Under these circumstances, the antinomies of the East European Marxist project were most obvious in the last decade of the Soviet Union, when the tribulations of the “Gorbachev phenomenon” were perfect examples of the failure of ideological reform. The fundamental question here, identical in its nature with the one that kick-started revisionist thinking, was, could the Soviet system reform itself into something really different without ceasing to be the Soviet system?'77 On the one hand, by the late 1980s, Gorbachev and his followers had a clear idea of what they were trying to reform: “a system that suffocated individuals, a totalitarian regime, a State monopoly over everything,” one not merely imposed by the Cold War, because “there was also, within it, a dominant group that sought embitterment, pursued utopia, yearned for War Communism, and thought it could govern with continued repressions.”78 However, the revitalization of the USSR's status on the world stage and the relegitimization of socialism (both domestically and internationally) were dependent, in Gorbachev's view, on a successful systemic transformation of the Soviet state. In other words, the Soviet leader rejected “the option of muddling through” characteristic of his predecessors.79 Ultimately, his staunch belief in the possibility of simultaneously dismantling “Stalinist socialism” (a formula used by the weekly Literaturnaya gazeta in May 1988) and refounding the Soviet polity lies at the heart of the paradoxes that brought about the collapse of the Moscow center. Retrospectively, this approach, which proved fatally contradictory, leaves us with a historical image of Gorbachev best described by political scientist Stephen Hanson in 1989: “A pure revolutionary romantic, believing absolutely in the creative power of the masses, unable to countenance in principle any concrete institutionalization of revolutionary politics that might stifle this creativity, and therefore doomed to be defeated by others who had no such scruples.”80
One can therefore safely say, as Archie Brown did throughout his work, that Gorbachev was in fact a genuine Marxist revisionist, who, while paying lip service to Lenin's iconic figure, moved away from Bolshevism as a political culture based on fanaticism, sectarianism, and voluntarism toward a self-styled version of Marxist revisionism. In the Russian tradition of reforms from above, Gorbachev's attempt to restore the moral impetus of Communism was based, however, on a miscalculation: the gradual elimination of the party's control over society opened the door to autonomous alternatives. The Russian literary critic Igor Dedkov spelled out in his diary the new horizons brought forth by Gorbachev's ascendance in the Kremlin: “A man of our generation has come to power. A new cycle of Russian illusions is about to begin.”81 The politics of glasnost unleashed pluralism, with its own dynamics that would transgress the focus of Gorbachev's reform project.
When trying to understand the complex picture of perestroika, its context and consequences, one must not overlook the role that ideas played in the course of events. In itself, the prehistory of East European revisionism was, along with the mythical “original Leninist moment” (the 1917 Soviets or the NEP period), a stepping stone for the Soviet 1980s. Moreover, the successes of the dissent movement in the region (greatly aided by Gorbachev's commitment to “non-intervention”) heightened the sense of revolutionary transformation among the actors involved in the process of change. I mentioned earlier in this chapter the three layers of the intellectual establishment in a Soviet-type system (ideological apparatchiks, party technocrats/intellectuals, and dissidents). In the 1980s, these three groups influenced each other to the extent of provoking a wholesale alteration of the discursive horizon, the conceptual pool employed, and the expectations both at the level of policy-making and of the public space. It could be argued that by the last decade of Leninism, there was a general consensus within Soviet intellectual milieus regarding the imperative of rethinking the possible solutions to the USSR's problems. Here lies the oddity of the situation: the Soviet polity was indeed on the decline (especially as a leader of the world Communist movement), but it was far from being in turmoil. According to Stephen Kotkin, “Nationalist separatism existed, but it did not remotely threaten the Soviet order. The KGB crushed the small dissident movement. The enormous intelligentsia griped incessantly, but it enjoyed massive state subsidies [that were] manipulated to promote overall loyalty.”82 Gorbachev's biographer, political scientist Archie Brown, formulated this argument in an even more straightforward fashion: “In the Soviet Union reform produced crisis more than crisis forced reform. The fate of the Soviet system and of the Soviet state did not hang in the balance in 1985. By 1989 the fate of both did.”83
The mixture of a fading and compromised international status (the U.S. challenge, the post-Helsinki embarrassments, the Third World adventures, the Afghan quagmire, or even Euro-Communism), the obvious lack of legitimacy of the East European Communist regimes (and their glaring inability to counter dissident movements without widespread violence), and the almost unanimous belief among large sections of the party elite in the necessity of proposing reform (in the aftermath of the Brezhnevite “stagnation” and of the Konstantin Chernenko debacle) produced an environment where Gorbachev and his followers' ideas could turn into a political program. In other words, it was time for revisionism to come to power at the very center of the empire. Herein lies the difference between the 1980s in the USSR and 1956 or 1968 in Central Europe. In 1968 Europe, critical Marxism officialized into policy was a response to chronic delegitimation of and turmoil within the respective regimes; in the former, it functioned rather as a preemptive measure and as a perceived need for systemic revival.84 In the Soviet Union, the “new thinking,” as the epitome of the leadership ranks' mindset, “did not merely signal a reconsideration of policy efficacy or recalculation of ends and means, but reflected instead a long-term and wholesale revision of beliefs, values, and identity.”85
The group of party intellectuals who rallied around the CPSU general secretary informed and influenced his political thought and major choices. These advisors and associates not only shared Gorbachev's reformist drive but also contributed to its radicalization.86 They were the “children of the Twentieth Party Congress,” individuals who benefited from the opening of possibilities, both domestically and internationally, facilitated by de-Stalinization: “Inadvertently, Khrushchev's policies of peaceful coexistence [and later Brezhnev's détente] and cultural competition, as well as his rhetoric, helped resurrect a major phenomenon familiar to the older Russian intelligentsia: the idea of the outside world, above all the West, as a measuring stick for Russia's progress or backwardness…. The discovery of other worlds was still linked in the minds of many intellectuals to the future of the Soviet communist experiment, its progress or failure.”87
The glasnost campaign notwithstanding, some things never changed in the structure of the Soviet propaganda rituals. The general secretary was still the dominant voice authorized to express the revealed truth. The limits of the discussion and the scope and objectives of openness were prescribed by the ideological nomenklatura. Even important figures such as Alexander Yakovlev were confronted with vilification by hard-core Communists, KGB top brass, and Great Russian xenophobes for being Gorbachev's “evil spirit” and archtraitors to socialism. Other such representatives of the reformers' group who got into the crosshairs of those threatened by the “Gorbachev phenomenon” were philosopher Ivan Frolov (for a while CPSU Central Committee secretary); political scientist Georgiy Shakhnazarov (president of the Political Sciences Academy); Gorbachev's foreign policy advisor Anatoly Chernyaev; Otto Latsis, deputy editor-in-chief of the CPSU theoretical journal Kommunist; Georgii Smirnov, the director of the CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism; Ivan Voronov, the head of the Central Committee's Cultural Department; and many others.88 Some of them had worked in Prague in the 1970s as editors of the monthly World Marxist Review and were attracted to ideas that within the general atmosphere of zastoi were unorthodox, if not altogether heretical.89 What remains crucial regarding the “young policy-academic elite” surrounding Gorbachev was that the bond which brought it together was a common experience of acculturation in reform. Robert English identified two levels in the process of learning a new identity: “Comparative-interactive learning, whereby foreign ties facilitate a shift in intellectuals' essential ‘self-categorization’ of the nation among allies and adversaries; and social learning, in which growing numbers of intellectuals from diverse professions are drawn into an informal domestic community.”90 People such as Yakovlev, Alexei Arbatov (department head of the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR), Abel Aganbegyan, Evgeny Velikhov, Chernyaev, Shakhnazarov, and others became the proponents of a “new thinking” in international politics that rejected the Soviet tradition of capitalist encirclement or permanent revolution in favor of integration with “the common stream of world civilization.” They brought about what conservatives called the “conspiracy of academicians,” which engineered the volte-face that brought an end to the Cold War.91 They were also among the first to attack the reality of Brezhnevschina—political paralysis accompanied by moral disarray, intellectual despair, and a continuous erosion of the ruling ideology. Robert C. Tucker rightly described pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union as a profoundly troubled society: “People en masse have stopped believing in the transcendent importance of a future collective condition called ‘communism.’ They have stopped believing in the likelihood of the society arriving at that condition and the desirability of trying to achieve it through the leading role of the Communist party, or through themselves as ‘builders of communism,’ which is how the official party program defines Soviet citizens. In a society with an official culture founded on just those beliefs, this spells a deep crisis.”92
The whole ethos of the Soviet political class thus suffered a process of slow and apparently irreversible dissolution. Not surprisingly, the regeneration of Soviet political culture emerged as a widely shared concern among the elite stalwarts. Gorbachev's 1989 unpublished manuscript in which he delineated the main directions for an overall pluralist renewal of the Soviet system can be considered an answer to those who expressed skepticism about his determination to go beyond the boundaries of a revamped Leninism (including many Soviet dissidents as well as Western academics and politicians). By promoting the idea of a system based on the rule of law, Gorbachev did in fact unleash an unstoppable political process with world-historical effects. In February 1990, Gorbachev convinced the Central Committee to accept the principle of a multiparty system and to relinquish the Communist Party's constitutional privilege: “The party in a renewing society can exist and play its role as vanguard only as a democratically recognized force. This means that its status should not be imposed through constitutional endorsement.”93 One can see that Gorbachev was actually restating a 1968 pronouncement by his friend Zdeněk Mlynář on the two conditions of validity for the preservation of the leading role of the party.94 According to many authors, even this approach was just the tip of the iceberg, in the sense that from 1987 until 1991, Gorbachev and his entourage jostled with the idea of splitting the CPSU in the search for greater legitimacy and wider support for the perestroika version of the USSR.95
In 1988, Brown argues, a major shift occurred in Gorbachev's intellectual awakening. By that time, he had already publicly condemned Stalin's “unforgettable and unforgivable crimes.” For all practical purposes, he converted to a version of Marxist revisionism directly inspired by Eduard Bernstein's evolutionary socialism. In the words of Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev was going through a process of “sweeping de-ideologization.”96 The Twenty-seventh Party Congress in 1986 had already replaced the iron law of class struggle with “a new doctrine emphasizing the priority of ‘universal human values,’ including human rights and self-determination.”97 By denouncing Stalin's reign of terror, Gorbachev was effectively bidding farewell to Lenin's ideology-driven partocratic system. Contrary to those who consider civil pressure as the major cause of perestroika, Brown underlines that “with the principal exception of Poland, it is doubtful that the growth of civil society should be seen as a source of fundamental political change in the communist world rather than as a consequence of it.”98 It was “institutional amphibiousness”99 that caused most of the transformations. In other words, institutions designed to foster and legitimize the system (ideological departments, the party academy, theoretical journals, and think tanks) came to undermine the role they were supposed to play. This point indeed clarifies the unexpected intellectual trajectories within the nomenklatura, including some spectacular apostasies that were responses to the system's insoluble moral and cultural crisis. Gorbachevism tried to offer antidotes to the rampant pathologies of cynicism, corruption, and cronyism. The last years of the Soviet Union were fundamentally characterized by a process of national iconoclasm, with the major mythological foundations of the existing system falling apart one after the other.
Ultimately, however, Gorbachev's inability to overcome the old ideological dramaturgy affected the extent of change within the Soviet system. Whereas Yakovlev came to the conclusion that Stalinism was inseparable from the Bolshevik tradition, which needed to be jettisoned entirely, Gorbachev could not breach a certain mental horizon determined by his attachment to the existing system. He held back for tactical reasons, but also because of his deep inner convictions. For Yakovlev, Lenin was guilty of crimes against humanity, a stance that Gorbachev would consistently evade. A seasoned Marxist-Leninist yet a fundamentally honest human being, Yakovlev came to understand the Soviet Union, the historical product of Leninism, in its essence as a state defined by proscription. Gorbachev could not overcome his perception of it as a realm of possibility.100
Yet Gorbachev's break with Leninism, less strident than Yakovlev's, was real. At the end of the day, one can see Gorbachev as a combination of Imre Nagy and Alexander Dubcek: unable to fully abandon the outworn Leninist model, desperately searching for “socialism with a human face,” torn between nostalgia for old ideals and the tragic awareness of their hollowness. More than a neo-Menshevik or a Western-style Social Democrat a la Willy Brandt (whom he admired), Gorbachev remains the last and most influential of those East European Leninist leaders who tried to humanize an inherently inhuman system. Yakovlev, for his part, was the prototypical case of the apparatchik turned apostate in the terminal stages of Bolshevism. His volume of dialogues with Lilly Marcou tried to point to a “democratic potential” of Leninism. At the time, he argued,
Through the return to universal values and the process of European integration, the socialist idea is taking root in Europe. The way out of this dead end that was the Cold War will be through perestroika in the USSR and through the evolution in the other East European nations…. For the moment, the people are refusing socialism: the idea has stumbled on the real conditions of East European countries; it was destroyed by the Stalinist counterrevolution. Now that the Stalinist model has been eliminated, we will see the emergence of a post-Thermidor socialism. This new socialism, which will no longer know bureaucratic oppression, will be made in the name of mankind.101
Of course, after 1992, the break was complete, allowing him to become the president of the Commission for the Rehabilitation of Stalinism's Victims. His book, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, bears witness to his journey from dogma to democracy.
The need for a dramatic divorce from the past was nevertheless recognized by the most radical partisans of perestroika. The Declaration of Moscow Conference of Socialist Clubs, issued in August 1987, formulated the following demands: legal status for independent organizations and associations; the right to initiate legislation and to secure the fulfillment of party decisions aimed at democratizing the electoral system; the right for social organizations to nominate their own representatives to all levels of the Soviets of People's Deputies without restrictions and with free access of candidates to the mass media; a legal distinction between criticism of the shortcomings of the existing system and antistate activity; and, in accord with the first point of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party program, citizen rights to prosecute in court officials responsible for illegal acts, independent of complaints made at administrative levels.102
As the perestroika policies advanced, political mobilization from below in the Soviet Union focused on the elimination of the counterweights preventing the realization of true democracy. These counterweights, according to Stephen Cohen, infringed on what he calls “the institutions of a representative democracy [existent already in the Soviet polity]—a constitution that included provisions for civil liberties, a legislature, elections, a judiciary, a federation.”103 Their removal seemingly would have finally unveiled the long-awaited “reformed Soviet socialism.” The USSR's rapid collapse combined with the political reorientation of large sections of the federation's population argue against Cohen's thesis. As Archie Brown notes, perestroika did not succeed in overcoming systemic limbo. The transition from one system to another was never completed, thus reinforcing the increasingly widespread perception of the Soviet polity's unreformability.104 Both Karen Dawisha and Stephen Hanson indicate that what Gorbachev envisaged as reform became, in the context of the last decade of the Moscow center, “a (counterrevolutionary self-destruction of the party-state.” To paraphrase Karen Dawisha, perestroika, through its policies, publicly acknowledged the elephant in the “communal apartment”—there was a critical and fatal error at the core of the Communist project for building a new civilization.105
The ruling elites in Communist countries failed because of their inability to function within political pluralism. The principal function of Communist bureaucracy was to exert dictatorship over mind and body. The Communist bureaucratic ethos involved a strong esprit de corps, a solidarity developed through common existential experience, continued paternalism, and a jealously guarded monopoly of power. It can be argued that Gorbachev was too conscious of the revolution from above that he had initiated. The policy of glasnost was, for him, primarily an instrument for clearing the ranks of state and party bureaucracy. The acceptance of the imposed degree of economic reform and democratization continued to torment the Soviet ruling elite.
Gorbachev seemed perplexed by the popular reaction and extrapolation of his policies, as he focused primarily on eliminating his rivals (from Ligachev to Yeltsin). He thus facilitated what Stephen Hanson calls “a breakdown of elite unity” that left the door open to “damaging, short-run opportunistic behavior by lower-level agents of the state bureaucracy throughout the USSR.”106 Gorbachev indeed triggered a revolution from above but missed the revolutionary effect it would have upon the population. His ultimate commitment to a Soviet state under the rule of the CPSU, another avatar of the old revisionist fancy of ideological craft from within with supposedly preexisting tools, is another explanation for his downfall. This commitment is key to his vacillations in early 1991, when he briefly approached the hard-liners in the party (sacrificing, among others, Yakovlev) and his dubious stand on the use of force in Latvia, Lithuania, and Azerbaijan. It also explains the January 1991 CPSU resolution that advocated “the export of energy sources to Eastern Europe as the most important instrument” for “reestablishing our [Soviet] ‘presence’ in the region” in order to “neutralize or at least diminish the anti-Soviet tendencies in the East European countries.”107 Even the famous abandonment of the CPSU's constitutionally guaranteed leading role in society (Article 6) came three days after a 100,000-strong demonstration in Moscow against the Communist Party.
Reading Gorbachev and Mlynář's dialogue in “What to Do with the Party?” it is obvious that the Soviet leader was utterly confused as to how to bring about political pluralism while sustaining state socialism. He correctly took the first step by digging up the Great October slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” in order to secularize power and decision-making in the USSR. In this way, he attempted to place party officials under the control of society. The original slogan of the 1917 revolution meant “freedom from party dictates not only for elected government bodies but also for executive bodies established by those legislative bodies. It meant a law-based separation of government powers.” The parallel structures created could not fully develop into bodies of representative democracy while preserving Article 6 of the CPSU Constitution, which maintained the power monopoly of the Communist Party. Gorbachev's description of the events shows how the protracted negotiations within the Central Committee did produce change, but only under pressure from the 1990 republican elections. He admits that only in July 1991 did the leading body of the party succeed in producing “a program of democratic socialism in the modern sense of the word.” Political pluralism for Gorbachev meant a rather dubious “development of the party into a social organism, that is, to regroup and reshape the millions of Communists who were not part of thenomenklatura”108 He apparently maintained a belief in the innerworldly vocation that characterized the virtuosi of the early years of Bolshevism. A question therefore lingers, one I initially raised in 1990: Did Gorbachev's revolution have the potential to be an anti-Leninist revolution? His plans do seem to have maintained the features of a movement-regime defined by an encompassing socialist spirit. He attempted to formulate a new social contract based on mutual trust and respect between leaders and citizens. The party as a collective intellectual in the Gramscian sense, its relegitimation through intellectual competence and moral authority, never succeeded, however, in becoming a viable alternative to the political and national pluralism or fragmentation of the Leninist twilight.
Following Archie Brown, one can identify three main causes for the failure of the Gorbachev experiment: first, he did not champion economic reforms in the direction of a market economy; second, he reacted late and often in self-defeating ways to the rise of centrifugal nationalist and separatist movements; third, he underestimated the nomenklatura's capacity for retrenchment and delayed an alliance with genuine democratic forces. It was Boris Yeltsin who knew how to capitalize politically on the tempestuous rise of civil society in Russia. Nonetheless, it was thanks to Gorbachev and the Gorbachevites that the USSR moved from a state based on contempt for the individual and the rule of law to one in which human and civil rights were taken seriously. Whatever one thinks of Gorbachev's post-Leninist political philosophy, it is certain that he dissociated himself from the obnoxiously despotic features of the old regime. Gorbachev's problem was that he and his followers advocated what Jacques Levesque called “an ideology of transition” permeated by “a Promethean ambition to change the existing world order, based on new, universal values.” It provided the justificatory basis for Soviet foreign policy and created the legitimacy that held in check and ultimately defeated the conservative forces within the CPSU.109 It also fueled a twofold illusion: the capacity to control change in the context of a society ravaged by the workings of the Marxist-Leninist political religion and a belief in the society's will for socialist transformation despite doctrinal competition and political pluralism. In other words, Gorbachevism did not realize at the time that no phoenix could be reborn from the ashes of “the first workers' state.”
The dissolution of civil society and the preservation of an atomized social space, the sine qua non features of Soviet-type totalitarianism, engendered widespread moral indifference and intellectual corruption. In the words of Archie Brown, “there were almost certainly more true believers in a radiant future during the worst years of mass terror than forty years later.”110 The official language was second nature, a protective shield against outbursts of spontaneity. People simulated loyalty to the system, generating a flourish of ritualistic behavior rather than of sentimental attachment. As Vaclav Havel put it, “Because of this dictatorship of the ritual, however, power becomes anonymous. Individuals are almost dissolved in the ritual. They allow themselves to be swept along by it and frequently it seems as though ritual alone carries people from obscurity into the light of power…. The automatic operation of a power structure thus dehumanized and made anonymous is a feature of the fundamental automatism of this system.”111