In 2001, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), Victor Trushkov, offered an analysis of the Soviet collapse that complements the one presented here. Trushkov said that capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union remained a danger as long as “exploiters on a world level” continued to exist, but “external pressure” only became a mortal threat when forces developed “inside the socialist system” with “an interest in restoring capitalism.” To understand how such forces could develop, Trushkov said, one must appreciate that “the picture of Soviet society as a practically classless one in the 80s,” was “far from reality.”
Trushkov pointed to the development of two quasi-bourgeois strata. In the first place, “a system of small-scale retail trade,” emerged. This trade was “barely legal” and depended on the misuse of resources that belonged to the state. Nevertheless, “between the moonlighting bricklayers and taxidrivers and the sales of the product of smallholdings it meant that this retailing was relatively important.” In the second place, a “private wholesale trade, which existed in the form of a parallel economy” emerged. “Its economic power was even greater [than retail trade]….Some research workers state that its turnover was comparable to that of the state.” In 1987-88, when Gorbachev began legalizing this retail and wholesale trade, those active in these areas sought “political means of protecting their interests,” hence the pressure for even more marketization and privatization. These moves in turn began an erosion of the state sector. “When the Gorbachev-Yakovlev tandem started to introduce the bourgeois system,” Trushkov said, “an important part of the [state] apparatus discovered it had competitors in those acting in the already existing forms of private property and expressed the will to preserve its privileged status (the privileges of power) by themselves appropriating state property.”219 In these ways, the second economy and Gorbachev’s reform sparked a dialectic of socialist betrayal.
4. Promise and Foreboding, 1985-86
Gorbachev’s first days and months were electrifying. His speeches and person-to-person talks with Leningrad workers put the first cracks in the ice of stagnation. Mike Davidow 220
A struggle still lies ahead for the party. Khrushchev was no accident. We are primarily a peasant country, and the right wing is powerful. Where’s the guarantee to prevent them from getting the upper hand? The anti-Stalinists in all probability will come to power in the near future, and they are most likely to be Bukharinists. V. M. Molotov 221
In place of the old corrupt elements that for decades had been festering in the body of the Communist Party and the society at large, suddenly, in the space of a year or two, came even more horrible and more absolutely corrupt forces that stifled the healthy start made in the Party and the country after April 1985. Yegor Ligachev 222
The policies of Mikhail Gorbachev occupy the center of any explanation of the collapse of Soviet socialism. In 1985, Gorbachev took over a country facing longstanding problems and in short order exacerbated the situation into a system-wide crisis. The kindest judgment that could be made of Gorbachev’s policies is that they failed. Perestroika did not produce its ostensible ends—a democratic, productive, and efficient socialism. Instead, it destroyed the Soviet Union as a state and left in its place a set of balkanized countries dominated by oligarchic and lawless capitalism that after a decade had impoverished the majority of the population. Whatever Gorbachev may have hoped to achieve, it was unlikely that he wanted this. Nor was it likely that he want to become a politician without a party, a president without a state, and a socialist without socialism.
Gorbachev and his defenders said that he inherited a society in crisis. This was false. In any conventional sense, the Soviet Union had not sunk into the throes of a crisis. In 1985, its economic problems did not approach the inflation and instability of Germany in the 1920s or the depression in the United States in the 1930s. Moreover, its political problems fell far short of a crisis of legitimacy. Complaints about shortages, waiting lines, and the quality of consumer goods occurred, but little popular discontent with the system itself existed. Oleg Kalugin, a high ranking KGB officer who served in Leningrad from 1979 to 1986, said he never encountered serious opposition to the system.223 As Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich point out that discontent arose as a product, not a cause, of the reform. Personal consumption of Soviet citizens had increased between 1975 and 1985. Even though the Soviet standard of living reached only one-third to one-fifth of the American level, a general appreciation existed that Soviet citizens enjoyed greater security, lower crime, and a higher cultural and moral level than citizens in the West did. Moreover, empirical studies in the mid-1980s revealed that Soviet and American workers expressed about the same degree of satisfaction with their jobs. As late as 1990, only a small minority favored a transition to a capitalist system. Barely 4 percent of Soviet citizens favored the removal of price controls, and only 18 per cent favored the encouragement of private property.224
The absence of an acute economic crisis and mass discontent did not mean that all was well. Soviet society faced manifold problems in economics, politics, and foreign affairs. A failure to address them might have eventually produced a crisis. Even such Communists as Yegor Ligachev and Gennady Zyuganov, who became strong critics of Gorbachev, acknowledged the severity of the problems that led to the reforms. Ligachev recalled that he “like many other provincial Party secretaries was impatient for change, [and was] uncomfortably aware that the country was headed for social and economic disaster.”225 Similarly, Zyuganov recalled, “The need for reforms had been obvious to everyone.”226
The most threatening domestic problems of all were economic. In his first policy speech to a plenum of the Central Committee on November 22, 1982, Yuri Andropov provided a useful summary of the economic problems. Andropov mentioned the quantity and quality of consumer goods, the shortage of certain foods, the waste of energy resources, the poor performance of transport, and the failure of iron and steel enterprises to meet their targets. What linked many of these problems for Andropov was the failure to employ the discoveries of science and technology. This failure was reflected in unsatisfactory progress in increasing productivity, intensifying production methods, and economizing material resources. These failures were in part traceable to a planning system that placed too much emphasis on the achievement of quantitative production goals. Since improving products and production methods could temporarily reduce or slow production, there was a built-in disincentive to innovate.
Abel Aganbegyan, who headed the Institute of Economics and Industrial Organization of the Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences from 1967 until 1985, when he became Gorbachev’s key economic advisor, described numerous economic problems. Though overstating the case, Aganbegyan expressed the thinking of Gorbachev’s inner circle. Aganbegyan traced most of the economic problems to over-centralization. These included waste and inefficiency, a lack of worker motivation, an absence of initiative, a weakness in productivity increases, and a poor diffusion of technological innovations. Because of a weak connection between producers and consumers, the system produced more tractors and shoes than consumers needed, but fewer quality items than consumers wanted. Consumer dissatisfaction fostered the black market and corruption. For various reasons, some of which had to do with the depletion of cheap natural resources and the demographic shortage of workers due to World War II, the rate of economic growth began to suffer. Though the economy grew between 1975 and 1985, the rate of growth slacked off in terms of national income, real per capita income, productive capital investment, number of workers in production, and productivity of labor.227 According to Aganbegyan, at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, “stagnation had occurred in the economy.”228