At the end of 1985 and early 1986, Gorbachev also began a retreat from the Soviet commitment to Afghanistan, even though a complete capitulation was two years away. Soviet military involvement in Afghanistan began in 1979, after the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) that had seized power the previous year made repeated requests for Soviet help to repel attacks by CIA-backed warlords. While attempting to modernize one of the poorest and most backward lands on earth, the PDPA had redistributed land, promoted religious freedom, given greater freedom to women, and initiated a literacy campaign aimed at the 90 percent of the population that could not read. Almost immediately, the government had faced armed resistance from local warlords, who began a counterrevolution by assassinating the rural teachers of girls.319 The warlords soon gained money and arms from the CIA, whose aid predated and intentionally provoked the Soviet intervention. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor later said, “We knowingly increased the probability that they [the Soviets] would [intervene].”320 This CIA support eventually amounted to its largest covert operation since World War II.321 The Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko governments viewed the Soviet aid to Afghanistan as international solidarity against the “hand of imperialism.”322
When Gorbachev assumed office in April 1985, he intensified the Soviet military effort in Afghanistan, a sure sign that he initially viewed the war as neither immoral nor unwinnable.323 In the fall of 1985, however, Gorbachev began to back away from the Soviet commitment, first by signaling Reagan at Geneva that some accommodation on Afghanistan was possible. 324 Then in February 1986 at the Twenty-seventh Congress, while blaming imperialism for the Afghan conflict, Gorbachev sounded a new, defeatist note. Instead of viewing Afghanistan like past leaders as a victim of imperialism, the General Secretary referred to the country as “a bleeding wound.”325 Still, the real turning point in Gorbachev’s thinking apparently did not occur until after the Reyjavik summit in October 1986, when Gorbachev and his advisors decided that any favorable response by the U.S. on arms control required a Soviet retreat from Afghanistan. According to Sarah Mendelson, who studied the Soviet archives, the decision to withdraw resulted neither from public pressure at home nor from defeats on the battlefield. Rather, the real reason for Soviet decision was Gorbachev’s belief that the success of perestroika required a cooperative international environment, the price of which was the abandonment of Afghanistan.326 At a Politburo meeting on November 13, 1986, the General Secretary said, “We have been at war in Afghanistan six years already. If we don’t change our approach we will be there another 20-30 years.”327 After November a debate began in top Soviet circles. The next month, Gorbachev told Afghan leader, Najibullah, that the Soviet Union would begin recalling its troops in 1988, though at this time the assumption was that the Soviet action would be accompanied by some reciprocal abatement of American interference and some guarantees of Afghan neutrality. According to Yakovlev, soon after this meeting, Gorbachev decided to use glasnost, that is to say journalistic coverage of the war, to counter the opposition to withdrawal on the part of some Soviet leaders.328 As Mendelson makes clear, however, neither morality, nor defeat, nor popular pressure motivated the change in Soviet policy. Instead, it was Gorbachev’s willingness to sacrifice international solidarity on the altar of perestroika.
Even though signs of a move in new directions on domestic and foreign policy began as early as the fall of 1985, the ultimate danger they represented were more apparent in hindsight than they were at the time. In 1985, where Gorbachev was heading was unclear. The signs were contradictory. After all, Gorbachev still spoke of reinvigorating Leninism and perfecting socialism. He said that he was neither revising nor abandoning socialist ideology, just adapting it to new global circumstances. Even as he signaled a retreat in Afghanistan, he actually increased the Soviet support of the African National Congress.329
Though the cutting edge of Gorbachev’s moves to the right first occurred subtly and hesitatingly in ideology, politics, and foreign policy, where he could act with the greatest independence, by 1986 moves consistent with these also occurred economic policy. The problematic aspects of Gorbachev’s economic ideas resided in the weakening of centralized planning and state ownership. These were the notes Gorbachev sounded at the Twenty-seventh Congress. Gorbachev advocated autonomy for enterprises, saying they should become totally responsible for running their own affairs on a profitable basis. The central economic bodies should get out of the business of day-to-day management and concentrate on long-term planning and scientific leadership. Enterprises should have the right to sell products that exceeded plan requirements to other enterprises. Enterprises should be responsible for their own wage fund, which should be dependent on their sales. As central planning receded, republic, regions, cities, and districts should assume a greater role in planning. As radical as these changes sounded, Gorbachev assured the Congress that innovations meant no sacrifice of “the unquestionable priority of the interests of the whole people” and no “retreat from the principles of planned guidance,” only a change in “methods.”
In his speech to the Congress, Gorbachev also opened the door to non-state property and even private enterprise. He said that “cooperative property” had “far from exhausted its possibilities in socialist production” and that the “utmost support should be given to the establishment and growth of cooperative enterprises.” This may have been true about genuine cooperatives, but what Gorbachev meant by “cooperative enterprises” turned out to be private enterprises, most likely not what his listeners had in mind. Gorbachev even expressed sympathy with private enterprise in the second economy by saying, “We must not permit any shadow to fall on those who do honest work to earn a supplementary income.”330 Nevertheless, Gorbachev tempered these remarks by a condemnation of the “unearned income” of those who stole from the socialist economy, took bribes, and developed a “distinct proprietary mentality.” He stressed that “the consolidation of socialism in practice should be the supreme criterion” of reform.331 Gorbachev thus masked new initiatives favoring private property by duplicitous language and contradictory intentions.
Following the Congress, the contradictions in Gorbachev’s approach to economic reform persisted. On the one hand, Gorbachev supported a law to penalize unearned incomes and supported the formation of a new state control agency to improve the quality of goods. On the other hand, and more importantly, the General Secretary initiated three steps toward economic liberalization that ended up encouraging private economic activity. In August, he allowed greater foreign economic activity for state-owned firms, including investment abroad. In October, he legalized a type of producer cooperative, which was really just a disguised form of private enterprise. In November, he made a small expansion in the scope of permissible private economic activity. According to Gregory Grossman, these moves had three consequences, though the full impact would not come into play until 1987 and after. The foreign arrangements “turned into a cornucopia from which just-privatized capital gushed abroad by the billions of dollars.” The co-ops “turned into a captive legal entity for asset- and profit-stripping activity in the state sector on a vast scale.” The law on private activity “did more to shelter the expansion of illicit private (‘shadow’) activity than to promote lawful small-scale activity.”332 These moves would ominously augment the petty bourgeois layer of the second economy, and it would create sections of the state-owned sector and Party with a vested interest in private enterprise. Consciously or not, Gorbachev was augmenting a base for further capitalist-oriented policies.