The revisionist side was better led than its opponents. Contingency, thus, played a role in the Soviet collapse. After the Nina Andreyeva clash in the Politburo, which ended in a debacle for Ligachev, the correlation of forces turned steadily against Gorbachev’s opponents. The revisionists kept the initiative and chopped away at the Party base of their opponents. Ligachev avoided taking the offensive or vying for the leadership. Ligachev opposed Gorbachev’s excesses, but according to Stephen F. Cohen, accepted some of Gorbachev’s assumptions, for example, a belief in the advantages of partial marketization.513 Until his demotion, Ligachev simply tried to compete with Yakovlev for Gorbachev’s ear. He saw Yakovlev as the gray eminence of revisionism, giving Gorbachev foolhardy advice. Only after it was too late did Ligachev initiate a consistent struggle against Gorbachev, and by then he was outside the CPSU top leadership.
An organized and determined opposition might have ousted Gorbachev, as Khrushchev had been. As late as May 1990, 70 percent of the CC was against Gorbachev.514 Why, then, did Ligachev lose his last battle against revisionism at the Twenty-eighth CPSU Congress? Why did no other major Communist emerge to lead the fight against Gorbachev inside the CPSU? Why had the CPSU leadership caliber declined so markedly since the 1960s? Why was the CPSU not able to overcome Gorbachev in 1987-91, though it had overcome Khrushchev in 1964?
The answer to these questions resided in the same place as the explanation of the collapse itself, in the economy and in politics. Politburo quarrels were not just clashes of ideas, where arguments were won on the merits. Underlying interests and forces determined the power of the opposing sides. Powerful political, ideological and economic forces were pulling the rug out from beneath Ligachev and his supporters. Most importantly, by the late 1980s, in contrast to the 1960s, the USSR’s second economy was far bigger, its corrupting inroads into the social order deeper, and its penetration of top sections of the CPSU more flagrant and pronounced. Ligachev saw clearly that by encouraging the second economy and private enterprise with his economic reforms, Gorbachev was likewise furthering corruption in the Party. Ligachev said: “Suddenly in the space of a year or two came even more horrible and more absolutely corrupt forces that stifled the healthy start made in the Party in April 1985.”515
There is evidence that from the highest Party levels down, Gorbachev encouraged corruption by example and toleration.516 Valery Boldin, Gorbachev’s one-time chief of staff, confessed that, throughout its history the CPSU had known inner struggle—against opportunists, deviations, splinter groups, Mensheviks, Trotskyites, and so on. He concluded however that, with Gorbachev, for the first time, the CPSU had a corruption problem, high and low, citing secretaries of district and regional Party committees, as well as members of the CC implicated in illegal schemes. According to Boldin, the Party has “never” had the same extent of corruption and greed “in high places.” This weakened the Party’s ability to defend itself. In Boldin’s words, “The virus of dishonesty gravely impaired the Party’s immune system and wrecked its stability.” 517
The growth of legal and illegal private enterprise and its entanglement with the Party sapped the efficacy and morale of honest Party functionaries at every level. They saw much of the upper Party and state bureaucracy purloining state assets with impunity. Meanwhile, the independent media run by anti-Communists were reshaping public perceptions, beliefs, and expectations. The Party was disappearing as the power center. Such trends altered the balance of forces in the CPSU. No such conditions existed in 1964.
At the same time a mobilization of the Party base and ordinary workers was extremely problematical because of the unprecedented political confusion accompanying a counterrevolution being led by a CPSU general secretary. Rank and file Communists were not inert, but they were accustomed to acting in response to Party initiative, not to initiating action against a Party leader. Moreover, rank and file workers were increasingly preoccupied with coping with inflation, shortages, and unemployment. By mid-1991 the economy was in a depression. Millions of workers defended their living standards through strikes, but the enfeebling of the CPSU made a fight within the Party difficult. Disorganization, disorientation, and disempowerment of the Party itself limited the possibility of grassroots resistance to the leadership. Notwithstanding these factors, in March 1991 Soviet workers voted by a huge majority to keep the USSR. Preoccupied with daily living, rank and file workers’ protests typically did not go beyond economic struggles, and they were often either ill-led, or not led at all. Nevertheless, the opposition to the revisionists among the CPSU rank and file remained substantial and ended only with Twenty-eighth Congress in July 1990.
Another reason the anti-revisionist forces lost was likewise related to the second economy. In late Soviet society new private wealth acquired in the second economy flowed into the campaign coffers of emerging pro-capitalist politicians. Historian Stephen Handelman observed, “The vory [thieves] knew that Kremlin conservatives [i.e., orthodox Communists] were anxious to cut short the economic liberalization that had already produced such impressive black market profits.” He added, “Gavril Popov who won election as Moscow mayor in the same campaign that took Yeltsin into the Moscow White House has admitted that reformers obtained support from teneviki (shadow businessmen often connnected to the underworld).” The influence of money in politics—with no precedent in Soviet history—strengthened anti-socialist elements and undermined the genuine Communists.518
Gorbachev’s extraordinary media policies gave him, and later outright pro-capitalist forces, a crucial advantage previously enjoyed by authentic Communists. Yakovlev’s appointees in the media set the terms and conditions of a political debate that went far beyond the mild liberalization of the Khrushchev era. After the 1989 birth of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the anti-CPSU intelligentsia and its media allies went on an offensive against the active supporters of socialism. Thus, the favorable political and ideological circumstances around Gorbachev were far different than around Khrushchev twenty-five years before.
Individual and subjective factors played a real, but subordinate role. Leadership qualities did matter. If Ligachev and his supporters had possessed brilliant leadership qualities, and if the revisionists had not, matters might have turned out differently, regardless of objective conditions. In the battle Gorbachev, however, always held the favorable high ground, even when outnumbered. His main opponent—Ligachev—may not have been “the pathetic, principled Ligachev”519 of one account, but Ligachev was definitely schooled in the Communist principles of democratic centralism, modesty, and loyalty, and those principles constrained his ability to mount an effective opposition. Even though Ligachev had wide respect and indisputable leadership qualities, for a long time he confined himself to attempts to moderate Gorbachev’s policies and to counter pressure from the right with his arguments. With the same collective determination, organization, and planning that Khrushchev had used to arrest Beria, and that Brezhnev had used to oust Khrushchev, Ligachev probably could have turned the Nina Andreyeva affair to his advantage and could have unseated Gorbachev. Ligachev’s failure to act except in his own defense, however, immobilized his allies, none of whom had Ligachev’s prestige. Given this opening, Gorbachev and Yakovlev subjected Ligachev to withering criticism and sent Ligachev’s allies in the leadership and the media scurrying for cover.