Yet, to believe that Gorbachev held social democratic or pro-capitalist views before becoming General Secretary confronts some intractable questions and stubborn facts. If Gorbachev did not adopt these ideas after becoming General Secretary, just when did he adopt them? How was it possible for someone with these views to conceal them so successfully and rise to the top while holding them? Gorbachev himself never claimed to have had a calculated and coherent plan to destroy the Communist Party and institute a free market and private property. Moreover, Ligachev and others who worked closely with the Soviet leader did not suspect him of harboring a secret revisionist agenda. This idea does appear in the writings of such outsiders as the economist Anders Aslund, who asserted that as early as 1984 Gorbachev had “a clear idea” of market-oriented economic reform. On close inspection, however, Aslund’s evidence showed no more than that early on Gorbachev advocated an eclectic mix of reform ideas. He entertained some ideas like cost accounting and increased competition that vaguely foreshadowed his later embrace of the market, but he mainly proposed ideas pioneered by Andropov such as a changed investment policy to promote new technology and new measures to enhance discipline and crack down on unearned incomes.271 Ellman and Kontorovich are nearer the mark than Aslund, when they note that Gorbachev’s economic contributions in 1982-84 revealed not only no plan but also no coherence.272
What was true was that Gorbachev’s background and experience made him uncommonly sympathetic to the second economy and susceptible to pro-capitalist ideas. For one thing, Stavropol, his home base, had a highly developed private or second economy with its attendant petty bourgeois mentality.273 Moreover, he had traveled more widely in the West than many other Soviet leaders, and he may well have been influenced by Italian Eurocommunism, whose ideas later echoed in his speeches.274 Thirdly, early on Gorbachev surrounded himself with advisors who held pronounced social democratic views. For example, he relied on such market-oriented intellectuals as Tatyana Zaslavskaya and Abel Aganbegyan.275 In 1986, he hired as a consultant the philosopher, Alexander Tsipko, a self-admitted anti-Marxist, who later claimed that Gorbachev’s idea of elevating “universal human values” over class values came from him.276 Gorbachev’s path would soon resemble the one Shevardnadze had followed in Georgia, the republic with “the largest second economy in the USSR,” where Shevardnadze had tried to co-opt the second economy “by making the official economy more market-oriented.”277
The hypothesis that from the start Gorbachev had a secret agenda to destroy Soviet socialism and move toward a Western European model is a hard sell. At best one could say that some things in his background might have predisposed him to move in that direction. After his initial reforms shook things up, Gorbachev—who lacked any plan—succumbed to this predisposition and abandoned Andropov’s path because his own weakness and inexperience made him ill-equipped to deal with the forces released by change, because he hoped to buy time and obtain resources by giving in to pressure from U.S., and most importantly, because doing so won him the passive support of those disaffected with the system and the active support of the ascendant stratum of entrepreneurs and corrupt Party officials tied to the second economy.
The second hypothesis involves the assumption that the problems of the Soviet economy stemmed from socialism itself. It assumes that the economy could not be improved while retaining socialized property and central planning. This hypothesis appeals to Gorbachev supporters who see him tragically driven to an extreme and ultimately disastrous course by the immutability of both the economic system and the Party. This hypothesis also has the appeal of common sense. Common sense would say that if Gorbachev’s initial efforts had revitalized the economy, Gorbachev would have had no need for stronger medicine. Therefore his initial efforts must have failed either because of the inherent constraints of the economic system or because of their undoing by those in the Party opposed to reform. History, however, does not always follow the logic of common sense, and history’s truth is often counter-intuitive. Only an examination of the actual history can provide an answer.
When and why Gorbachev began moving to the right, toward capitalism, pivots on the answer to three questions: 1. What were the results of Gorbachev’s early efforts at economic reform? That is, were the results a failure, and did they reveal the impossibility of moderate reform? 2. What was the Party’s response to the economic problems? Did it resist reform? 3. Did Gorbachev’s first rightward moves involve the economy? Only if the answers to these questions clearly showed that the moderate reform failed that the Party resisted economic reform, and that Gorbachev’s first moves to the right concerned the economy could the second hypothesis be true. In all three areas, the truth was far different.
The hypothesis that Gorbachev turned to the right because moderate economic reform did not work could be true only if the initial economic reform failed. This was not true. The economic changes brought about by Gorbachev’s early policies were not an unalloyed success, but they brought definite signs of improvement. In 1985 and 1986 both production and consumption increased.278 Economic growth went up 1 to 2 percent in the early reform period. Productivity increased from 2-3 percent to 4.5 percent. In 1986 in the machine industry alone, capital investment increased by 30 percent, more than in the preceding five years. The same year agricultural production grew by 5 percent.279 The consumption of goods and services increased by 10 percent in 1985 and 1986, about one and a half time greater than in the preceding years. Improvements in health care and other areas increased life expectancy for the first time in twenty years and lowered infant mortality.280
Gorbachev also registered some notable failures, particularly when he acted rashly. This happened with the anti-alcohol campaign. Gorbachev slashed alcohol production and sales, but this spawned rampant bootlegging. The production of illegal vodka depleted the stores of sugar and drained billions of rubles in tax revenue from the state budget. Had he based his policies on experiences elsewhere, Gorbachev would have realized that reducing the production of alcohol was bound to lead to illegal production and sales, just as Prohibition did in the United States. A campaign based on consumption taxes, education, counseling, and rehabilitation would have held greater promise. Within two years, Gorbachev abandoned the anti-alcohol campaign.281 Similarly, Gorbachev’s policy of accelerating production simply led to the increased production of shoddy goods. When Gorbachev countered with a system of state inspectors, the amount of goods rejected as substandard was so great that an outcry arose among workers who found their income reduced. Gorbachev had to abandon the inspectors just as he abandoned the anti-alcohol campaign.282 These failures involved impulsive measures aimed at quick returns. They were not representative of the economic reforms of the first year, which yielded positive results.