Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century
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developing radicalism of Gorbachev’s reforms.
18
(Yeltsin saw himself as being
in the vanguard of perestroika, although his emphasis at that time was more
on a greater social egalitarianism than on democracy. Gorbachev was the first
to call for competitive elections.)
In early 1988 the apparatus backlash against radical reform became more
apparent. A letter appeared under the name of Nina Andreeva, a hitherto
unknown Leningrad lecturer, in Sovetskaia Rossiia on 13 March 1988, which
attacked the processes under way in Russia from a neo-Stalinist standpoint. It
received immediate support from within the Central Committee apparatus. Its
publication date was deliberately chosen for a Sunday just before Gorbachev
left for Yugoslavia and Yakovlev for Mongolia. In their absence Ligachev com-
mended the article to journalists as ‘a benchmark for what we need in our
ideology today’.
19
There was a gap between publication of this document,
which appeared to many to portend a dramatic change of official course, and
its rebuttal. Most Russian intellectuals, including some who were later to crit-
icise Gorbachev for ‘half-measures’ and ‘indecisiveness’, waited to see which
way the wind was blowing. On Gorbachev’s insistence, the Politburo discussed
the Andreeva letter at a session that lasted for two days and it turned out that
at least half the membership were basically sympathetic to the anti-reformist
line it had expressed.
20
It was not until 5 April that an article appeared in Pravda
rebutting ‘Andreeva’ point by point. It was given additional party authority
by being unsigned, though it was drafted by Yakovlev, with the participation
of Gorbachev, and represented a clear victory for the reformist wing of the
leadership.
This, in turn, enabled Gorbachev, with particularly important help both
from Yakovlev and from his recently appointed adviser on reform of the polit-
ical system, Shakhnazarov, to radicalise the political agenda and to oversee
the production of documents presaging far-reaching reform that were pre-
sented to the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988. The conference itself
produced more open debate than had occurred at a party forum since the
1920s. Politburo members Mikhail Solomentsev, Gromyko and Ligachev were
18 For the transcript of the Central Committee meeting which led to Yeltsin’s removal from
his Moscow party post and from candidate membership of the Politburo (although he
remained a member of the Central Committee), see Izvestiia TsK CPSU,no.2 (1989):
209–87. On Yeltsin’s break with the party leadership in late 1987, see Leon Aron, Boris
Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (London: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 200–17; and Brown, The
Gorbachev Factor, 169–72 and 356–7.
19 For a more detailed account of the ‘Nina Andreeva affair’, see Brown, The Gorbachev
Factor,pp.172–5.
20 For the main points of that discussion, see ‘O stat’e N. Andreevoi i ne tol’ko o nei’, in
M. S. Gorbachev, Gody trudnykh reshenii (Moscow: Al’fa-Print, 1993), pp. 98–110.
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criticised by name and Gorbachev, though not yet explicitly named as some-
one guilty of social democratic deviation from Communist orthodoxy, was
the clear implicit target of several critical speeches from conservative Com-
munists. Nevertheless, at that time the party remained notably hierarchical
and Gorbachev still benefited from the authority traditionally enjoyed by the
General Secretary. As a result, he was able to get the conference delegates
to approve reforms that were both against the inner judgement of many of
them and which constituted a fundamental departure from Soviet practice.
The most important decision was to move to contested elections for a new
legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies, which would in turn elect an
inner body, the Supreme Soviet. The latter was to be in session for some eight
months of the year – unlike the existing rubber-stamp Supreme Soviet which
met for only a few days each year.
Until these elections were held in March 1989 the political institutional
changes constituted what Yakovlev and many others have called a ‘revolu-
tion from above’.
21
The elections, however, galvanised Soviet society – some
republics and nations more than others – and brought entirely new actors on
to the political stage. They also provided the opportunity for one demoted
politician, Boris Yeltsin, who had remained a nominal member of the Cen-
tral Committee, to make a spectacular comeback and begin his ascent to
power. Yeltsin stood for election in a constituency that comprised the whole
of Moscow and he overwhelmingly defeated the favoured candidate of the
party apparatus. A third of the seats were reserved for candidates from ‘public
organisations’ (which ranged from the Communist Party itself to the Academy
of Sciences and the Writers’ Union and Film-Makers’ Union). This was both
a concession to institutional interests within the Soviet system and also,
in the minds of some reformers, a way of getting talented people from out-
side the political class into the new legislature. Among the deputies chosen
from the Academy of Sciences was Andrei Sakharov. In the ballot by the elec-
torate as a whole for the remaining two-thirds of the deputies, there was real
contestation between two or more candidates in a majority of seats. About
a quarter of the constituencies had only one name on the ballot paper. This,
however, did not guarantee election, for the support of more than half of
those voting was required. A number of officials, who had contrived to have
no competitor, found themselves spurned. Among those thus defeated was
a candidate member of the Politburo, Iurii Solov’ev, in Leningrad.
22
These
21 See e.g. Aleksandr Iakovlev, Predislovie, obval, posleslovie (Moscow: Novosti, 1992), p. 267.
22 Stephen White, Richard Rose and Ian McAllister, How Russia Votes (Chatham, N.J.:
Chatham House, 1997), pp. 28–9.
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first contested national elections marked a breakthrough to real political plu-
ralism in the Soviet Union and kindled great public enthusiasm. The voter
turn-out was higher than for any subsequent Russia-wide election up to and
including the presidential election of 2004. Only a minority of those elected to
the new Soviet legislature were committed to further transformative change,
but some of those who were formed the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies
which numbered Sakharov, Yeltsin, and the historian Iurii Afanas’ev among its
leaders.
Other elections followed – in 1990 forthe legislaturesof all fifteen republics of
the Soviet Union (which saw Yeltsin emerge as chairman of the Supreme Soviet
of the Russian Republic) and in 1991 for newly created republican presidencies.
The most important of those elections was in June 1991 when Yeltsin got more
votes than all his opponents put together to become president of the Russian
Republic and the first popularly elected leader in Russian history. In March
1990 the institution of the presidency had been created at the level of the
Soviet Union. There was debate among reformers whether this should be a
nationwide election or an indirect election by the legislature, the Congress of
People’s Deputies. Even a number of reformers (including the distinguished
scholar, Academician Dmitrii Likhachev) urged Gorbachev to opt for the latter.
Some were for prompt indirect election on the grounds that, with tension rising
as a result of nationalist discontent and economic problems, the sooner a new
executive was formed the better. Other supporters of Gorbachev were worried
that he could lose the election, although it was in May 1990 that Yeltsin for the
first time moved ahead of Gorbachevin the surveysconducted by the All-Soviet
(later All-Russian) Institute for Public Opinon (VTsIOM), the most reliable of
the opinion pollsters at the time. Gorbachev’s election by the Congress of
People’s Deputies of the USSR to become the Soviet Union’s first executive
president in March 1990 was a tactical victory, but probably a strategic error.
If he had competed in a general election and won, he would have greatly
strengthened his legitimacy in an era – which he himself had inaugurated –
when this could no longer be conferred by the practice of seven decades
whereby a group of senior Communist Party officials got together behind
closed doors and chose the party leader who then automatically became the
country’s leader.
A systemic transformation occurred in the Soviet Union between 1988 and
1990. By March 1990 at the latest it was no longer meaningful to describe the
Soviet state as Communist. The two most fundamental political characteris-
tics of a Communist system were the monopoly of power of the Communist
Party and ‘democratic centralism’ (meaning hierarchical subordination, strict
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discipline and absence of open debate, with the centralism a reality and ‘demo-
cratic’ a misnomer). Both of these features had disappeared. The process had
begun with Gorbachev’s abolition of most of the economic departments of
the Central Committee and of lower party economic organs in the autumn
of 1988. Hitherto, ministerial and other state economic institutions had been
under close party supervision. Now they acquired a new autonomy. Com-
petitive elections, even when they were not multi-party elections, meant the
end of democratic centralism. There was much intra-party debate, some of it
conducted in the mass media, from 1986 onwards, and the elections for the
new Soviet legislature in 1989 pitted one CPSU member against another, fre-
quently displaying radically different political outlooks and advocating widely
divergent policies. Their fate was decided by the electorate, among whom
only 10 per cent of adults were members of the CPSU. Thus the Communist
Party’s monopoly of power was fast disappearing de facto in 1989 before it was
removed de jure from the Soviet Constitution at a session of the Congress of
People’s Deputies of the USSR in March 1990.
23
The creation of the Soviet presidency, while it did little to help Gorbachev
at a time when his popularity was slipping and Yeltsin was emerging as a
serious challenger to his authority, signalled the end of party hegemony. The
Politburo had from early in the Soviet period been the ruling body of the
country as well as of the party. From March 1990 onwards a state institution,
the presidency, was more powerful than the highest party organs, although
Gorbachev held on to his office of General Secretary to ensure that it did
not fall into the hands of a conservative Communist who might attempt to
reverse the process under way. A Presidential Council was created which was
more authoritative than the Politburo, although it suffered from the absence
of institutional underpinnings, a chain of command analogous to that which
had prevailed in the CPSU.
At the same time as the new Soviet presidency and the Presidential Council
were created in March 1990, so was a body known as the Federation Council.
It was composed of the presidents or the chairmen of the supreme soviets of
the union republics. As such, it was created from below – from the republics.
Neither Gorbachev, as president of the Soviet Union, nor the Communist Party
apparatus was able to determine who sat on the Federation Council. As the
Presidential Council was chosen by Gorbachev, listening to advice but with full
responsibility for the ultimate choice, it is evident that the loser of the power
23 On the emergence of new legislative and executive institutions and the switch from
party to state power, see Brown, The Gorbachev Factor,pp.188–205.
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of appointment in both cases was the central CPSU apparatus. Moreover, the
introduction of competitive elections in the republics as well as at the Centre
meant that politicians had to take more account of public opinion than ever
before. Whereas previously nothing was more important for a political leader
in Estonia or Ukraine than the opinion held of him in the Central Committee
building in Moscow, now the views of Estonians and Ukrainians assumed
greater significance.
The president himself, Gorbachev, was the chief arbiter of executive
decision-making – even more so than in the dayswhenhis power rested entirely
on the General Secretaryship, for when party organs reigned supreme, he still
had to take some account of opinion within the Politburo. However, the con-
straints from outside the federal executive were far greater in 1990–1 than at
any time since the consolidation of the Soviet regime in the 1920s. These came
partly from republican institutions and, for Gorbachev, the challenges to his
authority from Yeltsin in 1990–1 were of especial significance. There was also,
however, a new politics at street level. The second half of the 1980s saw the
development of new and independent organised groups. After the Nineteenth
Party Conference and the decision to move to contested elections, it was clear
that the dangers of engaging in such activity – which hitherto had been very
real – were becoming a thing of the past. Two authors who have studied Rus-
sian independent groups in contrasting ways agree at least that ‘1989 stands
out as the crucial takeoff phase for autonomous political activity in Russia’.
24
Put another way: ‘Elections of the People’s Deputies of the USSR in 1989 and
to the Russian Federation federal and local soviets in 1990 completely changed
the character of Russian independent political groups. Before this, despite
various impressive names, the “democratic” movement actually consisted of
many small clubs.’
25
Some of the new groups turned into mass movements,
most notably Democratic Russia, a loosely organised body which held its
founding congress in October 1990 and played a significant part in mobilis-
ing support for Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election the following
summer.
By the time the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held its Twenty-
Eighth (and last) Congress in the summer of 1990 it was no longer playing a
decisive role in the political process, at least at the central level. A document
adopted by the congress, ‘Towards a Humane, Democratic Socialism’, which
24 M. Steven Fish, Democracy from Scratch: Oppositionand Regimein the New Russian Revolution
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 35.
25 Alexander Lukin, The PoliticalCultureoftheRussian‘Democrats’(Oxford:OxfordUniversity
Press, 2000), p. 81.
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would have been a sensation at the previous party congress in 1986, no longer
made a significant impact. Work began on a new party programme and a
draft of it was presented to a Central Committee plenum in the summer of
1991. It fully reflected Gorbachev’s own intellectual journey in a little over
six years from Communist reformer to democratic socialist of a type familiar
in Western Europe (although not in Russia or the United States). However,
among those who duly voted for what was essentially a Social Democratic
platform, it appears that a majority had no intention of implementing it.
Some of those present had already turned their minds to the issue of how to
remove Gorbachev from office.
The failure of economic reform
The most immediate stimulus to change in the Soviet Union at the beginning
of the Gorbachev era was the long-term decline in the rate of economic growth
and the fact that the Soviet economy was not only lagging behind the most
advanced Western countries but also was being overtaken by some of the
newly industrialising countries in Asia. There was, however, no agreement
on what should be done to remedy matters. The most radical reformers in
the mid-1980s thought not in terms of a fully-fledged market economy but
simply of making significant concessions to market forces along the lines of
the Hungarian economic reform, launched in 1968. Others believed that what
was needed was more discipline of the kind which Andropov had begun to
impose. An influential group, which included the chairman of the Council of
Ministers, Ryzhkov, was from early in the Gorbachev era in favour of raising
prices but very cautious about leaving prices entirely to market forces. By the
end of the 1980s large numbers of specialists had lost all faith in state planning
of the economy and, instead of looking for a combination of plan and market,
were ready for a more radical shift to the market. The economist Nikolai
Petrakov, soon after he became Gorbachev’s aide on economic matters at the
beginning of 1990, told Ryzhkov that the State Committee on Prices should
be abolished, since it made no sense for the state to be fixing prices. Ryzhkov
agreed in principle but said the phasing-out of that State Committee should
occur in a few years’ time. Petrakov responded: ‘Nikolai Ivanovich, you talk
about the market as we used to talk about communism – it’s always sometime
later.’
26
26 Author’s interview with Petrakov, Moscow, June 1991.
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An economic error committed as early as May 1985 (and for which Ryzhkov
was entirely blameless, since he opposed the policy on the grounds that it
would lead to a serious reduction of state revenue) was the adoption of an
anti-alcohol programme. The production of alcohol in state distilleries and
wineries was drastically reduced, many retail outlets were closed, and illicit
alcohol production filled the gap. The state’s monopoly of this industry had
previously, given the high level of alcohol consumption (especially of vodka
in the Slavic parts of the Soviet Union), made a massive contribution to the
revenue side of the budget. Since alcoholism and drunkenness were alarmingly
widespread in Russia, the measure had some support, especially from women;
but, in spite of apparent early success in reducing alcohol consumption, it was
ultimately a failure. The prime movers in the Politburo for a major effort to
reduce alcohol consumption were Egor Ligachev and Mikhail Solomentsev,
but Gorbachev became associated with the campaign in the minds of most of
the public, for he supported the principle of a fresh attempt to tackle what he
recognised to be a serious social and moral problem.
A combination of the policy’s growing unpopularity and Ligachev’s loss
of his position as second secretary of the CPSU in 1988 meant that from that
year on the campaign was quietly abandoned.
27
There had been previous
propaganda campaigns against excessive alcohol consumption, but none had
been successful in the long term. By making it much harder for alcohol to be
obtained legally at convenient locations and times, this new assault on the hard
drinking culture did produce a sharp drop in legal sales which was reflected
both in the official statistics, suggesting that vodka consumption in 1987 was
less than half of what it had been in 1985, and by the hole that was left in the state
budget.
28
However, if moderate drinkers drank less because of a reluctance to
stand in long queues at the reduced number of shops selling alcohol, those at
whom the measure was primarily aimed were less easily deterred. Hardened
drinkers were prepared to queue for as long as it took or to fill the gap in legal
supplies with ‘moonshine’, thus depriving the state of the large element of
turnover tax on each bottle of liquor.
Bad luck as well as bad decisions complicated economic policy during per-
estroika. Whereas a rise in oil prices had partially disguised Soviet economic
inefficiency in the 1970s, a fall in oil prices in the second half of the 1980s did
nothing to cushion economic reform. It is arguable, though, that this may have
27 Stephen White, Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996), p. 183.
28 Ibid., p. 141.
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been a blessing in disguise in that it became increasingly clear that the existing
economic system needed to be replaced by one operating on fundamentally
different principles. Very few Soviet economists, not to speak of party and
government officials, held such a view in 1985. Between then and 1990,how-
ever, the economic philosophy of many of the social scientists, in particular,
underwent a fast evolution. By 1990 the view was widely held among them that
central planning would have to give way to an essentially market economy.
There were, though, differences of opinion among reformers between those
who favoured a mixed ownership system (state, co-operative and private) and
those who wished to go the whole hog to private ownership.
The first move towards recognising a role for non-state economic enter-
prise was the Law on Individual Economic Activity of November 1986. This
legalised individual and family-based work, such as car repairs, taxi services
and private tuition. A much more ambitious piece of legislation was intro-
duced the following year. The Law on the State Enterprise, a compromise
measure following debate within the leadership, in which Gorbachev played a
leading role, devolved more authority than hitherto to the enterprise level – in
particular, to factory managers. While the diagnosis that the Soviet economy
was too centralised and that economic ministries had too much power was
correct, the law did not achieve any of its intended results. The State Planning
Committee (Gosplan) and the economic ministries found ways of maintaining
many of their powers over the enterprises, even though the number of plan
indicators was cut drastically. To the extent that there was some real devolution
of authority to the factory level, it did more harm than good. Enterprises were
able to charge higher prices for work of no higher quality than before. The
law thus had inflationary consequences and also contributed to an increase in
inter-enterprise debt. Decentralisation without price liberalisation and com-
petition was doomed to failure, although at the time many Soviet reformers
and Western observers saw the Enterprise Law as a step forward. This was so
only in the sense that since the attempt to reform the Soviet economy pro-
ceeded on the basis of trial and error, and in conditions of glasnost’, the failures
could soon be brought into the light of day. One of the most important of the
unintended consequences of the Enterprise Law became apparent in the last
years of the Soviet Union and in early post-Soviet Russia when a process of
insider privatisation occurred. Taking advantage of the enhancement of their
legal rights provided by the 1987 law, factory managers, often aided and abetted
by local party officials, began to convert their control of industrial enterprises
into ownership.
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A more successful legislative act was the Law on Co-operatives of 1988.
Going well beyond the law whichhad legalised individual economic enterprise,
this law prescribed no maximum to the number of people who could be
employed in a ‘co-operative’. Many of the co-operatives became indistinguish-
able from private enterprise but it was an advantage in the late 1980s that the
former terminology could be supported by quotations from Lenin who in
1989 still topped a serious poll of Soviet citizens who perceived him as being by
far the greatest person who had ever lived.
29
An open acceptance of large-scale
private economic activity would have been seen as an embrace of capitalism
to which a majority of the population, as well as a majority of the political
elite, were at the time opposed.
Nevertheless, as political tensions rose in 1990 and the economy showed no
signs of the ‘acceleration’ which one of the earlier slogans of the Gorbachev era
had demanded, Gorbachev and Yeltsin came to an agreement in the summer of
that year to set up a team of specialists to come up with concrete proposals for
transition to a market economy. The group was to be drawn in equal numbers
from Gorbachev and Yeltsin nominees. The leader of Gorbachev’s team was
Stanislav Shatalin, a sophisticated critic of the Soviet command economy of
an older generation, while Yeltsin, in his capacity as chairman of the Russian
Supreme Soviet, nominated Grigorii Iavlinskii, a much younger enthusiast
for the market. In endorsing this project, Gorbachev completely bypassed
the Communist Party hierarchy and offended the head of the government,
Ryzhkov. The document that the Shatalin–Iavlinskii group produced became
known as the ‘500-Days Plan’, an ambitious attempt to make the transition to
a market economy within that time period.
30
The 238-page programme did
not so much as mention ‘socialism’ and made no concessions to traditional
Soviet ideology. It envisaged the speedy construction of market institutions,
large-scale privatisation and extensive devolution of power to the republics of
the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, after reading the document more than once, and
Yeltsin, without reading it, both gave the programme their initial enthusiastic
endorsement. In response to the backlash from within the ministerial network,
including the strong objections of Ryzhkov and the first deputy prime minister,
Leonid Abalkin (himself a reformist economist), as well as from CPSU, military
29 Even in 1994 and 1999 when the same question was put to Russian respondents by
the leading survey research organisation which had conducted the 1989 survey, Lenin
came second only to Peter the Great in the list of ‘most outstanding people of all
times and nations’ in the perception of respondents. See Boris Dubin, ‘Stalin i drugie:
Figury vysshei vlasti v obshchestvennom mnenii sovremennoi Rossii’, Monitoring obshch-
estvennogo mneniia (Moscow: VTsIOM), 1 ( Jan.–Feb. 2003): 13–25,atp.20.
30 Perekhod k rynku: Chast’ 1 . Kontseptsiia i Programma (Moscow: Arkhangel’skoe, 1990).
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and KGB critics, Gorbachev retreated from his earlier support for the ‘500-days’
document.
The issue was not by this time whether to move to a market economy, but
rather when,how and to whatkind of market economy. The Shatalin–Iavlinskii
proposals were less a plan or programme and more a set of aspirations which
were subsequently agreed to have been over-optimistic. Egor Gaidar, a mem-
ber of the team which produced the document, subsequently saw its desiderata
as more of a political than an economic statement and regarded them, on the
basis of his own post-Soviet experience, as having been naive.
31
The politi-
cal salience of the issue was, however, very great. Gorbachev’s retreat from
support of the Shatalin–Iavlinskii proposals undoubtedly lost him credibility
among Russian radical reformists as well as within the republics most desirous
of greater sovereignty. The mantle of leader of reform appeared now, in the
eyes of many intellectuals, to be passing to Yeltsin. Finding himself deserted by
a significant part of the constituency for change, Gorbachev became increas-
ingly reliant on the more conservative elements within the leadership during
the winter of 1990–1.
There is no doubt that the attempt to reform the Soviet economy ended
in failure. Part of the reason for that was the tension between reforming an
existing system to make it work better and replacing that system by one which
had a quite different logic. In the early years of perestroika the first aim was being
pursued – and with only very limited success. By 1990–1, while there was not
a consensus, there was at least a broad body of support among specialists for
the idea that the command economy had to give way to a market economy. It
was clearer to Gorbachev than to Yeltsin that this would mean tens of millions
of citizens becoming worse off for some years to come. Freeing prices would
improve the supply of goods and services but would also raise those prices to
a level the majority could ill afford. That factor, together with the institutional
opposition to change of the type proposed by the Shatalin–Iavlinskii group, and
concern about the possibly deleterious impact of economic systemic change on
the territorial integrity of the USSR, made Gorbachev hesitate about pushing
through the moveto a market economy in practice that he had already accepted
in principle. Much of the economic legislation of the perestroika years – not
least the Law on Co-operatives – had helped to pave the way for marketisation,
but the Soviet economy remained in limbo at the end of the Gorbachev era.
It was no longer a functioning command economy but not yet a market
system.
31 Egor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Moscow: Vagrius, 1996), p. 65.
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