The group of party intellectuals who rallied around the CPSU general secretary informed and influenced his political thought and major choices. These advisors and associates not only shared Gorbachev's reformist drive but also contributed to its radicalization.86 They were the “children of the Twentieth Party Congress,” individuals who benefited from the opening of possibilities, both domestically and internationally, facilitated by de-Stalinization: “Inadvertently, Khrushchev's policies of peaceful coexistence [and later Brezhnev's détente] and cultural competition, as well as his rhetoric, helped resurrect a major phenomenon familiar to the older Russian intelligentsia: the idea of the outside world, above all the West, as a measuring stick for Russia's progress or backwardness…. The discovery of other worlds was still linked in the minds of many intellectuals to the future of the Soviet communist experiment, its progress or failure.”87
The glasnost campaign notwithstanding, some things never changed in the structure of the Soviet propaganda rituals. The general secretary was still the dominant voice authorized to express the revealed truth. The limits of the discussion and the scope and objectives of openness were prescribed by the ideological nomenklatura. Even important figures such as Alexander Yakovlev were confronted with vilification by hard-core Communists, KGB top brass, and Great Russian xenophobes for being Gorbachev's “evil spirit” and archtraitors to socialism. Other such representatives of the reformers' group who got into the crosshairs of those threatened by the “Gorbachev phenomenon” were philosopher Ivan Frolov (for a while CPSU Central Committee secretary); political scientist Georgiy Shakhnazarov (president of the Political Sciences Academy); Gorbachev's foreign policy advisor Anatoly Chernyaev; Otto Latsis, deputy editor-in-chief of the CPSU theoretical journal Kommunist; Georgii Smirnov, the director of the CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism; Ivan Voronov, the head of the Central Committee's Cultural Department; and many others.88 Some of them had worked in Prague in the 1970s as editors of the monthly World Marxist Review and were attracted to ideas that within the general atmosphere of zastoi were unorthodox, if not altogether heretical.89 What remains crucial regarding the “young policy-academic elite” surrounding Gorbachev was that the bond which brought it together was a common experience of acculturation in reform. Robert English identified two levels in the process of learning a new identity: “Comparative-interactive learning, whereby foreign ties facilitate a shift in intellectuals' essential ‘self-categorization’ of the nation among allies and adversaries; and social learning, in which growing numbers of intellectuals from diverse professions are drawn into an informal domestic community.”90 People such as Yakovlev, Alexei Arbatov (department head of the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR), Abel Aganbegyan, Evgeny Velikhov, Chernyaev, Shakhnazarov, and others became the proponents of a “new thinking” in international politics that rejected the Soviet tradition of capitalist encirclement or permanent revolution in favor of integration with “the common stream of world civilization.” They brought about what conservatives called the “conspiracy of academicians,” which engineered the volte-face that brought an end to the Cold War.91 They were also among the first to attack the reality of Brezhnevschina—political paralysis accompanied by moral disarray, intellectual despair, and a continuous erosion of the ruling ideology. Robert C. Tucker rightly described pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union as a profoundly troubled society: “People en masse have stopped believing in the transcendent importance of a future collective condition called ‘communism.’ They have stopped believing in the likelihood of the society arriving at that condition and the desirability of trying to achieve it through the leading role of the Communist party, or through themselves as ‘builders of communism,’ which is how the official party program defines Soviet citizens. In a society with an official culture founded on just those beliefs, this spells a deep crisis.”92
The whole ethos of the Soviet political class thus suffered a process of slow and apparently irreversible dissolution. Not surprisingly, the regeneration of Soviet political culture emerged as a widely shared concern among the elite stalwarts. Gorbachev's 1989 unpublished manuscript in which he delineated the main directions for an overall pluralist renewal of the Soviet system can be considered an answer to those who expressed skepticism about his determination to go beyond the boundaries of a revamped Leninism (including many Soviet dissidents as well as Western academics and politicians). By promoting the idea of a system based on the rule of law, Gorbachev did in fact unleash an unstoppable political process with world-historical effects. In February 1990, Gorbachev convinced the Central Committee to accept the principle of a multiparty system and to relinquish the Communist Party's constitutional privilege: “The party in a renewing society can exist and play its role as vanguard only as a democratically recognized force. This means that its status should not be imposed through constitutional endorsement.”93 One can see that Gorbachev was actually restating a 1968 pronouncement by his friend Zdeněk Mlynář on the two conditions of validity for the preservation of the leading role of the party.94 According to many authors, even this approach was just the tip of the iceberg, in the sense that from 1987 until 1991, Gorbachev and his entourage jostled with the idea of splitting the CPSU in the search for greater legitimacy and wider support for the perestroika version of the USSR.95
In 1988, Brown argues, a major shift occurred in Gorbachev's intellectual awakening. By that time, he had already publicly condemned Stalin's “unforgettable and unforgivable crimes.” For all practical purposes, he converted to a version of Marxist revisionism directly inspired by Eduard Bernstein's evolutionary socialism. In the words of Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev was going through a process of “sweeping de-ideologization.”96 The Twenty-seventh Party Congress in 1986 had already replaced the iron law of class struggle with “a new doctrine emphasizing the priority of ‘universal human values,’ including human rights and self-determination.”97 By denouncing Stalin's reign of terror, Gorbachev was effectively bidding farewell to Lenin's ideology-driven partocratic system. Contrary to those who consider civil pressure as the major cause of perestroika, Brown underlines that “with the principal exception of Poland, it is doubtful that the growth of civil society should be seen as a source of fundamental political change in the communist world rather than as a consequence of it.”98 It was “institutional amphibiousness”99 that caused most of the transformations. In other words, institutions designed to foster and legitimize the system (ideological departments, the party academy, theoretical journals, and think tanks) came to undermine the role they were supposed to play. This point indeed clarifies the unexpected intellectual trajectories within the nomenklatura, including some spectacular apostasies that were responses to the system's insoluble moral and cultural crisis. Gorbachevism tried to offer antidotes to the rampant pathologies of cynicism, corruption, and cronyism. The last years of the Soviet Union were fundamentally characterized by a process of national iconoclasm, with the major mythological foundations of the existing system falling apart one after the other.