Russia. A History полностью

The government itself realized that it had failed to assimilate minorities. That failure was amply demonstrated in a secret report of 1978, which detailed the obstacles to Russification of schools, including a lack of qualified teachers: ‘Many of the teachers in minority elementary schools have only a poor knowledge of Russian. There are cases where, for this reason, Russian is not taught at all’. The failure of linguistic Russification was clearly apparent in Central Asia: the proportion claiming total ignorance of Russian language ranged from 24 per cent among Uzbeks to 28 per cent among Tajiks and Turkmen. Even graduates of specialized technical schools had a poor command of Russian. In response, the regime proposed to establish a special two- or three-month course in Russian for those due to perform military service. As Brezhnev admitted at the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress in February 1981, the government had made scant progress in its campaign to assimilate minorities and combat nationalism.

Towards the Abyss

When Leonid Brezhnev died on 10 November 1982, he bequeathed a country mired in profound systemic crisis. Its economic problems were daunting; amid falling prices on energy and commodities, the regime lacked the resources either to reindustrialize or to restructure agriculture. Although the KGB had seemingly decapitated the leadership of the democratic and nationalist movements, anti-regime sentiments were intense and widespread. Nor had the Brezhnev government achieved stability and security in foreign policy: the invasion of Afghanistan, débâcles elsewhere around the globe, even erosion of the Warsaw Bloc (especially in Poland) provided profound cause of concern and an endless drain on resources.

Neither of Brezhnev’s immediate successors, the former KGB chief Andropov or the quintessential party functionary Konstantin Chernenko, survived long enough to address the ugly legacy of the ‘years of stagnation’. Andropov placed the main emphasis on law and order, even for solving the economic crisis, with the explanation that ‘good order does not require any capital investment whatever, but can produce great results’. He also waged a vigorous campaign against corruption and, lacking Brezhnev’s veneration for ‘stability of cadres’, replaced a quarter of the ministers and oblast secretaries in a desperate attempt to revitalize the system. But within fifteen months he too was dead, with power devolving on Chernenko—an elderly partocrat whose only distinction was to have been Brezhnev’s chief adviser. In the end Chernenko became the old élite’s last hurrah—an ageing and ailing leader, he ‘reigned’ but only for one year before dying from emphysema and respiratory-cardiovascular problems in March 1985.

As the Politburo assembled to confirm the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to the post of General Secretary, the prospects for survival were bleak. Internationally, it had paid an enormous cost for the Afghanistan invasion and faced an awesome challenge from the aggressively anti-communist administration of Ronald Reagan in Washington. Domestically, its economy had ground to a halt, paralysed by profound structural problems in agriculture and industry and now deprived of lucrative revenues from the export of energy and raw materials. The new General Secretary, whatever his personal proclivities, had good cause to ponder the options for a fundamental ‘perestroika’.

14. A Modern ‘Time of Troubles’

FROM REFORM TO DISINTEGRATION, 1985–1999

GREGORY L. FREEZE

The fourteen and half years between Chernenko’s death and Putin’s presidency loomed like a redux of the ‘Time of Troubles’ in the early seventeenth century. What began as systemic reform turned into systemic collapse—dissolution of the Soviet Union, disastrous economic regression, profound social upheavals, and loss of superpower status. Mikhail Gorbachev initiated the reforms, aiming to reinvigorate and ultimately transform the Soviet system. His ‘perestroika’, however, unleashed forces and expectations even as it failed to satisfy minimal requirements. Dissolution of the Soviet Union, at the initiative of Russia under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, marked an end of communism and heralded a new attempt to reconstruct Russia after a Western model of democracy and free markets. That transition proved far more difficult, disruptive, and destructive than any imagined; the result was systemic breakdown of the economy, polity, and social system. By the late 1990s, Russia had been degraded from a superpower to a ‘failed state’ with an ‘undeveloping’ economy.

The General Secretary as Reformer: Mikhail Gorbachev