Ultimately, however, Gorbachev's inability to overcome the old ideological dramaturgy affected the extent of change within the Soviet system. Whereas Yakovlev came to the conclusion that Stalinism was inseparable from the Bolshevik tradition, which needed to be jettisoned entirely, Gorbachev could not breach a certain mental horizon determined by his attachment to the existing system. He held back for tactical reasons, but also because of his deep inner convictions. For Yakovlev, Lenin was guilty of crimes against humanity, a stance that Gorbachev would consistently evade. A seasoned Marxist-Leninist yet a fundamentally honest human being, Yakovlev came to understand the Soviet Union, the historical product of Leninism, in its essence as a state defined by proscription. Gorbachev could not overcome his perception of it as a realm of possibility.100
Yet Gorbachev's break with Leninism, less strident than Yakovlev's, was real. At the end of the day, one can see Gorbachev as a combination of Imre Nagy and Alexander Dubcek: unable to fully abandon the outworn Leninist model, desperately searching for “socialism with a human face,” torn between nostalgia for old ideals and the tragic awareness of their hollowness. More than a neo-Menshevik or a Western-style Social Democrat a la Willy Brandt (whom he admired), Gorbachev remains the last and most influential of those East European Leninist leaders who tried to humanize an inherently inhuman system. Yakovlev, for his part, was the prototypical case of the apparatchik turned apostate in the terminal stages of Bolshevism. His volume of dialogues with Lilly Marcou tried to point to a “democratic potential” of Leninism. At the time, he argued,
Through the return to universal values and the process of European integration, the socialist idea is taking root in Europe. The way out of this dead end that was the Cold War will be through perestroika in the USSR and through the evolution in the other East European nations…. For the moment, the people are refusing socialism: the idea has stumbled on the real conditions of East European countries; it was destroyed by the Stalinist counterrevolution. Now that the Stalinist model has been eliminated, we will see the emergence of a post-Thermidor socialism. This new socialism, which will no longer know bureaucratic oppression, will be made in the name of mankind.101
Of course, after 1992, the break was complete, allowing him to become the president of the Commission for the Rehabilitation of Stalinism's Victims. His book, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, bears witness to his journey from dogma to democracy.
The need for a dramatic divorce from the past was nevertheless recognized by the most radical partisans of perestroika. The Declaration of Moscow Conference of Socialist Clubs, issued in August 1987, formulated the following demands: legal status for independent organizations and associations; the right to initiate legislation and to secure the fulfillment of party decisions aimed at democratizing the electoral system; the right for social organizations to nominate their own representatives to all levels of the Soviets of People's Deputies without restrictions and with free access of candidates to the mass media; a legal distinction between criticism of the shortcomings of the existing system and antistate activity; and, in accord with the first point of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party program, citizen rights to prosecute in court officials responsible for illegal acts, independent of complaints made at administrative levels.102
As the perestroika policies advanced, political mobilization from below in the Soviet Union focused on the elimination of the counterweights preventing the realization of true democracy. These counterweights, according to Stephen Cohen, infringed on what he calls “the institutions of a representative democracy [existent already in the Soviet polity]—a constitution that included provisions for civil liberties, a legislature, elections, a judiciary, a federation.”103 Their removal seemingly would have finally unveiled the long-awaited “reformed Soviet socialism.” The USSR's rapid collapse combined with the political reorientation of large sections of the federation's population argue against Cohen's thesis. As Archie Brown notes, perestroika did not succeed in overcoming systemic limbo. The transition from one system to another was never completed, thus reinforcing the increasingly widespread perception of the Soviet polity's unreformability.104 Both Karen Dawisha and Stephen Hanson indicate that what Gorbachev envisaged as reform became, in the context of the last decade of the Moscow center, “a (counterrevolutionary self-destruction of the party-state.” To paraphrase Karen Dawisha, perestroika, through its policies, publicly acknowledged the elephant in the “communal apartment”—there was a critical and fatal error at the core of the Communist project for building a new civilization.105
The ruling elites in Communist countries failed because of their inability to function within political pluralism. The principal function of Communist bureaucracy was to exert dictatorship over mind and body. The Communist bureaucratic ethos involved a strong esprit de corps, a solidarity developed through common existential experience, continued paternalism, and a jealously guarded monopoly of power. It can be argued that Gorbachev was too conscious of the revolution from above that he had initiated. The policy of glasnost was, for him, primarily an instrument for clearing the ranks of state and party bureaucracy. The acceptance of the imposed degree of economic reform and democratization continued to torment the Soviet ruling elite.
Gorbachev seemed perplexed by the popular reaction and extrapolation of his policies, as he focused primarily on eliminating his rivals (from Ligachev to Yeltsin). He thus facilitated what Stephen Hanson calls “a breakdown of elite unity” that left the door open to “damaging, short-run opportunistic behavior by lower-level agents of the state bureaucracy throughout the USSR.”106 Gorbachev indeed triggered a revolution from above but missed the revolutionary effect it would have upon the population. His ultimate commitment to a Soviet state under the rule of the CPSU, another avatar of the old revisionist fancy of ideological craft from within with supposedly preexisting tools, is another explanation for his downfall. This commitment is key to his vacillations in early 1991, when he briefly approached the hard-liners in the party (sacrificing, among others, Yakovlev) and his dubious stand on the use of force in Latvia, Lithuania, and Azerbaijan. It also explains the January 1991 CPSU resolution that advocated “the export of energy sources to Eastern Europe as the most important instrument” for “reestablishing our [Soviet] ‘presence’ in the region” in order to “neutralize or at least diminish the anti-Soviet tendencies in the East European countries.”107 Even the famous abandonment of the CPSU's constitutionally guaranteed leading role in society (Article 6) came three days after a 100,000-strong demonstration in Moscow against the Communist Party.
Reading Gorbachev and Mlynář's dialogue in “What to Do with the Party?” it is obvious that the Soviet leader was utterly confused as to how to bring about political pluralism while sustaining state socialism. He correctly took the first step by digging up the Great October slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” in order to secularize power and decision-making in the USSR. In this way, he attempted to place party officials under the control of society. The original slogan of the 1917 revolution meant “freedom from party dictates not only for elected government bodies but also for executive bodies established by those legislative bodies. It meant a law-based separation of government powers.” The parallel structures created could not fully develop into bodies of representative democracy while preserving Article 6 of the CPSU Constitution, which maintained the power monopoly of the Communist Party. Gorbachev's description of the events shows how the protracted negotiations within the Central Committee did produce change, but only under pressure from the 1990 republican elections. He admits that only in July 1991 did the leading body of the party succeed in producing “a program of democratic socialism in the modern sense of the word.” Political pluralism for Gorbachev meant a rather dubious “development of the party into a social organism, that is, to regroup and reshape the millions of Communists who were not part of the nomenklatura”108 He apparently maintained a belief in the innerworldly vocation that characterized the virtuosi of the early years of Bolshevism. A question therefore lingers, one I initially raised in 1990: Did Gorbachev's revolution have the potential to be an anti-Leninist revolution? His plans do seem to have maintained the features of a movement-regime defined by an encompassing socialist spirit. He attempted to formulate a new social contract based on mutual trust and respect between leaders and citizens. The party as a collective intellectual in the Gramscian sense, its relegitimation through intellectual competence and moral authority, never succeeded, however, in becoming a viable alternative to the political and national pluralism or fragmentation of the Leninist twilight.