Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (7 page)

history’s cruel tricks

dependency that became common across the Soviet bloc.

East Germany, which abutted a far richer West Germany, eventually accumulated a $26.5 billion foreign debt, whose servicing absorbed 60 per cent of annual export earnings. But to buy off its walled-in people, the party leadership saw no alternative to increasing consumer imports and thus Western dependence.
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In Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, the only force holding back the long-term tidal pull of the West appeared to be Soviet resolve. The acquisition of an outer empire in Eastern Europe—what, again, looked like a Soviet strength—had proved to be a dangerous vul-nerability. Of course, in the late 1940s, when Soviet-style socialism first spread to Eastern Europe, it had seemed the leading edge of a possible world takeover, especially after the 1949 victory of the Chinese Communists in the world’s most populous country. Few people understood that a major shift had indeed occurred—but in the opposite direction, to the grave detriment of Soviet socialism.

Simply put, socialism was utterly dependent on the fortunes of capitalism, and the differences between capitalism in the Great Depression and capitalism in the post-war world were nothing short of earth shattering. No less momentous, the United States, which during the period of the Soviet Union’s rise prior to the Second World War had remained somewhat aloof from European and Asian affairs, now assumed a vigorous role as ‘leader of the free world’, uniting previously fractious capitalist powers under its leadership to counter the Soviet threat.

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Imagine a geopolitical contest in which one side says, I will take West Germany and France, you get East Germany and Romania; I will take Britain and Italy, you get Bulgaria and Hungary; I will take Japan and Saudi Arabia, you get Cuba and Angola. Even Communist China became a threat to the Soviet Union after the Chinese split with Moscow and put themselves forward as an alternative model for the Third World. And what a burden Third World entanglements could be! In the 1970s Somalia– Ethiopia conflict, the Soviet Union decided to airlift heavy tanks to Ethiopia, but because long-distance supply planes could carry only a single tank, transport exceeded the cost of the expensive tanks by five times—never mind what a superpower was doing seeking influence chiefly in countries whose main industry was civil war. The US, which had its own ambitions, opposed Soviet influence by arming proxies. And in the 1975 Helsinki Accords, the US

exchanged formal recognition of post-war European borders, a long-held dream of the Soviet leadership, for the Soviets’ written pledge to uphold human rights. This trade-off, whose importance the CIA completely missed, led to an international legal and moral ‘full court press’

that Soviet diplomats and negotiators felt alongside Western military, economic, and cultural might.
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Panic, humiliation, defection

Leonid Brezhnev, meeting with President Richard Nixon at San Clemente, California, in June 1973, had made a desperate attempt to protect Soviet–American détente by urging a new joint initiative for the Middle East. But Henry Kissinger dismissed Brezhnev’s warnings of impending war between Arabs and Israelis as a negotiating ploy; Kissinger remained unmoved even after the Soviets began to ferry diplomatic personnel and their families out of Arab states. Of course, following the outbreak of hostilities and the uptick in oil prices, the Soviet Union reaped benefits far greater than anything détente had delivered. Inside the Kremlin, the earlier anxiety about the negative effects of a Middle East war must have seemed comical.

But history was playing a cruel trick. Since the 1930s the Soviet Union had rapidly industrialized, captured Hitler’s Berlin, launched Sputnik, banged its shoe on the podium of the UN, and boasted that it would bury capitalism. But by winning the Second World War, and therefore having no necessity, or feeling no desire, to change fundamentally to compete in the transformed post-war international context, the Soviet Union in a way doomed itself.

Not only did it suffer a crushing turnaround
outside
the country between the 1930s and the 1960s, but also, right in the midst of its great 1970s oil boom, the socialist revolution entered a decrepit old age.

Soviet economic growth slowed substantially, and, 25

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because quality was notoriously poor, requiring high rates of replacement, a Soviet economy growing at 2 per cent was tantamount to stagnation. Soon, outright recession— by official statistics—set in. Decades of ecological degrad-ation also reached the tipping point. Key demographic trends were reversed: infant mortality began to rise, and life expectancy at birth began to decline. These negative data were covered up or falsified, but, for the huge populations in the Soviet Union’s industrial toxic zones, there was no concealing the fact that respiratory ailments among children had become epidemic, that the incidence of cancer grew phenomenally, and that alcoholism and absenteeism, already high, were rising. Behind this deep domestic funk, lay the fact that the competition with capitalism—not a policy, but something inherent to the system’s identity and survival—was unwinnable.

The 1973 oil shock initially had seemed to doom capitalism’s remarkable post-war run, but it definitively pushed capitalism further on to a path of deep structural reforms. Those changes would soon cast the USSR’s greatest ostensible achievement—its hyper fossil-fuel economy, upon which its superpower status rested—into a time warp, which its institutional framework could not or would not manage to confront. The 1980s decline in Soviet oil output and in world oil prices made the pain immediate. But it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the full intractability of these profound structural weaknesses would be exposed to the world and the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. What suddenly exposed, 26

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and vastly accelerated, the Soviet system’s decline in the mid and late 1980s was an unavoidable generational change at the top, followed by a much-anticipated campaign to reinvigorate the socialist system. That of course was Mikhail Gorbachev’s ill-fated perestroika.

In his 1987 book
Perestroika
, which sold five million copies in eighty languages, Gorbachev defined his programme as ‘an urgent necessity’. But the Brezhnev leadership had ignored or downplayed the increasing imbalances with the US, and after his death the country could have continued on the same path. Relative to the West, the planned economy performed inadequately, but it employed nearly every person of working age, and the Soviet standard of living, though disappointing, was tolerable for most people (given what they did not know owing to censorship and travel restrictions). The Soviet Union was not in turmoil. 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 manipulated to promote overall loyalty.

Respect for the army was extremely high. Soviet patriotism was very strong. Soviet nuclear forces could have annihi-lated the world many times over. Only the unravelling of the socialist system in Poland constituted an immediate danger, but even that was put off by the successful 1981

Polish crackdown.

Perestroika, however, was born not simply in tangible indicators, but in the crucial psychological dimension of 27

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the superpower competition.
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Among Soviet elites, there was panic at the scope of Western advances as well as humiliation at the country’s deepening relative backwardness. There were, in addition, unmistakable signs of internal defection in elite ranks. By the 1970s and early 1980s, large swathes of the Soviet Union’s upper ranks, including academics, were travelling to the West, and, whether patriots or cynics, they usually came back loaded down with boom boxes, VCRs, fancy clothes, and other goods. The highest officials had such items discretely imported for them, while their children, the future generation of Soviet leadership, pursued coveted long-term postings abroad in the not very socialist occupation of foreign trade representatives. Many party posts, which served as vehicles for enrichment, were being sold to the highest bidder. In 1982, one émigré defector derided the USSR

as a ‘land of kleptocracy’.
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Soulless indulgence, on top of a loss of confidence, had taken deep root, and this frightened loyalists most of all.

Socialist idealism

How does a dictatorship, particularly one without even the discipline of private property and a strong judiciary necessitated by a market economy, control proliferating ranks of its own functionaries? After 1953, when Stalin died, mass terror ceased to be practicable, and anyway it had never prevented malfeasance. In the ensuing decades, 28

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Soviet leaders continued to struggle trying to curb the behaviour of officials. Khrushchev relied upon client networks and toyed with possible term limits for party posts before being ousted. Brezhnev also favoured clientelism, pitting ever-growing informal ‘family circles’, or groupings of officials, against each other, but he proclaimed a post-Stalin ‘stability of cadres’, which became an invitation to licentiousness. Andropov launched campaigns to tighten discipline, and dozens of death sentences were handed out for bribe taking or the abuse of authority, but the overwhelming majority of official misdeeds went unpunished. How could it have been otherwise? In the fulfilment of tasks, rule violations were not only condoned but also encouraged, and determining which violations were permissible, to what degree, and in which circumstances, was arbitrary. If every transgression were to have been punished, almost all of Soviet officialdom would have had to have been executed or jailed.
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All of this was well known, of course, but many party officials nonetheless retained considerable faith in the possibilities of socialism and the party itself. Indeed, the party, not just the economy, was the target of perestroika.

And the party was, simultaneously, also the instrument of perestroika. Gorbachev, as well as the like-minded officials and academic advisers he assembled around him, was acutely aware of the dramatic changes in the post-war West, and the historical fork in the world economy that had popped up in the 1970s—what they called the scientific-technological revolution. Yet they still considered their 29

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country to be on a different time line, for which the key dates were: 1917, the October revolution; 1924, Lenin’s death, followed by Stalin’s ‘usurpation’; 1956, the beginning of Khrushchev’s drive for reform socialism; 1964, Khrushchev’s sacking; and 1968, the Prague Spring’s suppression, which trampled, but did not lay to rest, the vision of a humane socialism. It was not just the superpower competition but a deeply felt urge to make socialism live up to its promises, to reinvigorate the party and return to the imagined ideals of October, that shaped both the decision to launch perestroika and, even more importantly, the
specific form
it took.

In a delicious irony, very rigid political and concomitant economic structures were shaken to their foundations by what was erroneously assumed to have been the Soviet Union’s most rigid structure, Communist ideology.

Marxism-Leninism, after a generational change, turned out to be the source of extraordinary, albeit destabilizing, dynamism. What proved to be the party’s final mobilization, perestroika, was driven not by cold calculation about achieving an orderly retrenchment, but by the pursuit of a romantic dream.

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2

Reviving the dream

We are firmly of the opinion that in the course of peaceful competition the peoples will be able to satisfy themselves as to which social system secures them a higher standard of living, greater assurance for the future, freer access to education and culture, more perfect forms of democracy and personal freedom. We have no doubt that in such competition Communism will win.

(Nikita Khrushchev, preface,
New Communist
Party Programme
, 1961) Gorbachev, unlike Brezhnev, strikes me as a true believer.

(Milovan Djilas, 1988)

Russia’s chaotic, wartime 1917 revolutions were propelled by a desire to remake the world, to overcome what was perceived to be the country’s false and hideous life, and achieve a just and beautiful life, through mass violence if necessary. By the 1930s, under Stalin, the revolutionary 31

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dream for a world of abundance without exploitation had become an enslavement of the peasantry and a forced, headlong expansion of heavy industry, with millions of people called upon to sacrifice whatever it took to ‘catch and overtake’ the capitalists. Alongside the roar of heavy industry, there was also the stamping of jackboots: the Imperial Japanese over-running Manchuria; the Italian fascists marching through Abyssinia (Ethiopia); the Nazis annexing Austria and the Czech lands. The Soviet regime consumed the country and itself in terror, but also girded itself in the armour of advanced modernity—blast fur-naces, turbines, tanks, airplanes—and mobilized its hard-ened factory workers, collective farmers, camp inmates, and commissars for war.

The Second World War was a defining moment for the Soviet Union. No other industrial country has ever experienced the devastation that befell the USSR
in victory
. The Nazi onslaught of 1941–5 levelled more than 1,700 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages, and obliterated about one-third of the USSR’s wealth. Soviet military deaths numbered at least seven million, about half the total for all combatants (the Germans lost 3.5 million soldiers; the Americans about 300,000). Soviet civilian deaths probably numbered between seventeen and twenty million, making its combined human losses near twenty-seven million. Almost an equal number of people were left homeless. Another two million perished from famine between 1946 and 1948. Each year of the first post-war decade, approximately one million children were born 32