Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 by Stephen Kotkin

the country’s past was nothing but mistakes and crimes, keeping silent about the greatest achievements of the past and the present’. 12 The letter appeared in print the day Gorbachev left on a trip to Yugoslavia, and, as was party custom, his place was temporarily assumed by Ligachev. After Gorbachev’s return, at the next politburo meeting, the general secretary casually brought the letter up, and, as pre-arranged, Alexander Yakovlev condemned it as an ‘anti-perestroika manifesto’. Aspersions were cast on Ligachev and the Secretariat for overseeing the letter’s publication.
    Analysts at the time misperceived this important turn of events as evidence of determined apparat resistance rather than of Gorbachev manipulation. Gorbachev writes obliquely in his memoirs that the letter ‘contained information known only to a relatively narrow circle’. Ligachev writes that Gorbachev had the circumstances of publication investigated and privately exonerated him of responsibility. Gorbachev never made a public disavowal of the suspicions. On the contrary, with the avid assistance of the Soviet and foreign media Ligachev was made into an unwitting instrument in the general secretary’s efforts to cultivate society’s sympathies and to pressure the 74
    the drama of reform
    apparat publicly to demonstrate that it was not anti-perestroika. Gorbachev also fashioned himself a scapegoat for economic failures: the Ligachev-led conservatives were strangling the reforms. To top it all off, he continued to enjoy Ligachev’s loyalty, owing to party discipline and to the insincere private exculpation. ‘Without knowing it,’
    Gorbachev writes with evident satisfaction, ‘Nina Andreeva actually helped us’. 13 But his clever manipulation simply stirred up even greater popular fury at the party, without magically transforming the behaviour of apparatchiks, let alone the economy.
    The general secretary expended extraordinary effort urging all levels of the apparat that not to take the risks of political reform would be even more dangerous. In 1987–8, he had managed to coax the politburo into agreeing to ‘democratize’ the party with competitive elections.
    Accustomed to lifetime appointments and perquisites in exchange for following orders, most party officials, even those who had reformist inclinations, did not know how to address a public reconfigured as voters. Nor did functionaries appreciate being held personally accountable for Stalin’s crimes. The courageous types who heeded the call for the vanguard to lead ‘perestroika’ discovered that, in the absence of anticipated economic improvements, they were ‘leading’ little more than angry public ventilations over heretofore unmentionable problems, for which the party was being blamed. And, while party members among Moscow’s intelligentsia were consumed in debates on history and freedom, wrote one New York Times reporter of a 75
    the drama of reform
    July 1988 party conference, ‘the delegates from the provinces want[ed] to talk about empty stores, dirty rivers, hospitals without water, and factories with deteriorating assembly lines’. 14
    Somehow, the Communist Party was supposed to be both the instrument and the object of perestroika, but, at that same July conference, Gorbachev, still seeking a reliable political base and levers of power, unveiled a plan to revive the soviets. Power had been seized in the names of the soviets in October 1917, yet these councils embodying a vision, like Jacobin clubs, of radical, direct democracy (rather than representative democracy) had long since atrophied. Now, local soviets were to be revived by means of contested elections, and these were to be accompanied by elections to a new all-union body, a Congress of People’s Deputies, which would in turn choose representatives to a thoroughly revamped USSR Supreme Soviet, or working parliament. This plan, nominally only a refurbishment of existing institutions, meant moving