The energy of the mid-1980s and the sense of renewal were sustained by the release of a vast body of art and literature which had been created over the previous seventy years and kept under lock and key. It was an archival revolution: the previously banned works of Boris Pasternak, Vasily Grossman and Anna Akhmatova were published over a period of some four or five years in literary journals whose circulation soared to the levels of Western tabloid newspapers. By the late 1980s, the sales of Novy Mir, which published Doctor Zhivago and Gulag Archipelago for the first time in the Soviet Union, reached nearly 3 million copies.
The ideas and ideals of Tvardovsky filled the air of the 1980s. In 1987 two literary journals published an anti-Stalinist poem which he had written in the late 1960s entitled ‘By Right of Memory’. In a tribute to the poem and to link the two eras, Yuri Burtin, a literary critic and a former Novy Mir editor, wrote an essay which he called ‘To You, from Another Generation’, tracing the spiritual roots of Perestroika to Tvardovsky’s journal.
As Burtin wrote, Tvardovsky and his circle had formed a socialist opposition that derived its legitimacy from the presumption that socialism was open to democracy and did not have to resort to violence. ‘The idea was so strong that even today we live by it in our hopes for Perestroika. There is no other idea.’2 In the 1980s that ‘opposition’ came to power – not through an election but through a generational shift. Their lifelong dream – ‘if only I was in charge’ – became a reality. It was only natural that this ‘opposition’ tapped into the pool of ideas that had formed them in the first place.
They started from the point at which they considered the country to have gone wrong – August 1968. Perestroika was carried out under the slogans of the Prague Spring: socialism with a human face. Its declared goal was a revival of Lenin’s principles distorted first by Stalinism and then by eighteen years of Brezhnev’s stagnation. It was an aspiration which Gorbachev’s generation had harboured since Khrushchev’s Thaw and which was quashed by Soviet tanks in Prague. Gorbachev was picking up from the point where Alexander Dubček had left off in 1968.
The violent abortion of the Prague reforms had a crucial and unforeseen consequence which became clear only twenty years later: it created a powerful myth that had it not been for the Soviet intervention, the Prague reforms would have succeeded, that ‘socialism with a human face’ was compatible with democracy and could be achieved. In fact, this was a utopia, a no-place. Had the reforms in the Czechoslovakia been allowed to proceed, there is every likelihood that they would have ended with Czechoslovakia’s becoming a normal Western-style capitalist country. By prematurely ending the experiment, the Soviet government turned the Czech reforms into an alluring and evasive goal which Perestroika reformers tried to pursue twenty years later.
Gorbachev had had a personal experience of the Prague Spring. One of his closest friends at university in Moscow was Zdeněk Mlynář, Dubček’s right-hand man. In 1967 Mlynář had visited Gorbachev in his native Stavropol region where he worked as party secretary and the two discussed the reforms in Czechoslovakia. When the Soviet tanks invaded Prague in 1968, Mlynář was brought to Moscow in handcuffs, along with Dubček himself, for a meeting with Brezhnev.
A year after the Soviet invasion, Gorbachev went to Prague as part of the Komsomol (the Young Communist Party League) to build bridges with Czech youth. He did not see Mlynář, who by then had retreated and worked in a museum – that would have been political suicide. But he saw anti-Soviet slogans and hostile workers who refused to talk to the Russian visitors. It was an uncomfortable trip. ‘I understood that there was something in our country that was not right,’ Gorbachev told Mlynář during one of their later conversations.3 Now he had a chance to put it right. The spring air of 1985 was filled with enormous optimism and hope. It seemed so simple: shift the heavy tombstone of Soviet bureaucracy and the nation would spring back to life with force and vitality. In the minds of Gorbachev’s reformers, socialism was the best system for releasing the creative potential of the people.
Perestroika reformers were obsessed with the idea of history as a tape that could be rewound to the point where the country took a wrong turn. In 1986, they called the country back to 1968 and even further back to Lenin’s New Economic Policy. In search of healthy economic forces, they turned to farmers and small-time entrepreneurs. Writer Anatoly Strelyany made a documentary about a smart, hard-working Russian man called Nikolai Sivkov who lived in a remote part of Archangel Region, on the northern edge of Russia, ‘in a Kingdom far, far away…’. Strelyany unhurriedly narrated the story of a model Russian farmer who survived the collectivization of land and spirit. His common sense, quick brain and able hands retained the muscle memory of hard work. He was a modern-day Ivan Denisovich who still carried the gene of the Russian peasantry. ‘There must be [other] Sivkovs. It can’t be that there are not any. There are, there are Sivkovs,’ Strelyany almost chanted at the end of the film.
But the miracle of revival did not happen. History could not be wound back. Sivkov was a rare sample of a nearly extinct breed eliminated through collectivization and subsequent negative selection. The likes of Sivkov may still have existed in the late 1950s but his type was almost gone by the mid-1980s. As Gorbachev himself admitted a couple of years after the launch of reforms, ‘There is something that prevents us from moving forward… We have passed more than 60 decrees on agriculture since April 1985. But people don’t believe in these decrees.’ The problem was not the decrees but the shortage of people who could respond to them. The roots suppressed by the tombstone of the socialist economy atrophied. In their obsessive striving to rewind the tape of history, the reformers followed the logic of the Sleeping Beauty. It was as though the country, which went into a slumber in the 1960s, could wake up fresh and strong twenty years later. There is a second part to Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, which is rarely included in children’s books. In it the Prince’s mother turns out to be a cannibal and orders that the children of the Prince and Sleeping Beauty be cooked for her dinner. (Luckily, they are spared by the cook and saved by the Prince.)
Gorbachev formally launched Perestroika in February 1986, at the 27th Congress of the Communist Party – thirty years to the day after Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th Congress in 1956. In the years that had passed since Khrushchev’s Thaw, the country had not become cannibalistic, but it was in bad shape: exhausted, demoralized, economically crippled and, most important of all, drained of its human resources.
Perhaps one person who understood that the system had to be carefully defused and dismantled before it blew up itself and the world was Alexander Yakovlev, whom Gorbachev had appointed in charge of ideology and propaganda. Unlike Gorbachev, Yakovlev had few illusions about the critical state of the system and its ability to transform into something humane without drastically changing its foundation.
Gorbachev first met Yakovlev in 1983, two years before taking office, during his visit to Canada where Yakovlev was still ambassador. They had instantly struck a chord and spent hours talking about the state of the country. A common understanding which underlined their conversation was that the country simply could not go on in the same way any more. Things had to change. The question was how.
This was the eleventh year of Yakovlev’s honorary ‘exile’ in Canada and he had had ample time to dwell on this subject. Unlike the shestidesiatniki, who tried to find support in the ideas of Lenin and Bukharin, Alexander Yakovlev began to review the very foundation on which the system rested: Marxism and Leninism. In particular he questioned one of the key postulates of Marx’s materialism – that being determines consciousness. Does it mean, Yakovlev asked himself, that the way people live and relate to each other is simply the result of their material conditions rather than their will?