Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (13 page)

But the party apparat that Khrushchev reinvigorated soon turned against him. Thus, the Soviet party–state seemed both to call forth efforts at socialist renewal and to block those efforts. This reformist/conservative dialectic was the political dynamic that had produced Gorbachev, and that he had set out to master, first with the Nina Andreeva manipulation of Ligachev, and then with the ‘reorgnization’ manœuvre against the party Secretariat.

But that momentous act set off a bomb inside the Union structure that undercut all his clever tactics.
16
The most poignant moment of Gorbachev’s memoir, written years after the fact, comes when he writes of the 1988–9 political reforms that he failed at that time ‘to put forward a real program’ for ‘the transformation of the unitary state into a federal state’.
17
But, by sabotaging the party Secretariat, this is exactly what he did, unawares. As his top military adviser Sergei Akhromeev wrote in 1991, ‘higher republic organs of power, in line with the USSR Constitution, were not subordinated to equivalent USSR organs.

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the drama of reform

They were connected only by the influence of the party and party discipline. . . . Did the politburo headed by Gorbachev understand all this? They should have.’
18

Even had he not (owing to his perception of reform/

conservative dynamics) waylaid the Secretariat, Gorbachev would have had his hands full bringing to heel the Soviet Union’s fifteen Union republics, because they had clearly defined state borders and their own state institutions.

Now, with the party’s central control mechanism shattered and its ideology discredited, and the tentacles of the planned economy disrupted, Gorbachev discovered that the Supreme Soviets of the republics began to act in accordance with what he had unintentionally made them: namely, parliaments of
de facto
independent states. In March 1990—the fifth anniversary of his ascension to power—he manœuvred the politburo into authorizing, and the USSR Supreme Soviet into voting, an executive presidency for him. But central power had been dispersed, and the survival of the Union was in doubt.

The missing Suslov

Gorbachev’s assault on the conservatives’ potential power base, meanwhile, succeeded spectacularly. But it was completely unnecessary. Ligachev moans in his memoirs that for a long time he
missed
the significance of the Secretariat’s 1988 ‘reorganization’. Even after belatedly seeing through Gorbachev’s camouflage, Ligachev shrank from 81

the drama of reform

raising the matter at subsequent politburo meetings.

When someone else brought it up, Gorbachev pointedly asked Ligachev if he personally needed a Secretariat. The party’s number two official confesses he remained silent, for fear of showing ambition, shuffled back to his office, and began writing alarmist letters to his boss. ‘The bitter truth’, Ligachev remonstrates, ‘is I turned out to be right’.

But, if Ligachev had known
back then
that socialism and the Union were in danger, the bitter truth is that the person best positioned to do whatever was necessary to stop the general secretary lacked the wits and the stomach to do so.

Ligachev had taken over the office once occupied by Mikhail Suslov, who had helped mastermind Khrushchev’s removal. But he was no Suslov. Passing Ligachev’s letters to the archives, Gorbachev continued on the haphazard quest for reformed socialism. Only it was not reform. It was dissolution.

Because he shared Gorbachev’s belief in the possibility of energizing the system, Ligachev refuses to accept that perestroika is precisely what precipitated the system’s demise, or even that the blame lay with the man he had helped put in power. Instead, Ligachev rails against the hijacking of perestroika by ‘radical conspirators’, such as Alexander Yakovlev, intent on destroying socialism. ‘The real drama of perestroika’, writes Ligachev, ‘was that the process . . . was distorted’.
19
Here we have the inept counterpart to Gorbachev’s brilliant scapegoating of the conservatives. True, Yakovlev constantly outmanœuvred Ligachev (when, for example, the politburo decided to 82

the drama of reform

reprimand someone in the media, Yakovlev ‘deferred’ to his nominal boss, Ligachev, reserving for himself the role of affording encouragement behind the scenes). But Ligachev’s endorsement of Yakovlev’s self-promotion as the ‘father of perestroika’ fails to do the general secretary justice. The decisive ‘conspirator’ was the general secretary.
20
More to the point, like a souvenir Matroshka doll, inside Gorbachev there was Khrushchev; inside Khrushchev was Stalin, and inside him, Lenin. Gorbachev’s predecessors had created an edifice lined with hidden booby traps that provoked their own detonation by calling forth the reformist impulse.

Having deliberately crippled the centralized party machine, Gorbachev retained control over the executive pillars of the Soviet state: the KGB and interior ministry (MVD), whose ‘republic’ branches were totally subordinated to Moscow, and the unified Soviet army. Yet, although the gargantuan KGB collected voluminous information, glasnost removed people’s fears and neutralized its capacity to intimidate.
21
The difficulties of using the army domestically were made plain in April 1989, when a few hundred demonstrators in the Georgian capital, some advocating independence, were violently dispersed, resulting in around twenty deaths, an incident that threatened to ignite the entire Georgian nation. As everyday political instruments, the KGB, the MVD, and the army were no substitute for the party. Their use, moreover, was now subject to debate in the revamped Soviet parliament as well as in the republic legislatures.

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Still, had troops been used
swiftly and massively
, as Machiavelli might have advised, to enforce the priority of USSR

laws in 1989 or even 1990, they could have set back independence movements and bought time. That was precisely what took place in January 1990 in Azerbaijan, where the secession of the Armenian enclave Karabakh had helped bring the nationalist-minded Azerbaijan ‘national front’ to power. On the pretext of stopping anti-Armenian pogroms, which had ended six days before, 17,000 Soviet troops swooped in, arrested a few leaders of the front, and restored the rule of Communist officials more pliant to Moscow, at a cost of around 200 lives and much popular resentment. The other republics, cognizant of such a possible use of force, endeavoured to split off MVD, KGB, and army officers stationed on their territories, achieving only limited success. Their greater ally was Gorbachev. The Soviet leader’s commitment to humane socialism, which had led him to destabilize the system, also made him hesitate to restabilize it. Even in Azerbaijan, Gorbachev refused to suppress the national front ruthlessly, instead inviting many of its members into the new government, thereby negating many of the effects of the forceful action.
22

For decades, Eastern Europe’s experience had shown that, in the teeth of the competition with capitalism, efforts to reform planning (without relinquishing socialism’s commitment against the ‘exploitation’ inherent in private property) failed and unsettled the whole system.

This was even truer of the efforts to combine wider 84

the drama of reform

latitude for the press or civic associations with the Communist Party’s monopoly. What, after all, had necessitated sending tanks to Budapest and Prague? One would think that the more recent lessons (1980–1) of Poland’s Solidarity would have raised even more profound questions. Yet to Gorbachev, and indeed to most analysts, the main drama of reform involved not squaring the circle, but a struggle between reformers and conservatives. The conservative ‘resistance’ during perestroika, however, was inept, while Gorbachev’s ‘sabotage’ of the system, though largely inadvertent, was masterly. Thus, the ‘real drama of reform’, obscured by fixation on the conservatives, featured a virtuoso tactician’s unwitting, yet extraordinarily deft, dismantling of the Soviet system—from the planned economy, to the ideological legitimacy for socialism, to the Union.

Well into 1990, as calls for an overthrow of the regime multiplied and republic legislatures passed laws super-seding those of the USSR, Gorbachev continued to state publicly that the principal obstacle to ‘reform’ was opposition by ‘conservatives’. This was
after
Eastern Europe had imploded.

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4

Waiting for the end of the world

There are some things—I call them last stands—that must be defended to the death, as in the battles for Moscow [1941] and Stalingrad [1942–3]. It is impossible to split us apart. We cannot be split apart, comrades. There will be a terrible war, there will be clashes.

(Mikhail Gorbachev, 28 November 1990) The Soviet Union resembled a chocolate bar: it was creased with the furrowed lines of future division, as if for the convenience of its consumers.

(Nikolai Leonov, Chief Analyst of the KGB) Eastern Europe was the weak link. In 1980–1, during Solidarity, the Soviet politburo pressured the Polish leadership to crack down, but internally Moscow recognized that its ability to implement the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine— the use of force to maintain loyal socialist regimes in Eastern Europe—was exhausted.
1
At Chernenko’s funeral in 1985, Gorbachev advised East European leaders that they 86

waiting for the end of the world were on their own.
2
Thereafter, he began to make this momentous fact public. In 1986–7, the Soviet military, preparing for all contingencies, studied what they would do should the Warsaw Pact suffer major difficulties. The high command opposed imperial retreat, except perhaps to ‘cede’ East Germany in exchange for a neutral unified Germany, thereby weakening NATO. The cost of having acquired a position in Europe in the Second World War, and maintained it through armed interventions, made the stakes very high. Above all, no one could be sure how changes in Eastern Europe might reverberate within the Soviet Union.

Appointing the neophyte Eduard Shevardnadze to replace the veteran Gromyko as foreign minister attested to the importance Gorbachev attached to foreign policy.
3

Now unencumbered, the Soviet leader deliberately neglected the satellites, aside from mostly indirect prodding of Eastern Europe’s anti-reform leaders. This distancing, together with the exit from Afghanistan, formed part of a strategy to defuse the superpower confrontation, thereby reducing the strain on his country and raising his own profile. It worked like a charm. Gorbachev achieved major, albeit asymmetrical arms reduction and a deep détente with an American president who in 1983 had vili-fied the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’. Perestroika-like ‘reforms’ were underway in Poland and Hungary, and, though hardliners held out in East Germany and Romania, Western Europe was delirious with ‘Gorbymania’. For four years, he strut the world stage like a grand statesman 87

waiting for the end of the world transforming the international system, imagining his country would soon be accepted as part of the West.

Then, the floor caved in. In reformist Poland, the Solidarity opposition, driven underground in late 1981, returned stronger than ever, and, in the June 1989 elections, it won 99 of the 100 seats it was allowed to contest.

Even though the Polish Communists had rigged matters to guarantee themselves a parliamentary majority, General Jaruzelski—who had ordered the 1981 crackdown— invited the anti-Communist opposition to form the government. Reform had led to regime capitulation. In unreforming East Germany, the results were the same.

Tens of thousands of people fled westwards by obtaining tourist visas to neighbouring socialist countries and then applying for asylum at Western embassies. The flow increased in September 1989 after Hungary, prompted by West German credits, removed the barbed wire at its border with Austria. With popular (and Soviet) pressure mounting against the East German regime, someone in the GDR leadership, at a bungled press conference on 9

November, accidentally declared foreign travel open.

Crowds began dismantling the Berlin wall!

No one could figure out what the enormous Soviet military establishment was up to. It turns out that they were mostly kept out of the policy loop. Before 1989, according to Marshall Sergei Akhromeev, Gorbachev never once discussed scenarios for Eastern Europe with the Soviet military. In March 1990, the brass blew their fuse, denouncing Gorbachev’s surrogate, Shevardnadze, for having failed to 88

waiting for the end of the world consult them—at a meeting the foreign minister failed to attend. Of course, Gorbachev had never planned to ‘lose’

the bloc. Overtaken by events, he began pressing for guarantees that NATO would not absorb East Germany or expand eastwards. But, in May 1990, US President George Bush pressed the issue of German unification
within
NATO. Two months later, Gorbachev presented the more cautious West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl with the gift of a phased, complete withdrawal of Soviet troops, without trying to secure German neutrality.
4
Nor could the Soviet leader save the Warsaw Pact. A foreign policy aimed at a ‘common European home’ had led to the Soviet Union’s ejection from Europe. ‘I would be less than sincere,’ Gorbachev wrote, ‘if I said that I had foreseen the course of events and the problems that the German question would eventually create’.
5

The Soviet leader’s dramatic non-intervention to retain Eastern Europe should be viewed in the light not only of the USSR’s 1981
de facto
internal repeal of the Brezhnev doctrine, but also of France’s long, futile war to hold Algeria or the brutal tenacity of the Dutch and Portuguese throughout Asia and Africa. Domestically, the Soviet leader’s aides pitched the ‘sacrifice’ of Eastern Europe as essential for improving relations with the West, which they argued was itself an imperative, since the USSR could no longer afford the superpower competition.
6
But for the Soviet military and security establishment, now burdened with the logistics of a hurried, humiliating retreat, Gorbachev’s ‘transformation’ of the international system meant 89