Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (23 page)

called for retaining the party’s control while sanction-ing a free press and competing associations—in short, 175

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something close to perestroika. Back in 1967, invited to explain Czechoslovakia’s political reform plans in Moscow, Mlynárˇ also paid a social visit to Gorbachev in Stavropol.

The two talked of a renewed socialism devoid of Stalinist ‘distortions’, the enchanted fable for the educated, Marxist idealists of their cohort.
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In fact, Lenin had not been less dictatorial or less ruthless than Stalin. But the myth that Lenin had been different, the myth of a redeemable party-led socialism, turned out to be of overriding importance.

It had, in the post-Second World War conjuncture, the dissolving impact on Soviet structures that the First World War had on the then intact Habsburg state.

Gorbachev’s ascent to the pinnacle of power in Moscow was not preordained, but neither was it a historical accident. It was a consequence of an inescapable generational change in the party leadership. Even Gorbachev’s supreme tactical skills, so crucial for the full unfolding of perestroika, were not an accident, since such skills were a prime reason for his ascent as the top representative of his generation. Ligachev’s timidity may also seem an accident, but he was elevated to the party’s number two position by Gorbachev, who knew his deputy’s weaknesses—and party history. Khrushchev’s removal by the apparat, an event that helped motivate Gorbachev’s 1988 sabotage of the party Secretariat, which unhinged the Union, was also not some happenstance. Under the pressure and logic of events, Khrushchev had brought forth the vision of a humanistic socialism as the party’s answer to Stalinism, but his reforms resulted in his ouster. Khrushchev’s sacking, 176

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and Brezhnev’s caretaker reign, gave rise to the mistaken view that the key to Soviet politics was a struggle between ‘reformers’ and ‘conservatives’, a notion that misled Gorbachev as well as the voluminous commentary on him. The key was different: reform seemed necessary, but it would be tantamount to destabilization.

Those rare analysts, such as Vladimir Bukovsky, a dissident and then émigré, who did understand the Catch-22

nature of Soviet politics, predicted that, following a destabilizing reform, a system-saving crackdown would ensue, to be followed in future by another futile cycle of reform and reaction.
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But Gorbachev proved Bukovsky wrong by not cracking down. Again, Mlynárˇ provides the answer. In 1969, after Soviet tanks had crushed the Prague Spring, he was expelled from the party; eight years later, he joined a group of Czechoslovak intellectuals, artists, and former apparatchiks who initialled an appeal to the regime to uphold human rights—what became known as Charter 77. Mlynárˇ had taken the next step in his evolution from committed Stalinist: discovering the impossibility of reforming socialism, he repudiated socialism, but he kept his humanist vision. That is also what happened to Gorbachev.
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For him, amid the turmoil of perestroika, to have returned to Stalinist methods to preserve the system would have not only destroyed his international reputation but made a lie of his whole inner life. After 1991, Gorbachev remained a man of his convictions, recasting them as Western social democracy. The ‘God that failed’

had a leftist, not just a rightist, incarnation.

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Only a few of Gorbachev’s politburo colleagues shared his socialist romanticism, but even fewer matched his craftiness. He knew that opponents of his specific initiatives were not united and hesitated to demonstrate lack of confidence in the general secretary. Wielding the prestige of his office, he refrained from praising any politburo member in front of the rest, while making sure to convey his support for each in private. Outside the politburo, he knew that duty to party discipline inhibited his opponents from voting against proposals put forth in the party’s name.
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But perestroika was a party programme in more than name. For all his authority and hocus-pocus, Gorbachev could have got his way for so long only because everything he set out to do was within the framework of the revolution: raise industrial output’s quantity and quality, advance peace, revitalize the Communist Party, activate the masses, reinvigorate the soviets. Only in 1990–1

did he begin, reluctantly, to discuss a possible market economy and the remaking of the Union, inducing party stalwarts to accuse him of being an agent of Washington.
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But Gorbachev and his destabilizing quest for humane socialism had emerged from the soul of the Soviet system.

The October revolution’s ideals—a world of abundance, social justice, and people’s power—also informed Boris Yeltsin’s anti-Communist populism (which used as its vehicle another fundamental element within the Soviet system: the republics). Glasnost revealed, for those still unaware, that the revolution’s ideals were embedded in institutions that made them not only unrealized but also 178

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unrealizable. Glasnost provoked outrage, because the ideals were still powerful and people clung to them, in their own ways. Of course, for many there were no ideals to recapture, just a system to overthrow (the very few dissidents) or to perpetuate (the many ‘patriots’). But anyone who spent time in the USSR during the late 1980s and early 1990s knows just how passionately hopeful much of the heartland was. It was an ambivalent hope, full of scep-ticism, 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 that riveted the country. Then, Yeltsin came along and brought the promise of the ideals without the party and apparatchiks! The people, and some suddenly former party members, embraced him as they had embraced no one else.

When Yeltsin launched his populist crusade he was probably no less sincere than Gorbachev had been, but it was obvious Yeltsin had less of a sense of post-Communism than Gorbachev had had of the structural booby traps of the old system. Attempting to rule Moscow, let alone Russia, with a tiny group of self-styled ‘democrats’, some cronies from the Urals, and other administrative incompetents brought a rude awakening. Yeltsin quickly became a willing vehicle for the human detritus of the Soviet-era institutions that had smothered the revolutionary ideals and had been stirred by Gorbachev’s efforts to bring them to life. True, the vast elite underwent transformation, yet most of it survived, especially the upwardly 179

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mobile second and third echelons. At the same time, freed from Communist Party ‘discipline’ and legitimated by elections, office-holders became far more venal than they or their predecessors had been when Yuri Andropov had begun assembling a team of earnest apparatchiks, headed by Gorbachev, to combat official corruption. The acclaim, and then loathing, for Yeltsin afforded 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, relatively peaceful dissolution.

China offered an important counterpoint. Many people regretted that Gorbachev had not followed the Chinese model of reforms. Under Deng, the Chinese leadership
bolstered
the party’s monopoly by allowing—at first grudgingly—market behaviour to flourish, while maintaining political controls with repression. But China did not have to overcome the wreckage of the world’s largest ever assemblage of obsolete equipment. Heavy industry in China was in deplorable shape, yet the population was 80

per cent peasant. Also, China’s economic boom was made possible by massive direct foreign investments, some $300

billion in the 1990s, mostly from overseas Chinese (and secondarily Japanese and American investors); Russia had no Hong Kong or Taiwan. Finally, the ambiguous results in China—the widespread unpaid debts, the unsecured property rights, the official malfeasance—were not neces-sarily so different from those in Russia. And the Chinese process was far from over.
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Be that as it may, China’s 180

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example was further proof that socialism with a human face precipitated the Soviet collapse. Instead of a Deng or Beria-type ruthless pragmatist, Soviet reforms were carried out by someone willing to sacrifice centralized power in the name of party democracy but hesitant for ideological reasons to support full-bore capitalism—in short, by a Khrushchevian true-believer.

The armageddon that never was

Academic Russia watchers, formerly known as Sovietologists, survived the collapse. Prior to 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
proved to be
unreformable
and
Gorbachev the reformer presided over the system’s docile replacement by a democratically elected government, each side refused to concede defeat, a boldness backed by tenure.

Both were wrong. Neither had a clue about the institutional dynamic that tied the fate of the Union to the fate of socialism—the party’s simultaneous redundancy and indispensability to the federal Soviet state. The right’s realism about the Soviet system’s coercion and insoluble contradictions was wilfully blind to the elements of popular consent and positive content in the revolution’s enduring ideals, which were crucial for converting reform into 181

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repudiation. The left’s romanticism about a reform that would make socialism humane was, as the right argued, an illusion, but this illusion sustained what the right thought impossible—the top-down, self-dismantling of the system.

How many Sovietologists understood the depth of Gorbachev’s reform-socialist beliefs, the mortal danger they posed to the system, and their likely evolution, fore-shadowed by Mlynárˇ (and many others), into a humanist repudiation of Leninism? Who appreciated the profound gulf between the seemingly similar ‘conservative’ number two men—Mikhail Suslov, who helped orchestrate the palace coup against Khrushchev, and Yegor Ligachev, who never moved to oust Gorbachev yet drew so much mis-comprehending attention? Which analysts understood that the republics, especially the Russian republic, could be vehicles to power for ambitious members of the middle echelon and irresistible safe harbours for the drifting, well-armed top elites? Russia as a refuge from the Union!

Who recognized that unconstrained access to state-owned property and state bank accounts would turn elite betrayal, unintentionally augmented by Gorbachev’s renewal efforts, into a mass movement? Idealism unleash-ing the basest opportunism? There was a Shakespearian quality to the system’s surprise, yet ultimately logical self-destruction, inaugurated by romanticism and con-summated by treason.

A fortunate blend of fair and foul, of principled restraint and scheming self-interest, brought a deadly system to meek dissolution. No republic branch of the KGB

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broke openly from the Union until early August 1991, when the Georgian KGB proclaimed its allegiance to the Georgian president.
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Interior ministry police troops— about 350,000 strong—were becoming more dependent on local authorities for resources, but they were also undergoing deepened militarization at Moscow’s direction.
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As for the army, republics were assuming greater responsibility for the draft and conscripts were increasingly serving on the territory of their home republic, but ‘somewhat surprisingly’, a top expert concluded, the Armed Forces ‘did not collapse overnight. The major command structures proved fairly resilient.’
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Thankfully, however, reform socialism meant breaking with anything that resembled Stalinism or Brezhnevism, including domestic military crackdowns; even the men who belatedly attempted in August 1991 to salvage the Union chose not to mobilize more than a tiny fraction of their available might, which in any case they failed to use. In this light, perestroika should be judged a stunning success.
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Reform socialism also, unintentionally, incited Soviet elites to tear their system apart, which they did with gusto.

In this light, too, perestroika was a success.

Remember the mesmerizing maps of Eurasia covered with miniature tanks, missile launchers, and troops representing the Soviet military that appeared on American television for Congressional debates over Pentagon appropriations? This hyper-militarized USSR, during the troubles of perestroika, did not even
attempt
to stage a cynical foreign war to rally support for the regime. Remember 183

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the uproar over Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait—right amid the Soviet drama—and his feared possession of weapons of mass destruction? Iraq’s capabilities were trivial next to the Soviet Union’s. Remember the decades of cold-war warnings, right through the 1980s, about the danger of a pre-emptive Soviet first strike? Even if Soviet leaders had calculated that they were doomed, they could have wreaked terrifying havoc out of spite, or engaged in blackmail. Remember the celebrated treatises equating the Soviet and Nazi regimes? The Nazi regime, which never acquired atomic weapons, held on to the last drop of blood. Remember the wrath that Franklin Roosevelt incurred for ‘handing over’ Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta? Roosevelt had not a single soldier on the ground. Gorbachev had 500,000 troops in Eastern Europe, including 200,000 in Germany
after
the unification. The Warsaw Pact command and control structure remained operational right through the end of 1991.

It was Gorbachev who ‘handed over’ Eastern Europe.

Flabbergasted by events, he turned over the jewel in Moscow’s crown, Berlin, which had been paid for with the highest price in lives world history has yet seen, and in return he got some cash and credits, soon to be wasted, as well as empty promises of partnership. At a 1994 ceremony to mark the completion of troop withdrawals, Boris Yeltsin, in a depressed, drunken state, grabbed a baton and started conducting a German orchestra, causing a scandal. How much worse it all might have turned out, if a strong leader and faction of the Moscow elite had shown 184