With this cloak of mystery torn into pieces, authority was irreversibly seeping from the Kremlin. As Sakharov wrote at the time: ‘The Congress has cut off all the roads back. Now it is clear to everyone that there is only the road forward or ruin.’33 As it happened, it was both: the road forward led to the ruin of the empire.
The Congress produced an astonishing sense of exhilaration and euphoria. But it also revealed an unbridgeable divide between the minority of the liberal intelligentsia and what one of its members called an ‘aggressively obedient majority’ – the grey and menacing mass of Soviet-bred men and women who applauded the military commander who had led the crackdown in Tbilisi and who tried to boo Sakharov off the stage. They belonged to the same breed as Nina Andreeva, usually known as ‘Homo soveticus’, which had little in common with Soviet people such as Alexander Yakovlev. These were two different species.
The fact that Homo soveticus made up the majority was not merely the result of the election rules of the Congress. It was a fair reflection of a negative selection process which first eliminated the best and the brightest physically and then nurtured double-think, suspicion, isolationism, dependence, and discouraged independence of thought and action. As the fairy-tale dragon from a play by Evgeny Shvarts, the 1940s Soviet playwright, tells the hero who slaughters him before he dies: ‘I leave you burnt souls, hollow souls, dead souls.’
In the same year, 1989, a group of Russian sociologists led by Yuri Levada launched a research project about Homo soveticus. Its aim was to describe a vanishing social type created by several decades of oppressive regimes, but one that could no longer reproduce in the new circumstances. But as the sociologists realized over the next decades, the breed of Homo soveticus was immensely resilient. The type did not vanish: it mutated and reproduced, acquiring new characteristics along the way. Conversely, the social genes of Alexander Yakovlev and Andrei Sakharov would over the years become weaker.
But for a short period in the late 1980s this liberal minority had the upper hand – not least because of its broad and even unlimited, at some point, access to the media. Despite all the hushing and stamping, their voices were more audible and their speeches far more powerful than those of the ‘aggressively obedient majority’. Members of the Politburo were exiting through a guarded back door to escape the journalists – both foreign and Russian – who were harassing them with microphones and notepads. As Sakharov wrote in his memoirs, drafted a few months after the 1st Congress, ‘That evening we felt triumphant. But, of course, this feeling was mixed with a sense of tragedy and complexity of the situation in general. If our feeling can be described as optimism, it was tragic optimism.’34
The Congress ended – just as it had begun – with a speech by Sakharov. He called for a repeal of the Communist Party’s rule, transfer of power to the Soviets, privatization of land and reorganization of the country along federal lines. During this speech Gorbachev grew increasingly impatient, telling Sakharov that his time was over, trying to send him back to his seat. Then Gorbachev simply switched off the microphone. But Sakharov continued to speak. Remarkably, while the audience was no longer able and willing to listen to Sakharov, his speech continued to be broadcast on television. At the end of his speech Sakharov demanded that the Soviet Union recall its ambassador to China in protest against the bloody massacre in Beijing.
Sakharov did not have long to live. He died on 14 December 1989. With his death, the country lost the moral authority that no politician could replace. Coming from the depths of the Stalinist system, he was the closest thing to a saint that Russia could produce. He was the elite in a way that neither the intelligentsia nor the nomenclatura ever were. On the day of his funeral, attended by long lines of mourners in a terrible frost, Moskovskie novosti printed a special issue dedicated to ‘Andrei Sakharov – Our Bitter Conscience’, carrying tributes from Russian intellectuals, writers and politicians. The most poignant was written by Sergei Averintsev, the scholar of early Christianity and one of Russia’s finest thinkers. Averintsev overturned the popular perception of Sakharov as an other-worldly, unpragmatic and inept politician. A truth searcher and a good speaker are not the same thing, Averintsev wrote.
A prophet does not see the audience in front of himself, he sees what he talks about. Andrei Dmitrievich often did not see what was next to him. His eyes were fixated on the distance; he saw the whole. The way in which he thought about modernity brought him closer to the great thinkers and theoreticians of natural laws and social contracts: his thought moved top down, from great abstractions to specifics, always orientated towards immovable stars. Sakharov was a man of principles, not in Nina Andreeva’s sense of the word, but in its original classical sense: a foundation, a basis, an essence.35
In many ways, Sakharov was the moral foundation of Perestroika. With his death, the ground turned into shifting sands.
A few hours before he died, Sakharov spoke to a group of liberal deputies. His short speech was printed in Moskovskie novosti: ‘We cannot take responsibility for the actions of the country’s leadership. It is leading the country towards a catastrophe, prolonging the process of Perestroika for years. It leaves the country in a state of intense decay. All the plans of moving towards an intensified, market economy will turn out to be unattainable and the disappointment is already rising.’36
By May 1989 the parliaments of all three Baltic republics now dominated by non-communists, declared their sovereignty. To give their demand historic legitimacy, the deputies from the Baltic states requested that a special commission should be set up for a historic assessment of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact and its secret protocol that carved up Europe, something that the Kremlin continued to insist had not existed. The commission was headed by Alexander Yakovlev. At the same time Novy Mir started printing chapters from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago – ‘the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times,’37 as George Kennan, the dean of American diplomats, put it. The Soviet Union had little to offer its people in way of economic benefits. Now it was also deprived of its historic legitimacy.
THREE
‘We Suffered a Victory’
By the end of 1989 the excitement and euphoria inspired by Perestroika and sustained by Moskovskie novosti were evaporating. Hopes of reviving socialism and rewinding the tape of history to the point where socialism had gone astray clashed with the economic reality. By 1990, the queues had subsided: there was simply nothing to queue for anymore. Shortages of tobacco in Leningrad risked sparking off riots. Ration cards became a reality. Newspapers did not have to write about shortages – they were literally visible in the poor quality of their paper and in the fading colour of the print. The foreign firms that provided the Soviet Union with ink and paper were not getting paid and halted their supplies. As economists warned Gorbachev, from 1 January the state would not be able to pay salaries to the army and the police.
The last year of the 1980s was also the end of an historic era. As a policy, Perestroika would continue for another two years, but its spirit had left the country. The future seemed bleak and utterly unpredictable. Millions headed to the West. Gorbachev’s traditional New Year’s greeting for 1990 conveyed a sense of gloom. As Marietta Chudakova, a literary historian, recorded in her diary: ‘Gorbachev started his greetings with a serious, almost tragic face. A momentary glimpse of fear, if not horror, touched his face. What does he see in front? What does he feel?’1