Launching political reform
While there had been an accumulation of problems over several decades, including a secular decline in the rate of economic growth and rising rates of infant mortality and alcoholism, and though the gulf between Soviet rhetoric and reality had led to an increase in popular cynicism, there was no strong pressure from below for change in 1985. The dissident movement had been crushed and the atmosphere was primarily one of political apathy and fatalism. In Brezhnev's time there had been a lot of talk about the 'scientific and technological revolution', but technologically the Soviet Union was lagging far behind the advanced Western countries and not faring well in comparison with the newly industrialising countries of Asia. Moreover, the war in Afghanistan was proving costly and becoming increasingly unpopular. Yet all the mechanisms of political control were firmly in place and it is highly likely that the system - and, accordingly, the Soviet state - could have survived into the twenty-first century had not radical reform, or 'revolution from above', shaken its foundations. Although Gorbachev, with some justification, spoke of the presence of 'pre-crisis phenomena' in the Soviet Union he inherited, it was not so much a case of crisis forcing radical reform as of radical reform generating crisis.[9]
The General Secretary in the post-Stalin era did not have a completely free hand in making appointments to the Politburo and Secretariat of the Central Committee. Generally, Soviet leaders required time to build up their power base, gradually bringing in known supporters who had worked with them in thepast. Gorbachev was unusual in that no one whom he promoted to eitherof the two highest organs ofthe CPSU was from his native Stavropol' where he had spent the whole ofhis career in the Komsomol and party between graduating from the Law Faculty of Moscow University in 1955 and being brought to Moscow as a secretary of the Central Committee in 1978.[10] Nevertheless, he used to the full his authority as General Secretary to make radical personnel changes in his first year. Among those who were ousted from the Politburo were Grishin, Romanov and Tikhonov. Ligachev was given full membership of the Politburo in April 1985 and became the second secretary within the party. Nikolai Ryzhkov was also promoted to the Politburo in April and was appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers in succession to Tikhonov in September 1985. An appointment that turned out to be even more important in retrospect than it appeared at the time was that ofBoris Yeltsin as first secretary ofthe Moscow party organisation, in succession to Grishin, in December 1985.
Much of the focus of the new leadership team was on getting the country moving again and one of the early catchwords of the Gorbachev era was uskorenie (acceleration). Gorbachev himself was from the outset, however, interested also in what he called 'democratisation', which included a greater tolerance of, and even encouragement for, a variety of views, although it did not yet signify for him or anyone in a position of authority fully-fledged pluralist democracy. Yet, it was symbolic of the way in which political reform edged ahead of economic change in Gorbachev's priorities that when in 1987 two important Central Committee plenary sessions put radical reform on the political agenda, it was the first of these, the January plenum, that was devoted to political reform and only the second, the June plenum, that focused on the economy. At the January plenary session, Gorbachev introduced some measures of intra-party democratisation and announced that there would be a special all-Union conference in the summer of 1988 'to discuss matters of further democratising the life ofthe party and society as a whole'.[11] That event, the Nineteenth Party Conference (discussed later in this chapter), was to be the point at which Gorbachev and his allies moved beyond reform and embarked on a path of systemic transformation. Already in January 1987 Gorbachev launched a strong attack on the stagnation in Soviet political thinking which, he claimed, had not advanced much beyond the level of the 1930s and 1940s. The June plenum on economic reform, accompanied by a document outlining the principles of economic reform, inaugurated an attempt to decentralise economic decision-making in the Soviet Union. While the assumption at this stage was that the economy would remain a centrally planned one, the aim was to try to keep the focus of central planners on issues of national importance, 'leaving all operational decisions to lower levels'.[12] The reform also extended the rights of workers to participate in factory decision-making.
While in the summer of 1987 a majority of the members of the Politburo and Secretariat were far from being committed to fundamental reform, four of the five most important politicians in the country by that time had been brought into those positions since Gorbachev succeeded Chernenko. The three most powerful politicians after Gorbachev, following the June 1987 plenum, were Ligachev, Ryzhkov and Aleksandr Yakovlev, followed by Eduard Shevardnadze. Of the top five, three - Gorbachev, Yakovlev and Shevardnadze - were firmly in the radically reformist camp, although Gorbachev often played the role of a 'centrist' in order to carry more conservative colleagues along with him. Ryzhkov had a more limited and technocratic view of reform, while Ligachev was increasingly identifying with those who felt that freedom to criticise the Soviet past and present was getting out of hand.
Yakovlev's promotion had been extraordinarily speedy. He was not one of the 470 people elected to full or candidate membership of the Central Committee in March 1981 at the end of the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress. Thus, Yakovlev could not be promoted to the Secretariat until that deficiency had been rectified at a party congress. He was not only duly elected to the Central Committee at the Twenty-Seventh Congress in February-March 1986 but also simultaneously promoted by Gorbachev to a secretaryship of that body. At the January 1987 plenum he became a candidate member of the Politburo and at the June plenum a full member. The diversity of view which had long existed within the Soviet Communist Party (although carefully concealed from most outside observers) was now increasingly clearly represented in the highest echelons of the CPSU. Yakovlev and Ligachev vied with each other for predominant influence within the Secretariat. Their disagreement and rivalry not only exemplified but also facilitated a growing intra-party as well as societal pluralism. According to their disposition, editors and party functionaries could take their cue from the radically reformist Yakovlev or the conservative Ligachev.
The new freedoms
One of the most important developments in the Soviet Union following Gorbachev's selection as General Secretary was a change of political language. New concepts were introduced into Soviet political discourse and old ones shed the meanings they had been accorded hitherto by Soviet ideology. A case in point was the idea of freedom. Instead of freedom meaning the recognition of (Marxist-Leninist) necessity, it acquired in the Soviet political lexicon its everyday meaning of freedom from constraints or, simply, 'ordinary freedom, as established and practiced in the liberal democratic countries of the world'.[13] The term 'pluralism' had hitherto been used in Soviet publications and speeches only pejoratively in the context of attacks on East European 'revisionism' and on 'bourgeois democracy'. It was Gorbachev who broke that taboo by speaking positively about a 'socialist pluralism' and a 'pluralism of opinion' in 1987.[14] This gave a green light to social scientists and journalists to advocate pluralism and frequently to leave out the adjective 'socialist'.
9
For interesting elaboration of that point, see Stephen Kotkin,
10
The nearest thing to an exception was Vsevolod Murakhovskii, who had been Gorbachev's subordinate and later his successor as first secretary of the Stavropol' regional party organisation. Murakhovskii was brought to Moscow as head of a newly created State Committee for the Agro-Industrial Complex. It was not, however, a particularly powerful post, and Gosagroprom, as it was known, was abolished in early 1989, having failed to live up to Gorbachev's expectations.
11
M. S. Gorbachev, 'O perestroike i kadrovoi politike partii', in Gorbachev,
12
Ed A. Hewett,
13
AndrzejWalicki,