The government itself realized that it had failed to assimilate minorities. That failure was amply demonstrated in a secret report of 1978, which detailed the obstacles to Russification of schools, including a lack of qualified teachers: ‘Many of the teachers in minority elementary schools have only a poor knowledge of Russian. There are cases where, for this reason, Russian is not taught at all’. The failure of linguistic Russification was clearly apparent in Central Asia: the proportion claiming total ignorance of Russian language ranged from 24 per cent among Uzbeks to 28 per cent among Tajiks and Turkmen. Even graduates of specialized technical schools had a poor command of Russian. In response, the regime proposed to establish a special two- or three-month course in Russian for those due to perform military service. As Brezhnev admitted at the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress in February 1981, the government had made scant progress in its campaign to assimilate minorities and combat nationalism.
Towards the Abyss
When Leonid Brezhnev died on 10 November 1982, he bequeathed a country mired in profound systemic crisis. Its economic problems were daunting; amid falling prices on energy and commodities, the regime lacked the resources either to reindustrialize or to restructure agriculture. Although the KGB had seemingly decapitated the leadership of the democratic and nationalist movements, anti-regime sentiments were intense and widespread. Nor had the Brezhnev government achieved stability and security in foreign policy: the invasion of Afghanistan, débâcles elsewhere around the globe, even erosion of the Warsaw Bloc (especially in Poland) provided profound cause of concern and an endless drain on resources.
Neither of Brezhnev’s immediate successors, the former KGB chief Andropov or the quintessential party functionary Konstantin Chernenko, survived long enough to address the ugly legacy of the ‘years of stagnation’. Andropov placed the main emphasis on law and order, even for solving the economic crisis, with the explanation that ‘good order does not require any capital investment whatever, but can produce great results’. He also waged a vigorous campaign against corruption and, lacking Brezhnev’s veneration for ‘stability of cadres’, replaced a quarter of the ministers and oblast secretaries in a desperate attempt to revitalize the system. But within fifteen months he too was dead, with power devolving on Chernenko—an elderly partocrat whose only distinction was to have been Brezhnev’s chief adviser. In the end Chernenko became the old élite’s last hurrah—an ageing and ailing leader, he ‘reigned’ but only for one year before dying from emphysema and respiratory-cardiovascular problems in March 1985.
As the Politburo assembled to confirm the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to the post of General Secretary, the prospects for survival were bleak. Internationally, it had paid an enormous cost for the Afghanistan invasion and faced an awesome challenge from the aggressively anti-communist administration of Ronald Reagan in Washington. Domestically, its economy had ground to a halt, paralysed by profound structural problems in agriculture and industry and now deprived of lucrative revenues from the export of energy and raw materials. The new General Secretary, whatever his personal proclivities, had good cause to ponder the options for a fundamental ‘perestroika’.
14. A Modern ‘Time of Troubles’
FROM REFORM TO DISINTEGRATION, 1985–1999
GREGORY L. FREEZE
The fourteen and half years between Chernenko’s death and Putin’s presidency loomed like a redux of the ‘Time of Troubles’ in the early seventeenth century. What began as systemic reform turned into systemic collapse—dissolution of the Soviet Union, disastrous economic regression, profound social upheavals, and loss of superpower status. Mikhail Gorbachev initiated the reforms, aiming to reinvigorate and ultimately transform the Soviet system. His ‘perestroika’, however, unleashed forces and expectations even as it failed to satisfy minimal requirements. Dissolution of the Soviet Union, at the initiative of Russia under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, marked an end of communism and heralded a new attempt to reconstruct Russia after a Western model of democracy and free markets. That transition proved far more difficult, disruptive, and destructive than any imagined; the result was systemic breakdown of the economy, polity, and social system. By the late 1990s, Russia had been degraded from a superpower to a ‘failed state’ with an ‘undeveloping’ economy.
The General Secretary as Reformer: Mikhail Gorbachev
By any standard, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev had an extraordinary career. Born in 1931 in the agricultural heartland of southern Russia, he lived through the difficult 1930s and personally experienced the full weight of German occupation. After the war he not only studied but laboured, with distinction, earning the Order of the Red Banner of Labour by helping a collective farm produce a record harvest. That distinction, and raw intelligence, earned him a coveted place at Moscow State University in 1950, and set him apart from others who matriculated by dint of military service or family connections. Gorbachev majored in law and, by all accounts, demonstrated a keen mind and exceptional curiosity. Upon graduation in 1955, in accordance with the Soviet system of ‘assignment’, authorities returned him to Stavropol’, where he quickly rose in the local party hierarchy. Gorbachev also continued graduate studies, specializing in agriculture and earning a reputation for expertise in what was undeniably the Achilles heel of the Soviet economy. That expertise, plus ties to people like Iurii Andropov, helped to catapult Gorbachev to Politburo membership in 1978 and brought him from a provincial backwater to the very centre of power. With Chernenko’s death on 10 March 1985, the Politburo—with a strong recommendation by the éminence grise, Andrei Gromyko—made the youthful Gorbachev the new general secretary, the youngest general secretary since Stalin assumed that post in 1922.
Although elevated to power by the old guard, Gorbachev was cut from a very different cloth. He was a ‘post-Stalinist’ member of the élite: he formally joined the party in 1952, but made his career under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Profoundly influenced by Khrushchev’s revelations and reforms, Gorbachev belonged more to the free-thinking shestidesiatniki (‘people of the 1960s’) than the older Stalinist cadres who dominated the party apparatus. Foreign travel in the 1970s broadened his horizons, reinforcing his intellectual curiosity and encouraging a broader, even critical perspective of the Soviet system. Gorbachev nurtured ties to intellectuals like Aleksandr Iakovlev, who would figure prominently in the attempt to transform the Soviet system. Thus the 1970s and 1980s, along with ‘stagnation’, generated a critically thinking élite, which included such figures as Abel Aganbegian and Tat’iana Zaslavskaia, who worked in research institutes and bore the accolade institutchiki. Gorbachev’s wife Raisa had close connections to these intellectual circles and played a key role in broadening his intellectual horizons. The impact was evident even before he became general secretary; in December 1984, four months prior to becoming party head, Gorbachev candidly spoke about ‘a slowdown of economic growth at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s’ and hinted at the need for far-reaching changes. Heeding advice from prominent institutchiki, Gorbachev spoke openly about the need to consider price, cost, and efficiency and thus challenged the basic premisses of the command economy that had impeded innovation and growth.