The Gorbachev era
ARCHIE BROWN
No period in peacetime in twentieth-century Russia saw such dramatic change as the years between 1985 and 1991. During this time Russia achieved a greater political freedom than it had ever enjoyed before. The Soviet system moved from being highly authoritarian to essentially pluralist. This process ended with the disintegration of the Soviet state, although even after the fifteen union republics went their separate ways, Russia remained the largest country in the world. The break-up itself was remarkably peaceful, in sharp contrast to the extensive violence that accompanied the separation of the constituent parts of Yugoslavia. Within what was sometimes called 'the outer empire', the Soviet leadership broke with the past by ruling out military intervention when, one after another, the countries of Eastern Europe became non-Communist and independent. The Cold War, which had begun with the Soviet takeover of East-Central Europe, ended definitively in I989 when the Central and Eastern European states regained their sovereignty.
Before these remarkable changes are examined in greater detail, the immediate prelude to the Gorbachev era deserves attention, albeit briefly. When Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982 he was succeeded by Iurii Andropov who had earlier in the same year become the second secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, following Mikhail Suslov. Andropov had spent the previous fifteen years as chairman of the KGB and that organisation had left its mark on him. Immediately prior to running the security police, he had been an anti-Stalinist secretary of the Central Committee. Appointed by Nikita Khrushchev, Andropov gathered around him in the first half of the 1960s a team of highly capable consultants, who were to acquire a justified reputation as 'progressives' in the Brezhnev years and some of whom (especially Georgii Shakhnazarov) were to be among the most influential contributors to the 'New Political Thinking' of the Gorbachev era.
Andropov, once he had become General Secretary, continued the policy of cracking down on any sign of overt dissidence which he had pursued as KGB
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chief, but somewhat widened the bounds of permissible discussion by speaking more about economic and social problems than the complacent Brezhnev had done. At the same time he demanded greater discipline in the workplace and made examples of some of the more notoriously corrupt officials who had prospered under his predecessor.[1] Although prepared to contemplate reform within strict limits, Andropov showed no sign during his fifteen months at the helm of being willing to engage in fundamental transformation of the Soviet system. Nevertheless, he made an unwitting contribution to that more ambitious task. Andropov was an admirer of the abilities and energy of Mikhail Gorbachev and he accorded him greater responsibility within the Secretariat of the Central Committee. Gorbachev was already a full member of the Politburo as well as a Central Committee secretary when Andropov reached the top post in 1982. At that time, however, his duties were confined to agriculture. Andropov gave him responsibility for the economy as a whole and also brought into the Secretariat two people who were to work with Gorbachev and who, in turn, were to become significant political actors in the perestroika (reconstruction) era, Egor Ligachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov.
Andropov had hoped that Gorbachev would be his direct successor and, as illness prevented him from working normally during the second half of his tenure of the top post, he relied increasingly on the younger man. In December 1983 he sent an addendum to a speech at a plenary session of the Central Committee, which he was too ill to attend in person, proposing that Gorbachev be designated to chair the Politburo and lead the Secretariat during his absence. That was a clear attempt to move Gorbachev from the third to the second position in the party hierarchy and to make him, rather than the more senior Konstantin Chernenko, Andropov's successor as party leader. Such a move was anathema to the old guard within the Politburo who, while they were as yet unaware of just how radical a reformer Gorbachev would be, were conscious that he was likely to wield a new broom that could sweep them aside. Chernenko, in consultation with two members of the top leadership team even older than himself, Chairman of the Council of Ministers Nikolai Tikhonov and Defence Minister Dmitrii Ustinov, took the decision to suppress the extra six paragraphs Andropov had added to his earlier text.[2]
When Andropov died in February 1984 he was succeeded by Chernenko, already aged seventy-two and in poor health. Several Politburo members who were worried about granting Gorbachevthe role of Chernenko's heir apparent tried to prevent him acceding to the vacant slot of second secretary. As a compromise it was agreed that Gorbachev would carry out the duties of the second-in-command without formally being recognised as such. This meant that he led the Secretariat and, when Chernenko was indisposed, chaired the Politburo as well. Later Gorbachev was recognised within the party apparatus as the second secretary, and responsibility for ideology and foreign affairs was added to his overlordship of the economy. However, there were many attempts to undermine him and to prevent him becoming the sole serious candidate to succeed Chernenko, whose health was in visible decline. It was, for example, only at the last minute that Gorbachev would be informed that Chernenko was too unwell to chair Politburo meetings.[3] A Central Committee plenum on scientific and technological progress that Gorbachev had been preparing was postponed, and Chernenko himself telephoned Gorbachev on the very eve of a December 1984 conference devoted to ideology to propose the postponement also of that event.[4] Chernenko's own immediate circle, strongly supported by the editor of the party's theoretical journal, Kommunist (Richard Kosolapov), was anxious to put a stop to the rise of Gorbachev. It seized upon the text of Gorbachev's speech prepared for the conference which, on the instigation of Chernenko's aides, had been circulated to members of the Politburo and Secretariat.[5] In it Gorbachev had used some of the new vocabulary of politics which would become commonplace during the period of perestroika and he attacked as irrelevant to the problems of real life a number of the tired formulae of Soviet doctrine, complaining about the attempt 'to squeeze newphenomena into the Procrustean bed of moribund conceptions'.[6] In a gesture of defiance that was very unusual in the strictly hierarchical Soviet Communist Party, Gorbachev firmly refused to go along with Chernenko's wishes that he change the formulations in his speech to which the General Secretary objected and that he postpone the conference.[7]
The conference had some reverberations in the highest echelons of the CPSU, but Gorbachev was still not clearly perceived to be a reformer. For his elderly colleagues in the Politburo, he was primarily a young man in a hurry.
When Chernenko died on 10 March 1985, this was just a week after Gorbachev's fifty-fourth birthday. He was still the youngest person in the top leadership team. Making full use of the possibilities offered by his position as second secretary, he lost no time in convening a meeting of the Politburo. It was held on the same evening that Chernenko died and it was agreed that the election of a new General Secretary would take place the next day. Less than twenty-four hours after Chernenko's death Gorbachev had not only been nominated as General Secretary by the Politburo but had also been elected to that office by the Central Committee. Both votes were unanimous, for when it came to the point Gorbachev's enemies within the leadership knew that they could not find a viable alternative leader, although both the Moscow party first secretary, Viktor Grishin, and the former Leningrad first secretary, Grigorii Romanov (whom Andropov had brought to Moscowto join the Secretariat ofthe Central Committee), had aspired to the top post.[8]
1
Luc Duhamel, 'The Last Campaign against Corruption in Soviet Moscow',
2
For further detail on this episode, see Archie Brown,
3
Yegor Ligachev,
4
Ibid., pp. 46-8; Vadim Medvedev,
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Gorbachev's allies, among them two people who were later to find themselves on opposite sides of the political struggle, Egor Ligachev and Aleksandr Yakovlev, who in 1984 was still the director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), had also not been idle in preparing for Gorbachev's succession to Chernenko. See Iakovlev,