direct link with the long-suffering Russian people, the narod , over the heads of the apparatchiks. This would provide him with the independent power base he needed to push through his program of reform.
“Let us put them [the bureaucrats] under control. You from one end, and us from the other,” he told an appreciative audience at one of his stops. “Without the support of the workers, no policy is worth anything. If it is not supported by the working people, it is no policy, it is some farfetched thing.” 63
By the time he arrived in Nizhnevartovsk, Gorbachev had already discovered a magical tool for awakening the slumbering masses. He was the first general secretary to understand the power of television. As a rising apparatchik he had seen how television had helped destroy public confidence in leaders like Brezhnev and Chernenko by broadcasting their obvious infirmities to an increasingly disillusioned nation. Now he proposed using the same medium to project himself as a dynamic new leader tackling the problems of ordinary people. The state-run television network gave him a captive audience. Every evening, at precisely nine, across the eleven time zones of the Soviet Union, 150 million people tuned in to the news show Vremya , broadcast on all main channels. The lead story during those early days was almost always Mikhail Gorbachev, hectoring local officials, diving into crowds, explaining his policies to attentive workers. He combined the roles of newsmaker and news editor. Vremya producers often received a telephone call from Gorbachev or one of his close aides with detailed instructions on what to include in the show and what to delete. 64
Television cameras accompanied Gorbachev practically everywhere he went in western Siberia. Here he embraced the notion of the “human factor” as the decisive element in the revolution that he was attempting to unleash. Like many visitors to Siberia, he was struck by the contrast between the riches that were pouring out of the ground and the squalor in which people were forced to live. As he toured supermarkets, drilling rigs, and gas compressor stations, he was besieged by complaints about shoddy housing, poor food supplies, air pollution, outdated equipment, and the lack of consumergoods. The ends had clearly not justified the means. The Stalinist system of economic management had created a monster that fed on itself, producing little benefit either for the country or for its inhabitants.
The new gensek was shaken to learn that for all the billions of rubles that it had contributed to the central treasury, Nizhnevartovsk did not possess a single public movie house. Movies were screened occasionally at a Communist Party youth club, but tickets were hard to acquire. All this troubled Gorbachev as he flew to the regional capital, Tyumen, for a meeting with local party officials. The next morning he got up early to revise the text of the speech that his aides had prepared for him. 65 He agreed with the planners that urgent measures had to be taken to reverse the decline in oil production. But there was another message he wanted to convey: The entire economy had to be reoriented toward the individual.
“It is embarrassing for us to talk about the millions of tons of oil and cubic meters of gas when a drilling foreman says to us that the greatest incentive in Nizhnevartovsk is to be given a ticket to see a film,” he told party workers, gathered in front of him like dim-witted schoolchildren. “Why, at the end of the day, do we need to extract millions of tons of oil and gas? Not so that we can simply talk and brag about such quantities, but so that people’s lives can be improved, so that the economy becomes stronger, so that our defenses can be strengthened, so that the people’s living conditions can be improved. That is why all this is necessary.” 66
During those early barnstorming trips around the country Gorbachev frequently discarded the speeches that had been
“Let us put them [the bureaucrats] under control. You from one end, and us from the other,” he told an appreciative audience at one of his stops. “Without the support of the workers, no policy is worth anything. If it is not supported by the working people, it is no policy, it is some farfetched thing.” 63
By the time he arrived in Nizhnevartovsk, Gorbachev had already discovered a magical tool for awakening the slumbering masses. He was the first general secretary to understand the power of television. As a rising apparatchik he had seen how television had helped destroy public confidence in leaders like Brezhnev and Chernenko by broadcasting their obvious infirmities to an increasingly disillusioned nation. Now he proposed using the same medium to project himself as a dynamic new leader tackling the problems of ordinary people. The state-run television network gave him a captive audience. Every evening, at precisely nine, across the eleven time zones of the Soviet Union, 150 million people tuned in to the news show Vremya , broadcast on all main channels. The lead story during those early days was almost always Mikhail Gorbachev, hectoring local officials, diving into crowds, explaining his policies to attentive workers. He combined the roles of newsmaker and news editor. Vremya producers often received a telephone call from Gorbachev or one of his close aides with detailed instructions on what to include in the show and what to delete. 64
Television cameras accompanied Gorbachev practically everywhere he went in western Siberia. Here he embraced the notion of the “human factor” as the decisive element in the revolution that he was attempting to unleash. Like many visitors to Siberia, he was struck by the contrast between the riches that were pouring out of the ground and the squalor in which people were forced to live. As he toured supermarkets, drilling rigs, and gas compressor stations, he was besieged by complaints about shoddy housing, poor food supplies, air pollution, outdated equipment, and the lack of consumergoods. The ends had clearly not justified the means. The Stalinist system of economic management had created a monster that fed on itself, producing little benefit either for the country or for its inhabitants.
The new gensek was shaken to learn that for all the billions of rubles that it had contributed to the central treasury, Nizhnevartovsk did not possess a single public movie house. Movies were screened occasionally at a Communist Party youth club, but tickets were hard to acquire. All this troubled Gorbachev as he flew to the regional capital, Tyumen, for a meeting with local party officials. The next morning he got up early to revise the text of the speech that his aides had prepared for him. 65 He agreed with the planners that urgent measures had to be taken to reverse the decline in oil production. But there was another message he wanted to convey: The entire economy had to be reoriented toward the individual.
“It is embarrassing for us to talk about the millions of tons of oil and cubic meters of gas when a drilling foreman says to us that the greatest incentive in Nizhnevartovsk is to be given a ticket to see a film,” he told party workers, gathered in front of him like dim-witted schoolchildren. “Why, at the end of the day, do we need to extract millions of tons of oil and gas? Not so that we can simply talk and brag about such quantities, but so that people’s lives can be improved, so that the economy becomes stronger, so that our defenses can be strengthened, so that the people’s living conditions can be improved. That is why all this is necessary.” 66
During those early barnstorming trips around the country Gorbachev frequently discarded the speeches that had been
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