The figures cited by Gaidar were devastating. In the period from 1976 to 1985, when the Soviet Union invested $150 billion into its agriculture, the increase in agricultural product was… zero. Soviet workers mined seven times the amount of iron ore extracted in America, cast three times as much iron and yet they smelted the same amount of steel. The waste was enormous. The Soviet Union made twelve times as many combine harvesters as America did, but harvested less wheat. The point of the article, however, was not to lament past losses but to warn of the dangers ahead. By continuing to pour money into an inefficient economy the country was digging itself a grave.
Gaidar introduced a new language and a way of thinking about the economy which moved beyond the communist ideology and which operated in concepts that were alien to Soviet party bosses: budget deficit, inflation, unemployment. His voice sounded calm and cold. The question, he wrote in a column for Moskovskie novosti, was not whether capitalism was preferable to socialism, but how to avoid another social explosion.
History left us no chance to repeat an English model of social evolution. The idea that we could simply erase seventy years of history from memory and try and replay the game which had been already played, that we could consolidate the country by transferring the means of production into the hands of the new rich, operating in the shadow economy, the most agile [communist] bosses, or international corporations, demonstrates the power of utopian traditions in our country.29
As far as Gaidar was concerned there was no point in trying to retrace one’s steps back to Lenin, just as there was no point in fantasizing about a painless transformation of a socialist economy into a capitalist one by taking Lenin’s body out of the Mausoleum. The situation in which the Soviet Union – a superpower with nuclear arms – found itself in the late 1980s simply had no historical precedents.
End of Mystery
In the summer of 1989 a group of American Sovietologists asked the young, bright analyst and academic Igor Malashenko what Gorbachev was doing with the country. ‘I told them: he is dismantling the whole system of the communist regime, the Soviet Union. Then they asked me what he was planning to do next and suddenly I was stuck for an answer.’30 A Moscow University graduate with a degree in philosophy, Malashenko had joined the international department at the Central Committee of the Communist Party. A few years earlier this would have seemed like a smart decision, but in 1989 the omnipotent Central Committee was suddenly no longer seen as a good career move; indeed, many staffers were heading for the exit. But Malashenko was curious. ‘I thought that there must be a plan and that I was simply not getting it because I did not have access to information. It was only when I got into the Central Committee that I realized that not only was there no plan, but that Gorbachev did not even understand the consequences of his own actions. Unlike Alice in Wonderland, he did not remember that “if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds”.’31 In fact, had Gorbachev foreseen the consequences of his actions, he was unlikely to have started.
In the absence of coherent economic reforms and policy towards the Soviet republics, Gorbachev proceeded to loosen political control as the communist reformers had urged him to do, transferring power to the Soviets – government bodies, or councils, which were in theory electable even though in practice they were simply enacting the policies of the Communist Party.
It was the opposite of China where economic reforms were happening under authoritarian rule. But in June 1989, the Chinese way led to Tiananmen Square. The Soviet way led to the first democratically elected Congress of People’s Deputies which proclaimed ‘all power to the Soviets’. What had long been an empty slogan suddenly became reality. It was the strongest signal that Moscow was letting go of the centralized system and dissolving power.
The Congress started with a minute of silence: a few weeks earlier, in the small hours of 9 April, Russian troops and armour had moved in against 10,000 people who had come out onto the streets of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, to demand cessation from the Soviet Union. The soldiers used a paralytic gas of unknown origin and spades to crack skulls open. Twenty people were killed, sixteen of them women, including one seventy-year-old and two sixteen-year-olds.
Gorbachev was in London and apparently only learned the facts when he returned to Moscow on the evening of 9 April. Everyone tried to distance themselves from the massacre. It was not clear who had ordered it. What was clear was that the country’s leadership was not prepared to take responsibility for cracking down on a protest and had run away at the first sight of blood. Yegor Yakovlev, along with several other deputies of the Supreme Soviet, went to Tbilisi to investigate and concluded that the use of force was completely unjustified. At the opening of the Congress, a deputy from Lithuania demanded that everyone should stand up to pay their respects to those killed in Tbilisi, effectively implying that the leadership had committed a crime of murder – in the presence of the party hacks who occupied most seats in the audience.
This was just a start. Independent deputies from the ranks of the liberal intelligentsia insisted that the Congress, in the spirit of Glasnost, should be broadcast live on the central television channels. In the past, important decisions were always made behind closed doors. The amount of information the public received about official meetings was usually in reverse proportion to their importance. Congresses of the Communist Party that decided nothing were broadcast almost in full. Central Committee meetings and Politburo sessions were never made public. This was the first time a genuinely important convention was not only reported but televised.
As the Grand Inquisitor explains in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, ‘There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness. Those powers are miracle, mystery and authority.’ Soviet rulers, and Stalin in particular, learned the lessons of the Grand Inquisitor well. But the three powers that had been guarded by Soviet ideologists for decades were destroyed in a two-week-long televised drama.
The country was glued to the television screen, listening to speeches and debates which were considered too radical for newspapers to print or for television news programmes to repeat. People watched Andrei Sakharov, whose name was taboo in the media only a few years before, propose radical political reform and challenge Gorbachev; they heard a former Olympic weightlifter attack the KGB – ‘a veritable underground empire’ – and a Dostoevskian scholar demand the removal of Lenin from the Mausoleum; they heard that their ‘country was bankrupt’, that the war in Afghanistan was a criminal mistake; that the rate of child mortality in the Soviet Union was higher than in many African countries and that life expectancy was up to eight years shorter than in the developed world; that half of all processed baby milk contained a dangerously high concentration of chemicals. But the most shocking part was not what was said but that it was being said on a state television channel. As Alexander Yakovlev said at the outset of Perestroika, ‘the television image is everything’.32