The Red Flag: A History of Communism (97 page)

Gorbachev’s worldview for the first few years of his rule was not, at root, a liberal one. The Soviet people, he believed, had made a ‘socialist choice’ in 1917 and was fundamentally unified, collectivist, and committed to socialism. So why, then, was the system not working? Gorbachev concluded that the problem lay in the fact that the masses’ innate creativity was being stifled. Deploying rhetoric that was one part young Marx and one part almost liberal idealism, he explained that bureaucrats and the ‘authoritarian-bureaucratic system’ ‘suppress the initiative of the people, alienate them in all spheres of vital activity and belittle the dignity of the individual’. The solution to this problem lay in a new form of ‘democracy’ that involved open discussion but not Western-style pluralism. This ‘democracy’ would change people’s psychology, motivating them to become enthusiastic workers and citizens, or ‘activating the human factor’ in the jargon of the time; it would also undermine (and hopefully topple) the ‘bureaucrats’ who were suppressing popular energies.
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Such a Romantic vision may seem like a inadequate basis for a practical programme of reform, but it made sense within the Marxist tradition, much as it had to Khrushchev. Indeed, the reformers saw their policies in that context. As Iakovlev explained to a sceptical Western interviewer, ‘On the theoretical plane, we have never asserted that the revolution in our country, which began in 1917, has ended…
Perestroika
is the continuation of the revolution.’
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However, from the beginning of 1987 it had become clear that discipline and tinkering with the economy had achieved little, and Gorbachev embarked on a more radical programme of economic liberalization and political democratization. Imitating the liberalizing reforms that had taken place in Hungary and Yugoslavia, he gave factory directors more independence from the centre. Inevitably, the planners dragged their feet, and Gorbachev’s response was to launch an attack on the ‘bureaucrats’, who, he declared, were a fundamentally conservative force, a ‘braking mechanism’ on change.

Initially – like Khrushchev before him – Gorbachev had hoped that the party would lead society towards reform, but he rapidly lost faith in it, as party officials resisted his measures. Instead he looked for new alliances among the disenchanted middle classes, relaxing censorship to some degree and permitting the organization of ‘informal’ discussion groups outside the party. More serious, though, was the abolition of the powerful party secretariat in 1988, and the decision to create a new, popularly elected Congress of People’s Deputies. Elections were held in 1989, and whilst many Communist bosses did win seats, several high-profile leaders were defeated. The party had been humiliated. Gorbachev was essentially shifting the centre of power from the party to a popularly elected state authority.

There were limits to Gorbachev’s liberalism, and he always insisted that democracy had to be controlled. The Communist Party was given a guaranteed 100 seats in the Congress of People’s Deputies of 1989;
‘pluralism of opinions’ was fine, but the opinions all had to be ‘socialist’; and criticism had to be ‘principled’, not ‘irresponsible’. However, Gorbachev found it very difficult to preserve these red lines, especially as the party was subjected to an unprecedented ideological assault, encouraged by the Kremlin itself. Gorbachev reopened the Stalin question, appointing a commission to investigate Stalinist repressions in September 1987, and the ‘blank pages’ of Soviet history were discussed much more freely than in the 1950s. If for Khrushchev, socialism had started to decay in 1934,
after
industrialization and collectivization, Gorbachev argued that the rot had set in with Stalin’s victory over Bukharin in 1928, whilst the supposedly liberal Marxist Lenin of the NEP was held up as the authentic voice of socialism. As early as 1986 Gorbachev’s ideology adviser, Georgii Smirnov, explained his views in a conversation with Tsipko:

Gorbachev hoped he could preserve the reputation of 1917 and relaunch the Soviet project in the name of ‘Leninism’. But it was inevitably difficult to draw a clear line between Lenin and Stalin, and the party intellectuals themselves began to lose faith in the whole Marxist project. Tsipko recalls that as early as 1986, Iakovlev commissioned a ‘probe into the fundamental flaws of Soviet socialism’ which included Marxism itself, and at the end of 1988 Tsipko published the first major article to argue that the roots of Stalinist ‘barracks-type socialism’ lay in Marxism-Leninism.
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The following year, Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago
, which denounced Lenin as a founder of the prison system, was published legally in the Soviet Union for the first time. By then the liberal sections of the Soviet press had become remarkably anti-Soviet and pro-Western, full of criticisms of the past and the murderous system the Bolsheviks had created.

Gorbachev and Iakovlev, as long-established party apparatchiks, well understood the power of ideology, and believed that revisions of history were an essential part of their revolution. They saw
perestroika
as a moral and cultural campaign to transform old ‘Stalinist’ and ‘bureaucratic’
mentalities. But this was a very risky strategy indeed. The Communist Party based its legitimacy on moral arguments: living standards might be lower than in the West, and there might be some injustice and illegitimate privilege, but fundamentally the system was just and superior to capitalism. If leaders and intellectuals were now saying that the party had led the people along the wrong path for sixty years, exploiting their self-sacrifice for nothing, how could the regime expect to retain their loyalty? A letter to the weekly magazine
Argumenty i fakty
from a certain N. R. Zarafshan shows how the re-examination of history could reinforce a vague sense of injustice and lead to a traumatic ideological – and emotional – crisis:

Gorbachev was inadvertently destroying the ideological foundations of the Soviet system, and opinion changed very rapidly between 1987 and 1991. More became hostile to the party and positive towards the West. This even happened in Soviet satellites, where people had had a good knowledge of the West for some time; in Hungary, the number of those believing that ‘opportunities for educational and cultural growth’ were fully realized in the West leapt from 22.8 per cent in 1985 to 51.1 per cent in 1989.
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Even so, this is not to say that a majority of Soviet bloc citizens wanted a Western-style market economy. When asked what should be done to escape from the increasingly serious economic crisis, only 18 per cent of Soviet citizens wanted more private enterprise; 50 per cent wanted more discipline and order.
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Similarly, in 1989 73 per cent of Czechoslovaks opposed the privatization of industry and 83 per cent were hostile to the end of collective farms.
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The real beneficiary of the ideological crisis was nationalism and some of the earliest signs of political collapse came in the Baltic States, where nationalist hostility to Soviet rule had been widespread for some time. Popular Fronts in Support of
Perestroika
, created by the KGB to channel democracy in approved directions, soon escaped central control.
Demonstrators began demanding complete independence, calling for a return to private property and the end of the Soviet system.

Gorbachev was soon faced with chaos. By attacking the old political system and ideology, he was cutting the sinews of power before an alternative power structure had been built. Much the same was true of the economy: the power of the state was undermined, before the ground had been prepared for the market to replace it. Gorbachev was faced with two coherent alternatives. There was the Chinese model, which assumed a gradual move to the market, led by a powerful party and reliant on continuing repression of dissent; or there was a neo-liberal ‘shock therapy’, counselled by many Western economists and the IMF. Understandably, Gorbachev resolutely set his face against the former: it contradicted his plans for political democracy, and, he believed, would only entrench the power of the bureaucrats he hated so much. However, Gorbachev also rejected shock therapy – equally predictably. It would have destroyed the economic bureaucracy at a stroke, and replaced it with markets, privatization and tough anti-inflation measures. Yet the result would also have been wild price swings, deep recession and mass unemployment. Even had this been a good idea, Gorbachev would never have pursued it because he was determined to have democracy and markets at the same time, whilst retaining his own power. The introduction of the market would inevitably have hurt many people, and democracy would have given the millions of ‘losers’ a powerful weapon against the government. Gorbachev himself responded to popular pressure by cushioning living standards with borrowing from the West. The consequence was ballooning foreign debt.

In place of neo-liberal shock therapy and Chinese-style state-led reform, Gorbachev settled on a deeply flawed compromise. The attack on the bureaucracy destroyed the old system that delivered supplies from one factory to another, whilst enterprise directors were given new autonomy: they were now free of any pressure – market or political – to produce efficiently and cheaply. Inevitably prices rose, shelves emptied and queues lengthened. Whilst the peace-maker ‘Gorby’ was being hailed in the West, his popularity at home plummeted.

Some at the time urged that Gorbachev copy the more statist Chinese model, and the debate over alternative paths continues.
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Chinese conditions were certainly very different from Russia’s. In the Soviet Union, agriculture had been more damaged by collectivization, and the
old industrial apparatchiks were much more powerful and able to block economic reforms. Nevertheless, some argue that had the right incentives been put in place, some version of Deng’s Four Modernizations might have produced a better economic result.

It is perhaps pointless to speculate about possible alternatives. Given the democratic, anti-bureaucratic worldview of Gorbachev and the reformers, and the liberal intellectual environment in the West, the Chinese model had little chance. And even had a version of the Chinese model secured an improved economic result, it would have been at the expense of political freedom, and probably world peace. The Communists would have remained in power, and an old guard would have been more likely to resist the retreats of 1989 in Eastern Europe.

However, the course Gorbachev chose, whatever its political advantages, had a damaging economic outcome: the effective collapse of the state and the ‘theft’ of the economy by managers and officials. When, in 1989, the dithering Gorbachev eventually did appoint the liberal Nikolai Petrakov as his economic adviser, and made it clear the following year that privatization was on the cards, they began to ‘self-privatize’, selling off equipment and pocketing the proceeds. Meanwhile party bosses and state officials took advantage of Gorbachev’s attack on the central hierarchy and took the assets of the organizations they worked for. The bureaucrats were ‘stealing the state’.
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This semi-legal larceny was the source of the wealth of many of the ‘oligarchs’ of the 1990s. Gorbachev, intent on destroying the ‘bureaucrats’, had actually helped many of them to enrich themselves, and his idealism had set in train the decade of political and economic collapse that beset Russia after Communism, in turn fuelling the anti-liberal reaction that followed it under President Vladimir Putin.

From the autumn of 1989 onwards, therefore, the effects of Gorbachev’s creeping revolution against the Communist Party were becoming clear: the various spheres of Soviet power were collapsing. And it was no surprise that the first to go was the weakest link in the chain: Eastern Europe.

In the days before the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution on 7 November 1987, the citizens of Wrocław learnt of plans for an unusual commemoration of the Soviet state’s foundation:

This satirical celebration of revolutionary history was just one of the events organized by Poland’s ‘Orange Alternative’, a surrealist protest group. They satirized the early Bolshevik political festivals like the Storming of the Winter Palace of 1920 – complete with a mock-up of the revolutionary battleship
Aurora
, a ‘cavalry’ wearing Russian civil-war (Budionnyi) caps, and banners bearing slogans such as ‘Red Borscht’. One of the organizers described the scene: ‘Shouts of “RE-VOLU-TION”. The Proletariat [i.e. workers from local factories] emerged from the bus; on their shirts are signs reading “I will work more” and “Tomorrow will be better”.’ The police were ready in large numbers, but were put in the humiliating position of arresting anybody dressed in red or provocatively drinking strawberry juice.
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