The ascent of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Politburo and to the leadership of the Soviet Union from his beginnings in the rural region of Privolnoye is only slightly less remarkable than the speed with which his actions in the 1980s led to the ultimate dissolution of the largest country in the world and the end of an era of world politics. His ideological and work experiences were those of a new generation of well-educated products of the Soviet system. When placed at the levers of power, the MGU law graduate attempted to turn around the country and system in which he believed. The reforms of 1985-1989 were implemented with the intent of achieving change without eliminating the Party's leading role. Only in response to the ineffectiveness of his attempts did Gorbachev move toward what might be characterized as radical reform, such that only the net effort could really be called radical, while each step is only the next on an inexorable path to the radical outcome.
The stable period in Soviet life through the 1970s under the remarkably boring and eventually incapacitated Brezhnev, appropriately termed zastoi, was perhaps most interesting in how little Brezhnev and his aging government attempted to improve the country. After 18 years of rule, Brezhnev died in 1982. In his time, there had been very little turnover in the Soviet bureaucracy, establishing a very comfortable position for the nomenklatura, which now was highly resistant to reforms which might disturb its privileged status.
The first threat to this entrenched class was Andropov, Brezhnev's successor. For most of Brezhnev's tenure, Andropov was head of the KGB (1967-1982), a time when the security service was actively deployed against dissidents. Unlike Stalin's repression, Andropov's was “not bloodthirsty,” opting to exile, deport, or commit dissidents, rather than kill (Kaiser 58). In the last years before Brezhnev's death, Andropov actively took on corruption, ousting a number of close Brezhnev compatriots (Kaiser 58). Upon taking office, Andropov accomplished little, at least in part due to his ill health and death after eighteen months. In Kaiser's assessment, Andropov was a relatively intelligent man who kept company with an eclectic group of highly-educated and free-thinking intellectuals, something of an anomaly in the highest echelon of Soviet officials (Kaiser 54). Kenez is less flattering, noting only: “He stayed in office too short a time to realize how profound the problems were… It is at least conceivable, though unlikely, that had he stayed in office he might have followed the same path as Gorbachev.” (Kenez 244) Whether we take Kaiser's or Kenez's assessment of his policy trajectory, Andropov's short tenure certainly prevented the institution of meaningful change. It may, however, still inform the debate to see the juxtaposition of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko as a series of leaders that made the necessity for fundamental change clear, at least within the party. The common characteristics of Andropov and Gorbachev that Kaiser posits may have strengthened the political tide that enabled Gorbachev's reforms when he finally acceded in March 1985.
Apart from highlighting his predecessor's and successor's reformist agendas by contrast to his own retrogression, Chernenko is most relevant to the current debate insofar as his conservatism let Gorbachev, then a Politburo member, position himself as a reformer, establishing “working groups” to examine the problems facing the Soviet Union, which drew support of the most intelligent, if not the most powerful, members of the Party (Kaiser 73). The return to stagnation left an air of uncertainty; Kaiser quotes an editor at the time, “You know, I have no idea what may happen. Maybe I'll be visiting you in America in five years. And maybe I'll be shot.” (Kaiser 72). This is resignation to an unknowable future which would be soon in coming. Chernenko died in March 1985, and Gorbachev took over.
As previously noted, Gorbachev grew up in agriculture and in the Party. He worked at a machine tractor station, an institution that represented the influence of central government on village life. He led his school Komsomol organization and was invited to join the Party as a “candidate member” (Kaiser 25). Gorbachev enrolled in Moscow State University (MGU) in the law faculty. Kaiser notes that law training was regarded as fairly useless in the 1950s Soviet Union, in no small part because there was no rule of law. A Czech classmate and roommate, Zdenek Mlynar, recalled that Gorbachev questioned the Stalinist interpretation of history and its absolute terminology of enemies and allies (Kaiser 27). After graduation, Gorbachev returned to rural Russia, working in the Stavropol region.
In 1977 and 1978, Gorbachev worked with the party head of the Stavropol region, Fyodor Kulakov, on what amounted to a Stakhanovite harvesting operation, which doubled the winter wheat output of one area in two years. Their success brought Gorbachev national attention, including front page mention in Pravda. After the second harvest, Kulakov died abruptly – officially, “his heart stopped beating.” Kaiser suggests that in fact Kulakov committed suicide after the rejection of radical economic reforms that he had put forth that summer. Whether we accept Kaiser's implication that Kulakov's reformism influenced Gorbachev's formulation of perestroika, it definitely presaged it. After meeting with Brezhnev and Chernenko in September and October 1978, Gorbachev was promoted to the Central Committee as secretary for agriculture (Kaiser 41-46). Altogether, Kaiser clearly depicts the man as one of the most intelligent leaders in the country, and one of the few intelligent men of his generation to tolerate the Party apparatus enough to rise through it into the corridors of power. In 1979, Gorbachev became of an alternate member of the Politburo and in 1980 a full member.
Kenez sees Gorbachev's reforms as a well-intended solution to problems the depth of which he did not understand, a description only slightly less damning than his assessment of Andropov's solutions as superficial. Despite having personally worked in agriculture for much of his career, the Stakhanovite achievements that catapulted Gorbachev into the secretariat are examples of perhaps the least effective aspects of economic policy in the Soviet era, wherein sustainable returns are politically less desirable than short-term record results. Gorbachev's first calls for increased discipline and quality met with opposition from a working-class that saw no incentive to work harder, and his call for decentralization was doomed to be ineffective so long as the local incentive was not coincidental with national objective, as it still favored immediate results over long-term improvements. These calls for sacrifice in the name of good times ahead rang hollow after proving false for seventy years.
The premier reform summarized glasnost', in Kenez's understanding, is consciously constructed to be not freedom of press, speech, or assembly in the Western meaning, but a return to “openness in discussing public affairs”, a position of 19th century Slavophiles (Kenez 253). By deferring to “Leninist norms”, Gorbachev echoed a position that he had confided to Mlynar in their MGU days, that the Stalinist oppression was not Lenin's legacy (Kaiser 27). It is irrelevant whether or not this characterization is historically accurate, as the position is most informative insofar as it frames the reform as a return to the proper road to communism. Kenez sees glasnost' as effecting nothing short of freedom of speech, marked by the release of long-banned books and films, an outpouring that recalls Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968; while Gorbachev could not help but see the parallels, there is not evidence that he intended to replicate their loss of control. Working in this theoretical framework, however, Kenez argues that Gorbachev's most significant action in precipitating the dissolution of the Soviet Union was his failure to use force to counteract the growing momentum of reform. Instead, the debate over glasnost' encouraged the development of an empowered civil society (Kenez 256). Thus, the beginning of the end was at hand.
The structural reform, perestroika, was to be democratization paired with a guiding role for the Party, the “regime's last attempt to realize a utopian theory” (Kenez 258). The Party's internal debates on the merits of Gorbachev's reforms took place in the openness of glasnost', a definite break from the illusion of a monolithic party that had been promulgated since the 1920s (Kenez 258). Gorbachev felt ineffectual, noting in June 1986, “Every day that goes by brings new facts, one worse than the other, that demonstrate the difficulties facing those trying to implement his reforms” (as quoted in Kaiser 131). In July, he admitted what ultimately came to be, “If we do not involve the people, nothing will come out of this” (Kaiser 131). Kaiser argues that Gorbachev had assumed that the Party could survive the reforms and maintain an active and guiding role, but the Party proved incapable and “the old system did crumble under the pressures Gorbachev's candor had created” (Kaiser 135).
At the October 1987 plenum of the Central Committee, Yeltsin (a Gorbachev appointee) attacked Gorbachev and the conservative KGB head, Ligachev, for failing to realize the promises of perestroika, and tendered his resignation from his posts. In the ensuing months, the Party apparatus pressured Yeltsin to back down, prompting Muscovites to petition on his behalf (Kaiser 179-193). Kaiser notes the whole affair as proof that civil society was extant and that the Party did not know how to act in such an environment. This was the end, in Kaiser's eyes, of Gorbachev's hopes for reform within the Party.
In the Theses of May 1988, it was resolved that “all Party organizations must act within the framework of the USSR constitution and state laws” and “full restoration of the role and authority of the Soviets of People's Deputies as sovereign bodies of popular representation” (as quoted in Kaiser 225-226). Thus, it was on the agenda of the 28th party congress to separate the party from the government. In December 1988, the USSR Supreme Soviet established the tricameral Congress of People's Deputies, which would elect a Supreme Soviet to conduct ordinary parliamentary business. In March 1989, competitive elections were held for the CPD, the first since November 1917 (Kenez 259-260). This was an attempt at one-party democracy, the last attempt by Gorbachev to legitimize the Party and maintain its primacy without authoritarianism. The CPD elected Gorbachev to President of the Republic (May 1989), but there was no popular election – Kenez sees this as a crucial error, undermining the legitimacy of Gorbachev's rule (Kenez 260).
As the newly constituted CPD and Supreme Soviet still failed to accomplish reform, Gorbachev lost any semblance of control over perestroika. With miners' strikes in 1989, New Year's riots in 1990, and the revolutions in the satellite states in 1989, the guiding role sought by Gorbachev was no longer feasible. As the populace polarized into hard-line conservatives eager to return to Brezhnev's era, and the democratic and liberal contingents eager for the dissolution of the Party and the end of the Soviet Union, Sakwa argues that Gorbachev was left without a power base. From this point on, Gorbachev could no longer control the reform, now a revolution.
Gorbachev was not afraid to sacrifice for his goals; he opened up the legislative process with a degree of freedom in elections, he at least presented the extrication of the party from government, but the truly radical outcome of 1991 was not his intent. Gorbachev was driven by a belief in the Party and a vision of a better society, and the ultimate sacrifice of the former in pursuit of the latter was not by choice, per se, but rather by his acquiescence to the political powers that he brought into being. His tenure was reformist in intent, but predicated on an overestimation of the Party's capacity for reform.
- Kaiser, Robert G., Why Gorbachev happened, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1991.
- Kenez, Peter, A history of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
- LSakwa, Richard, Russian politics and society, London: Routledge, 2002.