A simple cause underlay the seemingly complex pattern of these tumultuous years. The Gorbachev leadership replaced a policy of struggle with one of compromise and retreat. Gorbachev retreated before the pro–capitalist coalition led by Boris Yeltsin. He retreated before the media that berated his centrism and timidity. He retreated before nationalist separatism. He retreated before U.S. imperialism with its unquenchable thirst for one-sided concessions and for global dominion.
Gorbachev was incapable of analyzing why his regime was disintegrating. He could not see that liquidating the CPSU was leading straight to the Soviet Union’s collapse. By weakening the CPSU, he relatively strengthened the Yeltsin camp, the separatists, the second economy, corrupt elements in the Party, the Russian mob and Western imperialism. Soviet analyst Jerry Hough, rejecting the Western description of Gorbachev as “a man riding a tiger he could not control,” observed that Gorbachev never seriously tried to restrain the tiger. “Instead he continually urged it on. In the rare case when force was applied it seemed very effective.466
Gorbachev’s analysis of his political predicament lacked realism in some respects, yet he could count votes and read polls. With approval ratings slumping into the single digits, he lacked the courage to push his market policies to their logical conclusion. He never mustered the temerity to impose economic “shock therapy.” Boris Yeltsin did. The very expression merits deconstruction. Economic “shock therapy” derived from a discredited and sadistic therapy of applying electric shock to severely mentally ill patients, causing needless suffering without helping most and providing a cure for few. Economic shock therapy treated people living under socialism as if they were suffering from a mental illness. This “shock therapy” forced the vast majority to suffer a loss of jobs, housing, children’s education, health care, pensions, and security from crime, while providing to a few a chance at wealth.
Gorbachev tried to manage his worsening political position by maneuvering, vacillating, improvising, and dissembling. As mass discontent rose in 1989-91, the Soviet people mocked his wordy speeches about “new turning points” and “decisive tests” and laughed bitterly at his attempt to portray catastrophes as advances. Gorbachev frantically sought to stabilize the USSR, to reassert control, without abandoning policies that were de-stabilizing every aspect of economics and politics. Having jettisoned the Party, Gorbachev tried to evade the consequences. To stabilize the political system, he sought to govern through new state institutions, especially an executive presidency and the Congress of People’s Deputies. The “democrats,” however, swiftly won key positions in the Congress. To stabilize the sinking economy, Gorbachev searched for a transition to a market economy. To stabilize his influence over a CPSU shattered by his policies, he clung to the post of General Secretary of the CPSU and placated his opponents by appointments to his inner circle. The latter tactic was evident in his temporary about-face of late 1990 and early 1991, when arch-revisionists Yakovlev and Shevardnadze left Gorbachev’s side and he elevated Vladimir Kryuchkov and other Communists. To prevent the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, he first tried repression, and then sought to negotiate a Union Treaty.
No attempts at stabilization succeeded, save one. Gorbachev achieved stability, of a kind, in foreign relations by turning Soviet foreign policy upside down. In the final years of perestroika, Gorbachev abandoned socialist and Third World allies, while seeking political support and financial credits from the West. By late 1991 the Soviet Union had evolved into a compliant junior partner of the U.S.
This chapter treats the key events of 1989-91—the overthrow of socialist governments in Eastern Europe, the Party’s destruction, the rise of the “democrat” opposition, the deepening economic crisis, and the USSR’s dismemberment. They were interacting processes. In the final analysis one process drove them alclass="underline" the leadership’s determination to end the dominant role of the CPSU which, even at this late date, remained a latent obstacle to Gorbachev’s policies.
If Gorbachev himself lacked a realistic view of the consequences of his policies, some in his inner circle were not so naïve. According to William Odom, Gorbachev’s adviser Alexander Yakovlev knew all along where things were heading.
In June 1994 I [Odom] put that same question (‘Did he understand from the beginning that Gorbachev’s reforms might require the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet system?’) to Yakovlev during a dinner chat. He replied that he did realize that they were destroying the old regime, adding with a certain glee ‘and we did it before our opponents woke up in time to prevent it!’467
Similarly, Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s top foreign policy aide, described the mindset of the more realistic in the Gorbachev leadership as things fell apart. Without abandoning his revisionist prejudices and vocabulary, Chernyaev stated that at least some began to discern that the “third way” they were following was a mirage. On the eve of a Politburo meeting to discuss the draft Program of the CPSU’s Twenty-eighth Congress, Chernyaev chose these words to characterize the predicament the core leaders thought they faced:
The crux of the matter was that the pendulum of opinion was swinging between two poles. One way was to hold on to Stalin’s model of socialism only without the use of repression (a contradiction in terms). The other was to accept the precepts of a market society (in essence bourgeois democratic) that were already bursting forth. It seemed obvious that once we rejected the coercive model and its imposition on society by use of force and a state ideology, there would be no choice but to follow the second path. No one wanted to admit this. Indeed we hardly realized that this was how matters really stood.468
As the crises multiplied, some observers saw the signs of a U.S.–sponsored destabilization. They remembered the U.S.-campaign against Allende’s Chile in 1970-1973, when Nixon and Kissinger “made the Chilean economy scream.” Destabilization was a familiar imperialist policy for undoing Communist, left, nationalist, and other independent governments in weak Third World countries. The USSR, however, was too strong for external de-stabilization. The U.S. war buildup could strain the USSR, but not crush it.469 After the Soviet collapse, Reagan Administration officials exaggerated their role in the Soviet disintegration.470 The Bush Administration tried to impose a unified Western policy in support of Gorbachev. It believed Gorbachev was a reliable client who would deliver the whole Soviet Union to capitalism on a platter. At first, until it was clear Gorbachev was a spent force, the U.S. and NATO did not favor Yeltsin, who had only Russia to offer. The U.S. also feared the risk posed by ethnic clashes and military disintegration to the vast network of Soviet nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. In 1991, Bush also wanted Gorbachev’s support for the Persian Gulf War.
Toward the end, as Gorbachev’s position sank into hopelessness, he seemed to have trouble distinguishing between wishes and facts. Some of his aides saw pathological irrationality at work. The lavish praise heaped on him during his foreign trips in 1990 and 1991 deluded him. Chernyaev said Gorbachev’s thinking became “increasingly filled with circular and unrealistic logic” about his real political situation at home. “The narcotic of lionization by foreign leaders and journalists was warping his thinking in an increasingly visible way.”471
Nothing was more irrational than the General Secretary’s pursuit of a new Union Treaty, whose provisions he ostensibly opposed. Gorbachev bridled at each new draft of the Union Treaty that, at Yeltsin’s insistence, gave a smaller and smaller role to the all-Union state. At the end of his tether and confused, he descended into self-deception and political self-destruction.472 Jerry Hough remarked that history knows no other example of a government with full power over taxation stemming from its ownership of all property ruining itself by allowing local governmental units “under its control to take control of tax revenue. …That is what happened from the summer of 1990 to the late summer of 1991.”473