The contradictory nature of Gorbachev’s policies and the almost universal desire for reform among Party leaders explain the failure of a vocal left wing opposition to appear during Gorbachev’s first two years. The course followed by Yegor Ligachev illustrated the slow development of a left wing opposition. Born in Siberia in 1920, Ligachev was raised in Novosibirsk, where his father worked in a factory. After becoming an aviation engineer in Moscow, Ligachev returned to Novosibirsk, where he worked in a plant building fighter planes used in World War II. After joining the Communist Party in 1944, he rose in the ranks, in 1959 becoming the head of the Novosibirsk district. In 1961 to 1965, he worked in the Central Committee offices in Moscow, and then at his own request he became the head of the Tomsk Province Party, a position he held for seventeen years. Ligachev, who always rejected the exaggerated idea that the Brezhnev years were a period of stagnation, recalled with pride his accomplishments in Tomsk during the Brezhnev years. Ligachev said, “I was building socialism. And there were millions like me.” Historian Stephen F. Cohen said of Ligachev in these years: “Teetotaling, self-confident, hard-working, and a scandal-free family man, he modernized the province’s industry and agriculture, developed new enterprises, preserved Tomsk’s historic wooden buildings, patronized the arts, and minded the Party’s monopolistic interests wherever necessary.” In 1983, General Secretary Andropov brought Ligachev to Moscow, where like Gorbachev he became one of the reform-minded members of the Politburo.333
During the first stage of reform, Ligachev represented the most thoroughly grounded Leninist of any of the top leaders. As the person in charge of Party cadre, he also occupied the second most powerful position in the Party, second only to Gorbachev. Ligachev supported the general thrust of Gorbachev’s reforms, which he thought were long overdue and which he believed would simply revive the course that Andropov had charted, a course to which Ligachev seemingly remained loyal. As an enthusiast of reform, Ligachev failed to see the rightward drift of Gorbachev’s policies and even furthered some of them himself, moves he later regretted. For example, Ligachev helped select the editor of Ogonyok, who turned into one of the most anti-Party of all editors. Moreover, Ligachev later admitted that he “did not understand” the motives of the fast-paced reforms pushed by the media. Only after 1986, did he realize that ceding power over the media to Yakovlev “was clearly a big mistake.”334
By the end of 1986, Gorbachev’s reforms had become either Janus-faced, looking both left and right, or two-faced, looking left and marching right. Though some measures had failed, others showed promise. Though the ultimate direction and fate of his policies remained very much up in the air, Gorbachev maintained the support of the Politburo and the masses. Then in December from unexpected quarters a crisis arose, a sudden outburst of nationalist extremism in Kazahkstan that foreshadowed even more serious problems ahead. The crisis was clearly traceable to Gorbachev’s weaknesses.
In ways that reflected his provincial Russian background, Gorbachev had repeatedly slighted the national interests of the Soviet republics on the periphery. Historian Helene D’Encausse said, “He paid scant attention to national sensitivities, and he blithely overlooked the rules for national representation that had been in effect since 1956.” Whereas under Brezhnev, the Politburo contained three non-Russian members who were leaders of their republics, under Gorbachev, the PB had only one non-Russian republican leader, Scherbitsky of the Ukraine. Moreover, whereas under Brezhnev full members and deputies had represented the Muslim republics of Central Asia and from the Caucasus, Georgia, and the two Slavic states, the Ukraine and Byelorussia, under Gorbachev, “all the Muslim republics and the Caucasus disappeared from the Politburo.” On top of that, other than Shevardnadze, no one in the leadership even had significant experience in the border republics. According to D’Encausse, the result was that the periphery felt “ignored and even scorned.”335
Naturally, the problems in Kazakhstan did not begin with Gorbachev. The grievances of the Kazakhs had deep roots. Over the years, internal migration had reduced the Kazakhs to a minority (40 percent) in their own republic. Policies to develop local leaders and promote bilingualism had fallen short of their goals. Russian remained the language of public life. Consequently, some Kazakhs felt like outsiders in their own land. If such grievances provided the tinder, Gorbachev himself applied the torch. He simply refused or was unable to recognize the seriousness of the national question and was tone deaf to national sensitivities. At the Twenty-seventh Congress earlier in the year, he had said nothing about ethnic differences and frustrations, but had simply mouthed what D’Encausse called “celebratory rhetoric.” While glasnost was giving people the license to criticize, Gorbachev’s highhandedness was giving them something to criticize. After having previously expelled half of the secretaries of the Kazakh Central Committee, in December 1986 Gorbachev replaced the General Secretary, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, a native Kazakh, with Gennadi Kolbin, a Russian with no experience in Kazakhstan. This was either a huge mistake or a calculated provocation of monstrous proportions. Ten thousand students and others took to the streets of Alma Ata chanting nationalist slogans—“Kazakhstan for the Kazakhs and only the Kazakhs!”— and attacking public buildings and the Party headquarters. The army had to suppress the riot. According to D’Encausse, Gorbachev learned nothing from having provoked the worst ethnic uprising in the history of the Soviet Union, and his statements afterwards revealed “his constant discomfort with the national question, even an inability to grasp the facts.”336
The shards of broken glass in the streets of Alma Ata reflected the problematic course reform was taking. When Gorbachev departed from Andropov’s precedents, he began exhortations for revolutionary change without a well-thought-out plan. He began entertaining the ready-made ideas of a Party reformist tradition stretching back to Khrushchev and Bukharin, ideas that reflected the interests of much of the intelligentsia and the sector of entrepreneurs and Party bureaucrats profiting from the second economy. Subtly, with tacking and weaving, and traditional rhetorical cover, Gorbachev began jettisoning traditional Marxist-Leninist ideas. In politics and ideology, Gorbachev departed from traditional notions of criticism and self-criticism and the Party’s control of the media for his own version of glasnost, a model of the press drawn from Western liberalism. In foreign affairs, he began sacrificing both the ideas of class conflict and international solidarity and the policies of equality and reciprocity for the idea of eternal human values and the policy of unilateral concessions. In economic reform, Gorbachev began entertaining the ideas of those who advocated moving from centralized planning toward enterprise autonomy and the market, from state ownership toward cooperative and private enterprise, from suppressing the second economy to unleashing it. Moreover, when confronted with setbacks or opposition, Gorbachev showed a disturbing tendency to plunge ahead, “to escape forward.”337 It was a dangerous and uncharted course. The riots in Alma-Ata showed that this course could have consequences of a frightening magnitude.
5. Turning Point, 1987-88
The erosion or disintegration of central authority was unanimously regarded as the primary reason for the crisis. Ellman and Kontorovich.338