Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia · 1988
Did Gorbachev fail, or end the Soviet system without war?
The seminar question: “Should Gorbachev be judged a failure for losing the system he set out to save, or credited for ending it without a major war?”
Mikhail Gorbachev, chosen Soviet leader in March 1985, set out to save socialism by making it work. An anti-alcohol campaign and the oil price fall of 1985–86 emptied the budget, Chernobyl in April 1986 turned him to glasnost, and the contested elections of March 1989 gave an opposition a national stage.
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Gorbachev’s early reforms tried to make the old system run faster, and they collided with an economic shock. As general secretary, the party’s leader and so the country’s, he promised “acceleration” through investment in machine-building and tighter discipline, and in May 1985 he launched a campaign against drinking that cut vodka production and raised prices. Alcohol taxes had been one of the budget’s largest sources of income, and the campaign removed tens of billions of roubles over three years while moonshine replaced state vodka. At the same moment world oil prices fell from about 27 dollars a barrel in 1985 to around 14 in 1986, cutting the export earnings on which grain imports depended. The government covered the gap by printing money, and by 1989 the budget deficit, the gap between spending and revenue, reached about a tenth of national output by Western estimates. In December 1986 the replacement of Kazakhstan’s Kazakh party chief by a Russian outsider brought students onto the streets of Alma-Ata. A reformer who needed money and calm began his work with neither.
The short answer
- A generational change at the top. Between November 1982 and March 1985 three general secretaries died in office, and the old guard finally gave way to a younger man who had risen through regional party work in Stavropol and agriculture. Gorbachev and his allies, including Alexander Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze, had seen the West and believed the system could be renewed. The decline described in chapter 7 had created the demand for reform; the deaths of the old leaders created the opportunity.
- Falling oil prices and the vodka campaign emptied the budget. The two largest sources of state income besides enterprise profits were alcohol taxes at home and oil and gas sales abroad. Gorbachev’s temperance campaign cut the first, and the collapse of world oil prices in 1985–86 cut the second. With the war in Afghanistan, the Chernobyl clean-up and an investment drive also to be paid for, the government printed money, and the resulting excess of cash over goods undermined every later reform.
- Chernobyl discredited secrecy. The accident exposed incompetence and lies at every level, from the plant’s managers to the ministries in Moscow. It persuaded Gorbachev that problems hidden from the leadership could not be fixed, and it gave reformers an argument against the censors. Glasnost became the tool he used to expose opponents of reform, and it soon escaped his control as citizens used it to criticise the party itself.
- The apparatus resisted economic reform. Ministries and regional party bosses had built their careers on the plan, and they diluted every measure that threatened their control over resources. By 1988 Gorbachev had concluded that only political competition would force them to change. The 19th Party Conference in June–July 1988 approved contested elections to a new parliament, moving the struggle for reform from the party’s offices to the voting booth.
THE TURNING POINT
The elections of 26 March 1989. These elections are the hinge because they created a source of authority outside the party. For the first time since 1917 most voters had a choice of candidates, and in Leningrad and other cities they used it to reject senior party officials, while Boris Yeltsin won Moscow with almost 90% of the vote. When the Congress of People’s Deputies, a new 2,250-member parliament, met in May, millions watched its debates on television, including Andrei Sakharov’s attack on the party’s monopoly. From now on power could be claimed through votes, and leaders of the republics would soon claim it in the name of their own peoples.
What it changed
An elected opposition gained a national stage. Inside the new Congress, Yeltsin, Sakharov and several hundred allies formed the Inter-Regional Group of deputies, the first organised opposition since the 1920s. In March 1990 the Congress abolished the article of the constitution that guaranteed the party’s leading role. Elections to the republics’ parliaments that spring brought nationalist and democratic movements to power in the Baltic states, Russia and elsewhere.
Shortages turned into a crisis of supply. By 1989–90 the state could no longer deliver basic goods, rationing spread, and regions and republics hoarded food and raw materials. The money overhang and empty shops that perestroika left behind became the starting point for the price liberalisation of January 1992. Any successor government would inherit an economy with too much money and too few goods.
National movements found their voice. Glasnost allowed the peoples of the Union to speak about their own grievances. In February 1988 the Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh, hatched on the map, voted to leave Azerbaijan, and that year popular fronts formed in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Reform from the centre was producing demands for freedom from the centre.
The full answer, argued
Judged by his own goals, Gorbachev failed: he wanted a reformed, more productive socialism within a renewed Union, and by 1991 the economy was in free fall and the Union had dissolved. His economic measures, from the vodka campaign to the enterprise law, made shortages and deficits worse. Yet historians such as Archie Brown and William Taubman stress that he refused to use mass force to keep power at home or in Eastern Europe, accepted competitive elections and ended the Cold War. The episodes of violence in Tbilisi in 1989 and Vilnius in 1991 show both that force was used and that it was not pursued to the end. A strong answer separates intention from outcome and economics from politics, and weighs what alternative leaders might realistically have done. Many conclude that he was a failed economic reformer and a remarkable political one. The transferable lesson is that a leader’s refusal to use force can decide the character of a transition as much as any policy.
An interesting fact
The anti-alcohol campaign was so unpopular that people nicknamed Gorbachev the “mineral secretary” instead of the general secretary. Yet the campaign had a measurable effect on health: deaths from heart disease, accidents and alcohol poisoning fell, and male life expectancy in Russia rose to about 65 years in 1987, its highest level in the whole Soviet period. When the campaign was abandoned and drinking returned, life expectancy began to fall again, and the collapse that followed in the 1990s was partly a delayed bill for the lives the campaign had briefly saved.
This is the study layer of Perestroika and glasnost, chapter 8 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000; the full index of the atlas is here.
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