History did not like being mythologized and used as device and it took its revenge on both camps. The biggest problem was that by casting Perestroika in terms of the 1920s New Economic Policy and Bukharin’s idea of socialism, the reformers were not only distorting the picture of the past, they were also distorting the picture of the present. Perestroika was described as a new beginning, not as the ending that it actually was. But an ending, misconceived as a beginning, is nothing but a dead end.
Jumping off the Train
One person who did not care much about ideology and who recognized Perestroika for what it was – an ending of the Soviet command system rather than its second incarnation – was the secretary of the Moscow Party Committee and Russia’s future president, Boris Yeltsin. Like everyone else, Yeltsin made ritualistic speeches about the revolution and Lenin, but he also understood, earlier than most, that the party was heading towards self-destruction.
In the summer of 1987 Yeltsin wrote a letter to Gorbachev, who was on vacation, complaining that Perestroika was turning into empty words and asking him to relieve him from his duties as the secretary of the party organization and a candidate member of the Politburo. There were many cases when people were pushed out of the Politburo but nobody in the party’s history had ever asked to be removed from it voluntarily. When Gorbachev returned from vacation, he called Yeltsin, suggesting they should find time to talk. But a week passed, then another. Gorbachev was too busy working on a speech marking the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution, in which he would mention Bukharin, to meet Yeltsin.
For several generations of Soviet leaders, Bukharin represented something they feared most: political opposition. Yet, too preoccupied with history, few paid attention to the fact that political opposition to Gorbachev was emerging in present time.
On 15 October a draft of Gorbachev’s speech was discussed by members of the Politburo. Andrei Gromyko, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the party’s elder statesman, enthused: ‘What an act is being born! Such acts are not your regular anniversary stuff. They make history. What does [the speech] say? From start to finish it conveys the following idea: there is capitalism and there is socialism, which was born seventy years ago… And in 1,000 years socialism will still be bringing good to the nation and to the world.’19 The time to the end of the Soviet Union was four years and counting.
With hindsight, the discussion among members of the Politburo was almost insane – as if train drivers were to discuss how to make an engine work faster, while their train, having lost its brakes, was heading towards a dead end. Yeltsin decided to jump off that train before it reached its destination.
Six days later, at a plenum of the Central Committee, Yeltsin publicly attacked hardliners in the Kremlin, warned that Perestroika was losing popular support (unsurprising given the empty shops) and, in conclusion, offered his resignation as a candidate member to the Politburo.
Most of the liberal reformers close to Gorbachev saw Yeltsin’s speech as a reckless acceleration of events which could only harm Gorbachev in his fight with the hardliners. In fact, Yeltsin’s speech was useful to him in two ways: first, it attacked the hardliners; and second, it allowed Gorbachev to slap down Yeltsin himself. As soon as Yeltsin sat down, Gorbachev launched a vicious and humiliating attack on him. He then invited members of the Politburo to speak.
When it came to Alexander Yakovlev’s turn, he said that Yeltsin was ‘immoral’ and ‘put his personal ambitions, personal interests, above the interest of the party’. Strictly speaking, Yakovlev, who shared Yeltsin’s frustration with the pace of Perestroika, was right: Yeltsin did have his own game. It was simpler and more strategic than that of Gorbachev. A politician of great animal-like instinct, what Yeltsin cared about was power – something that he understood better than anyone in the audience. Being held responsible for the worsening of the economic situation in the country without being able to implement reforms was politically dangerous. What may have seemed like political suicide from the outside, was, in fact, an act of self-rescue and survival. This did not, however, minimize the drama of his actions: jumping off an accelerating train was a risky business.
A few days later he was subjected to another savage attack – this time by the Moscow Party Organization which he headed. Stylistically, the language of many of their speeches resembled that of the 1930s show trials. But only stylistically. Yeltsin was no Bukharin and Gorbachev was certainly no Stalin. The dogs barked, but their teeth had been spoilt by all the sweets they had been handing out to each other over the past decades. In the 1930s, party renegades were shot. In the late 1950s, they were forced into retirement or placed under house arrest. In the more ‘vegetarian’ 1970s, they were parked in far-flung embassies. In the 1980s, they were propelled to the top. Gorbachev appointed Yeltsin as minister for construction and pledged ‘never to let Yeltsin into politics again’. He did not realize it was far too late for that and that he had just helped to create a new hero.
Once again, the role of the media was not to report Yeltsin’s speech. The protocol of the October Plenum, which contained Gorbachev’s speech, was kept secret and newspaper editors were strictly prohibited from mentioning Yeltsin’s name in print. This only boosted his popularity and his status as a martyr who suffered for the truth. Yeltsin’s speech struck a chord with the grievances of ordinary Russians, who, after two years’ talk about reforms, wanted to see and feel results. Instead they saw empty shelves and rising black market prices. By giving up his position within the Politburo and lashing out at the privileges enjoyed by the apparatchiks, Yeltsin gained far greater power – deriving its legitimacy from popular support.
Unable to read Yeltsin’s speech, people started to make up their own apocryphal versions of it. At least eight such ‘speeches’ circulated in Moscow. The most popular one read: ‘It is hard for me to explain to the factory worker why, in the seventieth year of his political power, he is obliged to stand in line for sausages in which there is more starch than meat, while on our table there is sturgeon, caviar and all sorts of delicacies easily acquired from a place which he cannot even approach… How can I look them in the eye?’20 Yeltsin himself could not have put it better.
Yeltsin was focused on the present and the present gave little ground for optimism and illusions. ‘Where is Perestroika?’ a worker from the Urals asked a party conference convened by Gorbachev. ‘The stores are just as badly supplied with food as before. There was no meat before and there is no meat now. Popular consumption goods have vanished.’21 In the first issue of 1988, Moskovskie novosti ran a page-long vox populi conducted over a ten-day train journey from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific. Like any long-distance train conversation in Russia, it started over the traditional fare of boiled chicken and hard-boiled eggs, which passengers pulled out of plastic bags minutes after the train’s departure from Moscow, and continued over a bottle of vodka in the dining car. But as the train left Moscow further behind, the comments became more outspoken and the fare on compartment tables more primitive. In the old days, passengers were able to buy steaming boiled potatoes with dill, fried and salted fish, pickles and berries from an army of local men and women who ambushed the train at every station. Now, locals ambushed the train not to sell but to buy produce from the passengers: meat, butter and anything else.
The local shops were empty and so was the dining car which sold its own supplies to entrepreneurial re-sellers along the way. Amid the train conversations, Moskovskie novosti distributed a questionnaire among the passengers. In response to the question, ‘Do you believe in Perestroika’s results?’ 64 per cent answered negatively. More generally, only 16 per cent enthusiastically supported Perestroika and 13 per cent rejected it. This was hardly a scientific poll, but it amply bore out Yeltsin’s point. It was this train that Yeltsin was jumping off.