Counterfactual speculation aside, the August crisis enabled Boris Yeltsin to seize full power in Russia, eliminate the moribund CPSU and do away with the USSR. That was the real coup. Historian William Odom stated that the SCSE leaders ”occupied the most powerful posts in the regime when the crisis began.” When the August crisis was over, an official with no formal position in the central government had amassed enough power to begin the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “Yeltsin was the coup maker, a successful one.”604
On November 6, 1991, Yeltsin banned the CPSU and CPRF from operating on Russian soil and ordered their dissolution. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned. On the same day control over USSR nuclear weapons passed from Gorbachev to Yeltsin. Yeltsin simply took over the Soviet army and security services, renaming them Russian state institutions, and retaining most of their personnel. On December 31, 1991 the USSR formally went out of existence. Nikolai Ryzhkov called the dissolution “the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.”605
7. Conclusions and Implications
Do we mean to say that, had Gorbachev and his associates not come to power, the Soviet Union would have hobbled along, and might have continued to muddle through without overt instability? That is the only possible conclusion. Alexander Dallin606
What do these two men [Gorbachev and Khrushchev] have in common? In the first place, their personal qualities: vigor, a reforming disposition, and an intuitive sense of democracy. They were both born in villages, Gorbachev, moreover, in the Cossack region that had retained its yearning for the Russian tradition of communities of free men who had escaped serfdom. Furthermore, they both represented the social democratic trend in the party, out of which emerged such figures as Bukharin, Rykov, Rudzutak and Voznesensky. This social democratic trend never died despite the Stalinist massacres…. This initial social democratism, fortified by the expectations of the people and the demands of the economy, lived on. And it is precisely this that explains such apparently inexplicable phenomena as Khrushchev’s accession to power after Stalin and Gorbachev’s after Brezhnev. Fedor Burlatsky607
Two opposing tendencies existed in the CPSU—proletarian and petty bourgeois, democratic and bureaucratic. Two wings, corresponding to the two tendencies, then developed in the CPSU. In the course of the ensuing continual political struggle between them, a political line was shaped in practice. Without taking this into account, it is impossible to understand such contradictions in Soviet history as that between the mass creative enthusiasm and the repression of the 1930s and 1940s. Only by keeping these conditions in mind can one reach an objective assessment of such Party and state leaders as Stalin and Molotov, Khrushchev and Malenkov, Brezhnev and Kosygin. Communist Party of the Russian Federation, 1997.608
What caused the Soviet collapse? Our thesis is that the economic problems, external pressure, and political and ideological stagnation challenging the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, alone or together, did not produce the Soviet collapse. Instead, it was triggered by the specific reform policies of Gorbachev and his allies. In 1987 Gorbachev turned his back on the reform course initiated by Yuri Andropov, the path Gorbachev himself had followed for two years. He took up new policies that replicated in an extreme way the Khrushchev policies of 1953-64 and even further back, the ideas espoused by Bukharin in the 1920s. Gorbachev’s about-face was made possible by the growth of the second economy that provided a social basis for anti-socialist consciousness. Gorbachev’s revisionism routed its opponents and went on to discard essential tenets of Marxism-Leninism: class struggle, the leading role of the Party, international solidarity, and the primacy of collective ownership and planning. Soviet foreign policy retreats and the evisceration of the CPSU soon resulted. The latter process occurred with the Party’s surrender of the mass media, the unraveling of central planning mechanisms and resulting economic decline, and the end of the Party’s role in harmonizing the constituent nations of the USSR. Mass discontent enabled the Yeltsin anti-Communist “democrats” to capture control of the giant Russian Republic, and to begin to impose capitalism there. Separatists won out in the non-Russian republics. The USSR fell apart.
Several major American writers, including ones highly critical of Soviet socialism, have come to conclusions resembling, in part, the thesis advanced here. For example, Jerry Hough, a Brookings Institution scholar, wrote,
The revolution was not caused by the State’s poor economic performance, nationalist pressures from the Union republics, popular discontent over the lack of freedom or consumer goods, or the very effort to liberalize a dictatorial regime.…the key to the outcome is to be found at the top of the political system or ‘the state.’ …The problem was not the weakness of the state as such, but the weakness of the state of mind of those running the state.609
The Soviet collapse was not inevitable. No basis exists for the conclusion trumpeted in the corporate media that Soviet socialism was doomed from the start, that all socialist states are doomed, that in the end Marx was wrong and human history ends with “liberal capitalism.”610
Gorbachev’s policies may not have been inevitable but they were no accident either. Powerful internal and external forces sustained the revisionism that came to power with Gorbachev. Those forces—the internal legal and illegal private enterprise and its associated corruption, the external aggressiveness and militarism of the United States, as well as a resurgent free market ideology—had grown stronger in the decades before 1985; soon Gorbachev would unleash the internal forces and accommodate the external ones. The Gorbachev program after 1986, above all its core commitment to reducing the influence of the CPSU, reflected Gorbachev’s determination to learn from what he saw as Khrushchev’s failure to deal decisively with his opponents in the Party.
Though Gorbachev’s revisionism had a long gestation in CPSU politics and in Soviet society, the Soviet collapse was not foreordained. There were many points in the previous thirty-five years where developments could have headed in another direction. The strongest argument for this belief is that the CPSU had defeated the opportunism of Nikolai Bukharin in the late 1920s, when its class roots were also strong, when an immense peasant majority surrounded the working-class state. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union, no longer encircled and invaded, could have entered a less repressive post-Stalin era without making Khrushchev’s many blunders of theory and policy. Such critics of the Khrushchev policies as Viacheslav Molotov offered an alternative political course. Those critics were defeated. In the politically stagnant second half of the Brezhnev era, the leaders might have carried on a better fight against growing negative trends, in particular the second economy and corruption. Yuri Andropov, had he lived to evaluate the results of his first reforms, might have sharpened his analysis and made the reform process deeper and broader. Even in the perestroika era, the problematic direction policies took after 1986 was not a certainty, either in the leadership as a whole, or in Gorbachev’s own mind. That the tendency that Bukharin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev represented kept re-asserting itself and finally won, bears witness to its stubborn material roots, no longer in the peasant outlook so tenacious in the first revolutionary decades but in the spreading commercialism and crime of the second economy.