At some point in 1987, I personally realized that a society based on violence and fear could not be reformed and that we faced a momentous historical task of dismantling an entire social and economic system with all its ideological, economic and political roots. Alexander Yakovlev.339
Comrades, we have every right to say that the nationality question has been solved in our country. Mikhail Gorbachev.340
The impact of a personality like him [Bukharin] cannot be freely acknowledged, either because of political constraints that are today stronger than those under Khrushchev, or because of the lack of political and historical training among the debaters who sometimes do not know much about such affinities. It is astonishing to discover how many ideas of Bukharin’s anti-Stalinist program of 1928-29 were adopted by current reformers as their own and how much of their critique of past practices followed his strictures and prophecies even in their expression…. Quite obviously in the present situation the question is no longer how to industrialize a peasant country, but how to run an industrial giant. The environment of the 1960s and 1970s is very different from that of the 1920s. Naturally enough the current debates have ramifications beyond those put forward by those originally advocating NEP. However, actual arguments used in both periods coincide astonishingly. Moshe Lewin.341
In 1987 and 1988, the turning-point years of perestroika, the Gorbachev leadership of the CPSU abandoned the reform project of 1985-86. In the name of speeding up perestroika and overcoming “conservative resistance,” Gorbachev and his advisers adopted a new direction at the January 1987 Central Committee Plenum and the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988. These new policies objectively undermined the foundations of Soviet socialism—the leadership of the Communist Party, state property, and economic planning—and shattered the unity of the USSR as a multinational federal state. The turning point was not a discrete moment but an eighteen-month interval from January 1987 through June 1988, when the “radical political reform” and “radical economic reform” policies transformed perestroika from a potentially constructive program into its opposite, a demolition project that destroyed the socialist USSR.
The new policies weakened and dismantled centralized planning in favor of the market, promoted private property, and abandoned international solidarity. Central to all was the weakening of the Party. In the words of a U.S. historian, Robert V. Daniels, Gorbachev unleashed “a sequence of events at the political center, inherently unpredictable, that eviscerated the authority and legitimacy” of the Communist Party. Under the slogans “democratization” and “decentralization,” the process that Gorbachev set in motion in 1988-89 in the name of the Communist Party and its leaders quickly became irrevocable.342
How was this mutation possible? How could a CPSU general secretary embark on such a course? How could he get away with a course that, as early as 1988 led to economic decline and separatist fury? Archie Brown, a leading British analyst, observed, “Gorbachev could have been removed—and surely would have been—at a moment’s notice by the CC [Central Committee] of the CPSU on the advice of the Politburo had he openly criticized either Communism or socialism.”343 Brown was right. The attack on socialism did not come openly, but surreptitiously under the guise of improving socialism.
When the world remembers the Soviet drama of 1985-91 the mind’s eye sees the outward signs of disintegration visible in the 1989-91 endgame: ethnic strife, mass protest rallies, bread lines, and miners’ strikes. The processes and events of the two preceding years 1987 and 1988 are, by comparison, less visible.
In this middle period the class and political content of perestroika changed. In essence, the Soviet leadership replaced a seventy-year-old policy of struggle against capitalism and imperialism with a policy of surrender. The revolutionary movement had long harbored a tendency that favored an accommodation with capitalism at home and abroad. Since the 1950s, this tendency had acquired a new social base in the second, or private, economy that had been developing within socialism. The cost of competing militarily with the West, a competition vastly intensified by Reagan, added to the appeal of those seeking an accommodation with capitalism. In the 1980s, the need to deal with the chronic problems of slowing economic growth, poor consumer goods quality, political stagnation, and the strain of the Cold War, provided an opportunity for this tendency to reassert itself.
Gorbachev did not invent his new direction from thin air. Similar policy ideas had existed for decades in Soviet society and in the CPSU, though they fell out of favor after Khrushchev. Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post noted the history: ”Gorbachev’s brand of reformism caught much of the Western world by surprise, but he is actually part of a reform tradition almost as old as the party itself. Nikolai Bukharin, one of Lenin’s closest comrades, was godfather to this group.”344 In effect, in 1987-88 Gorbachev took off one ideological coat and put on another, though he briefly had an arm in the sleeve of each. Since the Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, Soviet dissidents and a section of the intellectuals kept alive this political trend’s main planks: cultural liberalism; a smaller, more relaxed ideological role for the CPSU; bourgeois liberal notions of democracy; emulation and appeasement of the West; and an antipathy to class struggle. This trend’s analysis of nationalism, Russian and non-Russian, remained faulty or non-existent. Its economic ideology, even when frowned upon in the Kremlin, thrived in corners of Soviet academia that maintained a sneaking regard for Western bourgeois doctrines. As an economic ideology, it stressed the advantages of market relations, not the plan; decentralization, not centralism; evolutionary methods, never coercion. It had a high estimate of “the natural advantages of the system,” a phrase much used early in the Gorbachev era. It stressed a “socialism of the productive forces,”345 which downplayed the need for struggle to perfect the relations of production, that is, ending class divisions. Accordingly, this wing of the CPSU stressed output and growth, but underestimated the need to keep all market relations and private property within strict bounds.
In 1987-88 the new course took three forms. First, Party reform became Party liquidation, and the exclusion of the Party from power. Second, under the banner of glasnost, the Soviet media became increasingly anti-Communist. Third, Gorbachev embraced private entrepreneurial activity.
In 1985 and 1986 the Soviet Communist press had demanded an end to Party abuses. The press railed against corruption, cronyism, patronage, nepotism, bureaucratic departmentalism, protection of loyal toadies by higher-ups, insufficient cadre training, formalism, complacency, and ideological weakness. Responding to such criticism, the Twenty-seventh Congress launched a program of Party reform. The reforms included new Party rules to reinforce criticism and self-criticism, and a new approach to collective leadership emphasizing personal accountability. The Congress also called for close supervision of the performance of Party leaders.346 Gorbachev never implemented the reforms.
Instead, in 1987-88 Gorbachev came to view the CPSU as the main obstacle to perestroika, and he decided to use “radical political reform,” to weaken it. As part of the attack on the Party, Gorbachev initiated a “de-Stalinization” campaign. Twice, in early 1987 and 1988, Gorbachev and Yakovlev waged major campaigns to drive the media to revise Party history. Khrushchev had pioneered this practice against Party opponents in 1956 and in 1961.347 Gorbachev gave his approval to economic exposés claiming Soviet statistics had been systematically falsified to understate economic failure, and that “Stalinist” stagnation was at the root of the crisis, which, Gorbachev alleged, was far worse than people realized. Gorbachev used denunciations of Stalin to weaken Ligachev and his allies. In February 1987, Gorbachev decided to relax even more the restraints on the media and to allow the media to air criticisms of Stalin. This represented an about-face from his warning six months earlier against “digging up the past.”348 An attack on Stalin helped Gorbachev create a coalition against honest socialist forces. As historian Stephen Kotkin said, his coalition joined together “those who denounced Stalin in the name of reforming socialism and those who denounced him in the name of repudiating socialism.”349 Stephen F. Cohen said that anti-Stalinism became the “ideology of Communist reform from above, as it was under Khrushchev.”350