Gorbachev's Agenda

Changes In Soviet Domestic And Foreign Policy

Susan L Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429713897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume assesses contemporary Soviet domestic and foreign policy and surveys the traditions, challenges, and contexts within which the Soviet leadership was operating. General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev is generating ferment at home and anticipation abroad about the prospects for change in Soviet policy. Western analysts can provide only an in

Part I
Gorbachev’s Reform Efforts and Emerging Opposition

Introduction

The fundamental question facing the Gorbachev leadership today is whether the Soviet Union can actually be reformed. The Western world’s reaction to perestroika, glasnost,’ and other Soviet initiatives has ranged from persistent skepticism to overwhelming enthusiasm. There is a concern not to miss what may be a valuable opportunity, yet at the same time there is a fear about acting too hastily and finding that we have been gullible. As Robbin Laird explains in his introduction, the best approach is to combine vision with vigilance.

Even before addressing the question of whether the Soviet Union can be reformed, it is important to identify what it means to reform. Overcoming the Stalinist legacy is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the Gorbachev leadership. To do so, it will be necessary to overcome fundamental systemic and societal barriers that are prevalent throughout the Soviet Union. And while the initial reason for perestroika lay in the poor performance of the Soviet economy, as Astrid von Borcke and Elizabeth Teague explain, the target of this reform effort has now expanded to affect every aspect of Soviet life. The dilemma for the Gorbachev leadership is deciding how to react to a system that is even more resistant to change than had been imagined.

It is equally critical to understand the perceptions of the various players and groups within Soviet society on the issue of perestroika. Von Borcke assesses the attitudes of the KGB, the military, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Party. Teague analyzes this issue with respect to specified socio-economic groups. Thus, both authors identify a range of support for and opposition to this effort within Soviet society. As Teague concludes, Gorbachev is faced with the dilemma of needing worker support for perestroika to succeed, yet such support is difficult to obtain as living conditions have deteriorated.

The glasnost’ and perestroika efforts are the most significant factors that could lead to an explosion in nationalist unrest within the USSR’s republics. In fact, perestroika and glasnost’, in particular, have unleashed a veritable Pandora’s box in the form of reawakened national identities and unprecedented opportunities to display these feelings openly. Nieves Bregante details Gorbachev’s slow realization that nationalist tensions are a significant obstacle to the success of his reform efforts and that, in turn, his perestroika program has precipitated heightened nationalist sentiments.

1
Gorbachev’s Perestroika: Can the Soviet System be Reformed?

Astrid von Borcke

Perestroika: Its Purposes and Puzzles

Virtually no one still doubts Gorbachev’s serious commitment to perestroika.¹ Gorbachev seeks a quasi-revolutionary transformation of the Soviet economy and, particularly since the XIX Party Conference in 1988, of the political system. Ultimately, Soviet society as a whole is to be transformed.

Gorbachev’s proclaimed goal has been to strengthen socialism, to create a truly modern and effective system that is on a par with the most developed countries in the world and that holds a new ideological appeal. Yet from the beginning, observers have been puzzled how this is to be achieved. Even if, at an early stage, Gorbachev claimed that the reformers had a clear strategy, the General Secretary does not appear to have had a clear theoretical or practical conception of where perestroika would lead in the long run. To a considerable extent he had to proceed, as Yurii Andropov had foreseen, by trial and error. Nevertheless, an underlying consistency, an “inner logic,” to perestroika does exist

The reformers did know what had to be rejected and changed, from an inefficient economy to the demoralization of society. These assumptions provided a certain framework, since rejection limits the options of acceptable solutions. For Gorbachev perestroika started as a kind of anti-movement, a declaration of war on the traditional, essentially Stalinist command system. Like Deng Xiaoping in China, Gorbachev and the reformers were ready to start from the facts and thus proclaimed a new pragmatism, already an important step for a system claiming ideological legitimacy. “Perestroika,” A. Yakovlev explained, “means maximal attention to concrete questions and tasks, to concrete conditions, goals and priorities on the basis of collective experience, starting out from the responsibility of Party and State above all vis-à-vis its own people.”²

Chinese reformers have singled out the lack of theory as one of perestroika’s basic weaknesses. German colleagues, often inclined to value theory and ideology, have to some extent felt the same way. However, refraining from too much theorizing proved politically astute. Gorbachev avoided rousing powerful opponents earlier than necessary because different people could initially interpret the new catchword in different ways.

The new agnosticism is also more honest than claims of having a grand design. There are no patent solutions to the Soviet Union’s dilemmas. There is only the reformers’ earnest determination to listen, learn, and try what is feasible: “Perhaps we are lacking in experience,” Gorbachev has admitted, “but we have a conscience and responsibility. And we don’t lack in patriotism.”³ Valentin Falin, Gorbachev’s chief consultant on West Germany since 1986 and the new chief of the International Department and full member of the Central Committee as of April 1989, declared that Soviet reforms are not being carried out “abstractly for world socialism, but concretely for the Soviet Union.”⁴

Had Gorbachev proceeded as a theoretician of liberalization (the essence of perestroika) he would have faced a fundamental and virtually insurmountable dilemma: The real alternative to the planned or command system is a market order-the very order against which Marxism-Leninism had originally declared total war. In other words, instead of a vertically integrated, dictatorial system based on the Party’s claim to a monopoly of political power, it would be necessary to create a new pluralistic system of lateral contract relationships and independent social groups (ultimately including parties), based on law.

The various crises and attempts at reform in all the socialist states point to a fundamental crisis of Communism in its Leninist-Stalinist version. Here Zbigniew Brzezinski is right to call Communism “a grand failure.”⁵ Increasingly, this fact is also recognized in the Soviet Union. It was pragmatically advantageous to first combat Stalinism in the guise of returning to an allegedly pure Leninism. After all, Stalin was the real founder of the modern Soviet autocratic state. Lenin was more democratic and more European; his later policies and statements left room for new political departures.

Glasnost’ has publicized the extent of the system’s inefficiencies inherited from Stalin. As Gorbachev admits, not even his own leadership foresaw the magnitude of these problems. In addition, Stalin’s crimes are now being openly discussed, crimes so horrendous that it is difficult for protagonists of the old order to continue to defend this kind of “reason of revolution,” all the more since this revolution has not been able to keep its promises.⁶ Indeed, even Lenin’s infallibility is becoming problematic, an evolution that was not completely unforeseeable. As conservatives like Ye. K. Ligachev had feared, glasnost’ is becoming morally and politically fatal for them.

But Gorbachev has proceeded gradually, even if retrospectively there is a striking inner logic to all his efforts. Gorbachev is a radical reformer, not a revolutionary. His use of the term revolution for perestroika seems more like the invocation of a “hallowed” word of Soviet political culture, for he abhors violence, illegality, and the unleashing of popular destructive passions.

Gorbachev cleverly began his reform efforts by claiming to restore true Leninism, while at the same time interpreting Lenin in a pointedly selective, Eurocommunist,⁷ reformist way. Gorbachev chose the mature Lenin of the NEP, in contrast to Lenin the revolutionary and Blanquist.⁸ The NEP, the New Economic Policy of 1921 to 1928, was Lenin’s attempt at a first reconciliation between the revolutionary regime and society, above all the peasants (who then comprised 80 percent of the population). The NEP permitted the reintroduction of private, capitalist enteiprise, except in critical industries. Yet at the same time, Lenin not only retained Party control over the “commanding heights,” but also initiated the totalitarian turn in the Party’s internal development by forbidding any factions in 1921. Gorbachev does not stress this latter aspect of NEP. Thus, Gorbachev has selectively interpreted NEP too, focusing on the rehabilitation of the market, traditionally anathema to Soviet ideology.

Lenin’s politics of the 1920s were to some extent reinterpreted by Gorbachev as a justification for redemocratization, thereby returning to the time before the split in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903, that is, before the rise of Bolshevism. At the same time this reinterpretation has allowed reformers to turn toward modern Social Democracy in the outside world. “An important element” of the foreign policy of NEP, A. N. Yakovlev pointed out, “was the resolution of the III Comintern Congress about the formation of a ‘unity front’ of the workers of both currents-the Communists and Social Democrats-which in principle permitted the possibility of negotiations with the leaders of the II International.”⁹ Yakovlev also made clear that this policy is meant to go beyond the domain of foreign affairs, beyond a new unity front in the interest of foreign and security policy; it incorporates “the Leninist conception of ‘bridge building’ toward Social Democracy.”¹⁰

This may be an important new departure.¹¹ That these contacts are considered of direct political relevance to the search for models for reformed socialism was confirmed by V. Medvedev, chief ideologist since September 1988, who declared: “We still have to seriously consider [osmyslit’] the practice of contemporary social democracy.”¹²

In fact, as conservatives like Nina Andreeva realize, this reorientation heralds a turn from Bolshevism to Menshevism. For Gorbachev, such a turn also means linking up with international social democracy, a reorientation that had been prepared for somewhat by Eurocommunism. In some other socialist countries—such as Hungary and Poland-this move toward social democracy has been even more pronounced. While Soviet political culture was not ripe to discuss all of this openly and immediately, it was possible to take recourse to Marx. “In a sense,” Yakovlev remarked, “we are studying the basics of Marxism all over again, both because of our own social experience as well as in practice, without conceiving of its basic insights only as dogma. In the course of the process, perestroika comes to understand itself not only as a multiplicity of concrete tasks but also as an objective phase in die development of the socialist way of life.”¹³

The question still remains: What does perestroika mean in a positive sense? Not surprisingly, the leaders-who basically agreed on what they rejected, including even a conservative like Ligachev-were bound to disagree about the path, methods, and pace to adopt. B. N. Yel’tsin’s ouster in November 1987 and his spectacular comeback in the March 1989 elections, the September plenum of 1988 that produced the greatest change in the top leadership since 1957, and the plenum of April 1989 (which followed the resounding defeat of conservatives and, basically, the Party apparat in the elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies), all demonstrated the existence of such conflict.

Perestroika essentially amounts to a new raskreposhchertie—an emancipation of society and the individual from the traditional compulsory universal state service reinstitutionalized by Stalin and held dear by all the conservative bureaucracies. Thus perestroika is more than a technocratically motivated remarketization, originally designed to improve and salvage the plan system. It is also more than an indication of the rise of a new middle class as the consequence of Russia’s modernization and professionalization.¹⁴ Gorbachev’s new policy of religious tolerance, the search for a universal ethic, a renewed re-Europeanization of Russia, and a new openness vis-à-vis the world at large are proof of perestroika’s broader scope. What these trends indicate is the resumption of an old tradition of liberalization and “Westernization” in Russia.

However, instead of beginning with ideological and theoretical discussions of the ultimate goals of perestroika, Gorbachev pragmatically began with a diagnosis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Introduction: The Changing Soviet Environment
• PART I GORBACHEV’S REFORM EFFORTS AND EMERGING OPPOSITION
• PART II ECONOMIC AND TRADE REFORM
• PART III THE MILITARY CHALLENGE
• PART IV THE EUROPEAN AGENDA
• PART V REGIONAL ISSUES
• Index