In the end, Gorbachev and Yakovlev had turned Andreyeva’s letter, one of scores that appeared critical of perestroika, into a pretext to ambush their leading PB opponent, Yegor Ligachev, and intimidate anti-revisionist opponents generally. In the ensuing assault they stripped Ligachev of his allies and his authority, and turned the control of ideology and the media over to Yakovlev, the most extreme revisionist in the leadership. The rough handling of Sovietskaya Rossiya and the rest of the media sent a clear message, in the words of historian Gibbs: “the only acceptable use of glasnost was in promoting restructuring as Gorbachev directed it.”401 In the afterglow, Yakovlev told a friend, “We have crossed the Rubicon,”402 and Gorbachev mused that the Andreyeva letter may have been “a good thing.” With Ligachev dispatched and the media chastened, “an avalanche of anti-Stalinism” ensued. Chernyaev recalled thinking at the time, “if there had been no Nina Andreyeva, we would have had to invent her.”403
The Gorbachev victory in the Nina Andreyeva affair signified the triumph of his brand of revisionism. Gorbachev’s victory over Ligachev in this confrontation prepared the way for his domination of the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988. Meanwhile, Yakovlev and Medvedev assumed Ligachev’s responsibility for ideology, and in September 1988, Ligachev was demoted to agriculture. Gorbachev eventually removed all the Politburo leaders who supported the Andreyeva letter, except Anatoly Lukyanov, Gorbachev’s friend from student days.
If the January 1987 CC Plenum was a tremor, the June 1988 Nineteenth Party Conference was an earthquake. The ten theses distributed a month in advance of the Party Conference resembled the existing Soviet leadership consensus. When Gorbachev opened the conference, however, he went well beyond anything in the theses. He proposed the creation of a Congress of People’s Deputies, a new supreme body of state power. The people would elect fifteen hundred deputies to five-year terms, with 750 reserved for the Party and related organizations. These deputies would elect from their number a small Supreme Soviet in two houses, a permanent body accountable to the Congress. The Congress would elect an executive president, the post that Gorbachev envisioned for himself. The proposal, introduced in the final minutes in a surprise resolution by Gorbachev in the chair, amounted to the overthrow of the Central Committee. According to one commentator, “As they sang the Internationale many delegates began to wonder what they had done.”404
The Nineteenth Party Conference’s decisions departed from past political practice in astonishing ways. Whereas the Party exercised the leading role in Soviet society and government, at a stroke the Nineteenth Party Conference reversed the roles by declaring that the state, rather than the Party, should lead. The Nineteenth Party Conference thus dramatically shrunk the role of the CPSU and turned it into a parliamentary party. It legalized non-Communist parties. As the CPSU faded in importance, the newly created executive presidency gave Gorbachev a platform from which to rule. Other steps soon followed. In September 1988, Gorbachev outlined a plan to replace the CC Secretariat with commissions, depriving Party leaders of an operating staff. This move weakened his opponents on the CC and, above all, weakened the allies of Ligachev for whom the CC Secretariat served as a political base. Each weakening and marginalizing of the CPSU had far-reaching consequences. Turning back became progressively more difficult. By April 1989, while chairing a Politburo meeting, Ligachev discerned a “strangely weak”405 governing party.
At some point, Gorbachev’s commitment to Party liquidation—indeed to dismantling the central government406—must have become fully conscious. One intriguing clue about the timing of Gorbachev’s conversion to revisionism occurred in his response to a Yakovlev memo in 1985 calling for splitting the CPSU into two parties, a Socialist Party and a People’s Democratic Party, an echo of Khrushchev’s decision to divide the CPSU along urban and rural lines.407 According to Yakovlev, Gorbachev simply replied, “Too soon!” After this incident Yakovlev ascended in the hierarchy. If Yakovlev’s account is correct, Gorbachev had in mind far-reaching political changes from the beginning of his tenure.408
Other evidence for the nature and timing of his political conversion varied. Gorbachev’s own Memoirs, conflated early and later attitudes into a mess of contradictions. Fondness, pity, and disdain for the CPSU simultaneously filled the pages. Still, if he is to be believed, from the early days Gorbachev saw the CPSU as the main obstacle, and the Party apparatus as his main enemy, not as an instrument to carry the struggle for reform forward. He had to outmaneuver the Party, not struggle within it. He always appealed to intellectuals and the public over the Party’s head. Everywhere, his Memoirs contain such sentiments as “Party structures are applying the brakes.”409
Nevertheless, Gorbachev’s final views stood out clearly. According to Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev had only contempt for the CPSU. When Chernyaev, one of his most loyal aides, pleaded with Gorbachev to leave the Party, Gorbachev replied: “You know Tolya, do you think I don’t see? I see and I read your memo. [Georgy] Arbatov, [Nikolai] Shmelev … also say the same, they try to persuade me to abandon the general secretary post. But remember: that mangy dog can’t be let off the leash. If I do that, the whole enormous thing will be against me.”410 The organization that had made him what he was he viewed as a mangy dog.
Outsiders viewed changes in 1987-88 through a glass darkly, but even insiders had trouble seeing things clearly. Possibly Gorbachev himself lacked an awareness of the full implications of what he was doing. At this time he wanted something like Western European social democracy without capitalist restoration. He told those critics who accused him of “social democratizing” the Party that the distinction between social reformism and Marxism-Leninism no longer had validity.411 In capitalist society, of course, left-center coalitions are routine and make perfect sense. In a socialist society, they represent backsliding. In any case, he was pursuing a mirage, for social democracy’s fundamental loyalty, in the last analysis, is to capitalism.412
The Gorbachev regime became a “transmission belt”413 for ideas that repudiated the theoretical foundations of Marxism-Leninism. Gorbachev’s speeches transmitted such ideas as “new thinking,” “universal human values,” bourgeois notions of democracy, and “market socialism” to the Party and the media. Then, the glasnost media expanded on the new ideas, setting the stage for new Gorbachev speeches embracing further shifts in an anti-socialist direction.
In essence, Gorbachev’s new thinking amounted to substituting surrender to capitalism for the struggle against it. Substituting surrender for struggle has a psychological as well as a political dimension. To stop struggling produces relief. Certain recurrent phrases in the perestroika years evinced the opportunist psychology of the Gorbachev circle and its readiness to yield to rewards and pressure. Gorbachev knew that his concessions won him adulation in the West. Gorbachev once exclaimed, “We cannot go on living this way!” but, by any reasonable measure, no unbearable crisis existed. Similarly, perestroika promised to produce “a normal country.” In a world where socialism must struggle to survive against a dominant capitalism which tries to strangle socialism, normality could only mean accommodating to capitalism. The CPSU leaders in Gorbachev’s camp abandoned the notion of socialism as a system that working people consciously build, a desertion they would eventually regard with smug complacency. The lengths to which Gorbachev went to please the U.S. stunned American diplomats. No statesman surrenders a long-held bargaining position unless he gets something equivalent or better in return. Yet, Gorbachev did so in February 1987, when he accepted the “zero option,” an utterly asymmetric deal to remove existing Soviet missiles in exchange for a U.S. decision not to build such missiles in the future. The move made sense only if Gorbachev aimed not to win the struggle, but to call it off.