6. Crisis and Collapse, 1989-91
During 1989 the worst fears of those who had foreseen the potential of the changes wrought at the Nineteenth Party Conference were realized. The working out of those political reforms created a political situation, which the party and its leadership could no longer control. From the end of March 1989, the party leadership was reactive, trying to keep up with changes, which were occurring faster than it could control and propelled by political forces for the most part outside of that leadership and of the party as a whole. Graeme Gill452
The shadow economy has pervaded all economic sectors. Stanislav Menshikov453
In 1991, the masses supported demands for freedom and democracy, opposed the privileges and power so long monopolized by the Communist Party bureaucracy, and hoped for an improvement in their material conditions. The mass rallies for Yeltsin featured banners such as “Down with Gorbachev” and “Down with the CPSU,” but I never saw a banner saying “Long Live Capitalism” or “All Power to the Bourgeoisie.” Roy Medvedev454
In 1989-91, the final three years of perestroika, after having triumphed over his opponents, Gorbachev remade the Soviet Union in five crucial ways. First, he ended the leading role and monopoly position of the CPSU, changing it to a parliamentary party. Secondly, he undermined central planning and public ownership. He pushed the CPSU out of economic management while searching for a transition to a market economy. He began privatizing state-owned enterprises and encouraged the burgeoning second economy. Third, he surrendered to the United States on a range of foreign policy issues and eventually sought an outright alliance with imperialism. Fourth, he allowed the glasnost media to remake Soviet ideology and culture. Fifth, always baffled by the national question, he tried repression against Baltic separatists and then flip-flopped to negotiations in an ultimately fruitless search for a new basis for the union of republics.
Gorbachev was mindful of Khrushchev’s overthrow by the Party in 1964, and he was bent on making his reforms irreversible by a “momentous break”455 with Leninism itself. This took the form of rendering the CPSU powerless, turning it into a kind of advisory, strategic planning department for Soviet society and the parliamentary voice of the Soviet working class. He also wanted a multiparty system and a pluralist media and culture. To make the Soviet economy more flexible and dynamic, he demanded a large role for market forces, private ownership, and private initiative. He desired the continuation of the all-Union federal state. He wished to see less conflict with the West. Only his last wish came true.
Perestroika became “catastroika”456 in 1989. What actually happened was three years of mounting chaos from one end of the USSR to the other, ending in the collapse of Soviet socialism. In 1989 counterrevolution shook Eastern Europe and a year later Germany re-united on NATO’s terms. At the same time Gorbachev’s worst enemy, Boris Yeltsin, whose career seemed dead and buried when Gorbachev publicly booted him out of the leadership in 1987, made a Lazarus-like political comeback. Reborn as a leader of the ”democrats,” he captured control of the all-important Russian Republic. By early 1990, dual power existed in the USSR, with Yeltsin controlling Russia and Gorbachev the Soviet Union.457 In 1989-91, the economy went from bad to worse: production declined, shortages multiplied, store shelves emptied, paychecks sometimes failed to materialize, and popular resentment grew.458 The destruction of East European socialism adversely affected the Soviet economy. The steady withdrawal of the Party from the economy proved disastrous. By the summer of 1991 Western analysts spoke of a Soviet “depression.”459 Soviet citizens blamed perestroika. Unprecedented mine strikes rocked the regime twice, in 1989 and in 1991. The government sank into debt to Western banks. As one after another union republic declared its sovereignty and then seceded, the Soviet Union crumbled as a unitary state.
The media drove all politics rightward. Anatoly Chernyaev called glasnost the motor of perestroika. “Under the increasing pressure of glasnost,” Chernyaev said, “the de-ideologization of perestroika began.”460 Actually, the process was re-ideologization: opening the floodgates to non-socialist and anti-socialist ideas. Gorbachev could not control the genie he had let out of the bottle. By 1989 the media were falling into the grip of the pro-Yeltsin “democrats.” By 1991, a frantic USSR Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov rued that the Soviet media were almost wholly in the “democrat” opposition’s hands.461
In perestroika’s last years, economic forces on the dark side of Soviet society demanded legitimacy and power. The black market and the Russian mob multiplied like vermin. The private enterprise, bogus “co-ops” grew.462 The ambitious and acquisitive backers of Boris Yeltsin lobbied for a drastic shift to radical marketization. If the market replaced the plan and if Yeltsin privatized the Russian economy, high officials, directors of enterprises, and managers could look forward to “unprecedented wealth.”463 The dominant sections of the Party and state leadership could easily see which way the wind was blowing. Corrupt elements of the leadership began embezzling state and Party property and transforming it into their own private property.
In the bewildering last years of perestroika, the Soviet people grew to hate Gorbachev and to treat him with scorn. Frantically racing to quell one crisis here while another broke out there, Gorbachev cut a pitiable figure. A magician who had run out of tricks, he had few friends other than the Western media and governments. In late 1991, even his false friends in the American White House abandoned him.
Gorbachev’s degeneration from a Communist to a social democrat was stark. His illusions about where events were heading were laughable. In May 1990, he gave an interview to Time magazine that took the measure of his “internal political revolution.”464 Answering the questions, “What does it mean to be a Communist today?” and “What will it mean in years to come?” he replied:
To be a Communist as I see it means not to be afraid of what is new, to reject obedience to any dogma, to think independently, to submit one’s thoughts and actions to the test of morality and through political action, to help working people realize their hopes and aspirations and live up to their abilities. I believe that to be a Communist today means first of all to be consistently democratic and to put universal human values above everything else. …As we dismantle the Stalinist system, we are not retreating from socialism but are moving toward it.465