Examples of the Gorbachev team’s incomprehension of nationalism and the national question abound. In his 1987 Revolution Day speech Gorbachev declared that the Soviet Union had solved the national question. Well into the perestroika era, Gorbachev’s top adviser Yakovlev defended his 1972 broadside against Russian nationalism. That article, “Against Anti-Historicism” assailed the inclusionary policies of Brezhnev and Suslov toward Russian nationalism, policies they hoped would limit the damage done to the Soviet state’s legitimacy by Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinization” campaigns, which the young Yakovlev had supported and an older Yakovlev revived under Gorbachev.443 In 1972, Yakovlev had worried that an alliance of Russian nationalists (who shared some ideas with Marxism-Leninism, for example, a disdain for the capitalist West) and anti-Khrushchevites in the CPSU would threaten key policies of the Khrushchev era such as emulation of the West. In 1985-91 Yakovlev remained worried about such an alliance. To oppose Russian nationalism, therefore, was consistent with his defense of the policies of Khrushchev and Gorbachev.
Gorbachev proved utterly inept at handling the national question. When nationalist ferment arose in the Baltics, he first ignored it. Then, he used economic repression against Lithuania, and later changed course to a weak and hopeless re-negotiation of the Union Treaty that, by degrees, caved in to ever more extreme nationalist and separatist demands.
As the possibility of state fragmentation grew—in July 1988 mass demonstrations in the Baltic states protested their annexation to the Soviet Union444—the key allies of Gorbachev in the Politburo acted like ostriches. Nationalists increasingly dominated the “informal” perestroika groups that formed in outlying republics. Such nationalists increasingly spoke of separation from Russia and increasingly raised their cause even within the republican Communist Parties. In September 1988 when Yakovlev came back from a trip to the Baltics and reported to the Politburo: “There is no problem; perestroika is developing normally,” Ligachev reacted with fury because he correctly saw a situation about to spin out of control. Yakovlev, however, counseled doing nothing, and he prevailed. Within several months the Lithuanian CP had split, Party organizations ceased to function, and emboldened separatists were on the verge of power.445
By contrast, orthodox Marxist-Leninists favored the self-determination of nations, including the right of secession, a right they hoped would never need to be exercised, as well as the development of national languages and culture, guarantees of minority representation in political leadership, and “affirmative-action-style” socioeconomic development in the case of the non-Russian regions. Even some bourgeois Sovietologists favorably compare Soviet nationality policy and U.S. affirmative action. For example, a recent American study that credited the Soviet Union with elevating previously oppressed nationalities, stressed how much its policies broke the mold of historical instances in which a large, more advanced nation embraced smaller, less advanced ones, by calling the USSR “the world’s first Affirmative Action Empire.” The author of the study, Terry Martin, said, the Soviet Union was the first state to respond to rising nationalism “by systematically promoting national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the characteristic institutional forms of the nation state.”446
Gorbachev ignored national inequality, or utterly overstated progress against it. On his six-year watch he underestimated and misunderstood the depth of the national sentiment of specific peoples almost everywhere, including the way his other reform policies fanned national sentiment. Eleven months after the Alma Ata riots of December 1986, Gorbachev boasted the Soviet Union had solved the national question.
In the case of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Gorbachev, when not ignoring problems or claiming to have solved them, indulged in cynical manipulation of national strife to improve his position in the Politburo, a blatant example of sacrificing principle for short-term gain. In April 1987, Gorbachev encouraged a rebellion of the Armenians in the Azeri province of Nagorno-Karabahk because doing so created an embarrassment for Gaidar Aliev, an Azeri Politburo member and Gorbachev opponent. Aliev came under fire from many quarters, including Ligachev, and his career went into eclipse in mid-1987. By the fall, he was off the Politburo.
Encouraging the Armenian claims in Karabakh formed part of a pattern of Gorbachev behavior. The pattern was to cheer “national fronts for perestroika” against local officials, usually the Party first secretaries who had put obstacles in Gorbachev’s path. In April 1988, activists in the Baltic Republics began forming national fronts to support perestroika447 and to affirm their nationalist aspirations. These fronts rapidly took on a separatist and pro-capitalist character. Yet, for Gorbachev, ethnic clashes had certain advantages. Each disturbance handed Gorbachev, if he did anything at all, an opportunity to oust local Party leaders if they happened to be his opponents. Each time the Gorbachev Politburo sided with the fronts or did nothing, it encouraged more extreme expressions of nationalism. In the words of Anthony D’Agostino,448 Gorbachev played “sorcerer’s apprentice,” promoting nationalist resentments for his own purposes until they spun out of control.
As perestroika failed in one sphere, the damage rippled in all directions. Starting in 1988, economic hardship and separatism reinforced each other. As consumer shortages worsened in 1988, the tendency for various republics to hoard production and to go it alone increased. The USSR planned economy had developed as a single grid with a precise division of labor and specialization among republics. For example, one industrial complex in the Baltic region supplied paper cups for the whole USSR. As the economic authority of the center in Moscow grew feeble, barter between republics replaced planning, and economic disruption grew. The economic disorder and uncertainty fueled separatist fires, as each union republic sought to protect its economic interests as best it could.
Several of Gorbachev’s moves strengthened outlying localities against the center. The CC Plenum of January 1987 launched a public attack on the nomenklatura system, the practice of selecting state and republican officials from a list developed by the CC Secretariat in Moscow. Beginning in 1987, Gorbachev and other Party leaders denounced this appointment system and refused to defend local officials from attacks in their regions and districts. Consequently, local officials became more preoccupied with accommodating local views rather than the views of Moscow leaders. When local and all-Union interests conflicted, survival required local leaders to favor local interests. Gorbachev’s foreign policy also encouraged local interests, particularly in the Baltic states. Ellman and Kontorovich said that Gorbachev’s policy of ending the Cold War and seeking close co-operation with the West “made him open to pressure from the West to recognize the rights of the Baltic states, especially Lithuania, to self-determination.”449
As the 1987-1988 period closed out, Gorbachev and his circle had all but routed Ligachev and their other opponents. The rout transformed the nature of perestroika. The growing disarray in the Party, its removal from the economy, led to economic difficulties that became obvious in 1988. This took the form of inflation, shortages, budget deficits and disintegration of key economic institutions of the planned economy. In 1988, for the first time in forty years, prices began rising throughout the economy. A year later, inflation galloped at a yearly rate of 20 percent. As consumer goods vanished from shelves, hoarding proliferated. Gorbachev’s edicts crippled the formerly powerful industrial ministries in Moscow.450 In 1988, Soviet economist T. Koriagana calculated illicitly obtained personal wealth at 200 to 240 billion rubles, perhaps representing 20 to 25 percent of all personal wealth in the Soviet Union.451 Economic crisis, in turn, strengthened reactionary nationalist separatism. Gorbachev’s encouragement of “popular fronts” and “national fronts”—motivated by a desire to put pressure on his Party opponents in the union republics—handed power to separatists. A year later, in 1989, economic decline— caused by the failure of perestroika, not by a long-term growth slowdown—set in motion mass hostility to Gorbachev and the CPSU, and growing support for Boris Yeltsin’s anti-Communist populism. In 1987 and 1988, Gorbachev made the turn. The unraveling had begun.