The Return

Russia's Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev

Daniel Treisman

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781451605747
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

A refreshing and deeply reported look at the political, economic, and cultural changes in Russia, with an in-depth examination of Vladimir Putin's rise, the power of the oligarchy, and what it means for the world. Almost twenty-five years after Mikhail Gorbachev began radically reshaping his country, Russia has changed beyond recognition. In his third book on this subject, Professor Daniel Treisman takes stock of the country that has emerged from the debris of Soviet communism and addresses the questions that preoccupy scholars of its history and politics: Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Could its collapse have been avoided? Did Yeltsin destroy too much or too little of the Soviet political order? What explains Putin's unprecedented popularity with the Russian public?Based on two decades of research and his own experiences in the country, Treisman cuts through the scholarly and journalistic debates to provide a portrait of a country returning to the international community on its own terms. At a time when global politics are more important than ever, The Return illuminates the inner workings of a country that has increasingly come to influence, and which will continue to shape, American foreign policy and world events.

CHAPTER 1

The Captain

Mikhail Gorbachev steered the Soviet ship of state for six years and nine months. An idealistic socialist, he set out to revitalize the communist order he had inherited, to inject open discussion, creativity, and common sense into an ossified Leninist party. He ended forty years of nuclear confrontation with the West and introduced the beginnings of democracy and economic freedom. Yet, to his dismay and despite his energetic maneuvering, the course he charted led into a hurricane. By the time he left office, the economy was in ruins, the ruling communist parties in his country and its European satellites had been swept from office, and the Soviet multinational state had fractured into fifteen pieces.

Why did Gorbachev’s attempts to revive the Soviet political and economic order end in its overthrow? To some observers, the fall of Soviet communism seemed—in retrospect, at least—inevitable. The inefficiency of centralized control and state ownership could not help but erode economic performance, while a political system based on repression could not last forever. “Communism,” wrote the historian Martin Malia, “cannot be reformed or given a human face; it can only be dismantled and replaced.” To others, the system’s demise seemed a “highly contingent process... frequently spurred on by chance occurrences and twists of fate.” In this view, the Soviet order could have survived but fell apart because of Gorbachev’s mistakes or failures of leadership. To orthodox communists, he was incompetent or treacherous; to liberals, he was indecisive and inflexible. Gorbachev, in his writings, mostly blames the destructive ambitions of the radical democrats who came to oppose him toward the end.

Twenty years later, one can begin to distinguish what might have been from what could never have occurred. The weight of evidence suggests that although a major crisis had become unavoidable by 1989, this was not the case in 1985 when Gorbachev assumed the leadership. The system could have persisted for several decades. Its collapse cannot be blamed simply on the actions of Boris Yeltsin or other advocates of radical change. In criticizing Gorbachev and urging faster reform, they were not merely indulging personal ambition: they were articulating what the Russian public said it wanted at that time. Similarly, Gorbachev’s mistakes towards the end—although almost as striking as his achievements—explain only how the end came, not why it did. Had he acted with greater political skill in 1990–91, or even with more determined force, this would not have saved the Soviet system. By that point, it was too late. The seeds of the crisis that swept Gorbachev from power were sown in his first three years in office, when his improvisational attempts at economic reform created budgetary and financial imbalances that would, a few years later, destroy the consumer market and purge the last remnants of popular support for Soviet rule.

The Southerner

Mikhail Gorbachev was born into a peasant family in Russia’s agricultural South in 1931, the first of two children. His father repaired tractors on a recently formed collective farm. Gorbachev was ten when the Nazis invaded. A year later, as the fighting approached, he recalls watching the “fiery arrows” of Katyusha rockets explode across the night sky. German motorcyclists burst into his village, followed by infantry, which stayed through the winter months, uprooting orchards, commandeering food, and terrorizing the population. Just eleven, Gorbachev witnessed prisoners of war being executed in the street. He remembers, as a teenager, after the war, driving combine harvesters twenty hours a day in the grime and sweat of southern summers, sleeping under haystacks with his father and the other farmhands. He emerged from this with a Red Banner of Labor medal, enormous self-confidence, and an ear for diagnosing trouble in the internal organs of farm machinery.

The medal helped propel him to the Law Faculty of Moscow State University, where he studied among children of the communist elite. Despite the tense climate of the late Stalin years, Gorbachev’s professors introduced students not just to Soviet criminal procedure but also to logic, Roman law, Latin, German, and the history of ideas. With a young wife in tow, Gorbachev returned to his home region of Stavropol after graduating, where he worked his way up through the party ranks, first in the Communist Youth League (the Komsomol) and then the party itself. At thirty-nine, he became first secretary of this outpost of 2 million people and 10 million sheep. Some eight years later, in 1978, he was promoted to Moscow to serve as party secretary in charge of agriculture.

The Soviet state machine was a pyramid with three faces. The Communist Party held ultimate power. At its peak in Moscow were two governing bodies. The Politburo, a committee of fifteen or so political heavyweights, set policy. (A few “candidate members” could join in discussions, but not vote.) Politburo meetings were chaired by the general secretary, who was chosen by the other members and served for life or until his colleagues contrived to oust him, as happened to Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. Each Thursday morning, to the wail of police sirens, a stream of ZIL limousines would pour down Kuybyshev Street from the party’s head office on Staraya Ploshchad (“Old Square”) to the Kremlin, home of the Soviet government. After chatting in the wood-paneled “walnut room,” the Politburo members would take their assigned places along an enormous conference table covered in green cloth. The second body, the Secretariat, consisted of ten or twelve party secretaries, who headed the administrative departments that implemented the Politburo’s decisions and managed party membership and property. The Secretariat met on Tuesday afternoons on the fifth floor of the grey stone building on Staraya Ploshchad.

A hierarchy of command connected these communist bosses to every corner of the country. A Central Committee, with three hundred full members in 1986, ratified the Politburo’s decisions at its plenary sessions held every few months. It was elected by a Party Congress of several thousand that met every five years or so. All fourteen Union republics except Russia had their own central committees, and below these were party committees at the regional, town, and village levels. At the base of the pyramid, primary party organizations existed in all enterprises, collective farms, schools, army units, police stations, and other bodies. Although members were indirectly elected, from the grass roots to the Politburo, the leadership provided lists that usually named just one candidate per slot.

The Communist Party was the pyramid’s first face. The other two were the hierarchies of legislative and executive bodies. Both of these were tightly controlled by the party. Legislative councils or “soviets,” based at all levels from the rural settlement to the Union, passed laws and ordinances. Members were elected, again from party-approved lists without alternatives. At the top of the executive branch, councils of ministers (of the Union and of the fifteen republics) administered public services and branches of the planned economy. The ministries, and the regional associations they directed, coordinated the activity of the country’s 46,000 industrial companies, 50,000 state and collective farms, and several hundred thousand smaller enterprises and organizations.

A political career meant rising through the party, perhaps holding executive or legislative posts along the way, perhaps heading an industrial enterprise. This required fitting into the spider’s web of factional ties that linked party and economic managers at different levels. These ties came in many forms—from bonds of mutual trust between idealistic fellow communists to the murkiest pacts between partners in corruption.

Operating within this system was a complicated, high-stakes poker game, in which one always had to guess what cards the other players held and how each would play. A wrong guess and one might land in jail, a psychiatric ward, or, in the best case, a dead-end job in some provincial outpost. Suppose, for instance, a journalist is assigned to investigate claims that the captain of a whaling ship has been selling souvenirs carved from ivory for profit during layovers at foreign ports. He finds the allegations are true. What to do? File the story, expose the corrupt captain, and advance the interests of the journalist’s editor and his official backers, who presumably provided the lead? Or cover up for the captain in case his protectors turn out to be even more highly placed? In the latter case, if the reporter writes the truth he may be dragged into court and punished for making “slanderous” accusations. In this incident, which actually occurred in the 1970s, even Brezhnev, the general secretary, turned out to have received gifts from the captain. After a tense meeting, the Soviet leader regretfully decided to sacrifice the nautical entrepreneur. “Just don’t whistle!” he reportedly barked at the journalist’s protectors.

Profiteering was a crime within the Soviet centrally administered economy. All property, except for some personal possessions and houses in the countryside, belonged to the state. Enterprises took orders from the central planners, who were based in an imposing building near the Kremlin. Five-year plans set strategic goals; these were then broken down annually, with production targets, prices, and supplies calculated on enormous input-output tables. Although the plans listed up to 750,000 items, this still represented only 2–3 percent of the 24 million goods produced in the early 1980s. The planners told enterprises what to make, what materials they would receive, and where to ship their output. Managers and workers won bonuses if they met their targets. Money flowed among the enterprises’ bank accounts, mostly just for accounting convenience. When companies needed cash to pay workers, the state banks simply transfered the funds.

In principle, this system was hypercentralized. The Politburo was once asked to rule on the size of servings fed to police horses and dogs. Gorbachev later joked that under Brezhnev “you had to ask the permission of the Council of Ministers to install a toilet.” In practice, to get things done managers improvised, lobbied the ministers in Moscow for special breaks, and sent agents around the country to strike illegal bargains for supplies. The planners themselves gave up on optimizing and just raised targets a little each year. Of course, this meant managers took pains to avoid overfulfilling their plans so future targets would remain low. In the late 1960s, the prime minister Aleksey Kosygin tried to give enterprises a little more autonomy, but his reforms, opposed by the planners, never got off the ground.

Two other elements were key to the system’s operation. The first was fear. Although prison camps and political executions were scaled back after Stalin’s death, dissent was suppressed by force and intimidation. State terror was somewhat decentralized under Brezhnev, who permitted regional leaders considerable discretion in return for loyalty. One Uzbek party boss operated a private prison and underground torture chamber. Security agents worked hard to keep citizens on edge, tapping phones, and recruiting informers. Under Stalin, Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan had said that: “Every citizen of the USSR is a collaborator of the NKVD,” the acronym then used for the secret police. Under Brezhnev, the secret services remained large and mostly unsupervised.

The second key ingredient was a preoccupation with controlling information. No independent media were allowed, and all photocopiers had to be registered with the police. Under Stalin even owning a typewriter had required police permission. Most statistical reports were marked “secret,” “top secret,” or “for official use only.” Quite often, efforts to deceive the population ended up blinding the policymakers. Not even top leaders received briefings on military expenditures. As a Politburo member in the early 1980s, Gorbachev asked to see the state budget, but he writes that: “[General Secretary] Andropov simply laughed that off: ‘Nothing doing! You’re asking too much.’” In the 1960s, party leaders ordered the Ministry of Communications to jam foreign radio broadcasts, a technically challenging and costly task in a country covering eleven time zones. But the party bosses insisted, so the ministry found a solution. According to Aleksandr Yakovlev, then a Central Committee secretary, it built two powerful jamming stations in central Moscow—one across the street from the Central Committee office, the other on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where most party leaders lived. Presumably, officials who heard static when they tried to tune to the Voice of America did not know that a few dozen miles outside major cities the broadcasts came through loud and clear. The main victims were the party leaders themselves. By 1980, half the Soviet population had access to shortwave radios. The other main sources of information were the spinners of rumors, who, as Boris Yeltsin put it, became “the main telegraph agency of the Soviet Union.”

By the late 1970s when Gorbachev arrived in Moscow, the absurdities and waste this system generated were obvious to all who cared to look. Many, of course, did not. An army of time-servers in the party’s higher and middle ranks wanted only to expand their privileges. But a number of mostly younger, better educated officials were becoming disillusioned with the empty speech making, decrepit health, and blatant cynicism of Brezhnev and his cronies. These covert free thinkers were by no means all democrats or believers in capitalism; in fact, they ranged from adamant Leninists to Western-style liberals. But most had two things in common: impatience with the stagnant atmosphere of Brezhnev’s last years and respect for—and sometimes the support of—the most enigmatic Politburo member, Yury Andropov.

A hard-line ideologue, Andropov had helped suppress popular uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968. As KGB chief, he trained foreign terrorists, and committed dissidents to psychiatric hospitals, where they were diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and shot up with drugs. He authorized the murder by ricin pellet of the Bulgarian exile Georgy Markov. At the same time, he stood out for an “indifference to luxury” amid the crassness of Brezhnev’s circle. He read the literary journals and could write passable verse in the style of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Genuinely concerned about the country’s problems, he encouraged his advisors to speak frankly, and sought practical solutions, although he did not find many. According to one aide, he was looking for a way out of Afghanistan as early as 1980. Many of the communist reformers of the Gorbachev era grew up in his shadow.

Gorbachev was his greatest discovery. The two had become close while vacationing in the Stavropol resort of Kislovodsk. Gorbachev’s Memoirs contains an intriguing photograph of the two future party leaders playing dominoes outdoors. Th...