Nowhere were unilateral Soviet foreign policy concessions more apparent than in Afghanistan. Since 1979 the Afghan revolutionary government and its Soviet allies had been pitted against the U.S., Pakistan, and China. At first Gorbachev favored intensifying the war,424 a noble struggle against barbarism and reaction, not entirely unlike the fight for a democratic Spanish Republic in 1936-39. In early 1987, the new Afghan Communist leader, Najibullah, having taken over from Karmal in May 1986 with the blessing—and some believe, the connivance—of the Gorbachev leadership,425 called for “national reconciliation,” implying openness to negotiation, coalition, and eventual Soviet withdrawal. The uncompromising Karmal had always referred to the mujahadin counterrevolutionary opposition as “bandits.” A more critical tone about the war had entered Gorbachev’s public comments as early as 1986. In 1987 Gorbachev, Yakovlev and Shevardnadze began to use the glasnost media to build up Soviet domestic support for withdrawal. In 1987 Artyom Borovik, the correspondent of Ogonyok, a revisionist media stronghold, filed reports from Afghanistan critical of the Soviet war effort. His battlefield reports graphically described the casualties. At the December 1987 Washington Summit, Gorbachev announced that the Soviets would withdraw from Afghanistan. In February 1988 he proposed a timetable for the withdrawal of Soviet troops by early 1989. In 1988, letters critical of the war “spontaneously” began to pour into the glasnost press from mothers of soldiers. In mid-1988, Ogonyok published the first article in which a top Soviet military man criticized the war.
To the end, Najibullah, anti-revisionists in the CPSU leadership and military, and such Soviet allies as Cuba and Angola opposed an unconditional Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Despite Western claims of a Soviet “Vietnam quagmire,” and rising domestic opposition to the war—much of the latter orchestrated from above—Soviet casualties were lower than at the start of the intervention. According to an American scholar on the Afghan conflict, “The outcome of this war was ultimately determined at home in Moscow.”426 The withdrawal occurred with no agreement on Soviet demands for an end to U.S. military aid to the mujahadin, and no American guarantees for the safety of Afghan Communist leaders or for a non-aligned Afghanistan. On February 15, 1989 the last Soviet troops left, with nothing to show for their years of sacrifice.427 The Afghans were left to the mercy of murderous warlords first, and then to the Islamic fundamentalists of the Taliban, as all of the economic, political, and educational progress of the erstwhile revolutionary regime was destroyed.
Gorbachev’s betrayals of other liberation movements and socialist states came in the final three years of perestroika. Until December 1988, the USSR still largely supported the African National Congress (ANC) and other African freedom movements. In late 1988, however, came the first sign of a change in Soviet policy. The advancing liberation movements in Southwest Africa, aided by Cuba and the USSR, had compelled an election in Namibia whose fairness would be guaranteed by UN troops. Without consulting the liberation movement, the Southwest African People’s Organization (SWAPO), or its ally Cuba, Shevardnadze suddenly agreed to an American proposal to cut down the presence of UN troops in Namibia.428
In 1987-88, other foreign policy concessions followed in rapid succession. In May 1988, Reagan visited Moscow. In June 1988, the Nineteenth Party Conference discarded the doctrine of nuclear parity. In September-October 1988, the next CC Plenum affirmed the priority of universal human values over class struggle. The Plenum, thus, “de-ideologized” Soviet foreign policy. This Plenum also retired Gromyko and demoted Ligachev. In December 1988 at the UN in New York, Gorbachev announced a cut of 500,000 in Soviet troops, including the removal of six tank divisions from Eastern Europe. In 1989 counterrevolution swept Eastern Europe.
Gorbachev abandoned the so-called “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which held that the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states had a right and a duty to defend socialism in any member state of the Warsaw Pact. This doctrine was consistent with Lenin’s classic writings that considerations of the class struggle take precedence over considerations of national sovereignty.429 The doctrine expressed a form of class solidarity extended to interstate relations, the solidarity of one socialist state with another. According to David Lane, “In 1989 it was made clear that the USSR would not intervene in the affairs of other states, even if members of the same alliance.”430 In Eastern Europe where Communist governments had always been less deeply rooted than in the USSR, Gorbachev’s policy of troop cutbacks and non-interference spelled disaster. In all Eastern European societies, the Communist governments rapidly lost self-confidence, and opposition elements took heart. Gorbachev gave up the Brezhnev Doctrine unilaterally. The fate of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) revealed the catastrophe of yielding something in return for nothing. Instead of a negotiated coming together of two German states with different social systems on the basis of mutual interest and equal rights, the end of the GDR became a humiliating forced annexation and capitalist restoration.
In early 1987 Gorbachev began to push for radical economic reform. Parallel with his political reform program, the radical measures that Gorbachev proposed abandoned earlier incremental efforts and experiments.431 The leadership’s plans and programs were not the only spurs to radical economic change. Three other forces drove economic developments in a pro-capitalist direction: the glasnost media, the weakening of the CPSU, including its withdrawal from economic management, and the unbridled growth of the second economy. In 1987-88, perestroika unleashed new economic forces and processes. Ostensibly, the Law on State Enterprise passed in 1987 at the July CC Plenum neither rejected centralized planning nor endorsed a transition to a full-blooded market economy. Its proponents claimed the law would make planning less rigid and would allow autonomy for the enterprises and experimentation with market mechanisms. It also provided for the election of plant managers, an ill-conceived idea that swiftly led to unacceptable wage increases to workers by managers whose eyes were on the ballot box. After its inflationary implications were understood, this feature of the law was repealed. Ellman and Kontorovich noted that the wording of the Law on State Enterprises bore little resemblance to a conventional economic statute for a planned economy. “It is hard to imagine similar wording, which does not oblige anyone to do anything, in the statutes of another country.”432 To a large degree the statute served as a political rallying cry signaling the direction of change.
The glasnost media pushed the Soviet leadership to implement new economic policies in the riskiest possible way. The media influenced the public policy debate and public sentiment about economic change enormously. The glasnost media, subservient to Yakovlev and Gorbachev until 1988, made sure every economic blunder or failure, even when due to Gorbachev’s policies, strengthened the case for more enterprise autonomy and more marketization, never the case for reinvigorating the central plan. The public debate moved only in an anti-socialist direction. In time, “it became politically feasible to demand the complete liquidation” of the planning institutions.433