History of the Soviet Union (1985-1991)

The rise of Gorbachev

Although reform in the Soviet Union stalled between 1969–1982, a generational shift gave new momentum for reform. Changing relations with the United States might also have been an impetus for reform. While it was Jimmy Carter who had officially ended the policy of Détente following Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, East-West tensions during the first term of U.S. President Ronald Reagan (1981–1985) increased to levels not seen since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

After years of stagnation, the "new thinking" of younger Communist apparatchiks began to emerge. Following the death of the elderly Konstantin Chernenko, the Politburo elected Mikhail Gorbachev to the position of General Secretary of the Soviet Union in March 1985, marking the rise of a new generation of leadership. Under Gorbachev, relatively young, reform-oriented technocrats, who had begun their careers in the heyday of "de-Stalinization" under Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964), rapidly consolidated power within the CPSU, providing new momentum for political and economic liberalization, and the impetus for cultivating warmer relations and trade with the West.

Perestroika poster featuring Gorbachev

By the time Gorbachev ushered in the process that would lead to the dismantling of the Soviet administrative command economy through his programs of glasnost (political openness), perestroika (economic restructuring), and uskoreniye (speed-up of economic development), the Soviet economy suffered from both hidden inflation and pervasive supply shortages aggravated by an increasingly open black market that undermined the official economy. Additionally, the costs of superpower status–the military, KGB, subsidies to client states–were out of proportion to the Soviet economy. The new wave of industrialization based upon information technology had left the Soviet Union desperate for Western technology and credits in order to counter its increasing backwardness.

Reforms

The first reform under Gorbachev was the 1985 alcohol reform, which was designed to fight wide-spread alcoholism in the Soviet Union. Prices on vodka, wine and beer were lifted, and their sales were restricted. People who were caught drunk at work or in public were prosecuted. Drinking on long-distance trains and in public places was banned. Economically it was a serious blow to the state budget (a loss of approximately 100 billion rubles according to Alexander Yakovlev) after alcohol production migrated to black market economy.

The Law on Cooperatives enacted in May 1988 was perhaps the most radical of the economic reforms during the early part of the Gorbachev era. For the first time since Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy, the law permitted private ownership of businesses in the services, manufacturing, and foreign-trade sectors.Under this provision, cooperative restaurants, shops, and manufacturers became part of the Soviet scene.

Glasnost gave a greater freedom of speech. The press became far less controlled, and thousands of political prisoners and many dissidents were released. While Gorbachev's primary goal in undertaking glasnost was to pressure conservatives who opposed his policies of economic restructuring, he also hoped that the Soviet people would support his reform initiatives.

In January 1987, Gorbachev called for democratization: the infusion of democratic elements such as multi-candidate elections into the Soviet political process. In June 1988, at the CPSU's Nineteenth Party Conference, Gorbachev launched radical reforms meant to reduce party control of the government apparatus. In December 1988, the Supreme Soviet approved the establishment of a Congress of People's Deputies, which constitutional amendments had established as the Soviet Union's new legislative body. Elections to the congress were held throughout the USSR in March and April 1989. On March 15, 1990, Gorbachev was elected as the first executive President of the Soviet Union.

Unintended consequences

Gorbachev's efforts to streamline the Communist system offered promise, but were ultimately doomed to failure. By the late 1980s, it was evident that Gorbachev's policies of openness and democratization were going far beyond what had been originally intended. Perestroika and glasnost began exposing how a once revolutionary Communist Party had become moribund at the very centre of the system.

Relaxation of censorship under glasnost resulted in the Communist Party losing its absolute grip on the media. Before long, and much to the embarrassment of the authorities, the media began to expose severe social and economic problems the Soviet government had long denied existed and actively concealed. Problems such as poor housing, alcoholism, drug abuse, pollution, outdated Stalinist-era factories, and petty to large-scale corruption, all of which the official media had ignored, received increased attention. Media reports also exposed crimes committed by Stalin and the Soviet regime, such as Gulags and the Great Purges ignored by the official media. Moreover, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and the mishandling of the 1986 Chernobyl accident further damaged the credibility of the Soviet government at a time when dissatisfaction was increasing.

In all, the very positive view of Soviet life which had long been presented to the public by the official media was being rapidly dismantled, and the negative aspects of life in the Soviet Union were brought into the spotlight. This undermined the faith of the public in the Soviet system and eroded the Communist Party's social power base, threatening the identity and integrity of the Soviet Union itself.

Fraying amongst the members of the Warsaw Pact nations and instability of its western allies, first indicated by Lech Wałęsa's 1980 rise to leadership of the trade union Solidarity, accelerated, leaving the Soviet Union unable to depend upon its satellite states for protection of its borders, as buffer states. By 1989, Moscow had repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine in favor of non-intervention in the internal affairs of its Eastern European allies, fatally depriving Eastern Europe’s regimes of the assurance of Soviet assistance and intervention in the event of popular uprising. Gradually, each of the Warsaw Pact nations saw their communist governments fall to popular elections and, in the case of Romania, a violent uprising. By 1991, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania's communist governments imposed after World War II were brought down as revolution swept Eastern Europe.

The Soviet Union also began experiencing upheaval as the political consequenses of glasnost reverberated throughout the country. Despite efforts at containment, the instability in Eastern Europe inevitably spread to nationalities within the USSR. In elections to the regional assemblies of the Soviet Union's constituent republics, nationalists as well as radical reformers swept the board. As Gorbachev had weakened the system of internal political repression, the ability of the USSR's central Moscow government to impose its will on the USSR's constituent republics had been largely undermined.

The rise of nationalism under glasnost soon reawakened simmering ethnic tensions in various Soviet republics, further discrediting the ideal of a unified Soviet people. One instance occurred in February 1988, when the government in Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly ethnic Armenian region in the Azerbaijan SSR, passed a resolution calling for unification with the Armenian SSR. Violence against local Azerbajanis was reported on Soviet television, provoking massacres of Armenians in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait.

Emboldened by the liberalized atmosphere of glasnost, public dissatisfaction with economic conditions was much more overt than ever before in the Soviet period. Although perestroika was considered bold in the context of Soviet history, Gorbachev's attempts at economic reform were not radical enough to restart the country's chronically sluggish economy in the late 1980s. The reforms made some inroads in decentralization, but Gorbachev and his team left intact most of the fundamental elements of the Stalinist system, including price controls, inconvertibility of the ruble, exclusion of private property ownership, and the government monopoly over most means of production.

By 1990 the Soviet government had virtually lost control over economic conditions. Government spending increased sharply as an increasing number of unprofitable enterprises required state support and consumer price subsidies to continue. Tax revenues declined as revenues from the sales of vodka plummeted during the anti-alcohol campaign and because republic and local governments withheld tax revenues from the central government under the growing spirit of regional autonomy. The elimination of central control over production decisions, especially in the consumer goods sector, led to the breakdown in traditional supplier-producer relationships without contributing to the formation of new ones. Thus, instead of streamlining the system, Gorbachev's decentralization caused new production bottlenecks.

Yeltsin and the dissolution of the USSR

Gorbachev accused Boris Yeltsin, his old rival and Russia's first post-Soviet president, of tearing the country apart out of a desire to advance his own personal interests.

On February 7, 1990 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union agreed to give up its monopoly of power. The USSR's constituent republics began to assert their national sovereignty over Moscow, and started a "war of laws" with the central Moscow government, in which the governments of the constituent republics repudiated all-union legislation where it conflicted with local laws, asserting control over their local economies and refusing to pay tax revenue to the central Moscow government. This strife caused economic dislocation, as supply lines in the economy were broken, and caused the Soviet economy to decline further.

In January 1990, a visit by Gorbachev to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, provoked a pro-independence rally of around 250,000 people. On March 11 1990, Lithuania, led by Chairman of the Supreme Council Vytautas Landsbergis, declared independence. However, the Red Army had a strong presence in Lithuania. The Soviet Union initiated an economic blockade of Lithuania and kept troops there "to secure the rights of ethnic Russians."

On March 30, 1990 the Estonian Supreme Council declared Soviet power in Estonia since 1940 to have been illegal, and started a process to reestablish Estonia as an independent state.

On January 13, 1991 clashes between Soviet troops and unarmed Lithuanian civilians occurred. This further weakened the Soviet Union's legitimacy, internationally and domestically.

On March 17, 1991, in a Union-wide referendum 78 % of all voters voted for the retention of the Soviet Union in a reformed form. The Baltics, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova boycotted the referendum. In each of the other nine republics, a majority of the voters supported the retention of the Soviet Union.

In June 1991, direct elections were held for the post of president of the Russian SFSR. Boris Yeltsin got 57 % of the vote, Nikolai Ryzhkov got 16 %.

The August Coup

For the main article see Soviet coup attempt of 1991.

Gorbachev attempted to restructure the Soviet Union into a less centralized state. On August 20, 1991, the republics were to sign a new union treaty, making them independent republics. The new treaty was supported by the Central Asian republics, who needed the Soviet Union to prosper. Disintegration of the USSR also accorded the desire of local authorities, such as Yeltsin's presidency, to establish full power over their territories. The conservatives and remaining patriots of the USSR, still strong within the CPSU and military establishment, were completely opposed to anything which might contribute to the weakening of the Soviet state.

On August 19, 1991, to prevent the signing of the union treaty by forming the "State Committee on the State Emergency." The "Committee" put Gorbachev (vacationing in the Crimea) under house arrest and attempted to restore the union state. The coup leaders quickly issued an emergency decree suspending political activity and banning most newspapers.

Thousands of people came out to defend the "White House" (Yeltsin's office), then the symbolic seat of Russian sovereignty. The organizers tried but ultimately failed to arrest Boris Yeltsin, who rallied mass opposition to the coup.

On August 21, the coup collapsed, and Gorbachev returned as president of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's powers were fatally compromised as neither union nor Russian power structures heeded his commands. Through the fall of 1991, the Russian government took over the union government, ministry by ministry. In November 1991, Yeltsin issued a decree banning the CPSU throughout the Russian republic.

On September 6, 1991, the Soviet government recognized the independence of the three Baltic states. Then on December 1, 1991, Ukraine declared its independence from the USSR after a popular referendum wherein 90 % of voters opted for independence.

Formation of the CIS and official end of the USSR

On December 8, 1991, the leaders of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian republics met in Belavezhskaya Pushcha to issue a declaration that the Soviet Union was dissolved and replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Twelve of the fifteen republics signed the European Energy Charter in the Hague on December 17, 1991 as if they were sovereign states, along with 28 other European countries, the European Community, and four non-European countries.

On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of the USSR. By December 31, 1991 all official Soviet institutions had ceased operations as individual republics assumed the central government's role. The Soviet flag was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin.

Summary

The four principal elements of the old Soviet system were the hierarchy of soviets, ethnic federalism, state socialism, and Communist Party dominance. Gorbachev's programs of perestroika and glasnost produced radical unanticipated effects that brought that system down. As a means of reviving the Soviet state, Gorbachev repeatedly attempted to build a coalition of political leaders supportive of reform and created new arenas and bases of power. He implemented these measures because of economic problems and political inertia that clearly threatened to put the Soviet Union into a state of long-term stagnation.

But by using structural reforms to widen opportunities for leaders and popular movements in the union republics to gain influence, Gorbachev also made it possible for nationalist, orthodox communist, and populist forces to oppose his attempts to liberalize and revitalize Soviet communism. Although some of the new movements aspired to replace the Soviet system altogether with a liberal democratic one, others demanded independence for the national republics. Still others insisted on the restoration of the old Soviet ways. Ultimately, Gorbachev could not forge a compromise among these forces and the consequence was the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Post-Soviet restructuring

For main article see History of post-Soviet Russia.

Begging in the streets of post-Soviet Russia became increasingly common in the 1990s.

In order to restructure the Soviet administrative command system and effect a transition to capitalism, Yeltsin's shock program, employed days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, cut subsidies to money-losing farms and industries, decontrolled prices, moved toward convertibility of the ruble, created opportunities for his circle and other enterpreneurs to seize the former people's property and moved toward restructuring the largely state-owned economy. After obtaining power, the vast majority of idealistic reformers gained huge possessions using their key positions in government structures. Preexisting institutions had been abandoned before the legal structures of a market economy that governed private property, oversaw the financial market, and enforced taxation had been made functional.

Market economists believed that the dismantling of the administrative command system in Russia would raise GDP and living standards by allocating resources more efficiently. They also thought the collapse would create a movement outward towards production possibilities by eliminating central planning, substituting a decentralized market system, eliminating huge distortions through liberalization, and providing incentives through privatization.

Russia currently faces many problems that the planners in 1992 did not expect, including the 25% of the population that now lives below the poverty line, a drop in life expectancy, low birthrates, and the drop in GDP, which plunged by half after the USSR's collapse. In the eyes of many of the older generation in Russia, life under the old Soviet system was much better and more secure than it is today. These problems led to a series of crises in the 1990s, which nearly lead to election of Yeltsin's Communist opponent in the 1996 presidential election.

External links

• Reform, Coup and Collapse: The End of the Soviet State by Professor Archie Brown.
• Soviet Archives collected by Vladimir Bukovsky
• The Soviet Union Disintegrates by Frank E. Smitha

Further reading

• Helene Carrere D'Encausse, The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations, Basic Books, 1992, ISBN 0465098185

• Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Stanford University Press, 1993, ISBN 0804722471