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The generation of the children of the Twentieth Party Congress carried the curse of Oedipus: they came to vindicate their fathers’ ideas and uphold a purer vision of socialism, but they ended up unknowingly slaying it with words rather than tanks.
Anti-Semitism, rife among the White Army emigrants, was reimported into the Soviet Union from Germany after the Second World War and served as a common ground between Stalinists and nationalists: both saw Jews as agents of Western influence and enemies of the traditional Russian faith and the Russian state.
When we look one another in the face, we’re neither of us just looking at a face we hate—no, we are gazing into a mirror. That’s the tragedy of our age. . . . Today you’re appalled by our hatred of the Jews. Tomorrow you may make use of our experience yourselves. . . . You know, as well as we do, that nationalism is the greatest force of our century. Nationalism is the soul of the epoch. Nationalism is the soul of the era.55
He remembered the bodies of young soldiers left in the snow-covered swamps and resurfacing after the thaw: “They were dead but did not know this.”56
One impression Yakovlev brought back was the gap between propaganda and real life—in Russia and America. His personal experience and his own mind proved stronger than Soviet ideology. He never lost his peasant sensibility, just as he never lost his vowel-singing accent.
Brezhnev did not like the article either—not because he shared the ideas of the opposite camp but because he resented confrontation within the party. He was neither a nationalist nor a liberal, and he decided to rid himself of both groups in order to rule in peace.
The most important result of the years spent in comfortable exile was that they offered time to think.
His speech ushered in a decade of “developed socialism,” otherwise known as zastoi (stagnation), a period in which the volume of empty words and slogans about economic achievements was matched only by the number of jokes about them. As one of the jokes went, it was a time when “the difficulty of growth turned into the growth of difficulties.”
His main charge was that the intelligentsia had failed in its most vital task: to speak on behalf of the people suppressed by an authoritarian state. Members of the intelligentsia had become part of the system, allowing themselves to get comfortable in its folds, nooks and crannies. “A hundred years ago,” he wrote in 1974, “the Russian intelligentsia considered a death sentence to be a sacrifice. Today an administrative reprimand is considered a sacrifice.” The Soviet intelligentsia had little in common with the nineteenth-century thinkers who had been wiped out by the revolution and Stalinist
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As Andrei Zorin, a Russian cultural historian, argued, Soviet military needs led to an overproduction of all kinds of scientists, matched by a hyperproduction of culture. The consumers of this culture were the millions of engineers and scientists who worked in research institutes and construction offices with a postbox number for an address.
Thanks to rising oil prices in the 1970s, the Soviet people were getting better off.
As Zorin has noted, it was a familiar pattern: the state first creates an educated class, which is then emancipated and starts undermining the state. When the state eventually collapses, the educated class finds itself buried under the rubble.
For all its political nastiness, the 1970s was a golden era for the Soviet intelligentsia—a period of accumulation of knowledge and cultural experience. It produced a cultural layer that sustained the nation for years to come. Real life was happening on stage, on the screen, in libraries, while pretense, boredom and falsehood dominated reality. For those who dealt in reality—as journalists were supposed to—the 1970s were the least productive years.
He went back to 1929—the year Stalin had called the “Great Break” (wrongly translated in English as a Great Leap Forward)—that marked the end of Lenin’s New Economic Policy and the start of the forced collectivization (or elimination, to be precise) of peasantry. He saw a holy grail in the ideas of Nikolai Bukharin. A charismatic Bolshevik leader executed by Stalin, Bukharin in the late 1920s had called on peasants “to enrich” themselves, defending competition between private and state enterprises, and had argued that the market was a necessary step toward socialism.
Upon his return from Prague, Yegor went back to Izvestia but was advised to “write less.” Instead he turned to a subject that was hard to ban: Lenin. By the 1970s the official Soviet iconography had produced a Lenin who was completely devoid of any human or even historic features. He had turned into a vehicle, a device for carrying almost any political message. Citations from Lenin could be used to prove diametrically opposite points of view. In the 1930s Lenin had justified Stalinism; in the 1950s and early 1960s he had justified anti-Stalinism. In the 1970s the liberal thinkers adopted him
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By the 1970s the official Soviet iconography had produced a Lenin who was completely devoid of any human or even historic features. He had turned into a vehicle, a device for carrying almost any political message. Citations from Lenin could be used to prove diametrically opposite points of view. In the 1930s Lenin had justified Stalinism; in the 1950s and early 1960s he had justified anti-Stalinism. In the 1970s the liberal thinkers adopted him to show the inadequacies of the Soviet economic and political system.
Born for an active life, they felt their energy seeping into the sand. They engaged in meaningless imitations of intellectual activity. This was both exhausting and humiliating, causing anguish and pain similar to that of Chekhov’s characters.
In 1998, seven years after Gorbachev ceased to be the president of the USSR and the country itself was gone, I asked him why that performance of Uncle Vanya had made such an impression on him. He paused and finally replied, “I understood a lot while watching it. I realized that we, the whole of society, were seriously ill and that we needed immediate surgery.”65
Stunned by this impromptu engagement with the crowd, one woman uttered a Soviet cliché: “Stay close to the people, and the people won’t let you down.” Gorbachev, barely able to stretch his arms in the crowd, quipped, “Can’t get any closer.” The crowd broke into laughter—not staged but genuine.
The energy of the mid-1980s and the sense of renewal were sustained by the release of a vast body of art and literature that had been created over the previous seventy years and kept under lock and key. It was an archival revolution: the previously banned works of Boris Pasternak, Vasily Grossman and Anna Akhmatova were published over a period of some four or five years in literary journals whose circulation soared to the levels of Western tabloid newspapers. By the late 1980s the sales of Novy Mir, which published Doctor Zhivago and Gulag Archipelago for the first time in the Soviet Union,
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“I understood that there was something in our country that was not right,” Gorbachev told Mlynář during one of their later conversations.3 Now he had a chance to put it right. The spring air of 1985 was filled with enormous optimism and hope. It seemed so simple: shift the heavy tombstone of Soviet bureaucracy, and the nation would spring back to life with force and vitality. In the minds of Gorbachev’s reformers, unfettered socialism was the best system for releasing the creative potential of the people.
In particular, he questioned one of the key postulates of Marx’s materialism; that being determines consciousness. Does this mean, Yakovlev asked himself, that the way people live and relate to one another is simply a result of their material conditions rather than their will?
Civil life is poisoned by lies. Presumption of guilt is a guiding principle. Two hundred thousand different instructions tell a person that he is a potential villain. One has to prove integrity with references and certificates. Conformism is seen as a sign of trustworthiness. Socialism has cut itself off from a way forward and started moving backward toward feudalism and in some places . . . descended into slavery. . . . For thousands of years we have been ruled by people and not by laws. . . . What we are talking about is not the dismantling of Stalinism but a replacement of a
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The main goal of the official Soviet media has traditionally been not to reveal but to conceal the facts. When, in 1962, an uprising by workers in Novocherkassk, an industrial town in the south of Russia, was brutally put down by government forces, the media’s role was not to report it. The bloodstained streets were repaved, and amateur radio reports were jammed. Discerning readers deduced facts from what newspapers did not say rather than from what they did: omissions were more informative than inclusions. If the media said something did not happen, people understood it to mean the opposite.
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Moskovskie novosti, a propaganda sheet printed in a dozen languages, published an article headlined A POISONED CLOUD OF ANTI-SOVIETISM. It listed foreign nuclear incidents and harangued the West for stirring up anti-Soviet hysteria. “Yes, we are talking about a premeditated and well-orchestrated campaign, the aim of which is to soil the political atmosphere in the East-West relationship and to use this poisoned cloud to cover up criminal acts of militarism by the USA and NATO against peace and security.”
As a transcript of an emergency Politburo meeting shows, Gorbachev himself had limited access to information, which made him furious: “We had no information about what was going on. Everything was kept secret from the Central Committee. The whole system was penetrated by the spirit of boot-licking, persecution of dissidents, clannishness, window-dressing and nepotism. We will put an end to all this.”
Its purpose, as Gorbachev understood it, was to inject vitality into socialism. Its consequence, as Yakovlev saw it, was to change the country.
Moskovskie novosti did not adhere to Western notions of a newspaper. Fact-based material was still forbidden. The news was not gathered by the newspaper but was distributed through the Soviet telegraphic agency TASS.
People did not come to Moskovskie novosti for news in the strictest sense of the word, but to get a sense of the direction in which the country was heading.
What was published was not new—it had long been the subject of private discussions around kitchen tables. What was “new” was the fact that this could now be printed in a newspaper under someone’s byline, that things that had been banished into the world of samizdat were now published. The very existence of such a paper was the biggest news of all.
The first Vzglyad programs were anything but controversial. In one a young man from an orphanage read his own poetry. In another a presenter told the audience how to distinguish real Levi’s from fakes, or gave advice on how to open a small private business—a total novelty in a country where making a profit was a crime. The episodes were divided from one another by musical numbers. But every program tested and pushed the limits, discussing things that allegedly did not exist in the USSR: homosexuality, drugs, AIDS, corruption.
Three-quarters of all publications in the years of perestroika were dedicated to the past. As Boris Dubin and Lev Gudkov, two Russian sociologists, wrote, Soviet society resembled a man who was walking backward into the future.
The whole point of the printed word was its permanence. But when two opposing signals went through two party newspapers within two weeks, the system went into convulsions. It was clear that there was no single party line. As Korotich, the editor of Ogonyok, told Yegor at the time, “We used to keep trying to find out what’s going on. We overlooked the fact that we ourselves were creating the situation.”18
Closely related to the ideas of National Socialism or fascism, Soviet nationalism was a noxious compound of anti-Semitism and chauvinism. The opposing ideology, “socialism with a human face,” extolled individual human values such as dignity and privacy. It rejected Stalinism in all its forms and looked back to Bukharin and the New Economic Policy as a vanished ideal.
History does not like being mythologized, and it took its revenge on both camps.
Perestroika was described as a new beginning, not the ending that it actually was. But an ending, misconceived as a beginning, is nothing but a dead end.
For several generations of Soviet leaders, Bukharin had represented the thing they feared most: political opposition. Now, too preoccupied with history, few paid attention to the fact that political opposition to Gorbachev was emerging in present time.
Yeltsin was no Bukharin, and Gorbachev was certainly no Stalin. The dogs barked, but their teeth had been spoiled by all the sweets they had been handing out to one another over the decades.
In the 1930s party renegades had been shot. In the late 1950s they had been forced into retirement or were placed under house arrest. In the more “vegetarian” 1970s, they had been parked in far-flung embassies. In the 1980s they were propelled to the top.
Unlike China, which kept its ideology and reformed the economy, Russia changed its ideology but did not reform the economy.
The need to move to a free market and to liberalize state-controlled prices was obvious to almost everyone in the Soviet government. But Gorbachev dithered. Raising or deregulating prices would mean breaking the social contract that implied that food was affordable even if it was not available.
“The cooperator’s job was to legitimize the black market that the corrupt bureaucracy did not want to see legitimized, and to destroy the prejudices that the Communist power structure did not want to see destroyed.”
A few years later this “trading desk” was sold, turning Timchenko and his partners into private oil traders. Fifteen years on, under Vladimir Putin, Timchenko would emerge as one of the biggest private traders of Russia’s state-owned oil, and, critics say, a symbol of crony capitalism and the corporatist state. In 2014 he was designated as a member of Putin’s inner circle by the US government and was subjected to sanctions.
Many of Russia’s first businessmen, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the future oil tycoon turned political prisoner, emerged from the ranks of the Young Communist League. Komsomol activists were young, cynical and ruthless. They had none of the idealism or the baggage of their fathers and all the frustrations of a hungry elite constrained by the doldrums of Soviet ideology. They could not care less about Bukharin or the New Economic Policy and embraced with a vengeance the opportunity offered by perestroika.
In 1990 Nikolai Ryzhkov, the head of Gorbachev’s cabinet, posed a question: “Are we building socialism or capitalism?” By that time the question had long since been answered, not only by the cooperators but also by a large number of the red directors who had begun to transfer state property into their own hands well before the official privatization of the 1990s. The signs of this major shift in economic power from the central government to the Soviet managerial corps were out there, but few, including Ryzhkov, understood the consequences.
The story of Gazprom’s creation goes a long way to explaining why the disintegration of the Soviet regime was relatively peaceful, but also why its transformation was so incomplete. The economic foundation of the Soviet system was destroyed not by an external enemy or by dissidents but by the proprietor’s instinct of members of the nomenklatura who gladly exchanged their petty privileges for something far bigger—a piece of the pie. It was the nomenklatura who undermined the core principle of socialism.
The economic foundation of the Soviet system was destroyed not by an external enemy or by dissidents but by the proprietor’s instinct of members of the nomenklatura who gladly exchanged their petty privileges for something far bigger—a piece of the pie.
Stalin got rid of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which allowed small-time private enterprise, not because he doubted its results but because he had correctly judged that any such enterprise was a threat to the regime. Stalin bestowed upon his courtiers royal privileges, grand state apartments, cars and dachas, but the ownership of all these assets stayed with the Kremlin. The fact that nothing could be sold or bequeathed bred a sense of dependency and impermanence.
For years proprietorial instincts had been constrained by the ideology of state ownership and the threat of state-sanctioned violence. When ideological constraints were loosened and private enterprise legalized, those who were charged with managing state assets gave in to their ownership instinct. They realized that instead of being rewarded for looking after these assets, they could actually own them.
“The nomenklatura moved forward, testing its way through, step by step—not according to some thought-through plan but by submitting to its deep instinct. It followed the scent of property as a predator follows its prey.”27 Everything was done by trial and error. The benefits of the trials went into the pockets of the bureaucracy. The costs of the errors stayed with the state.
