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THE HISTORY OF Charles E. Ziegler The Greenwood
Histories of the Modern Nations |
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8 Gorbachev, Perestroika, and the
Collapse of Communism The Soviet people are convinced that as a result
of perestroika and democratization the country will become richer and
stronger. Life will get better. There are, and will be, difficulties,
sometimes considerable, on the road to perestroika, and we are not concealing
that. But we will cope with them. Of that we are sure. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our
Country and the World From its birth in the Revolution of 1917 to
its demise at the end of 1991, the The first indications of the economic
problems that would eventually lead to Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms surfaced during
Nikita Khrushchev's tenure as General Secretary, from 1953 to 1964.
Khrushchev's ill-fated attempts at reform alienated much of the Party and
government bureaucracy, and his successors, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei
Kosygin, merely tinkered with the Stalinist structure of centralized
political control and economic planning. A period of bureaucratic lethargy,
what Gorbachev and the reformers would later call the "time of
stagnation," supplanted Stalin's terroristic oppression and Khrushchev's
poorly thought out experiments. Problems became more acute and obvious to
younger, reform-minded Soviet leaders as the industrial economy could not
keep up with the dynamic computer and information-driven economies of Europe,
the MOUNTING PROBLEMS There was no single factor that brought the
Soviet system to a state of crisis. Economic problems were the most
disturbing, particularly a steep decline in the gross national product (GNP)
growth, to the point where the Soviet economy was expanding at only .5 to 2
percent annually in the early 1980s. If we consider the waste and
inefficiency, routine distortion of production figures, continued population
growth, and the fact that much of what was produced was of poor quality or
not in demand by consumers, the record is even worse. A black market
(underground) economy, comprising about one-fifth of total output, was a
measure of the inadequacy of the legal economy. Absenteeism and alcoholism
were common among workers. Most state stores closed early, so workers would
often leave work early to do their shopping; daily shopping was necessary
since there were no prepared foods and most homes boasted only compact
refrigerators with little if any freezer space. Soviet economic problems were complex, and
resulted from the inherent difficulties in trying to operate a modern economy
through central planning. First, the economy was extraordinarily wasteful--it
took more than twice as much raw material and energy to produce finished
goods in the Strains also were beginning to show in the
multinational fabric of the Another major problem was the economic and
human costs associated with environmental pollution. Soviet economic
development strategies had taken an extraordinary toll on the natural
environment. Most of the major rivers and lakes were severely polluted from
poorly treated sewage, industrial effluents, and agricultural runoff. In 1989
fully 75 percent of all surface water in the The costs of this cavalier attitude toward
the environment were enormous. The Soviet fishing industry saw its harvests
drop precipitously in the polluted lakes, rivers, and inland seas. Water
contaminated by oil products, pesticides, and industrial wastes was
responsible for hepatitis, cholera, and other water-borne diseases. Air
pollution caused high rates of respiratory disease and eye infections in many
industrial cities. Liberal use of pesticides and herbicides in agriculture,
and heavy industrial emissions, led to increased cancer rates, birth defects,
and blood and liver diseases. The The Soviet economy had provided the
population with a modestly improving standard of living ever since Stalin's
death, but it could not match rising consumer expectations. Much of Soviet
investment went to feed the huge military machine, which absorbed some 20 to
25 percent of total gross domestic product. As the In sum, the early 1980s found an aging and
unimaginative Soviet leadership facing intractable domestic problems and an
increasingly difficult international environment. As the old guard died off
or retired, a new generation of leaders, influenced more by Khrushchev's thaw
than by Stalin's terror, moved into the highest echelons of power. Alexei
Kosygin died in office in 1980; the Party's chief ideologist and reactionary,
Mikhail Suslov, the "gray eminence" of Soviet politics, died early
in 1982. Leonid Brezhnev died November 10, 1982, and conservative Politburo
members chose Yurii Andropov, chairman of the KGB since 1967 and trained as a
barge engineer, to be the new General Secretary. Andropov was clearly not the
closet liberal some Western observers suspected (because he drank scotch and
preferred jazz), but as head of the secret police he was well informed about
Soviet social and economic problems. By contrast, most of the elderly
leadership was insulated from the hardships of everyday life--the endless
lines, poor-quality housing, crowded mass transportation, polluted rivers,
and surly bureaucrats. Comfortable in their well-appointed Kremlin offices,
spacious country dachas, and Zil limousines, Soviet leaders probably believed
their own propaganda about how life in the However, Andropov died within a year, and
the Politburo settled on Brezhnev's nondescript protégé, Konstantin
Chernenko, as an acceptable transitional figure. Chernenko was a Party
apparatchik of extraordinarily limited intellect and poor health; the more
vigorous Mikhail Gorbachev, now second in command, often stood in for
Chernenko when he was incapacitated. The Soviet intelligentsia, who had been
cautiously optimistic about the possibility for change when Andropov was in
power, were appalled. Reform was put on hold as the doddering Chernenko
served out a painful thirteen months and then died of heart failure, having
accomplished nothing. On March 11, 1985, after divisive wrangling, Politburo
members appointed the relatively youthful (age fiftyfour) Mikhail Gorbachev
General Secretary of the Communist Party. GORBACHEV SUCCEEDS The dramatic changes that led to the
collapse of the Born in 1931 in the southern Russian region
of From the perspective of Gorbachev and
like-minded reformers, the economy was the greatest weakness of the Soviet
system. Top-heavy central planning, with its focus on generating ever larger
quotas of heavy industrial products, was clearly out of sync with the modern
electronic age. Shortly after Brezhnev died, the country's top social
scientists hadbeen charged with developing a set of recommendations for
economic and social reform. Andropov assigned Gorbachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov,
another member of the Secretariat, to head this task force. Many reform
proposals looked back to the limited capitalism of the NEP, while others
suggested adopting ideas from the Hungarian, East German, or Chinese
experiments. Occasionally these internal debates spilled into the pages of
mass circulation journals and newspapers. One of the most prominent voices of
reform, Siberian sociologist Tatiana Zaslavskaya, argued that rigid
authoritarian methods of production established under Stalin were no longer
appropriate for an educated urban workforce. The recent example of Poland and
instances of worker dissatisfaction throughout the USSR and Eastern Europe,
she argued in her famous Novosibirsk Report, suggested that alienation, a
Marxist concept applied until now only to capitalist systems, was a very real
problem in the "workers' paradise." The findings in Zaslavskaya's
report were quite sensitive; her paper and other frank analyses of Soviet shortcomings
were at first restricted to specialists and Party officials. When the simpleminded Chernenko died in
March 1985, Gorbachev assumed office with literally hundreds of proposals for
reform in hand. Of course, there were still conservatives in the Soviet
leadership who resisted significant change, so Gorbachev had to proceed
cautiously until he could develop a stronger base of support in the Kremlin.
Through a series of adroit maneuvers, Gorbachev demoted or retired many of
the older generation of policy makers, replacing them with younger, more
reform-minded officials. Within three months he had eased Andrei Gromyko out
of his position as Minister of Foreign Affairs, replacing him with the
Georgian First Secretary and reformer Eduard Shevardnadze. A new face in the
foreign ministry was essential if Gorbachev was to succeed in implementing
his "new thinking" in Soviet foreign policy. Gorbachev also
appointed Aleksandr Yakovlev, an intellectual and former ambassador to By the middle of 1987 Gorbachev had
solidified his political position and had managed to put his ideas for
change--most notably, perestroika and glasnost (economic and political
restructuring)--at the top of the Soviet agenda. It should be emphasized,
however, that neither Gorbachev nor his reformist allies had a grand strategy
for change. Theywere experimenting, trying to
reshape a moribund system and yet preserve most of the central elements of
that system. It was a strategy that could not succeed. PERESTROIKA AND GLASNOST Perestroika, broadly defined as the
restructuring of the Soviet economy, was at the heart of Gorbachev's reform
program, as outlined in his book of the same title. Gorbachev, who never
abandoned his belief in the inherent superiority of socialism, initially
sought to modernize the Soviet economy by correcting some of its more
egregious failures while leaving the basic structure intact. For the first
two years, Gorbachev stressed the importance of "accelerating"
economic performance, improving worker discipline, and attacking alcoholism
(which seriously impaired productivity). These measures had been proposed
during the brief tenure of Yurii Andropov, who had been a cautious voice for
reform and one of Gorbachev's patrons in the leadership. Such palliatives did
not get at the root of the problem, however. By mid-1987 it was increasingly
apparent that more was needed than simply adjusting the Soviet system of
central planning. One very unpopular reform that Gorbachev
pursued and then abandoned was his attack on alcohol. Drinking to excess has
a long and honored tradition in At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986
Gorbachev had laid out a program of economic reform for the twelfth Five Year
Plan ( 19861990). Specific elements of economic reform included legalizing
cooperatives, relaxing central controls over state enterprises, and
liberalizing foreign trade. Other features of the economic reform plan
included reform of the taxation system and substantial cuts in the bloated
defense budget. Gorbachev was also determined to end the practice of
subsidizing radical The first cooperatives appeared in 1987; by
the end of 1991 there were thousands of these small businesses providing
much-needed services to the Soviet consumer. Cooperatives were in actuality
small private businesses--restaurants, taxi services, souvenir stands, car
repair shops, dental clinics, dating services, and so forth. In many cases,
legalization of cooperatives simply meant that illegal black market
operations could now do business legally. However, limits on their ability to
hire labor and the difficulty involved in finding space for shops (virtually
all buildings were, of course, owned by the state) hindered their potential
for growth. Making the huge, bureaucratic state
enterprises and the state and collective farms more efficient was a far more
challenging task. A Law on the State Enterprise was enacted in 1988 granting
enterprises greater independence from the central ministries, while requiring
them to function on a "cost-accounting" basis; that is, to cover
costs through sales. Enterprises would now engage in wholesale trade among
themselves, and would no longer be allocated materials through a central
supply committee. Planning would now be less detailed, providing enterprises
with general guidance instead of exact quotas. Factories were also supposed
to operate with greater input from the workers, who would be empowered to
elect their managers. Since the early Stalin era, Soviet enterprises had been
organized on the principle of one-person authoritarian management. Factory
managers had behaved like nineteenth-century American capitalist barons.
Workers could not strike and had virtually no say in running the plant.
Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Chernenko had each publicly promoted the idea of
greater workplace democracy, but these pronouncements had little effect on
industrial management practices. Of course, none of these communist rulers
really favored genuine factory democracy. Those who governed the workers'
state feared the workers, and their grand pronouncements were little more
than ploys designed to keep the working class quiescent. Gorbachev's notion
of democracywas also tied to a specific goal--improving worker morale and
enhancing productivity--rather than being important for its own sake. As political relaxation progressed, Soviet
workers began spontaneously to demand that the Party and government address
long-standing grievances. In July 1989 tens of thousands of miners from the
country's major coal regions--the Kuznets coal basin in Siberia, the Donets
basin in Ukraine, Vorkuta in the far north, and Karaganda in northern
Kazakhstan--went out on strike. Coal miners, one of the "elite"
groups of Soviet labor, worked deep underground in difficult and dangerous
conditions. The miners lived in miserable apartments, received only sporadic
supplies of poor-quality goods, and had very few benefits. But the ultimate
indignity was not having enough soap to wash off the coal dust and grime.
Intimidated by this spontaneous uprising of the proletariat, the government
quickly provided food, clothing, better salaries, more benefits, and lots of
soap. Gorbachev's reform program had only a
marginal impact on Soviet industry. Much of the government's ineffectiveness
lay in its inability to enact meaningful price reform. Without real prices,
enterprises had no means of gauging their true costs and whether or not they
were profitable. Central ministry directives about how much to produce were
supposed to yield to lower-level market exchanges, but in the absence of true
prices enterprises continued to receive state orders for their goods.
Ministries also continued to take most of enterprise profits, leaving them
little independence. The continued presence of state bureaucracies in
production also hampered cooperation between new private businesses and state
enterprises. A private construction firm, for example, might have ample
supplies of bricks to build new houses. However, if lumber could only be
obtained through the Ministry of Timber, and all its production was promised
to state enterprises, it would be impossible for the private firm to get the
needed materials. Partial reform threw the economy into a tailspin. In agriculture, reform consisted of reducing
subsidies granted to the collective and state farms, encouraging them to turn
a profit, and providing incentives for increased output. Under Brezhnev
small-scale family "teams" had become active in Soviet agriculture,
and the private plots had become a vital part of food production. Although
these plots comprised only 3 percent of the total arable land, private plots
had produced about one-quarter of all food consumed in the By liberalizing foreign trade, the regime
hoped for an infusion of new technology into the moribund Soviet economy.
Competition with foreign businesses would provide an incentive for Soviet
firms to produce better products. The Ministry of Foreign Trade was stripped
of its monopoly position, and by the end of 1988 most ministries, enterprises,
and other organizations were allowed to engage in foreign trade. Joint
ventures with foreign firms were encouraged, and the government planned to
make the ruble a convertible currency within a few years. The Soviet
government indicated its intention to participate in international economic
organizations--such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the
World Trade Organization), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), and the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation forum--which it had
previously denounced as capitalist dominated. By 1989 Gorbachev had evolved from his
initial cautious position on economic reform to accepting the need for the
market to be the primary regulator of the Soviet economy. However, more
conservative Politburo members, top officials in the military and the KGB,
enterprise managers, and the powerful heads of the economic ministries and
state committees favored preserving the command economy. For decades Soviet
propaganda had condemned the market as inefficient and exploitative; this
conditioning was hard to resist. Perhaps more important, adopting a genuine
market economy threatened the positions and perquisites of many Soviet
officials. The economic ministries had derailed previous reform efforts; now
they severely constrained the reform process. The second major principle of Gorbachev's
reform program, glasnost, was supposed to provide the conditions for more
effective economic restructuring. Usually translated as "openness"
or "publicity," glasnost was meant to expose the full extent of
mismanagement, corruption, and falsification in the economic system, holding
both management and workers up to the glare of public opinion. Given the long
Soviet (and Russian) tradition of secrecy, most Soviet leaders, Gorbachev
included, did not envision completely abolishing the government's control
over information. Itproved difficult to apply glasnost selectively, however.
When Reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl encouraged a frightened Soviet
populace to demand from their government more honest reporting on a wide
range of social, economic, and political issues--environmental pollution,
disease, crime, official corruption, accidents, and natural disasters. As
censorship weakened, the official Soviet press became increasingly critical
of government actions, and subjects open for public discussion expanded to
include nationality relations, military issues, foreign policy, and even the
private lives of top Soviet leaders. Encouraged by Gorbachev, the media
attempted to fill in the "blank spots" in Soviet history, events
that had been ignored or blatantly falsified in order to portray the Soviet
system in a more flattering light. Stalin's bloody dictatorship was
reappraised, and such prominent "enemies of the state" as Leon
Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin (the Party's chief theoretician in the 1920s and an
outspoken advocate of the liberal policies of that period), and Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, the famous dissident novelist and historian of the prison
camps, were reevaluated. By the end of the 1980s, even Lenin, who had been
virtually deified after his death as a prophet of Marxism and a supposedly
infallible ruler, was condemned for having planted the seeds of dictatorship. Ever since Lenin had convinced other Party
leaders to ban opposing "factions" at the Tenth Party Congress in
1921, political opposition had been punished as a crime against the state.
Not only were competing parties illegal; all social and cultural
organizations, from churches to chess clubs, were tightly controlled and
monitored by the Communist Party. As perestroika and glasnost evolved,
political controls were relaxed and independent groups began to organize and
articulate their demands. Ecology was one prominent issue that captured a
great deal of attention, especially after Of course, ecology problems were only one in
a long list of resentments held by the national minorities. The elaborate
federal structure of the Soviet government theoretically gave the republics,
autonomous republics, autonomous regions, and national areas a certain
measure of self-determination. In reality, the national aspirations of most
minorities were frustrated by centralized Party control and persistent
efforts at Russification. Gorbachev and many of the reformers did not realize
the strength of nationalism in the NEW THINKING IN FOREIGN POLICY A third element of
Gorbachev's reform program was his determination to end the Cold War, repair
ties with China, revise relations with the Third World, and put Soviet-East
European relations on a new footing. The confrontational character of Soviet
foreign policy had unnecessarily raised international tensions, provoked
bloody conflicts by proxy in places like Since the end of World War II Eastern As it became clear that Soviet military forces
would no longer intervene to prop up unpopular communist governments, demands
for change in Eastern Europe's liberation provided further
encouragement to the movements for greater autonomy in the fifteen union
republics that comprised the Beyond Eastern Europe, Gorbachev's new
thinking in foreign policy led to major improvements in relations with the Despite initial skepticism in the West, new
thinking produced a sea change in Soviet foreign policy. The first
breakthrough--the December 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF)
Treaty signed by the NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries also
began serious negotiations to reduce the huge stores of conventional
(nonnuclear) weapons deployed between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gorbachev also moved to repair relations
with the countries of Soviet involvement in Two decades of tensions between the Gorbachev also implemented a major
breakthrough in Soviet policy on the Korean peninsula. Since the end of World
War II, Although these remarkable developments in
foreign policy created the relaxed international climate necessary for
perestroika, many influential voices in the DEMOCRATIZATION Radical changes in Soviet political and
economic life had polarized opinions, with elites divided between such
conservatives as Yegor Ligachev and supporters of more rapid reform, led by
Boris Yeltsin and Aleksandr Yakovlev. Gorbachev sought to occupy the middle
ground, but it was a difficult balancing act. At first, Gorbachev could not
bring himself to question the "leading and guiding role" of the
Communist Party in Soviet society, a position enshrined in the 1977
Constitution. He believed that the Party could democratize, carry out
perestroika, and still remain the nucleus of the political system. As early
as 1987 experiments were introduced providing for competitive, secret ballots
for local and regional Party offices, and for term limits. However, these
attempts to undermine the old, comfortable, and often corrupt system of
Nomenklatura appointments by which politically loyal officials secured
powerful jobs alienated conservatives in the CPSU. Gorbachev had brought Boris Yeltsin to The Nineteenth Party Conference of June
1988, which illustrated the strength of conservative opposition to reform
within the Communist Party, marked a watershed in political reform. By this
point Gorbachev was convinced that perestroika could not succeed barring a
shift of political power from the authoritarian CPSU to elected governmental
institutions. Popular pressure expressed through the electoral process, he
reasoned, would compel reluctant officials to support his reform program. The
Nineteenth Party Conference adopted resolutions calling for the further
democratization of Soviet society, and the Party's Central Committee designed
a series of constitutional amendments that created an electoral system and a
functioning parliament. Elections to the new Congress of People's
Deputies, held in March 1989, were relatively free by Soviet standards.
Although some offices were filled Soviet-style, with only one nominee per
office, many had two, five, or even twelve candidates for one position. The
most undemocratic aspect of elections to the 2,250-member Congress was the
provision of electing one-third of the deputies from social and political
organizations--the Communist Party, Komsomol, trade unions, women's
organizations, and the The Congress, which opened in May 1989, was
broadcast live on Soviet television to an entranced audience. Unaccustomed to
democracy, deputies to the Congress haggled over procedural issues and traded
accusations. Champion weightlifter Yurii Vlasov condemned historic abusesby
the KGB. Delegates from Much of the problem in trying to effect
reform stemmed from the pervasive influence of the CPSU in Soviet political
life. The Party had succeeded, albeit at tremendous cost, in constructing the
rudiments of a modern industrial society--an urbanized population base,
factories, transportation and communications infrastructure, mass education,
and science. As a consequence, Soviet society and the economy had experienced
major transformations since the Revolution. The moribund political system,
however, had great difficulty adapting to the changing conditions of the late
twentieth century. The Communist Party's obsession with secrecy clashed with
the demands of the information age, its myopic focus on expanding industrial
output ignored the worldwide trend toward quality and efficiency, and its
centralized approach to political issues could not meet the challenge of
creating community out of an increasingly diverse society. Prior to
Gorbachev, the Party had resisted granting the population a larger role in
governing. Lacking flexibility, the Soviet state maintained the appearance of
exercising effective authority right up to the point when the system began to
collapse. As Harvard political scientist Samuel
Huntington pointed out in his classic Political
Order in Changing Societies (
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), a political system with several
powerful institutions is more likely to adapt to change than a system with
only one significant institution. If one institution suffers a loss of
legitimacy, the others can assume some of the weakened institution's
functions. Soviet reformers, however, faced the daunting task of creating
entirely new institutions--a functioning legislature, independent courts, a
responsible executive, and genuine federalism--virtually overnight, to
replace a rapidly disintegrating Communist Party. As might be expected, there
was considerable disagreement over the precise form these new governing
institutions would assume. In all political systems it takes time for
new institutions to acquire legitimacy--acceptance by the public of their
right to make decisions that govern people's lives. The A genuine constitutional order is essential
for democracy. Serious discussion about the need for a state based on the
rule of law was introduced at the Nineteenth Party Conference. The Soviet
constitutions of 1918, 1924, 1936, and 1977 had been more statements of
intent and propaganda devices than binding legal documents outlining
institutions' powers and protecting citizens' rights and liberties. Under
Gorbachev, the Brezhnev Constitution of 1977 was amended repeatedly by the
Supreme Soviet; one-third of all the Constitution's articles were amended in
1988 alone. These amendments shifted power from the Party to more
representative political institutions such as the Congress of People's
Deputies, created an executive presidency, designed a committee on
constitutional supervision to adjudicate disputes at the highest level, and broadened
citizens' rights. Early in 1990, Article 6, guaranteeing the Communist
Party's leading position, was dropped from the Constitution. These changes
did not immediately establish a constitutional government in the This hodgepodge of amendments yielded a
document that was unwieldy and inadequate for an effectively functioning
democracy. Late in 1989 Gorbachev appointed a Constitutional Commission to
draft a completely new constitution. By this point, however, political events
were moving so rapidly that the authorities could not keep up with exploding
demands. Relations between the capital and the republics were a major
sticking point in the constitutional negotiations. Revelations about official
corruption and mismanagement and the obvious failure of Gorbachev's economic
reform policies undermined the credibility of central authorities and
inspired calls for greater autonomy in the provinces. Toward the end of 1990, Soviet leaders began to
reevaluate the sham federalism that had promised cultural autonomy while
ensuring centralized Communist Party control over the various national
republics. Plans were drawn up for a new Union Treaty to replace the one that
had created the CULTURE AND SOCIETY A key element of reform was freeing the
creative energies of Soviet society, in publishing, theater, art, music, and political
and social activity. Aleksandr Yakovlev, who was promoted to membership in
the Politburo in January 1987, was a key architect of glasnost. Convinced
that a more open society was needed to rally support for perestroika,
Yakovlev used his influence to appoint liberals as editors of influential
newspapers and magazines; liberals were also given key positions in the film
industry and theater. Vitalii Korotich became editor of Ogonyok(Little Flame), a
color weekly that became widely read for its biting satire of public affairs.
As the new editor of Novyi
Mir, Sergei Zalygin, an erudite hydraulic engineer, published penetrating
political articles, previously banned novels, and environmental exposés. As censorship controls eased, previously
banned works were published-- Pasternak Dr.
Zhivago, Anatoly Rybakov Children
of the Arbat, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novels. SolzhenitsynGulag
Archipelago, for which he had been expelled from the Glasnost had exposed the extent of the
regime's deception and mistreatment of its own people. The revelations about
Soviet labor camps, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, the
1930s show trials, corruption and mismanagement in government, environmental
disasters, and costly foreign policy mistakes led to widespread cynicism and
disillusionment among much of the population. Marxist-Leninist ideology was
quickly abandoned by all but a few loyal adherents. Many Soviet citizens
turned to religion to fill the spiritual void in their lives. Attendance at
Russian Orthodox churches ballooned, and groups began raising money to restore
churches that had fallen into disrepair. Catholics, Baptists, Seventh-Day
Adventists, and other Christian denominations became more active; Hare
Krishnas and even more exotic cults became popular. Faith healers,
spiritualists, and followers of the occult dominated Soviet television and
filled local news kiosks with their pamphlets. In one of the many ironies of that period,
two societies sharing the same name but having radically different agendas
appeared on the scene. One Pamyat (Memorial), formed in 1987, was committed
to publicizing the terrible truth about Stalin's rule. Led mostly by young
scholars and writers, Memorial's goal was to build monuments and research
centers to commemorate the victims of Stalin's Terror. Much like Jewish
studies of the Holocaust, Memorial wanted the world to know and remember what
had happened, so that history would not be repeated. The other Pamyat
(Memory) was an anti-Semitic, violently Russian nationalist organization.
Formed late in the Brezhnev era to preserve Russian cultural monuments and
supported by forces in the military and the Party, Memory claimed that Jews,
Westerners, and Zionists were responsible for all Russia's ills, from AIDS
and drugs to alcoholism and rock 'n' roll, and that the Bolshevik Revolution
was really a Jewish-led conspiracy that destroyed the true, tsarist Russia. Liberalization eventually led to a backlash
by conservative forces dismayed by the breakdown of order in Soviet society.
A strong authoritarian current has long existed in Russian political culture,
and these sentiments found an outlet not only in fringe groups, but also in
Russian nationalist and communist publications. Nash Sovremennik (Our Contemporary) and the Party
newspaper Pravda were two conservative periodicals
that decried the reformers' preoccupation with the ills of Soviet society and
their attempts to degrade communism's historical achievements. Elderly citizens who had gone through
collectivization, the Purges, and the Great Fatherland War found it difficult
to accept the notion that their sacrifices had been in vain. One middle-aged
chemistry teacher, Nina Andreyevna, expressed her commitment to fundamental
Stalinism in a March 1988 article submitted as a letter to Sovetskaya
Rossiya. The paper's editors, backed by Politburo hard-liner Anatoly
Lukyanov, published her article under the title "I Cannot Forsake
Principles." Knowledgeable insiders realized that this was a blatant
attack on Gorbachev, reflecting the views of Party hard-liners and appearing
as it did in one of the Party's flagship papers. Andreyeva's article was
timed for publication just as Gorbachev was leaving for STRAINS OF NATIONALISM With glasnost and political liberalization
Soviet people quickly lost their fear of the regime and began forming
political organizations. Among the hundreds of "informal groups"
that sprang up were independent labor unions, women's groups, ecology groups,
peasant organizations, professional groups, and religious cults. Most of
these groups were small and local in nature; many were little more than
discussion groups. Such organizations, though, are the very fabric of a civic
culture, a responsible and active society autonomous from the state, and are
necessary in building a successful democracy. The most potent political demands from a
newly active population were for ethnic and national freedom. Contrary to
Marxian predictions, nationalism, not class, was the basis for revolution in
the National front organizations first formed in
the Baltic states of Nationalism in the Caucasian republics took
the form of internecine struggle, rather than opposition to National front organizations formed in The nuclear explosion at The rebirth of Russian nationalism was
critical in the breakup of the Political decentralization, which resulted
in the formation of independent republic legislatures in 1990-1991, provided
a powerful boostto the Russian national movement.
Competitive elections were held for a new COUP AND COLLAPSE Conservative forces had been gathering
strength in the latter part of 1990 and the first half of 1991. Foreign Minister
Eduard Shevardnadze cautioned against the possibility of a right-wing coup in
December 1990, when he resigned his position. The other prominent advocate of
reform, Aleksandr Yakovlev, had warned Gorbachev that he was surrounded by
enemies just before his resignation in July. Yakovlev was admonished not to
exaggerate. U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock met with Gorbachev in June 1991 and
passed along to him intelligence reports about a possible coup. The stubborn
General Secretary refused to take these warnings seriously and left with his
family for a vacation in the The proximate cause of what was called the
August Coup was the new Union Treaty scheduled to be signed on August 20.
This treaty would have revised the Soviet Constitution, establishing a
genuine federal system for the first time in Soviet history. Soviet
hard-liners understood that transferring authority from Fortunately, the coup instigators had
neither the ability nor the ruthlessness necessary to consolidate their grasp
on power. Key democratic leaders--Yeltsin, Russian republic Prime Minister
Aleksandr Rutskoi, Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, Reactions to the attempted takeover
illustrated the highly fragmented character of public opinion toward the
changes taking place in the Gorbachev attempted to hold the With the failed coup the most powerful
Soviet institutions were no longer able to exercise control over this vast
territory. The Communist Party had been thoroughly discredited, and Yeltsin
issued a decree in November ordering it banned altogether. In early December
Yeltsin, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, and Belarusian Supreme Soviet
Chairman Stanislav Shushkievich met in Many factors played a role in the collapse
of the The accumulation of domestic problems and
international pressures coincided with a major generational change in the
Soviet leadership. Gorbachev was central in planning and promoting reform,
but it should be remembered that he was supported by younger officials for
whom theterror of the Stalin era was only a
vague memory. This generation was better educated and more critical of Soviet
"achievements" than were the Brezhnevs, the Suslovs, and the
Gromykos, whose careers were built over the graves of the Old Bolsheviks. And
lastly, we should not forget the Soviet people, who were disillusioned and
impatient with a corrupt, repressive system that refused to acknowledge their
humanity. The revolution that brought about the collapse of the CHARLES
E. ZIEGLER is Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at the |
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