Epilogue The End of the USSR
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the reappearance of Russia were momentous events, but events that are difficult to describe in any depth. The main outlines are clear, as much of its fall took place in public under intense scrutiny by the Soviet population, Russian and foreign journalists, and the governments of the world. Yet many of the crucial decisions took place behind closed doors and are too recent to be the object of study by historians. Many of the major events of the time have already fallen from memory, and others have been probably exaggerated in popular accounts as well as in the few academic attempts at analysis. Real sources scarcely exist, and sensational memoirs and fragments of information do not make good history. To complicate matters, perceptions of the events outside Russia and among the Russian and most former Soviet populations differ profoundly. All that is possible is a sketch of the events and of some of the more obvious social, political, and economic trends of a quarter of a century of upheaval, with some attention to the understanding of these events and trends by the Russians who lived through them.
Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party in March of 1985, just a few hours after the death of Chernenko. He brought with him a new team – among others, Aleksandr Iakovlev as an adviser and Boris Yeltsin, whom he put in charge of the Moscow party organization. Gorbachev belonged to a new generation: born in 1931, he graduated from Moscow University in law in 1955. The last Soviet leader with a university education had been Lenin. After university Gorbachev soon became the party boss of his native Stavropol’, an agricultural district in the plains north of the Caucasus. In 1979 he entered the Politburo. Iakovlev was older, born in 1923, and had risen through the party propaganda network in the 1950s. He spent 1958 at Columbia University in New York on an exchange, and was ambassador to Canada from 1973 to 1983. These two men would lead the attempt to reform the Soviet order. Their nemesis was another party boss from the provinces, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin, born the same year as Gorbachev, graduated from the Technical University in Sverdlovsk, also in 1955, and went on to become the party boss of the Sverdlovsk region, one of the USSR’s key industrial regions. He remained at that post from 1976 until Gorbachev brought him to Moscow.
The first year or so after the appearance of Gorbachev brought little change on the surface. Indeed the most spectacular event of his first year in office was the explosion of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in April 1986. The country that had sent the first man into space could not maintain the safety of its reactors. Gorbachev called for a radical improvement in the economy at the 1986 party conference, but got nowhere. Andrei Sakharov was allowed to return to Moscow late in the year, but most of the policy discussion still remained behind the closed doors of party meetings. In 1987 Gorbachev began to call for “restructuring” (perestroika in Russian), publishing a whole book to promote his vision. He soon added to this glasnost’, which meant something like “openness” or perhaps even “transparency.” The idea was simply that major issues should be part of public debate, not just discussion behind closed doors within the party elite. At the same time a whole series of measures began to open the economic structure to non-governmental enterprise. The first important example was the law that permitted “cooperatives” to function, which were, in fact, small private businesses such as restaurants. Largely unnoticed at the time, the leadership also took steps to speed up the economy by making use of the Komsomol, the Communist League of Youth. Founded in the Civil War as a means of mobilizing the young behind the party’s goals, it had become an essentially bureaucratic organization, a lifeless adjunct to the party. Now it was encouraged to set up “Youth Scientific-Technical Groups,” which were allowed to engage in tax-free entrepreneurial activities, mainly with electronics and automobiles. In these groups the later oligarchs took their first steps.
Just as important as these changes in attitude and policy was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Gorbachev seems to have decided on this move almost immediately, but he did not announce the withdrawal until 1988. Within a year, the Soviets were out of Afghanistan, which then fell into civil war. The ensuing years of Perestroika were politically exciting, as new publications sprang up in Moscow and Leningrad and many other parts of the country. Issues from the Stalin era and other dark parts of Soviet history were the objects of intense discussion. Former dissidents like Sakharov for a moment were national heroes. Not all of this ferment was the result of newly found freedom: the first article to appear critical of Lenin was written on command from the authorities, and historians who questioned its nationalistic conclusions were told it was not for discussion. In parts of the country, such as the Ukraine or Central Asia, the press continued in the Soviet mode. Nevertheless in most of the central press, in film, in literature, at the theater, and at the dinner tables of ordinary people, intense arguments raged and no one any longer took account of what the authorities thought or did. The excitement of political debate, the first such debate in seventy years, went along with a rapidly deteriorating economy. Gorbachev’s first economic reforms removed many of the mechanisms of the Soviet economy but put nothing in their place. A real market did not yet exist. The supply of consumer goods, already very poor in the early 1980s, fell catastrophically. The state also began to lose control of the periphery. In 1988 Armenia began to make claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in neighboring Azerbaidzhan. Moscow was unable to resolve the dispute, and Armenia began to reject the authority of the Soviet state.
The pace of change quickened. Behind the scenes, the Komsomol entrepreneurs had accumulated vast sums, and were soon joined by Soviet banks and industrial ministries, which converted themselves into “firms” oriented toward the growing market. In 1989 the Ministry of Natural Gas Industry became Gazprom, and it was only one of many such organizations. Essentially, a kind of privatization was taking place behind closed doors. Other changes were public. Everywhere in the country Gorbachev’s policy was to replace the hierarchy of party offices with “Soviet,” that is to say, government, offices. In many cases the local party boss simply moved across the street to head the local government, but the change meant that the party suddenly was becoming irrelevant. Inside the party opposition to Perestroika was growing. Then Gorbachev announced that the old Supreme Soviet, the nominal legislature of the USSR, would be replaced with a “Congress of People’s Deputies.” Elections to the new Congress would be real and open: there was to be more than one candidate for each seat. The result was a more or less free election, the first since 1917, but the results were mixed. Gorbachev wanted the new Congress as a vehicle to move ahead the process of economic liberalization as well as “democratization,” newly included in the agenda of reform. Unfortunately the composition of the new Congress meant a stalemate. Moscow and Leningrad predictably elected strongly reformist deputies, most of them from the intelligentsia, as did many Russian provincial cities and districts. The Ukraine, however, still firmly under party boss Leonid Kravchuk, and the Central Asian republics elected conservative deputies opposed to reform. The Baltic republics, swept by a wave of nationalism, were more interested in separation than reform, and the Transcaucasian republics were focused on their mutual quarrels. The elections also brought Boris Yeltsin into the public eye. In 1987 he had fallen afoul of Gorbachev, who had then removed him from his Moscow post. Now as a deputy to the Congress, he used the platform to criticize the pace and scope of reform. He also began to affirm the need for the Russian republic to look after its own rights and needs, and not defer to the central, or Soviet, authorities. The year 1989 also saw the collapse of Communist power everywhere in Eastern Europe, climaxed by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November. Even anti-Soviet Communists in Rumania were overthrown. Gorbachev accepted all this, apparently hoping it would lead to better relations with the West.