The Soviet Century

My 1960s are as fluid as the 1930s, devoted to Stalinism, were; and will lead us via selected topics to the end of the regime. Having displayed considerable vitality in many spheres, from the early 1970s the Soviet Union entered into a downswing, before sinking definitively into ‘stagnation’ (zastoi). Leadership personalities are a good indicator of the system’s variable health: Khrushchev and Andropov personified a certain dynamism, whereas Brezhnev and Chernenko epitomized decline. Such curves on the historical graph were nothing new in themselves. From the outset, the historical dynamic of the Soviet Union fluctuated. In this instance, however, we are dealing with the final phase of a descending curve that was novel and ominous – though not lacking in intriguing aspects.

This prompts us to reiterate what should by now be obvious: the Russia that went to war in 1941 and emerged victorious in 1945 was still only on the way to becoming an urbanized industrial power. Sociologically and, in many respects, culturally, it was still mired in its rural past – even when it came to the characteristic features of its modernizing state. ‘Primitive’ is the adjective that comes to mind to encapsulate the postwar period and Stalin’s last years. All efforts were focused on two objectives: restoring prewar living standards and reconstructing a semblance of the Soviet system in the vast territories that had been occupied by the Germans.

The chaos that initially reigned over reconstruction is ineffable. Thousands of officials were dispatched to the reconquered territories, but were often unqualified for the task that awaited them. Of the thousands of others recruited locally, many were ex-collaborators. The regime faced numerous foes: in the Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, guerrilla units engaged the Red Army in pitched battles. Reconstruction of the system and suppression of the unrest took time and involved heavy casualties. Economic revival was launched and energetically pursued. But although recovery to prewar (1940) levels had been achieved in many spheres by 1953, this was not yet true of consumer goods. As far as food supplies were concerned, the USSR of 1945–53 remained a country whose population went hungry, or at any rate was very poorly fed.

The particular point we would like to emphasize here is this: reconstruction, however impressive in some spheres – beginning with arms production, and especially atomic weapons – coincided with the restoration of Stalinism, which was a degenerating, profoundly dysfunctional system. This included a return to wanton terror – the ageing dictator’s main political instrument – and the promulgation of a retrograde nationalist ‘great power’ ideology. Openly adopted by the dictator during the war, it was now ‘perfected’ in the autocratic mould of imperial Russia.

The regime was the personal dictatorship of a man whose titles stopped just short of rivalling the Tsars’, and who imposed a replica of Peter the Great’s ‘table of ranks and uniforms’ on the senior bureaucracy. The reference to ‘Great and Holy Russia’ in the Union’s national anthem, as the crowning symbol of the state and its ideology, rounded off this new–old rhetorical format. As for popular compliance, it was ensured by terror. Nothing is more characteristic of this aspect of the ‘restoration’, seemingly quite successful, than the figures for the Gulag. Having declined to 800,000 during the war, the number of inmates exceeded 3 million by 1953. And when we add the figures for those exiled and imprisoned, we arrive at a total of 5 million people – an all-time record. In the same year, however, the numbers did begin to fall again. Meanwhile, no policy switch of any significance can be identified. Stalin carried on plotting changes of personnel and none of the leadership knew where (or how) they would end up; Molotov and Mikoyan were convinced that they were going to be liquidated. Endless appointments and reorganizations – a replay of the constant ministerial musical chairs in Tsarism’s dying days – are indicative of the confusion that prevailed at the top. In short, it cannot be said that the USSR was really governed in these years.

When Stalin was struck down by serious illness, Politburo members took turns at his bedside (or perhaps in an adjoining room). Once it was apparent that his condition was terminal, they turned to political matters. Most of them were already nurturing schemes and began manoeuvring for positions and allies. Whatever the outcome of these shifting combinations, the new rulers were inheriting a regime that belonged to a different – past – age. Changes began almost at once, and initially isolated measures soon gave way to successive waves of reform.

We shall discuss these reforms below. But for now it is important to appreciate that Stalin’s disappearance opened various valves in the system, making it possible to form a leadership group capable of reviving the regime. Those at the top can all be characterized as ‘Stalinists’, so it is scarcely surprising that one of their first steps was the classically Stalinist deed of eliminating one of their number – Beria – as well as a significant number of secret police officials, who were shot or imprisoned on the basis of a tissue of hastily concocted, incoherent charges.

This affair is in part explained by the sequence of events. Stalin died on 5 March 1953. The same day, a session of the Central Committee plenum, the Council of Ministers and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decreed that the MGB (Ministry of State Security) and the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) should once again be fused into one MVD, to be headed by Beria, who was also appointed Deputy Prime Minister. These decisions were made official by the Supreme Soviet on 15 March. That day, the Council of Ministers appointed people close to Beria and Malenkov to various posts: Kruglov, Kobulov and Serov became Beria’s first deputies, Maslennikov was made MVD deputy minister, and all of them were named members of the MVD collegium (an internal consultative council present in every ministry). The precise whys and wherefores of these appointments remain obscure. But the fact is that Beria, under the auspices of his putative ally, Prime Minister Malenkov, retained a key role in government and kept a grip on the whole repressive apparatus and its military formations, totalling more than a million people.

Something in this rapid sequence must have alarmed Khrushchev. It is not clear to me how he managed to persuade Malenkov to dump his associate, but Beria was arrested on 26 June 1953 during a Politburo meeting and arrests of other MVD officials followed. It was decided to dismantle the ministry’s industrial structures, and its extra-judicial ‘special concilium’ was abolished on 1 September. Further changes ensued.

However, the real story of Beria and co.’s misdeeds was not made public. Moreover, no one would have believed it. Instead, citizens were served up a classically Stalinist concoction. There is no way of knowing whether Beria really intended to eliminate all or some of his colleagues. Moreover, most – even all – of the leaders in post had signed or consigned orders for the execution of innocent people and thus risked being implicated. A single top leader – unquestionably a dangerous one – and some lesser figures thus paid for the crimes of all the other Stalinists, who had not yet stated what they thought about the whole bloody past. One fact nevertheless stands out: the nightmarish ‘investigations’, the fake accusations, and the trials currently in progress – notably the notorious ‘doctors’ plot’ – were halted overnight. The victims were fully rehabilitated and the doctors returned to their positions in the Kremlin. Further rehabilitations and releases soon began, with less fanfare.

This was a clear signal that something significant was afoot. Il’ia Ehrenburg was to refer to these changes as ‘the thaw’ in a novel of that title, even though the leadership still contained figures who would remain faithful to Stalin, and utterly unrepentant about the past, for the rest of their lives. When, in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev launched his sensational attack on Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress, Soviet society, and especially the intelligentsia, understood that the days of Stalinist show trials and arbitrary arrests and executions had gone for good. Yet the thaw was not initiated by that congress: its participants were as surprised as everyone else and the many Stalinists among them were in a state of shock. No one had anticipated such a bombshell – and so soon. The Stalinist riposte came a year later: assured of a majority in the Presidium, they attempted a palace coup against Khrushchev. But it was thwarted by an alliance between the military and a majority of Central Committee members; Khrushchev remained in power and consolidated his position. What happened next was unheard of: no death sentences – no prison sentences even – were pronounced against the plotters. They were simply relieved of their positions. One of them – Voroshilov – was even pardoned and retained a ceremonial post.

All this – and more that we have not mentioned – was quite unprecedented and remained the rule in the political class under Khrushchev and after his removal. Another decisive change occurred, which for the most part historians have not stressed sufficiently: imprisonment of countless people accused of ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ ceased. The notion even disappeared from the criminal code, to be replaced by ‘crimes against the state’, directed at oppositional activities. Political opposition continued to be repressed, but (as we shall see) the repression was henceforth on a quite different scale and less brutal. Now – and this was not insignificant – the accused actually had to do something before being charged. Those who suffered repression certainly paid a heavy price, and comparisons with the past were small consolation, yet the fact remains that the changes in penal policy were meaningful. To engage in protest was no longer a suicidal step; people survived their sentences. Some public and confidential channels existed for protesting against the arbitrary use of power.

We can now turn to a survey of deeper systemic changes. These were ushered in by government policy, but also created by spontaneous transformations in Soviet reality. They concern the triad of social ‘militarization–criminalization–mobilization’ characteristic of the Stalinist regime.

Under the broad heading of changes in the prison system, we must mention the dismantling of a core component of the previous regime: the Gulag – a system of forced labour that we described above as being in an advanced state of decay. It lasted for twenty years. Yet many speak as if it had always existed, while others fail to register its disappearance. The reform began in earnest from 1954 onwards, although some key structures had been abolished the year before. Of crucial importance was the dismantling, already noted, of the MVD’s economic—industrial complex, which was the essential element in the Gulag’s forced-labour empire. With the transfer to civilian ministries of most of its industrial agencies (road and rail construction, forestry, mining, etc.), this sinister repressive complex, deeply interested in a constant supply of unpaid labour, was significantly reduced. The labour force no longer consisted in slaves, but in paid workers enjoying the protections afforded by the labour code, which was substantially amended at the same time. With this large-scale ‘expropriation’ of the MVD went a step-by-step transformation of the whole Gulag structure into a reformed prison system with a new name, followed by a reduction in the number of inmates in the camps (now called ‘colonies’, ‘prisons’ and ‘deportee settlements’). The number of detainees in these various institutions (excluding prisons) fell from 5,223,000 on 1 January 1953 to 997,000 on 1 January 1959; the figure for ‘counter-revolutionaries’ dropped from 580,000 to 11,000. From the early 1960s onwards, arbitrary persecution ceased to be widespread.

These reforms did not proceed smoothly, but public pressure to accelerate ‘normalization’ was supported by the Interior Minister and the office of the Prosecutor General. The latter were highly critical of the practices of the MVD’s prisons directorate and pressured it to implement party and state decisions concerning the penal system. Two reports, separated by four years, are highly instructive in this regard. The first, dating from 1957, was written by the Interior Minister Dudorov (it was his second year in post) and concerned ‘The Problem of the Camps and New Penal Policies’. The second was by the deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR, Mishutin, reporting in 1961. We shall begin with the latter, since it contains a survey of the steps taken between 1953 and 1956.[1]

Mishutin’s main points were as follows. Until 1953, camp administrations did not bother about the ‘correction and re-education’ of prisoners. The prison population was predominantly regarded as manpower; and the MVD thus neglected what should have been its main duty. For years, legislation on penal policy was virtually non-existent. Access to penal institutions by representatives of society was barred and oversight of their functioning by prosecutors limited. On 10 July 1954, the Central Committee had adopted a resolution seeking to improve the situation in the MVD’s camps and colonies. The MVD was criticized for concentrating exclusively on economic output, when its main task was to engage inmates in productive labour and thereby prepare them for their reintegration into society. On 24 May 1955, the Central Committee, followed shortly afterwards by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, promulgated a ‘statute on prosecutorial supervision’ in the USSR, chapter five of which dealt with the supervision of detention centres. Henceforth camp prosecutors had to refer to the territorial offices of the Prosecutor’s Office, rather than directly to the Prosecutor General. This measure in itself was an improvement. But the situation in the camps remained unsatisfactory. On 25 October 1956, a joint decree of the Council of Ministers and the Central Committee was issued listing ‘measures to improve the work of the MVD of the USSR’ and its republican equivalents, which were accused of neglecting their reeducation duties – the evidence for this was the number of re-offenders. The government now speeded up measures to reduce and abolish the system of corrective labour camps (ispravitel’ no-trudovye lageria – ITLs), and to create supervisory bodies in conjunction with the executive committees of local soviets to oversee what occurred in what were now to be called ‘colonies’.

Minutes of a session of the MVD Collegium from early 1957, under the chairmanship of Dudorov (former party apparatchik), give us some idea of the situation. Appointed to head the MVD by the party in order to improve its functioning, Dudorov was not at all content with the camps and colonies directorate in his own ministry, particularly when it came to the re-education and utilization of prison manpower.[2] Some 6 per cent of prisoners were not working because there were no jobs for them; and for those who were employed, the remuneration system was complete chaos. In 1956 the MVD had devoted much of its energy to dealing with police matters, and the minister hoped that 1957 would be the year when it would finally succeed in resolving the outstanding problems in the prison system, as required by the Central Committee. He continued:

In passing, the minister observed that ‘colonies produce consumer goods (clothing, furniture, household utensils, some agricultural machinery). Thus, the zeks earn some money for themselves and their families.’

Dudorov was painting a rather rosy picture. Experience suggested (as he himself noted) that prisoners should not be paid in cash, because many of them tended to lose the money playing cards or being robbed by other prisoners. Some of the zeks themselves preferred payment in kind. Dudorov ended his report by stating that the directorate and collegium of the ministry hoped to resolve this problem in the course of 1957 (in the event, establishing the colonies was to take several more years).

Returning now to Mishutin’s 1961 text, we learn that the initial liberalization had gone too far; that it was creating malfunctions in the system; and that adjustments were required (something we already gleaned from Dudorov’s recommendation not to give prisoners too much money).

Local authorities were charged with finding employment for those being released. On 8 December 1957 the government approved a decree jointly drawn up by the Prosecutor’s Office and the MVD on the ‘correctional labour colonies and prisons of the Ministry of Internal Affairs’. The text required strict separation between different categories of prisoners, so as not to mix hardened criminals with first-time offenders. It ordered revision of procedures for early release based on a calculation of working days and sharply reduced the number of prisoners who were allowed to leave colony confines unescorted. It introduced non-cash payment, as well as other measures.

From 1953 onwards, the number of prisoners decreased regularly. Between 1953 and 1957, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet announced several amnesties for different categories of prisoner – among them, one in 1955 for people who had collaborated with the German occupier. In 1957, the fortieth anniversary of the October revolution saw a new amnesty affecting a significant number of inmates. In 1956 and 1959, commissions were set up in the republics to review directly in prison establishments the cases of those convicted of crimes against the state, malfeasance and other economic crimes, as well as minor offences. The Prosecutor General of the USSR helped to draw up these measures and oversaw their implementation.

By January 1961, the prison population had declined significantly and its composition by category of crime had changed. In 1953, 10.7 per cent of prisoners were sentenced for organized crime, robbery, premeditated murder, and rape; in 1961 the corresponding figure was 31.5 per cent. This meant that a substantial percentage of prisoners was now composed of common-law offenders, with a hard core of recidivists and dangerous criminals. This is why the colonies and prisons statute issued on 8 December 1958 now seemed inadequate: it was insufficiently severe on dangerous recidivists and the fight against crime was suffering in consequence. So on 5 November 1959 the Central Committee enjoined the Prosecutor General’s Office to step up the fight against such criminals and ensure an appropriate prison regime for them.

Two years later, the government was still not satisfied with the situation. On 3 April 1961 a new decree by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers ordered the internal affairs ministries of the republics to do more for the prison systems they were responsible for, to analyse the condition of each institution carefully, and to reinforce the separation between different categories of criminal. It also abolished the liberal system of early release for a good work record. As our documents indicate, these and other measures had been under discussion for almost five years, but had not always been implemented. Liberal and conservative politicians and jurists had sparred over every point, and there were many. Another important measure was the creation on 27 February 1959 of the collegium of the Prosecutor General and republican equivalents, followed by numerous tours of inspection and training sessions by leading functionaries from the USSR Prosecutor’s Office, with a view to reinforcing the fight against crime and improving prison administration.

We shall say no more about the way in which different government bodies tackled these issues. Specialist monographs would be required to tell the story in precise detail. But we can draw a few provisional conclusions. The Stalinist system of hard unpaid slave labour by prisoners – most of them convicted of common-law offences, but many of them ‘counter-revolutionaries’ who had committed no crime – was now a thing of the past. The same applies to mass exile settlements where more than 2 million people served sentences, often for life: in 1960, these were almost entirely emptied of inmates and such sentences were largely discontinued.[3] On the other hand, normalization of the prison and penal complex was not straightforward in a system that had inherited a strong inclination to punish without concerning itself unduly with proof of guilt. If that system had nothing to do with justice, the 1960s saw an attempt to create a proper justice system. This is what clearly emerges if we turn to the intensive drafting and redrafting of the criminal and prison codes by penal institutions and the government bodies responsible for them. The discussions and pressures for further change that began immediately after the war developed with Khrushchev’s arrival in power, and continued almost to the very end of the Soviet system. A rapid survey of the legislation in force in 1984 provides a picture of the juridical principles that governed the treatment of offenders down to 1991.

In particular, we shall examine penal policy and ‘prison labour law’ as set out in the relevant codes and commentaries on them. This is a rather onerous exercise, but since the discovery of Hammurabi’s code historians have known how instructive legal texts can be – even if they are not always followed. The changes introduced by these codes should not be underestimated.[4] This particularly applies to the right now enjoyed by prisoners to meet with their lawyers, without time limits and with no guards present. This formed part of a broader definition of prisoners’ rights, based on a premise to which the codes and jurisprudence devoted much space – namely, that imprisonment does not entail loss of the status of citizen and hence of citizens’ rights. Punishment restricts such rights, of course, but prisoners continue to belong to the community of citizens. The restrictions were serious: a prisoner’s wife could divorce him without waiting for his release, prisoners did not have the right to vote, they could not freely dispose of their own money, and so on. But they enjoyed the basic right to criticize and launch complaints against the prison administration. They could do so directly, in a letter to the administration, which was obliged to respond. They could also appeal to other instances (party and state) via the prison administration. The latter would probably seek to persuade the prisoner not to proceed with a complaint, but if he insisted the administration was obliged to submit it. Should it fail to do so, he could disclose the matter to visiting family or friends. The prison administration was not entitled to open prisoners’ letters to prosecutors and had to forward them within twenty-four hours.

As pointed out, an important advance was the prisoner’s right to see a lawyer with no time limit. Another source indicates that lawyers’ visits to prisoners came under the section on ‘visiting rights’.[5] But they were regulated by the ‘correctional labour codes’ of the republics, not by the All-Union code. Unless these codes specified otherwise, meetings with a lawyer were to be authorized following a written request by the prisoner, a member of his family, or a representative of a public organization. They were to be conducted outside working hours and the lawyer must be duly accredited. If so requested by prisoner or lawyer, the meeting was to be held in private. (I must confess that discovering these legal provisions in the texts of the late 1970s and early 1980s came as a surprise.)

There is plentiful evidence from prosecutors, courts and local bodies of the large number of complaints from prisoners received by the Ministry of Internal Affairs itself, government supervisory agencies (central and local), regional bodies and public organizations. They were more or less carefully investigated, or passed on to more competent authorities.[6] Legal power to monitor respect for the law inside places of confinement was granted to a number of bodies, of which the most powerful were the Prosecutor’s Office and state control agencies (whatever their current title). The MVD also had an internal general inspectorate, equipped with real power and able to conduct detailed inquiries. It was quite legitimately suspected of bias, given that the prison system came within its ministry’s domain. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that senior ministerial officials were well informed of the situation.

The control exercised by the higher courts over compliance with the law in the justice system had an influence on the bodies in charge of penal institutions. Such courts handled cases of violations by prison administrations and appeals, as well as cases requiring adjudication of the appropriateness of a sentence. Their activity certainly had an impact on the lot of prisoners and the atmosphere of the prison system in general. The right of social bodies to take an interest in the fate of prisoners had a similar effect, because it now formed one of a set of rights and possibilities of redress.

Political prisoners, including the better-known dissidents, were not entirely denied access to judicial review or channels for complaints. Protests by scientists and other members of the intelligentsia, addressed directly to the Central Committee or other high instances, or transmitted by confidential channels, are well documented. Some of them could be quite effective. International pressure also had an impact, prompting the authorities to prefer stripping dissidents of their nationality and exiling them abroad to keeping them in prison. We shall return to this subject.

The concern on the part of the authorities and judges not to have minor offenders mix with dangerous criminals – a principle adopted by democratic systems – led to the creation of institutions for different categories of prisoner with corresponding regimes. People serving a first sentence were separated from recidivists in all categories. There were separate institutions for women and minors. Finally, high-security complexes, isolated from the rest of the system, held those who had been convicted of ‘especially dangerous crimes against the state’, ‘particularly dangerous recidivists’, and prisoners condemned to death but whose sentence had been commuted by a pardon or amnesty. Foreigners and stateless persons were also confined in separate prison establishments. Republics had the right to demand the separation of other categories as well. In contrast, none of these distinctions applied in prison hospitals, whose regulations were determined by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in consultation with prosecutors.

In total, the system had four categories of corrective labour colonies, differentiated by their internal regime: general, ‘enhanced’, ‘strict’, and ‘special’ regimes. Added to this were the various categories of ‘settlement colonies’. The ‘strict’ regime was intended for those convicted of ‘particularly dangerous crimes against the state’ and persons who had already served one sentence; while the ‘special’ regime applied to multiple offenders and women who had had their death sentence commuted. The ‘settlement colonies’ were for inmates well on the road to rehabilitation who had been transferred from other categories of colony.

Prisons comprised a sixth category, receiving those who had committed heinous crimes; especially dangerous recidivists were also sent to a prison if the court so specified. They also contained inmates transferred from colonies as a punishment for bad behaviour, as well as prisoners doing service work there instead of being sent to colonies. Prisons had two regimes: ‘general’ and ‘strict’. A prisoner could not be subject to the latter for more than six months. Women who were pregnant, or accompanied by young children, were exempt from it. In the general regime, prisoners occupied collective cells, although if the prison governor so decided they could, with the prosecutor’s consent, be transferred to individual cells. They were allowed one hour’s exercise a day (30 minutes in the special regime). Those who served their prison sentence as auxiliary staff could keep their money, receive short-term visits and packages (as per the norms of the general regime), and buy food.

Two regimes were in force in corrective labour colonies for adolescents, which formed another important sector: ‘general’ and ‘enhanced’ – the latter for very serious crimes.

Finally, in the settlement colonies, where there was supervision but no guards, inmates could move freely from the time they awoke until bedtime. If their work or studies so required, this freedom extended to the confines of the administrative region. Inmates were allowed to wear civilian clothes, carry money and use it as they wished, and keep valuables. With administrative authorization, they could live with their family in the colony; they could acquire a house and cultivate a private plot. Once married, men and women could live together in the same colony, regardless of where they had separately served the first part of their sentences.

All able-bodied inmates were obliged to perform work in accordance with their physical abilities and, so far as was possible, their professional skills. The work was primarily done in enterprises located within the colony. Inmates might work for other agencies as well, but it was up to the MVD to organize its own workshops and factories. Economic agencies were obliged to help correctional institutions realize this objective.

In principle, the ‘special’ regime required inmates to do hard labour. In reality, they were given the available jobs in branches of the surrounding economy, which meant that the labour was not necessarily ‘hard’. The physically handicapped had a lighter workload. Given that the professed objective was correction and re-education, the work was not supposed to entail physical suffering. Excessive toil would have contradicted the principle that work was not a punishment. It was up to a medical commission to assess each inmate’s physical abilities, taking account of state of health, previous work experience, and so on. Work in the inmate’s speciality could be refused only if the court’s sentence expressly forbade it. The aim was for everyone to perform profitable labour and to keep work in the colony’s internal services to a minimum.

We should indicate at this point that the issue of ‘hard labour’ under the ‘special’ regime was much debated. One senses from their reservations, which we have set out, that jurists were uncomfortable about it. When not seeking – indirectly – to challenge the very idea of ‘hard labour’, they attempted to water it down in one way or another. After all, these texts were studied in the law faculties where jurists were being trained. The latter certainly asked questions in the 1980s, or even earlier.

The vagueness of the category of ‘hard labour’ increases still further when we read the relevant paragraphs about feeding prisoners. Those subject to the special regime were entitled only to smaller, less varied rations. The suspicion arises that such prisoners were being punished by eventual starvation. The undernourishment of prisoners condemned to hard labour (or the mere power to inflict such punishment) was something that jurists commenting on the codes were vague about. However heinous their crimes (these were the most dangerous criminals), it left room for abuse. In contrast, pregnant women and sick people were entitled to better food. More generally, women (especially if they had young children), adolescents, and invalids were supposed to have special attention and better conditions. This prescription was probably followed: the death of a baby would inevitably have entailed an investigation.

LABOUR IN THE COLONIES

All prisoners worked an eight-hour day, except on Sundays and public holidays. But they were not entitled to a vacation and their years in prison were not taken into account when it came to calculating pension entitlements. Otherwise, health and safety rules and other provisions of labour law did apply to the colonies. People who became disabled during their confinement were entitled to a pension and compensation after their release. Prisoners’ work was paid in line with civilian norms, minus the cost of upkeep (food, clothing) and, where stipulated, deductions ordered by the courts.

The research of W. I. Butler, a Western specialist on Soviet law, provides further information and some chronological clarification.[7] It was on 26 June 1963 that Soviet republics established the additional penal institutions known as ‘settlement colonies’, intended for prisoners who had displayed evidence of their aptitude for reintegration into society. On 3 June 1968 a statute on labour colonies for minors was enacted. Even though the texts were not published, such legislative measures helped shape the general development of penal institutions – in these instances, in the direction of reducing unnecessary severity in sentencing. Jurists exercised significant influence.[8] Among them we can identify a consistent school of thought that sought to push things in a positive direction, but which obviously needed support from above.

The MVD of the USSR determined the procedure for assigning convicted persons to one or other of the penal institutions or, in consultation with the Prosecutor’s Office, to psychiatric institutions. Medical care in prisons and colonies was jointly regulated by the MVD and the Health Ministry. In 1977, ‘Rules for Internal Order in Corrective Labour Institutions’, valid for the whole USSR, were adopted by the MVD. Other rules defining the regime of a place of confinement could be issued by the USSR’s Council of Ministers or that of the relevant republic, as well as by the Minister of Internal Affairs and his deputies. But Soviet jurists publicly warned against granting prerogatives to heads of internal affairs departments at intermediate levels or the directors of the institutions themselves. Their approach was a realistic one, but they would probably have also liked to reduce the MVD’s prerogatives in determining prison regimes, because (or this is my hypothesis) many penal institutions were located far from Moscow and their administrations contained supporters of harsh methods. These jurists knew their country’s history and the kind of people who worked in its law-and-order agencies.

Some of the principles professed by Soviet jurists under the banner of ‘socialist humanism’ did not aim only to guide interpretation of the law. While pressing for the law to be implemented to protect society from criminals, they also sought to promote a multi-faceted policy of reform, re-education and resocialization of prisoners, with a view to reintegrating them into society. Combining punishment with labour – a key part of their credo – was the best way of enabling a prisoner to return to normal life. Respecting human dignity, remitting sentences for good behaviour, combining coercion and persuasion, differentiating between punishments by separating categories of prisoner, and adjusting the severity of sentences to the gravity of the crime – these were principles they constantly invoked and fought for. Of the six categories of prison regime that we have listed, the two strictest involved only a relatively small number of inmates (unfortunately, precise figures are unavailable). Jurists also promoted the principle of ‘individualization’ – that is to say, adapting punishment and re-education to the personality of each prisoner, on the basis that everyone could be reformed.

It would certainly be reasonable to suppose that these ‘principles’ were unacceptable to conservatives of all hues, and even to some liberal-minded people who did not believe that prison warders or administrations could educate anyone and who were fearful that such measures might have negative consequences.

Other issues debated by specialists cannot be broached here. But one point that we have already discussed merits renewed emphasis: the basic premise that a prisoner remained a citizen. In itself, this challenged the deeply rooted Soviet tendency to repression. The very category of ‘enemy of the people’, and the special treatment meted out to those who fell under it, was implicitly – and often explicitly – condemned in numerous texts from the 1960s onwards. The provisions under which people were pursued for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ or as an ‘enemy of the people’ were removed from the criminal code, and the expressions disappeared from the terminology of law-enforcement. In 1961 they were replaced in the code by six paragraphs dealing with ‘the most dangerous crimes against the state’, which formed the basis for subsequent persecution of political opponents – unlike the furies of Stalinism, without providing for the death sentence. Several such crimes were punished by deprivation of Soviet citizenship and expulsion from the USSR (which was not in itself an atrocity). Guilt had to be defined in accordance with the Soviet codes. Sheer arbitrariness thus ceased to be the rule. But the very fact of pursuing political opponents, even citizens who were simply expressing criticism, was an embarrassment for the Soviet government, internationally and internally.

It is not easy to ascertain whether the letter and spirit of the legislation we have evoked were observed in practice. I have not come across a reliable monograph on the post-Stalinist prison system, except as regards the conditions of detention of political prisoners, particularly ‘dissidents’. The latter were invariably held in high-security colonies in Mordovia and the Urals, and subject to the ‘special’ regime. Conditions were very strict and relations between prisoners – some of whom were combative and unyielding – and a brutal prison administration helped make camp life particularly harsh. Comprehensive research would be required to know the true state of these camps: their number, the sentences served, casualties, and so on. We have some information courtesy of Amnesty International,[9] and many of the rights that we have cited from juridical sources are not mentioned in it. Amnesty International refers to the limitations placed on the presence of lawyers during investigations (which we knew about), but says nothing about access to lawyers once convicted persons were serving their sentences. We can surmise that, having been convicted of an ‘especially dangerous crime against the state’ and confined to high-security prisons with the strictest regime, political detainees had fewer rights than other inmates. For example, whereas a generally respected legal provision allowed most prisoners to be held in the region where their family lived, legal texts provided for the converse in the case of dissidents. In the absence of proof to the contrary, there is no reason to suppose that they were regarded as citizens with inalienable rights.

The situation of the broad prison population improved appreciably, but without additional information there is no way of knowing to what extent the reality corresponded to the new legislation. Because of the dispersal of the colonies over vast territories, the poor level of training of prison administrators, and the brutal habits of MVD prison staff – not to mention the obvious difficulty of handling hardened criminals – it is likely that actual conditions must have departed from legal provisions to varying degrees.

Even so, the existence of codes and powerful institutions responsible for enforcing them, public opinion, and prisoners’ considerable experience in working the system and using the relevant provisions to their advantage, make it reasonable to assume that the reforms created a system quite distinct from that in force under Stalin, including for political prisoners – a subject we shall return to. At all events, this is the conclusion pointed to by the enormous quantity of material we possess, whether the complaints, appeals to prosecutors and judges, and demands for reviews from prisoners or their families reaching party and state authorities; or the various investigative committees (whose documents are sometimes available to Western observers). Appeals procedures, and the intervention of prosecutors or higher courts exercising their powers to review the decisions of lower courts, were important correctives in legal procedures and improved the lot of prisoners.

Another significant development, bound up with the rationalizing (should we say modernizing?) trend in penal policy, was the strong pressure from legal circles and their political allies to moderate the system’s punitive bent still further, which – or so many argued – solved nothing and simply created new problems. W. I. Butler has studied the growing pressure for the application of types of sentence which, however harsh, were non-custodial. Thus he has analysed a whole range of ‘conditional sentences’, the harshest consisting in exile from a given place or banishment to some remote location. Others took the form of mandatory labour (convicted persons continued to work as before, but with a deduction equivalent to a large fine from their wages); aiding ex-prisoners with their reintegration; and sentences without mandatory labour (introduced into the legislation of the USSR and the republic by a decree of 15 March 1983 that regulated the status of such sentences, their supervision by prosecutors, and their execution). In addition to the fines that we have already mentioned, this type of penalty included proscription from holding certain posts or engaging in specified activities, confiscation of property, the loss of a military rank or a title, and public cautions in the workplace. Reforms in criminal justice in the 1970s and the early 1980s indicate that this was a growing trend, and non-custodial sentences became increasingly widespread among the judiciary.

It should be remembered that the number of political prisoners and dangerous criminals confined in prisons, or the two categories of colony with the strictest regimes, was relatively small. The great majority of prisoners served their sentences in the ‘milder’ categories, and this was the target population for the experiments defended among the higher judiciary, jurists and some government circles. The aim was a large-scale ‘de-penalization’ of a system traditionally inclined to impose predominantly custodial sentences. The fight to liberalize sentences had begun much earlier, in the immediate post-Stalin years or even before. But it became a serious – and largely successful – struggle in the early 1980s. The phrase ‘in search of de-penalization’, used by Todd Fogleson (from whom I derive this information),[10] perfectly encapsulates this period.

Data from the Russian Federation’s Justice Ministry indicate that in 1980 roughly 94 per cent of defendants in criminal cases were found guilty, and nearly 60 per cent of them were imprisoned. In 1990 these numbers fell to 84 per cent and 40 per cent respectively. According to Fogleson, shifts of this magnitude are rare; and it is difficult to explain the phenomenon exclusively on the basis of the published material and interviews (the criminal justice archives for the late 1970s and early 1980s remain inaccessible). But he later surmises, not without reason, that labour shortages might have had something to do with it – a point we shall return to.

For now, we shall attend to an important discovery by Fogleson relating to the political sphere. In the past, judges had been supervised by party officials and justice ministries, whereas the higher courts essentially exercised their powers of judicial oversight. In the 1970s, the campaign to liberalize criminal justice was not led by the party, which had relinquished interference in this domain. The Justice Ministry was not a driving force either. It was the upper tier of the court system – i.e. the Supreme Court of the USSR and its republican equivalents – that took the initiative in pressing lower courts to ‘de-penalize’ their verdicts and make greater use of non-custodial sentences. To achieve this, it used its appellate or oversight powers, issuing criticisms and organizing training seminars for judges.

The first significant changes occurred in February and March 1977, when the Supreme Soviet ‘decriminalized’ a whole range of minor offences, which were henceforth punished by simple fines or two weeks’ imprisonment (the minimum sentence had hitherto been one year). In cases they did not regard as ‘socially dangerous’, judges could now hand down suspended sentences, as well as penalties of mandatory labour for sentences of less than three years. In 1978 the Supreme Soviet broadened the categories of offences to which fines and non-custodial sentences could apply. Let us note that the arguments in favour of this reduction in penalties for minor offices derived from Soviet criminologists, who questioned the efficacy of short-term imprisonment. One of the most eminent among them argued from 1976 onwards that much of the increase in crime was caused by family break-up, disruption of social ties, lack of integration into broader social networks, and the increasing impact of social benefits. Isolation in prisons would only make things worse. Others, cited by Fogleson, maintained that non-custodial sentences prevented people thinking of themselves as criminals and hence actually becoming such.

Thus, in 1977–8 prominent jurists argued for ‘greater economy in the means of repression’ and changes in criminal law that would make it more effective in helping to realize the system’s general objectives. Others insisted that their findings were scientific and that policy in the late twentieth century should be based on science. Some authors urged a move away from a punitive logic to a utilitarian philosophy: retribution should take second place to the achievement of social goals.

While the Supreme Court pressed lower courts to make greater use of differential sentencing, and to be more exacting about the conduct of criminal inquiries and proof of guilt, the overall results of this policy were a disappointment to its promoters. In November 1984, the Justice Ministry concluded that some judges had not got the message and paid too little heed to the decisions of higher courts. The old policy was certainly more unproblematic and more acceptable to the repressive mentality that persisted widely in lower Soviet courts. Nevertheless, other changes were to follow, for the penal reform front was now broad and mobile.

The legal, judicial and ideological reasoning behind this impulse to break with punitive tendencies was not the whole story. The growing manpower shortage, which we shall discuss in more detail later, was a background factor in the de-penalization endeavour and the debates over it. In the Stalinist system, ‘free labour’ was no such thing, since workers were attached to their workplace by a whole series of legal and economic constraints. The actual situation was attenuated by an almost unstoppable spontaneous mobility of labour, which the authorities nevertheless sought to counter by legal and economic measures, and by campaigns of moral denunciation of shirkers and deserters.

Here we are dealing with a broader phenomenon – a natural development that could not be contained even at the height of Stalinism, and which ended up being legitimated and recognized during the post-Stalinist changes. This is what we might call the ‘de-Stalinization of labour’. Reform of the penal system and the trend towards ‘de-penalizing’ sentences formed part of this broader process. The powerful waves of change that kept sweeping over workplace relations forced penal and social policy to follow suit. The survey of labour legislation and practices that we are about to undertake indicates how, in factories and offices, workers succeeded in acquiring de jure and de facto rights. These rights were written into legal documents, beginning with the labour code.

LABOUR LAW: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

From the very beginning of the Soviet regime, labour laws were a prominent part of the government’s agenda: the eight-hour working day, two weeks’ paid holiday, pensions, unemployment, sickness and disability insurance. On 9 December 1918 the Russian Federation’s labour code was promulgated (but never published). All those between the ages of sixteen and fifty, with the exception of the disabled, had an ‘obligation to work’. The principle of equal pay for equal work was proclaimed and various working conditions were subject to regulation. According to Soviet experts, it was the Civil War of 1918–21 that dictated enlistment of labour in place of voluntary contractual relationships. A new code promulgated on 30 October 1922 came into force on 15 November. The ‘obligation to work’ was replaced by ‘employment procedures’: labour relationships were henceforth based on voluntary agreement. The ‘obligation to work’ was restricted to exceptional situations (natural disasters, urgent public tasks). A separate chapter dealt with collective agreements and individual work contracts. Labour and management could alter the latter, as long as certain key provisions were respected. Collective negotiations were conducted by trade unions; labour disputes were settled by people’s courts; various ad hoc commissions on wages, conciliation bodies, and arbitration tribunals were established. The eight-hour day was maintained and overtime was regulated. In short, the 1922 labour code closely resembled those of Western countries, even if it favoured the state sector.

The transition to national economic planning in 1929 brought with it changes in several provisions. The state was now the sole employer and unions became a component of economic management. From 1934 onwards, they no longer drafted collective agreements, but administered social security and enforced regulations – something that had previously fallen to the powerful Labour Commissariat. In 1933 the latter was abolished: it was supposedly merged with the unions, but they did not possess the same authority as a Commissariat belonging to the government. Compulsory assignment of graduates to workplaces was introduced in 1930 as part of planning procedures. And in 1932, labour control was tightened – a single day’s absence was immediately punishable by dismissal. Nineteen thirty-eight saw a further spate of disciplinary measures: arriving late for work, or leaving early, became an offence. A decree from early 1940 proscribed resignation from a job without the consent of management. Contrariwise, the state could transfer employees at will, without their consent. Collective agreements were formally reintroduced in 1947, but despite having been abolished in 1935 they had actually survived in various guises, indicating their necessity in workplaces. As for wage increases, they became ever more dependent on centralized decisions, with some flexibility permitted at local level. Thus, between 1930 and 1940 most of the 1922 labour code had been rendered obsolete; and the text was no longer published.[11]

In the post-Stalin era, some of the most draconian measures were rescinded. Workers recovered the right to resign or change jobs, and new texts (1957) relaxed the strict provisions introduced during the war. A new labour code was set in train. A first draft was published for discussion in 1959, but it was only enacted in 1970 and came into force on 1 January 1971.

Analysis of these texts, and the commentaries they prompted, allows us to track the development of labour legislation up to 1986. The right to leave a job, by cancelling the contract with one’s employer, was set down as basic; management could not refuse it.[12] The ‘work contract’ became a serious procedure, with numerous guarantees for both parties and special clauses favouring workers. Managerial rights were clearly spelt out, including the power to impose sanctions for misdemeanours that are detailed in the code.

Cancellation of the contract by the employee (in the case of permanent contracts) was already included in article 16 of the ‘Foundations of Labour Law’ (replicated in the Russian Federation’s labour code and elsewhere). Employees had to give two months’ notice in writing; if they had valid grounds, the period of notice could be reduced to a month. A fixed-term contract (section 2 of article 10) could be revoked by a worker ahead of time in the event of illness, disability, infringement of the regulations governing individual or collective contracts, and for other valid reasons (as specified in the new versions of the relevant section drafted in 1980 and 1983).

The 1983 version also allowed workers to leave their jobs before the two months’ notice was up. In all cases, management was obliged to return the employee’s ‘work record book’ and pay any outstanding wages. These clauses were extremely detailed and one commentator even adds that the employee is not required to explain why he wishes to leave his job (this is in connection with a 1980 text which states that two weeks’ notice is sufficient – a mere three days in the case of seasonal workers). Only those who wished to quit their job while serving a non-custodial sentence had to obtain authorization, from the body supervising their sentence.

LABOUR DISPUTES

Labour disputes take up a lot of space in the labour codes, central and republican. A whole system was established, comprising an array of institutions and rules, to handle every possible kind of complaint by workers (including work norms). Thus, every large enterprise and office was required to have a ‘labour disputes committee’, with equal union-management representation. In smaller enterprises and offices, a ‘trade-union commission’ was the competent body, and if it could not settle a dispute it was referred to a local (town or district) tribunal. Disputes involving senior employees and technical staff were a matter for the management of the enterprise concerned. If the judgement went in favour of the plaintiff, management was required not only to compensate him but also to take measures to eliminate the causes of such disputes. Where management was deemed guilty of having violated workers’ rights, the case could end up in the courts.[13] In such instances, it was judged according to civil law. Prosecutors became involved and were authorized to accept complaints (in accordance with a list of very precise instructions); they even had the power to initiate proceedings if one of the parties broke the law. Employees involved in a dispute at a given level of an enterprise could simultaneously appeal to their senior management. They could go to the courts if they were not satisfied with the decision of their enterprise’s union commission. Employers had the same right. Finally, in the event of dismissal, employees could turn directly to the courts – just as employers could sue them for any damage they might have caused – without going through either the union commission or labour disputes committee.[14]

The code was highly elaborate and extremely detailed. It indicates that employees could act as legitimate parties in court actions over work-related issues, though it might be wondered whether the legal procedures were not excessively complicated for workers, whereas they were much more straightforward for employers. But the available statistics allow us to conclude that workers also learnt to use these procedures at different levels of conflict resolution, and turned in massive numbers to the courts, which were often more favourable to their cause than to the management’s.[15]

At all events, the work contract committed both parties. And if management had a lot of power, employees possessed a more effective weapon than resort to the courts: they could defend their interests by changing jobs. The phenomenon of labour turnover was studied by Soviet sociologists and statisticians in detail. Administrators – not workers – formed the privileged class, but given that labour shortages loomed on the horizon, the bureaucracy was forced to arrive at solutions and accommodations to keep workers in their posts. Larger enterprises disposed of more means to do this, offering housing, clubs, crèches and other amenities, or squeezing the expenses for them out of municipalities that often depended on the presence of such enterprises (particularly with the proliferation of factory towns – a long-forgotten chapter in the history of Western industrialization).

The broader social phenomenon just mentioned – labour turnover – affected all sectors. Underlying and surrounding the provisions of the labour code was a quite different reality, with constant changes of employer, and migration to areas with new jobs and back again when working, housing and climatic conditions proved too exacting. These labour-force trends presented economic planning with serious problems. The Stalinist solution – mobilization, coercion and police methods – was now excluded. The system’s rulers had to face what can legitimately be called a ‘labour market’ and the emergence of a tacit understanding between workers and the employer-state. It is encapsulated in the formula ‘You get what you pay for’ – or, in its surrealist version, ‘You pretend to pay us and we pretend to work’. But the term ‘labour market’ captures this reality better than the ‘surrealism’ beloved of some intellectuals. What was actually occurring was the emergence and operation of an open, direct process – and/or, in part, an informal, indirect process – of economic bargaining, which justifies the use of this term. Increasing labour shortages exercised implacable constraints, because employers were not only badly in need of manpower, but also – by virtue of a paradox that hovered over the employment situation – had an interest in retaining a reserve labour-force. This created an interesting anomaly: workers leaving jobs in difficult areas with a labour shortage, on the grounds that the state had not fulfilled its contractual obligations to guarantee decent living conditions, could return to regions with a labour surplus – and still find employment.

The developments we have just described – in policing and penal policy, the abolition of the Gulag and mass terror, legal codes and labour rights – also affected the functioning of the state, its bureaucracy, and the party. A reinvigoration of conservative reflexes, and corresponding institutional changes (including in the KGB), were the leadership’s response to what it perceived of the wider social world, particularly the world of work. Confronted with mounting social pressure for greater relaxation of the regime, some wanted to react, with the KGB’s help, by tightening the screws. But it was becoming ever more difficult to find the ‘screws’ for the job.

We can now turn our attention to one of the key law-enforcement agencies – the secret police – and the way it dealt with political opponents. As yet, we possess no authoritative history of the KGB and its archives are, at time of writing, still closed to researchers. We shall therefore have to make do with some of the information that has emerged.

In its various pre-Khrushchevite incarnations – Cheka, GPU, NKVD – the secret police had a chequered history that has been recounted by historians. From the creation of the Cheka (Chrezvychainaia Kommissiia) in 1917, its agents have always been officially referred to as ‘chekists’ (chekisty) – and still are in post-Soviet Russia. This unfailing attachment to a prestigious title, which is explained by the role of these agents in the revolutionary period, possibly served the tacit purpose of distancing the agency from the Stalinist period. Chekists fought for a great cause, risked their lives and died for it, whereas under Stalin NKVD operatives (nkvdisty) tortured and killed masses of innocent people. They too risked their lives, but not heroically: they might be eliminated by their patron to blot out the traces of the criminal deeds he himself ordered them to commit.

It is worth recalling that when, in 1934, the GPU was supposedly absorbed by the NKVD (Commissariat for Internal Affairs), it was in fact the reverse that occurred. The NKVD was taken over by the leadership of the GPU, which was kept intact inside the commissariat as the GUGB (General Directorate of State Security). In that way, the complex of political security and intelligence services, domestic and international, could at a moment’s notice become an independent agency (of the MGB or KGB variety), or return to being a component of the NKVD-MVD. It should also be remembered that under Stalin the latter was headed by the chief of the security services, and that the ‘part’ was therefore in control of the ‘whole’. Why such frequent, successive restructurings were required is a question for experts. For us, the key point is that the secret police and intelligence services remained substantially intact, even if the great purges took a heavy toll on them and numerous changes post-Stalin created agitation – sometimes chaos – in their ranks.

At one stage, the MVD – a bureaucratic ‘superpower’ – ruled over the Gulag, the whole intelligence complex and substantial military special forces, as well as border guards. In addition, it had all the usual functions of an interior ministry – public order, public records, local government supervision. After Stalin’s death its power was seriously curtailed, and in 1962 it was abolished as a Union ministry. On 10 February 1954 the MGB (Ministry of State Security) once again became independent of the MVD – this time for good. It was placed under the authority of General Serov, previously MVD deputy minister, and several MVD functions were transferred to it. Serov was moved from this position on 8 December 1958, having been appointed head of military counter-intelligence (GRU) and deputy chief of staff of the armed forces. The MGB, which in the interim had become the KGB (K for Komitet), was entrusted to A. N. Shelepin, who had started his career in the Komsomol, before heading the Central Committee department responsible for supervising republican party organizations. On Khrushchev’s instructions, Shelepin simplified the KGB’s sprawling organizational structure and proceeded to substantial staff reductions. These changes have been seen by some historians as ‘cardinal’ and are summed up in Khrushchev’s anti-militaristic phrase: ‘tearing off their pompous epaulettes and trouser stripes’ (it sounds more pithy in Russian: raspogonim, razlampasim). This was why neither Shelepin nor the new Interior Minister Dudorov was entitled to the military titles and uniforms so highly coveted by some leading figures.

Things fell slowly into place in the KGB’s Moscow headquarters on the Lubianka. The secret police found its bearings once again, though not without some significant changes in its modus operandi (which fell far short of what liberal-minded citizens, jurists and intellectuals wanted to see). The KGB’s internal structure remained unchanged from 1958 until the mid-1960s. At the same time, however, changes affecting the character of the regime – the growing importance of laws and legal codes, the considerable role of the legal professions, the diminished effectiveness of coercive measures in an increasingly urban society – were bound to have an impact on it. It is true that in this treacherous sphere there were ‘natural’ limits to change – notably because the same was true of the regime as a whole – and it is important not to forget them. Even so, the changes that did occur were substantial.

To begin with, curtailing the powers of Stalin’s secret police was carried out in stages, but amounted to a thorough cleansing operation. Disbanding such extra-judicial bodies as the special conferences, the kangaroo courts operated directly by the political police, or the sinister local ‘troikas’, marked a decisive step, which was followed by obliging the KGB to hand over the results of its investigations to the regular courts. This move eliminated some of the most shocking potential for arbitrariness, which the security services had been instructed to exploit to the full. The abolition of the Gulag as an industrial labour pool for the secret police, and the latter’s consequent disappearance as an economic actor, was another crucial turning point. The ongoing campaign against the venality and brutality of the police, whether secret or in uniform, tended in the same direction. In Part One we indicated how, as early as the 1920s, the GPU had bridled at supervision by public prosecutors – derided as ‘legalistic hair-splitting’ by the chekists, who preferred to have a free hand to pursue the regime’s enemies. The prosecutors had lost out at the time, and many of them later perished. Now, the restoration of supervision of KGB investigations by prosecutors was in train, though it was not without its ups and downs.

Among the significant measures taken under Khrushchev to rein in the Stalinist monstrosity and change the climate in the secret services was the introduction of new people to lead them, selected from the party apparatus. In his autobiography,[1] Mikoyan, who in reality was second in importance in the regime after Khrushchev, approved of this move, but criticized him for the appointment of General Serov, who had been NKVD head in the Ukraine from 2 September 1939 until 25 July 1941, at the time when Khrushchev was Central Committee first secretary there. The new ruler in the Kremlin trusted Serov in a way no one else did – at least if we are to believe Mikoyan, who claims that Khrushchev was easily manipulated by skilful sycophants. When finally forced to remove Serov by irrefutable arguments (they actually derived from opponents of Khrushchev), he still appointed him to an honorific position.

The MGB had been reconstructed in 1954 as an agency (the KGB) with jurisdiction over the whole USSR, and it absorbed a growing number of functions that had previously fallen to the MVD – border guards, among others. Unlike the MVD, however, it no longer ran an enormous prison system (that remained with the MVD) and operated only a smaller number of prisons for suspects under investigation. It is possible that it also possessed a larger camp or colony, but I have come across no clear evidence for this. On the other hand, the KGB constituted a formidable machine, concentrating intelligence, counter-intelligence and communications and transport security under one roof, and equipped with massive technical resources for surveillance, a typical detective service (‘external surveillance’ in its jargon), a whole host of other departments and subdepartments, and a large staff – not to mention stukachi, unpaid informers, recruited in any sector the KGB deemed sensitive. Such concentration of power was characteristic of the deeply ingrained Soviet belief in the virtues of centralization. It is yet more obvious if we round off this sketch by adding that the KGB was responsible for the security of Soviet leaders and, to a large extent, for what they knew (or what the KGB wanted them to know) about the USSR and the rest of the world. Hence the KGB was an administrative giant – but different from its predecessor under Stalin.

Finally, let us note that KGB chiefs were dependent on the power constellation at the top, and were doubtless tempted to support a preferred leader against some other figure. Thus, the KGB unquestionably played a role in the ousting of Khrushchev in 1964, as surmised by the well-informed R. G. Pikhoia. According to him, the ease with which the plot proceeded must have had something to do with Khrushchev’s tense relations with the security services. After Beria’s arrest in 1953, his deputy, S. N. Kruglov, had become head of the MVD, and many had interpreted this as a sign that Stalinist methods were on the way back – especially since various military industrial branches that had just been removed from the MVD were being restored to them. In fact, these ominous signs were generated by a partial and temporary short-circuit in the top leadership, and the purge of Beria’s old accomplices continued. At the end of August 1953 the head of the MVD reported that the mopping-up operation in regional directorates was over (certain officials were condemned to death or lengthy prison sentences). Taxed with all the ‘pogroms’ of the 1930s, the MVD’s influence was on the wane, while the future KGB’s star was rising.

A year later, an MVD was created for the Russian republic, which had not possessed one since 1930, when an all-Union Internal Affairs Ministry based in Moscow was deemed sufficient. This presaged further changes. In 1956, Kruglov was replaced at the top of the MVD by Dudorov, head of the Central Committee’s construction department. In 1956–7, many MVD cadres were dismissed as a logical prelude to the abolition on 13 January 1962 of the MVD of the USSR, whose functions were turned over to its republican namesakes. In Russia, even its name changed: it became MOOP (Ministry for Public Order). But the reader need not worry: it soon reverted to its old name, for in an authoritarian state such powerful traditions are not so readily blotted out.[2]

The KGB’s so-called ‘political’ functions were defined by its statute, approved by the Central Committee Presidium on 9 January 1959. It was a ‘political organ’ responsible for defending the system from internal and external enemies. With Shelepin’s appointment in 1958, a further thinning out of its ranks was conducted, extending the measures that had been taken since Khrushchev’s arrival in power. In January 1963, Shelepin was promoted to the Politburo and replaced at the head of the KGB by Semichastny (an old Komsomol comrade). That same year, Semichastny reported that 46,000 officers had been dismissed (half of them before 1959), and that more than 90 per cent of the generals and officers in military counter-intelligence had been transferred to civilian jobs ‘in the course of the last four years’ (he probably meant 1959–63). New agents arrived with party and Komsomol references. On the other hand, many former KGB operatives were redeployed to work in the party, soviets, or in the Prosecutor’s offices. Shelepin and Semichastny’s KGB, strengthened by party cadres who were supposed to rekindle its ideological fervour, once again regarded itself as an ‘armed detachment of the party’ (Stalin’s formula), and not necessarily as pro-Khrushchev. But many of the old cadres who survived must have been upset by the dismissal of tens of thousands of agents, the reduction in their salaries, and the elimination of several perks (free medicine, privileges for length of service).

The KGB could not but inherit a sinister reputation from the Stalinist NKVD. In the USSR and throughout the world, it ‘enjoyed’ the image of the repressive agency of a regime whose foundations largely rested on repression (it is enough to refer to the list of its duties). In reality, however, its activities in this sphere did not have much in common with those of the MVD during the Stalinist period. We now possess data on the number of arrests and types of sentence meted out to opponents in the broad sense. Not unlike the trend observed in other spheres, they were now on another scale, even though it should be specified that the level of repression was determined by the leadership decisions, not exclusively by the KGB. Horrified and fascinated by the absurdity of Stalin’s repression, and amply supplied with data about it, Western opinion readily accepted the idea that it continued on the same scale and with the same means after his demise. In fact, however, the two periods are not comparable – if only because the secret police, however powerful, had lost the outrageous power to judge and punish their victims themselves. Their cases now had to go to court. As for KGB investigations, as with the Cheka at the beginning of the NEP, they had to be registered with the Prosecutor General or local prosecutors. Their results had to be communicated to the special department of the Prosecutor’s Office that oversaw such investigations (the same applied at local level). The available evidence, albeit still scanty, indicates that these procedures were observed – although we may assume that the opening of the archives will disclose shortcomings in this supervision. Predictably, respect for procedures depended on the relative weight of conservative and reformist currents in the leadership. Moreover, the outcome of strictly political cases and trials, directly handled by the Politburo in accordance with the regime’s interests, was a foregone conclusion: judges and prosecutors would simply act out a scenario decided elsewhere, and the professed guarantees were cast aside. Since persons accused of political crimes, notably the dissidents, no longer faced the death penalty, national and international public opinion could play a role. Debate within the regime and considerations of high politics would not infrequently introduce some important correctives. In the case of less high-profile individual and group oppositional activity, legal proceedings followed their normal course. We now possess a great deal of information about the number of such cases and the sentences handed down, appealed, reduced or dismissed.

OPPONENTS AND CRITICS

We shall start with the information supplied by the KGB to the government about anti-Soviet political activities. The KGB leadership was concerned about what it perceived as a growing mood of opposition in the country.[3] In the first half of 1962, it amounted to nothing less than an ‘explosion of popular discontent with Khrushchev’s policies’ (this is Pikhoja’s conclusion, not the KGB’s own assessment). In this period, the number of anonymous anti-Soviet leaflets and letters in circulation was twice as high as in the first six months of 1961: 7,705 leaflets, produced by 2,522 authors, were seized. In the first six months of 1962, sixty anti-Soviet groups – invariably composed of only a few individuals – had been uncovered, compared with forty-seven for the whole of the previous year. After a lengthy interval, leaflets lauding the ‘anti-party group’ (Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov), which had been disbanded in 1957, began to appear. The chekists managed to identify 1,039 authors of 6,726 anti-Soviet documents: among them were to be found 364 workers, 192 employees, 210 students or secondary-school pupils, 105 pensioners and 60 kolkhoz members. More than 40 per cent of these authors had a secondary-school education; 47 per cent were younger than thirty; and some were party and military veterans. We leave it to readers to decide what conclusions to draw from these statistics. But other, more dramatic events were to jolt the Central Committee and KGB.

At the end of May 1962, reacting to a deteriorating supply situation, the government increased food prices and at the same time ordered factory managers to raise output norms without increasing wages. Given that kolkhoz members had just been prohibited from growing food on their private plots, Khrushchev’s popularity was at its nadir. The KGB recorded signs of growing popular discontent. At Novocherkask, in the Rostov-on-Don region, things took an especially dramatic turn. Between 1 and 3 June 1962, protest exploded in an important factory and spread to the whole city: demonstrations, blockades of trains, attacks on party and KGB offices, beating up of policemen. The local administration, party and military were paralysed: soldiers fraternized with the strikers and their officers did not issue orders to open fire. For them, as for the KGB, the situation was unheard of. But when it threatened to get completely out of control, Moscow dispatched troops and the rioting was suppressed, at the cost of twenty-three dead and numerous wounded. Many arrests and sanctions followed.[4]

Events like this were worrying, because they demonstrated that the system could break down and lose control throughout a city: the soviet officials and party secretaries were arrogant, unpopular bureaucrats who collapsed when it came to the crunch. They often had no local roots and no popular following.

Thereafter, further disorders, varying in kind and importance, required the intervention of troops. Hitherto they had not been taken too seriously, but now they were followed with particular attention and measures were adopted to prevent any recurrence. The protest movement in Novocherkask had caught the KGB unawares and unprepared, and it was reeling from its failure. The Central Committee decided to strengthen the secret police. Perhaps Khrushchev had reason to regret his policy towards the KGB and even, more generally, his anti-Stalinism.

Various documents from the end of 1962 and the beginning of 1963 allow us access to the KGB’s inner sanctum and to hear its chiefs talking, reasoning, organizing and acting. The new KGB head Semichastny reverted to the old-style repressive and aggressive attitude towards enemies. This approach, which his agencies tended to celebrate as authentically ‘chekist’, was in fact rooted in the ideology of the conservatives, shared by Semichastny when a Komsomol functionary. In July 1962 the Central Committee received a memo from a commission of seven senior officials (Shelepin, Semichastny, Ivashutin, Zakharov, Tikunov, Rudenko and Mironov – the last-named a party apparatchik with his eye on the KGB leadership). It offered a series of proposals for stepping up the struggle against anti-Soviet activities and possible mass disorder.[5] It was argued that there was no need for any new decisions; existing directives from the Central Committee and Khrushchev personally were adequate for the task. The commission of seven merely wanted to propose some supplementary measures relating to the activity of certain administrative bodies – measures that featured in draft orders drawn up by the head of the KGB and the Prosecutor General. It added that the MVD of the Russian Federation intended to create reserve units within its existing internal armed forces, to be used, should the need arise, to guard public buildings, communication centres, radio stations, banks and prisons (in case of riots), and which would be equipped with special weapons and communications systems. To this end, the MVD of the Russian Federation had presented a draft to the Central Committee office that handled the affairs of the Russian party.

This text did not wish to be alarmist. The same is not true, however, of one written by Semichastny personally and sent separately, which was much more ‘activist’. His reference to the mass disorders occurring in different parts of the country possibly conveys genuine alarm. But it might also have been intended to present himself and the KGB as more indispensable than ever. In fact the few figures he provided were scarcely alarming – especially in a country as vast as the USSR.

The Presidium of the Central Committee approved the drafts of the decisions that Semichastny and Rudenko (the Prosecutor General) were to implement in their respective domains. The KGB was authorized to recruit a further 400 agents for regional counter-intelligence services. Parts of the text were to be communicated to party secretaries at regional and district level. But only key members of the Politburo and leaders of the MVD and KGB could have sight of the whole text; local officials were to be restricted to paragraphs 1 and 3, meaning that they were not to know that the KGB was recruiting an additional 400 agents (they did not always see eye to eye with the local KGB).

This text is followed by another document, marked ‘top secret’, containing the draft of an order by Semichastny to his agents enjoining them to ‘intensify the KGB’s struggle against demonstrations of hostility by anti-Soviet elements’. It begins with a report on the period between the Twentieth and Twenty-second Congresses (1956–61). According to Semichastny, links between the KGB and the population had been strengthened, allowing for an improvement in intelligence and ‘operational activities’. ‘Prophylactic’ measures (a notion we shall return to) had also paid off However, many KGB agencies had relaxed their guard in uncovering and suppressing anti-Soviet activities. Upright citizens were with the government, on the domestic and international fronts alike, but the fact that society still harboured anti-social elements was something not to be underestimated. Influenced by hostile foreign propaganda, they were spreading malicious slanders against the party and sometimes exploited temporary difficulties to incite Soviet citizens to riot. In recent years, such disorders had included the sacking of administrative buildings, the destruction of public property, attacks on state representatives, and other such excesses. The initiators or perpetrators were mostly criminals and hooligans, but all sorts of people hostile to the regime had also emerged from the shadows – former collaborators with the Germans, for example, or members of churches and sects. Having served their sentences, all these hostile elements were moving to the south, and they might have played a prominent role in the Novocherkask events. Dealing with the situation demanded both an intensification of the struggle against the subversive activities of foreign intelligence agencies and an improvement in KGB operations against the internal enemy. Moreover, in some KGB units, agents in leadership positions, or with responsibilities for operations on the ground, were guilty of a certain complacency and were not taking the requisite measures, which should include repression.

Semichastny mentioned other chinks in the KGB’s armour. Thus, enterprises in the military–industrial complex had intelligence agencies. However, in many important enterprises deemed non-strategic, even though they were formally assigned to KGB officers, no one was actually doing the operative work. They had no secret agents and no reliable informers, with the result that the KGB received no timely information on matters of operational interest. The same was true of many higher education institutions. Furthermore, counter-intelligence units were falling down on what should be a constant preoccupation – i.e. surveillance of suspect individuals after they had served their sentences: foreign agents, members of nationalist and foreign organizations, former Nazis and their collaborators, members of churches and sects. In numerous instances, even the residence of such people was not registered, making surveillance impossible; and many of those on file had been lost sight of.

Semichastny also deplored the lack of cooperation with the MVD and the absence of common plans for action against anti-social elements (who ‘live a parasitic existence’). The KGB had no information about where they gathered, and no measures were in place to deal with them in the event of them getting out of hand. This was one of the reasons why, in several cases, mass disorder had not been prevented, with far-reaching consequences.

These ‘mass disorders’ – a term and reality that were manifestly traumatizing for the KGB chief – had been the subject of KGB inquiries; in particular, to investigate how local chekists had dealt with them. What had emerged was that the latter were unprepared. As soon as the explosion occurred, contact between operational forces and intelligence agents was lost. The forces on the ground did not possess the requisite information and had no way of manipulating the rioters, because there were no agents planted in their ranks.

At this point we might pose a question: would the presence of plants have prevented the disorders? Only if the disorders were organized. But they were not – plants would not have made a difference. The disorders were provoked by the indolence of local leaders. The KGB chief did not raise such questions. His report was followed by a six-page order, beginning with the formula ‘I am therefore ordering that’, and containing thirteen points. Its general philosophy was this: without weakening the fight against foreign agents, it was imperative to strengthen the internal intelligence service and make it a priority issue. To the potentially dangerous elements he had already listed, Semichastny now added those who had been tried in the past for anti-state crimes, émigrés who had returned to the USSR, and any foreigners from capitalist countries. It was also necessary to make better use of technical services and the network of detectives; and to improve political training for secret agents and informers so that they were better equipped to identify people with hostile attitudes and intentions, potential fomenters of mass disorder and perpetrators of terrorist acts, as well as authors of leaflets and other anonymous material spreading provocative rumours and inciting people to riot. In liaison with party bodies, measures should be taken to isolate such individuals. It was also important to explain to cadres that preventive operations by the KGB should not replace or weaken the fight against enemies who had already been identified.

The KGB chief went on to list concrete organizational measures and plans for acquiring technical resources. He once again stressed the need to strengthen intelligence activity in higher education and special technical schools, as well as among the intelligentsia. This set of measures was aimed at preventing, with the party’s help, political errors and dangerous ideological deviations, which could easily lead to anti-Soviet activity. The long order closed on a ‘progressive’ note: make sure that no enemy goes unpunished and that no innocent people are subject to unjustified repression.

The available data still do not allow us to answer this question: How serious were the ‘increase in oppositional sentiment’ and ‘explosions of popular discontent’ referred to by one of our sources (Pikhoia)? We know that in 1962 the KGB flushed out more authors of anonymous letters than in the previous year and that Khrushchev’s policies were breeding widespread discontent. But that is not new. We also know of several mass riots that caught the KGB unawares (Novocherkask was the most dramatic). But we do not know how to interpret these events. In the third part of this work, we shall provide data that make it possible to compare mass riots under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. We shall discover that the system was never threatened, but that ideological hard-liners and the KGB may have had an interest in exaggerating the scale of the problem.

Conservative leaders like Semichastny, supporters of a hard line, painted a picture of a regime under attack: this was their way of thinking. But the kind of disorder he referred to was easily identifiable in advance and controllable, and its perpetrators were incapable of organizing politically. It is more than likely that his analysis was contested within the KGB itself. Semichastny himself may unwittingly have hinted as much when he confided that the recent influx into the KGB of a large squad of Komsomol and party officials (including himself) was not appreciated by older cadres. We know from other sources that these ‘malcontents’ regarded themselves as professionals and found the new arrivals from the Komsomol impertinent, unduly ideological, and incompetent. It therefore seems plausible that there were leaders, taxed with ‘insufficient vigilance’ by Semichastny, who had a different interpretation of the events and preferred different policies. Plenty of hints to this effect are to be found in the memoirs of ex-KGB senior officials. There were intelligent people in the KGB’s ranks, particularly in the agencies responsible for analysing intelligence, and they had no difficulty in seeing that Semichastny’s text lacked not only analytical content but also any self-critical reflection. It made do with a list of regrettable incidents, whose source could be traced to a few guilty individuals, and his response consisted in suggesting technical surveillance and intelligence measures – as well as the ‘bonus’ of 400 additional officers for the whole country.

This hard ideological-repressive line, which for Semichastny was self-explanatory, did not have to emanate from within the KGB itself. It came straight from the Komsomol, where opponents of Khrushchev’s earlier de-Stalinization policies began to show signs of rebellion. We find similar refrains in conservative discourse everywhere – in particular, a tendency to regard ‘immorality’ as a direct prelude to criminality.

For Semichastny, ‘vagrants’ were potential enemies of the state and anyone without regular work was, by definition, about to engage in an anti-Soviet plot. Believers were also potential culprits, not on account of their religious faith but because of their tendency to create organizations, which virtually amounted to a conspiracy in the making. All this explains why Semichastny’s KGB spied on citizens far beyond the remit of its statutes and at the expense of its actual tasks, which would have kept it fully occupied.

The background to the picture painted by the KGB chief suggested that the situation was more tense in the USSR than previously. Khrushchev was losing any sense of direction and vacillating. He had increased prices and work norms at a time of food shortages. Retreating from his initial anti-Stalinist ardour, which had proved too costly politically, he developed a more ‘conservative’ line just at the time when bold new initiatives were needed. (We shall return to these issues in due course.) Nineteen sixty-three was the year in which legislation against political opponents was reinforced by six articles in the criminal code redefining crimes against the state. This initiative led to a certain increase in the number of arrests, albeit a rather small one. From 1966 onwards, we even witness a clear decline in political persecution.

COUNTERING THE OPPOSITION: LAWS AGAINST CRITICS

Laws against political critics, targeted at ‘especially dangerous crimes against the state’, achieved notoriety during the Cold War when the phenomenon of dissidence emerged. Criminal prosecution of it was based on the following set of articles:

Most cases of a political character were brought for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’, ‘organizational activities’, defamation of the state, or (in lesser numbers) violation of the law on separation of Church and state. According to the KGB, 8,124 trials were held for ‘anti-Soviet manifestations’ during the Khrushchev–Brezhnev–Chernenko periods (1957–85), most of them on the basis of the articles targeting anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda and the deliberate circulation of calumnies against the state – the two most widely used articles.[7]

POLITICAL ARRESTS AND ‘PROPHYLAXIS’ (1959–74)

For a period of twenty-eight years, the above figures seem ‘disappointingly’ low. Let us turn to a statistical table drawn up by an authoritative source,[8] furnishing data on repression in four four-year periods: 1959–62, 1963–6, 1967–70, 1971–4. The total number of cases is greater than that given by the KGB for the period 1957–85, because it includes all convictions for crimes against the state based on the six articles of the criminal code. For the four periods, the respective totals are as follows: 5,413, 3,251, 2,456, and 2,424. In the first period, an average of 1,354 persons per annum were charged; the figure drops to 606 for the last period. The majority of the accused were pursued for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda: 1,601 in the first period and 348 in the last. Readers will find full details in Appendix 3. But we should also add the category of those who were not charged or convicted, but made subject to ‘prophylactic’ procedures: 58,291 between 1967 and 1970 and 63,108 between 1971 and 1974. The trigger for a ‘prophylactic’ intervention by the KGB was suspicious contacts with foreigners, treasonable intentions or harmful political manifestations. ‘Prophylaxis’ could be carried on in the workplace and take the form of an official warning. In the event of recidivism, cases could be referred to the courts (this occurred in only 150 cases over eight years). Some publications supply different figures, using different timespans and recording the various alleged offences. But Pikhoia’s data seem the most reliable (they doubtless derive from the presidential archive) and also provide information on categories of offence.

We know more about this curious procedure of ‘prophylaxis’ thanks to data from the KGB for the years 1967–72. Its then head was Andropov, and although its reports still bristled with the usual array of crimes despised by the regime, the emphasis on prophylactic work now became more pronounced. It consisted in ‘measures to prevent attempts at organized subversive activities by nationalist, revisionist and other anti-Soviet elements’ and to ‘confine the potentially dangerous groups that tend to appear here and there’.

This method was not without ambiguities and surprises. Already in use under Shelepin, or even earlier, it took its name from medical terminology, implying that anyone entertaining political opinions different from those of the regime was in need of ‘treatment’. Under Andropov it became a broader strategy, which was actually preferred to other means. We do not possess any sources on discussions about the validity of this option, but it is interesting to examine the report presented to the Central Committee by Andropov and the Prosecutor General Rudenko on 11 October 1972, which precisely deals with the way in which prophylaxis operated.[9]

It is described as being quite widespread. Between 1967 and 1972, 3,096 political groups had been discovered and 13,602 people belonging to them had been subject to prophylaxis. In other words, they had not been arrested, but summoned for an interview with a KGB officer who had explained the erroneous character of their positions or actions. Rather politely, but without concealing the danger they found themselves in, the officer had advised them to desist. In 1967, 2,196 people from 502 groups were ‘interviewed’ in this way; in 1968, 2,870 from 625 groups; in 1969, 3,130 from 733 groups; in 1970, 3,102 from 709 groups; and in 1971, 2,304 from 527 groups. Such groups, which typically comprised only a few people, had been uncovered in Moscow, Sverdlovsk, Tula, Vladimir, Omsk, Kazan and Tiumen, as well as the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia, Moldavia, Kazakhstan, and so on.

Thanks to these preventative measures, the number of arrests for anti-Soviet propaganda had fallen. The majority of interviewees left it at that, but others persisted in scheming that might induce them to commit a ‘crime against the state’. In order to strengthen preventative action against people contemplating criminal activity, and to suppress manifestations by anti-social elements more actively, the authors of the report recommended that the KGB should be authorized, if necessary, to issue a written warning to such people requesting them to desist from politically harmful activity and spelling out the consequences if they refused to comply.

Andropov and Rudenko believed that such a course of action might increase the sense of moral responsibility of those so warned. If they did then commit criminal acts, they should be arrested, subject to preliminary investigation, and turned over to the courts for a ‘character assessment’.

The authors appended a draft resolution for the Central Committee and a draft decree for the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet – the standard bureaucratic procedure when submitting a proposal – with a request that they be considered. Unlike the 1962–3 KGB texts deploring ‘mass disorder’, there was no suggestion this time that the system was threatened. The stress on ‘preventative medicine’, which sounded too soft to conservative ears, was quite liberal for a country like the USSR. A sense of imminent danger might certainly induce regression to the Semichastny-style line, but there was no question of it in the immediate future. Yet the longer-term prospects for the system’s health were scarcely reassuring, as our later excursion into economic issues will show.

In one respect there was something troubling about this ‘preventative medicine’. What did ‘character assessment’ actually mean? Among other things, it could lead to the person in question being sent, not to prison, but to a psychiatric clinic. This can seem like a fairly lenient gesture by judges anywhere. But abuses are possible and, in the case of the Soviet Union, there were numerous well-documented instances of the use of psychiatric wards to incarcerate perfectly sane people, whose political positions were identified as paranoid delirium or some such, and who were pumped full of harmful drugs. This was testimony to the ugly and reactionary mentality of some Soviet leaders.

There is an abundant literature on this subject in the West, but I have not as yet come across any satisfactory sources in Russia itself. We still do not know how long such practices persisted and how many people they affected. We do know that there were internal debates about the propriety of such methods, which were not unanimously supported within the government. It became public knowledge that figures from the academic community, and certainly legal scholars, had protested to the Central Committee – particularly in the case of the geneticist Zhores Medvedev, who was released. There is no doubt that the issue was debated within the KGB, by Andropov and people around him, and probably reached the Politburo.[10]

The actual number of people proceeded against (including by way of prophylaxis) does not in itself alter the fact that the Soviet system was politically retrograde, allowing its opponents’ propaganda to score points. The regime possessed repulsive features that cost it dear in the international arena. But the scope of the repression we are dealing with for the post-Stalinist period – an average of 312 cases a year for twenty-six years for the two main political crimes (and in some cases, reduction or quashing of sentences by a higher court) – constitutes not merely a statistic, but an index: this was no longer Stalinism and it does not warrant description of the USSR as the ‘Evil Empire’, which was common in the West. Apocalyptic invective of this sort makes the Soviet Union seem rather innocent by comparison. Leaders should control their rhetoric, lest it rebounds.

Whatever their precise number, dissidents, of whom the most well-known were Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and later Sharansky, were aggressively followed and spied on by Andropov’s agencies. Compromising materials were confiscated and hostile witnesses sought out and induced to testify, and so on. But we will arrive at a better understanding of the specific approach adopted by Andropov, KGB chief since mid-1967, if we compare it with what ‘normal conservatives’ would have liked to see him do in each particular case. It is true that the latter no longer demanded the death penalty. But they still sought criminal prosecution and sentences that would be heavy enough to remove culprits from the scene, by exiling them to a remote region where they could not be seen or heard. In each instance, Andropov pressed for the adoption of a more clement course – in particular, expulsion from the Soviet Union. Sakharov, for example, was exiled to Gorky – a city whose climate and living conditions did not greatly differ from Moscow’s. The way that the West used each case (indeed, the whole dissident movement) for its own purposes, and the way in which different dissidents responded to the West’s appeal, could not escape the KGB chief or be a matter of indifference to him, quite independently of the fact that excessive ‘clemency’ might bring his career to an abrupt end.

There is an enormous literature in the West on the dissidents. We shall restrict ourselves to a few points and, in the first instance, to the case of Solzhenitsyn, who together with Sakharov was the most famous of them (even though one cannot imagine two more different personalities). When discussing Solzhenitsyn, we shall also say something about the remarkable case of an opponent from within the system – namely, the editor of the literary journal Novyi Mir, the poet Alexander Tvardovsky. Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and Tvardovsky constitute a ‘typology’ of political opposition and social criticism, even if they do not cover all its varieties and nuances, from open protest to silent ‘internal emigration’ via rejection through indifference and the pursuit of reforms from within the regime.

The Solzhenitsyn phenomenon has various facets. Viewed from afar (i.e. from abroad), he looked like a giant single-handedly taking on a dictatorial machine. The picture has become more complicated over time. Better knowledge of his personality would explain why he did not have only admirers in Russia. He also had many critics among liberal minded oppositionists, probably because they did not regard him as a democrat. As long as he waged his battle from the inside, foreign observers assumed that he was fighting for democratization of the system: the cause he was defending – greater freedom for intellectuals, and especially writers – would help to expand political freedom for all citizens. However, once he was exiled in the West it soon transpired – as in many other cases – that anti-communism was not automatically a vehicle for democracy. Solzhenitsyn’s struggle was in fact inspired by, and served, a profoundly anti-democratic ideology, combining elements of ‘national-statism’ with archaic traits of the Orthodox religion; it was hostile not only to the ills of the West but also to the very concept of democracy. In short, Solzhenitsyn harboured a deep authoritarianism of his own devising which, if not formulated when he first appeared on the public stage, developed in the course of his struggle – especially at the stage of his life when he sensed that higher powers were summoning him to ‘slay the dragon’, and single-handedly at that, by publishing his Gulag Archipelago.

Thrown in the face of the Soviet regime, a book like The Gulag Archipelago may be regarded as an act of literary-political revenge: condemnation of a system that had betrayed its own ideals and those of humanity by creating hell on earth for millions of people, including Solzhenitsyn. Yet he did not offer the slightest hint that by the time of its publication the Gulag as he had known it no longer existed. To have said as much would have been an act of political honesty and would have required of him a deeper critical analysis of the system, with arguments adapted to post-Stalinist Russia. But he did not offer one; and it was of no significance to him. It was much simpler to attack the Soviet Union for its Stalinist history and pretend that it still persisted – something that also fitted his self-image. For Solzhenitsyn considered himself the depository of higher values inherited from Russia’s distant past, and it was with reference to that past that he sought to suggest remedies for twentieth-century Russia.

There were excellent reasons why his celebrated novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in Tvardovsky’s Novyi Mir, should have been unanimously well received in Russia. Resistance to a degrading penal system was identified with indestructible human values, personified by a simple working man, a peasant, who had the inner strength to resist the degradation inflicted on him by his jailers. But there were equally good reasons why The Gulag Archipelago, written and published when the Gulag had essentially been dismantled, was badly received by many internal critics, who regarded it as an apocalyptic exaggeration doubtless very useful to the USSR’s enemies, but damaging for the democratic struggle against a system which, albeit modernized, remained quite primitive in many ways. Many critics of Soviet authoritarianism could not but reject Solzhenitsyn’s alternative, as well as his pretensions to the status of liberator. A fine writer, but politically inept and with a highly inflated sense of his own importance, Solzhenitsyn lacked sufficient grasp of reality to think in political terms. In this respect, the contrast with such figures as Andrei Sakharov, Roy Medvedev or Andrei Sinyavsky could not be more pronounced.

His autobiography The Calf and the Oak supplies us with some of the keys to his personality – notably his sense of having been selected to accomplish a mystical mission, but also some of the other, less attractive characteristics that prompted him to engage in a vicious (and quite unexpected) attack on Tvardovsky and his colleagues at Novyi Mir. These were the people who had fought so hard for Solzhenitsyn and his work in the Soviet Union, and who launched him onto the national – indeed, international – stage. He accused the editorial board of cowardice, self-glorification, ineptitude and duplicity. The response by Tvardovsky’s former deputy, Vladimir Lakshin – an outstanding literary critic and essayist – was powerful, indignant and devastating.[11] In his psychological portrait of Solzhenitsyn, Lakshin highlights the characteristics that helped him to survive the camps. In fact, he writes, Solzhenitsyn had assimilated the lessons of the Gulag only too well. He was a product of the camps, who identified with the zek and had always retained the zek mentality.

Highly relevant, this analysis will only briefly detain us here. The crucial question, already alluded to, is what Solzhenitsyn was fighting for. The Novyi Mir milieu was broadly socialist or social-democratic, and the battles they engaged in, however cautiously, were rooted in that ideology. This, more than anything else, was what provoked Solzhenitsyn’s fury. Lakshin was highly dubious about the programme offered by Solzhenitsyn to his fellow citizens: ‘Judging by his idyllic conception of our pre-revolutionary past, he seems to think that Russia’s only future is… her past.’ This boiled down to advising the Soviet leadership to renounce its ideology in favour of nationalism and Orthodoxy: ‘What emerges from the fog of his verbiage is the triad proposed by Count Uvarov [in the nineteenth century]: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nation.’ Lakshin does not deny Solzhenitsyn’s great talent or his role in fighting evil, but he deplores that fact that he seems incapable of deriving anything positive from it:

Lakshin’s rejection of Solzhenitsyn’s message becomes ever more bitter and adamant:

The fury, bitterness and complexity of the battles over the Soviet system, and the drama lived by those engaged in them, are conveyed by these few quotations. No one won; everyone was right; everyone lost. Solzhenitsyn returned to his country liberated from communism and found it ‘in a state of collapse’ (such was the title of his book, published in 1998). The amazing journal Novyi Mir was progressively throttled after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It fought on until the Writers’ Union appointed a new editorial board without consulting Tvardovsky, thereby forcing him to resign (February 1970). He died shortly thereafter, a broken, bitter man who bequeathed a legacy of great poetry and personal nobility.

We have briefly dealt with some aspects of opposition and dissidence, after having mapped out the evolution of forms of political repression in the post-Stalin period. The sound and fury over dissidence at home and especially abroad, and the authorities’ treatment of it, should not be allowed to obscure the systemic trends that were at work in the Soviet Union. It is one thing when a worker cannot leave his job or legally protest against injustice in the workplace; it is quite another when he can do so. A system denying all rights was supplanted by a system of laws, rights and guarantees.

Eliminating the notion of ‘counter-revolutionary crime’, and replacing it by that of ‘especially dangerous crime against the state’, might seem merely cosmetic and utterly irrelevant to those persecuted and prosecuted for such crimes. In this context, biography counts for more than historiography. But for historians, changes involve transition to another stage. We have already signalled the fact that the Soviet leadership had a justifiably poor reputation abroad for political repression. And yet, when a penal system amounting to arbitrary punishment and slave labour is transformed into one where slave labour is abolished, where judicial procedures exist, where prisoners possess certain rights and means of challenging the prison administration, where they can maintain access with the outside world, consult a lawyer, protest legally against their treatment, and when the system recognizes that it has an interest in establishing a modicum of legality in the penal domain – when all this obtains, we are dealing with a different kind of regime. To suffer a term of imprisonment for political opinions produces a legitimate sense of injustice, and the biographical experience eclipses the historical dimension: ‘Why should I care if the punishment would have been worse ten years earlier?’ For their part, however, historians cannot discount what would have happened to prisoners – and their families – ten years earlier.

The secret police, which had hitherto operated completely unchecked – running amok, arresting, torturing, imprisoning and shooting almost at will – was now brought under control: the KGB was no longer empowered to convict and sentence; and its investigations were subject to oversight by divisions within the Prosecutor’s Office at all levels created for the purpose. The Prosecutor General now exercised this power at the very heart of a dictatorial system which, in Stalin’s time, had also massacred a good number of unduly ‘nosy’ prosecutors. From March 1953 (and up until 1991), the department of the Prosecutor’s Office responsible for oversight of KGB investigations had to be informed of any case opened by the secret police and would open its own file at the same time. It was also empowered to re-examine cases in the event of appeals by convicted persons or their relatives. They could then refer the case back to the courts (instances of a reduction in sentence were quite frequent), or initiate an appeals process for the rehabilitation of the convicted person or the amendment of the offence (on the basis of a different article in the criminal code from that of the original trial).[12]

These facts and trends, like many others, can be submitted to two types of comparison, requiring us to subject each phenomenon to two different interpretations. Thus, in the first instance the Soviet Union can be compared with other countries. Here the inability of the regime to accept society’s increasing political differentiation, its fear and denial of independent opinions (a basic right in a modern civilized society), demonstrates the inferiority of the system, which had found ways of tolerating or professing more than one opinion, but generally of a rather conservative complexion. The Soviet Union paid a heavy political price for this in international opinion. And it may come as a revelation to some to learn that Soviet intellectuals were not the only ones concerned about this: such people were also to be found in the KGB’s ranks.

So it is scarcely surprising if the Soviet authorities resorted to an ‘active-reactive’ policy, introducing or reviving a whole range of laws specifically designed to counter critics who explicitly or implicitly sided with the Western bloc. As regards the system’s ‘inferiority’ (its dictatorial character), the laws against ‘anti-state crimes’ that were supposed to defend it from opponents were in themselves evidence of its failure – testimonium paupertatis. When its rulers wanted critics to be silenced, the various legal guarantees would be set aside and judges, secret services and prosecutors would operate hand in glove.

The second relevant historical comparison is with the country’s own past. The anti-state crime laws were now on the statute books for all to see; and to be prosecuted, people actually had to violate them. The intention to commit a criminal act was no longer sufficient to justify such arrests, which were now illegal. The new version of an extensive criminal code and the strengthening of legal institutions afforded a marked contrast with the past, even if the overall framework remained undemocratic. This aspect of political repression was a subject of continual debate among the leadership, jurists, and the KGB; and it explains the protests from different, mainly academic circles when they judged that the regime was not respecting its own legal rules. Such phenomena were part of the political scene and should be perceived as such.

A further consideration comes to mind in the context of a historical reflection. We have stressed that historical changes were in train in all aspects of social existence, including the very character of the regime. Were it not for such phenomena, which attest to the system’s accommodation to new realities, including in its repressive practices, we would be unable to explain how and why the regime disappeared from the historical stage without firing a shot.

A realistic approach, which does not shy away from unpalatable facts, is bound to admit that democracies which achieve the status of great powers do not always respect rights and are not always very democratic. Countries without a democratic system are not necessarily ‘guilty’ because they lack one. Democracy is not a plant that flourishes everywhere. Historical realities do not necessarily correspond to ideals or propaganda claims. The West knows perfectly well whose human rights are to be promoted and whose can be neglected or even curtailed. Ardour for democratic freedoms burns or dims according to global strategic considerations. Cold War pressures, and the whole complex put in place by the West (with the intelligence services playing a leading role) to identify the slightest crack in the other camp, were not invented by Soviet paranoia. And they did nothing to help the small groups or isolated individuals in the USSR who sought to liberalize the regime.

The background to the changes we have sketched, particularly in the sphere of penal policy and what I have called the ‘de-Stalinization of the workplace’, was a momentous process of urbanization – the commanding factor in the history of the USSR. After the war – in stages, obviously – urbanization inevitably began to have a powerful impact on society, culture, mentalities, and even the state. An accelerated transition from a predominantly rural society to a mainly urban one involved, at halfway stage, a phase when the two types of society were basically intermingled. Frequently incompatible, they coexisted in an explosive mix and the historical distance between them remained very considerable. The Soviet Union became ‘semi-urban’ in 1960, but the Russian Federation had crossed this threshold earlier. Until 1958 there was no official definition of a ‘town’ or ‘urban settlement’ valid for the whole Soviet Union; each republic had its own. In 1958 the threshold was fixed at 12,000 inhabitants for a town and 2,000 for an ‘urban settlement’, provided at least 50 per cent of the population were not directly employed in agriculture.

So this intermediate phase could be considered a historical stage in its own right for the country and its regime. The rural population, which supplied the bulk of the new urban population, ‘ruralized’ the towns before the latter succeeded in urbanizing the rural folk. That would happen only in the post-Stalin period – and not without much friction and many ‘side effects’. Although not without government input, these processes were basically spontaneous. They oblige us temporarily to distance ourselves from the idea of a rigid party-state dominating and controlling everything, and to reveal something passed over by most studies: ‘spontaneity’ (stikhiia, a term of Greek origin). In any serious general history of the USSR, stikhiia should be a legitimate – and sometimes central – topic, although it seems unacceptable to analysts with an overly politicized view of matters.

Scarcely a smooth process, urbanization was the crucial novelty of the twentieth century in Russian history and may be reckoned to have been completed by the mid-1960s. By then, the majority of the population was composed of town dwellers in Russia, the Ukraine and the Baltic states. Some of the towns were old, but most were of recent construction. One randomly selected index is revealing about the conditions of this urbanization: in Soviet towns in the 1960s, 60 per cent of families lived in state-owned housing with communal kitchens and toilets. Indicative of low living standards, this statistic also points to excessively rapid and, we might safely add, ‘unplanned’ urbanization. Likewise largely unplanned, the consequences were many and various. Whatever the specificities of the process in the USSR, some of them are common to cases of precipitous urbanization elsewhere. We shall return to this point when we consider other data, but we can already venture that at this juncture in its history the country embarked on a novel stage: it became a new society whose interaction with the state assumed different forms. The juxtaposition of these two themes will lead us to consider parameters that proved decisive for the system’s vitality, longevity and mortality.

We have already dealt with labour mobility and an emerging ‘labour market’, which became an accepted reality. To extend the canvas to the whole society, we must signal an important manifestation of ‘spontaneity’ in action: namely, powerful migration flows, which the authorities could no longer control through the previous routine of sanctions and restrictions. In the new environment of massive population movements other strategies had to be conceived and applied. The following statistics for such population flows in 1965 can cut a long story short:[1]

All Towns in the USSR

Arrived from:

Departed to:

Balance in favour of towns from:

If these numbers do not seem particularly high, a clarification specific to the Soviet Union should be introduced: the data include only those who registered with the police. Yet many came to the towns, sometimes stayed for long stretches, and left without registering, while others settled for good without reporting to any administrative authority.

Population movements for the years 1961–6 for the Russian Federation alone were imposing: nearly 29 million people arrived in towns while 24.2 left them, yielding a total of 53.2 million migrants. In Western Siberia the total was 6 million; in Eastern Siberia 4.5 million; and in the Far East 4.5 million.

Some worrying phenomena emerge from these figures. It transpires that few people set off for the east of the country with the intention of genuinely settling there. Streams of people returned from these regions where they were badly needed, in part because of housing shortages, and often because wages were too low. According to numerous local inquiries, 82 per cent of single people and 70 per cent of married couples left on account of often lamentable housing conditions (they were renting rooms – sometimes just the corner of a room).

This situation created a countrywide problem. Changing the direction of such population movements necessitated an improvement in the housing conditions in deprived regions. Yet despite sustained efforts, the housing problem remained critical throughout the country. In 1957, average availability of housing per inhabitant in the Russian Federation stood at 6.7 square metres; in the Far East, at 5.9; in Eastern Siberia, 6.1; in Western Siberia, 6.3; and in the Urals, 6.3. Thus, in the eastern territories of the USSR, whither the government wanted to attract labour, there was less housing, central heating and running water than the Russian average, and even than the average for central Russia, itself poorly equipped.

The Soviet leadership and elites were very preoccupied with the problem of inducing labour to migrate to the east and settle there. The problem was not that such population movements were impossible to control by police or ‘totalitarian’ methods – no one seriously envisaged any such thing. Given the new social conditions and realities, the situation seemed utterly inextricable. On the one hand, Siberia contained enormous wealth that could ensure the system’s prosperity, and the requisite labour to exploit it existed in the populated regions of the country. On the other hand, it was impossible to attract this labour to the east and induce it to settle there. People from better-off European areas of the USSR would have to be guaranteed good wages and suitable supplies, while those from poorer regions with huge labour surpluses – e.g. the central Asian republics – would not move because of profound cultural attachments to their traditional environment.

We shall come across other such seemingly insoluble imbroglios, for they were to keep on emerging at a systemic level. For now, however, we shall stick to the problems bound up with urbanization, with particular attention to the issue of labour supplies between 1953 and 1968.

In the mid-1960s and for some years thereafter, the situation still seemed amenable to solution by better coordination and implementation of plans for manpower supplies – that is to say, correcting an excess here and remedying a deficit there by tapping the available reserves in some sector and place. The country was not as yet facing the generalized, acute labour shortage that we shall discuss in Part Three.

A good interdisciplinary institution, Gosplan’s own research institute was perfectly capable of studying and forecasting complex situations and knew the planning system well. It sought to understand the present in order to prepare for the immediate future. Intellectually, its researchers were better equipped than other planners and politicians to grasp an intricate socio-economic constellation; and they announced that the clouds were gathering. In February 1965, at the request of Gosplan’s leadership, they presented a report on the whole question of labour supplies and demography. The head of the institute, Efimov, had already ruffled feathers more than once and fuelled the ardour of economic reformers. But that was in internal, unpublished texts, which were often criticized by other planners and officials. Now, in a year already marked by a heated debate, Yefimov, who was probably a Kosyginite, produced a major report on Soviet industry, presenting weighty arguments in favour of change and offering a detailed view of the mechanisms involved in the complex business of managing labour supplies.[2] Efimov tackled the problems encountered by the centre and the regions, without concealing the looming tensions; and offered various proposals – sometimes clearly formulated, sometimes merely hints – about ways to confront them. The text is empirically and analytically very rich. It contains both a good diagnosis and a warning as to the dire consequences to be expected in the absence of reforms.

Here is the picture sketched by Yefimov. To start with, he drew attention to a growing imbalance between the available labour force and its employment. During the years 1959–63, the working population had grown by 9 million, while manpower supplies had increased by only 1.7 million. In other words, the requisite workers had been obtained mainly by drawing on those working at home or on their private plots. Eighty-one per cent of the shortfall (or 7.3 million additional workers) had been covered thus. But the number of those working at home was continuing to fall and this source would soon dry up.

The national picture indicated areas experiencing labour shortages and others enjoying surpluses. In Central Asia, natural demographic growth had risen to 27–33 per cent in recent years – twice the Soviet average. From 1959 to 1963 the number of people employed in the state-owned economy, or still engaged in their studies, had grown at the rate of 2.2–4.4 per cent a year; and the percentage of workers employed outside the state sector was between 20 and 26 per cent, compared with an average 17.2 per cent for the whole Soviet Union. In most of the central Asian republics, the bulk of those who did not work in the state sector belonged to the ethnic majority. Demographic growth in Kazakhstan had been lower, but there too the percentage of people working privately was very high: 21.8 per cent. In many regions, rates of population growth and economic development were diverging.

These major disparities lay behind the poor utilization of labour resources. The central Asian republics, Armenia and Kazakhstan were continuing to accumulate surpluses, whereas the Baltic countries – especially Latvia and Estonia – posted the lowest population growth and a high employment rate, and were obliged to look elsewhere for workers. Significant natural population growth was also evident in Moldavia, Western Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus, in towns and countryside alike. At the same time, there was a considerable influx of people from Siberia into regions that already had a labour surplus.

Employment rates also varied according to the size of towns – large, medium-sized or small. The report – and this was no trifle – deplored the fact that when the regional distribution of industrial plant and output was planned, labour availability was not taken into consideration, resulting in utterly aberrant situations. (This is my gloss: the report’s author would obviously not have used such language when addressing senior officials.) Major labour-intensive industries had been located in regions where labour was scarce; while in other places where female employment could have been expanded, heavy industry with predominantly male employment had been set up.

In small towns, there were some 2.3 million people in search of a job. The real figure was probably closer to 3 million, since large enterprises tended to maintain a labour reserve. Most of those seeking jobs had minimal education and few skills; they needed professional training. In order to encourage women to seek employment, crèches would have to be created, because otherwise they would not be prepared to work outside the home. In the central Asian republics, interviews with unemployed people in small and medium-sized towns had indicated that they did not want to work away from home, even when jobs were available. Most of these were young women with children who had no education or skills.

Special attention should be paid to the creation of youth employment, not only for those who had reached working age (sixteen), but also for the many fourteen- to fifteen-year-old teenagers who had left school earlier for a variety of reasons. There was often no work for them and labour legislation prohibited the employment of young people who had just finished their compulsory education, when only 60 per cent of school-leavers went on to higher education. The Central Statistical Office had calculated that on 1 July 1963 some 2 million teenagers between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were neither at school nor at work. A further study conducted by the same body on 1 October 1964 had turned up an even higher figure.

The deteriorating employment situation of recent years was ‘due in part to miscalculations by planning and economic agencies, and in part to errors in economic policy’, concluded the report, which was not loath to identify the culprits. These shortcomings had reduced the effectiveness of investment, in particular as a result of faulty regional distribution of assets. Recent years had witnessed a major redirection of investment eastwards, into mining and electricity generation (particularly with the construction of large hydro-electric stations). But this policy had not been backed up by incentives to labour to settle in the east. At the same time, regions with surplus labour had experienced reduced investment – another mistake.

Job creation depended on capital investment, but the returns on the latter were falling because enormous quantities of material were ‘frozen’: uninstalled equipment and abandoned construction sites represented huge sums. Finishing such projects and starting up the new enterprises would alone create work for 15 million people, 10 million of them in industry. This was double the number of jobs created during the whole of the last five-year plan. Poor use of investment also stemmed from the fact that much of it was directed towards regional and republican centres, and what were already important industrial towns where spare labour was in short supply. The result was expansion of the latter at the expense of the countryside and small or medium-sized towns. The excessive growth of large towns entailed huge investment in infrastructure and housing, even though some towns with a lot of housing were not always in a position to maximize use of the local labour force or even squandered it.

The obstacles to a rational distribution of labour and employment had been compounded by Khrushchev’s restriction of private family plots in the countryside, which had led to the loss of 3.5 million jobs in this sector (Central Statistical Office), as well as to serious food supply problems in towns and countryside alike. Estimates indicated that simply to maintain existing levels of consumption of meat and dairy products by kolkhozniks deprived of their private plots, kolkhozes would have to increase their production of milk and dairy products by two-thirds, of meat and lard by three-quarters, of eggs by 150 per cent, of potatoes by 50 per cent, and of vegetables, melons and gourds by two-thirds. These figures underlined just how important a source of food and income private plots were (approximately half of what people received from the kolkhoz). The restriction of family plots by administrative measures, especially in small and medium-sized towns where they were very common, was exacerbating the labour supply problem. People deprived of the income they had derived from them needed work to replace it, but jobs were not easy to come by in towns. (Khrushchev’s reckless decision accounts for much of the popular discontent and instances of riot deplored by the KGB, which was ill-equipped to contain them.)

The unplanned, excessive influx of rural inhabitants into towns further complicated the state of the job market. Between 1959 and 1963, about 6 million rural inhabitants had arrived in towns. Most of them were young – under the age of twenty-nine. In itself this was a positive development, but not when it occurred in conditions of slow growth in output and labour productivity in the countryside. Most of these people from the countryside hailed from regions not where there was a labour surplus, but where it was in short supply and food production inadequate.

Another aberration: the spontaneous migration from countryside to town necessitated enlisting town dwellers to work in the fields, especially at harvest time. In some areas, this agricultural labour took the form of a ‘sponsorship’ of the rural zone in question; the phenomenon was becoming commonplace. The ‘sponsors’ (mostly factories) took on a significant share of the agricultural work in the farming units they were sponsoring – cultivation, harvesting, and so on. They supplied the state with its share of the crops and undertook the requisite construction and repair work. Industrial plants were therefore obliged to maintain a reserve labour force for this seasonal work. In some regions, the organization of such work was not increasing agricultural output, because the managers of kolkhozy and sovkhozy had grown dependent on outside help. At the same time, such collaboration was having a negative impact on industrial plants by hampering productivity improvements in them. In the final analysis, the consequences were negative all round.

The formation of labour reserves in urban enterprises for the purposes of agricultural work was promoting an abnormal process of labour exchange. Many kolkhozniks, accustomed to work in the fields, preferred to find a job in the factories of neighbouring towns. The reason was simple: the wages they could earn in industrial enterprises in the same region were 2.5–3 times higher than those paid by the kolkhozy.

One possible solution proposed by the Gosplan research institute is especially worthy of note. The central Asian republics, Kazakhstan and Georgia had high rates of population growth and possessed huge labour resources, but no economic assets – apart from agriculture, family plots and minor occupations. Moreover, their predominantly Muslim populations were reluctant to emigrate. This was where investment was required – not in more developed regions with low population growth and labour shortages.

Here a question suggests itself: What about the labour required to exploit resource-rich Siberia? The researchers probably assumed that their strategy of redirecting investment to central Asia and the Caucasus would generate enough economic growth to allow the state to offer the necessary wages to attract workers to Siberia.

One can image the debates that such a proposal must have sparked off. Just overcoming the opposition in Islamic areas to women working for a wage outside the home was far from straightforward. Language problems and professional training were additional major headaches. On the other hand, prioritizing the development of non-Russian regions, and postponing Siberia’s exploitation until better times, would provoke strong reactions among Russian nationalists, defenders of the central state, and other analogous currents that would be difficult to counter. Nevertheless, unperturbed, the author of the report pursued his survey of all the regions, in each instance proposing specific solutions that formed part of a comprehensive policy – as if saying to the Soviet leadership: ‘If you really want to plan, this is what you have got to do.’

Readers will by now have an idea of just how complex the labour issue was, as well as of the social and economic ramifications of the accumulating distortions. The whole venture demanded a set of coordinated measures, including material incentives, which were supposed to be the very essence of planning. Yet the Gosplan institute bluntly reported that ‘the problem is not so much a lack of information, as the fact that the employment factor is still not genuinely integrated into the formation of the national economic plan’. In other words, Gosplan did not know how to plan employment, its distribution and stabilization; and therefore did not plan it. It remained stuck in an age when manpower supplies were plentiful and it sufficed to fix investment and output targets for the labour to follow – or be forced to follow. That period corresponded to a stage of economic development and was not a matter of chance. But times were changing and the complexity of the task was increasing.

At this point we may venture a provisional conclusion. There was no question as yet of an imminent crisis. However, the government had to opt for a different method of planning that was not confined to fixing quantitative targets, but which would coordinate, anticipate and correct the efforts of productive units, which themselves knew what they wanted and needed to do. Gosplan and the government had been put on notice: labour supply and demand was an urgent issue. If it was ignored, or assumed to be self-regulating, as had been the case, the economy would stagnate, Gosplan or no Gosplan.

Following this analysis of problems with labour supply in 1965, we can now supplement our picture with data and analysis first from 1968 and then 1972.

On 16 September 1968, three years after the Yefimov report, the head of the labour force department in the Russian Federation’s Gosplan, Kasimovsky (who may have been attached to Yefimov’s research institute), delivered a speech to a selected audience of government experts. His main points were as follows. The extraordinary concentration of the population in towns over the last twenty years had significantly complicated labour supply problems (availability and distribution). The fastest growth had occurred in large towns; the share of the population in small towns was declining. Between 1926 and 1960, the population of towns with more than 500,000 inhabitants had multiplied by 5.9 (the figure for the Russian Federation was 4.5). In many instances, smaller towns and urban settlements that could play a vital role for the surrounding population had been destabilized by the uncontrolled pace of urbanization. Instead of becoming centres of support for the whole area, they often turned into a source of employment and demographic problems.

The number of small towns was not increasing and their population had dropped by 17 per cent in Russia (and, to a lesser extent, in the USSR as a whole). In the Russian Federal Republic, the share of the population living in towns with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants had declined from 9 to 1 per cent between 1926 and 1960, whereas towns of between 100,000 and 200,000 had increased their share of the total. The USA had experienced a different pattern: the number of small towns and their share of the urban population had remained stable; medium-sized towns (10–50,000 inhabitants) had grown; and the largest towns had experienced a population decline. The US pattern was unquestionably preferable, because exploiting a hectare of land was much cheaper in a small town. In Russia, it cost 45–47 roubles, as against 110–130 in large towns.

In the country’s twenty-eight largest towns, construction of new factories was banned. Yet in the current five-year plan, ministries, whether by obtaining exemptions or simply disregarding regulations, had set up enterprises there in order to take advantage of superior infrastructure, causing a serious labour shortage in those towns. Their population was growing fast, but the creation of new industries (and – I would add – not just industries) was outstripping it. In smaller towns, the reverse was true: enterprises were indeed being constructed, but there were still labour surpluses. This generated a set of related problems – in particular, the socially negative impact of imbalances between male and female labour.[3]

This complicated situation was analysed four years later in great detail by another labour expert. In small and medium-sized towns, worrying economic and social problems were accumulating, reflected in the use of the labour force. The imbalance between male and female employment was once again underlined.

In towns where new industries were located, the proportion of untapped labour was falling. In contrast, those that had not experienced economic development saw population outflows, to the point where some small and medium-sized towns were suffering from labour shortages. In addition, in many towns one-sided specialization led to predominantly female or predominantly male employment, resulting in imbalances between the sexes. In Russia alone, around 300 towns were experiencing more or less serious imbalances of this kind, impacting on the make-up of the population. The study referred to dealt with seventy towns in twenty large regions where this problem existed.

In towns where single-sex employment was prevalent, the other sex found itself without a job and turned to work at home or on a private plot. The impossibility of starting a family was fuelling labour mobility; a labour shortage was emerging, impacting in particular on the town’s most important economic enterprises and disrupting the distribution of professional skills and qualifications. Research indicated that in towns with high female employment, the percentage of men among the unemployed was between 27 and 57 per cent, whereas the national average was 13 per cent. Labour turnover was much greater there than elsewhere, and automatically accompanied by an exodus and shortage of labour. Many textile factories had to import female labour – mostly women as young as fifteen. Fewer and fewer female workers were of local origin: no more than 30 per cent, as against 90–100 per cent for males. But these young newcomers did not stay long, on account of the unfavourable demographic balance. This was the main reason for instability in the female labour force up to the age of twenty-nine, as evidenced by a sociological study in the large textile centre of Ivanovo-Voznesensk. Another irrationality observed in towns with predominantly female employment was that skilled workers had nothing to do except cultivate their private plot – work that required no skill. In the towns of the Vladimir region, 20–30 per cent of employees in commerce and the food industry were men, whereas the average for the Russian Federation was 15.1 per cent.

The sum total of these imbalances, particularly in the distribution of the generations and sexes, had a negative demographic impact: a low rate of natural population growth, high automatic population outflows, and a drop in overall population growth. Small towns had 125 women for every 100 men (118 for 100 for all the Russian Federation’s towns). On average, the female surplus mostly emerged from the age of forty, but in small and medium-sized towns it was already evident from fifteen onwards.

A consequence of the slowdown in demographic growth was an ageing population: twenty- to thirty-nine-year olds accounted for only 30 per cent of the population of Russian towns. As a percentage of the total population of the republic, including the countryside, they represented 33 per cent. The report also dealt with the problem of starting families and single-parent families.

According to the report’s author, the complexity of these phenomena was beyond the grasp of the republican authorities. The measures taken to rectify the situation had been found wanting. Among the obstacles cited were poor planning, a lack of incentives for ministries to locate industries in small towns, instabilities in their plans, and the weakness of their construction capacities. The government of the Russian Federation had tried to persuade the USSR Gosplan to help it eliminate these failures by a special plan for twenty-eight ‘feminized’ towns and five ‘masculinized’ ones – but to no avail. Gosplan had other priorities.[4]

As we can see, these complicated problems of labour supply and demographics attracted plenty of attention and anxiety; sociologists and a small team of social psychologists also joined in the debate. Their national and ethnic dimensions were further causes for concern.

Was the Soviet system equipped to deal with this kind of situation? It had certainly proved capable of determining priorities like the accelerated development of key economic sectors, defence (linked in numerous respects to the former), and mass education. But in each instance the specific task was fairly easy to define. What came to the fore in the 1960s were challenges of a quite different order, which required a capacity for articulating several plans. In other words, the task now was conceptualizing and managing complexity itself. Employment had become part of a social, economic, political and demographic puzzle and was regarded as such.

OTHER WOES OF THE ECONOMIC MODEL

After Stalin’s death, important changes were made in the economy, with positive results. A sharp increase in agricultural investment (mainly in the ‘virgin lands’ of Kazakhstan and elsewhere), and an increase in the prices paid to agricultural producers, led to a doubling in the monetary income of collective farms between 1953 and 1958. Agricultural output grew by 55 per cent between 1950 and 1960; grain output alone rose from 80 to 126 million tons, with three-quarters of the increase deriving from the virgin lands. But the latter were not a stable source of grain in the longer run.

To improve living standards, investment in housing and consumer goods was stepped up. Between 1950 and 1965, the urban housing stock doubled and the gulf between investment in capital goods – priority of the Stalinist period – and in consumer goods narrowed.

Great improvements were made in health care. The mortality rate declined from 18 per thousand in 1940 to 9.7 in 1950 and 7.3 in 1965. Infant mortality – the best indicator of public health standards – dropped from 182 per thousand live births in 1940 to 81 in 1958 and 27 in 1965.

Educational levels also rose: the number of pupils continuing their education beyond the four years of elementary schooling rose from 1.8 million in 1950 to 12.7 million in 1965–6. As for numbers in higher education, they trebled from 1.25 million students to 3.86 million in the same years.

Extremely low in 1953, peasant incomes grew more rapidly than those of town dwellers. Within the urban population, a certain levelling set in: minimum incomes rose, as did pensions, while wage differentials narrowed.

But the old preference for heavy industry and armaments persisted, and in so far as an effort was being made at the same time to raise living standards and stimulate technological progress, problems were mounting. In these years, Japan caught up with Soviet growth levels and succeeded in both improving its living standards and modernizing its economy. By contrast, Soviet economists and planners knew and said – in secret but also in published works – that the country’s economic model, which remained basically Stalinist, contained dangerous disequilibria. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union enjoyed some spectacular successes, especially in aerospace, so that (in R. W. Davies’s words) ‘by 1965 the Soviet Union faced the future with confidence, observed by the capitalist powers with considerable alarm’.[5] But as the archival material from Gosplan and other institutions indicates, the immediate future was much more complicated and worrying, and the planners began to grow seriously alarmed.

Regarding the targets of the eighth five-year plan (1966–70), certain failures were already evident. Gosplan’s collegium had warned the government that these shortcomings would impact on the subsequent plan.[6] Although investment from all sources had increased by 1.7 per cent (10 million roubles), the central investment plan from which the bulk of new productive capacity derived (especially in heavy industry) had fallen short by 27 billion roubles (10 per cent). On top of this, an extra 30 billion had to be spent to cover increased construction costs for productive units, whose productive capacity had not thereby been enhanced. Thus, the plan’s targets for the coming on stream of new units had been met only to the tune of 60 per cent for coal and steel, 35–45 per cent for the chemical industry, 42–49 per cent for tractors and lorries, 65 per cent for cement, and 40 per cent for cellulose. All this would impact on the construction of plant in the course of the subsequent plan.

Gosplan attributed the responsibility to government ministries, which had to find the reserves required to expand output. But most of them did not include proposals for improvements in their respective sectors in their plans for 1971–5 – and this despite numerous injunctions from government to do so and to find reserves.

CONTINUAL GROWTH IN EXTENSIVE FACTORS IN THE ECONOMY

A yet more revealing diagnosis was offered, again by Gosplan’s research institute. On 19 November 1970 its director, Kotov, wrote to Gosplan’s deputy head, Sokolov, and had this to say: in its directive for the ninth five-year plan (1971–5), the Twenty–fourth Party Congress had postulated that economic success was based on intensive growth and the introduction of new technology (this also applied to agriculture). But the relevant data indicated, in agriculture in the first instance, that the expenditure already committed in terms of labour, wages and social funds was growing faster than output. This trend contradicted the imperative of economic development – namely, achieving relative savings in social labour.[7]

The far from favourable prospects for the next five-year plan were primarily caused by the signal reduction in the productivity of capital assets. The existing indicator for measuring returns on investment was inadequate and economists in the agricultural department lacked a reliable instrument for assessing these assets and planning the requisite amounts of capital.

Kotov then produced a series of calculations that we shall not reproduce here, but which served as a basis for his warning to Gosplan and the government: ‘Extensive factors are becoming stronger in the development of the Soviet economy, primarily because growth in basic capital assets is outstripping growth in output. This trend is even more apparent in agriculture than other sectors.’

If the experts were alarmed, it was because such a trend ran counter to modern industrial and scientific development. There is no doubt that some of the leaders involved in the development and implementation of economic policy were also aware of these trends and what they portended.

‘BARGAINING’

We can now return to the Soviet bureaucracy, whose fate we tracked under Stalin. After his death, what happened to it can best be described, without the slightest hyperbole, as the ‘emancipation of the bureaucracy’. Stalinism cost it dear, and even if administrators served as best they could, the system did not allow them to behave like the bosses they were supposed to be. Henceforth they did everything in their power to eliminate from the system all the elements of Stalinism that had spoilt things for them. To anticipate somewhat, we can say that the bureaucratic phenomenon was going to flourish as never before and that the Soviet system’s modus operandi was to be profoundly transformed by it. Henceforth the decision-making process was ‘bureaucratized’ – that is to say, it no longer took the form of categorical orders, but of a complex process of negotiation—coordination (soglasovyvanié) between top political leaders and administrative agencies. This new modus operandi had already existed in many respects, but was always vulnerable to abrupt termination by sometimes bloody purges. That was now out of the question, even if a peremptory reform by Khrushchev abolished a large number of government agencies and offices with a stroke of the pen. But this had nothing in common with the way Stalin had operated. Moreover, the reform in question actually ended up failing, as we shall see in more detail later.

Two Russian terms are especially useful when dealing with the bureaucratic universe. The first, just mentioned, is soglasovyvanie, which perfectly encapsulates the interminable process of negotiation-coordination – similar to a variety of bargaining – between ministerial departments, as well as between government and party officials. The second is upravlentsy, referring to the administrative cadres engaged in upravlenie, which means something like ‘managing-governing-commanding’.

Having registered the depressed state of the party apparatus after the war compared with the influence and arrogance of ministers – something bitterly resented by party apparatchiks – we are in a position to follow the policy initially pursued by Khrushchev. It aimed to reinvigorate the party and restore the status and power of its apparatus by strengthening its ideological role (this policy and the hopes it raised would subsequently fade). To this end, Khrushchev put much effort into his own reformulation, at once new and old, of socialist aspirations. He set particular store by such practical measures as raising the living standards not only of the population as a whole but also of the apparatchiks themselves, so that the latter could approximate to the level of material comfort enjoyed by top ministerial officials – the yardstick for party bosses and the ranks below them. It was not only a matter of wages, but in particular of an array of perks that were an intense object of desire among different upper strata. In their eyes, such perks were the only way of measuring their real status (something not invented by Soviet bureaucrats). The Central Committee had to do something urgently to satisfy the personnel of the party apparatus at central and republican levels alike, so that they did not remain a second-rate group composed of impoverished malcontents. As this was the only way of preventing an exodus of the brightest or cleverest apparatchiks to work for the ‘competition’, steps were taken to ensure that they once again felt themselves to be in the saddle and were seen as so being, as befitted a ruling party.

THE STATE ADMINISTRATION

In our sketch of the state administration, as in Part One we shall make a clear distinction between the upravlentsy on the one hand, and the apparatchiks of the Central Committee apparatus and party bodies on the other.

Predictably, in every sector the powerful state administration was, like the rest of society, highly sensitive to the transition under way to a different kind of social, cultural and, in some respects, political organization. The bureaucracy had to react to the spontaneous waves of change and, in so doing, exhibited a ‘spontaneity’ of its own – i.e. the various trends at work within it. It adopted new patterns of behaviour; its self-image and ways of conceiving its own interests evolved. Our inquiry will focus on this last point: the predominant orientation of the bureaucracy, especially in its upper echelons, to its own interests and its assessment of its position within the system.

The story of the Soviet bureaucracy remains little known. The complex, troubled history of the construction of the state’s administrative structures and recruitment of its personnel, constantly on the agenda since Lenin first asked for an inventory of officials after the Civil War, contains a shadow history: the invention of new bodies to control this administration. Like the administrative structures themselves, these were constantly being disbanded and replaced by different ones. There is no need to go into the details. Suffice it to say that Soviet administrative history exhibited an astonishing tendency for ‘bureau-creativity’, replete with endless restructuring that finally subsided in the regime’s last years. But by then, as wicked tongues had it, senior bureaucrats no longer retired: they died in their office chairs.

Whatever the supervisory agency in question (the first dated from 1921), its task was to define, classify, and of course inventory the numbers and cost of the monster. This in itself proved onerous. In the first two decades of the regime, there were numerous computations, inventories and classifications. But we shall pass directly to 1947, when the Central Statistical Office conducted a complete census of the various administrative strata and reliable figures were communicated to the leadership. Naturally, numbers were just the start of the operation. Assessing the cost of administrative agencies, establishing remuneration rules, working on organizational structures, handling appointments (the nomenklatura or rather nomenklaturas, for there were several) – this was a mammoth undertaking. Wages policy alone (assuming some order was desirable in it) required a huge amount of work: job definitions, pay scales (with special treatment for priority and privileged sectors), control over the use of the wages fund – not to mention the broader problem of how ministries actually managed the budgets accorded them by the Finance Ministry, after approval by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers. Each of the tasks signalled here demanded considerable time and effort on the part of the supervisory agencies; and the top leadership also immersed itself in the matter. The ‘circular’ complexity of the venture (one apparatus controlling another apparatus) was such that no so-called ‘state control’ agency could effectively oversee a constantly expanding bureaucratic universe.

The first of the ‘controllers’ was the Finance Ministry, since it held the purse-strings. Next came Gosplan, which assigned ministries their economic tasks and therefore had to know the number, structure and cost of their personnel. The Central Statistical Office, whose services no one could dispense with, periodically conducted general or partial inventories. Then there was the ‘state control’ agency proper (frequently reorganized and renamed in the course of its history). It studied and investigated administrative bodies, uncovering a proliferation of agencies and officials. Its archives contain a wealth of data for researchers to delve into. Among other things, we learn from them that the state administration suffered from something like a propensity to ‘parcellization’ – that is to say, to the creation of multiple sub-units with overlapping functions and myriad malfunctions. Finally, the Prosecutor’s Office, the police and the KGB had their hands full with cases of gross negligence, derelictions and criminal behaviour. Party organizations – particularly its own apparatus – made their own contribution to analysing the phenomenon with a view to formulating policy proposals. They frequently initiated investigations or created committees of inquiry to analyze the problems of the ‘administrative system’ in general or some particular agency. The Russian term for the whole bureaucratic phenomenon – administrativno-upravlencheskaia-sistema (command-administrative system) – is apt. But it covers both state administration and party apparatus. To round off our picture of a bureaucracy that was constantly being inspected, investigated and restructured, we shall mention in passing that each administrative body had its own inspectorate. Yet nothing could stop this ever more complex structure from expanding by its own momentum in a direction no one desired.

We cannot disregard the leadership’s ability to wield its axe and launch anti-bureaucratic offensives. Stalin’s purges are a case in point. But efforts to reduce and rationalize the administration, to make it more efficient, less expensive and more responsive to both the leadership and public opinion, had been as ineffectual as they were legion. This probably explains why the impetuous, cocksure Khrushchev opted for a frontal assault in order to settle the problem at one stroke, but as ever without having thought his strategy through. Initially, such shock treatment was highly impressive, because it was not wanting in plausibility.

KHRUSHCHEV’S ADMINISTRATIVE OVERHAUL (1957–64)

The aim was to replace the massive pyramid of economic ministries (mostly linked to industry), which were over-centralized and oblivious to local interests, by local economic administrative bodies. Their mission was to manage and coordinate the economy with a much clearer sense and knowledge of local conditions than remote bureaucrats based in Moscow could muster. Given that the bulk of economic activity occurred at local level, the move was intended to facilitate initiative and release new resources, remedying the failures of the previous pyramid structure. A joke captures the problem. Two economic agencies located opposite each other in a street in Kazan both possess merchandise in their warehouses needed by the other agency. But they cannot negotiate a transaction without calling their ministry in Moscow. When the latter gives its agreement, trains leave Moscow for Kazan loaded with the material already stocked in sufficient quantities in the local warehouses. This contained more than a grain of truth.

The unwieldiness of ministries made it imperative to bring management closer to production, by adopting a territorial rather than a branch principle. On 10 May 1957, the Central Committee decided that it was no longer possible to manage 200,000 enterprises and 100,000 construction sites spread across the country from ministerial offices in Moscow. The moment had come to enhance republican and local powers, and to dispatch management directly to the economic-administrative regions.

Mainly intended for industry and construction, the programme was also implemented in other sectors. In May—June 1957, the Supreme Soviet created 105 economic regions (70 in the Russian Federation, 11 in the Ukraine, and in some instances just one per republic). All in all, 141 economic ministries were abolished at central, central-republican and republic levels, shedding 56,000 officials, which represented a saving of 600 million roubles. They were replaced by economic councils (sovnarkhozy), which were responsible for several branches on their territory. Initially, their personnel was small – just 11–15 officials. In due course – 1960 – the managers of major enterprises and construction sites were co-opted and additional departments were created, containing sections responsible for branch management. Subsequently, technical councils were established bringing together experts, engineering staff, and so-called economic rationalizers.

In 1959 and 1960 the economic successes were beyond dispute, with annual growth rates of 8 per cent. In the largest republics, ‘republican councils of the national economy’ were instituted to coordinate the smaller local councils and handle material-technical supply issues. At the end of 1962 various sovnarkhozy were amalgamated and their number fell from 105 to 43. On 24 November 1962 an All-Union Council of the National Economy was set up in Moscow. Its task was to compile a national plan and a general supply system for raw materials and technology, and it managed things through the republican governments, sovnarkhozy, and individual ministries. Central government – i.e. the Council of Ministers of the USSR – dealt only with what was not included in the plan. Thus, even if it remained somewhat fragmented, a central level was being recreated. On 13 March 1963 the USSR Council of the National Economy was invested with dual union-republican status: a central body, it was now to have homologues in the republics. During 1963–5 it was assigned jurisdiction over Gosplan, the State Construction Committee, and the branch committees of the Council of Ministers in key sectors. Following the good results of 1957–60, the next four years were marked by a slowdown in economic growth, and the defects of the new system became apparent. The intention to decentralize and democratize management of the economy was a good one, but the sovnarkhozy proved incapable of ensuring the indispensable branch-level specialization where essential technological development occurs. They prioritized relations with the enterprises in their regions, neglecting the transverse problems peculiar to branches.[1]

Many had understood from the outset in 1957 that the territorial and branch principles needed to be combined. State production committees, under the Council of Ministers in Moscow, began to emerge for this purpose. Another anomaly in need of correction was that scientific research and development offices were cut off from production units. They did not come under the sovnarkhozy; and the state production committees that supervised them were not empowered to introduce their inventions into production – they could only make recommendations.

In addition, sovnarkhozy tended to prioritize local interests, aiming at a form of economic autarky where everything would be produced locally. This generated a certain ‘localism’ whereby everyone tended to their own business in the first instance. In these circumstances, the central government’s branch committees (as their head, Kosygin, explained to the Central Committee in 1965) could not have any impact on technological progress: they were merely consultative bodies. Poorly conceived, Khrushchev’s reform was coming apart at the seams.

The failure of the sovnarkhozy prompted a new wave of criticism of ‘voluntarism’ and a propensity to ‘administer’, which came down to issuing instructions. Such criticism had frequently been directed at the previous system. After Khrushchev’s fall, however, the status quo ante was restored: the sovnarkhozy were disbanded and the vertical ministerial system re-established.

The restoration of vertical ministries in 1965, almost immediately after Khrushchev had been ousted, was no accident. The regime felt more confident about its ability to control centralized administrative pyramids than to deal with a system that combined both principles, but which had never been seriously worked out. The Central Committee plenum in 1965 drew the lessons of seven years of development and in a single stroke eliminated the different central, republican and local bodies of the ‘sovnarkhoz’ variety. At the end of 1965, thirty-five economic ministries were back at work, operating as before. As for Gosplan, which had had to endure an unhappy cohabitation with the National Economic Council, it recovered its previous powers, as did the powerful but notorious Gossnab (State Committee for Material and Technical Supplies).

This reorganization was not to represent a happy outcome, even if Kosygin had declared in favour of a return to the vertical pyramids of centralized ministries. Unlike other leaders, he did not idealize them and in the same year – 1965 – without fanfare he launched a new economic experiment – the regime’s last – aimed at changing the system of economic incentives, but not directly the command-administrative system.

The rapidity of the reversion to the enormous complex of pre-Khrushchevite economic administration looked like a miracle. In fact, however, the old system had never really disappeared. Very soon after the creation of the sovnarkhozy, a system of substitutes had been established in the form of the industrial branch committees attached to the Council of Ministers, whose design actually corresponded to the former ministries. The number of officials in the various central industrial agencies reached 123,000 at the end of 1964, surpassing the figure for 1956. Moreover – something we have not yet mentioned – numerous branch supply committees, supplanting the disbanded supply super-ministry, sprang up quite incongruously in Gosplan. They employed many of the former cadres from the ministries, preserving their know-how, which meant that they were ready to restore the previous structures at short notice.

Some ministerial officialdom had been disadvantaged by Khrushchev’s overhaul and even obliged to quit Moscow for the provinces, but this was no purge of any kind. It was well known in bureaucratic circles that administrators took care of their own: no sooner had they been removed from one post than they found another elsewhere – usually at the same level. The Moscow megacentre was a master in the art of this ‘bureaucratic security system’, even if those in the know were well aware that it was not necessarily the most effective personnel who were retained, but the best connected and most socially skilful – something, to reiterate the point, that is not peculiar to the USSR.

The re-establishment of the ministries, while a cause for rejoicing among many bureaucrats, also entailed the re-emergence of all the problems that had prompted the Khrushchev reform. A book by relatives and friends of Kosygin, who was the boss of the economy and intent on efficiency, affords us some idea of his scathing verdict.[2] Kosygin complained bitterly about the fact that so many things reached the Council of Ministers when they should have been resolved lower down by the numerous administrative bodies that existed to deal with them: ‘Why should the government have to concern itself with the quality of the sand being supplied to the glass industry and other industrial branches? There are ministries and a state standards agency: why don’t they meet and resolve the issue?’ The State Construction Agency – a powerful body – came to see Kosygin to discuss its new housing designs, but these fell exclusively within its competence. All this, argues the author of the relevant chapter, attested to the inefficiency of numerous state agencies. Kosygin was unsparing in his criticism of them and sought to improve their functioning. One day, when the Finance Minister Garbuzov was talking to him about the expansion of the state apparatus, its multiple hierarchies, and the number of redundant departments, Kosygin answered him thus:

There is an audible note of despair here. Kosygin depicts a system which, at the level immediately below the summit, is not doing much and does not really care. For understandable historical reasons, the system had been constructed ‘from the top down’. But it remained stuck in this mould to the very end. The reckless interlude opened by Khrushchev was a legitimate attempt to alter this modus operandi, but the former system returned like a shot. In essence, the bureaucratic system remained the same; it was just temporarily split into local replicas of the ‘big brother’.

Did Kosygin have a clear idea of why things were going so wrong? Had he pondered the deeper causes of the phenomenon? Without access to his papers, it is impossible to say for sure. However, a provisional response is perhaps hinted at by the reform of the ‘economic mechanism’, officially launched in 1965, which carries his name. This was the largest economic reform since the war and it was initiated cautiously, without official fanfare. Its main objective was to reduce the burden of central planning indicators – a tentacular system that was difficult to coordinate – and introduce new incentives from below into the system, in particular by making funds available to reward managers and workers for good results or technological innovation. The method was first of all experimented with in a limited number of factories. Then, when it yielded encouraging results, it was extended to a larger number of enterprises and branches. However, it rapidly ran into obstacles that could only have been overcome by taking other measures to bolster the break with existing structures. These would have opened the way for a ‘de-bureaucratization’ and altered the relationship between the plan’s indicators (a veritable straitjacket) and material incentives inside production units and among consumers. Conservative critics were right when they said that that would have amounted to transforming the system beyond recognition. This was what was required. But the political dynamic needed to push it through was lacking. Kosygin’s opponents managed to smother the reform, without even having to proclaim it openly.

These ‘opponents’ comprised a coalition or, more precisely, a bloc of the upper echelons of the state and party bureaucracy. The term nomenklatura will serve to denote them here. They were all party members and some simultaneously occupied a high administrative position and a seat on the Central Committee. But there are good reasons for distinguishing between administrative cadres and party apparatchiks, and studying them separately. In Part One, we saw that during and after the war the two bureaucracies regarded themselves as distinct, competing categories, vying for power over one another. One of Khrushchev’s first professed objectives had been to restore the preeminence of the party – in the first instance, of its apparatus – in order to make it an instrument of his own power. That is why it is worth returning to some key features of this apparatus.

THE PARTY APPARATUS

Some figures are a basis to start from.[3] On 1 October 1949 there were 15,436 party committees (or organizations) in the whole country. Excluding the Central Committee’s own administration, full-time (i.e. remunerated) apparatchiks numbered 138,961, of whom 113,002 were ‘political officials’ and 25,959 ‘technicians’. We possess data on the staffs of local party bodies for the period 1940 – 1 November 1955, broken down into two categories (political officials and technicians), but also according to the position of the organization in the country’s administrative structure (republics, regions, districts, subdistricts, and workplaces). Here are some annual totals for 1 January of each year.

^{* On 1 November.}

A reliable source on party personnel on 1 December 1963 – the most recent that I have been able to obtain – gives the following figures for the apparatus, excluding the Central Committee: 24,290 party organizations, with 117,504 full-timers, of whom 96,909 were ‘political officials’ and 20,595 ‘technicians’. The monthly wages bill amounted to 12,859,700 roubles for the former and 1,054,100 for the latter. The relatively low proportion of technical personnel reflected pressure from above not to exceed budgetary limits. As a result, the political personnel lacked adequate support staff – notably secretaries and typists.[4]

In 1958, the personnel of the Central Committee – the Moscow power hub – numbered 1,118 officials and 1,085 technicians, or 2,203 people; as well as the officials of the party committee within the Central Committee (for like any other workplace, party members at the Central Committee had their own cell). As we can see, the Central Committee needed more ‘technicians’ and could afford them. The annual wages bill in 1958 was 57,039,600 roubles.[5] Five years later, a report refers to an annual wages bill of 65 million roubles – an increase justified by the recruitment of new apparatchiks for newly created posts and structures.[6]

Two thousand plus employees, 1,100 of them engaged in political tasks: such was the size of the workforce at Moscow’s Staraia Ploshchad – the famous square where the Central Committee apparatus was located, which constituted the seat of power in the Soviet Union. But these figures do not reflect the real configuration of central power. To them we must add the central administration of the USSR government and ministries, or some 75,000 people who were likewise based in Moscow (the party apparatus for Moscow and its region is not included in these figures, but belongs in the same category). Without adding more data, it is worth mentioning that the ‘summits’ of the republics and administrative regions – especially the wealthier ones – should also be included, since they acquired ever more power as the centre became submerged by an avalanche of seemingly insoluble problems.

This relatively small number of people making up the upper echelon is not to be confused with the much larger class of rukovoditeli (officials performing managerial duties), who were distributed throughout the country in economic, administrative and party positions and who numbered some 2 million.

The Moscow apparatchiks were certainly well paid. In the Soviet Union, however, wages were not an adequate yardstick for gauging living standards or the way in which merit was rewarded. Over and above the inherent satisfaction to be had from occupying high rank, as far as everyone was concerned the real rewards lay in the system of privileges and perks. It merits brief investigation.

PRIVILEGES AND PERKS

Access to priority medical services was an especially coveted privilege.[7] The list of beneficiaries was kept by a special main directorate – the fourth – of the Health Ministry, which was also in charge of the best medical centres. It managed three diagnostic centres and three top hospitals, as well as a special diagnostic and treatment centre reserved for members of the Central Committee, the government and their families. The first and second diagnostic centres, as well as the university hospital and an emergency centre, were reserved for the leaders of central and local party bodies, organs of the soviet, and economic agencies.

The list of the privileged grew with successive decisions by the Central Committee and Council of Ministers, which reflected the expansion of the national economy, social organizations and the media. It ended up including around half a million people. Thus, top-ranking officials (and their families), from the capital down to the districts, had access to the best medical facilities. The narrow circle of the Politburo and the Council of Ministers had its own health services in the Kremlin, supervised by the Health Ministry.

To provide proof of status (and take pride in it), it was enough to mention that one was entitled to the ‘Kremlin’s medical facilities’. Thus, in order to know precisely who belonged to the privileged few, the best source is the Health Ministry archives. In them we also find some interesting data on those who lost these perks – and not only because of their demise. But hospitals and medical facilities are only part of the story.

On 19 April 1966, the deputy head of the Central Committee’s financial affairs department communicated to the Central Statistical Office, which had requested it, the list of sanatoria, rest homes and hotels it controlled. On 1 January 1966 there were twelve sanatoria, five rest homes (excluding those for one-day visits) and two hotels. The document specified who was entitled to use them (adults and children), how many people per year stayed in them during the high season, and where they were situated. The Central Statistical Office had been instructed to keep tabs on these various perks. The file provided similar data for Defence Ministry and KGB establishments. Every self-respecting ministry possessed such recreational establishments, not to mention dachas for bigwigs.

Lower-level party officials in workplaces also had to be motivated in their work. Extraordinary privileges were invented for party, Komsomol and trade-union apparatchiks (i.e. paid functionaries not involved in production). In March 1961 the Central Committee decided that they were to share in the premiums accorded to engineers and administrators for introducing new technology into production (including in the arms industry). The premiums awarded by the relevant party body were not to exceed three years’ wages, whereas administrators and engineers could earn bonuses worth up to six years’ wages.[8] Even so, this represented a significant sum. The claim – or fiction – that the work of party secretaries was indispensable was thus bolstered by this remuneration of their ‘contribution’ to the technological innovation made by engineers in enterprises and research departments. In the absence of such devices, the pay and position of party officials in factories would have rendered them poor relations. And not to have granted them the right to these premiums would have implied that their work did not really count.

I have no evidence to prove for certain that this measure was ever implemented. It may be doubted whether it was the ideal way to restore the prestige of party functionaries in the eyes of technical personnel. At all events, it serves as a reminder – should one be needed – that most party secretaries were officials (and not people with a political mission) who wanted to receive their share like other people, even if their actual contribution to production was virtually nil.

PENSIONS: A DELICATE SUBJECT

We have not broached the delicate issue of pensions for top party apparatchiks. It might be assumed that they depended on the rank people had attained by the end of their careers. Yet surprising as it may seem, in a bureaucracy obsessed with privileges pensions remained a weak point. Basically, the problem was evaded, for confronting it would have involved fixing a retirement age, which could have had unfortunate consequences. Retirement dates were largely arbitrary, dependent on the whim of superiors. This absence of regulation caused many difficulties for high-ranking officials who were retiring or being forced to retire. Despite their age, many regional secretaries glued themselves to their chairs, blocking the arrival of new blood. They feared an abrupt and drastic reduction in their living standards. Under Brezhnev, the size of pensions depended on connection with Politburo members, even with Brezhnev himself or members of his entourage. This legal vacuum only deepened the dependence of local leaders on the centre. Not infrequently, dedicated local leaders who had paid no attention to cultivating cosy relations with their superiors suffered when it came to retirement, unlike the toadies among them.[9] Our source here is Ligachev – a Politburo member dedicated to the party and known for his personal integrity. But he would have done well to ask if such behaviour was ‘communist’ and why he was so insistent on the term for his party.

To finish this section on a happier note, we can add that the Council of Ministers did finally issue a decree regulating pensions for leading state and party officials in 1984 – one year before Gorbachev’s arrival in power.

A WELFARE STATE… FOR PARTY AND STATE BIGWIGS

Even if there were surprising gaps when it came to pensions, the kinds of perks offered by the regime to its rulers – who were also party and state employees receiving a salary (though they were not the owners or co-owners of the units under their command) – mean that we can legitimately speak of a welfare state. Obviously, this welfare state also existed for poorer layers of the population, but in the case of the privileged it assumed luxurious proportions in the given Soviet conditions. In an economy constantly suffering shortages of every variety, a good wage was not enough. Special access was also required to products and services that were in short supply and available exclusively to the privileged few. Hence the development of a perverse mechanism involving high-ranking employees, lobbying hard for perks as a condition of good performance, and their powerful employers (Central Committee, Council of Ministers, ministries) using these perks as a carrot (granting them) or a stick (withdrawing them). This threatened one day to exceed what the system could afford, for it revolved around the redistribution of existing resources, not the creation of new ones. Inevitably, it revealed new motivational realities on both sides. The appetites of administrators went on growing, beyond the system’s limits. That some of the highest-level apparatchiks remained ardent partisans of their ‘socialism’ is readily explicable: no other system would have afforded them as much. We can judge for ourselves from some examples of the degree of material comfort extended to top apparatchiks as they climbed the ladder of the central apparatus.

Almost incredulous, a Central Committee secretary has recounted the perks offered him. We are in 1986, but the information is also valid for the earlier period. It comes from the former ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin.[10] Dobrynin knew the leadership well, but had only a vague idea of the universe of the party apparatus. In March 1986 he became secretary of the Central Committee in his capacity as head of the International Department. The following day, he met a representative of the ninth directorate of the KGB, which was responsible for the personal security of leading figures and the material perks granted to Politburo and Secretariat members (it was frequently referred to as ‘the Politburo’s nanny’). ‘I found myself in a world apart’, Dobrynin writes. According to the current rules, he was entitled to three bodyguards, a Zil limousine, and a dacha near Moscow at Sosnovyi Bor – the ‘Sosnovka’ occupied by Marshal Zhukov until his death – with the following staff attached to it: two cooks, two gardeners, four waitresses, and guards. The building comprised two floors, with a large dining room, a living room, several bedrooms and a projection room. There was another building nearby, with a tennis court, a sauna, an orangery and an orchard. ‘What a contrast with the Muscovite life I’d been used to!’ And yet Dobrynin was simply one of several Central Committee secretaries, not a Politburo member, let alone general-secretary. What was a Politburo member entitled to? He does not say. More than a Central Committee secretary, obviously, but a lot less than the general-secretary. In any event, it is worth registering the (doubtless sincere) astonishment of this highly placed – and hence already privileged – Muscovite.

Whatever the amenities they enjoyed, Politburo members could always demand more. But some of them – a majority, perhaps – were not really interested in luxury, and certainly not in ostentatious luxury, with the well-known exception of Brezhnev.

Ligachev’s personal experience offers us a glimpse of the Politburo’s working life in its twilight years in the early 1980s.[11] After Andropov’s death, the Central Committee elected Konstantin Chernenko as general-secretary. He was proposed by Prime Minister Tikhonov and seconded by Gromyko – an unproblematic election. A year later, Chernenko caused some consternation by proposing that Gorbachev – Andropov’s protege – should chair Secretariat meetings, effectively making him the regime’s number two. There was opposition from some quarters, but Chernenko, although not at all close to Gorbachev, insisted. The position of number two was not a formal one. Ligachev remembers that in 1984 there were people who sought to find compromising material on Gorbachev from the time when he was regional secretary of the Stavropol region, but does not name them. The use of compromising documents was a favourite weapon in leadership infighting: one side to a conflict would try to dig up dirt to dish on the other. Access to police material or information from the ‘underworld’ could be a precious asset.

Chernenko received detailed briefings on the state of health of other leaders from Tchazov, the Health Minister. But the health of the general-secretary himself was kept top-secret: even other Politburo members were largely ignorant. Such secrecy was fertile ground for rumours and allowed some members of the leadership, who had personal access to the sick general-secretary, to manipulate him to personal or group advantage.

The Central Committee building on the Staraia Ploshchad was itself a highly secret place. But those in the know would tell you that, traditionally, office no. 6 on the ninth floor was the general-secretary’s. Office no. 2 was known as ‘Suslov’s office’. It was from there (I think) that the Central Committee Secretariat was managed.

The Politburo convened every Thursday at 11 AM precisely, either at the Kremlin or Staraia Ploshchad. In the Kremlin, on the third floor of the old part of the building, the general-secretary had an office as well as a reception room. This was also where the ‘nut-tree hall’ was located, with its large round table around which leaders discussed problems informally before the Politburo session began. While candidate members and Central Committee secretaries attended the latter, they did not participate in the informal discussions.

Under Brezhnev, Politburo meetings were short. It took an hour, or even forty minutes, to approve decisions that had been prepared in advance. Under Andropov, the Politburo’s work was more serious and deliberations could last hours. The Politburo had to decide on important appointments – something it did rapidly under Brezhnev and more attentively under Andropov.

A brief passage in Ligachev’s memoirs adds an interesting note to this collective portrait. One day – probably in 1983 – one of the most powerful partisans of the conservative wing, the long-time defence head Ustinov (who died in 1984), said to the newly arrived Ligachev: ‘Yegor, you are one of us, part of our circle.’ Ligachev says that he did not understand what was meant by this. In fact, Ustinov was giving the provincial newcomer to understand that there were factions in the Politburo. His own comprised the conservative ‘state patriots’, and after his death, the lack of Ligachev’s support for ‘us’ was sorely felt. By then, Ligachev was already in Gorbachev’s camp. Subsequently, during perestroika, he rejoined the conservative faction. In his memoirs, Ligachev comments that Gromyko, Ustinov and Chernenko – the figures from the previous generation – can be taxed with a whole variety of failures: they were responsible for the fact that the state was ‘on the verge of collapse’ in the 1980s. However, he adds that it was to their credit that they opted not to pursue Brezhnev’s line but to back Gorbachev instead. In this respect, they proved superior to all the last-minute turncoats who abandoned politics to concentrate on their own personal interests. Gromyko had been the first Politburo member to propose Gorbachev for the post of general-secretary, which had secured him unanimous endorsement not only in the Politburo but also from the Central Committee secretaries. According to Ligachev, things could have turned out quite differently.

As for the modus operandi of the Politburo in Gorbachev’s time, there is some interesting information in Dobrynin’s memoirs. It remained pretty much unchanged. The main difference stemmed from Gorbachev’s personal style, which was more modern than that of the figures described by Ligachev in a period when, with Chernenko ill, the atmosphere had more in common with the priesthood of a mystical cult than the leadership of a modern state.

As a Central Committee secretary, Dobrynin participated in Politburo meetings. He had the right to express his views, but not to vote. The Central Committee secretaries were invariably in attendance. From time to time, Gorbachev convened special sessions. Votes on contentious issues were rarely taken: Gorbachev would forestall them by stating that the issue merited further attention and would be discussed at the next meeting. He would use the intervening period to prepare the decision he wanted to see adopted. Gorbachev liked to talk at length, and sessions would sometimes last until 6 or 8 PM. But he also allowed his colleagues to express their opinions; and in this respect, the atmosphere was more democratic. During the lunch break, which lasted an hour, everyone sat together at a long table in a small working hall. They could choose between two very plain menus, without alcohol. At lunch, discussion was more freewheeling and no stenographic record was made, although Gorbachev’s personal assistant did take ‘private’ notes.

Officially, only Politburo decisions were recorded in writing and transmitted to a short list of officials to be implemented and supervised. The most important decisions were kept in a special folder. The agenda was drawn up by the general-secretary, but Politburo members were entitled to supplement or amend it – something they rarely did. Papers for each meeting were sent out a day or two in advance by the ‘general department’, the Secretariat’s main executive body. This department occupied a special place in the party apparatus. It was always headed by the general-secretary’s right-hand man: Chernenko under Brezhnev, and Lukyanov, followed by Boldin, under Gorbachev. Lukyanov was a well-educated, measured person, while Boldin was a narrow-minded bureaucrat who held sway over Gorbachev. This was a cause of bewilderment to many, especially when Boldin showed his true colours by turning out to be one of the instigators of the plot against Gorbachev in August 1991.

The international department run by Dobrynin had nothing to do with foreign affairs. Its 200 officials dealt with Communist parties and other left-wing movements abroad, but not the parties of the popular democracies, which were handled by a separate department. Dobrynin had asked Gorbachev to reverse an old decision, dating from the time of the Comintern, and let his own department handle foreign affairs. He had his way on 13 May 1986, when Gorbachev also authorized the transfer of some experts from the Foreign Ministry to the international department to aid Dobrynin in his new duties.[12] We should add that these moves involved some internal politicking. As we can see from his memoirs, Gorbachev was trying to eliminate Gromyko’s influence over foreign policy and even remove him completely from political life. Henceforth, with Dobrynin’s professional input, the general-secretary monopolized foreign affairs.

In the context of this brief sketch of the Politburo’s functioning, it is important to realize that, for all his ‘modern’ style, Gorbachev remained a ‘classical’ general-secretary. His career in the party apparatus had shaped his conception of power, and particularly of the role of general-secretary as superior to other Politburo members and subject to its own rules. Even if Dobrynin does not explicitly say as much, his description confirms it: Gorbachev manipulated his colleagues through rather transparent stratagems in order to get his own way. Gorbachev was incapable of shedding the ‘general-secretary syndrome’, and it took him time to realize that a system of power which generated this kind of ‘disembodied’ central position was already moribund.

Let us now pursue our investigation of the country’s problems and woes through a different optic: that of the men at its head or in charge of a key sector. The figures selected here are not typical Politburo members – Brezhnev, Kirilenko, Suslov, Chernenko, and their ilk – some of whom were skilful operators, but political and intellectual mediocrities who ultimately prevailed. They can be tagged as ‘the swamp’, and the very fact that they held power is a symptom of the system’s decay. We have instead singled out personalities who proved capable of reflecting on the system – or their own domain, at any rate – and who were ready to attempt change. Many of them may have shared our opinion of the ‘swamp’ that was primarily responsible for the period of ‘stagnation’.

We only have space here to discuss a few figures – in particular, Khrushchev, with whom our period opens, and Andropov, with whom it closes.

ANDREI GROMYKO

Andrei Gromyko was a figure of considerable stature, but with a seemingly unimpressive personality – an unusual combination of incompatible characteristics. He was at the helm of Soviet foreign affairs for twenty-eight years. Although not known to have been involved in reformist initiatives, he was nevertheless a pillar of the system in this crucial sphere. Many found him utterly boring and sour-faced, but if we turn to the Western diplomats who dealt with him, like Henry Kissinger, we are given to understand that he was probably the ‘number one’ of international diplomacy, renowned among his peers as a glutton for work: ‘If you can face Gromyko for an hour and survive, then you can begin to call yourself a diplomat’, said Kissinger. One of the ‘survivors’ was President Reagan. Having spent an hour with Gromyko, he returned all excited to the White House, where the event was duly celebrated: the meeting was in a sense his graduation. What he did not know was that Dobrynin had briefed Gromyko on Reagan and advised him to go easy on him for diplomatic reasons. The heads of the Israeli UN delegation (including David Horowitz) never said anything in their memoirs about Gromyko’s ‘sour’ face at the time when he was Soviet ambassador there and the creation of the state of Israel was on the agenda. Each day he would ask them: ‘What can I do for you today?’ Times change.

Whatever one’s assessment of Gromyko’s personality, Soviet diplomacy and the performance of its experts and senior ambassadors were mostly of a high quality under his intendancy; and this was largely attributable to his own perfectionism. A reading of his briefs, analyses and recommendations on the world situation confirm his in-depth knowledge. Whether his Politburo colleagues listened is another matter. But the general quality of the information available to the leadership was constantly improving – and not only in the diplomatic sphere – which was no doubt testimony to the system’s ‘modernizing’ aspect. It is sufficient today to meet any Russian diplomat formed in this school – he will invariably speak several foreign languages well – to see how proud he is of his alma mater. The Soviet ambassadors to key countries were always highly respected – particularly their doyen, Dobrynin, or the special envoy Kvetsinsky, famous for making progress in negotiations during his ‘walk in the woods’ with his American counterpart, Paul Nitze.

Gromyko’s main characteristics were his complete identification with the interests of the state and his faithful service to it. They explain his personal self-effacement and mastery of his ego – things extremely rare for someone who was the linchpin of international diplomacy for twenty-eight years. The West German politician Egon Bahr, who was in charge of foreign affairs from 1968 to 1972, does not conceal his critical admiration for Gromyko. Commenting on the latter’s memoirs, which disclosed so little about his life and work, Bahr remarked:

We can round off this rapid sketch of Gromyko with reference to a decisive political intervention of his. Having been one of the senior statesmen in the Politburo under Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, he played a crucial role in the election of Gorbachev to the post of general-secretary, knowing full well that it would entail a reformist course, probably in the direction mapped out by Andropov. As Ligachev intimated, the outcome of that Politburo meeting might have been very different.

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV

Nikita Khrushchev was endowed with a unique mixture of character traits. I still do not know how he survived Stalin and whether he ever entertained doubts about him when making his career under him. His folksy side, and his ability to perform a gopak (a popular Ukrainian dance) during one of Stalin’s banquets (‘when Stalin says dance, you dance!’, he reminisced), may have fooled the chief as to the ambitions and intentions of this ‘simpleton’. One cannot imagine two more utterly contrasting characters.

He certainly became a sensation on the world stage, and not only as a result of such behaviour as banging on his lectern with his shoe during a session of the UN (not terribly diplomatic!), or exclaiming ‘We shall bury you’ to the Americans – a statement that was in fact distorted by a poor translation (My vas pokhoronim also means ‘We shall outlive you’). He knew how to take enormous risks, especially in 1962 during the Cuban episode, when he neither won nor lost. He was also a genuine supporter of peace on the international scene. Those who dealt with him directly in international summits never claimed that he was not master of his brief. But he had a tendency to talk too much, to the point of sometimes disclosing state secrets even when sober – much to the despair of the KGB. Khrushchev was a reformer, not a state-builder; an impatient, impetuous leader with a propensity for large-scale – and sometimes risky – panaceas. On occasion, he could be truly bold. The ‘secret speech’ against Stalin at the Twentieth Congress was his own initiative; he stuck with it and imposed it on recalcitrant colleagues without regard for the rules or niceties. And thus the Congress suddenly learnt that the icon, the idol, the glorious symbol of the country’s superpower status was a bloody mass murderer. For the anti-Stalinists, it was a shocking revelation. As for the Stalinists of various hues, they were more than embarrassed and claimed that the picture was exaggerated, when in fact it was very incomplete. For inveterate Stalinists, the most embarrassing thing was to see so many high-ranking leaders evince their astonishment: how could they pretend that they knew nothing about the scale of the atrocities? In fact, only a few insiders were aware of the true scale of things: Stalin’s personal secretariat, a handful of Politburo members, and the MVD chiefs who had conducted the operations.

The denunciation of Stalin and his cult was preceded by a wave of rehabilitation of innocent victims, who were subsequently restored to party membership. This made the Stalinist terror a crucial issue for the first congress to be convened after his death.[2] Even before the ‘secret speech’, by a Central Committee decision of 31 December 1953 the Presidium created a committee of inquiry, including Pospelov, Komarov, Aristov and Shvernik (it became known by the name of its chairman, Pospelov). Its brief was to determine how the mass repression had struck members and candidate members of the Central Committee elected by the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934. It was assisted in its work by KGB chief Serov and by a group of departmental heads from the same body: secretariat, personnel, archives and special inspection. The Prosecutor’s Office was represented by the deputy of the chief military prosecutor. Naturally, all of these were party members. On the eve of the Congress the Presidium of the Central Committee heard the testimony of the prisoner Boris Rodos, who had been the investigator in some highly sensitive cases and a key figure in the political trials of the late 1940s. In his affidavit he testified that Stalin had directed matters personally. He (Rodos) had interrogated victims and constantly demanded higher execution quotas. Khrushchev insisted on foregrounding Stalin’s personal responsibility and demanded that the issue be raised during a session of the Twentieth Congress. During the debates in Presidium meetings, Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich argued for stressing Stalin’s greatness despite his crimes. But Mikoyan and Saburov argued against this: ‘If all this is true, it cannot be pardoned’ (Saburov). On 8 February 1956, the committee presented to the Presidium a terrifying picture of the systematic extermination of countless party and state cadres by Stalin.

With the eviction of Khrushchev in 1964, a more conservative line re-emerged. Reformist circles were anxious lest Stalin’s rehabilitation was envisaged. But notwithstanding some efforts in this direction by members of the new team, neither the spirit of Stalin nor Stalinism ever returned. Following Khrushchev’s bold moves, the term ‘Stalinism’ ceased to apply to the Soviet system. His decision to remove Stalin’s body from the mausoleum and rebury it elsewhere did prevent the evil spirit from returning – proof that popular beliefs sometimes count. Even if there were still Stalinists at the summit of power harbouring secret hopes, and even if some pernicious features of the old system endured, Stalinism as such belonged to the past.

The shock therapy applied by Khrushchev cost him dearly politically. But he survived the various after-shocks of de-Stalinization, if not without difficulty and even if it may be that he had second thoughts about the whole enterprise. In any event, the denunciation of Stalin was not restricted to words, but was preceded and succeeded by deeds: a large-scale process of ‘rehabilitation’ and the dismantling of the MVD’s industrial complex which, as we have seen, was the core of the Stalinist machinery of repression.

Khrushchev’s style and passion can be explained by the authenticity of his populism, but also by an emotionalism he did not always control. But over and above the joke about his ‘goulash socialism’ (he actually did say that goulash was preferable to empty phrases about popular well-being), he was convinced that an improvement in living standards was more than a political imperative: it was a matter of justice and ‘socialism’. His folksiness was authentic. He was proud of his working-class origins and even his rural roots. He had been a shepherd’s apprentice prior to his industrial career as a metal-worker and miner. There was a direct connection between this past and his language, his aversion for the military, his loathing of bureaucrats, and his preference for production-oriented secondary schools. If he tried to promote such a reform, it was (he said) because the existing secondary schools were educating wimps who knew nothing about physical labour in factories or fields. The reform was abandoned under pressure from public opinion – that is to say, from the better off, the better educated, and bureaucrats, who were indignant and lobbied against this ‘industrialization’ of secondary schools. As it happened, they were right. But we may assume that this was a crowd of people for whom Nikita had no time: they had never held a pick in their hand!

The same mentality was at work in his turbulent relations with the creative artists. He liked The House of Matrena and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and allowed their publication. Both novels depicted profoundly moral characters from the countryside: Matrena, a peasant woman, has a strong, impressive personality; Ivan, also a peasant, preserves his human dignity despite the humiliating reality of the camps.

Here we must once again mention Tvardovsky, the editor of literary journal Novyi Mir, who had published Solzhenitsyn’s first two novels and fought to publish more. The friendly relations between Khrushchev and Tvardovsky were literally based on common ground. Tvardosvky was the son of a dispossessed, persecuted kulak. He knew the rural world well and had remained in touch with rural realities despite his elevated position in Moscow’s intellectual elite. It is likely that Khrushchev could accept political criticism if it was presented in a down-to-earth manner by people of popular extraction – but not when urban intellectuals said the same thing in their sophisticated idiom. He was also capable of crude, even indecent outbursts against works he did not understand or artists whom he suspected of being hostile to the regime.

Tvardovsky was different in Khrushchev’s view. During the war, he had written a long poem about the adventures of a soldier of popular extraction, Vasilii Terkin. After the war, he returned to his now demobilized hero in a poem entitled ‘Terkin in Heaven’. In it, Terkin is sent to heaven, where he observes (and endures) the celestial bureaucracy, before deciding to return to earth: at least the bureaucracy down there is breathing. As soon as he learnt of the existence of this scathing satire of the Soviet bureaucracy and hence of the system, which was also turned into a play, Nikita called his son-in-law, who was editor of Izvestiia, to tell him to publish it forthwith. Had it been written by a modish intellectual, he would probably have dialled a different number.

Here we might insert a symptomatic detail. The famous film director Mikhail Romm and the no less celebrated sculptor Ernst Neizvestny had both been subject to Khrushchev’s irascible outbursts; and both had reacted sharply and uncompromisingly. Later, however, they both referred to him fondly, defending his historical role. Khrushchev’s tombstone was sculpted (free of charge) by Neizvestny – against the will of those in power. Romm’s later assessment was likewise warm. Manifestly, Khrushchev emitted contradictory signals, but both these artists accentuated the positive ones. Similarly, as we shall see, Anastas Mikoyan, after weighing up the pros and cons, ended up judging Khrushchev ‘a somebody’.

Here we must restate two important historical facts discussed in Part One. First, in 1945 Soviet Russia was a mighty state, but in reality a shaky one. It was hungry, devastated, exhausted, terrorized, ruled by a decaying power complex: a needy, ailing superpower. Under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union experienced dramatic improvements in the 1950s and early 1960s. Whatever experts might say about not exaggerating the results given the low starting point, Soviet citizens felt the difference in their lives. Russia succeeded in recovering its great power status, while healing the wounds of the Second World War and overcoming the ravages of Stalinism. It found the reserves to ensure its future growth and the functioning of its institutions at all levels. Thus the regime possessed reserves and muscle: to recover from such ruination demanded enormous vitality.

The second fact is that, while undoubtedly talented, shrewd, and capable of learning, Khrushchev was still a ‘non-modern’ leader – a new version of the khoziain (‘master’), rather than a contemporary statesman and political strategist. The khoziain model was still widespread among the leadership, with its sense of owning the state in rather the same way that one owns a farm, meddling in every detail. Khrushchev and most of the other leaders were products of a deeply ingrained patriarchalism – as is indicated, for example, by their impatience with other people’s opinions. This is confirmed by observers like F. M. Burlatsky, who spent many years in the Soviet press and apparatus. Although the impetuous populist ruler was no despot by comparison with Stalin, he too had a tendency to want to run everything personally – institutions and people alike. After all, Stalin was the only big chief Khrushchev (and others) had known; and he must have served as a model, even if Khrushchev rejected many of his practices. Unlike the generalissimo, for example, he deeply disliked the military and their pompous uniforms. He enraged them, and especially the KGB’s top brass, who were so attached to their uniforms and titles, with his ‘We are going to tear off their epaulettes and trouser stripes’ – a threat he actually began to implement in the case of KGB generals. Some of his ideas were very dangerous for the apparatchiks, especially the proposal to introduce mandatory rotation of officials at all levels after a certain age. Some say that the Brezhnevites ousted him on account of this. For others, the ‘conservatives’ never forgave him for ‘de-Stalinization’, and the loss of prestige and disorientation it occasioned in the communist world and elsewhere. Both these factors were at work, together with others – particularly the new ‘hare-brained’ ideas he was entertaining, and which the 1964 plotters nipped in the bud.

ANASTAS MIKOYAN

Anastas Mikoyan was a quite remarkable personality – a veritable résumé of the Soviet regime, or rather of its leadership. A Politburo member for something approaching forty years, he was known for being ‘unsinkable’. A master in the art of survival, he proved capable of retaining a degree of humanity and a sense of reality, despite his participation in many atrocities that were not necessarily down to his initiative. In his memoirs he emerges as a Stalinist from the very beginning. His reflections on his early years as a leader are deeply and naively indulgent towards Stalin, hostile to all the anti-Stalinist oppositions, and utterly ignorant of what was really at stake.

As a member of the Politburo, Mikoyan would not have survived had he not signed the death sentences circulated by Stalin or made the requisite speeches about ‘counter-revolutionary traitors’. In his memoirs he claims that he was once forced to co-sign arrests and death sentences because convincing ‘proof’ had been presented. In charge of trade issues in the Politburo, in a country suffering constant shortages, he accomplished remarkable feats in a domain which, though vital, was not a real priority for the regime most of the time. His talent as an organizer is beyond dispute, but he was also a skilful politician. While considerable flexibility on his part was to be expected, his steadfast support for Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization comes as a surprise. He even claims to have initiated it. At any rate, it was he who supervised the work of the rehabilitation commission in his capacity as President of the Supreme Soviet. He was also the only person to support Khrushchev during the Central Committee session that deposed him: a lone voice among the howling pack. Reading his personal file reveals that the conservatives resented him well into the 1970s. But he was too strong for them.

Mikoyan’s book has a wealth of detail on Stalin’s final days. Stalin had decided to eliminate – and probably execute – Molotov and Mikoyan: both were sure of it. This might help explain the anti-Stalinist ardour of the post-Stalinist Mikoyan. While Stalin was dying in March 1953, the Politburo’s main players were almost permanently in touch, meeting in the Kremlin or in attendance every day at Stalin’s home. Discussions occurred and alliances began to take shape. Initially, Mikoyan was not a prime mover. The Malenkov-Beria-Khrushchev trio took the lead. Mikoyan’s sketch of how things played out in the room used for Politburo meetings is worthy of Ionesco. The whole Politburo was present, but the heavyweights – Khrushchev, Malenkov and Beria, who were respectively General-Secretary, Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister (Beria was also head of the secret police and a massive industrial-military production complex) – huddled together in a corner of the room to discuss the agenda for the meeting that was due to be held. The lesser figures were reduced to observing, not without some disquiet, the formation of a new clique that would decide their fate. The suspense was to continue for some time, because the clique did not last: Malenkov and Khrushchev allied with Molotov to remove Beria. And that was only the beginning. Shifting alliances were endemic and manifestly inherited from Stalin’s modus operandi.

Mikoyan describes Khrushchev’s turn against Beria approvingly, as well as other alliances, realignments and coalitions. His narrative illuminates a further feature of the way the Politburo functioned: its inability to establish fixed rules, with genuine debates in which disagreement could be expressed, followed by a majority decision, before proceeding to the next item on the agenda. Once again, this was part of Stalin’s legacy. Engaging in an argument and losing it could be lethal under Stalin, who deliberately kept everyone in a state of permanent insecurity. When the Politburo finally found itself liberated from his sinister tutelage, it had no idea how to construct a working arrangement – i.e. the very ‘collective leadership’ it proclaimed. Everything continued to revolve around the general-secretary (still called chairman of the Presidium of the Politburo), and no political measure could be adopted without the approval of the general-secretary and his followers. Before Stalin, leadership bodies – and especially the Politburo – definitely did have a constitution (written and unwritten). Depending on the issue, majorities could switch. The then leader (Lenin) was used to being in a minority and yet pursuing the business in hand: an altogether different set-up. We shall return to the absence of any constitution for the Politburo.

The main problem posed by Mikoyan’s memoirs lies in his argument about Stalin and Stalinism. He was a staunch supporter of the man, his ideology and policy. He was on good terms with him, deemed him a highly able leader, and often argued with him (mostly on economic policy). But when Stalin began to eliminate the people around him, and particularly after Kirov’s unexplained death, he began to ask himself questions. He pleaded with Stalin on behalf of arrested people whom he knew personally, or would say to him: ‘But you know very well that he couldn’t have been a spy.’ Stalin would then show him alleged ‘confessions’ or sometimes accede to his plea for clemency. When it comes to the great terror of 1937–8, Mikoyan’s text strikes a disingenuous note: ‘We other members of Politburo did not know the truth [they were always shown the documents adduced as “proof’], or the scale of the repression.’ He claims to have learned the true facts only from the rehabilitations commission he supervised. Even more troubling is that Mikoyan proceeds to no critical reflection on this type of rule or ‘party’ (which had actually ceased to be one). He argues that Stalin had displayed rationality and greatness during the war, but had become ‘unpredictable’ again thereafter, refusing the democratization expected by a victorious people. Without pressing his critique any further, he merely declares that after Stalin’s death he constantly hoped for a democratization that never occurred.

It may be that such criticism is misplaced in the case of a politician who was no political thinker. It may be more relevant to identify character traits that serve to distinguish one type of Stalinist from another. In other words, ‘structural’ Stalinism was not common to all Stalinists. Thanks to the high position he had attained, the young Mikoyan adapted to the system well before the definitive triumph of Stalinism. Subsequently, he had no difficulty shedding Stalinist practices and attitudes and genuinely adopting a different perspective, even a different world-view. ‘Structural’ Stalinists like Molotov and Kaganovich were completely identified with the Stalinist model and Stalin personally, and they never reneged on their commitment. A third breed of Stalinist might change – or pretend to have changed – allegiances, while remaining Stalinist in their make-up and behaviour. Dogmatism and the habit of exclusion, absolute condemnation, rigid argumentation and the perception of conspiracies everywhere were integral parts of their personality. Mikoyan was not of this stamp.

What Mikoyan has to say about Khrushchev is revealing (we shall pass over his all too predictable assessment of Brezhnev). Reviewing the changes introduced by Khrushchev after his assumption of power, he endorses some of them but criticizes many others. Naturally, he also challenges what Khrushchev had to say about him in his memoirs, where Mikoyan’s merits are ignored and he is even attacked. Even so, Mikoyan’s appraisal of Khrushchev’s personality and activity is measured, offering a veritable balance sheet of his qualities and faults. Khrushchev often irritated Mikoyan, who lists his errors meticulously. But he ends up with a positive assessment. In fact, Mikoyan supported Khrushchev on many crucial issues and in difficult situations. But he draws a portrait of an inconsistent, disloyal character who more than once lost his sense of reality. As other witnesses have also testified, his rule was a story of reckless initiatives and an incomparable capacity for turning everything upside down. Mikoyan offers a good inventory of Khrushchev’s zigzags. He understood full well that Khrushchev had antagonized just about everyone and was heading for a fall. And yet he defended this chaotic general-secretary because he had numerous things to his credit and the alternative was unappealing. His conclusion is that the irascible Nikita was ‘someone’ and that after he had been sacked his abilities should have been utilized in a different post. This judgement relates to a little-known episode. Some time before his removal, Khrushchev, who had become disillusioned with the party, had mused about revitalizing the Supreme Soviet, transforming it into something like an effective parliament. The first step would have been for Mikoyan to become President (not merely Chairman) of the Supreme Soviet and then seriously to empower this body. Khrushchev had made some initial moves in this direction and the prospect enthused Mikoyan, but Khrushchev’s fall signalled the burial of the project. This episode clarifies Mikoyan’s closing remarks. At all events, if this final initiative petered out, other irreversible changes had been introduced thanks to Khrushchev.

One point in Mikoyan’s critique merits separate examination. He criticizes Khrushchev for having yielded to the conservatives (or his own misgivings) by abruptly terminating the policy of rehabilitating the victims of Stalinism, which Mikoyan supervised by virtue of his position in the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Mikoyan and liberal public opinion wanted to cap the process by rehabilitating the victims of the show trials: Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and so on. But Khrushchev balked, despite Mikoyan’s insistence. For the latter, all the accusations were false and the executions belonged in the category of Stalin’s crimes. However, for as yet minimally de-Stalinized party stalwarts, those accused, even if it was on the basis of false charges, were the leaders of an ‘anti-party’ opposition. In an earlier chapter of his book, Mikoyan himself refers to them scornfully and does not conceal the fact that he supported Stalin’s moves against them. In his fervour for de-Stalinization, Mikoyan seems not to appreciate that to have rehabilitated the victims would have been to restore these oppositionists – erstwhile ‘Trotskyists-rightists’ – to the status of critics of Stalin and Stalinism.

Here we can ‘sympathize’ with Khrushchev. He had encountered enough problems with the de-Stalinization he had launched. Reviewing the show trials would have been too much for him. After all, he never envisaged the possibility of open factions and debates within the party.

ALEXEI KOSYGIN

Alexei Kosygin was never a central political player and not a flamboyant one either. Moreover, he never wished to be in the ‘race’ for the post of general-secretary. Nevertheless, his remarkable administrative skills made him indispensable. It was known in top circles that the economy rested on his shoulders – and that nobody else possessed such broad ones.

The career of this phenomenal administrator reads like a history of Soviet government, from junior jobs to the highest posts, and contains some genuinely heroic chapters during the war. Among the latter, as has already been mentioned, were evacuating industry from territory about to be overrun by the Germans and breaking the Leningrad blockade by organizing the construction of a supply route and pipeline on the bottom of Lake Lagoda. But he was also sometime Finance Minister, head of Gosplan, Deputy Prime Minister, Prime Minister, and Politburo member; and admired and envied by general-secretaries because he knew better than anyone else how to make the administrative machinery work. The people around him really did work! But he was also known in government circles for having challenged Brezhnev over the right of the general-secretary to represent the country abroad – a function which he believed should fall to the Prime Minister, as in every other country. This was actually implemented for a period until Brezhnev, who could not have been very fond of such a figure, put an end to it. Kosygin was also known for the interesting economic reform he launched, which was scuttled by the conservatives, who continued to hold it against him.

The book edited by his son-in-law, Gvishiani, offers a glimpse of Kosygin’s thinking.[1] Dedicated to the system, he was also well aware of the need to reform it; and around 1964 everything still seemed possible. He believed in semi-public companies and cooperatives. He was conscious of the West’s superiority and the need to learn from it. He believed in initiating gradual changes, setting in train a transition from a ‘state-administered economy’ to a system in which ‘the state restricts itself to guiding enterprises’. He was in favour of a multiplicity of forms of property and management – something he tried to explain to Khrushchev and then Brezhnev, but to no avail. Khrushchev had fully nationalized the producers’ cooperatives and Gvishiani was present on an occasion when Kosygin tried to convince Brezhnev to elaborate a genuine economic strategy and discuss it at a Politburo meeting. As was his wont, Brezhnev used delaying tactics, which amounted to burying the idea. Kosygin emerged from such conversations completely demoralized: ‘He warned against a blind faith in our power and the danger of incompetent policies.’ He was strongly opposed to harebrained schemes for ‘reversing the course of Siberia’s rivers’, and was against the interventions in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. He said out loud that massive military expenditure or the aid to ‘friendly countries’ was beyond the USSR’s means. However, the Politburo refused to tackle these real problems and ‘instead busied itself with all sorts of nonsense’.

Under Brezhnev, many important questions, including foreign policy, were dealt with on the Staraia Ploshchad. But it was difficult to find anyone there with a good intellectual education. The role of grey figures like Suslov and Kirilenko was ‘considerable’, says Gvishiani, who was present at numerous meetings or commissions of the Central Committee when nobody spoke. They all just sat there obediently in silence, until a document appeared stating: ‘The Politburo (or Secretariat) considers that…’

No one would dream of attributing a role in some ‘intellectual effervescence’ or ‘renaissance’ to an austere, non-flamboyant person like Kosygin. However, something like that actually did occur with the economic reforms of the mid-1960s (in fact, from the late 1950s). The cautious Kosygin, who had never uttered the least heterodoxy in public, promoted, supported and protected a real renaissance in economic thinking and publishing. A genuine economic literature, accompanied by a wealth of data, was published, including utterly subversive texts parading under innocuous titles. This brought about an explosion of creativity in the social sciences, which coincided with the economic debates by challenging various ‘sacred cows’ and their political implications. All this occurred under the prime minister’s protection.

The debate took apart, bit by bit, all key aspects of the economic system. In 1964, academician V. Nemchinov published a powerful indictment in Kommunist of the whole system of material and technical supply, demonstrating that it was the main obstacle to economic development. Many well-known economists participated – Novozhilov, Kantorovich and Yefimov among them – as well as a group of mathematical economists. They all attacked Gossnab directly, showing that it was merely an outgrowth of an administrative planning system that handled the economy in terms of physical units and fixed prices arbitrarily. The capital required for investment was offered cost-free – hence the enormous pressure from ministries, enterprises and local government for ever more investment, but without any constraints on them to use it productively.

This in itself was a barrier to an expanded reproduction of capital at a higher technological level. Over-investment lay behind falling growth rates and had a further inevitable consequence: permanent shortages. In such conditions, planning ultimately amounted to perpetuating a routine.

The lively debates of the 1960s extended to numerous publications. Even though many authors avoided drawing direct political conclusions from their analyses, they were implicit. Everyone knew that there was a political ‘owner’ in charge of the economy and the system, and that there was no way to keep the genie in the bottle. A letter to the Central Committee from three dissidents – A. D. Sakharov, V. F. Turchin and Roy Medvedev – reached Le Monde, which published it in its edition of 12–13 April 1970. It warned of the dangers looming on the horizon if political reforms were too long delayed. The production situation was critical, as was the plight of citizens; and the country was doomed to become a second-rank state. At least one book – V. P. Shkredov’s Ekonomika i Pravo (The Economy and Law), published in 1967 – engaged in a powerful, head-on critique of the state and its ideological underpinnings, which was all the more remarkable in that it defended a Marxist perspective. According to Shkredov, the state – a politico-juridical institution that claimed ownership of the economy – was forgetting that the politico-juridical aspect (however important in economic life) came second to the actual state of the country’s socioeconomic development. Consequently, the owner’s claim to impose its vision on the economy, to plan and run it directly as it wished, would inflict great damage if the level of economic and technological development did not yet (if ever) allow for administrative planning. The relations of production were not to be confused with legal forms like ownership. That would be Proudhonism, not Marxism. An usurper state, hiding behind its right not to conform to economic reality, could only breed bureaucratization and constituted a major obstacle to economic development. Shkredov stressed that basic property forms had not changed for long stretches of history, whereas forms of production – as Marx had shown – had evolved in stages into developed capitalism.

The book received a positive reception in Novyi Mir (no. 10, 1968) from V. Georgiev, a Kosygin supporter. The reviewer praised Shkredov for having directly tackled what was now the country’s central task: ‘overcoming voluntarism in managing society’s system of production’, by integrating it into the framework of a broader theoretical problem – ‘the correlation between objective relations of production and the subjective, voluntary activity of human beings’. No one was naive enough not to read in these words the message that the state, by running the economy as it currently did, was doing enormous damage.

Economics was not the only science to flourish in this period. Other fields of knowledge were in a state of effervescence, uncovering new dimensions of social and cultural life, asking pertinent questions, and verging dangerously on the political. The journal Novyi Mir had become the outlet for critical thinking in many areas, not just literature. Its 150,000 monthly copies, which were distributed to the farthest reaches of the country, were eagerly awaited. It carried plenty of information on and analyses of the West and an embryonic social-democratic vision for the Soviet Union. Its initial sponsor had been Khrushchev, and Kosygin protected it as best he could, at least until 1968. As we have seen, Tvardovsky was removed as editor in 1970 and died the following year. He was buried in the Novo-Devichii cemetery in Moscow, with a small, inconspicuous grave stone amid a profusion of sumptuous ones for highly decorated nonentities.

Sociologists were also knocking at the door with studies of labour, youth and many previously neglected topics – especially urbanization (migration, families, women). They raised the problems of a new society in the making, which required novel approaches and novel solutions.

The legal world, particularly criminologists and jurists, pressed for reform of the criminal law and the abrogation of purely punitive elements. A commission was appointed for this purpose, comprising three authoritarian ministers and six liberal judges and scholars (including Strogovich), who were thus assured of a majority. It can safely be assumed that someone high up had taken care with the commission’s composition. In 1966, the same Strogovich – one of a small but combative group – published his Fundamental Questions of Soviet Socialist Legality, in which he argued strongly in favour of the rule of law with no exemptions or exceptions. The book contained powerful arguments, supported by numerous concrete examples, for protecting citizens’ rights against arbitrary infringement. Much remained to be done in this domain. He came out unequivocally against a retrograde, essentially repressive legal system – one more inclined to punish than to seek solutions, and indifferent to the many other avenues open to courts when it came to fighting crime. In effect, prison served only to transform inmates into hardened criminals.

The flourishing of econometrics and cybernetics, and the creation of a Ministry of Scientific and Technological Development (assigned to Gvishiani), mainly staffed by reformers and enjoying considerable prestige – these were so many signs of the times, with its news ideas and hopes. We may assume that Kosygin was not antipathetic to all this, even if he never openly challenged the status quo with provocative statements. Others could speak out without mincing their words in the official media. Thus, academician Nemchinov declared that ‘a system which is so harnessed from top to bottom will fetter technological and social development; and it will break down sooner or later under the pressure of the real processes of economic life’.

So we can see that it is false to claim that ‘no one’ predicted the collapse of the system, as has often been maintained in recent years: Nemchinov’s declaration dates from 1965.[2] Readers will already be aware that the years ahead became known as the ‘period of stagnation’; and now they know that they were preceded among the elite, and possibly ordinary people (but this requires research), by a ferment of considerable intellectual and practical import. It was attributable to the ‘men of the 1960s’, who many hoped would one day assume control of the party and transform Russia. But all this came to an end with ‘Brezhnevism’ and its debilitating ‘maturation’. When Gorbachev launched perestroika, the ‘men of the 1960s’ were already worn out.

YURI ANDROPOV

Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, who closes the period we are studying, remains little-known. Here we shall touch upon various aspects of the regime’s history that are directly bound up with his personality. Then we shall sketch his short stint as general-secretary, even if the relevant archives remain closed. In May 1967, when he left the leadership of one of the Central Committee’s international departments to head the KGB, Andropov became the system’s shield. His biographers say that the scenes he had witnessed in 1956 during the uprising in Budapest, where he was ambassador, haunted him. It would also appear that the Hungarian leader, Janos Kadar, was an important influence.

Under Andropov, the KGB’s status attained its zenith. A year after he took over the agency, on 5 July 1968, the KGB became a state committee directly attached to the USSR’s Council of Ministers – something that elevated it above other committees and ministries – and its chairman became a member of the government. A candidate member of the Politburo since 1967, Andropov became a full member in 1973. The jurisdiction of the KGB, based in Moscow, extended to the whole of the Soviet Union; and it had its equivalents in all republics. Its statutory duties were espionage, threats to state security, frontier guard, the protection of official secrets and confidential documents, investigating acts of high treason, terrorism, smuggling, large-scale currency crime, and the defence of all lines of communication against electronic espionage. Which of these many tasks consumed most time and resources is not as yet clear, though intelligence and counter-intelligence may be a safe bet.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, the KGB acquired considerable influence in all spheres of life. It watched over the whole state apparatus, the uniformed police, and churches; it ran military counter-intelligence, initiated legal proceedings against opponents, and fought against the intelligentsia. These activities earned it an appalling image and reputation, as they did its master, who managed to tame the dissident movement – an issue at the heart of the propaganda war fought by and against the West. Andropov was a loyal Brezhnevite, but what else could he have been? We should add to the picture the abusive recourse to psychiatric asylums – probably the regime’s most reprehensible act.

Nevertheless, rumours and attested characteristics complicate our image of Andropov. Why was it that this rampart of an ultra-conservative system was also constantly reputed to be a ‘liberal’? To fool people? Maybe not. For a start, unlike other KGB chiefs he was first and foremost a politician, not a product of the firm. When still in charge of one of the Central Committee’s international relations departments, he was described by his aides (he had recruited some very bright ones) as someone who was very open to discussion, a great reader, with a gift for analysing foreign and domestic affairs. For his principal lieutenants (Arbatov, Burlatsky, etc.), working with and under Andropov was an unforgettable experience. In the midst of that bastion of dogmatism, the Staraia Ploshchad, Andropov’s office was the ‘free world’. They discussed all subjects with him with absolute freedom and openly expressed their disagreements. If he disapproved of one of his aides’ viewpoints, it entailed no sanctions. He himself had told them: ‘Remember that in this office we can say what we want. But don’t get carried away: once you’re out the door, don’t forget where you are.’

Such a statement from a politician interested in intellectual issues, but who was also a realist, attests to the presence of a second persona – intelligent enough to talk freely, but also to act cautiously. Much can be gleaned about this ‘other’ Andropov from the memoirs of Markus Wolf, the former secret service head of the German Democratic Republic, who knew and admired him.[3]

During the 1950s, the KGB played a sinister role in the countries of the Eastern bloc. But things changed radically for the better when Andropov became its head, argues Wolf: ‘Here at last was a figure I admired, unbound by protocol and aloof from the petty intrigues that had marked the tenure of his predecessors.’ Andropov was free of the habitual arrogance of Soviet leaders, who considered their empire invulnerable. He realized that the interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia were signs of weakness, not strength. In his political and human qualities, he was entirely different from his predecessors and successors. His expansive horizon of interests and his ability to grasp the major problems of international and domestic politics convinced him that reform of the Soviet Union and its bloc, albeit risky, was imperative; and he intended to get down to the task. During official visits to East Germany and the banquets given in his honour, Andropov was relaxed and courteous, and a few drinks never altered his demeanour. In conversation on political matters like Czechoslovakia or relations with West German Social Democrats, he rejected any purely ideological approach. He implied that the Czechoslovak communists had been slow to realize the extent of discontent and to remedy the situation. He also favoured a dialogue with social-democrats and was unperturbed that this clashed with the East German leadership’s hatred of the SPD. Wolf appreciated such candour ‘in a forum where flattery and rhetoric were otherwise the order of the day’.

Andropov’s ideas about foreign intelligence methods, and the greater accountability and new managerial structure he introduced into the KGB, are of less interest to us here. However, we should perhaps mention his disapproval of the arrogance of KGB agents towards their own diplomats or government agencies in Eastern bloc countries: he had sharp words for the ‘imperial manner’ of some of his officers.

Andropov’s numerous conversations with Wolf demonstrated his awareness that the Soviets were lagging behind the West. Excessive centralization, obsessive secrecy and the total divorce between military and civilian sectors deprived the Soviet Union of the huge benefits that Western countries derived from advances in military technology. The two men discussed ways to overcome this damaging compartmentalization. Observing the stagnation all around him, Andropov mused about a social-democratic ‘third way’ led by Hungary and certain factions in the GDR, and about forms of political as well as economic pluralism.

The conversations between Andropov and Wolf confirm one key point: in the light of the mass of information on the West and the USSR at his disposal, Andropov had arrived at the conclusion that his country was in need of profound restructuring. According to one of his deputies, Bobkov, even the propaganda war strengthened his conviction that change was the only course. We do not know when he began to think that it was up to him personally to assume this mission. But his mind was engaged and, within the context of his KGB and Politburo duties, he prepared for such an eventuality.

The KGB was a complex organization, sometimes sloppy and undisciplined. But Andropov turned this ‘conglomerate’ into a highly effective instrument. There is much evidence to this effect, though I am not in a position to make a definitive judgement. Andropov had his own views, but shared them only with close associates and people like Markus Wolf. Those who knew and worked with him are unanimous in their view that he was a convinced anti-Stalinist – an important trait in view of the forces around Brezhnev. This was reflected in his style and working methods. In transforming the KGB and its methods of repression, he demanded ‘professionalism’ above all. He was always extremely curious about the Western world – particularly the United States – and his knowledge in this area earned him the admiration of the best Soviet diplomats and even some of the system’s critics.

For Andropov, a policy of repression had to be conceived as a way of resolving a problem. Faced with Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Medvedev and other dissidents, the approach he adopted aimed to limit the political damage they could cause – and not to destroy the persons themselves, as a Stalinist or any species of derzhavnik would have done. Andropov was an analyst, not an executioner. Whereas the hard-liners wanted to isolate Solzhenitsyn by dispatching him to Siberia, he opted to exile him abroad. I do not know what their preference was in the case of Sakharov, but Andropov’s solution – exile to Gorky – threatened neither his health nor his pursuit of his intellectual work.

It has often been said that Andropov was simply the old system’s policeman – a conservative, a supporter of repression, and hence a KGB boss like any other. However, this is to miss the point. Of course he was the system’s shield and put political opponents in jail. How else should he be expected to have behaved, given that he was under close surveillance by hawks in the Politburo and his own agency? Andropov performed his duties faithfully and carefully. His country’s security was certainly of concern to him and he believed that its enemies, who were often allies of the Western world, should not be tolerated. The fact that his own position and safety were at the mercy of Brezhnev’s whims was another aspect of the rat-trap he found himself in.

Nevertheless, his analytical mind and the politician in him made him an unusual KGB chief. For his predecessor Semichastny, there was a list of threats on the one hand and of enemies on the other: the latter were automatically guilty as charged. They had to be repressed: full stop. Andropov asked himself: What is the nature of the threat? What are its causes? How is it to be guarded against, given that serious problems, if left unresolved, become open wounds? He sought to come up with a political solution and reforms. Because he was regarded ‘on high’ as a hard-line defender of the system, he was in a strong position, affording him the possibility of neutralizing certain influential supporters of a hard line, or even enlisting their support, and thus dividing their ranks. (This was the case, for example, with his good relations with the ultra-conservative Ustinov.)

His option for analysis, as opposed to a repressive approach, emerges from two reports on the situation in student circles that he submitted to the Politburo, the first on 5 November 1968 and the second on 12 December 1976. They contain very different messages.[4]

The first report, containing an extended analysis of the ‘group psychology’ – the mentality, aspirations and political attitudes – of students in the city of Odessa, had been produced by a student who was working for the KGB. Andropov recommended that members of the Politburo read it carefully because, notwithstanding some naivety on the part of its young author, what it had to say was important. Its main message was the total, abysmal failure of the whole party structure and its politicoideological arsenal among the student body. The argument was straightforward: students knew their city very well and were perfectly well aware that local leaders were accumulating material privileges; they were shocked by the cynicism with which the latter exploited power for personal advantage. Documents, data and quotations were adduced to demonstrate the stupidity of Komsomol and the party in higher education institutions. The author pointed to the complete intellectual disarray of party functionaries, who gave standard ‘idiotic’ lectures and were unable to answer questions logically and cogently. The level in the social sciences was very low – hence students’ preference for the natural sciences and technology, which enjoyed prestige. The social sciences were held in disdain – of interest only to those set on a career in the party. Students’ preference for anything Western was scarcely surprising given their lack of respect for those whom they heard criticizing the West.

So this is what Andropov, shortly after his appointment, wanted the Politburo to hear. A few years later, he would know better. We do not know how long it took Andropov to realize that his first deputy Semen Tsvigun, who was appointed at the same time as him with the rank of general, was in fact a Brezhnev plant, charged with keeping an eye – and reporting – on him (such were the habits of the time); and that he was not the only one.

The second document, eight years later, was produced by the fifth directorate (dealing with ideological subversion), headed by Bobkov. It was signed by the latter and likewise dealt with students’ state of mind. It began by maintaining that Western intelligence and propaganda agencies targeted Soviet youth in particular (which was not wrong), before proceeding to a statistical analysis of ‘events’ of a political nature in the student milieu in recent years: distribution of leaflets, small demonstrations, and so on. According to Bobkov, the most alarming thing was the number of young people sanctioned for heavy drinking and other ‘immoral’ habits. Some KGB observers noted that such behaviour led directly to political opposition. We do not know what Andropov thought of this document or why he had agreed to extend the fifth directorate’s remit well beyond the realm of counter-intelligence. In any event, this move was certainly to the taste of the hard-liners.

The difference in approach between the two texts is striking. Not unlike Semichastny, Bobkov lays the blame on the West and the culprits themselves; he says nothing about the system’s responsibility. Andropov submitted the report without any recommendations, listing the names of its five recipients (first among them Suslov, the ‘grey eminence’ of the Politburo). He simply attached a note indicating that the KGB intended to employ its usual methods (‘prophylaxis’ and arrests in the case of actual clandestine organizations). And the five recipients merely appended a ‘Yes’ to the document, probably indicating nothing more than ‘Yes, I have read it.’

If Andropov forwarded the report without comment, it was because its contents did not meet his wishes. However, in the book he wrote after the fall of the regime, Bobkov maintains that the KGB and the fifth directorate were often opposed to all kinds of ‘persecutions’ attributed to them by ‘uninformed’ critics.[5] They were simply obeying orders from the Politburo or party apparatus. His key argument – often heard from Andropov himself – was that, faced with the West’s intense anti-Soviet propaganda, there was a better way of responding than by simply turning the accusations back against the United States. The battle could have been won by instead recognizing the system’s weaknesses and failures and seeking to correct them. Analysts from the fifth directorate had often argued along these lines, but the leadership had brushed them aside, as if the KGB was sticking its nose in business that was none of its concern. According to Bobkov, Andropov was the only leader who actually undertook to change Soviet domestic policy radically. Fully apprised of the other side’s strategy for undermining the system, he proposed a broad strategy of counter-measures developed by scientific researchers (psychologists, military specialists, economists, philosophers). The plan was radically to alter the character of propaganda, to adopt an entirely different attitude to religion and political heterodoxy, to step up the fight against corruption and nationalist tendencies and, above all, to tackle the most urgent economic problems. The fifth directorate had carefully prepared the arguments deployed in Andropov’s report to the Politburo, ‘which could have led to a democratization of the party and state’.

Andropov presented the report at a Politburo meeting. Brezhnev, Kosygin, Mazurov, Shelepin, Shcherbitsky and even the main ideologue Suslov pronounced themselves in agreement with this dual programme of reform and a propaganda counter-offensive. Bobkov confides that he does not know whether the Politburo was serious about this, but the fact is that nothing actually happened, despite the fact that the text circulated by hand inside the apparatus. Thus it was that the only remaining card was squandered.

It is unclear why Bobkov does not date this meeting. Yet it seems unthinkable that an experienced KGB general would simply have invented such an episode. The report must be sitting in more than one archive. If true, the manoeuvre was an elegant one: table proposals for reform while making them palatable to conservatives by indicating that they also represented powerful propaganda counter-measures, in a phase of the Cold War when the Soviet Union’s position was fragile. Gorbachev’s phenomenal popularity on the world stage at the beginning of the perestroika indicated that a reforming Russia could score a big success with world opinion.

Yet either the idea was too clever given the intellectual level of Politburo members; or they were too shrewd to accept their own suicide. At all events, the KGB’s fine strategists saw their hopes vanish, leaving Bobkov to deplore the fact that those who held the trump card did not know how to play it. This event, which proved to be a non-event, confirms the uniqueness of Andropov’s profile. But it would be more convincing if we could read the famous report for ourselves.

ARRESTS AND DISSIDENTS

We now possess data on the repression of political dissidence for most of the 1960s and ’70s, and we cited some of it in chapter 15. The number of arrests and type of punishments meted out are revealing. Under Andropov, the key method was prevention: he favoured ‘prophylaxis’. This affected many people, but mass arbitrary arrests were a thing of the past. And many Russians confirm that from the 1960s onwards, the fear of the secret police and its arbitrary intrusions, familiar in Stalin’s day, had mostly faded. This in itself made dissidence and other forms of political activity more feasible.

Andropov, who knew some of the dissidents (including Roy Medvedev) personally, studied their characters, read their work, and often appreciated it. As head of political security, however, his agenda ranged far wider. His agencies had to be in a position to provide a precise map of sources of possible trouble. According to his estimates, the number of people with a potential for active opposition was in the region of 8.5 million, many of them ready to spring into action when the circumstances were right. The existence of such a potential offered some leading dissidents the chance to play a catalysing and unifying role. As far as Andropov was concerned, police methods were indispensable in confronting this – all the more so because not a few dissidents openly identified with the ‘other side’. Even so, the performance of the system was the key for him. The discrepancy between its growing needs and its ever scarcer means (not just in material terms, but also in the limited intellectual resources of its leadership) was widening. And this was true not only of the economy, but also of the system’s political foundations.

THE NEW BOSS

Paradoxically, to have stood a chance of success in 1982–3, the leader (or leaders) would have had to recognize not only that the system was ailing (that had been clear to an Andropov or Kosygin for some time), but that several of its vital organs were already dead.

As early as 1965, the economist Nemchinov had foreseen dangers ahead when he castigated ‘an ossified mechanical system in which all the key parameters are fixed in advance, so that the system is paralysed from top to bottom’. When an individual is pronounced dead, we know he cannot be resurrected. But when what is involved is a mode of government, dismantling and rebuilding remain an option. This may sound puzzling, but governmental models have been rebuilt using a significant number of old components.

As has already been indicated, it is clear that Kosygin and Andropov knew the situation better than any Western historian, thanks to the reports they read, which only became available to us twenty-five years later. Among them was a solid, unpublished work, commissioned by Kosygin when Prime Minister, from the economic section of the Academy of Sciences. Three years after Nemchinov’s warnings, the academicians presented a systematic comparison between American and Soviet economic structures – productivity, living standards, technological progress, incentive systems, the direction and character of investment. Their unvarnished verdict was as follows: the USSR was losing on all fronts, except in coal and steel. The latter was the pride of the regime, but it attested to the country’s backwardness, for this sector had been the benchmark in the previous century. The message was clear: it was that of the old Aramaic inscription on the walls of Belshazzar’s palace in Babylon – only now it read differently. The threat no longer came from God, but from the United States. There was not a minute to lose.

Underlying the stagnation – but also constituting its main symptom – was a deadlocked Politburo around a brain-dead Brezhnev: a humiliating impasse exhibited before the whole world. It was impossible to remove Brezhnev, for contrary to the case of Khrushchev no majority could be mustered in favour of a new leader. The other aspect of the picture, which was blatant enough to be widely known throughout Russia, was the spread of a tentacular corruption. Members of Brezhnev’s family were ostentatiously involved in it – a subject poor Leonid did not like to hear spoken about. Mushrooming mafia networks, with which many highly placed party officials were associated, were something else the country (if not certain leaders) was aware of. Nothing on such a scale had been known before. No doubt the KGB had all the information it required.

Just as the country learned of a major drive by the KGB against this scourge, and even as the noose around the Brezhnev family and other heavyweights was tightening, a shot suddenly rang out on the political stage: on 19 January 1982, Andropov’s first deputy, Semen Tsvigun – Brezhnev’s shadow over Andropov – committed suicide. Other such shots were to follow. A few days later, the second most influential conservative in the party – the grey eminence Suslov – died of natural causes. This conjunction of events was the key to the altered balance of forces within the Politburo, to the detriment of the ‘swamp’.

If it reads like the screenplay of a political thriller, so be it. Inside the KGB, Tsvigun (under Suslov’s supervision) was in charge of the main files on corruption – those involving people in high places, including Brezhnev’s family. Personally beyond reproach in this respect, Suslov nevertheless forbade him to use these files or to show them to anyone. Thus, Andropov supposedly had no access to them. When the two men died, Andropov got his hands on them and began to dig further. Tsvigun himself, it turned out, was involved in several corrupt transactions, along with various people connected to Politburo members.

We shall pass over the details (there are many). Brezhnev died just in time in 1982. The anti-corruption drive had broken the capacity of the ‘swamp’ to maintain a favourable balance of forces within the Politburo and Central Committee. And thus it was that the unusual KGB chief Andropov became general-secretary, almost by accident. He was only in power for fifteen months – another accident – but this brief period raises interesting problems that can only be treated tentatively, and partly as an exercise in counter-factual history (‘and if… and if…’).

The various characters I have sketched were dynamic and capable. The obtuse and inept ones who comprised the ‘swamp’, or the sheer dead weights, have been omitted. But it is worth lingering for a moment over one aspect of internal manoeuvrings in the Politburo. The general-secretary had power over all nominations: he could co-opt or exclude whomever he wished. It was up to his supporters to ensure approval of these decisions by the Politburo and Central Committee. Another scenario, which had a precedent, indicates that a group which wanted to select a new general-secretary could oust the incumbent on condition of obtaining sufficient support in the Central Committee and being able to count on the army and KGB. In fact, the army would suffice even against the KGB, which was no match for it in such circumstances.

Conversely, and paradoxically, weak leaders like Brezhnev or Chernenko could block the situation if there was a majority of mediocrities at the top who depended on an enfeebled general-secretary for their position. Thus Brezhnev, a cunning but not a malicious figure, became the cement and guarantor of the status quo: he was not a threat and the dead weights felt safe. The situation became even more paradoxical when such a general-secretary was still in post, but in practice completely absent because he had been ill for years.

When Mikoyan criticized Khrushchev’s ‘erratic’ policies, he was factually accurate. But they were not exclusively attributable to his character. Khrushchev’s shortcomings were in part made possible by the absence of constitutional rules within the Politburo, which was supposedly the all-powerful summit of a hyper-centralized system. In the absence of a proper constitution, a general-secretary intent on acquiring or regaining the ability to pursue some particular policy, or simply retaining his position, had to plot to obtain total control of power with the help of his personal following (which was never wholly reliable). The old model of personal dictatorship just popped up again as if the institutional vacuum could only be filled by one man. This prompted members of the Politburo to support an autocratic position, or to aspire to it personally, as if no other modus operandi was conceivable. This is what made possible the ‘impossible’ Khrushchev, who could have been an important player in a genuine team in a constitutionally regulated system. This quasi-structural weakness, which pushed the general-secretary into behaving like a dictator, or at least allowed him to, was a congenital feature bequeathed by Stalin – part of his legacy that was not eliminated.

However, not everything was fixed on the chessboard of power at the summit (Politburo, Central Committee, ministries). The top position could certainly be filled by a mediocre or weak figure (Brezhnev or Chernenko). But it could also fall to a strong, dynamic character (for better or worse) – a Stalin, Khrushchev, or Andropov. Ousting a mediocrity and changing course proved impossible for quite a time, until the appropriate moment arrived: such, to my mind, was the occasion when the tentacles of corruption extended to various members of the ‘swamp’, rendering them vulnerable and malleable.

Thus, if the system was prone to paralysis, with no one really at the helm, this did not prevent the emergence of a real pilot capable of imposing a change of direction, starting with a shake-up at the top. Sheer chance unquestionably played a role at the outset. But once that chance had been seized, it was possible rapidly to drain the ‘swamp’ by means of a vigorous purge of its supports in the party apparatus. With the arrival of new leading cadres, new initiatives became possible. And this is precisely what happened with Andropov.

One of his close associates in the KGB, Viacheslav Kevorkov, a high-ranking official in counter-intelligence, adds to our picture of him.[6] Kevorkov carried out various international assignments – in particular, running a ‘secret’ channel with West German leaders. In this capacity, he frequently met with Andropov and is thus a primary source. According to Kevorkov, Andropov reflected on the possibility of coming to an agreement with the intelligentsia whereby it would aid him to reform the system. His model was manifestly Lunacharsky who, under Lenin, had known how to communicate and cooperate with this social group. A highly intelligent man, Andropov was acutely conscious that the party suffered on account of the low intellectual level of many of its top cadres and leaders. The frequent sneers about his ‘pro-Brezhnevism’ are disingenuous: his job was in Brezhnev’s gift. My claim that Andropov appreciated the true worth of the top leadership is confirmed by Kevorkov, who quotes his chief’s opinion: ‘Virtually none of the party or state’s current leaders belongs in the class of talented politicians who could confront the problems the country is facing.’ For Kevorkov, Andropov did belong to this class, and he concludes his book with this sentence: ‘Andropov was no doubt the last statesman who believed in the vitality of the Soviet system, but not the system he had inherited when he came to power: he believed in the system he intended to create by carrying out radical reforms.’

From this and other accounts, it seems clear that an intelligent politician like Andropov understood that the system was in need of reconstruction, because its economic and political foundations were by now in a parlous state. Reconstructing it could only mean replacing it in a phased transition. Did he really think in these terms? Even though his personal archives remain inaccessible, the decisions he took (or was intent on taking) permit us to answer in the affirmative.

He took over power rapidly and smoothly. He started off very cautiously, but the country soon learned that something serious was afoot in the Kremlin. The first steps were predictable: restoring discipline in the workplace. But this extended beyond the workers to re-educating the elites, who were not a shining example when it came to their work ethic. He scoffed at their addiction to dachas and other amenities (he was known for his rather austere lifestyle). As soon as this became common knowledge, his popularity grew. The country had a boss – visibly so. Reforms required preparation and time: task forces and commissions were set up. Some measures were temporary; others were irreversible – notably, a rapid purge of a whole layer of powerful, backward-looking apparatus officials that had been the linchpin of the previous leadership. The account given by one of those nominated to replace them furnishes some details.[7]

The dismissal of N. A. Shchelokov, a Brezhnev protege running the Interior Ministry, was widely acclaimed. In the Central Committee apparatus, the heads of departments like ‘business organization’, ‘party organizations’, ‘research and academic institutions’ and the ‘general department’, who formed what was called the ‘small working cabinet’ (or sometimes the ‘shadow cabinet’), prepared many of the most important policies. Andropov put an end to their omnipotence.

The intelligentsia was delighted by the pensioning off of Trapeznikov, another Brezhnev protege who considered himself the ideological luminary of the party. A grand inquisitor and inveterate Stalinist, he pursued writers and academics whose statements displeased him. Such people were the hard core of the party leadership: eliminating them at one stroke sent a very powerful signal.

Under Andropov, Gorbachev’s role carried on expanding. New people arrived in key positions in the party apparatus. Andropov invited Vadim Medvedev to head the ‘research and academic institutions’ department. Medvedev had been violently criticized by its previous head for his ‘insubordination’ in trying to make the party’s Academy of Social Sciences, of which he was the director, a serious research institution. Andropov told him that new approaches were needed to accelerate technological and scientific progress and to improve the situation in the social sciences, which had been given a hard time by Trapeznikov. The Academy should engage in serious research, rather than producing utterly empty ideological texts.

V. I. Vorotnikov, Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, was appointed its Prime Minister and a member of the Politburo by Andropov in 1983. In the private diary he published,[8] he adds to our picture of Andropov. He was very impressed by his intelligence, which was evident from their conversations. His notes, taken during Politburo meetings, disclose a vigorous, incisive Andropov, not reluctant to broach ever more complex problems, from workplace discipline to the functioning of the economy and the search for a new model. The way he approached change was highly pragmatic: he wanted to proceed by gradually enlarging the scope of the reforms. The first important step in the economic sphere consisted in allowing factories to operate on a fully self-financing basis – that is to say, taking account of costs and profits. However, Vorotnikov – a novice who was not as yet fully integrated into Politburo practices – says nothing about the high-ranking commissions set up to prepare such moves and was not in the know as regards Andropov’s plans for reforming the party. For that we shall have to look elsewhere.

As Andropov’s first modest initiatives began to unfold, he was preparing others and alluded to them: ‘We have to change the economic mechanism and the planning system.’ A task force, which may have existed before he became general-secretary, set to work. In the meantime, private plots, which Khrushchev had reduced or outlawed, were rehabilitated. And the state administration was put on notice: ministerial departments had not given a good example of efficient organization and had failed to create the conditions for a ‘normal, highly productive work atmosphere’.[9]

These initiatives were significant, if rather predictable, and more seemed in the offing. But excerpts from the minutes of Politburo meetings that have become available cast new and surprising light on the emerging strategy. As the campaign for the re-election of party bodies approached, accompanied by the reports habitually delivered on these occasions, Andropov suddenly declared in an official party resolution in August 1983: ‘The party’s electoral assemblies are conducted in accordance with a pre-existing script, without serious and frank debate. Candidates’ declarations have been edited beforehand; any initiative or criticism is suppressed. From now on, none of this will be tolerated.’[10]

This was a bombshell. Criticizing sloppy, self-interested party bosses, and making it clear that they could be removed just as the re-election campaign was opening, created an absolutely novel situation for the whole ruling stratum. Most of them were ex officio members of ‘elected’ party bodies at all levels, from party offices and committees, via regional committees, to the Central Committee itself. Changing this set-up would be a momentous step. It would create an entirely different atmosphere from one in which ‘election’ simply meant ‘nomination’. Andropov openly stated that he wanted to see real elections. This meant he knew that the so-called ‘party’ was in fact a corpse, that it could not be resurrected and must be destroyed. And the incumbent rulers understood this full well. The notorious ‘security of cadres’ (security of tenure regardless of performance) was about to disappear – and, with it, the impunity of the ‘good old days’. The cosy, parasitic power of the class of party-state bosses was nearing its end. Genuine elections inside the party betokened the re-emergence of political factions and new leaders; and this could mean the advent of a new party, whatever its name might be. Such a party, still in power but planning reforms, could have served to steer the country during the difficult transition to a new model.

Of course, this is all counter-factual history. Andropov, who suffered from an incurable kidney disease, soon departed the stage in 1984. He was replaced by another very sick man, Chernenko – a faceless apparatchik who lasted only thirteen months. Thereafter, the ‘party’ was headed for some spectacular novel experiences. First, in 1985, came a young general-secretary, Gorbachev, who was Andropov’s heir, had many of the right ideas, and was destined for a downfall that was as pitiful as his rise had been meteoric. Next, the state-party (or party-state) would disappear, without any blood being spilt, with its formidable security forces still intact but receiving no orders to shoot. This was another of Gorbachev’s merits, but it did not prevent him from sinking into impotence and losing power. In fact, there was no one to shoot at, since the system had not been toppled by enraged masses. There then ensued the slide into ‘reforms’ that have plunged Russia into a new form of underdevelopment.

DIAGNOSTIC NOTES

Terms like ‘paradox’ and ‘irony’ are wholly apt for characterizing Russia’s historical destiny. But so is the image of a heavy burden borne by its people, in the manner of the bargemen of the Volga who hauled heavy barges while singing: ‘Those smart English have an easy time of it; they use machines to haul their loads.’ For their part, the Russians had only their song to give them courage.

This troubled history, with its twists and turns, has induced a deep existential anguish in many Russians (or, more precisely, inhabitants of Russia), which is best expressed by the term toska, with its wealth of nuances from melancholy, through sadness and anguish, to depression. We may add to it unynie (despair), as well as a touch of self-pity of course. This is a powerful brew of sorrows – one that could perhaps only be drowned by another brew… These sentiments, plus an unbearable dose of cynicism, are to be found in popular songs about the underworld, with their sentimental attachment to the knife – a tool for settling scores and the symbol of a whole way of life. Prior to pere-stroika, singers like Okudzhava, Galich and Vysotsky rarely sang cheerful songs: they expressed a mood – theirs and their country’s – poised between rejection, commiseration, entreaty and despair. Not because people knew no gaiety in the USSR (there was plenty of it), but because these artists perceived that the country was on the wrong track and that history would not treat it kindly. In times of decline, decay and stagnation, the rich party and the bards despair.

Our data are drawn from the archives of Gosplan and the Central Statistical Office, which were unavailable when the songs of the bards were reverberating in Russia. Yet putting these two types of ‘source’ together, we find that they were telling the same story after all.