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Against objections by the planning
bureaucracy, Gorbachev rammed through a series of sweeping extensions
of formerly restricted experiments, which included enterprise autonomy,
some direct “market-like” relations among factories, and
small-scale private enterprises under the guise of “cooperatives.”
Leading Soviet social scientists brought in as advisors singled out
“social activism” as the sine qua non of successful economic
reform, and Gorbachev permitted the formation of “unofficial”
(neformaly) associations as well as the workplace election of managers.
Undergirding these moves was his putative ace in the hole. A good
third of his memoir is taken up with his goading of Ronald Reagan
(and then George Bush) into accepting steep mutual reductions in nuclear
arsenals to “free up” vast resources for peaceful economic
reconstruction and attract Western investment. Though the USSR began
a phased withdrawal from Afghanistan, arms negotiations dragged on.
But international public opinion and the desire for a place in history
led to a number of agreements as well as promises of aid and “partnership.”
That, in a nutshell, was it—perestroika.
Gorbachev revolutionized the USSR’s relationship with the West
and secured the Politburo’s approval to open up the system to
the scrutiny of the domestic and foreign media. He also began a serious
if difficult attempt to unblock the Soviet economy, inviting citizen
activism and associations outside the party. Thus did the occupant
of Brezhnev’s old office captivate the world and confound the
experts. What went wrong?
It started with the economy. Following the misexecution of the anti-alcohol
campaign, much care and expertise went into the laws on economic reform
in 1987-88. The press, too, was an ally, exposing the worst absurdities
of planning. Nonetheless, Gorbachev had no choice but to leave the
ministerial bureaucracy to implement a decentralization that involved
a far-reaching transfer of its authority. The slow progress, he concluded,
did not derive from an incompatibility between the market (real prices)
as well as limited private property, on the one hand, and planning,
on the other, but from bureaucratic resistance. Yet he was groping,
just as Stalin had. Stalin’s improvisation involved the suppression
of the market, private property, and wage labor as the path to socialism.
Gorbachev was discovering that his “reform” of the socialist
economy required the reintroduction of the very capitalistic mechanisms
whose suppression constituted the essence of socialism. As economic
“reform” moved very haltingly toward the market, the planned
economy became unhinged and output plummeted.
Behind planning lay far deeper problems.
By the 1980s the USSR economy consisted, incredibly, of around 70
percent heavy industry, mostly of the early twentieth-century fossil-fuel
variety. Efforts in the 1960s and 70s to correct the imbalance by
expanding light industry had little effect. Moreover, by that time,
much of the country’s heavy industry had become hopelessly antiquated,
as yet untouched by the rust-belt shock that had wrenched the postwar
capitalist world (where heavy industry had never been nearly as dominant
as in the USSR). In Gorbachev’s reforms, however, no new investment
was forthcoming to revamp the country’s gigantic assemblage of
obsolete manufacturing (or to clean up the nearly unfathomable environmental
catastrophe). In fact, the most advanced sectors (defense), which
might have provided investment capital, were targeted for drastic
downsizing. Military retrenchment abroad, meanwhile, cost money, to
pay for decommissioning Soviet troops and arming former clients to
defend themselves.
These economic quandaries were compounded
by the unforeseen consequences of glasnost. Complaints and jokes about
the system were a time-honored tradition, and little love was lost
on most apparatchiks, but the Soviet system was founded in part on
belief, at least the willingness to suspend disbelief, particularly
against the background of interwar fascism and the Great Depression.
Postwar capitalism had become peaceful and prosperous, and though
the superiority of capitalist living standards was suspected long
before glasnost supplied startling (indeed exaggerated) information,
many Soviets, Gorbachev included, believed that the absence of unemployment
and the provision of social welfare made socialism superior. Glasnost
induced profound shock and anger at the apparent proof that socialism
was in no way more just than capitalism. Peoples’ identities,
all the sacrifices, were betrayed—right when expectations had
been raised. The flood of new details about Communist repressions,
less surprisingly, further undermined the allegiance to socialism.
Having introduced openness and social
activism to elicit support and achieved the opposite result, Gorbachev
also saw various groups take advantage of the freedoms to advocate
radicalization of the “reforms.” Open calls began to be
heard for the overthrow of the Communist Party, mostly among the tiny
handful of former “dissidents,” but such challenges took
on a national complexion with the 1988 formation of “national
fronts”—with party and KGB involvement. The fact that nationalist
political movements kept threatening to go beyond “acceptable”
bounds was perhaps overshadowed in the leadership’s perception
by the outbreaks of mass inter-ethnic violence in the Caucasus. Yet
the manifest liquidational logic of economic reform was paralleled
in the political realm. Eastern Europe’s experience had shown
that the efforts to fuse elements of the market with planning or with
socialism’s claim to have overcome exploitation (as embodied
by wage labor and private property) were highly problematic. This
was even more true of the efforts to combine wider latitude for the
press and political associations with the Communist Party’s monopoly.
What, after all, had brought the tanks to Budapest and Prague? One
would think that the more recent lessons of Poland’s Solidarity
would have raised profound questions. But to Gorbachev and indeed
to most analysts, the main drama of reforming socialism involved not
squaring the circle, but a fierce struggle between reformers and hard-liners.
Gorbachev recounts how much effort he expended urging all levels of
the apparat that not to take the risks of political reform would be
more dangerous. In 1987, he managed to coax the Politburo into agreeing
to “democratize” the party with competitive elections. Accustomed
to lifetime appointments and perquisites in exchange for following
orders, most party officials, even those who had reformist inclinations,
did not know how to address a public reconfigured as voters. Nor did
functionaries appreciate being held personally accountable for Stalin’s
past crimes. The courageous types who heeded the call for the vanguard
to lead “perestroika”
discovered that, in the absence of economic improvements, they were
“leading” little more than angry public ventilations over
the existence of deepening problems for which the party was blamed.
It was not long before an apparat revanche, which Gorbachev had been
expecting, emerged into the open.
At the February 1988 party plenum, higher
party officials let loose a plaintive wail, replete with dire warnings
of catastrophe. The next month a storm erupted over a Leningrad schoolteacher’s
letter to the editor of a rearguard newspaper. The general secretary
moved to have the “Nina Andreeva” text branded an “anti-perestroika
manifesto” at a special Politburo
session. Aspersions were cast on Ligachev and the Secretariat for
masterminding the letter’s contents and publication. Gorbachev
writes obliquely that the letter “contained information known
only to a relatively narrow circle.” Ligachev writes that Gorbachev
had the circumstances of publication investigated and privately exonerated
him of responsibility. Gorbachev never made a public disavowal of
the suspicions. On the contrary, with the avid assistance of the Soviet
and foreign media, Ligachev was made into an unwitting instrument
in the general secretary’s efforts to cultivate society’s
sympathies and to pressure the apparat to demonstrate publicly that
it was not anti-perestroika. Gorbachev also fashioned himself a scapegoat
for economic failures: the Ligachev-led conservatives were strangling
the reforms. To top it all off, he continued to enjoy Ligachev’s
loyalty, owing to party discipline and to the insincere private exculpation.
“Without knowing it,” Gorbachev writes innocently, “Nina
Andreeva actually helped us.” But his brilliant stroke stirred
up even greater fury at (and within) the party, without magically
transforming the behavior of apparatchiks, let alone the economy.
Gorbachev seemed to recognize as much,
for not long after he had launched the effort to “democratize”
the party and begun the exploitation of Ligachev, he unveiled a plan
to revive the soviets. Power had been seized in their name in October
1917, yet these Jacobin clubs embodying a vision of direct democracy
had long since atrophied. Now, local soviets were to be reinvigorated
by means of contested elections. These were to be accompanied by elections
to a new all-Union body, a Congress of People’s Deputies, which
in turn would choose representatives to a thoroughly revamped USSR
Supreme Soviet or parliament. Nominally only a refurbishment, this
plan meant moving beyond the party’s hereditary power and acquiring
a popular mandate—a test that the vast majority of sitting party
officials who stood for election to the soviets failed miserably.
(Gorbachev exempted himself and the rest of the Politburo from the
competitive elections.)
As always, Gorbachev’s larger strategy
was dictated by tactical considerations. Khrushchev’s efforts
at reform, first strongly supported by the party, had come to an abrupt
end when the nomenklatura balked at plans for terms limits and, in
a conspiracy, used its formal powers to accept his “request to
retire.” While aiming to invigorate the soviets, Gorbachev also
sought to protect himself against a repetition of October 1964. Not
content with the Nina Andreeva stratagem, he went after Ligachev’s
power base. In late September 1988, just prior to the upcoming 1989
election campaign for the Congress of People’s Deputies, Gorbachev
engineered a “reorganization” of the party Secretariat,
abolishing its Union-wide supervisory functions so that it could not
serve as a behind-the-scenes coordinator of either the elections (and
the economy) or a conspiracy against the general secretary. Thus he
deliberately broke the apparat’s might well before he relented
on the demands to abolish the constitutional clause on the party’s
monopoly. But he failed to grasp that, by undermining the party and
enhancing the state (Union and republic Supreme Soviets), he was exchanging
a unitary structure for a federalized one. The most poignant moment
of his memoir comes when he writes of the 1988-89 political reforms,
that he failed at that time to put forward a program to transform
“the unitary state into a federal state.” This is exactly
what he did do—unawares.
Few people, Gorbachev included, understood
the party as an institution. The party had been formed as an underground
conspiracy to seize power, but once power had been seized in 1917
and a revolutionary government formed, what was to be the party’s
role? Instead of being abolished as redundant, the party came to serve
as a political watchdog in the government and indeed in all institutions
during the civil war (1918-1921), when members of the tsarist officer
corps were enlisted in the Red Army and political commissars were
introduced alongside the officers to guarantee political loyalty.
Such, haphazardly, became the model for the whole country: in every
institution party “cells” acted as guarantors of experts’
political loyalty. But after army officers, bureaucrats, and engineers
ceased to be holdovers from the tsarist period, the separate party-member
meetings within every state institution could seem superfluous. More
than that, the party had a full set of administrative bodies completely
parallel to those of the state that were performing the same function:
management of society and the economy.
This redundancy might have been just
a smothering inefficiency had it not also been central to the multinational
aspect of the revolutionary state. During the turmoil of 1917-18 a
number of borderland areas in the empire had declared themselves independent.
Although in the civil war the Red Army forced them to reestablish
their association with Russia, the political situation in the republics,
especially Ukraine, helped prevent their absorption into Soviet Russia.
An innovative compromise—the USSR—was proclaimed in January
1924. Whereas the Russian empire, aside from the Duchy of Finland
and the Central Asian “protectorates” of Bukhara and Khiva,
had recognized only non-ethnic administrative units, the Soviet state
became federal, comprising fifteen ethnic republics (many created
after 1924). For each republic, Moscow introduced constitutions, parliaments,
and academies of science and oversaw the expansion of native literacy
and native elites (albeit unevenly). This nationality-based institution-building
and consciousness endured the purges, mass deportations, and xenophobia
and was reinvigorated with de-Stalinization. Of course, alongside
the federal (nationality-based) structure of the state, Soviet leaders
counted on the unitary structure of the party (the embodiment of working
class or universal interests). A 1919 resolution had declared that
the Ukrainian and other republic-level Communist parties retained
the status of regional committees “wholly subordinated”
to the Russian party. As one Bolshevik leader explained, “a single
centralized party beside a federation of states.” So remove the
party, and you would be left with a federal association of republics
each of which could chose to withdraw from the Union, as was permitted
by the USSR Constitution. The Communist Party, administratively redundant
and yet critical to the integrity of the country, was like a bomb
planted inside the core of the USSR.
In this light, Beria’s proposals
immediately after Stalin’s death stand out as fateful. Beginning
with the industrialization of the 1930s and continuing through WWII
and the onset of the Cold War, the state side of the dual political
structure became more dominant yet the bifurcation persisted. Beria,
a highly skilled if ruthless organizer and the top boss of the state’s
military-industrial complex, proposed virtually eliminating the administrative
role of the party and restructuring the multinational institutions.
The rest of the leadership pounced on him before he pounced on them.
Khrushchev, with the backing of the party officials whom the technocratic
Beria disdained, won the ensuing power struggle and renewed the commitment
to Communist ideals as well as the role of the party vis-à-vis
the state, thereby reconsolidating the system’s perilous dualism.
The reinvigorated apparat then turned against Khrushchev. The party-state
seemed both to call forth efforts at socialist renewal and to block
those efforts. That was the contradictory political dynamic that had
produced Gorbachev and that he had set out to master, first with the
Nina Andreeva manipulation and then with a momentous maneuver that
undermined all his clever tactics. Even had he not waylaid the party
Secretariat in September 1988, Gorbachev would have had his hands
full bringing separatist aspirations to heel. With the party’s
central structure broken, he discovered that the Supreme Soviets of
the federal republics began to act as what he had made them: parliaments
of de facto independent states.
To be sure, Gorbachev retained control
over the executive pillars of the Soviet state: the KGB, interior
ministry (MVD), and the army, each of which was centralized (republic
KGBs and MVDs were completely subordinated to Moscow; there was a
single Soviet Army). Had the MVD’s several hundred thousand highly
trained troops and the KGB’s even greater number of operatives
been ordered into swift and massive action to enforce the priority
of USSR laws in 1989 or even 1990, they could have set back independence
and anti-Communist movements in any of the republics and bought precious
time. Well aware of this threat, the republics endeavored to split
off MVD, KGB, and army officers stationed in their territories, achieving
nominal success. But their greater ally was Gorbachev: the same dynamic
that had produced him and perestroika rendered him reluctant to resort
to methods that smacked of Stalin. Few people credit the Soviet president’s
insistence that he had nothing to do with the bloody dispersal of
street demonstrators in Georgia in April 1989 or the violence in Lithuania
in January 1991. Whether we accept the implausible denials, we must
admit that he came to see that the irresolute spilling of blood served
as a formidable weapon in the hands of separatists, recruiting “nationalists”
among those who had been undecided and placing Moscow on the defensive.
As political instruments, the KGB, MVD, and army were no substitute
for the party’s Secretariat--or for the USSR Supreme Soviet,
undergoing a major renovation and competing with republic Supreme
Soviets. In March 1990, Gorbachev persuaded the alarmed Politburo
to authorize, and the USSR Supreme Soviet to create, an executive
presidency for him. But central power had been dispersed, and the
survival of the Union was in doubt.
The assault on the conservative’s
potential power base, meanwhile, succeeded spectacularly. Ligachev
moans that for a long time he missed the significance of the Secretariat’s
September 1988 “reorganization.” But even after seeing through
Gorbachev’s camouflage, Ligachev shrank from raising the matter
at subsequent Politburo meetings. When someone else brought it up,
Gorbachev pointedly asked Ligachev if he (personally) needed a Secretariat.
The party’s number two man confesses he remained silent for fear
of showing ambition, shuffled back to his office and began writing
alarmist letters to his boss. “The bitter truth,” Ligachev
concludes, is that “I turned out to be right.” But if Ligachev
knew back then that socialism and the motherland were in danger, as
excerpts he claims to be citing from his written protests indicate,
the bitter truth is that the person best positioned to do whatever
was necessary to stop the general secretary lacked the wits and the
stomach to do so. He was, in short, no Suslov. Passing Ligachev’s
letters to the archives, Gorbachev continued on his haphazard quest
for reformed socialism. Only it wasn’t reform. It was dissolution.
Because Ligachev shared Gorbachev’s
belief in the necessity and possibility of energizing the system,
he refuses to concede that it was precisely perestroika that precipitated
the system’s demise or even that the blame lay with the man he
helped put in power. Instead, Ligachev rails against the hijacking
of the original “socialist” perestroika by Yakovlev and
other “radical conspirators” intent on destroying socialism.
Here is the inept counterpart to Gorbachev’s scapegoating of
the conservatives. For American readers, Ligachev’s exposure
of Yakovlev’s neo-Bolshevik manipulations may be eye-opening,
but the flattering endorsement of Yakovlev’s self-promotion does
not do the general secretary justice. Gorbachev sidesteps clarifying
the role of Yakovlev, yet the latter served at his behest; the decisive
“conspirator” was the general secretary himself. But as
the souvenir Matroshka dolls demonstrate, inside Gorbachev there was
Khrushchev; inside Khrushchev was Stalin, and inside him, Lenin. The
founders of the Soviet system had inadvertently booby-trapped it with
a dangerously redundant administrative structure, an explosive mix
to which Gorbachev added incomparable political skills. The play within
the play, obscured by the fixations on his personality and pas de
deux with Ligachev or the banal preservationism of millions of functionaries,
featured the virtuoso tactician’s unwitting, yet extraordinarily
deft, dismantling of the system.
Into 1990, with the planned economy
stumbling, organized political movements calling for an overthrow
of the regime, and various republics passing laws superseding those
of the USSR, Gorbachev continued to state publicly that the principal
obstacle to “reform” was conservative opposition. This was
after Eastern Europe had imploded. Then in June 1990, the Russian
Republic declared its “sovereignty,” a move incited and
imitated by the Baltic republics. Ukraine and Belorussia followed
suit. With some republics raising doubts about future contributions
to the Union budget, Gorbachev belatedly announced preparations for
a new “union treaty.” During the summer and fall, he also
joined forces with the “left” to prepare a 500-day program
for a transition to the market. The program recognized reality: both
the socialist economy and the unitary state were absent. Confronted
by what he had wrought, Gorbachev renounced the 500-Day Program and
appointed several proponents of “order” to a new Soviet
government. These were the men who would attempt to impose martial
law.
The final act
Accompanying Gorbachev’s November
1990 rightward lurch, which his memoirs cover up, a draft union treaty
was published. It accorded republics only limited control over enterprises
and resources on their territories, maintained the primacy of Union
laws, specified Russian as the state language, and failed to mention
the USSR Constitution’s guarantee of secession. The draft had
no prayer of winning republic approval. Even before its appearance,
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had refused to take part in any discussions
about a union. (In January 1991, riot troops and “national salvation”
committees were let loose in the Baltics—mysterious episodes
that lasted just a few days and were denounced by Gorbachev.) Armenia,
Georgia, and Moldova announced that they also wanted nothing to do
with the Union. A new draft union treaty was unveiled promising a
much looser federation and restoring the right to secession (piled
with restrictions). The leaders of the nine republics still willing
to recognize “the center” continued to demand that Gorbachev
stop dictating futilely and enter into direct negotiations. In late
April 1991 he agreed, tacking back to the “left,” though
he kept his hardline government in place. While depicting himself
as the initiator of the confidential talks, Gorbachev pointedly notes
that the fate of the Union lay in the hands of the republics, above
all Russia—meaning Boris Yeltsin. Party boss in provincial Sverdlovsk
during the Brezhnev era, Yeltsin had been transferred to Moscow by
Ligachev in 1985. By 1987, he clashed with Ligachev over apparatchik
perquisites and then, with Gorbachev, impulsively accusing the general
secretary of fostering sycophantism and being indecisive. Yeltsin
was bounced from the Politburo. Gorbachev threw him a line, the post
of deputy head of the construction industry, which Yeltsin took. But
he provoked further attacks and party officials obtusely obliged,
facilitating Yeltsin’s 1989 landslide election to the USSR Congress
of People’s Deputies. The next year he was elected to the copycat
Russian Federation Congress, becoming its chairman and pronouncing
Russia “sovereign.” One of Yeltsin’s foreign supporters
(and Gorbachev’s denigrators), John Dunlop of the Hoover Institution,
acknowledges that his man, too, was a product of the Soviet system.
But whereas Gorbachev was guided by his belief in the reformability
of socialism as a system, Yeltsin’s commitment to socialism was
more an emotional identification with the “little man.”
Wielding the common touch Gorbachev lacked, Yeltsin capitalized on
Gorbachev’s most vulnerable point: disillusionment with socialism.
Foreigners erred in thinking that the
Soviet population had become pro-market overnight. Much of the faith
placed in the market in the early 1990s betrayed the same desire for
social justice that had been the promise of socialism. Unwilling to
grant Soviet socialism the possibility of any popular support, Dunlop
argues mistakenly that Yeltsin’s popularity had nothing to do
with the system. Nonetheless, he gets the main point: Yeltsin’s
electoral victories were founded on social-justice populism. Yeltsin
had the people and he had the Russian Republic. Not one to give up,
Gorbachev reached into his bag of tactics and pulled out a referendum,
to be held in March 1991, on the preservation of the Union. Unable
to block the vote, Yeltsin did better: he managed to attach a second
question on the desirability of creating a presidency for the Russian
Republic. With an 80-percent turnout, three-quarters of the electorate
(slightly less in Russia) supported a “renewed union.” True,
six republics disallowed the ballot on their territories—a fact
Gorbachev omits—but the Soviet president had his “mandate.”
At the same time, Yeltsin began his Union-challenging presidential
election campaign, which he won resoundingly in June.
Such was the background to the Union
Treaty negotiations between nine republics and Gorbachev, which opened
in late April. In late July, an agreement was reached in principle.
It dropped the word “socialist,” devolved most ministerial
functions to the republics, upheld the supremacy of republic laws,
called for the dissolution of the USSR Supreme Soviet, and made clear
that Union membership was voluntary. For the radically diminished
“center,” this was a worse deal than the one Gorbachev had
rejected nine months earlier in the 500-Day Program. The Soviet leader
went on television to praise the accord—without divulging its
contents—and then left for vacation in the Crimea. The Union
Treaty was set to be signed in Moscow on August 20. Gorbachev admits
that he remained concerned about Yeltsin’s possible abandonment
of the settlement, but neglects to add that Ukraine, too, seemed unsure
whether it would sign. He also does not explain that the treaty was
only a general framework that appeared unworkable to many.
Two days before the signing ceremony,
on August 18, in the early evening, a group of Soviet
officials arrived unsummoned at Gorbachev’s Crimean dacha with
a decree for him to sign declaring a state of emergency. He appears
to have refused that as well as their alternative—to claim illness,
temporarily appoint Vice President Yanaev in his place, and return
“healthy” when the dust settled. The heads of the KGB, army,
military-industrial complex, and civilian Soviet government went forward
tipsily with the second scenario. In personal terms, their demise
had been made plain by the text of the Union Treaty, leaked to the
press on August 15, and by Yeltsin’s imperious decrees asserting
the Russian Republic takeover of the valuable USSR oil and natural
gas industries and the formation of a Russian Republic KGB and army
general staff. In case they still did not get it, Union KGB chief
Kriuchkov exhibited the transcript of an eavesdropped conversation
among Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the president of the Kazakh republic,
Nursultan Nazarbaev, that named every top USSR official for removal.
On 19 August, tanks rolled into Moscow.
Serious though they were, the plotters
failed, as Dunlop effectively explains, because of blunders, rainy
weather, the “fog of war,” the absence of a single charismatic
leader, and the hesitancy of commanders unsure what country and which
president they served. Yeltsin’s defiance, symbolized by his
fearless climb onto the tank and supported by a coterie of courageous
people, was critical to shattering the coup quickly, rather than having
it come apart over time or explode into a shortlived yet violent “Romanian
scenario.” His stand gave rise to the comforting myth of the
triumph of “democrats” over Communists, a view also propagated
by Dunlop. This is a partial truth concealing a much larger one. Well
before August 1991, press freedom and competitive elections had become
regular features of the political system. De facto and then de jure,
the party’s monopoly had ended. Party “cells” in factories
and other institutions were being dissolved spontaneously and party
facilities given over to other organizations. The move to the market
had become inescapable and was willy-nilly underway. Of course, Gorbachev
resisted a full embrace of the market, and he stubbornly clung to
the Communist Party (even after the coup). Yet those who condemn him
for his belief in reformed socialism forget that this was the very
reason that the transformation got started and reached the point at
which it became irreversible.
In a book that sparkles with insider
information from former KGB officials and classified documents, the
Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats shows that the KGB was deeply involved
in launching and trying to direct perestroika. The secretive arm of
the Soviet state sponsored informal political associations and individual
politicians, watched and infiltrated, and collected voluminous information;
but to what effect? Glasnost removed people’s fears, while Gorbachev’s
hectoring about a law-based state neutralized the KGB’s intimidation
potential. True, the KGB conducted an international smear campaign
against Yeltsin, tapping his and other “democrats’“
telephones (materials that were later discovered in a safe with annotations
in Gorbachev’s hand). But deprived of the option of inducing
disappearance, the KGB proved to be of
limited use. Evincing a dissident’s mentality about the KGB’s
omnipotence, Albats fails to pose the obvious question: why did the
all-knowing KGB not lead a crackdown earlier than August 1991?
Since only the KGB had the political
and technical means, while the internal troops and special army units
were subordinated to the interior and defense ministers, any action
required the coordination of three separate men, each of whom answered
to the general secretary (later, the Soviet president). In 1988, around
the time Gorbachev disarmed Ligachev and the Central Committee Secretariat,
he transferred KGB chief Chebrikov there. He was pensioned off the
next year. Writing that Chebrikov had begun to express alarm over
the new press freedoms, Gorbachev notes that he chose as a replacement
Vladimir Kriuchkov, a longtime deputy of Andropov (since Hungary 1956).
Was Gorbachev less afraid of Kriuchkov acting independently than Chebrikov?
Or was he trying to improve the KGB leadership? Or both? Gorbachev
does not say. All we know is that, under Kriuchkov, the KGB bombarded
Gorbachev with disquieting (and accurate) analyses of the political
situation, followed his orders to prepare contingency plans for martial
law, and waited as he temporized. Gorbachev’s move to the right
in November 1990 resulted from his own disorientation, but also from
KGB and military pressures (following the army’s doleful recognition
that retrenchment in Europe had turned out to be one-sided). Yet the
move appears to have stalled the KGB until the summer of 1991, by
which time the Russian Republic had become an authoritative source
of allegiance.
Gorbachev’s reluctance to employ
the full force of the USSR’s repressive-military machine was
the flip side of his hesitation to embrace the market completely and
cashier the party, but this chimera of reformed socialism, which led
him to embark on the 1987-1989 political reforms that unknowingly
destabilized the Union, also thwarted his efforts in 1990-91 to salvage
the USSR in some form. Enamored of procedural solutions and his aptitude
for orchestration, he fought to hold onto the country and his own
job, but the remnants of the party and the planned economy weighed
him down. And on the new playing field of electoral politics that
Gorbachev’s reformed socialism created, Yeltsin, the martyred
“democrat,” proved to be a far more difficult challenge
than had the “conservative” Ligachev in the more familiar
apparat snake-pit. Yeltsin sought preeminent power by pressing Russia’s
sovereignty, and in the federal system, Russia’s strength was
inversely related to that of the centralized Communist Party. He also
championed an immediate market economy, about which he knew nothing
but which supposedly promised a better and fairer life for the little
man whom he had always claimed to favor, the same illusion shared
by the striking miners who supported him. In short, Yeltsin could
abandon the party as well as socialism and feel he was being even
more true to his lifelong ideals, while also trumping the man in the
Kremlin.
Nationalism did not bring down the USSR.
Only the central elite, rather than the independence movements of
the periphery, could destroy the Union. As illusions about “market
relations” increased Yeltsin’s popularity in society and,
as his success in fortifying Russian Republic institutions became
manifest, his constituency at the top expanded beyond a small group
of high-profile “democrats” to officials in the USSR state
who saw a chance either to preserve or increase their power. After
it started to sink in that the weakening of the party had subverted
the Union, members of the decisive Soviet central elite began to abandon
the USSR because they had somewhere to go: the Russian Republic. The
coup plotters, by attempting to save their own skins, brought matters
to a head. Their evident lack of success catalyzed the divisions that
Yeltsin had fostered in the Soviet military and KGB. (One of the many
high-ranking officers who made calculated overtures to Yeltsin was
Alexander Lebed.) After the failed putsch, Yeltsin subtracted the
withering party from the administrative system and removed a number
of state functionaries for complicity, but a far greater number of
officers and officials parachuted their way to safety in the Russian
Federation. Thus the larger truth about 1991 is that the “triumph”
of democracy involved an unambiguous bid for power by Russian Republic
officials, joined at various points by patriots and opportunists from
the all-Union nomenklatura. Anyone who has been caught in a landslide
knows the value of a large tree that suddenly comes into view and
is solidly rooted. Some caught on right away, others later.
Yeltsin accelerated the Russian Republic’s
corporate takeover of the Union during the putsch itself. Immediately
afterwards, he announced Russia’s seizure of the USSR Finance
Ministry and Soviet mint. But the USSR state still formally existed
as Yeltsin, apparently ill, disappeared on a seventeen-day vacation
in the Crimea in September. The degree to which he and the rest of
the ambitious leadership of the Russian Republic understood that they
were terminating the Union remains difficult to judge. Gorbachev quotes
a confidential document submitted to Yeltsin by his advisors suggesting
that Russia would be better off without the other republics, but there
was continual policy cockfighting in Yeltsin’s entourage. Yeltsin’s
own damage-control second memoir argues creatively that he had actually
been trying to save the Union. Others have suggested Yeltsin would
have never signed an agreement that preserved Gorbachev’s position.
In any event, matters were settled by the vacillating Ukrainian leadership.
It reversed its deteriorating popularity by a declaration of independence,
subject to a referendum held on December 1, which received overwhelming
support.
Republic heads continued to “negotiate”
with USSR President Gorbachev until December 7. That evening, at a
hunting lodge outside Minsk, Yeltsin met on the sly with the leaders
of Ukraine (Kravchuk) and Belorussia (Shushkevich). The next day,
without the knowledge of their parliaments, the three announced an
accord to form the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Dunlop
accepts Yeltsin’s whopper that the stealth and extra-legality
of the CIS ploy were dictated by the need to ward off another military
coup. In this version of events, Gorbachev’s appeal on December
10 to the military high command constitutionally subordinated to him
is interpreted as an attempted putsch, while the generals’ backing
of the Russian president the next day is seen as proof of Yeltsin’s
having warded off a coup. In fact, Gorbachev might have dismissed
USSR Defense Minister Shaposhnikov for insubordination and perhaps
tried to hold on; but instead he agreed formally to dissolve the rump
Union and step down. On December 27, four days prior to the date Gorbachev
was supposed to vacate his Kremlin office, the receptionist called
him at home to report that Yeltsin and two collaborators had already
squatted the coveted space, where they downed a celebratory bottle
of whisky. It was 8:30 am.
Long fearing the “conservatives,”
Gorbachev had mesmerized and browbeat them with what must have been
intoxicating wizardry. He led them into territory that they had never
imagined; they hated him for it, but were petrified of being left
without him. After he drew close to them in late 1990, only to semi-abandon
them in April 1991, they finally acted. Yet their scheme was based
on his willingness to join in! These stalwarts dealt Gorbachev a lethal
blow. But he had helped thwart them beforehand by containing them
for so long and in the meantime bringing about a revolution in consciousness
and institutions whose most potent symbol was the democratically elected
Boris Yeltsin. If Yeltsin’s memoirs cannot conceal the fact that
Gorbachev grudgingly provided him with the possibility of office and
the requisite cover for his reckless taunting of the Soviet nomenklatura,
Gorbachev’s cannot disguise his scorn: the nonpareil lion-tamer
of the nomenklatura and world renown ringmaster of reform was upstaged
by the guy who climbs out of a Volkswagen. Yeltsin would have been
eaten alive in Gorbachev’s position, but he achieved what Gorbachev
never dared: power rooted in the ballot box. In the end, the Russian
president proved too petty and the Soviet president too vain for the
two to embrace each other, yet it took both of their complementary
roles to defang a dangerous police state.
Looking back at the putsch, Dunlop cites
Gorbachev’s “failure” to break out of the Crimean dacha
and discrepancies in reports of when communications were halted to
suggest a wait-and-see complicity. Gorbachev admits that he had a
loyal bodyguard contingent, but the grounds were surrounded, and there
were patrol boats at sea, while the prospects of procuring an aircraft
and flying through controlled airspace were uncertain. Chief Investigator
Evgeni Lisov of the Russian Federation Procuracy, quoted by Dunlop,
concluded that, “Gorbachev did not give any hints, obliquely
or directly, to indicate that he was with the [conspirators].”
Lisov added, however, that the plotters calculated that Gorbachev
would join them after a few days. We may never learn the full story.
The more important point is that, at various times, Gorbachev himself
might have tried to institute a vigorous martial law and did not.
Staggered to learn that his socialist renewal was leading to the liquidation
of the system, Gorbachev more or less went along. In sanctimonious,
selective, and occasionally distorted reminiscences, he presents this
acquiescence as an activist strategy—a disingenuous and ultimately
superfluous exercise. Yugoslavia’s death-agony, as well as the
careers of Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, and their tinpot henchmen,
will forever provoke additional shudders over how everything might
have turned out across northern Eurasia and the satellites of East
Central Europe.
The discovery of property
At the end of George Orwell’s
recently reissued 1945 “fairy tale,” something extraordinary
occurs. Recall that having overthrown Mr. Jones in the Great Rebellion,
the animals of Manor Farm set about building a new world without exploitation
when the pigs, who assumed a leading role, announced they were moving
from the communal barn into Mr. Jones’s old manor house. The
pigs even took to wearing clothes and walking on two legs. Such a
turn of events, the pigs explained, was absolutely in keeping with
the spirit of the rebellion and in any case necessary, because all
the surrounding farms, still run by people, remained hostile. Sure
enough, a neighbor, Mr. Frederick, attacked with his men. Entering
into an alliance with another human, Animal Farm survived Frederick’s
onslaught. When Mr. Pilkington visited to celebrate with his pig allies,
the rest of the creatures, who lived badly yet retained a sense of
honor as inhabitants of the only farm owned and operated by animals,
huddled against the outer windows of the manor house. They discovered
the uncanny resemblance of the pigs to people and overheard Mr. Pilkington
compliment the pig leader, Napoleon, on the low rations, long working
hours, and absence of pampering of the lower animals on Animal Farm.
Gratified, Napoleon squealed that the pigs had just decided to abolish
the outmoded revolutionary name Animal Farm and revert to the original
Manor Farm!
Orwell’s prediction, viewed in
light of the intensity with which party conservatives and central
planners resisted the introduction of market-style reforms, may appear
off the mark. The “pigs” seem to have fought ferociously
to maintain their power and perquisites, not convert them into private
property. But that was until around 1989-90. Then, factory directors
began to use the laws on forming “cooperatives” to reclassify
the profitable operations inside “their” factories and pocket
the proceeds—a legalization and enlargement of shadow economy
practices. The Central Committee opened businesses with party capital,
while party and state officials heading into retirement began to sell
themselves, at bargain prices, the dachas that they had been using.
When the Russian Republic cast aside the Union carcass and a rapid
turn to the market became official policy, the seizure of the former
state-owned wealth of the USSR progressed to a frenzy.
Lo and behold. Exactly what everyone expected and yet did not see
from the Soviet nomenklatura before 1991 took place after. The elements
of the former central elite of the USSR that assumed power in the
core successor republics—Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan—began
to use considerable force to maintain their grip. Democratically elected
parliaments were intimidated and/or bombed, opposition leaders arrested
under various pretexts, executive authority extended by fiat, and
television networks forced under strict control—all in the name
of safeguarding “reform.” Whether, as Yeltsin writes, such
measures were necessary to overcome the stubborn legacies of Communism
and defeat dangerous people who supposedly wanted to return to the
past can be debated. But there is no doubt that they were very useful
in consolidating presidential power. And here’s the kicker: although
its population is approximately half as large as the USSR’s had
been, Russia now has even more state functionaries. (This holds true
for local governments too.) The expansion of officeholders, like the
desire to retain power at all costs, can be traced to the “privatization”
of state property by whoever sits in office.
Thus did the lead zeppelin of 1991-92
postcommunist euphoria crash and burn, and the
finger-pointing begin. Tim McDaniel, an historical sociologist at
UC San Diego, asserts that by slavishly trying to follow the West’s
prescriptions Russia became a West manqué. Yes, Gorbachev and
Yeltsin were gullible about American “partnership” and the
global economic hierarchy, but every culture is unique and buffeted
by the market, whose pitiless laws are repudiated at great peril.
By reifying the “Russian Idea” (national traditions), McDaniel
universalizes the “agony” of the impoverished intelligentsia.
(Eternally apocalyptic, the intelligentsia finally lived to see the
day: it helped topple a system that had provided massive subsidies
for culture and shielded it from the market). But considerable new
housing is under construction, innumerably more cars are congesting
the roads, ever more Russian tour groups are popping up abroad, and
some nine hundred thousand small businesses are operating, employing
close to 15 million people and accounting for 12 percent of GDP. The
Russian economy is churning, powered by bureaucrat tycoons, racketeers,
citizen importer-exporters, moonlighting workers, misemployed professionals
and engineers—in short, by shadowy and non-shadowy entrepreneurship
as well as sheer survivalism.
Inequality has always been the hallmark
of capitalism and it has become glaringly visible in the new Russia:
official statistics put the number of people below the poverty level
at around one-quarter of the population. Pensioners and the infirm,
schoolteachers and social workers, are especially badly off. Yet millions
of people are doing better, particularly but not exclusively youth.
The problem is not some slavish imitation of the West but Russia’s
failure to “copy” the institutional framework that makes
capitalist countries work. Russia lacks an impartial regulatory state.
In the widespread extortion for the performance of routine public
duties and the bestowal of favors on businesses that they partly own,
elected and appointed officials in Russia may now outclass their infamous
counterparts in Italy, Mexico, and even Nigeria. Russian criminal
clusters, meanwhile, having absorbed surpluses of ex-KGB personnel
and ex-subsidized sportsmen, extract tribute in exchange for “protection”
against other criminals, yet sadly they are also sometimes the only
means for enforcing legitimate contracts. Even worse, because of the
absence of laws, or their contradictory nature, ordinary people often
must engage in formally illegal behavior to carry out their duties
conscientiously.
Stephen Handelman, an early Yeltsin
supporter and former Moscow bureau chief (1987-92) for the Toronto
Star, is even more outraged than McDaniel. Handelman became one of
the first foreign observers to begin tracking the unauthorized garage
sales by the military and other winked-at malfeasance. His rich anecdotes
accrete like manure over the fields, but the analytical harvest is
small. On the one hand, he has learned that the late-Soviet Gulag
contained not just thousands of political prisoners but—guess
what?—hundreds of thousands of thieves, con artists, and murderers,
whose criminal “organizations” took advantage of the dissolution
of the USSR. On the other hand, Handleman
has come to see that rather than a staff of a million Andrei Sakharovs,
the Russian bureaucracy is manned by officials of the old Soviet state
who either joined forces with or muscled aside the Soviet-era gangs.
Moscow’s pin-striped goodfellas sporting red carnations and machine
guns are a sight to sore the eyes, but Handelman blurs them in with
the everyday petty shuttlers who travel abroad and return with bales
of consumer goods to be sold at street bazaars. It’s all “the
mafia.” At one point he reveals that the car-theft “mafia”
invested its ill-gotten profits in a legal automobile manufacturing
plant—then he catches himself, lest the narrative break the boundaries
he has set of “disillusionment.” He concludes that because
“we” had illusions that once Communism was miraculously
transcended by the “democrats” everyone would live happily
ever after as in the suburbs of Toronto, “we” have some
soul-searching to do. He even suggests that, by expecting too much,
“we” share responsibility for having “lost Russia.”
Russia was never lost, only the analysts were. Revolutions—whatever
happens or does not happen in the streets—are struggles for power
among elites. Inevitably there is some reshuffling, yet however many
fresh faces rise, the “new” elite always derives substantially
from the old. It makes little sense to have understood before 1991
that Soviet officials resisted decentralization and the introduction
of the market because they feared losing their sinecures, and then
to act shocked, shocked when prohibitions against private property
are lifted and these same
officials vigorously pursue their material interests.
This is not to excuse insider theft
in Russia. Some officials steal a great deal more than others (a few
who pilfer the most are among the best administrators). Handelman
shows that while large sections of the police are abetting crime and
corruption, other sections are battling it. Government policies, or
their absence, have made a difference and will continue to do so.
Yet official corruption was not a matter of to be or not to be, but
of degree. Postcommunist Russia was not the East Germany economy being
privatized by a West German commission. Nor was it the tiny economies
of Czechoslovakia or Hungary, or even medium-sized Poland. Russia
was a monumental accumulation of non-private property, including the
world’s richest array of resources—oil, gas, nickel, copper,
and diamonds—suddenly priced at world levels. Overnight, when
direct exports were encouraged (at IMF insistence), Russia became
one of the greatest economic bonanzas the world has seen—for
those with the wits and wherewithal to ship abroad. Even finished
steel could be exported profitably, as scrap.
Predictably, the biggest new barons
came from the resource sector, the so called syroviki—raw materials
people who gathered mind-numbing fortunes, helped create the shaky
financial system (writing the banking laws that were passed), and
purchased the country’s newspapers and television stations. It
would be fair to say that the Russian government under Yeltsin has
incarnated the interests of the syroviki, whose most visible symbol
is Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former boss of the USSR
natural gas industry. In late 1992, Chernomyrdin replaced the shock
therapist Yegor Gaidar amid laments that Russia’s market “reforms”
were over. But Russia had an overabundance of shock without much therapy,
owing in part to the textbook myopia of American consultants who did
not see that the US market economy depends on an extensive civil service
and legal infrastructure or that the planned economy was hypermonopolistic.
Gaidar achieved little more than smashing the lingering price controls
of planning and inciting hyperinflation. With his removal, the Yeltsin
economic “reforms” were in a way just beginning, as refineries,
nickel-processing plants, and other big money-makers were sold by
and to people like Chernomyrdin, and the government sought to
stabilize the economic environment.
Instead of the party ideologues and
KGB operatives, factory managers and former economic ministers now
dominate. These include, besides the reigning syroviki, the promyshlenniki
(manufacturers), who have not done as well because most of their property
requires major new investments that have yet to be made. The city
of Moscow (home to the elite) and the oil and gas regions of Siberia
together account for almost as much state investment as all other
regions of Russia combined. This represents a substantial deepening
of trends dating back to the Brezhnev years, when growth slackened
and nomenklatura lifestyles were maintained only by expanded oil and
gas exports. Since 1991, Russia has become a virtual export-led economy,
but unlike, say, the Asian “tigers” or their model (Japan),
the former superpower sells raw materials rather than finished goods—a
typical Third World or colonial profile. Against this background,
many of Russia’s promyshlenniki looked to the government’s
main opposition—the reinstituted Communist Party—to uphold
their own and the country’s interests.
Typically, American analysts interpreted
calls for state investment in industry and manufacturing as a troglodyte
longing for Communism rather than a national-interest reallocation
of the vast sums that were fattening the offshore bank accounts of
government officials and their banker-syroviki friends. In fact, the
“surprisingly” strong showing of “Communist” candidates
in the 1995 parliamentary elections reflected the backing of the manufacturing
constituency. Chastened, the Yeltsin team sought to coopt as many
promyshlenniki as possible, a goal facilitated by the fact that some
military manufacturers found new customers abroad and ceased to look
favorably on “sharing” wealth. Nonetheless, had the “Communist”
presidential candidate in 1996, Gennadi Zyuganov been less inept,
and had he taken the advice to bring the promyshlenniki into the center
of his campaign rather than give pride of place to kooky Communist
residuals like himself, Yeltsin’s alliance of syroviki, their
banks, and some military promyshlenniki could have been unseated.
Though given a post-1991 reprieve, the nominal Communists appear to
have discredited themselves beyond salvation, yet it remains a possibility
that the remaining industrialists, not to mention the still extensive
working class, could help bring forth a new candidate (or party) to
displace the current power group. One potential winning slogan could
be “an end to corruption”—meaning, in practical terms,
the use of export, privatization, and tax revenues for construction,
purchasing new technology, and providing social
services, along the lines of what Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has done within
Moscow.
Whether popular pressures help curb
the economic cannibalism of comprador oligarchies and compel a national
government that governs in the national interest, the key point of
contemporary Russian politics is that no one can come to power or
rule without taking into account the forces who own the country’s
property. There is, therefore, no possibility of a return to Communism.
Whatever their hopes, the Communists lack the instruments for a restoration
and anyway, influential groups would block such a scenario. It was
the energy interests who took the initiative in the 1996 Russian presidential
election and approached the floundering Yeltsin through Anatoly Chubais,
the former privatization minister (1992-95) who gave it all away.
These money types insisted that Yeltsin not cancel the elections,
promising to help. They financed and ran the campaigns not only of
Yeltsin but also of the first round’s third-place finisher, Alexander
Lebed, who backed Yeltsin in the run-off against Zyuganov. That Lebed
and Yeltsin then had a falling out because the former flaunted his
own presidential ambitions when the latter went under the knife has
been taken as a sign of the inordinate volatility of Russian politics.
Yes, the long-hidden Kremlin intrigues Gorbachev describes in his
memoir are now in plain view and compete for media attention with
the apocalyptic threats of the Communist-dominated legislature. Beyond
the noise, however, there is a certain equilibrium deriving from the
concerns of small and large property owners, who strongly support
low inflation, a stable currency, and the legitimacy of elections
(if only to calm stock markets), even as some of them stop at nothing
to gain control over the vast part of the country’s property
still being privatized and to form Zaibatsu.
Russia’s instability comes not
from presidential intrigues or from the strident clashes between the
executive branch and the nearly irrelevant Duma, or even from misnamed
“clan” wars among rival oligarchies, but from the dearth
of productive investment in industrial restructuring and new manufacturing,
notwithstanding formidable export profits, and from the absence of
any dividing line between public office and the private sphere. Whether
the power brokers in Russia who run and/or are friendly with the national
and increasing important regional governments will use their riches
to develop the country for the long term and better institutionalize
the market economy remains to be seen. Some commentators invoke analogies
to the nineteenth-century American “robber barons,” who
supposedly employed their ill-gained fortunes to promote the general
good. In fact, the stabilization of a market society and market infrastructure
in America took place over a long period and largely as a result of
popular pressures to curtail arbitrariness and injustice, usually
against the robber barons’ objections. Be that as it may, there
are some encouraging signs that the Russian superelite has at least
acknowledged the problems of bargain-basement insider privatization,
tax favoritism, and generally chaotic public finance, formidable challenges
no less acute at the local level.
Whatever the continuing deficiencies
of Russia’s market system, however, the much-feared Red-Brown
coalition has failed to materialize. David Remnick’s unsentimental
survey of Russia’s “strange and contradictory landscape,”
consumed as it is with the supposed double-Z threat (neo-fascist Zhirinovsky
and neo-Communist Zyuganov), demonstrates all the same that despite
the rumors of possible uprisings in the decomposed army and the sensational
murders of bankers and journalists, Russia’s politics are not
militarized but monetized. A writer for The New Yorker, Remnick observes
that Russia’s fastest growing service industry is security. Yet
he also notes that considerable power has de facto devolved to the
regions, the media are highly developed (if manipulated), and the
population well-educated and skilled. Underscoring the tens of billions
in capital flight and the mass tax evasion, Remnick has in effect
shown that Russia is not caught in a Weimar syndrome but a Latin American
one. High crime and unchecked corruption make the
illusion of authoritarianism tempting. But Russia has effected the
basic “transition” to private property, elections, and demagogy.
The end of empire?
For most of its history, the Russian
empire was a highly vulnerable great power striving for more than
it could achieve, ambitions that were a source of pride but also of
great misery. Under the strain of WWI, the empire dissolved, yet its
territory and its great-power mission were restored in a new form,
the USSR. WWII brought the USSR deeper into Europe and Asia, but the
postwar competition with the US stretched the USSR and its people
to the breaking point, a circumstance acknowledged by Gorbachev and
cited by apologists for Ronald Reagan’s military spending spree.
Because officials of the Bush administration showed “restraint”
as the conquerors of Berlin began a humiliating retreat without having
lost a battlefield engagement—a spectacle not seen since Napoleon’s
evacuation along the same roads from the other direction—they,
too, have awarded themselves high honors. The kudos have been misappropriated.
Gorbachev served up the severed head of his superpower on a silver
platter and still had to employ all his artifice to cajole two American
administrations to the banquet.
Gorbachev does not disclose whose idea
it was to have a Soviet “tourist” on the grounds of the
Kremlin buttonhole the affable Reagan in front of journalists and
make him concede he no longer thought the USSR was an “evil empire.”
But had the Soviet Union been anything like what Reagan, the CIA,
and American policymakers thought, it would never have liquidated
itself, let alone in a peaceful manner. If unbearable military competition
with the U.S. had been the foremost concern that necessitated change,
why would the Soviet leader have exhausted himself trying to democratize
and have the Communist Party live up to its vanguard role? Why, having
achieved disarmament, would he continue to pursue socialist renewal
as “conservatives” and the KGB warned him the homeland was
at risk? Why, once it was clear to the whole world that the survival
of the centuries-old state was at stake, did the Soviet leader not
employ the
massive resources at his command and deliver a knockout blow to the
republic drives for independence? Because the principal consideration
was not military competitiveness but the ideals of the October revolution.
Gorbachev confirms what everyone long
suspected: he never had a majority in the Politburo. He made full
use of the prestige of the general secretaryship and refrained from
praising any of the Politburo members in front of the rest while making
sure to convey his support for each in private. But for all his authority
and hocus-pocus, he could have continually gotten his way only because
everything he set out to do was in the name of the revolution: revitalize
the Communist Party, raise industrial output’s quantity and quality,
activate the masses, reinvigorate the soviets. At the core of his
thinking lay the assumption that the Soviet people shared his commitment
to the “socialist choice” of 1917. They did, and then they
did not. The renunciation of KGB coercion meant that everything rested
on consent, just when people acquired new comparative information
whose long suppression magnified its significance. Glasnost quickened
a conceptual reevaluation of socialism’s supposed superiority
to capitalism that censorship had mostly retarded. But whence all
the crack Soviet journalists and the ravenous Soviet reading public?
The land of relentless propaganda had a literacy rate far higher than
the United States.
Glasnost made clear that socialism had
lost the competition with the world’s most advanced countries
that it assumed voluntarily in 1917 and could not have won in the
postwar period even without the astronomical spending made on missiles
and tanks. It was not the fantasy of Star Wars (the KGB had sounded
the geopolitical alarm well before Reagan came along and accelerated
the deterioration in America’s schools and cities), nor even
the important resolve of containment, but the defeat of interwar fascism,
the postwar capitalist economic boom and accompanying investments
in social welfare that were decisive. These changes meant that socialism
could not provide a better standard of living, a more substantial
safety net and just society, or a superior political order to that
of the capitalist democracies. And it was the USSR that sacrificed
20 million lives to defeat Nazism. And it was the fear of the Soviet
model’s spread that helped force the capitalist expansion in
job programs, unemployment benefits, pensions, medical subsidies,
accident insurance, school lunches. And it was American cold-war hotheads
who not only opposed social welfare, but time after time damaged the
ultimate weapon of strength, open and democratic government. The triumphalism
is, as they say on Sundays, wide to the right.
Deceptively gratifying to the right,
the Soviet collapse also appears misleadingly obvious, as book after
garden-variety book now “reveals.” Socialism’s and
the USSR’s simultaneous demise could have been foreseen only
by someone who knew that socialism was born as non-capitalism and
enjoyed a measure of popular support dependent on the image of capitalism;
that, rather than being mono-organizational, the Soviet administrative
structure was bifurcated into party and state; that the USSR was both
unitary and a federation of nations it helped foster; that the integrity
of the Union rested on the existence of the party; that the Communist
Party was not just incompatible with press freedoms and civic associations
but administratively redundant; and that the October revolution was
accompanied by ideals, which endured all the nightmares. In hindsight,
what is remarkable is not that this structure collapsed, but that
contrary to expectation, the enormous Soviet nomenklatura did not
go to the wall. What neutralized the nomenklatura’s capacity
and will to hold onto the system with all its might was not policy
in Washington but Gorbachev’s quest for a non-existent reformed
socialism, combined with the ineffectiveness of the “conservative”
hope Ligachev. The Soviet leader compelled the elite to take their
own system’s promises seriously. Many obliged enthusiastically,
others reluctantly or not at all, but how could they openly refuse?
Dumbfounded by the spiral of events and Gorbachev’s acquiescence,
the foremost representatives of the nomenklatura, following their
own hapless mutiny, eventually accused him of treason. But he and
his quest had emerged from the soul of the system.
The revolution’s ideals—a
world of abundance, justice, and people’s power—also informed
Yeltsin’s anti-Communist populism. Many sensed, and glasnost
made clear, that the ideals were embedded in institutions that made
them not only unrealized and but unrealizable. Those institutions,
from the party-state and the planned economy to the KGB, brought forth
such horrors that they evoked outrage in society and among the more
conscientious officials. It was outrage, not indifference, precisely
because the ideals were powerful and some party members and most of
the people clung to them in their own ways. Yes, for many there were
no revolutionary ideals to uphold, just a system to overthrow (the
dissidents) or perpetuate (the Brezhnevites). But anyone who spent
time in the USSR during the late 1980s and early 1990s knows just
how passionately hopeful much of the country was. It was an ambivalent
hope, full of deeply ingrained skepticism and rooted in a visceral
separation of the Communist Party from Soviet (people’s) power
and justice. This is what Gorbachev tapped during the 1989 Congress
of People’s Deputies when the country was riveted to its television
sets for two weeks. Then, Yeltsin came along and brought the promise
of the ideals without the party and apparatchiks! It was too good
to be true, and the people, as well as many suddenly former party
members, embraced him like they had no one else.
When Yeltsin started out he was probably
no less sincere than Gorbachev had been, but it was obvious that he
had even less of a grasp of postcommunism than Gorbachev had had of
the old system. The realities of the market and the administrative
incompetence of the “democrats” provided a rude awakening,
and Yeltsin became a vehicle for the human detritus of the various
Soviet-era institutions that had been produced by the October revolution,
choked the revolutionary ideals, and been dissolved by Gorbachev’s
efforts to bring them to life. True, the traumatized nomenklatura
underwent spasms, yet much of it survived, under new conditions in
which the richest showed they prefer elections and in 1996 could talk
the populist Russian president into going along. At the same time,
officeholders, freed from Communist Party “discipline” and
legitimated by elections, turned out to be far more brazen than they
had been when Yuri Andropov began assembling a team of earnest apparatchiks
to wage war against corruption. The acclaim, and then loathing, for
Yeltsin provide further evidence that long-held dreams for a better,
more just world were structures in the Soviet socio-political landscape,
and the main chemical agent in the system’s unexpected, peaceful
dissolution.
Many members of the old Soviet elite
who lost out or regret the disappearance of the USSR now advise that
Gorbachev should have followed the so-called Chinese model of reforms.
No less committed to the rule of the party, the Chinese leadership
under Deng bolstered the party’s standing by permitting a real
market economy and cracking down mercilessly whenever the reform process
began to extend beyond certain political boundaries. Tiananmen upset
neither the party’s grip nor economic growth. But the Chinese
have a largely peasant economy. Old-style heavy industry in China
is in deplorable shape yet never reached anything remotely close to
the proportions it did in the USSR. Also, China’s growth has
been fueled by the investment of overseas Chinese (and secondarily
Japan); Russia had no Hong Kong or Taiwan. Finally, the results, particularly
the official corruption, are not necessarily so different from what
we see in Russia. And China’s reforms are not yet finished. Be
that as it may, China offers yet further proof that revolutionary
ideals brought down the USSR. Instead of a Deng or Beria-type realist,
Soviet reforms were carried out by a Khrushchevian true-believer.
And what of our own Sovietologists?
They continue to squabble over the meaning of 1991. One side (the
left) had staked its reputation on the argument that a reform group
would materialize and change the system, perhaps making it democratic;
the other (the right) had insisted that the system was incapable of
reform. Since Soviet socialism was unreformable and Gorbachev the
reformer presided over the system’s docile replacement by a democratically
elected government, each side refuses to concede defeat, a boldness
backed by tenure. Both were wrong. Neither had a clue about the party’s
redundancy and the brittleness of the administrative structure. Neither
had a clear picture of the nationalities dynamic in the context of
the federative nature of the Soviet state. The right’s realism
about the system’s coercion and insoluble contradictions was
willfully blind to the elements of consent and positive content in
the revolution’s aspirations. The peaceful dissolution, for which
the right has pirated awards, was effected by the very mechanism,
reform socialism, that the right denied had any significance—and
that much of the left had erroneously thought would make the system
humanely socialist. The majority left’s hopeless naiveté
on the Soviet system came with a hardnosed critique of the harmful
excesses of the necessary cold-war crusade. Only a very few analysts,
such as Orwell, managed a sober and subtle appraisal of Soviet realities
while maintaining a sharp critical eye on their own society. That
stance, so complicated by the Russian revolution, has now become far
easier, and remains no less timely.
Many former Sovietologists claim to
have metamorphed into students of transitions (!), but career-long
postures continue to inform their views on contemporary Russia. Those
who held out hope for Soviet reform scathingly condemn Yeltsin and
postcommunism (à la McDaniel), sometimes even expressing nostalgia
for Gorbachev. Those who denied the redeemability of Communism belittle
Gorbachev and pooh-pooh the corruption and authoritarianism of Yeltsin
(à la Dunlop). (Handelman exercises his journalist’s prerogative
to go from one side to the other and back.) Some former Sovietologists
have, however, tried a new tack. Following the unexpected disappearance
of their subject of study, they have taken to warning that the Russian
state has little “national identity” and/or is in danger
of breaking apart. They might try considering the case of Austria,
which in 1918 lost an empire many times its size and bordered on a
huge Germany state that spoke the same language, yet went on to develop
a strong post-imperial identity in conditions arguably far more challenging
than are Russia’s. As for the danger of dissolution, Russia is
more ethnically homogenous than Belgium, Spain, or Great Britain,
while Russia’s largest ethno-political units, such as Tatarstan
and Yakutia (Sakha), are internal and in any case not comparable to
Ukraine, let alone the Baltics. True, the reach of Russian sovereignty
in the Caucasus remains ambiguous, but the kind of international recognition
granted to the former Soviet republics is unlikely to come for small
separatist enclaves on one of Russia’s outer edges.
Russia’s dilemma is not possible
break-up but productive use of its enormous wealth and on that basis,
world integration. Russia has little prospect of joining any of the
world’s three main trading blocs, two of which partially overlap
security systems (NAFTA, Europe/NATO, Pacific Rim/US-Japan). The US
is the centerpiece of each. The relative balance of power in the Asia/Pacific
region has risen to a level competitive, if not superior, to Europe,
while Russia is now farther from the heart of Europe than it has been
since the eighteenth century. (That Gorbachev, who had an army in
place, failed to fix in writing Bush’s and Baker’s verbal
promise over German unification not to expand NATO eastward constitutes
a diplomatic blunder at least equal to any Roosevelt has been accused
of committing at Yalta.) Russia is not even fully integrated into
its own NAFTA, the CIS. Because of energy supplies, ethnic diasporas,
and sheer size, Russia will continue to wield clout throughout the
territories it used to rule. But even more tightly than the USSR,
Russia appears sandwiched between two economically superior blocs.
Is this wise? Inescapable? The payback for centuries of imperialism?
For the time being and perhaps far into
the future, any aspirations Russia may have to reclaim its empire
(and resume a global role) cannot be attained. Even more striking
than the loss of the means to carry out a broad imperial mission has
been the loss of Russian will to do so. Opinion polls are unequivocal,
even allowing for large margins of error: a craving for respect remains
strong, but the debacle of the Chechen war seems to have extinguished
most lingering ambitions for imperial “greatness.” Whether
this historic turnabout endures will be decided by Russia’s leaders
and people. Yet it is striking that Washington has been quick to take
credit for causing and managing the dissolution of the other superpower
while denying that its current efforts to “consolidate”
the imperial demarche will influence Russia’s geopolitical future.
Russia is invited to participate in as many NATO “discussions”
and “activities” as possible, while NATO is set to expand
eastward into the territories of the former Warsaw Pact, and perhaps
beyond.
If Russia can survive without an imperial
identity, if anyone who comes to power there will be assisted or co-opted
by business elites, if Russia’s need for Western capital and
markets provides unmatched leverage, if Russia agrees to joint military
exercises with the U.S. in Central Asia, what could be the harm of
NATO expansion? NATO expansionists insist that their actions are in
no way directed at moving the neo-containment goalposts against Russia
(just as Japanese consumers who use disposable wooden chopsticks could
well say that they do not intend to denude the world’s rainforests).
Anyway, aside from a refusal to ratify disarmament treaties it badly
needs, Russia cannot really do much about it. But history knows time-frames
longer than political careers. Stalin did not live to see that |
