Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 by Stephen Kotkin Page B
Authors: Stephen Kotkin
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hold-overs from the tsarist period. The country trained its own ‘Red’, or party-member, experts, yet the separate party organizations shadowing the experts were not removed.
On the contrary, the bureaucracy of the party continued to grow alongside the bureaucracy of the state, and both performed essentially the same functions: management of society and the economy. Thus, the Soviet Union acquired two parallel, overlapping administrative structures: party and state. Of course, if the redundant party were removed, one would be left not just with the Soviet central state bureaucracy, but also with a voluntary association of national republics, each of which could legally choose to withdraw from the Union. In sum, the Communist Party, administratively redundant to the Soviet state and yet critical to its integrity, was like a bomb inside the core of the Union.
In this light, the proposals immediately after Stalin’s death made by Lavrenti Beria stand out as a potentially fateful moment. A supremely skilled and murderous organizer, Beria was the kingpin of the state’s military-industrial complex, which beginning with the 1930s industrialization and continuing through the Second World War and the onset of the cold war, had got the upper hand over the party apparat in the dualist party– state system. In 1953, Beria proposed eliminating the administrative role of the party in favour of the state and 79
the drama of reform
enhancing the position of native elites in the Union republics (his other power base). Whether these proposals would have better secured the Soviet Union’s nationally federalized, party-dependent integrity will never be known. 15 The rest of the Soviet leaders pounced on Beria before he pounced on them. Nikita Khrushchev, with the backing of the apparatchiks whom the technocratic Beria disdained, won the ensuing power struggle. Khrushchev deepened the re-assertion (launched in 1952 at the 19th Party Congress) of the party’s role vis-à-vis the state.
But the party apparat that Khrushchev reinvigorated soon turned against him. Thus, the Soviet party–state seemed both to call forth efforts at socialist renewal and to block those efforts. This reformist/conservative dialectic was the political dynamic that had produced Gorbachev, and that he had set out to master, first with the Nina Andreeva manipulation of Ligachev, and then with the ‘reorgnization’ manœuvre against the party Secretariat.
But that momentous act set off a bomb inside the Union structure that undercut all his clever tactics. 16 The most poignant moment of Gorbachev’s memoir, written years after the fact, comes when he writes of the 1988–9 political reforms that he failed at that time ‘to put forward a real program’ for ‘the transformation of the unitary state into a federal state’. 17 But, by sabotaging the party Secretariat, this is exactly what he did, unawares. As his top military adviser Sergei Akhromeev wrote in 1991, ‘higher republic organs of power, in line with the USSR Constitution, were not subordinated to equivalent USSR organs.
80
the drama of reform
They were connected only by the influence of the party and party discipline. . . . Did the politburo headed by Gorbachev understand all this? They should have.’ 18
Even had he not (owing to his perception of reform/
conservative dynamics) waylaid the Secretariat, Gorbachev would have had his hands full bringing to heel the Soviet Union’s fifteen Union republics, because they had clearly defined state borders and their own state institutions.
Now, with the party’s central control mechanism shattered and its ideology discredited, and the tentacles of the planned economy disrupted, Gorbachev discovered that the Supreme Soviets of the republics began to act in accordance with what he had unintentionally made them: namely, parliaments of de facto independent states. In March 1990—the fifth anniversary of his ascension to power—he manœuvred the
On the contrary, the bureaucracy of the party continued to grow alongside the bureaucracy of the state, and both performed essentially the same functions: management of society and the economy. Thus, the Soviet Union acquired two parallel, overlapping administrative structures: party and state. Of course, if the redundant party were removed, one would be left not just with the Soviet central state bureaucracy, but also with a voluntary association of national republics, each of which could legally choose to withdraw from the Union. In sum, the Communist Party, administratively redundant to the Soviet state and yet critical to its integrity, was like a bomb inside the core of the Union.
In this light, the proposals immediately after Stalin’s death made by Lavrenti Beria stand out as a potentially fateful moment. A supremely skilled and murderous organizer, Beria was the kingpin of the state’s military-industrial complex, which beginning with the 1930s industrialization and continuing through the Second World War and the onset of the cold war, had got the upper hand over the party apparat in the dualist party– state system. In 1953, Beria proposed eliminating the administrative role of the party in favour of the state and 79
the drama of reform
enhancing the position of native elites in the Union republics (his other power base). Whether these proposals would have better secured the Soviet Union’s nationally federalized, party-dependent integrity will never be known. 15 The rest of the Soviet leaders pounced on Beria before he pounced on them. Nikita Khrushchev, with the backing of the apparatchiks whom the technocratic Beria disdained, won the ensuing power struggle. Khrushchev deepened the re-assertion (launched in 1952 at the 19th Party Congress) of the party’s role vis-à-vis the state.
But the party apparat that Khrushchev reinvigorated soon turned against him. Thus, the Soviet party–state seemed both to call forth efforts at socialist renewal and to block those efforts. This reformist/conservative dialectic was the political dynamic that had produced Gorbachev, and that he had set out to master, first with the Nina Andreeva manipulation of Ligachev, and then with the ‘reorgnization’ manœuvre against the party Secretariat.
But that momentous act set off a bomb inside the Union structure that undercut all his clever tactics. 16 The most poignant moment of Gorbachev’s memoir, written years after the fact, comes when he writes of the 1988–9 political reforms that he failed at that time ‘to put forward a real program’ for ‘the transformation of the unitary state into a federal state’. 17 But, by sabotaging the party Secretariat, this is exactly what he did, unawares. As his top military adviser Sergei Akhromeev wrote in 1991, ‘higher republic organs of power, in line with the USSR Constitution, were not subordinated to equivalent USSR organs.
80
the drama of reform
They were connected only by the influence of the party and party discipline. . . . Did the politburo headed by Gorbachev understand all this? They should have.’ 18
Even had he not (owing to his perception of reform/
conservative dynamics) waylaid the Secretariat, Gorbachev would have had his hands full bringing to heel the Soviet Union’s fifteen Union republics, because they had clearly defined state borders and their own state institutions.
Now, with the party’s central control mechanism shattered and its ideology discredited, and the tentacles of the planned economy disrupted, Gorbachev discovered that the Supreme Soviets of the republics began to act in accordance with what he had unintentionally made them: namely, parliaments of de facto independent states. In March 1990—the fifth anniversary of his ascension to power—he manœuvred the
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