Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 by Stephen Kotkin Page A
Authors: Stephen Kotkin
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beyond the party’s hereditary power and acquiring a popular mandate—a test that the vast majority of sitting party officials who stood for election in early 1989 to the Congress failed miserably. Gorbachev exempted himself and the rest of the leadership from the competitive elections, but the new political situation was evident from the seating in the Congress hall: except for Gorbachev, politburo members sat not in the presidium, but in a gallery off to the side.
Reinvigoration of the soviets was accompanied by a 76
the drama of reform
further, behind-the-scenes weakening of the party apparat’s power. Acutely aware that the top echelon had turned on a previous reformer, Khrushchev, compelling his ‘request to retire’ in October 1964, and evidently not content with the results of his manipulation of the Nina Andreeva affair, Gorbachev went after Ligachev’s power base. In September 1988, prior to the election campaign for the Congress of People’s Deputies, he pulled off a ‘reorganization’ of the party Secretariat. Citing a need to improve the work of the CC, Gorbachev created a series of separate, labour-intensive party commissions, each headed by a politburo member. Suddenly, there was no time for collective Secretariat meetings, or for its Union-wide supervisory functions of the still intact Union-wide party committees, whether for coordinating the elections to the Congress or for a conspiracy against the general secretary. Thus, while still holding to his Leninist faith in the potential of the party mass, Gorbachev deliberately broke the might of the apparat fifteen months before he relented (February 1990) on the demands formally to abolish the Communist Party’s monopoly. But, strange as it might seem, he failed to grasp that by undermining the party Secretariat and enhancing the state (the Supreme Soviets of the Union and of the republics) he was exchanging a unitary structure for a federalized one.
In the Russian empire of the tsars there had been no national republics, just non-ethnic provinces. National republics formed when the empire broke apart in the First World War, and, though the Red Army reconquered most 77
the drama of reform
of these territories, resistance by the new republics helped prevent their dissolution and absorption into Soviet Russia. Instead, an innovative compromise—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)—was reached in December 1922. Eventually, the Union came to have fifteen nationally designated republics, each with a state border, constitution, parliament, and (after 1944) a ministry of foreign affairs. In the similarly polyglot US, there were many Poles in Chicago but no Autonomous Polish Republic of Illinois—or Mexican Republic of California.
Rather, the US was a single ‘nation of nations’ comprising fifty non-ethnic ‘states’ that were really provinces. The Soviet Union was a kind of ‘empire of nations’, since fifteen of its nations had statehood. To keep this nationally structured federation of states together, the Soviet leadership relied on the pyramid-like hierarchy of the Communist Party.
What was the Communist Party? It was not a political party in the Western sense, but a conspiracy to take power, which it did in 1917, after which a new revolutionary government was formed, and there were a few calls to abolish the party. Instead, the party found a role in power. That took place during the Civil War (1918–21), when the former Russian empire territories were reconquered, tsarist officers were recruited to the Red Army, and ‘political commissars’ were introduced alongside the military experts to guarantee their loyalty. Such, haphazardly, became the model for the whole country: in every institution, from schools to ministries, party members, or 78
the drama of reform
commissars, were called upon to act as guarantors of loyalty and correct politics. But soon Soviet army officers, bureaucrats, teachers, and engineers ceased to be
Reinvigoration of the soviets was accompanied by a 76
the drama of reform
further, behind-the-scenes weakening of the party apparat’s power. Acutely aware that the top echelon had turned on a previous reformer, Khrushchev, compelling his ‘request to retire’ in October 1964, and evidently not content with the results of his manipulation of the Nina Andreeva affair, Gorbachev went after Ligachev’s power base. In September 1988, prior to the election campaign for the Congress of People’s Deputies, he pulled off a ‘reorganization’ of the party Secretariat. Citing a need to improve the work of the CC, Gorbachev created a series of separate, labour-intensive party commissions, each headed by a politburo member. Suddenly, there was no time for collective Secretariat meetings, or for its Union-wide supervisory functions of the still intact Union-wide party committees, whether for coordinating the elections to the Congress or for a conspiracy against the general secretary. Thus, while still holding to his Leninist faith in the potential of the party mass, Gorbachev deliberately broke the might of the apparat fifteen months before he relented (February 1990) on the demands formally to abolish the Communist Party’s monopoly. But, strange as it might seem, he failed to grasp that by undermining the party Secretariat and enhancing the state (the Supreme Soviets of the Union and of the republics) he was exchanging a unitary structure for a federalized one.
In the Russian empire of the tsars there had been no national republics, just non-ethnic provinces. National republics formed when the empire broke apart in the First World War, and, though the Red Army reconquered most 77
the drama of reform
of these territories, resistance by the new republics helped prevent their dissolution and absorption into Soviet Russia. Instead, an innovative compromise—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)—was reached in December 1922. Eventually, the Union came to have fifteen nationally designated republics, each with a state border, constitution, parliament, and (after 1944) a ministry of foreign affairs. In the similarly polyglot US, there were many Poles in Chicago but no Autonomous Polish Republic of Illinois—or Mexican Republic of California.
Rather, the US was a single ‘nation of nations’ comprising fifty non-ethnic ‘states’ that were really provinces. The Soviet Union was a kind of ‘empire of nations’, since fifteen of its nations had statehood. To keep this nationally structured federation of states together, the Soviet leadership relied on the pyramid-like hierarchy of the Communist Party.
What was the Communist Party? It was not a political party in the Western sense, but a conspiracy to take power, which it did in 1917, after which a new revolutionary government was formed, and there were a few calls to abolish the party. Instead, the party found a role in power. That took place during the Civil War (1918–21), when the former Russian empire territories were reconquered, tsarist officers were recruited to the Red Army, and ‘political commissars’ were introduced alongside the military experts to guarantee their loyalty. Such, haphazardly, became the model for the whole country: in every institution, from schools to ministries, party members, or 78
the drama of reform
commissars, were called upon to act as guarantors of loyalty and correct politics. But soon Soviet army officers, bureaucrats, teachers, and engineers ceased to be
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