Gorbachev remains alone.
On December 25 he resigns as president of the USSR. The red flag with the hammer and sickle is removed from the Kremlin.
The USSR ceases to exist.
I FOLLOWED the fate of perestroika and the process of the downfall of the Imperium on two screens simultaneously:
• on the screen of a television set (or, rather, on the screens of dozens of television sets, because I was constantly changing cities, train stations, hotels, and apartments), as well as
• on the screen of the country’s ordinary, daily reality, which surrounded me during my travels.
It was an unusual collision of two theaters:
• the theater of high politics (the television transmitted for hours on end the deliberations of the Supreme Council, of various congresses and conferences), as well as
• the theater of pedestrian existence — lines on a dark and freezing morning, nights in cold Siberian apartments, joy at the news that a mess hall had been opened and that one would be able to get a bowl of warm soup.
This schizophrenic perception in two different dimensions directed my attention toward the fundamental, even unbridgeable, gap that exists in our epoch between the time of material culture (or everyday life) and the time of political events. In the Middle Ages, both these times had a more or less convergent, compatible rhythm: cities were built over centuries and dynasties lasted centuries.
Today it is different: cities are still built over decades, but rulers often change every few years or even every few months. The political stage revolves many times faster than the stage of our daily existence. Regimes change, governing parties and their leaders change, but man lives just as he previously had — he still does not have an apartment or a job; the houses are still shabby, and there are potholes in the roads; the arduous task of making ends meet still goes on from dawn to dusk.
Perhaps that is why many people turn away from politics: it is for them an alien world, animated by a rhythm different from the one that punctuates the life of the average human being.
Television contributed greatly to the collapse of the Imperium. Merely by showing political leaders as normal people, by allowing everyone to look at them from up close — to see how they quarrel and become nervous, how they make mistakes and how they perspire, how they win, but also how they lose — by this lifting of the curtain and thus admitting the people to the highest and most exclusive salons, the salutary and liberating demystification of power took place.
Belief in the mystical nature of power had been one of the tenets of Russian political culture. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, portraits of the czar — as saint — hung in the churches. The Bolsheviks adopted this tradition readily and with alacrity. The lives of the leaders were enveloped in the deepest mystery. The leader resembled a pharaoh/mummy. He walked stiffly, did not smile, and remained silent, his gaze fixed on an indeterminate point in space. Staffs of Sovietologists extrapolated the structure of power in the Kremlin by analyzing the sequence in which names appeared in various communiqués. And they were right to do so, because detailed and rigid instructions governed the sequence, the number of times, the exact page of the newspaper, and the size of type in which the name of a given leader could be printed. Functionaries responsible for Party protocol watched over this obsessively. Look, Mikoyan stepped onto the platform ahead of Ustinov, there’s something to this! And all of Moscow would be abuzz with gossip and conjectures.
The growing role of television in politics has led all coup plotters to change their tactics: formerly, they would assault presidential palaces, governmental and parliamentary seats; now they try first and foremost to gain control of the television-station building. Recent battles in Vilno and Tbilisi, in Bucharest and in Lima, were waged over television stations, not the president’s palace. The screenplay of the latest film about a coup d’état: tanks roll out at dawn to capture the television station while the president sleeps peacefully, the Parliament building is dark; there isn’t a soul around. The plotters are headed for where the real power lies.
EACH GREAT transformation, change of regime, social revolution, is divided into three stages:
• The period of the destruction of the old system
• The period of transition
• The period of the construction of the new order
The former Soviet Imperium finds itself currently in the period of transition in which elements of the old system mingle with the forerunners of the new order. The notion of the transitional period is today the answer to everything. Things aren’t going well? Too bad, it’s a transitional period. Supplies are inadequate? That’s understandable; it’s a transitional period. The old bosses are still ruling? Don’t worry; it’s only a transitional period.
Taking into consideration the immensity of the country, as well as the fact that profound historical processes take long stretches of time, one can assume that this transitional period will last quite a number of years.
The main task, content, and idea of the transitional period are implementing large-scale economic and political reform, changing the regime, and creating a new quality of life.
Two historians — the Russian Natan Eydelman and the American Richard Pipes — define the two fundamental perspectives on all reforms in Russia.
Eydelman: Reform in Russia always came from above. The call always had to originate at the very summit of power, gradually trickle down, and there be realized. This feature was responsible for the limited character of the reforms. At a certain moment the impetus for reform weakened, the reform got stuck, stood still.
Pipes: Reforms in Russia are dictated by external circumstances and events. One such circumstance might be a Russian setback in the international arena, the country’s undue marginalization in the game to control the world. Russia’s shrinking international role is an argument for the reform camp, which persuades conservatives and other opponents that the country should be rendered efficient and modernized so that it can regain its global standing.
That is how it was until now. How it will be in the future — time will tell.
As I mentioned, Sovietologists did not foresee the sudden collapse of the USSR. But even those who believed and prophesied that this superpower would one day fall expressed fears that before the Bolsheviks would surrender power and depart, they would set the country afire and drown it in a sea of blood.
Nothing of the kind happened.
The fall of communism in this state occurred relatively bloodlessly, and in ethnic Russia, completely bloodlessly. The great Ukraine announced its independence without a single shot being fired. Likewise Belorussia.
We are witnessing in the contemporary world the growing phenomenon of velvet revolutions, bloodless revolutions, or — as Isaac Deutscher expressed it — unfinished revolutions.
Characteristically in these revolutions, although the old forces are departing, they are not departing completely, and the battle of the new with the old is simultaneously accompanied by various adaptive processes, taking place on both sides of the barricade. The operative principle is the avoidance of aggressive, bloodthirsty confrontatiqns.
It is interesting that today blood flows only where blind nationalism enters the fray, or zoological racism, or religious fundamentalism — in other words, the three black clouds that can darken the sky of the twenty-first century. In places where it is a matter of the transformation of the social structure and the various forms of class struggle that accompany this, the process takes place much more gently and, yes, bloodlessly.