Perestroika and the Final Crisis

The most striking fact about the final crisis of the Soviet Union was that its impetus came from within the system itself, as a response to external pressures generated by the ideological rivalry with the United States.

In 1985 Gorbachev became general secretary of the CPSU. Even before he gained the top job, he and his colleagues were coming to the conclusion that they could not continue the arms race indefinitely. The military had asked for an increase of 14 percent in their budget, but this would have finally doomed the already endan­gered “social contract” which guaranteed internal stability. Gorbachev considered that such an increase would not only exacerbate the country's economic crisis, but would also sharpen international tension, leading to a further arms race which guaranteed no one's security and had no foreseeable limit.^[2775]

Thus far there would have been general agreement among party leaders. Gorbachev, however, went much further. He took advice from the institutes and Central Committee departments which had special responsibility for the outside world, and he learned much from them about the real functioning of democratic societies and market economies. He decided it was his mission to end the Cold War, bring peace to Europe, and transform the Soviet Union.

He set about de-emphasizing certain key aspects of the ideology—class struggle and the ultimate inevitability of socialism—in favor of “all-human values” and a “common European home.” He sought security for the Soviet Union by concluding a series of international negotiations and agreements to reduce nuclear and con­ventional arms. His efforts demonstrated how important the Cold War was to the Soviet Union's identity and great power status. The tacit message soon reached the populations of Central Europe that the Soviet Union would no longer intervene to save their leaders from popular discontent. In June 1989 a non-Communist gov­ernment was elected in Poland, and in November the Berlin Wall was breached by angry GDR citizens. Thereafter all the other Soviet bloc regimes collapsed, and within a further year Comecon and the Warsaw Pact were wound up.^[2776]

Within the USSR, Gorbachev started by declaring war on corruption and im­posing tighter discipline, that is, returning with renewed determination to the system's ideals. This soon ran into the sands. The civil nuclear explosion at Chernobyl in April 1986, whose seriousness local officials tried to conceal, persuaded him that he had to combat powerful elements within the party-state apparatus—which he could do only by mobilizing public opinion against them. That decision was the key turning point, since in carrying it out he set free social forces he could not con­trol. Opening up the possibilities of political discussion released a torrent of mass discontent over poor supplies and services, shoddy housing, and—politically even more damaging—over the party's monopoly of politics and the privileges of the party-state apparatus. Discussing those problems led to a reassessment of Soviet history, and particularly the role of Stalin, far more radical than anything published under Khrushchev.

Reform also showed up the weaknesses of the economy. Gorbachev introduced “cooperatives” in the retail and service sector, that is, small businesses owned by their employees. Because people were desperate for scarce goods and had rubles to spare, the cooperatives were able to charge much higher prices than state enterprises, and soon sucked goods away from them. Shortages actually got worse, and within a couple of years there were serious questions about whether the large cities could be guaranteed food supplies.^[2777]

The contradictions of Communist nationality policy came to the surface. In the most disaffected non-Russian republics, Popular Fronts were formed demanding far-reaching authority over their own affairs; they won elections over nomen­klatura nominees. Eventually the three Baltic republics declared that they were seceding from the Soviet Union. Long-standing suppressed ethnic conflicts— between Azerbaijanis and Armenians, between Abkhazes and Georgians, between Chechens and Russians—burst forth. Eventually Gorbachev decided he could solve these problems only by promoting a new treaty between the Union Republics, giving them all much greater powers.

Gorbachev remained convinced to the very end that the best way to guide the process was through his power as CPSU general secretary, which he later combined with the (equally unelected) office of president of the USSR. His leadership style became a bundle of contradictions, created by amalgamating the official and the shadow ideology, the establishment and the interstitial elites. He was trying to be both Luther and the Pope. Given the nature of the Soviet system, perhaps there was no other way to proceed, but he was sawing off the branch on which he sat.

The new powers granted to all the Union Republics transformed the RSFSR into a weighty political force. We have seen that Russians had abundant reasons for being dissatisfied. The very first public association to demonstrate openly in Moscow was Pamiat, a Russian nationalist and anti-Semitic organization which demanded that Russians stop subsidizing non-Russians, and concentrate on defending their own en­vironment, culture, and historical monuments. None of this implied that Russians wanted to leave the Soviet Union—on the contrary. But they were now willing to use the leverage of their republic’s size and importance to demand political concessions. Many of them thought they could realize their aims better in a sovereign Russian state—and they were confused about whether “sovereign” meant “independent.”

It was not Russian nationalism which was decisive, but Russia as an institution. As discontent mounted with Gorbachev and the CPSU, the size of the RSFSR enabled not only conservatives but also liberals to use it as their fulcrum. Boris Yeltsin had originally been Gorbachev’s radical ally; he had gained public popularity through his denunciations of nomenklatura privilege, a grievance which the population felt deeply. Unprecedently, he resigned from the Politburo in the autumn of 1987 because he was frustrated at the slow pace of reform. In normal times, such a step would have condemned him to permanent impotence.

The final crisis exploded on August 19, 1991. To prevent the signing of Gorbachev’s new Union treaty, an Emergency Committee, consisting of some of the highest party-state officials, placed Gorbachev under house arrest and announced they were taking emergency powers “with the aim of overcoming the deep political, inter-ethnic and civil confrontations, the chaos and anarchy which are threatening the life and safety of citizens of the Soviet Union, as well as the sovereignty, integrity, freedom and independence of our fatherland.”^[2778] They failed to immobilize Yeltsin, however. He clambered onto a tank sent to storm the White House (home of the Russian parliament) and declared “Citizens of Russia! The legally elected President of the country has been removed from power [by an] anti-constitutional coup,” which he called a “state crime.” He warned all officials to “unswervingly adhere to the constitutional laws and decrees of the Russian Republic”: those who obeyed the Emergency Committee would be ’’prosecuted under the Criminal Code of the RSFSR.”^[2779]

The specialist Alpha units dispatched to overcome the defenders of the White House hesitated. Any troops ordered to fire on unarmed civilians wish to be abso­lutely certain that the command to do so is legal. Here it was not clear where legit­imate authority lay, and in the end the assault group refused to obey orders.^[2780] That decision doomed the Emergency Committee’s coup. Its instigators had precipitated exactly the opposite of what they had intended: the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself.

Neither the Emergency Committee nor Yeltsin mentioned socialism or Marxism­Leninism in their competing declarations. The final and deciding conflict, then, was not between Communists and anti-Communists, as the entire history of the Soviet Union might have led one to expect, nor between Russians and non-Russians, but between Russia and the Soviet Union as institutions bearing power and legitimacy.