Russia. A History полностью

By any standard, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev had an extraordinary career. Born in 1931 in the agricultural heartland of southern Russia, he lived through the difficult 1930s and personally experienced the full weight of German occupation. After the war he not only studied but laboured, with distinction, earning the Order of the Red Banner of Labour by helping a collective farm produce a record harvest. That distinction, and raw intelligence, earned him a coveted place at Moscow State University in 1950, and set him apart from others who matriculated by dint of military service or family connections. Gorbachev majored in law and, by all accounts, demonstrated a keen mind and exceptional curiosity. Upon graduation in 1955, in accordance with the Soviet system of ‘assignment’, authorities returned him to Stavropol’, where he quickly rose in the local party hierarchy. Gorbachev also continued graduate studies, specializing in agriculture and earning a reputation for expertise in what was undeniably the Achilles heel of the Soviet economy. That expertise, plus ties to people like Iurii Andropov, helped to catapult Gorbachev to Politburo membership in 1978 and brought him from a provincial backwater to the very centre of power. With Chernenko’s death on 10 March 1985, the Politburo—with a strong recommendation by the éminence grise, Andrei Gromyko—made the youthful Gorbachev the new general secretary, the youngest general secretary since Stalin assumed that post in 1922.

Although elevated to power by the old guard, Gorbachev was cut from a very different cloth. He was a ‘post-Stalinist’ member of the élite: he formally joined the party in 1952, but made his career under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Profoundly influenced by Khrushchev’s revelations and reforms, Gorbachev belonged more to the free-thinking shestidesiatniki (‘people of the 1960s’) than the older Stalinist cadres who dominated the party apparatus. Foreign travel in the 1970s broadened his horizons, reinforcing his intellectual curiosity and encouraging a broader, even critical perspective of the Soviet system. Gorbachev nurtured ties to intellectuals like Aleksandr Iakovlev, who would figure prominently in the attempt to transform the Soviet system. Thus the 1970s and 1980s, along with ‘stagnation’, generated a critically thinking élite, which included such figures as Abel Aganbegian and Tat’iana Zaslavskaia, who worked in research institutes and bore the accolade institutchiki. Gorbachev’s wife Raisa had close connections to these intellectual circles and played a key role in broadening his intellectual horizons. The impact was evident even before he became general secretary; in December 1984, four months prior to becoming party head, Gorbachev candidly spoke about ‘a slowdown of economic growth at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s’ and hinted at the need for far-reaching changes. Heeding advice from prominent institutchiki, Gorbachev spoke openly about the need to consider price, cost, and efficiency and thus challenged the basic premisses of the command economy that had impeded innovation and growth.

Power, Discipline, and Economic Growth

Vision was not enough: Gorbachev understood that he must consolidate power and change leadership at the very top. Thus, in his very first month in office, he had five allies promoted to key positions, with three becoming members of the Politburo. Over the next two years he engineered a massive turnover in the leadership, replacing the elderly and conservative with younger cadres and institutchiki disposed to transform the existing order. All this had a profound impact on discourse and policy discussions; the Politburo itself began to discuss issues hitherto regarded as taboo.

As the new general secretary consolidated power, he was not primarily seeking to transform the existing system but rather to make it more efficient. He initially laid a heavy emphasis on ‘discipline’. That included a campaign against corruption, much in the spirit of Andropov, but broadened to include not just venality but also the violations of work discipline and alcoholism which bore such heavy costs for the nation’s health and economy. The anti-alcoholism campaign entailed its own high costs, including the destruction of valuable vineyards, a sharp decrease in state revenues, and a boom in the production of untaxed (and unsafe)moonshine. The campaign also elicited popular discontent: in a sputtering economy rife with defitsity (deficit consumer goods), alcohol had absorbed the surplus money in circulation, but Gorbachev’s temperance campaign severely aggravated the ubiquitous problem of deficit goods.