

The hero of the late 1980s was regularly pilloried by his fellow Soviet citizens. He was much more popular abroad than at home. But even in international affairs he was buffeted: when in July 1991 he appealed to the ‘Group of Seven’ leading economic powers in London for assistance, he received much sympathy but no promise of a quick loan large enough to give relief to the traumatized Soviet economy. Gorbachëv’s demeanour appeared to many Soviet citizens as that of a cap-in-hand beggar. Yeltsin, who urged that Russia should get up off her knees, gained in popularity.

Several leading colleagues of Gorbachëv had long ago concluded that the USSR’s domestic chaos and international parlousness resulted from an excess of reform. Oleg Shenin, who had taken over the Central Committee Secretariat in the absence of both Gorbachëv and the physically-ailing Ivashko, called in January 1991 for an ‘end to the careless, anarchic approach’ to party affairs. USSR Vice-President Gennadi Yanaev talked often about the need for at least ‘elementary order’ in the country. Oleg Baklanov, Deputy Chairman of the Defence Council, regretted the arms agreements made with the USA. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov at the April 1991 Central Committee plenum demanded the declaration of a state of emergency on the railways, in the oil and metallurgical industries and in several whole regions of the USSR. At the Supreme Soviet, in June, he undermined the Novo-Ogarëvo negotiations by stating that the sovereignty demanded by the various Soviet republics could not be unconditional.

Gorbachëv was a tired man, too tired to take full cognizance of the dangers. He had often heard Shevardnadze and Yakovlev warning of an imminent coup d’état; yet nothing had ever happened. In late June 1991, when American Secretary of State James Baker sent him a message naming Pavlov, Kryuchkov and Yazov as possible conspirators, Gorbachëv refused to become alarmed, and went off in early August for an extended vacation in the dacha he had had built for himself in the Black Sea village of Foros.¹⁴

He underrated the extraordinary political discontent he left behind. On 23 July 1991 the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, which had carried Nina Andreeva’s letter in March 1988, published ‘A Word to the People’ signed by twelve public figures.¹⁵ Army generals Boris Gromov and Valentin Varennikov were among them: Gromov was First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Varennikov was Commander of Soviet Ground Forces. Another signatory was Soyuz leader Yuri Blokhin. Russian nationalists such as the film director Yuri Bondarëv and writers Alexander Prokhanov and Valentin Rasputin were also present. Others included Gennadi Zyuganov (member of the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party), Vasili Starodubtsev (chairman of the USSR Peasants’ Union) and Alexander Tizyakov (President of the Association of State Enterprises and Associations). None was at the peak of public eminence, but all were major Soviet personages.

Their ‘Word to the People’ railed against current conditions in the Soviet Union: ‘An enormous, unprecedented misfortune has occurred. The Motherland, our country, the great state entrusted to us by history, by nature and by our glorious forebears is perishing, is being broken up, is being plunged into darkness and oblivion.’¹⁶ All citizens were entreated to help to preserve the USSR. A wide variety of social groups was addressed: workers, managers, engineers, soldiers, officers, women, pensioners and young people.

No reference was made to Lenin and the October Revolution. The signatories appealed instead to patriotism and statehood: the Army, whose feat in vanquishing Nazi Germany was recorded, was the only institution selected for praise. Nor was any disrespect shown towards religion. The appeal was explicitly directed equally at Christians, Muslims and Buddhists.¹⁷ Ostensibly, too, the contents indicated no preference for any particular nation. But out of all countries and regions of the USSR, only Russia was mentioned as ‘beloved’. And indeed the appeal opened with the following phrase: ‘Dear Russians! Citizens of the USSR! Fellow countrymen!’ Here was a fusion of Russian and Soviet identities reminiscent of Stalin in the Second World War. Without saying so, the signatories firmly trusted that Russians would prove the national group that would act to save the USSR from the disaster of the projected Union Treaty.

They had practically written the manifesto for a coup d’état. It is inconceivable that they were publishing their feelings in the press without the knowledge of other governmental personages. Gorbachëv’s refusal to recognize how things stood was surprising: the only precaution he took in summer 1991 was to ask Yeltsin informally to stay in Moscow while the Gorbachëv family took a holiday in Crimea. Yeltsin was meant to mind the shop, as it were, in the owner’s absence. Such casualness later gave rise to rumours that Gorbachëv had secretly been planning to have a pretext to tear up the deal with Yeltsin. Perhaps he even wanted a coup to be attempted so that he might return as the mediator between all the contending forces. All this is far fetched. The likeliest explanation lies in Gorbachëv’s over-confidence. He trusted his fellow ministers because they were his own appointees. He had out-manoeuvred them year after year: he simply could not believe that they eventually might dance rings around him.

And so Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachëv went off to enjoy themselves in Foros with their daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren. Every day they walked six kilometres. (Much as he Americanized his image, Gorbachëv laudably refrained from the practice of TV-accompanied jogging.) Even on holiday, of course, he was a working President. In particular, he prepared a speech and an article on the Union Treaty to be signed on 20 August 1991.

On 18 August his quietude was interrupted, when he was visited unexpectedly by Shenin, Baklanov, Varennikov and his own personal assistant Valeri Boldin. On their arrival he noted that the telephones at his dacha were not functioning. This was the first sign that a conspiracy was afoot. His visitors told him that an emergency situation would shortly be declared, and that it would be appreciated if he would transfer his powers temporarily to Vice-President Yanaev. Baklanov assured him that they would restore order in the country and that he could subsequently return as President without having had to carry out the ‘dirty business’ himself. But Gorbachëv was intransigent. If he had misjudged his collaborators, they had got him wrong to an equal extent; and he swore at them lustily before sending them packing.¹⁸ Varennikov flew on to Kiev to inform Ukrainian political leaders that a state of emergency was being declared and that Gorbachëv was too ill to stay in charge. Baklanov, Shenin and Boldin returned to Moscow to confer with the other principal plotters.

Meanwhile KGB Chairman Kryuchkov and Interior Minister Pugo had been busy persuading functionaries to join them in the State Committee for the Emergency Situation. Vice-President Yanaev, Prime Minister Pavlov and Defence Minister Yazov were courted strongly. All eventually agreed even though Pavlov and Yanaev needed preliminary infusions of vodka. Along with them were Baklanov, Starodubtsev and Tizyakov. Kryuchkov had tried in vain to get Anatoli Lukyanov, the Supreme Soviet speaker and Gorbachëv’s friend since their university days, to join them. But at least Lukyanov handed the plotters an article criticizing the Union Treaty which could be broadcast by television early next morning;¹⁹ he also signalled to the plotters that he would prevent opposition arising in the Supreme Soviet.

From the night of 18–19 August nothing went right for the conspiracy. The plan for the creation of a State Committee for the Emergency Situation was to be announced in the morning. Explanations were to be sent out to the army, the KGB and the Soviet communist party. Then the members of the State Committee were set to appear at a televised press conference. In fact the press conference was a shambles. Yanaev, while declaring himself Acting President, could not stop his fingers from twitching. Pavlov was too drunk to attend. Outlandish incompetence was shown after the conference. Meetings of public protest were not broken up in the capital. The Moscow telephone network was allowed to function. Fax messages could be sent unimpeded. Satellite TV continued to be beamed into the USSR; foreign television crews moved around the city unhindered. The tanks sent into the streets contained naïve young soldiers who were disconcerted by the many bystanders who asked them why they were agreeing to use force upon fellow citizens.

The State Committee’s project for a coup d’état had not been unrealistic. Disillusionment with Gorbachëv in Russia was pervasive by summer 1991; order and tranquillity were universally demanded. Kryuchkov, Yanaev and their associates also had the cunning to gain popularity by releasing basic consumer products to be sold in the shops at rock-bottom prices. Moreover, every Soviet citizen knew that traditional institutions of coercion were at the disposal of the State Committee: resistance to the attempted coup would require considerable bravery.

Yet radical politicians showed exactly that quality. The State Committee had blundered in failing to arrest Yeltsin, Rutskoi, Silaev and Khasbulatov. Yeltsin, on hearing of the coup, phoned his colleagues and prepared a proclamation denouncing the State Committee as an illegal body and calling for Gorbachëv’s liberation. He also contacted Pavel Grachëv, Commander of Soviet Airborne-Ground Forces to request physical protection.²⁰ The State Committee had erred yet again; for they had put Grachëv in charge of military operations in Moscow without testing his political loyalty. Grachëv’s refusal to abandon Gorbachëv and Yeltsin was to prove crucial. Yeltsin got into a car and raced along country roads to the RSFSR Supreme Soviet building — which was becoming known as the White House — in central Moscow. There he rallied his associates, and a crowd of tens of thousands began to gather outside. Barricades of rubble, old trucks and wire were constructed around the building.

Yeltsin’s instincts told him what to do next. Tall and bulky, he strode out from the White House at one o’clock in the afternoon and clambered on to one of the tanks of the Taman Division stationed at the side of the road. From this exposed position the Russian President announced his defiance of the State Committee. The State Committee leaders had expected that the merest show of force, with perhaps only seventy arrests in the capital, would give them victory. Most of them, including Kryuchkov and Pugo, did not want to be responsible for a great number of deaths.

Their coup d’état had therefore depended on immediate total implementation. This scheme had not succeeded. The State Committee’s sole alternative was to intensify military operations. Above all, the White House had to be stormed. The suppression of resistance in Moscow would have the effect of intimidating all the Soviet republics into compliance. Unfortunately for the State Committee, ‘Acting President’ Yanaev was already losing his nerve and trying to avoid trouble. Baklanov, Kryuchkov and Pugo therefore decided to ignore him and direct their troops against the White House. Yeltsin, who had for years been well acquainted with the State Committee leaders, phoned them on a direct line to warn of the unpleasant international consequences. He also predicted that they would not be forgiven at home either. But the core of the State Committee’s membership held firm. Late on 19 August army commanders were asked to draw up a plan for the storming of the Russian White House.

At the same time the Taman Tank Division besieging the building was talking to Yeltsin’s Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi. ²¹ Yanaev’s will cracked. At a State Committee meeting at 8 p.m. he ordered that no action should be started against the White House.²² But the State Committee again ignored him, recognizing that any failure to arrest Yeltsin would bring ruin on themselves. Commands were given for further troop movements. In the night of 20–21 August tanks moved around the Garden Ring Road of Moscow. Crowds of citizens tried to block their path; and in an incident near the White House, three young civilian men — Dmitri Komar, Ilya Krichevski and Vladimir Usov — were killed.

A violent outcome seemed inevitable as Yeltsin and his associates got ready to resist an attack on the White House. Weapons were smuggled inside. The cellist Mtsislav Rostropovich joined Yeltsin in the building, playing his instrument to stiffen morale. Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev arrived to show solidarity. They all did this in the knowledge that they might not come out alive. Crowds of Muscovites, mainly youngsters, formed a human chain around the perimeter of the White House. They had no means of apprehending that in the early hours of 21 August the State Committee’s confidence was on the point of collapse. One after another, the military commanders withheld assistance from the State Committee: even the Alpha Division, which had been ordered to storm the White House, had become uncooperative. Yazov as Minister of Defence called off the military action; and Kryuchkov — to Baklanov’s disdain — refused to seize back control from Yazov.²³

By midday on 21 August the sole effective aspect of the State Committee’s activity was its maintenance of a news black-out on its decisions. In fact its leaders had decided to terminate the coup, and at 2.15 p.m. Kryuchkov and three other State Committee members along with Anatoli Lukyanov boarded a plane for the south. Their purpose was to plead their case directly with Gorbachëv in Foros. Gorbachëv refused to see most of them, but agreed to a brief meeting with Lukyanov. Having asked why Lukyanov had not convened the USSR Supreme Soviet in protest against the State Committee, Gorbachëv called him a traitor and showed him the door.²⁴ Yeltsin’s Vice-President Rutskoi, too, had meanwhile arrived at Foros to take custody of the various plotters. Gorbachëv and his family — including Raisa, who had had a severe collapse of some kind — immediately returned to Moscow. Kryuchkov and others were put on the same plane by Rutskoi to ensure that military sympathizers of the State Committee did not take it into their heads to fire upon them.²⁵

At four minutes after midnight on 22 August, Gorbachëv stepped down from the plane at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. He came back to a changed USSR. Yet Gorbachëv refused to lay blame on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union despite the evidence that many of its officials had collaborated with the ‘putsch’. He filled some of the posts of the putschists with figures who were as odious to the White House’s defenders as the putschists had been. At the funeral of Komar, Krichevski and Usov, it was Yeltsin rather than Gorbachëv who captured the public mood by asking forgiveness of their bereaved mothers for not having been able to protect their sons.

On 5 September the Congress of People’s Deputies set up yet another temporary central authority, the State Council, which comprised Gorbachëv and the leaders of those Soviet republics willing to remain part of the Union.²⁶ Gorbachëv’s resilience was truly remarkable: both his sense of duty and his will to retain power were unabated. But the putsch had altered the constellation of politics. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova had conducted a campaign of passive resistance to the State Committee of the Emergency Situation. Kazakhstan and Ukraine had been less forthright in opposing the Committee, but nevertheless had not co-operated with it. Only a minority of the USSR’s Soviet republics, notably Turkmenistan, had welcomed the putsch. In the RSFSR, Tatarstan under its leader Mintimer Shaimiev took a similar position; but most of the other internal autonomous republics refused to collaborate. When the putsch failed, even Turkmenistan’s President Niyazov started again to demand independence for his country.

No State Council would be able to impose central authority to the previous degree. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania appealed to the rest of the world to give them diplomatic recognition; and Yeltsin, unlike Gorbachëv, had long since supported their right to complete independence. At last the West gave the three states what they wanted. Meanwhile the humbling of Gorbachëv continued in Moscow. Having suffered at Gorbachëv’s hands in October 1987, Yeltsin had no reason to be gentle. At any rate he had never been a gracious victor. When the two of them had appeared together at the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR on 23 August, Yeltsin ordered the Soviet President about as if he were the junior office-holder. With a peremptory gesture of his hand he rasped out that the recently-compiled list of the State Committee’s collaborators should be made public: ‘Read them out!’ A doleful Gorbachëv had no choice but to release the list to the media.

No politician in twentieth-century Russia had effected so stupendous a comeback as Yeltsin. No one was as daring as he. Nor was anyone luckier. Gorbachëv could easily have finished him off politically in 1987. Certainly Ligachëv would have done just that. But Gorbachëv, once he had defeated Yeltsin, showed a degree of magnanimity which no previous Soviet leader had exhibited towards vanquished opponents.

Good fortune had blessed Yeltsin several times in his life. Born in a tiny village in Sverdlovsk province in 1931, he nearly died at his baptism when a tipsy priest dropped him in the font. His grandmother plucked him out to stop him drowning.²⁷ Young Boris was a rascal. Once he and his pals played with a hand-grenade they found in the woods. There was an explosion, and Boris lost two fingers of his left hand.²⁸ Yet his personality was irrepressible. His father had been sentenced to three years of forced labour for criticizing conditions of construction-site workers in Kazan;²⁹ but the young lad managed to keep this quiet when he entered the Urals Polytechnical Institute to train as a civil engineer. A natural athlete, he was quickly picked for the city’s volleyball team. In the vacations he travelled widely in Russia despite his poverty by climbing on to train carriage-tops and taking a free ride. He never lived life by the rules.

On graduating, he worked in the construction industry. In 1968 he switched careers, joining the Sverdlovsk Province Party Committee apparatus. Eight years later he was its first secretary, and in 1981 became a Central Committee member. Sverdlovsk (now a days known by its pre-revolutionary name, Yekaterinburg) is Russia’s fifth largest city. Yeltsin was its boisterous leader in the communist party tradition: he ranted and threatened. He broke legal and administrative procedures to achieve results for his province. He also used charm and guile. In search of finance for an underground rail-system in Sverdlovsk, he asked for an audience with Brezhnev and whispered his case into the ailing General Secretary’s ear. Sverdlovsk obtained the funds for its metro.³⁰

It was already evident that his style had a populistic streak. In Sverdlovsk he had turned public ceremonies into carnivals. Whole families walked in parade on the October Revolution anniversary and Yeltsin addressed them on the city’s main square. One year on the eve of the anniversary, when his car swerved into a ditch sixty kilometres from Sverdlovsk, he bounded over the fields to the nearest village and commandeered a tractor and a drunken tractor-driver to get them to the morning parade on time.³¹ On his transfer to the capital in 1985 he was already an audacious crowd-pleaser. His anti-corruption campaign in Moscow made him an object of hatred among the existing party personnel. But he did not mind about their criticisms; he understood that his popularity rose every time he was victimized by the Politburo from 1987. The more dangers he ran, the better he was liked in ordinary homes.

He had a mercurial personality. As Moscow party chief in 1985–7, he had been a bully and had sacked officials in their thousands without investigation of individual cases. But subsequently the Inter-Regional Group in the Congress of People’s Deputies since 1990 had given him an education in consultative procedures, and he learned how to listen and to act as a member of a team: this was not typical behaviour for a communist party official.

His apparent goal, after the arrest of the putschists, was the inception of a combination of democratic politics and capitalist economy in a Russia unrestrained by the USSR. On 23 August he suspended the legal status of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Russia. Gorbachëv complied by laying down the office of Party General Secretary. Yeltsin’s pressure was unremitting. On 28 October he made a lengthy, televised speech to the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies declaring his intention to implement an economic programme based upon the principles of the market. A few days later, on 6 November, he issued a decree banning the Soviet communist party altogether. He stipulated, too, that the ministers of the RSFSR had precedence over those of the USSR; and he applied a veto on any USSR appointments he disliked. Between 6 and 8 November he announced the composition of his full cabinet. He himself would be RSFSR prime minister while Yegor Gaidar, a proponent of laissez-faire economics, would be his Finance Minister and a Deputy Prime Minister. It would be a cabinet for drastic economic reform.

None the less Yeltsin had yet to reveal his purposes about the USSR. Publicly he denied any wish to break up the Union, and he accepted the invitation to return to the Novo-Ogarëvo negotiations. Yet Yeltsin’s aides had been working on contingency plans for Russia’s complete secession even before the August coup; and subsequently Yeltsin lost no chance to weaken the draft powers of the Union he was discussing with Gorbachëv. So what did Yeltsin really want?

Gorbachëv’s proposal was that the USSR should give way to a ‘Union of Sovereign States’. There would still be a single economic space and a unified military command; there would also be regular consultations among the republican presidents. Gorbachëv concurred that the Union President would not be allowed to dominate the others. His despair was such that he offered to step down in Yeltsin’s favour as Union President if only Yeltsin would agree to maintain the Union. ‘Let’s talk man to man about this,’ he implored Yeltsin.³² But Yeltsin was inscrutable. There were reasons for him to keep his options open. Of special importance was the refusal of Leonid Kravchuk, the Ukrainian President, to join the discussions. On 18 October, when a Treaty on the Economic Commonwealth had been signed, Ukraine declined to send a representative.³³ In such a situation, on 24 November, Yeltsin rejected Gorbachëv’s request to him and to the other republican leaders to initial the Union Treaty.³⁴

The people of Ukraine, including most of its Russian inhabitants, were terminally exasperated with Gorbachëv, and on 1 December they voted for independence in a referendum. The voters cast their ballots for a variety of reasons. Supporters of radical economic reform wanted freedom to carry it out fast; opponents of such reform advocated independence because they, too, wished to be liberated from Gorbachëv. And Ukrainian nationalists simply wanted independence. The result of the referendum was a disaster for the proposed Union of Sovereign States. Without Ukraine, such a Union was unrealizable.

Yeltsin arranged an emergency meeting with Ukrainian President Kravchuk and Shushkevich, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Belarus (as Belorussia now insisted on being called), in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha near the Belarusian capital Minsk. On 8 December, Yeltsin and Kravchuk persuaded Shushkevich to agree to the formation of a Common wealth of Independent States (CIS), an even weaker combination than the very weakened version of the Union lately proposed at Novo-Ogarëvo.³⁵ The Commonwealth would maintain a unified economic area and unified strategic military forces. But it would have its central offices not in Moscow but in Minsk, and there would be no president. The declaration of the three Slavic republics presented the other republics with a fait accompli. They could either join the Commonwealth or go it alone. On 21 December eight further Soviet republics assented to membership: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The dissenting republics were the three Baltic states and Georgia.

Perhaps the Ukrainian referendum was the pretext that Yeltsin had been waiting for to break up the USSR in line with a basic hidden strategy. More likely is the possibility that he simply had a keen wish to get rid of Gorbachëv and to assume unconditional authority in Moscow. It may also be that, being a very impulsive leader, he was merely reacting to situations as the mood took him.

What was indisputably clear was that the game was up for Gorbachëv. If there was not even to be a Union of Sovereign States, he had no function to discharge except the declaration of his retirement. He bowed to the inevitable and accepted that the Soviet republics were about to go their own ways. He did this with a heavy heart, predicting that the break-up of the Union would lead to military and political strife as well as economic ruin. But he had fought for the Union, and lost. On 25 December he gave a short speech on television. He spoke with simple dignity: ‘I leave my post with trepidation. But also with hope, with faith in you, in your wisdom and force of spirit. We are the inheritors of a great civilization, and now the burden falls on each and every one that it may be resurrected to a new, modern and worthy life.’³⁶ The USSR would be abolished at midnight on 31 December 1991.

Into oblivion would pass a state which had caused political tremors abroad by its very existence in the 1920s. A state whose borders were roughly the same as those of the Russian Empire and whose population embraced an unparalleled number of nations, religions and philosophies. A state which had built a mighty industrial base in the 1930s and had defeated Germany in the Second World War. A state which became a superpower, matching the USA in military capacity by the late 1970s. A state whose political and economic order had introduced a crucial category of the lexicon of twentieth-century thought. From the beginning of 1992, that state was no more.

26 Power and the Market (1992–1993)

The Soviet Union had ended not with a bang but with a whimper. Its communist party, its ideology, its flag and state anthem and its October Revolution disappeared. All this had occurred with extraordinary abruptness. Nobody, not even those at the apex of public power, had had a chance to ponder the general significance of the events in all their momentousness.

Politics remained volatile; a premium was still placed upon the swift implementation of fundamental reforms. But in the person of Yeltsin, Russia had a leader who had always been decisive. After the Soviet Union’s dismantlement, moreover, he had an incentive to display this characteristic. Having played a prominent part in the demise of the old order, he had to show that he could create a better economy and society. His room for choice in policies was at its greatest in his first few months of unrivalled power when his popularity was at its peak. The first half of 1992 was crucial for his prospects. Two main options were discussed by him and his advisers. The first was for him to call fresh elections so as to obtain an unequivocal political mandate for economic reform; the second was to proceed with economic reform in expectation of an eventual approval at elections to be held later.

Yeltsin selected the second alternative; and on 2 January 1992 he permitted Gaidar, his First Deputy Prime Minister, to introduce free-market prices for most goods in the shops of the Russian Federation. Thus the government gave up its right to fix prices for consumers. It was a big change of stance. Gaidar indicated that ‘price liberalization’ would be just the first of a series of reforms which would include measures to balance the budget, eliminate state subsidies and privatize virtually the whole economy. A transformation of industry, agriculture, commerce and finance was heralded.

It is easy to see why Yeltsin selected the second option. Imperious and impulsive, he had an aversion to Gorbachëv’s procrastinations; he must also have sensed that the political, economic and national élites at the centre and in the localities might retain a capacity to distort the results of any election he might at that stage have ordained. To Yeltsin, economic reform by presidential decree appeared the surer way to bring about the basic reform he required in the Russian economy. The choice between the two options was not a straightforward one; but Yeltsin’s decision to avoid the ballot-box probably caused more problems for him than it solved. It inclined him to use peremptory methods of governance which previously he had castigated. It also compelled him to operate alongside a Russian Supreme Soviet which had been elected in 1990 and whose majority was constituted by persons who had little sympathy with his project to create a full market economy.

Yeltsin and Gaidar made things worse for themselves by refusing to explain in any detail how they would fulfil their purposes. They reasoned among themselves that citizens were fed up with the publication of economic programmes. Yet Gaidar’s reticence induced widespread suspicion of the government. As prices rose by 245 per cent in January 1992,¹ suspicion gave way to fear. Russians worried that Gaidar’s ‘shock therapy’ would lead to mass impoverishment. Moreover, they had been brought up to be proud of the USSR’s material and social achievements and its status as a superpower. They were disorientated and humbled by the USSR’s disintegration. Russians had suddenly ceased to be Soviet citizens, becoming citizens of whatever new state they lived in; and their bafflement was such that when they spoke about their country it was seldom clear whether they were referring to Russia or the entire former Soviet Union.

Gaidar appeared on television to offer reassurance to everyone; but his lecturely style and abstract jargon did not go down well. Nor did viewers forget that earlier in his career he had been an assistant editor of the Marxist-Leninist journal Kommunist. Gaidar had never experienced material want; on the contrary, he had belonged to the Soviet central nomenklatura. Even his age — he was only thirty-five years old — was counted against him: it was thought that he knew too little about life.

Yeltsin knew of Gaidar’s unappealing image, and endeavoured to show that the government truly understood the popular unease. Aided by his speech-writer Lyudmila Pikhoya, he used words with discrimination. He ceased to refer to the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic as such; instead he usually called it the Russian Federation or simply Russia. At the same time he strove to encourage inter-ethnic harmony. He addressed his fellow citizens not as russkie (ethnic Russians) but as rossiyane, which referred to the entire population of the Russian Federation regardless of nationality.² While denouncing the destructiveness of seven decades of ‘communist experiment’, he did not criticize Lenin, Marxism-Leninism or the USSR by name in the year after the abortive August coup. Evidently Yeltsin wanted to avoid offending the many citizens of the Russian Federation who were not convinced that everything that had happened since 1991, or even since 1985, had been for the better.

The Russian President eschewed the word ‘capitalism’ and spoke in favour of a ‘market economy’.³ It would also have been impolitic for Yeltsin to recognize that the USA and her allies had won a victory over Russia: he refrained from mentioning ‘the West’ as such; his emphasis fell not on the East-West relationship but on Russia’s new opportunities to join ‘the civilized world’.⁴

Yeltsin towered above his team of ministers in experience. This was inevitable. The most illustrious ex-dissenters were unavailable. Sakharov was dead. Solzhenitsyn insisted on finishing his sequence of novels on the Russian revolutionary period before he would return home. Roy Medvedev’s reputation had been ruined by his role as adviser to Lukyanov, a collaborator of the putschists. In any case, the veteran dissenters — including the less prominent ones — adapted poorly to open politics: their personalities were more suited to criticizing institutions than to creating them. Yeltsin retained some of Gorbachëv’s more radical supporters. After the August coup, with Yeltsin’s encouragement, Gorbachëv had brought back Shevardnadze as Soviet Foreign Minister and Bakatin as chairman of the KGB, and these two stayed on with Yeltsin for a while. But Shevardnadze went off to Georgia in 1992 to become its President, and Bakatin resigned after the dissolution of the USSR.⁵

Necessarily the team around Yeltsin and Gaidar consisted of obscure adherents: Gennadi Burbulis, Anatoli Chubais, Andrei Kozyrev, Oleg Lobov, Alexander Shokhin, Sergei Shakhrai and Yuri Skokov. Most of them were in their thirties and forties, and few expected to hold power for long. Only Vice-President Rutskoi and the Speaker in the Russian Supreme Soviet Khasbulatov had previously held influential posts. Rutskoi was contemptuous of the youthful ministers, calling them ‘young boys in pink shorts and yellow boots’.⁶

But the young boys shared Yeltsin’s enthusiasm to effect change. The fact that they assumed that their tenure of office was temporary made them determined to make a brisk, ineradicable impact. What they lacked in experience they made up for in zeal. Yeltsin was raring to give them their opportunity. Where Gorbachëv had feared to tread, Yeltsin would boldly go. Having seized the reins of Great Russia’s coach and horses, he resolved to drive headlong along a bumpy path. Yeltsin saw himself as the twentieth-century Peter the Great, tsar and reformer.⁷ Those who knew their eighteenth-century history trembled at the comparison. Peter the Great had pummelled his country into the ground in consequence of his dream to turn Russia into a European power and society. Would Yeltsin do the same in pursuit of an economic transformation approved by the International Monetary Fund?

Yeltsin and his cabinet knew that the old communist order had not entirely disappeared with the USSR’s abolition. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had vanished; Marxism-Leninism and the October Revolution were discredited. But much else survived from the Soviet period. The Russian Supreme Soviet contained a large rump which hated Yeltsin. The local political and economic élites, too, operated autonomously of Moscow; they worked with criminal gangs to promote their common interests as the market economy began to be installed. In the internal non-Russian republics of the RSFSR the leaderships talked up nationalist themes and gained local support.

The methods of communism were used by Yeltsin to eradicate traces of the communist epoch. He rarely bothered with the sanction of the Supreme Soviet, and he visited it even more rarely. He confined deliberations on policy to a small circle of associates. These included not only Gaidar and his bright fellow ministers but also his bodyguard chief Alexander Korzhakov (who was his favourite drinking mate after a day’s work). He sacked personnel whenever and wherever his policies were not being obeyed. In provinces where his enemies still ruled he introduced his own appointees to bring localities over to his side. He called them variously his ‘plenipotentiaries’, ‘representatives’, ‘prefects’ and — eventually — ‘governors’. These appointees were empowered to enforce his will in their respective provinces. In the guise of a President, Yeltsin was ruling like a General Secretary — and indeed with less deference to ‘collective leadership’!⁸

To his relief, price liberalization did not lead to riots on the streets. The cost of living rose; but initially most people had sufficient savings to cope: years of not being able to buy things in Soviet shops meant that personal savings kept in banks were still large. Although Yeltsin’s popularity had peaked in October 1991,⁹ there was no serious rival to him for leadership of the country. He intended to make full use of his large latitude for the strategic reorientation of the economy. Nor did the industrial and agricultural directors object strongly to his proposals. For they quickly perceived that the liberalization of prices would give them a wonderful chance to increase enterprise profits and, more importantly, their personal incomes. Politicians from the Soviet nomenklatura, furthermore, had long been positioning themselves to take advantage of the business opportunities that were becoming available.¹⁰

Confidently Yeltsin and Gaidar proceeded to further stages of economic reform. The two most urgent, in their estimation, were the privatization of enterprises and the stabilization of the currency. The first of these was to be privatization. Its overseer was to be Anatoli Chubais, who was Chairman of the State Committee for the Management of State Property. His essential task was to put himself out of a job by transferring state enterprises to the private sector.

Chubais published projects on the need to turn factories, mines and kolkhozes into independent companies, and seemed to be about to facilitate the development of ‘popular capitalism’. But the crucial question remained: who was to own the companies? In June 1992, Chubais introduced a system of ‘vouchers’, which would be available to the value of 10,000 roubles per citizen and which could be invested in the new companies at the time of their creation. He also enabled those employed by any particular company, whether they were workers or managers, to buy up to twenty-five per cent of the shares put on the market; and further privileges would be granted to them if they should wish to take a majority stake in the company. But Chubais’s success was limited. At a time of rapid inflation, 10,000 roubles was a minuscule grant to individual citizens; and the facilitation of internal enterprise buy-outs virtually guaranteed that managers could assume complete authority over their companies; for very few workers were in a mood to struggle with their managers: strikes were small scale and few.¹¹

Chubais and Gaidar had ceded ground because the economic and social forces ranged against the government were too strong. The administrative élite of the Soviet period remained in charge of factories, kolkhozes, shops and offices. In particular, twenty-two per cent of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies had come from the highest echelons of party and governmental agencies of the USSR; thirty-six per cent were officials of a middling level; and twenty-one per cent were drawn from local political and economic management.¹² Although about a quarter of deputies in early 1992 were committed to basic reforms, there was a drift into the embrace of the thirteen anti-reformist caucuses in the Russian Supreme Soviet in the course of the year.

Outside the Congress, furthermore, several dozens of parties had recently been formed. Lobbying organizations emerged to increase the pressure on the government. Trade unions of workers had little influence. Only the miners caused trepidation to ministers — and even miners did not bring them to heel. But directors of energy, manufacturing and agricultural companies were more effective in pressurizing Yeltsin. Their lobbyists were men who had walked the corridors of power before the end of the USSR. Most famous of them was Arkadi Volsky, who headed the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. Another was Viktor Chernomyrdin, chairman of the vast state-owned gas company known as Gazprom. Even more remarkable was the decision of the Agrarian Union to choose Vasili Starodubtsev as their leader despite his having been imprisoned for belonging to the State Committee of the Emergency Situation in August 1991. Throughout the first six months of 1992 such lobbyists raised the spectre of economic collapse if existing enterprises were allowed to go to the wall.

They proved willing to bargain with Chubais. Their basic demand was that if the government was going to insist on the de-nationalization of companies, this should be done without ending state subsidies and without threatening the immediate interests of the directors or workers. It was only when Chubais gave way on this that the Supreme Soviet ratified his programme of privatization on 11 June. This was the last success of the radical economic reformers for a year.¹³ They knew that they had made compromises. But their rationale was that they had introduced enough capitalism to ensure that the members of the old Soviet nomenklatura would not permanently be able to shield themselves from the pressures of economic competition.¹⁴ Market relationships, they trusted, would eventually entail that the previous cosy relationships within whole sectors of industry, agriculture, finance, transport and trade would break down. Thus a revived Russian capitalism would consign the communist order to oblivion.

Rutskoi and Khasbulatov thought otherwise and aimed to continue stymieing Chubais’s programme. From midsummer 1992, both cast themselves in the semi-open role of opponents of Yeltsin. Usually they took care to criticize him by castigating Gaidar. But it was primarily Yeltsin whom they sought to harm.

Yeltsin gave ground to the preferences of Rutskoi and Khasbulatov. In May he had promoted Chernomyrdin, Gazprom’s chairman, to the post of Energy Minister. In July Yeltsin appointed Viktor Gerashchenko as head of the Central Bank of Russia. Whereas Gaidar wanted to decelerate inflation by restricting the printing of paper roubles, Gerashchenko expanded the credit facilities of the great companies. Inflation accelerated. Yet the public heaped the blame not on Gerashchenko but on Gaidar. In June Yeltsin had made him Acting Prime Minister in order to stress that economic reforms would somehow continue. But vehement hostility to Gaidar remained in the Russian Supreme Soviet, which rejected Yeltsin’s subsequent recommendation that Gaidar should be promoted to the post of Prime Minister. In December, Yeltsin yielded to the Supreme Soviet and instead nominated Chernomyrdin to the premiership. On 5 January 1993 Chernomyrdin introduced a limit on the rates of profit on several goods — and some of these goods also had governmental price controls applied to them. Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were delighted.

They had plentiful reason to think that Yeltsin had been given a shock that would permanently deter him. Disenchantment with him was spreading throughout society in 1992. Food production was only nine per cent down on the previous year;¹⁵ but the funds of the government were so depleted that most kolkhozes were unpaid for their deliveries to the state purchasing agencies.¹⁶ Industrial production continued to fall. Output in the same year was down by eighteen per cent on 1991.¹⁷ Inflation was 245 per cent in January.¹⁸ Whereas kolkhozniki could survive by means of their private plots and sales of their surplus products at the urban markets, workers and office employees were hard pressed unless they had nearby dachas where they could grow potatoes and vegetables. Some folk simply cut out a patch of land on the outskirts of towns to cultivate produce or keep rabbits, pigs or even cows.

Others moonlighted from their jobs, selling cigarettes at Metro stations. Factories, mines and offices no longer asserted work-discipline: like the kolkhozes, they frequently lacked funds to pay their workers; and, being unable to maintain regular production, they no longer needed everyone to be on site in working hours. Pensioners eked out a living similarly. Many of them queued for hours in shops to buy basic products and to sell them on the pavement at double the price to busy passers-by.

The economy was reverting to ancient techniques of barter. Foreigners were astounded by the adaptiveness of ordinary Russians; but this was because they had taken too much account of official Soviet propaganda. Petty thefts from enterprises had been an established way of life in the USSR: grocery-shop counter staff kept back the best sausages; bookshop salespeople secreted the most sensational books; factory workers went home with spanners and screwdrivers. Such prized acquisitions could be traded among friends. Capitalism had not existed in the Soviet Union since the 1920s; but personal commerce had never been eliminated. Under Yeltsin, the attempt was no longer made to harass those who tried, legally or even illegally, to gain a few little luxuries in an economy where such luxuries were in constant deficit. The militia might occasionally clear the streets of pedlars, but this was usually in order to receive the bribes that were their method of surviving on inadequate wages.

Such trading was one thing; it was much harder to kick-start a market economy into motion on a larger scale. For most people, the replacement of communism with capitalism was most obviously manifested in the tin kiosks erected in all towns and cities. The goods they sold were a curious assortment: soft-drinks, alcohol, bracelets, watches, Bibles, pens and pornographic magazines. The kiosks also got hold of goods of domestic provenance which were in chronic under-supply such as razors, flowers and apples. At first there was a flood of imports, but Russian enterprises became active in production, often presenting their goods in fictitious foreign packaging (including allegedly non-Russian vodka). Prices were high, profits large.

And so popular disgruntlement grew even though the kiosks’ operations were helping to end the perennial shortage of products. Poverty of the most dreadful kind was widespread. Tent-settlements of the homeless sprang up even in Moscow. Beggars held out their hands in the rain and snow. Most of them were frail pensioners, orphans and military invalids. Without charitable donations from passers-by they faced starvation. The incidence of homelessness increased. Meanwhile everyone — not only the poor — suffered from the continuing degradation of the environment. In areas of heavy industry such as Chelyabinsk, the rise in respiratory and dermatological illnesses was alarming. Spent nuclear fuel was casually emitted into the White Sea. Not since the Second World War had so many citizens of Russia felt so lacking in care by the authorities. The old, the poor and the sick were the victims of the governmental economic programme.

Virtually everyone who had a job, however, kept it. The exceptions were the soldiers of the Soviet Army who were being brought back from the garrisons of Eastern Europe since 1990, and many were compelled to retire from service. Conditions were often dire for those who remained in the armed forces. The state construction of housing blocks had more or less ceased, and in the worst cases, public lavatories were requisitioned as military residences. Through 1992, too, contingents of the Soviet Army were divided among the newly-independent states of the CIS and a Russian Army was formed.

Russian Army contingents, however, were located not only in Russia but across the entire former Soviet Union, and uncertainty persisted as to what should be done with them. In Moscow, crowds gathered daily outside the Lenin Museum off Red Square protesting at the USSR’s dismemberment. Stalinists, Russian nationalists and monarchists mingled. There was even a man with a huge billboard offering all and sundry a cheap cure for AIDs. This congregation was menacing, but also a little ridiculous: its dottiness outdid its activism. But its members were nostalgic for the Soviet Union, for orderliness and for Russian pride and power that was echoed amidst the population of the Russian Federation. Naturally this feeling was strongest among ethnic Russians. They constituted eighty-two per cent of the Russian Federation,¹⁹ and many of them worried about the potential fate of relatives and friends now living in what were formally foreign countries.

They worried, too, about the situation in Russia. Not since the Second World War had life been so precarious. By the mid-1990s the life expectancy of Russian males had fallen to fifty-nine years and was still falling. Alcohol abuse was widespread. But most problems faced by most citizens were beyond their control: declining health care; the pollution and lack of industrial safety standards; and the fall in average family income. Even those people who had jobs were not always paid. Salary and wages arrears became a national scandal.

In other ways, too, life was precarious. As the criminal and governmental organizations got closer, the use of direct violence became commonplace. Several politicians and investigative journalists were assassinated. Entrepreneurs organized the ‘contract killings’ of their entrepreneurial rivals; and elderly tenants of apartments in central city locations were beaten up if they refused to move out when property companies wished to buy up their blocks. Criminality was pervasive in the development of the Russian market economy. Governmental officials at the centre and in the localities were routinely bribed. The police were utterly venal. Russian generals sold their equipment to the highest bidder, sometimes even to anti-Russian Chechen terrorists. Illicit exports of nuclear fuels and precious metals were made; the sea-ports of Estonia were especially useful for this purpose. Half the capital invested abroad by Russians had been transferred in contravention of Russian law. The new large-scale capitalists were not demonstrably keen to invest their profits in their own country.

And so Russia did not build up its economic strength as quickly as neighbouring Poland and Czechoslovakia; and its legal order was a shambles. Sergei Kovalëv, the Russian government’s human rights commissioner, was increasingly isolated from ministers. The Constitutional Court retained a degree of independence from the President, but generally the goal of a law-based state proved elusive. Everywhere there was uncertainty. Arbitrary rule was ubiquitous, both centrally and locally. Justice was unenforceable. The rouble depreciated on a daily basis. It appeared to Russian citizens that their entire way of existence was in flux. On the streets they were bargaining with American dollars. At their kiosks they were buying German cooking-oil, French chocolate and British alcohol. In their homes they were watching Mexican soap-operas and American religious evangelists. A world of experience was being turned upside-down.

Nor were the problems of Russians confined to the Russian Federation. Twenty-five million people of Russian ethnic background lived in other states of the former Soviet Union. In Tajikestan (as its government now spelled its name), the outbreak of armed inter-clan struggle amongst the Tajik majority induced practically all Russian families to flee for their lives back to Russia. In Uzbekistan the local thugs stole their cars and pushed them out of prominent jobs. In Estonia there was discussion of a citizenship law which would have deprived resident Russians of political rights. Large pockets of Russians lived in areas where such intimidation was not quite so dramatic: north-western Kazakhstan and eastern Ukraine were prime examples. But Russians indeed had a difficult time in several successor states in the former Soviet Union.

Yeltsin hinted that he might wish to expand Russia at the expense of the other former Soviet republics, but foreign criticism led him to withdraw the remark. Other politicians were not so restrained. Vladimir Zhirinovski, who had contested the 1991 Russian presidential elections against Yeltsin, regarded the land mass south to the Indian Ocean as the Russian sphere of influence. Widely suspected of being sheltered by the KGB, Zhirinovski’s Liberal-Democratic Party had been the first officially-registered non-communist political party under Gorbachëv; and Zhirinovski had supported the State Committee of the Emergency Situation in August 1991. His regret at the USSR’s collapse was shared by communist conservatives who obtained a decision from the Constitutional Court in November 1992 allowing them to re-found themselves under the name of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Its new leader Gennadi Zyuganov and his colleagues cut back its ideology of internationalism and atheism while maintaining a commitment to the memory of Lenin and even Stalin.

The threat to Yeltsin came from such self-styled patriots. Unequivocal advocacy of liberal political principles became rarer. Several prominent critics of authoritarianism fell into disrepute: the most notable example was Gavriil Popov, mayor of Moscow, who resigned in 1992 after accusations were made of financial fraud. Sergei Stankevich, who had seemed the embodiment of liberalism, became gloomier about the applicability of Western democratic traditions to Russia — and he too was charged with being engaged in fraudulent deals. The few leading surviving liberals such as Galina Starovoitova and Sakharov’s widow Yelena Bonner were voices crying in the wilderness.

Russian politics were gradually becoming more authoritarian; and Yeltsin’s shifting policy towards Russia’s internal republics reflected this general development despite the amicable signature of a Federal Treaty in March 1992. Chechnya had been a sore point since its president, Dzhokar Dudaev, had declared its independence in November 1991. Tatarstan, too, toyed with such a project. Several other republics — Bashkortostan, Buryatiya, Karelia, Komi, Sakha (which had previously been known as Yakutia) and Tuva — insisted that their local legislation should take precedence over laws and decrees introduced by Yeltsin. North Osetiya discussed the possibility of unification with South Osetiya despite the fact that South Osetiya belonged to already independent Georgia. Yeltsin also had to contend with regionalist assertiveness in the areas inhabited predominantly by Russians. In summer 1993 his own native region, Sverdlovsk, briefly declared itself the centre of a so-called Urals Republic.²⁰

Yeltsin, the man who had urged the republics to assert their prerogatives against Gorbachëv, asserted the prerogatives of ‘the centre’. Taxes would be exacted. No separatist tendencies would be tolerated: the frontiers of ‘Russia’ were non-infringible. National, ethnic and regional aspirations were to be met exclusively within the framework of subordination to the Kremlin’s demands. A firm central authority needed to be reimposed if the disintegration of the Russian state was to be avoided during the implementation of economic reforms.

Furthermore, Yeltsin did not intend to go on giving way to the demands of Rutskoi, Khasbulatov and the Russian Supreme Soviet. He tried to shunt Vice-President Rutskoi out of harm’s way by assigning him agriculture as his legislative responsibility just as Gorbachëv had got rid of Ligachëvin 1989. There was less that could be done about Khasbulatov, the Supreme Soviet Speaker, who gave plenty of parliamentary time to deputies who opposed Gaidar’s monetarist economic objectives.²¹ But at least Yeltsin prevented Chernomyrdin, the Prime Minister since December 1992, from adopting policies still closer to those advocated by Khasbulatov. Yeltsin insisted that Chernomyrdin should accept Gaidar’s associate Boris Fëdorov as Minister of Finances; and the cabinet was compelled, at Yeltsin’s command, to adhere to Chubais’s programme of privatization. Yeltsin was biding his time until he could reinforce the campaign for a full market economy.

To outward appearances he was in trouble. His personal style of politics came in for persistent criticism from the newspapers and from the large number of political parties which had sprung up. For example, it was claimed that Russia was governed by a ‘Sverdlovsk Mafia’. Certainly Yeltsin was operating like a communist party boss appointing his clientele to high office; and he steadily awarded himself the very perks and privileges he had castigated before 1991. He was chauffeured around in a limousine and his wife no longer queued in the shops. He founded his own select tennis club: he seemed ever more secluded from other politicians in the country.²²

Yet Yeltsin made a virtue of this by stressing that he would always ignore the brouhaha of party politics. Like Nicholas II and Lenin, he habitually denounced politicking. Yeltsin had backed Gaidar in 1991-2, but not to the point of forming a party with him. He was a politician apart and intended to remain so. Moreover, the great blocks of economic and social interests in Russia had not yet coalesced into a small number of political parties. The problem was no longer the existence of a single party but of too many parties. The distinctions between one party and another were not very clear; their programmes were wordy and obscure and the parties tended to be dominated by single leaders. The far-right Liberal-Democratic Party was described in its official handouts as ‘the Party of Zhirinovski’.²³ Russia had not yet acquired a stable multi-party system, and this circumstance increased Yeltsin’s freedom of manoeuvre.

In March 1993 the Russian Supreme Soviet provided him with the kind of emergency in which he thrived by starting proceedings for his impeachment. Yeltsin struck back immediately, and held a referendum on his policies on 25 April 1993. Fifty-nine per cent of the popular turn-out expressed confidence in Yeltsin as president. Slightly less but still a majority — fifty-three per cent — approved of his economic policies.²⁴ Yeltsin drew comfort from the result, but not without reservations; for fifty per cent of those who voted were in favour of early presidential elections: not an unambiguous pat on the back for the existing president. Yet in general terms he had gained a victory: his policies were supported despite the unpleasantness they were causing to so many people. Undoubtedly Yeltsin had outflanked the Supreme Soviet; he could now, with reinforced confidence, claim to be governing with the consent of voters.

The trouble was that he would still need to rule by decree in pursuit of a fuller programme of economic reform leading to a market economy. Furthermore, Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were undaunted by the referendum. They still had strong support in a Supreme Soviet which could thwart the introduction of any such programme; they could also use the Supreme Soviet to prevent Yeltsin from calling early political elections. The result was a stalemate. Both sides agreed that Russia needed a period of firm rule; but there was irreconcilable disagreement about policies, and each side accused the other of bad faith in their negotiations.

Characteristically it was Yeltsin who took the initiative in breaking the stalemate. He plotted simply to disperse the Supreme Soviet, hold fresh parliamentary elections and propose a new Russian Constitution to the electorate. The plan was his own, and he approached his military and security ministers about it at the last moment in summer 1993. Chernomyrdin was on a trip to the USA when the discussions were held, and was told of them only upon his return.²⁵ Yeltsin planned to lock the Supreme Soviet deputies out of the White House. But he had made no allowance for his plan being leaked to Rutskoi and Khasbulatov. At least this is the kinder interpretation of his activity; the other possibility is that he was out to provoke a violent showdown with his adversaries and therefore wanted them to know of his intentions.²⁶ What is beyond dispute is that he flaunted his intention to resume the government’s campaign for a market economy; for on 18 September he pointedly brought back Yegor Gaidar as First Deputy Prime Minister.²⁷

In any case, when on 21 September the President duly issued his Decree No. 1400, Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were ready for him. Together with hundreds of Supreme Soviet deputies, they barricaded themselves inside the White House: they had arms, food and a determination to topple Yeltsin. Immediately Yeltsin, hero of the peaceful defence of the White House in August 1991, ordered his Defence Minister Grachëv to lay siege to the same building. In fact there continued to be much entering and leaving of the White House, and the White House’s defenders attracted a group of prominent enragés to their side, including Albert Makashov, Vladislav Achalov and Viktor Anpilov. Makashov and Achalov were army generals who had long wanted Yeltsin deposed by fair means or foul; Anpilov had founded a Russian Communist Workers’ Party which rejected Zyuganov’s Communist Party of the Russian Federation as being altogether too respectable. A violent outcome was not inevitable, but neither side was greatly predisposed towards reconciliation.

Rutskoi and Khasbulatov had become hostile to any compromise with Yeltsin and by now thought of themselves as protectors of parliament and legality; and indeed Yeltsin’s act of dispersal was a breach of the limits of his constitutional authority.²⁸ Yeltsin for his part affirmed that the parliament had been elected in 1990 whereas he had put his policies to a referendum in April 1993. The country’s government, he added, should not be held permanently in abeyance because of the perpetual stalemate between president and parliament.

Doubtless most citizens of the Russian Federation would have preferred a compromise. But it was not to be. Rutskoi, cheered by the crowd of supporters outside the White House, thought that a popular majority was on his side; he declared himself Acting President and announced that Achalov was his Defence Minister: it did not occur to him that this was bound to throw a wavering Grachëv into the arms of Yeltsin. On Sunday, 3 October, Makashov’s armed units tried to storm the Ostankino TV station in Moscow, and Rutskoi recklessly urged the crowd outside the White House to march on the Kremlin. Yeltsin resorted to direct armed action. In the early hours of 4 October, he and Chernomyrdin pushed Grachëv into retaking the White House.²⁹ A gaping hole was blasted in the building before Rutskoi, Khasbulatov and their supporters would concede defeat. They were arrested and detained in the same Sailors’ Rest Prison where several of the August 1991 plotters were still being held.

These ‘October Events’ were quickly exploited by Yeltsin, who sanctioned further steps towards the construction of a market economy. According to an optimistic calculation, average personal incomes had recovered by the end of 1994 to a level only ten per cent lower than they had held in 1987.³⁰ Privatization of companies, under Chubais’s direction, proceeded apace. By the end of 1994 two fifths of the working population in the Russian Federation were employed by private enterprises.³¹ Shops, stalls and street-vendors began to offer a variety of consumer products not seen on open sale for over six decades. Even more remarkable was what happened in the bakeries. The need to secure cheap basic foodstuffs for the towns had troubled governments in the Russian capital throughout the century. The question of grain supplies had been the touchstone of every ruler’s claim to efficient governance. Yeltsin put his confidence on parade: in the last quarter of 1993 the remaining price controls on consumer products were lifted; in particular, bakeries were at last permitted to charge what they wanted for bread.

Not everything went his way. Gross domestic product in 1993 fell by twelve per cent over 1992.³² And although there was a rise in general comfort in Moscow, things were much more unpleasant in most other cities, towns and villages. To some extent, the fault did not lie with Yeltsin’s government. He had taken office with the expectation that the Western powers would provide finance to enable him to set up a ‘stabilization fund’. Such a fund would have been of important assistance during the period of transition to a market economy: it would have helped both to sustain social-security benefits and to make the rouble freely convertible into the world’s other currencies. The Western powers, however, were impressed more by the limitations than the achievements of the Russian economic reforms.

Such limitations were considerable. Massive state subsidy was retained for the gas and oil industries; the fact that Prime Minister Chernomyrdin remained on friendly terms with his former colleagues in Gazprom made it unlikely that the subsidy would quickly be withdrawn. The kolkhozes, despite having been turned into private economic organizations of one kind or another, were another sector which continued to receive easy credit from the government. Ministers also refrained from introducing the long-awaited legislation on land privatization. Furthermore, there were persistent constraints upon entrepreneurial activity. The government did precious little to impose the rule of law. Businessmen did not have the predictable framework for their operations which they craved. The powers given to local administrations to grant or withhold trading licences impeded the emergence of an untrammelled market economy.

Yet much had been achieved under the premiership of Chernomyrdin, and Yeltsin acted to maximize his political advantage after the ‘October Events’ by arranging national and local elections and a constitutional referendum. The arrest of his Vice-President and Speaker removed his two most awkward antagonists from contention, and seemed to leave him free to devise a strategy unimpeded by considerations of compromise with the Supreme Soviet. He aimed to endorse the newly-formed political party of Yegor Gaidar, Russia’s Choice (Vybor Rossii); his favoured option was to go for a more drastic economic reform than Chernomyrdin approved. But Yeltsin had reckoned without the widespread revulsion caused by his action on the White House. The ‘October Events’ were an unsolicited gift to those of his opponents who claimed that he was violent and unpredictable.

Yet despite its roughness and imperfections, this was the first Russian parliamentary election where nearly all political parties could operate freely. The problem was that Russia still had a super-fluity of parties, and it made sense for electoral pacts to be formed among them. Russia’s Choice led a block committed to rapid economic liberalization. The Yabloko (‘Apple’) block favoured a somewhat slackened pace of change and a retention of subsidies for state-owned industry. There were also three blocks which brought together communist sympathizers; these were led respectively by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation itself and by the Agrarian Party and Women of Russia. Others stayed outside all blocks. Chief among these was the Liberal-Democratic Party, whose leader Vladimir Zhirinovski insisted that only his organization was not somehow linked to ‘the authorities’.

A bias in Gaidar’s favour was recognizable in both the amount and the content of central TV reportage. This was important; for rallies were few, posters were flimsy and unplentiful, newspapers were delivered intermittently and the local networks of the parties were patchy. Citizens got most of their information from their television sets. Yeltsin left nothing to chance: he even issued an instruction that no political broadcast could be made on television that referred critically to the draft Constitution.

Seemingly he obtained most of what he wanted. His Constitution draft secured the necessary approval of the electorate, albeit by a narrow majority. This meant that Yeltsin had virtually unrestricted authority to appoint his prime minister, to prorogue parliament and rule by decree. The static warfare between parliament and president appeared unlikely to recur. The new parliament was to be renamed the Federal Assembly. This Assembly would be bi-cameral: the first chamber was the State Duma, the second was the Council of the Federation. And the Council of the Federation, being constituted by leading figures in the legislatures and administrations of the republics and provinces, would be heavily influenced by the President’s wishes and would act as a check upon the State Duma. Of the 450 seats in the State Duma, furthermore, half were elected by local constituencies and half by national party lists. This system was designed to limit the ability of local political élites, especially those of a communist orientation, to resist the brave capitalist boys of Tsar Boris.

But not everything went well for Yeltsin. There had been signs of problems during the electoral campaign. In particular, Gaidar, a stilted public speaker at the best of times, was out of his depth. His pudgy, shiny face had never endeared itself to most voters and his language was as incomprehensible as ever; and even Yeltsin, appealing at the last moment for a vote in favour of his proposed Constitution and his preferred parties, looked uncomfortable in his addresses to the public on television.

By contrast Zhirinovski, having conjured up funds to buy time on the broadcast media, showed panache. He was the only politician who could speak the language of the man and woman in the street. His vulgar aggressiveness appealed to those Russian citizens who had suffered from the effects of Yeltsin’s policies, especially the provincial industrial workers, the middle aged and the serving officers. Zhirinovski was not the only threat to Yeltsin’s plans. There was also Zyuganov and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Zyuganov was an unprepossessing speaker and a writer of some of the stodgiest prose in the Russian language. And yet like Zhirinovski, he exposed the political and economic dislocation that had occurred in 1991. His charisma was negligible; but his party stood well with those sections of the electorate which were discomfited by Russia’s separation from the former USSR, her decline in global power and her inability to guarantee general material well-being.

The surge of support for Yeltsin’s adversaries was hidden by the ban on the divulgence of public-opinion surveys in the last weeks of the electoral campaign. But the talk in Moscow on 15 December, when voters went to the polls in the mildly snowy weather, indicated that Yeltsin was in trouble. Although he won sanction for the Constitution, he was troubled by the other results. To his consternation, the State Duma contained sixty-four deputies from the Liberal-Democratic Party and 103 from the block led by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation under Gennadi Zyuganov. Russia’s Choice supplied only seventy deputies. There had been much unfair manipulation before voting day and probably there was downright fraud in the counting of the votes; but still the results were compiled with a sufficient degree of fairness for a snub to be delivered to Boris Yeltsin.

27 The Lowering of Expectations (1994–1999)

Yeltsin had adopted democratic ideas late in life and in a superficial fashion. The electorate’s unhappiness with the results of his reforms quickly induced him to go back to more authoritarian habits. Surveys of popular opinion in the early 1990s made depressing reading for him and his government. Citizens of the Russian Federation had started by welcoming political democracy and being willing for market economics to be given a try.¹ As real average incomes went into steep decline, people resented the top stratum of an elite which had become rich and powerful beyond the wildest dreams of officialdom under communism. As Yeltsin’s popularity waned, so nostalgia grew for the safe and stable conditions remembered from the years before 1985. Brezhnev’s rule began to be recalled with enthusiasm.² The disintegration of the USSR was regretted. People were bewildered by the denigration of military, economic and cultural achievements of the Soviet period. The floor was giving way beneath the Kremlin reformers, and Yeltsin found it difficult to introduce his policies without extensive consultation with the representative bodies — the State Duma and the Council of the Federation — which had been established by his own new Constitution.

He stuffed his successive governments with politicians who lacked qualms about this approach. The dogged Viktor Chernomyrdin was retained as Prime Minister, and Yeltsin never attempted to bring Gaidar back to power. Nevertheless Yeltsin treated Chernomyrdin pretty shabbily, frequently indicating dissatisfaction with the government’s performance; but it was not until March 1998 that he risked replacing him with an economic radical in Gaidar’s mould. This was Sergei Kirienko, still in his mid-thirties, from Nizhni Novgorod. The financial collapse of August 1998 did for Kirienko and the State Duma’s intransigence induced Yeltsin to appoint Yevgeni Primakov to the premiership. Primakov’s willingness to have dealings with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation irked Yeltsin. Equally annoying was the Prime Minister’s high standing in popular opinion. In May 1999 Primakov was dropped and his post was given to former Minister of the Interior Sergei Stepashin. But when Stepashin refused to keep the state anti-corruption investigators away from the Yeltsin family’s affairs, he too was removed from office. In August 1999 the obscure Vladimir Putin, ex-head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), became Prime Minister. It was a giddying carousel on the fairground of Russian governance.

Yeltsin’s hands at the controls grew ever shakier, apart from when it came to decisions about sacking his associates. He was resorting extravagantly to the comforts of the vodka bottle, and in Berlin in 1994 he drunkenly snatched a conductor’s baton and led an orchestra through a rendition of the folksong ‘Kalinka’. His drinking aggravated a chronic heart ailment. Suffering a collapse on a flight across the Atlantic in the same year, he was too ill to meet the Irish Taoiseach at Dublin airport.³ For the duration of the 1996 presidential electoral campaign he had to be pumped full of palliative medicines. Afterwards a quintuple cardiac bypass operation proved necessary.

Neither Yeltsin nor his governments retained much support in the country. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin formed a party, the archly named Our Home’s Russia, to contest the Duma elections of December 1995. He had a huge advantage over the opposition since the new party had unrivalled financial resources and powers of patronage and secured unobstructed access to TV news programmes. Yet Chernomyrdin took only 65 seats out of 450. The lacklustre Gennadi Zyuganov and his Communist Party of the Russian Federation obtained 157, and the allies of the communists — the Agrarian Party and Women of Russia — added a further 23. This made Zyuganov the leader of the largest block in the Duma. Yeltsin, however, refused to compromise with him and insisted on keeping Chernomyrdin as Prime Minister. Zyuganov, filled with new confidence, denounced both Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin. The Duma elections, he declared, supplied a popular mandate for a reversal of the whole reform agenda. The USSR should never have been abolished. Economic privatization had reduced millions of households to poverty. The country’s assets and interests had tumbled into the grasp of Russian plutocrats and the IMF, and Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin were the agents of this dénouement. Zyuganov made the case for a government of communists to restore well-being in state and society.

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation had been widely thought to be at death’s door since it drew its support mainly from pensioners and from workers in the decaying sectors of industry. Yet there was a tenacity about Zyuganov, and his increasingly Russian nationalist statements continued to attract popular approval. His party comrades in the Duma, moreover, were well-organized and one of them, Gennadi Seleznëv, became its Speaker. Despite having equipped himself with abundant powers under the 1993 Constitution, President Yeltsin had to let his governments come to terms with Zyuganov whenever the communists stirred up controversy in the Duma about his behaviour, health or policies. Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin continued to trim back the project of reforms. The headlong rush into capitalism was slowed. The inclination to perceive Russia’s national interests in international relations as identical to those of the leading Western powers faded. The chaotic relationship between the centre and the republics and provinces in the Russian Federation began to be regularized. Yeltsin more and more rarely devoted his speeches to the theme of the communist totalitarian nightmare between 1917 and 1991.⁴

Although these adjustments came easily to the opportunistic President, he did not want to concede more than was absolutely necessary. He and his coterie were determined to hold on to power. In spring 1996, when Zyuganov was beating him in the national opinion surveys, he contemplated a plan to suspend the presidential election. His aide and chief bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov encouraged him, arguing that a communist restoration had to be prevented at all costs. A ‘red scare’ atmosphere was fostered in newspapers and on television. A decree of suspension was drafted. Not until the last moment was Yeltsin persuaded that he would do more damage than good by trampling on democratic procedures.⁵ Not that he stopped being devious. He agreed a secret deal with Boris Berezovski and a handful of other exceptionally wealthy businessmen who were commonly known as ‘the oligarchs’ whereby they would receive a lucrative stake in state-owned mining enterprises in return for bailing out the state budget and financing Yeltsin’s electoral campaign.⁶ He also came to an agreement with rival presidential candidate Alexander Lebed. With his booming voice and confident comportment, Lebed had a substantial following in the country. As reward for urging his supporters to vote in the second round for Yeltsin, Lebed was to become Secretary of the Security Council and principal negotiator for the Russian side in the conflict with Chechnya.

Zyuganov had started the electoral campaign with advantages. Even though he fought it with obsolete techniques, he was confronting an incumbent whose health problems were acute. Nevertheless the second round of the voting in July 1996, after the other candidates had been knocked out, gave a thumping victory to Yeltsin. Money, patronage and a brilliant media campaign had done the trick for him.

Despite his good performance in the presidential polls, though, Yeltsin lacked a stable, loyal majority for his policies in the State Duma.⁷ He did not attend its proceedings or negotiate with its leaders, leaving it to his prime ministers to manage some kind of accommodation. Chernomyrdin worked behind the scenes offering attractive deals to groups of deputies. Party politics lost much importance as various leading figures were bought off. Vladimir Zhirinovski and the Liberal-Democratic Party noisily criticized the government but did not always vote against it. Duma debates commanded little public respect or attention. Press and TV were concentrated upon the President and ministers except when something scandalous was happening in the chamber. Zhirinovski increased his notoriety in 1996 by physically assaulting a female Duma deputy; but his party’s fortunes did not benefit in subsequent elections. The situation was staider in the Council of the Federation but hardly more helpful in easing the passage of Chernomyrdin’s legislation unless he gave in to their demands for special concessions to region after region. This was pork-barrel politics par excellence.⁸

Of all the republics in the Russian Federation it was Chechnya which caused the greatest trouble for Moscow. Having declared unilateral independence in 1991, its leader Dzhokar Dudaev had continually cocked a snook at Yeltsin. He had presided over the thorough criminalization of economic activity in Chechnya and given haven to Chechen protection racketeers operating in Russia’s cities. He permitted the application of Sharia law. He declined to pre-empt Islamist terrorist raids from inside Chechnya upon nearby Russian areas. While Dudaev was right that Chechnya had remained with Russia solely because of the superior military power of tsars and commissars, he was not the simon-pure democrat and liberator depicted in his propaganda.⁹

In December 1994 Yeltsin’s Minister of Defence Pavel Grachëv had persuaded him that the Russian Army would quickly crush the Chechen rebellion. The motives for the invasion were murky. Grachëv wished to divert attention from his corrupt management of the armed forces’ finance and equipment. Powerful members of Moscow’s business elite also aimed to secure tighter control over their oil assets in the Chechen capital Grozny. Yet Grachëv had misled everybody about the readiness of his troops to take on the Chechens. After Grozny fell to artillery assault by land and air, Dudaev and his commanders organized resistance in the mountains. Terrorist actions were intensified in Russian cities. Moscow TV stations and newspapers had reporters in Chechnya who told of the Russian army’s incompetence and of the atrocities carried out by its troops. Such was the confidence of the Chechen fighters that even after Dudaev was killed, having been traced through his satellite-connected mobile phone, the armed struggle continued. But the cost in human lives mounted, and a truce was arranged for the duration of the presidential campaign; and Lebed soon succeeded in producing a peace agreement which left both sides with their honour intact. Military hostilities would cease; the Chechens would in practice govern Chechnya without interference and the independence question would simply be deferred.

No one really thought that the threshold had been crossed to a solution. Already the implications were dire for Russia’s self-liberation from the authoritarian past. Leading liberals Grigori Yavlinski and Yegor Gaidar were among the few politicians to censure the invasion. Yeltsin recognized his blunder over Chechnya too late and was a shadow of his former self. Practically the entire political establishment had casually accepted the use of massive and at times indiscriminate violence in pursuit of the state’s ends. There was scant appreciation of the damage done to the prospects for a healthy civil society to emerge.

The usually critical leaders of the Western powers did little more than go through the motions of upbraiding the Russian government. The perception was that Yeltsin, warts and all, was the best President available and that his economic and diplomatic achievements earned him the right to prolonged support. It was noted too that Chernomyrdin, while abandoning the laisser-faire zeal of Gaidar, continued to strengthen the roots of capitalism in Russia. Even Gaidar had avoided genuine ‘shock therapy’ for the ailing economy for fear that a drop in people’s living conditions might provoke civil disturbances. Chernomyrdin maintained the policy of enormous state subsidies for fuel, lighting, telephones and transport, and he ensured that tenants should receive the deeds to their apartments without charge. He also devoted resources to keep the prices of farm produce low. Moreover, fiscal regulations gave incentives to firms to eschew sacking employees; the incidence of unemployment stayed low.¹⁰ At the same time Chernomyrdin and his successors pressed ahead with economic measures which brought little benefit to anyone outside the tiny circles of the wealthy. By 1995 sixty-five per cent of industrial enterprises had been privatized. The market economy had been installed.

Markets in Russia, however, were of a very distorted kind. Competition was cramped by the dominance of a few ‘oligarchs’ over the banks and the media as well as the energy and rare metals sectors. Criminal gangs and corrupt administrative clientèles compounded the difficulty. The rule of law was seldom enforced. The economic environment was so unpredictable and indeed downright dangerous that the most successful entrepreneurs stashed away their profits in Swiss bank accounts. Fraud was rampant. About half the funds loaned to Russia by the IMF were illegally expropriated by powerful individuals and diverted abroad.

Not all the economic data were gloomy. Although gross domestic output continued to diminish after 1993, the rate of diminution was slowing. In comparison with most states of the CIS, indeed, Russia had an economy that seemed very vibrant. Tajikestan and Georgia were in desperate straits and even Ukraine could not afford to pay its debts to Russia for gas and petrol. The Ministry of Economics in Moscow in 1995 predicted that the Russian economy would at last start to expand again in the following year. The prognosis was proved wrong. Among the problems was the justified reluctance of foreign enterprises to set up branches in Russia while contracts were hardly worth the paper they were printed on. The government’s financial management also left much to be desired. In 1997 it issued state bonds to balance the budget. The terms were hopelessly disadvantageous to the government if ever the rouble fell under severe pressure. Global financial markets were febrile at the time and the dreaded run on the rouble duly occurred in August 1998. Russia unilaterally defaulted on its international loan repayments and Sergei Kirienko, despite not having been Prime Minister when the state bonds had been issued, stepped down.¹¹

Yeltsin’s reputation was in tatters, but the Russian financial collapse quickly turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The devaluation of the rouble increased the costs of imported goods and inadvertently provided a stimulus to domestic manufacturing and agriculture. Shops and kiosks bought up and sold Russia’s own products. By 1999 the beginnings of economic recovery were unmistakable and gross domestic output was rising; and these small steps forward were rightly treated as success.

Nevertheless the economic crisis was not simply an accidental result of the vagaries of financial markets at home and abroad; for the government’s incompetent policies had made a bad situation a lot worse. Such strength as the Russian Federation retained in the world economy anyway rested on the export of its natural resources. Oil and gas were in the lead. Not far behind came gold, diamonds and nickel. Wood pulp too was sold abroad — the result was a shortage in the supply of paper for Russian newspapers! The only finished industrial goods to be sold in any amount across Russian borders were armaments, and even in this sector there was the difficulty that the government was constrained by the Western powers to stop selling weaponry to traditional customers such as Iraq and Iran. Such an economic strategy had been followed by governments from Gaidar’s onwards. Indeed the structure of Soviet foreign trade had similarly been built on the export of natural resources. What was new after the collapse of the USSR, as Zyuganov pointed out, was the process of de-industrialization. Russian factories no longer produced as much output as in 1990 (which was a poor year for the Soviet economy). The Communist Party of the Russian Federation urged the need for tariff walls for the restoration of industrial production.

Communists were brisker in supplying criticism than practical policies. Indeed they appeared reconciled to permanent opposition, and their willingness to abandon tenets of Marxism-Leninism was remarkable. Zyuganov declared himself a Christian believer; his prolific pamphleteering was inspired more by anti-communists like Nikolai Berdyaev, Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler than by Lenin.¹² One prominent communist even owned a casino.

Such a party had become ever more incapable of reversing the changes made since 1991. Its most telling criticisms in the State Duma were aimed at the government’s foreign policy. Yeltsin had planned with Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev to sustain Russia as a power in alliance with the most influential Western countries: both believed in the need for a warm partnership with the USA and Yeltsin spoke confidently about his ‘friend Bill’ when reporting on his summit meetings with President Clinton. Yet the partnership was never remotely near to being an equal one. Russian economic distress disabled the government from competing with American technological advance, military power and global diplomacy. The only residue of old glory lay in Russia’s possession of ageing nuclear weapons: this was the sole reason why Clinton bothered to hold summit meetings. The Russian financial system’s dependence on the USA’s sanction for the IMF to go on lending to Russia meant that Yeltsin could never easily refuse an American diplomatic demand. Kozyrev’s ‘Atlanticist’ orientation was put under assault in the Duma and the press.

Yeltsin responded in characteristic fashion by publicly rebuking Kozyrev as if he himself had not had a hand in setting the orientation. He spoke about the need to protect the singular interests of the Russian state, and both he and Kozyrev warned that the government could not stay indifferent when other states of the former USSR discriminated against their ethnic Russians. The stringent linguistic and cultural qualifications for Estonian citizenship became a bone of contention. Within the CIS, moreover, Russia increasingly used its supply of oil and gas to neighbouring countries as an instrument to keep them within the Russian zone of political influence.

Hardening the line of foreign policy, Yeltsin sacked Kozyrev in December 1995. Yet he could do little about the series of encroachments by Western powers. Finland had joined the European Union earlier in the year and schemes were made for the eventual accession of many countries in Eastern Europe in the twentieth-first century. This was embarrassing enough. Worse for the Russian government was the NATO’s refusal to disband itself after the Cold War’s end and the Warsaw Pact’s dissolution. Quite the contrary: NATO set about territorial expansion. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary became members in 1999. NATO forces were sent into action in Bosnia in 1993–1995 and Kosovo in 1999 as inter-ethnic violence intensified. In both cases the Russian government protested that insufficient effort had been invested in diplomacy. Yeltsin sent Chernomyrdin as his personal envoy to Belgrade to plead with Serbia’s President Slobodan Milosević to come to terms with the Americans and avoid the bombing of his capital. But to no avail. Having lost its position as a global power, Russia was ceasing to carry much weight even in Eastern Europe.

The Russian Foreign Ministry and various Moscow think-tanks recognized that policy should be formulated on the basis of a realistic appreciation of Russia’s reduced capabilities. They recommended that Russia should seek other partners in world diplomacy without alienating the USA. The benefits of ‘multipolarity’ in global politics and economics were touted. The European Union, China and India were courted by Russian diplomats with a revitalized enthusiasm.

Nothing about this steady endeavour was going to capture the imagination of a public unaccustomed to seeing its government treated casually by the USA. It was Yeltsin’s good fortune that few public bodies took him to task. The Russian Orthodox Church supported his invasion of Chechnya and his diplomatic stand on the Kosovo question. Its hierarchy had little interest in the routine of politics. At times of national emergency, especially in late 1993, Patriarch Alexi II offered himself as an intermediary between Yeltsin and his enemies; but generally the Church, needing the government’s assistance in defending itself against the resurgence of other Christian denominations, was quiescent. So too was the Russian Army. Yeltsin never had to face the overt criticism by serving officers that Gorbachëv endured. Military critics no longer held seats in representative public institutions. The platform of criticism had been sawn from under them. The armed forces performed poorly in Chechnya. Although their finances had been savagely reduced, there was no excuse for their incompetence and brutality in the taking of Grozny. Even the media were easy on Yeltsin’s regime. They exposed corruption in his family; the NTV puppet show Kukly (‘Dolls’) satirized him as a bumbling idiot. But his policies rarely suffered assaults of a fundamental nature.

The reason was that Church, high command and media had more to lose than gain by the regime’s removal. A communist restoration would have disturbed their comforts at the very least. Yeltsin had prevented any such disturbance. He had also not needed to resort to violence again in Moscow. The order of Russian state and society was beginning to settle into a durable mould.

At the central level of politics it had proved not unduly difficult for former members of the Soviet nomenklatura to establish themselves in the new Russian elite. Typically, they were persons who had been in the early stage of a career when the USSR fell. In business circles too there were many entrepreneurs with a solid background in the communist party or the Komsomol before 1991. Newcomers were not excluded. Most of the ‘oligarchs’, for example, had worked in posts outside any nomenklatura.¹³ This mixture of old and new in the post-communist establishment was also observable in the localities. Mintimer Shaimiev had moved smoothly from being communist party first secretary of the Tatar Provincial Party Committee to installing himself as President of Tatarstan.¹⁴ So blatant a transition was in fact unusual in the Russian Federation. (It was much more common in ex-Soviet Central Asia.) But whoever emerged to lead a republic or a province was likely to bring along an entourage with administrative experience from the Soviet period. Patronage remained an important feature of local public life, and traditions of ‘tails’ and ‘nests’ were little affected by recurrent elections. The ruling group in nearly every locality used whatever trickery — or even illegality — was needed to hold on to power.¹⁵

The prime beneficiaries of the ‘new Russia’ were politicians, businessmen and gangsters. In some cases the individual might be all three things at once. Wealth was celebrated in public life. Successful sportsmen such as Yevgeni Kafelnikov or entertainers like Alla Pugachëva led an extremely luxurious life. Sumptuous dachas were built. Apartment blocks were bought up and renovated to the highest standards of opulence. Children were sent to English private schools. Domestic servants, chauffeurs and personal hairdressers were employed. Foreign limousines, clothing and holidays were treated as nothing out of the ordinary by families who had suddenly got rich as capitalism flooded all over Russia. The ultra-rich were seldom eager to keep their wealth a secret and were determined to keep their gains exclusively for themselves. They bought yachts and villas on the Mediterranean — the Black Sea had become too vulgar for them. Forsaking the Russian countryside, they purchased mansions in Hampstead and estates in the English home counties. They dressed in Versace or Prada outfits. Their limousines were Mercedes. Not since 1914 had the excesses of Russian material abundance been shown off so excessively.

Magazines sprang up to cater for such tastes. Most people who bought them were not wealthy; but they had to have an above-average income to afford a copy and ogle at how the ‘new Russians’ expected to live. As fortunes were made the competition grew to show them off. Birthday parties were celebrated by paying American or British rock stars to give private performances. Sons and daughters of the oligarchs were treated as celebrities.

At the same time there remained a possibility that wealth won so quickly and often so illicitly might one day soon be confiscated or stolen. Big businessmen protected themselves with personal bodyguards and financial sweeteners to influential politicians and police. They surrounded their dachas with hi-tech surveillance equipment. The poodle was for indoor companionship; in the grounds, the Rottweilers were the patrol dogs of choice. The danger usually came from fellow businessmen. Courts were only for the ‘little people’. Defence of funds and property effectively depended on firepower if bribery of officials failed, and company owners remained vulnerable unless they could assemble adequate means of defence. At restaurants and night-clubs no one was surprised to see guards with Kalashnikovs in the foyers. The atmosphere at the stratospheric level of Russian business was frantic. This in turn induced its practitioners to enjoy their earnings to the full in case they suffered a financial or personal disaster. Most oligarchs felt notoriously little inclination to share their wealth with charities. With a few exceptions their civic commitment was negligible.

A disproportionate number of them were non-Russians, especially Jews, which provided parties on the political far right with the pretext to make anti-Semitic propaganda. Russians ignored the fascists even while detesting the oligarchs. More congenial to Russian popular opinion were measures directed against people from the north and south Caucasus. Yeltsin, in a breach of multinational tolerance, backed Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s attempts to eject Azeris, Armenians and others from the capital. Demagogic tactics of this kind reflected an awareness of the widening resentment of the new street vendors and entrepreneurs — and people from the south of the former Soviet Union were prominent among the capital’s stallholders.

A long ladder separated the families at its top from the vast impoverished majority of citizens at its base. Russia — like other societies — had its wealthy, middling and poor strata. But the poor were a disturbingly large section of society. By the end of the twentieth century about two-fifths of the population lived below the poverty level as defined by the UN.¹⁶ The data were geographically diverse. Moscow and, to a lesser extent, St Petersburg had an economic buoyancy denied to the rest of the country. Inhabitants of big cities, moreover, did better materially than the rest of society. The Russian north and most parts of Siberia suffered especially badly as the state subsidies for salaries and accommodation in places of harsh climatic conditions were phased out. The standard of living also plummeted even in central cities whose economy depended on an industrial specialization which was beaten down by superior foreign imports. Machine tool production slumped in the Urals and the mid-Volga region with appalling consequences for the employees and their families. Large industrial firms in the USSR had provided cafeterias, kindergartens and sports facilities, and trade unions had organized holidays for their members. A whole way of making existence bearable was put in jeopardy.

Most people took shelter in the systems of mutual support that had helped them survive in the Soviet decades. Families and friends stuck together as they had always done. Cliental groups remained intact. The alternative was for individuals to take their chances on their own; but there was much risk so long as economic opportunities were outrageously unequal in society and political and judicial bias was flagrantly in favour of the rich and mighty. Limitations on freedom remained in Russian reality.

No greater limitation existed on life in general than conditions of employment. Wages fell far below the rocketing rate of inflation. Few Russian citizens could buy the imports of Western industrial products or even the bananas or oranges that had suddenly appeared in the kiosks. Workers in the factories and mines were lucky if they were paid at the end of the month. Teachers, doctors and often even civil servants suffered the same. Pensioners were treated abysmally. Privatization of state enterprises was accomplished by the issuance of vouchers for shares to all adults; but the vouchers lost value in the inflationary times. Directors tended to do much better than the other employees because of their inside knowledge. Some of the sting was removed from popular resentment by laws granting apartments to residents as private property; but building blocks fell into disrepair for want of continued finance by local authorities. Life remained hard for most people for bigger part of the decade and they coped by the well-worn methods of eking out a diet of bread and sausages, bartering their possessions and hoping that conditions would eventually improve. De-communization exhausted society.

Bit by bit, though, the situation eased somewhat. Staple foods in the shops increased in attractiveness and variety. Beer and vodka remained cheap; and breweries, distilleries and bakeries were among the most dynamic sectors of the consumer-oriented economic sectors. Basic clothes became more attuned to the aspirations of fashion.

Resistance to the general trends was therefore very weak. The labour movement, which had begun to arrest itself under Gorbachëv, fizzled out after 1991. The Federation of Independent Trade Unions called for a general strike in October 1998 with uninspiring results.¹⁷ Across the economy the advantage remained on the side of the employers. Not every segment of Russian business went along with the policy of privatization. Notable opponents were the collective farm directors, who obstructed the government’s desire to break up the kolkhozes into small, privately owned farms. By the mid-1990s the number of such farms had stabilized at only a quarter of million.¹⁸ Most kolkhozes simply redesigned themselves as agricultural cooperatives with the same director in charge and the same workforce under him. The point was that very few rural inhabitants welcomed the chance to go it alone: credit facilities were poor and the supply of the necessary equipment and fuel was unreliable. Yet if the countryside with its demoralized and ageing population was predictably conservative in outlook, the towns too disappointed those radical reformers who had believed that the abolition of the Soviet political structures would induce mass support for rapid change.

Russians made the best of a bad situation, as they always had done. Their energies were given mainly to their domestic conditions. They practised their DIY skills. They gardened (and produced food for their own tables). They took up hobbies, bought pets and watched TV. Western popular culture — rock music, sport and pornography — flooded into the country.

This caused affront to the established cultural elite, but younger writers relished the change and wrote incisive commentaries on the blending of the old and the new in Russian society. The satirical novels of Victor Pelevin caused a stir; and the poignant ballads of Boris Grebenshchikov and his rock group Akvarium searched for meaning in Russian history from its origins to the present day.¹⁹ Two of Grebenshchikov’s stanzas ran as follows:²⁰

The words reprise Soviet motifs of redness and the sickle. The old tsarist measure of length — the verst — is introduced. A still more ancient figure like the mythic Sirin (who was half-woman, half-bird) appears. The style brings together Soviet balladeering and the songs of Bob Dylan. The concern with Russian national themes was also favoured by novelists; and the film director Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark depicted current reality through the metaphor of a vessel trying to preserve the best of national culture and history from a life-threatening flood.²¹

Russians for two centuries had been accustomed to accepting moral guidance from their artists. Few young artists or poets felt comfortable about such a public role. The removal of the Soviet political and ideological lid decompressed the cultural order in Russia. Ideas of extreme diversity and experimentalism became the norm. Post-modernism flourished.

The intelligentsia in any case was losing its leverage on public opinion. Even Alexander Solzhenitsyn ceased to be taken seriously. Returning from America in 1994, he was given a weekly show on TV; but his humourless sermons on the need to restore Orthodox Christian values were unpopular and he was taken off air. Writers in general found it hard to touch the hearts of their public. Meanwhile the national press was beset by problems with paper supply and with distribution facilities. Billionaires who bought newspapers seldom wanted columnists who subjected the new capitalism to a thorough critique. Intellectuals themselves were baffled by the nature of the changes since 1991. Many sought to make what they could out of the marketplace; they were ceasing to act as the conscience of the nation. The Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed expanded congregations in comparison with earlier years when persecution had been intense. But secularism proved to be a tenacious phenomenon and the clergy’s refusal to renew liturgy or doctrines restricted the possibility of appealing to people who had no prior knowledge of Christianity. Scientists and other scholars too lost prominence in public life as the struggle to earn their daily bread acquired precedence over involvement in politics. The Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow retained its old prestige but without the former impact.

The government sought to fill the media with its vision of Russia. The attack on communism continued but patriotism was more increasingly emphasized. Electoral disappointments indicated that a gap had widened between official policies and popular expectations. Chernomyrdin was no man of ideas and had no inkling about how to regain the trust of Russians. His remedy in July 1996 was to announce a competition, with a $1,000 prize (which was more than two years’ wages for an office worker at the time), to answer the question: ‘What is Russia?’ The search was on for a fresh definition of ‘the Russian idea’. Hundreds of diverse entries appeared in the governmental newspaper. If Chernomyrdin was baffled before posing the question, he was just as confused when he read the attempted answers. The winner, philologist Guri Sudakov, offered bland words about Motherland and spirituality.²² Meanwhile Russians elsewhere went on disputing the whole topic with their usual gusto and there was never any prospect of a broad consensus.

The pluralism in culture high and low testified to the vivacity of Russian society below the carapace fixed upon it by the political and economic authorities. This vivacity had existed before Gorbachëv’s perestroika but it was only after 1985 that it came fully into the open. The pity was that the ruling group under Yeltsin made little attempt to enlist such energy and enthusiasm in the cause of fundamental reform. Probably the chances of success were very small. The invitation to participate in the country’s reformation had been extended by Gorbachëv and had evoked an inadequate response. But at least Gorbachëv had gone on trying. What obstructed him were the effects of decades, indeed centuries of political oppression which had made most people reluctant to engage at all in affairs of state. Increasingly Yeltsin, ill and distracted, had not bothered to try — and it may reasonably be asked whether his commitment to fundamental reform had ever been deeply felt. Certainly there were several influential members of his entourage who had always disliked aspects of the reform project.

The movement towards a more authoritarian political style accelerated in August 1999 when Yeltsin replaced Sergei Stepashin with Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister. At first the change in personnel did not seem to matter. Both Stepashin and Putin had backgrounds in the security agencies. Furthermore, Putin was obliged to behave as obsequiously to the President in public as every Prime Minister since Chernomyrdin. Continuity in policy and practice appeared the likely outcome.

Putin came to office with an agenda for the north Caucasus. Already Stepashin had secretly been planning a second invasion of Chechnya. In September there were bomb explosions in Moscow apartment blocks which were blamed on Chechen terrorists. The circumstantial evidence pointed away from Chechens and towards a provocation by the Federal Security Service, and the explanations offered by Bureau director Nikolai Patrushev were derisorily implausible. Nevertheless they were believed at the time by most Russians. The authorities had the pretext it needed, and Putin, in consultation with Yeltsin, ordered the Russian Army into Chechnya. Lessons had been learned from the 1994–1996 campaign. This time the government closely controlled news reporting. Firepower was maximized and, as Russian armed forces approached Grozny, warnings were given for civilians to evacuate the city. Piloting his own plane, Putin went down to visit troops near the front line. His popularity soared as total military victory appeared in sight. Yeltsin was already treating him as his heir. And then, on 31 December 1999, the entire county was taken by surprise when the President in a dignified address announced his retirement.²³ Putin was to become Acting President with immediate effect. The Yeltsin cavalcade was over.

28 And Russia? (From 2000)

Vladimir Putin achieved an impressive victory in the presidential election of March 2000. He had left nothing to chance against challengers who matched his zeal to promote Russian state interests and national pride. Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, let it be known he was ready to stand on behalf of the Fatherland party. Immediately the government-controlled TV stations released charges about his political and personal integrity. Then Yevgeni Primakov offered a further threat after bringing together the Fatherland and All Russia parties and announcing his candidacy for the presidency. Yet again Russian television stations conducted an operation against the challenger, and Primakov too decided to withdraw his candidacy. This left Zyuganov and Zhirinovski to put forward their standard hopeless case. Opinion polls universally predicted an electoral landslide and Putin made a virtue of refusing to campaign. His nonchalance was counterfeit currency at a time when his subordinates were working hard at conveying his image of cherubic militancy in the news bulletins and suppressing any untoward reports from the Chechnya front. A flattering biography was prepared and rushed into print. Youthfulness, sobriety, competence, persistence, patriotism: these were the qualities which commended themselves to voters. No second round of voting was required. Putin had already won the election in the first round, receiving fifty-three per cent of all votes cast.

Yeltsin and Patriarch Aleksi II gave their blessing at the Kremlin inauguration ceremony. Down the aisle of the St Andrew’s Hall walked Putin like a hunter eyeing the trees on either side of him for quarry. His address to the audience, televised live, indicated a determination to set a new tone in public life. He spoke about democracy and the rule of law. But much more insistent was his emphasis on state power and institutional order. Compliance with higher authority was going to be demanded. Russia’s place in the world would be asserted. Putin was combative in appearance and mode of delivery. He had not needed to go cap in hand to wealthy businessmen to get himself elected. Diminutive in stature, he towered over the proceedings and restored dignity to his office.

Putin was proud of being the product of a Soviet upbringing. He described the dismantling of the USSR as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’; he hated the blizzard-like deprecation of the USSR’s achievements. Born in Leningrad in 1952, he had a father who had fought in the Second World War and a grandfather who had cooked for Lenin. As an adolescent he became a judo champion in his native city. He also applied for recruitment to the KGB, but was told that the KGB expected to approach individuals, not to be approached by them. But his enthusiasm was noted and while he was studying at Leningrad State University he was promised a posting. His main early job was as an intelligence officer in the German Democratic Republic. Operating there during the years of Gorbachëv’s rule, he was filled with dismay. For Putin, perestroika’s principal effect was to dissolve a great state, economy and society. But he was also pragmatic and on returning to Leningrad joined the administrative team of mayor Anatoli Sobchak who was seeking to make political and economic reforms work well for the city. Putin was skilled at adapting to circumstances. His organizational talent attracted attention and in 1996 he was promoted to the Presidential Administration in the capital. Soon he was appointed head of the Federal Security Service, and in August 1999 this man whose name was barely known to most Russian citizens became their Prime Minister.¹

The ‘oligarch’ Berezovski had boasted to the press that it was he who had put Putin in power. He thought that his commercial interests would be protected in return. He could not have been more wrong. Soon after assuming the presidency Putin called the business elite into the Kremlin and issued a direct warning. Unlike Yeltsin, he would not tolerate their interference in politics. Most of the audience took him seriously but a few individuals chanced their luck. When Berezovski continued to brag and bluster it was made plain to him that his days of pomp were over. Police investigations were started into his alleged frauds. He fled to the United Kingdom in 2001 where he received political asylum and, wrapping himself in a coat of democratic principles and clean capitalism, publicized his accusations against Putin. Next to feel Putin’s wrath was Vladimir Gusinski. He too had multiple interests in the economy. And he had political ambitions: his NTV television channel regularly poked fun at Putin through the Kukly satirical puppet show.² But his business career had had its murky side and a police investigation was started. Gusinski was briefly arrested. He too fled the country in summer 2001, finding refuge in Israel and Spain.

Putin urged that the achievements of Russia after the October 1917 Revolution should be given their due; and he re-introduced the melody — if not the words — of the USSR state hymn.³ Most Russians welcomed the restoration of a stirring piece of music they associated with victory in the Second World War. They wanted to be proud again about being Russian; and surveys revealed that the proportion of citizens feeling associated more with the USSR than with Russia was going down only slowly.⁴ The popular response was favourable. His opinion-poll rating fell drastically only once. This was when he reacted stiffly to an explosion in the nuclear submarine Kursk in August 2000. All on board perished. Putin was widely criticized for declining to interrupt his holiday and display personal sympathy. He learned from this setback and tried to avoid falling out of step with national sensibilities. He was tested again in September 2004 when Chechen terrorists occupied a school in Beslan, a town in North Osetiya, and took captive a thousand tiny pupils, their minders and their teachers.⁵ Putin was televised supervising the handling of the siege until Russian security forces re-took the buildings. Although the operation was accompanied by many deaths it was not the Russian president who incurred the blame.

He consolidated his position by filling the offices of state with individuals who had ties to the Federal Security Service or other coercive agencies. They ruthlessly enforced governmental decrees. State power was their shibboleth. It is true that newspapers, books and posters continued to criticize or ridicule him. Yet television was the medium with the deepest popular impact, and the humbling of Berezovski and Gusinski had the effect desired by the Kremlin as TV programme editors exercised caution in what they transmitted about the central authorities.

The president was not an enemy of the big business corporations, only of businessmen who got politically too big for their boots. All the remaining ‘oligarchs’ understood this except the hot-blooded Mikhail Khodorkovski who continued to finance political parties and liberal causes hostile to Putin. As one of the wealthiest men on the planet and owner of the oil company Yukos, Khodorkovski had got used to doing things his own way. He declared his wish to encourage a more pluralist form of politics and a less corrupt environment for commerce in Russia. His newspapers regularly criticized the presidential administration and the government; he also subsidized opposition parties in the Duma. When he refused to desist he was put under investigation for fraud. Prosecutors brought him to court and charged him with tax evasion. A huge bill was delivered to the company. Facing bankruptcy, Khodorkovski was obliged to sell off his Yukos assets at a knockdown price to Rosneft, and in May 2005 he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in Chita province in eastern Siberia. Rosneft was a private company under tight governmental supervision. Its acquisition of Yukos was the decisive signal that Russia’s political economy had changed since Yeltsin’s presidency.

The implications for foreign businesses in the country were discouraging. The government’s declared priority in the early 2000s had been to attract the maximum of Western capital into the Russian economy. The world’s biggest energy companies queued up to buy up rights of extraction in areas of Russia where great profits seemed guaranteed in the near future. Royal Dutch Shell and BP signed early deals. Their investors rubbed their hands with satisfaction as Russia appeared committed to having an internationally open economy. Both companies soon suffered disappointment when official investigators were sent into their Sakhalin facilities. Infringements of environmental legislation were quickly diagnosed. One by one, American and European energy corporations were compelled to renegotiate their contracts and accept poorer deals or face the loss of all their holdings in the Russian Federation. They all gave way, and Gazprom, Rosneft and other native conglomerates exploited a commercial advantage. Personnel moved flexibly between them and the various ministries in Moscow. Russia was becoming a bastion of state capitalism. The State Duma in March 2008 rationalized the process by passing a bill to restrict foreign investment in forty-two ‘strategic’ sectors of the economy (which included petrochemicals, nuclear power, armaments, fisheries, airspace and the media). Russia was no longer up for sale to the highest external bidder.

There was no thought of dismantling capitalism. Cabinets during Putin’s presidency always included not only former intelligence officers but also liberal economic reformers. Among such liberals was Mikhail Kasyanov, who was Putin’s prime minister from May 2000 to February 2004. Kasyanov tried to impose a framework of commercial law — and indeed there was a degree of enhanced protection for small businesses to register and operate even though the local elites remained as corrupt as ever. Improvement was also detectable in the workings of the courts, but only in cases lacking a political dimension.⁶ Yet Putin and Kasyanov did not get everything their own way. They worked long and hard for a new Land Code and yet the Duma frustrated them by rejecting the proposal for the privatization of territory outside the urban outskirts. President and Prime Minister were annoyed that farms in the countryside remained outside the jurisdiction of the reform. The Federal Assembly was equally averse to the call for Gazprom to be broken up so that the pieces would compete with each other. Nor did it sanction the demand for electricity and other utilities to be sold at higher prices to Russian domestic consumers.⁷

Putin also ran into difficulties when he attempted to put pressure on the leaders of the various republics and provinces of the Russian Federation. Soon after being elected, he withdrew their right to sit automatically in the Council of the Federation where they could affect the passage of legislation; he awarded himself the power to sack any one of them. He also divided the whole country into seven super-regions and appointed his own plenipotentiary to each super-region with the mission to ensure compliance with central laws and Presidential decrees. Putin’s initiatives were greeted with barely a murmur of objection from local leaders.⁸ Yet little changed in reality. The sheer complexity of political and economic processes in every republic and province defeated the attempt at abrupt disciplinary action; Putin was more successful in intimidating the media than in securing obedience from the lower levels of the state hierarchy. But one thing he did achieve was a halting of criticism of the government. Mintimer Shaimiev of Tatarstan, who had been a thorn in Yeltsin’s flesh, became a garland around Putin’s shoulders. In 2004 Putin forced through a measure allowing the presidency not only to remove regional governors but also to appoint new ones without reference to the local electorate.

Formal central prerogatives were one thing, provincial reality was often entirely another. The new governors, being obliged to ensure stability of administration, needed the co-operation of local politicians and businessmen. A strategy of give-and-take worked better in practice than peremptory orders.⁹ The old Russian obstacles to achieving an effective political hierarchy persisted, and the Kremlin found itself increasing its fiscal subsidies to the regions.

Putin had formed a party, Unity, in September 1999 to enforce the government’s authority. Unity’s main function was not to discuss his policies but to agree to them in the Duma. But the party failed to achieve a majority in the Duma election of December 1999. The President in May 2001 engineered a coalition with three other parties called United Russia. Like Yeltsin, Putin refrained from becoming a party member and justified this by saying that the President ought to stand outside the fray of public dispute. In December 2003 the Duma elections left United Russia a little short of an absolute majority. But other Duma deputies quickly came over to Putin’s side and the Kremlin at last broke free of the restrictions in the parliament which had plagued Yeltsin. Presidential authority was strengthened as party discipline increased.¹⁰ Indeed Putin needed to veto only one bill produced by the legislature from 2002 onwards. He removed the Communist Party of Russia from the chairmanship of several Duma committees. After 2003, indeed, United Russia supplied the leaders of all such committees. The State Duma and the Council of the Federation had become pliant instruments of presidential rule.

Putin’s election for a second presidential term in March 2004 hardly required him to conduct a campaign. This had not stopped him from organizing fawning support from the media. Zyuganov, veteran of presidential contests in 1996 and 2000, said he had had enough and allowed Nikolai Kharitonov, who was not even a communist party member, to take his place. Zhirinovski took a similar decision: not even the chance of months in the political limelight induced him to take part. The liberals were in disarray. Irina Khakamada put herself forward on their behalf but did not succeed in uniting them. Russian TV took little notice of anyone but Putin, who asked to be judged on his record and appealed for patriotic unity. The election was a foregone conclusion: he would have needed to fall under the wheels of a Moscow trolley bus to lose against his rivals. This time Putin took seventy-one per cent of the votes in the first round, again rendering a second unnecessary.

He had been given credit for bringing order and stability to the country. In truth the economic resurgence had little to do with his performance as a leader. Since mid-1999, before he was even prime minister, there had been a steady rise in oil and gas prices on global markets. By the end of 2007 the Russian economy was the world’s tenth biggest in gross domestic product, having expanded at an annual rate of seven per cent since Putin’s rise to the presidency.¹¹ This had the effect of widening prosperity in Russia. Real incomes more than doubled in the same period. The size of the middle class purportedly grew to a fifth of the population by 2008. Other estimates put it at a tenth. What was undeniable was that people with a stake in the market economy had grown in number. From stall-holders to owners of small manufacturing or retail companies the proliferation was rapid and constant. Employment in all sectors of the economy had increased. Neglected regions were at last beginning to experience some improvement.

Yet capitalism in Russian remained a wild phenomenon. In industries big and small the executive and judicial authorities turned a blind eye to the infringement of health and safety rules. Mining and chemical enterprises were the tip of a dangerous iceberg for the workforce. But strikes were few and demonstrations were fewer. Political repression and manipulation played a part in procuring this situation, but anyhow the wish of most Russians was to live comfortably. There had been many improvements since the mid-1980s. Citizens of the Russian Federation had freedoms not witnessed since the fall of the Imperial monarchy. They also had a degree of privacy impossible in the USSR. They could enjoy their sense of nationhood without fear of official disapproval. Yet it rankled with them that blatant social inequalities remained. The conspicuous wealth of the few contrasted with the harsh austerities afflicting the many. Unfairness abounded. Administrative processes were still prone to arbitrary rule. Police and judges were venal. Russians went on grumbling and had much to grumble about. In order to cope with existence they turned to the traditions of mutual assistance which had for centuries helped them through the worst times. But they did not take to the streets. The last thing twenty-first-century Russians wanted was a revolution.

In the early years of his presidency Putin had confined his assertiveness to domestic politics. Recognizing that Russian power would remain restricted until the economy could be regenerated, he stressed his commitment to a ‘multipolar’ world. This was a tactful way of expressing dislike of the USA’s dominance as the single superpower. In practice, there was not much he could do to turn Russia into one of the globe’s great poles. Like Yeltsin, Putin tried to make up for this by holding frequent meetings with his leaders of other countries. Each get-together was managed superbly by his media experts and Putin, fit and increasingly confident, contrasted sharply with his decrepit predecessor. But substantial results were few.

Putin rushed to offer condolence and support to the USA after 11 September 2001 when Islamist terrorists flew aeroplanes into New York’s World Trade Centre. The destruction of the twin towers and the massive loss of human lives provoked the Americans into a furious reaction involving a military campaign in Afghanistan to eliminate the Al-Qaida organization. American President George W. Bush proclaimed a ‘war on terror’. Waiving Russia’s conventional claim to exclusive influence in the former Soviet republics of central Asia, Putin made no protest about the Americans using air bases in Kyrgyzstan to attack Al-Qaida in Afghanistan. He also made little fuss when, in December 2001, Bush unilaterally announced his intention to withdraw from the anti-ballistic missiles treaty signed by Washington and Moscow in 1972. Russian diplomatic stock was rising in Washington, and Putin for a while was treated as a worthy partner in international relations. Bush had claimed in midsummer 2001: ‘I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul.’ Putin acquired Western indulgence for the continuing military campaign in Chechnya. The fact that international Islamist groups had sent men, arms and money to the Chechen rebels allowed him to represent Russia as having been fighting at the front line against terrorism worldwide.

Washington ceased rewarding Putin for his assistance once the war in Afghanistan had ended in spring 2002. Although he was left alone to do what he wanted in Chechnya he was not encouraged to reassert Russian power outside the borders of the Federation. He continued to devote diplomatic efforts to the forging of closer links with the European Union and indeed with NATO. But the reality of Russia’s global weakness was there for all to see.

This situation turned in his favour as the revenues from oil and gas exports started to fill Russian state coffers; and Putin, thinking he had nothing to lose, adopted an assertive manner in reaction to American initiatives in international relations. The USA led an invasion of Iraq, a strong trading partner of the Russian Federation, between March and May 2003 in complete disregard of the Kremlin’s objections and concerns. The Americans also announced a willingness to prepare the way for Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO. They interfered in the politics of Uzbekistan. They cheered the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Kiev when, in December 2004, the anti-Moscow candidate Viktor Yushchenko won the presidential election despite serial attempts to defraud him of his victory. In 2006 they requested Poland and the Czech Republic, freshly incorporated in NATO, to allow them to install an anti-ballistic missile ‘shield’ on their territory. President George W. Bush insisted that the enemy he had in mind was Iran; but Russian politicians regarded it as one militant initiative too many against the interests of Russia’s security. In each instance Putin made public his criticisms, abandoning any worry of a worsening of the relationship with the USA — and his truculence found favour with Russians, who applauded him for restoring their country to a seat at the table of the world’s great powers.

Western politicians continually called on the Kremlin to show greater co-operativeness. They pleaded for NATO’s good intentions to be accepted. Putin barked it out at a dinner for Prime Minister Blair: ‘This is ridiculous. I am a Russian. I cannot agree with the Americans on everything. My public won’t let me for a start. I would not survive for two years if I did that. We often have different interests.’¹² As proof of his determination, in July 2007, Putin suspended Russia’s adherence to the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty signed by the Soviet leadership in 1990. His attitude went down well with Russians regardless of political orientation. Disputes among parties were shunted to marginal matters of foreign policy as opinion rallied to Putin.

The broad ruling group, however, never felt completely secure in power, and it was ruthless in enforcing its grip on public debate. Investigative journalists who highlighted official corruption or challenged the government’s account of the war in Chechnya exposed themselves to personal danger. In October 2006 Anna Politkovskaya was murdered outside her Moscow apartment. She was the most prominent of the critical reporters targeted in this manner, but there were several others. Her newspaper, Novaya gazeta, was subjected to repeated acts of persecution. Vladimir Slivyak exposed the widespread negligence in the civil nuclear industry in the Russian far north; he was treated as a traitor and subjected to continual harassment. In the United Kingdom, where Boris Berezovski stepped up his barrage of accusations against the Russian authorities, Alexander Litvinenko — one of his associates — was poisoned with a lethal dose of polonium-210. Outspoken rival politicians were intimidated. A gang of unidentified thugs had crushed the fingers of Yabloko leader Grigori Yavlinski’s pianist son in Yeltsin’s time. The dangers of opposition persisted under Putin. Garry Kasparov was temporarily thrown into gaol merely for campaigning for justice and civil rights. The FSB was given licence to act outside the law in defence of the whole state order. Putin himself professed ignorance of the specific cases. What is more, he showed little sympathy for the victims and did next to nothing to rectify the general situation. Russia sank deeper and deeper into a pit of authoritarian rule backed by criminality.

Putin in his second term moved ever further down the road towards a centralization of power. From December 2004 the leaders of the Russian Federation’s republics, instead of being elected, were to be selected by the president and their names were to be submitted to the legislative bodies of their localities for approval or rejection. Several of the smaller of the non-Russian republics in the Federation, moreover, were abolished. The authority of ‘the centre’ was ceaselessly confirmed.

In April 2005 Putin also took a grip of the country’s thousands of civil associations from charities to recreational groups, making it compulsory for them to acquire official registration and subjecting them to central supervision through a Public Chamber he himself appointed. Foreign agencies were treated with some suspicion and difficulties were placed in the way of the British Council, the BBC Russian Service and other bodies. Religious denominations too were put under pressure. Although the Russian Orthodox Church was granted privileges, in return it was required to show eager loyalty to the secular authorities. Putin, himself a professed Christian, interfered in personnel appointments in other faiths. Berel Lazar, a Hasid, was his first choice as Chief Rabbi in 2000. Universities were vigorously patrolled. Textbooks were vetted; approved authors had to moderate any criticism of Stalin. A youth movement, Nashi (‘Our Ones’), was founded to divert adolescents towards patriotic ideals. Its organizations were employed to harass the British ambassador after a worsening of Russo–UK relations in 2006. Lip-service was paid to enhancing social freedom. The reality was that the Kremlin distrusted collective endeavours by citizens unless there could be confidence that respect for the government, its leaders and its policies would be maintained.

Putin and his fellow rulers over several years combined electoral abuse, legislative licence, violent repression and media control to sustain an authoritarian regime. His projects on terrorism, on political extremism and public demonstrations were smoothly passed by the Federal Assembly. The loose wording of the laws was designed to make it easier for government and security agencies to curtail open dissent. Putin also succeeded, after years of trying, to scrap the remnants of the communist system of social security and replace it with monetary payments that gave a lesser guarantee of assistance in times of personal emergency.¹³ Yet he could not permanently ignore the popular grievances recorded in sample surveys. In 2005 he announced four ‘national programmes’ for urgent reform in housing, social welfare, agriculture and health care. The central and local elites had neglected such sectors since the fall of communism since they themselves could easily pay privately for what they needed. Most families, though, experienced dreadful under-provision. They lived in cramped accommodation. They could ill afford the weekly grocery bill. If they fell sick, they had to pay bribes to state-employed doctors for treatment.

His public image was assiduously manicured by his spokesmen, and it elicited a positive response from most Russians. The female pop duo Singing Together had a hit with ‘I Want A Man Like Putin’; his sober lifestyle commended itself especially to young women. When he appeared on radio for a question-and-answer programme, middle-aged listeners rang him up to express their heartfelt thanks. Male adults appreciated his relish for macho sports like judo. He also posed for a photo holding a tiger cub which an unknown friend had given him on his birthday. TV stations, all owned by his supporters, joined in the praise. The photographers accompanied him on a tour of eastern Siberia in August 2007 when he took Prince Albert II of Monaco out fishing — and pictures appeared of him stripped to the waist in the bright sunlight. Requests came through from the public for the Constitution to be amended so that he could stand again for a presidential third term. For a while he seemed to toy with the idea. The loyal sections of the media gave the impression that Russia, having found its saviour, should not allow him to stand down from the paramount office.

Outside of politics, Russians also began to do better on the international stage. Official sport recovered. Yeltsin had always supported tennis and the proliferation of private clubs produced a grand slam champion, Marat Safin. Female players thrust themselves forward in 2006–2007. Russian football became a serious force in European competitions. At the Beijing Olympics in August 2008 the country came third in the medals table. In December of the same year Xenia Sikhinova won the Miss World contest in South Africa.

The Duma elections in December 2007 produced 315 seats for United Russia. This was a remarkable endorsement of Putin’s period of rule. But he resisted the temptation to alter the Constitution and pondered whom to recommend as his successor. It was thought that his choice might fall on Viktor Zubkov, whom he appointed Prime Minister in September 2007. Like Putin, Zubkov hailed from St Petersburg, and the two of them had worked together for a long time. In the end Putin plumped for Dmitri Medvedev. At the time Medvedev was serving as First Deputy Prime Minister; he was also in charge of the ‘national programmes’ announced by Putin to improve health care, housing, agriculture and education. He was not a complete unknown but as yet lacked a clear profile in the eyes of most Russians. Continuity would be preserved by a secret deal whereby Putin would be asked to serve as the new Prime Minister. The usual dirty tricks were played. Liberal-minded politicians were ruled out of the contest on spurious technical grounds. These included ex-premier Mikhail Kasyanov. Even the former chess world champion Garry Kasparov was banned. Tired veterans Zyuganov and Zhirinovski were allowed to stand but they received little airtime on television. In stark contrast, Medvedev’s every public appearance was filmed and the Kremlin’s mastership of ‘political technology’ secured the desired result in March 2008.

Medvedev was an appropriate selection for Putin to make. A fellow Leningrader, Medvedev had proved his allegiance as a political client over many years. He was bright in intellect and gentle in appearance. If Putin strutted around like a judo master, Medvedev had the aura of a retired member of a 1990s boy band. What attracted the rest of the world was Medvedev’s readiness to emphasize Russia’s need for the rule of law. But his appointment of Putin as Prime Minister made it clear that change, if it was going to happen, would occur only very gradually.

Russian assertiveness in international relations kept rising. The ‘foreign policy concept’ adopted in July 2008 took pleasure in the recent strengthening of state power and economic well-being in Russia. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov suggested that the period of the West’s global dominance was over, and Medvedev’s team were determined to roll back the recent inroads made by NATO. A suitable opportunity cropped up in August 2008 when President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia sent troops into the rebellious republic of South Osetiya. Georgia had already announced its intention to apply for NATO membership. Russian presidents since the break-up of the Soviet Union had regarded the ‘near abroad’ as a zone where American influence was not welcome. Saakashvili’s campaign met with a furious response. The tank units of the Russian Army thrust their way over the mountains down into Georgia, smashing all military resistance and ruining strategic economic infrastructure. Medvedev, while announcing that armed occupation would be only temporary, proceeded to give official recognition to the independence of both South Osetiya and Abkhazia.

The Russian Army carried out a crude operation that attracted opprobium in the rest of the world. It was reported — and never convincingly denied — that Putin told French President Nicolas Sarkozy that he intended to follow the example of what the Americans had done to Saddam Hussein and to ‘hang up Saakashvili by the balls’. Sarkozy allegedly asked: ‘Yes, but do you want to end up like Bush?’ Putin admitted: ‘Ah, you’ve got a point there.’¹⁴ Russia’s people in any case felt positive about the Russian campaign. The rulers and the ruled sensed that proof had finally been given that the country would need to be taken seriously even by the Americans. First Putin and then Medvedev demanded that the US should stop using NATO as a means to pursue a unilateralist foreign and security policy around the globe. Medvedev claimed that the difficult stage of rebuilding the Russian state and economy was over. Russia was again a great power. It demanded respect for international law in relations among states. It required to be treated on an equal basis by the countries of NATO. It depicted itself as having its own distinct civilization, and the values and power of the West were declared as being on the decline.

The bludgeoning of Georgia removed lingering doubts in Poland and the Czech Republic about accepting the American proposal to establish installations against long-range ballistic missiles on their territory. Russia caused fear without gaining friends or admirers. It also worried potential investors. Despite its petrochemical riches, it needed help in modernizing its drilling and refining facilities — and the Russian government’s bullying of foreign companies was scarcely going to hasten this process. The harassment of Berezovski, Gusinski and Khodorkovski had the effect of inducing other rich businessmen to try and decant their fortunes to London. Putin and Medvedev inadvertently pushed economic talent westwards. The departure of Berezovski and other ‘oligarchs’ was regretted by few citizens but the atmosphere of Russian big business was not improved. The Kremlin and the petrochemical industrial sector were locked in an intimate embrace. Occasional information trickled out about the wealth of ministers. Public office became a ticket to vast wealth. Liberal political opposition to the Kremlin became demoralized. Yavlinski stepped down from the Yabloko leadership in June 2008. The Union of Right Forces gave up independent activity in November, amalgamating itself with other such parties into the new Right Cause party and campaigning for democracy, the rule of law and free markets; but the fact that Medvedev endorsed its foundation indicated how little a challenge to him it represented.¹⁵

Moscow’s meddling in the post-1991 territorial settlement in the former USSR was on the increase. Medvedev pointed out that this was no different in principle from what the Americans had done with Kosovo (which formally declared its independence from Serbia in February 2008). Russia strengthened its ties with Venezuela and Cuba as if searching to help the enemies of successive American presidents in the New World. A dispute with Ukraine about payment for Russian gas led to a suspension of supplies to several other European countries in January 2009 until the Ukrainian government agreed to terms. In November 2008, furthermore, Medvedev had announced the intention to install missile-launching facilities in the west of the Russian Federation in reaction to President Bush’s initiative in Poland and the Czech Republic. By January 2009, after Barack Obama’s inauguration as US President, things were calming down, and Medvedev suggested the need to resume negotiations. Russians aimed to bargain from a position of pride and strength. Tacitly they regarded most of the former Soviet Union as falling inside their sphere of legitimate influence and aimed to secure agreement from the Americans to keep their noses out of the region.

The Russian rulers vigorously pursued the national economic interest in international relations. They — or Gazprom and Rosneft — sold their energy resources to Europe. The existing pipelines favoured the maintaining of this commercial connection. The Chinese were known to be slow payers; the Europeans had a record of prompt settling of charges. Medvedev, moreover, was just as aware as Putin that Russia stood in need of foreign capital and technology. The boom in state revenues from gas and oil was disrupted in mid-2008 when world prices dipped; and the forecasts of Russian extraction of its energy resources anyway suggested that output was going to fall. Manufacturing, agriculture and transport remained in an outdated condition. Moscow and a few great cities flourished while the rest of the country awaited ‘modernization’. Public education stood in great need of adequate financing and rapid reform. The decline in the birth rate among ethnic Russians continued. What is more, eastern Siberia underwent depopulation as the state withdrew its subsidy for residence there. Although the incidence of poverty across the country declined during Putin’s presidential terms it still affected one in seven households in mid-2008.¹⁶ Russia took 131st place in a world ranking of countries according to how ‘peaceful’ they were. Quite apart from the violence in the north Caucasus, Russian crime, political repression and military expenditure were high and getting higher.¹⁷ Drug abuse, moreover, went on rising. Acute concern grew about Russia’s demography as measured in rates of mortality, births and ill-health.

A vast task of transformation lay ahead. The Kremlin elite was aware of its responsibilities to the nation and spoke often about them. Putin and Medvedev settled for a mixture of politics and economics which appeared to have worked elsewhere. Vigorous control over elections and policy-making was imposed. Big business was made to understand that its freedom to make money could and would be revoked if ever its leaders fell out of line with the government’s wishes. At the same time the Kremlin held back from censoring the Internet or closing down bookstores. Private dissent was tolerated so long as it stayed inside the apartments of the dissenters or was limited to a few eccentrics selling poorly produced pamphlets on street corners — this was more than what was allowed in China, Singapore or Indonesia.

The Russian economy after 1991 was immensely sensitive to shockwaves emitted by the global economy. When the global ‘credit crunch’ occurred in summer 2008 the Russian stock exchange had to suspend its operations several times before the end of the year. The decrease in oil and gas revenues in the same months aggravated problems. The budget had been written on the assumption that Russian energy products would continue to command high prices on foreign markets. There was a return to the difficulties of the 1990s with salary and pension arrears, job uncertainty and inflation. The Russian boom had failed to last a full decade. Closures of businesses became an epidemic. Even the mightiest Russian company, Gazprom, experienced an eighty per cent collapse in its share prices in the second half of the year. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs had accumulated their wealth by raising huge loans from foreign banks, and as the value of commodities fell on world markets they faced difficulty in servicing their debts. The solution for them was to sell off assets to the state. Once-mighty oligarchs felt the bruises of a deep recession and started to lose their grip on the country’s natural resources. The loans-for-shares débâcle of 1996 was repeated in reverse: this time it was the business elite going cap in hand to the government. The fragility of Russia’s decade-long economic upsurge was revealed.

Medvedev feared that the recession might lead to social unrest, and he warned political opponents against trying to exploit the situation. The security forces were held at the ready. Although they could maintain order on the streets there were worries amidst the political elites that this was not permanently guaranteeable. At the end of January 2009 a large protest demonstration was organized on the Pacific periphery of the Russian Federation, in Vladivostok, against the policies of the government. Security forces were put in readiness to deal with angry demonstrators in other cities. Placards were held high: ‘Down with capitalist slavery!’ and ‘Bring back the right to work!’ Communist party organizers were not the only militants. Putin’s rating in the opinion polls dipped for the first time since the Kursk disaster. Suddenly the political order appeared less than completely stable. The Kremlin leaders had always been nervous about popular opinion. This was one of the reasons why they took so much care to emasculate the electoral process. For years the containment of popular grievances had been effective. But when the material improvements made since the turn of the millennium were put under threat the patience of millions of Russians wore thin. The question arose: would the people continue to remain silent?