As the superpower is sapped of its strength and sinks into twilight, a whole generation of leaders departs with it. In the several years preceding the historic 1985, Kulakov, Rashidov, Suslov, Brezhnev, Kosygin, Ustinov, and Andropov die one after the other. The last of this group, Chernenko, dies on March 11, 1985. Others, like Gromyko and Grishin, are increasingly infirm, wallow in alcoholism or, like Aliyev, in monstrous corruption.
Public opinion does exist in this country, although in the preperestroika years it was expressed differently than in democratic states. People made their views known through silence, not speech. The way in which they were silent was significant and said volumes. The way in which they looked at something or at someone had its eloquence. Where they appeared and where they were absent. The way (slowly) in which they gathered for a forced meeting and the way (instantaneously) in which they then dispersed. Despite the government’s contempt and arrogance vis-à-vis society, it nevertheless paid attention to the kind of silence that prevailed in that society. I met a student in Petersburg who, during a Komsomol congress in that city (during Brezhnev’s time), was “responsible for the atmosphere in the hall.” Public opinion in 1985 is best expressed by the title of a film made at the end of the eighties by the Russian director Stanislav Govoruhin—Tak zyt’ nielzia (One Cannot Live Like This).
And all those crises in which the Imperium is at this time immersed internationally and domestically occur under conditions of universal, everyday human misery, ubiquitous material want and hopelessness. For one must remember that that which was called the privilege of the governing elite was only a relative privilege, existing against a background of penury. The resident of a wealthy country could often laugh at such privileges. For instance, scandal broke out somewhere in the Ukraine because the trunk of the car of some Party official sprang open as he was driving and passersby noticed that there was kielbasa inside. I was myself a witness to another scandal in Ufa — rotten apples were being sold in the market, while workers of the apparat could buy apples that were admittedly worm-eaten, but not rotten! How many times, as I entered various apartments, did my hosts greet me at the door with the words: “Rishard, izvini nashu sovietskuyu nishchetu!” (“Forgive us our Soviet misery!”) Sometimes the subject of evening conversation was the standard and quality of life in wealthy countries. At the end of my accounts, the Russians would smile and say with a certain resignation in their voice: “Eto nie dla nas.…” (“That is not for us.…”)
IN SUCH A SITUATION, in March 1985, on Andrey Gromyko’s recommendation, Mikhail Gorbachev is chosen secretary-general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A month later, during the Party’s April plenum, he delivers the speech that ushers in the era of perestroika and glasnost.
In some sense perestroika and glasnost are the artificial lungs hooked up to the increasingly enfeebled, dying organism of the USSR. Thanks to them, the USSR will survive for another six and a half years. I mention this because Gorbachev’s enemies claim that he assumed the leadership of a flourishing USSR and brought about its breakup. It was just the opposite — the USSR was disintegrating for a long time, and Gorbachev extended its life for as long as it was possible to do so. I mention it also because (this is one of the world’s great paradoxes), just before the breakup of the USSR, the view of that country as a model of the most stable and durable system in the world had gained wide acceptance among Western Sovietologists, and especially among a group of American political scientists. The main proponent of this way of thinking was Jerry F. Hough, a professor at Duke University. As Theodore Draper notes (New York Review of Books, June 11, 1992), there was not one American political scientist who predicted the collapse of the USSR.
That is why, when the USSR ceased to exist at the end of 1991, one could hear exclamations of surprise and consternation around the world. How is that possible? So stable, and yet it fell? So indivisible, and yet it crumbled? From one day to the next? But this “from one day to the next” applied only to the final act. In reality, the process of disintegration began much earlier.
FOR ME, perestroika was the combination of two great processes to which the society of the Imperium was subjected:
• A mass detoxication to cure fear
• A collective journey into the universe of information
Someone who wasn’t brought up in an atmosphere of general, animal fear, and in a world without information, will have difficulty understanding what this was all about.
The foundation of the Soviet Imperium is terror and its inseparable, gnawing offshoot — fear. Because the Kremlin abandons the politics of mass terror with the deaths of Stalin and Beria, one can say that their departure is the beginning of the end of the Imperium. The thaw under Khrushchev and then the years of stagnation alleviate somewhat the frightful nightmare of Stalin’s epoch, but nevertheless do not radically eliminate it. The persecutions of dissidents continue; people still lose their jobs if they think otherwise than they are supposed to; censorship rages on, et cetera. Only perestroika and glasnost introduce a significant change. For the first time people begin to express their opinions publicly, to have views — to criticize and postulate. They overdo this, of course, get drunk on it, which in the long run becomes extremely tiring, because everyone, everywhere, is endlessly talking, talking, and talking. Or writing, writing, and writing. A deluge of words, billions of words — in assembly halls; on all the airways; on tons, hundreds of tons, of pieces of paper. This overabundance of speech, this agitated stream of words, is abetted by the Russian language itself, with its broad phrasing, expansive, unending, like the Russian land. No Cartesian discipline here, no aphoristic asceticism. One must wade through the torrent of some lecture or struggle through countless pages of text before one arrives at a sentence of value. How one must toil to attain this gem!
Not only can one talk now, but there is also something to talk about. For, simultaneously, the voyage into the universe of information began. To generalize and simplify, one of the fundamental differences between the first half of our century and the second half (especially the most recent years) is the radically different access to information that characterized each of these epochs. In this regard, a man living in the first half of the century, especially in the USSR, was closer to the caveman than to the man who today sits before a computer and who, just by pressing the keys, can immediately obtain all the information he wants. Lev Kopieliev, a Russian dissident writer, draws attention to this difference in his book The Idols of My Youth, writing that insofar as information is concerned, even adults were children then, whereas today even children are adults. During the first half of the century in the USSR, people really knew very little. Access to information was one of the real privileges. The archives of the KGB were more closely guarded than the arsenals of the weapons of mass destruction. One Russian journalist (I do not remember his name) recalls that when he asked Brezhnev, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, to whom one was allowed to write concerning the situation in that country, Brezhnev replied: “Write everything, but only in a single copy, and send it only to me.”
And now there are suddenly references to Katyń, to Kuropaty, to Solovki.…
AFTER FIVE YEARS of great effort and tension, Gorbachev is increasingly fatigued, disoriented, and nervous. He is visibly losing his initiative and dynamism, and his politics, until now so creative and, given Russian circumstances, so innovative and extraordinary, are becoming routine, indecisive, concessionary. In December 1990, his minister of international affairs and a tried-and-true ally, Eduard Shevardnadze, warns publicly that the country’s conservative forces are preparing a coup d’état and offers his resignation. Gorbachev doesn’t react. His entourage now consists of people he himself appointed to the highest positions and who will soon betray him. They are all Party bureaucrats, agents of neo-Stalinist reaction.