Why were those who believed in genuinely democratic market socialism unable to prevent the collapse of the Soviet state and the Soviet system?

A still greater success in the process of democratisation was arguably the restructuring of Soviet politics in terms of the relationship between party and state. By the 19th Party Conference of June-July 1988 external pressure for reform had accumulated significantly. Gorbachev notes in his Memoirs that “perestroika was being taken up by the masses, people were emerging from a state of apathy and alienation”. The conference was televised, and the dramatic debate between Yeltsin and Ligachev provided evidence of politics moving towards open democracy. Each subsequent change in Soviet political fabric seemed to herald a new age of democratic socialism: from the resolutions of the conference, via the constitutional amendments of December 1988, to free elections the following March. For many of the millions who watched the first sitting on live television on 28 May, it seemed as though Gorbachev had achieved the impossible task of democratising the USSR.

Yet the impression of functioning democracy masked profound tensions between the Politburo and the new institutions, at the centre of which was the contradiction of the continued monopoly of the party. Gorbachev only managed to convince the Politburo to dispense with the lynchpin of 70 years of Soviet rule at great expense in terms of his credibility within the party. Furthermore when the escalating economic and nationalities problems led him to assume the executive Presidency in March, he used the crisis to bypass a general election, leaving him without a popular mandate. Finally, Gorbachev’s refusal to drastically reform the Communist Party lost him amongst the democrats, and his refusal to resign as General Secretary tied him to a party organisation which was increasingly defunct. Jonathan Steele commented that Gorbachev “was like a man riding two horses, and both were lame”.  Gorbachev’s position now relied largely on the realisation of Medvedev’s theory that complete separation of party and state and the introduction of multi-party democracy would create a natural consensus for the party, marginalising both conservative and radical opinion.

Instead, the political movement that would gain most from the new constitutional framework was the democratic opposition to the party. The elections of March 1990 saw ‘Democratic Russia’ win 350 out of 1,026 seats, making it a significant minority. The movement’s greatest asset was its leader Boris Yeltsin. An interview he gave to Moskovskaya Pravda in April 1987 had shown peculiar political foresight in comments on perestroika:

“The choice is simple: Either throw open the windows so the wind can blow away the cobwebs, or again sweep the dust into the corners and close the heavy bolts.”

Yeltsin’s stand against the corruption of the nomenklatura system at the October 1987 Central Committee plenum, and his subsequent resignation and political resurrection, had given him the appearance of an anti-establishment hero. His skills of political opportunism also proved crucial, particularly in his use of the institutions of the RSFSR to undermine the authority of the Soviet Union. His election as Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet in May 1990, and the symbolic Declaration of State Sovereignty which followed it, put him in the position of a nationalist leader fighting for the cause of Russia in outright opposition to the Soviet centre. Thus the more perestroika and Gorbachev failed to solve the crises of the Soviet Union, the more popular Yeltsin became. According to Jonathan Steele, one of the first foreign correspondents allowed to attend a Communist Party Congress, “the sensation of the [July 1990] party Congress was Boris Yeltsin’s announcement that he was suspending his membership” being the first senior figure to do so. This dramatic departure cast Yeltsin as an independent national leader condemning a corrupt and failing institution. Gorbachev was once again left outmanoeuvred and embarrassed. A poll of October 1990 gave Yeltsin a 60% popularity rating, which contrasted starkly with Gorbachev’s 21%, and indicated the success of democratic opposition in weakening support for his moderate politics.

By the winter of 1990 it was clear that democratisation had critically undermined the authority of the CPSU, the prime indication of which was a massive loss of between three and four million party members over the course of the year. Robert Service lists six traditional pillars of Soviet social and political control, and argues that all of them had disappeared or been significantly weakened by 1990: the one-party state, mono-ideological controls, militant atheism, a centralized administration, a state economic monopoly and the ‘suspendability’ of law. While genuine democrats could not countenance these factors remaining in any measure, supporters of the old system demanded nothing less than complete return to former methods of control. The weakening of the authority of the party endangered the very existence of the party elite, who maintained significant influence as the former backbone of the Soviet state.

Increasingly militant opposition from this conservative elite was a powerful threat to those who still supported democratic socialism. Their abiding influence constrained the possibility of further radical reform of the USSR, which might have been able to undercut or assimilate Yeltsin and his supporters. The strengthening of opposition from the right began with Ivan Polozkov’s appointment as first secretary of the Communist Party of Russia in June 1990. This arch-conservative had thereby won for the right a national organisation almost as subversive as Yeltsin’s control of the RSFSR. The threat of counter-revolution tied Gorbachev so firmly to the party elite, that when Ryzhkov threatened to resign over the Shatalin-Yavlinsky programme in autumn 1990, the whole project was terminally disrupted. Federal reform was simultaneously derailed by the ‘Soyuz’ parliamentary movement, which had brought together a workable conservative majority in the Supreme Soviet, and had crucial links with the armed forces. Their intransigence on the issue of granting a measure economic independence to the Soviet republics left Gorbachev with little room for manoeuvre in his nationalities policy. Opposition to a democratic socialist solution from both left and right had paralysed its leader, and left him powerless to deal with the two great crises of the Soviet system.

The failure of ‘market socialism’ and accelerating economic collapse encouraged a vicious circle by making radical democratic reform more popular and conservative opinion more militant. As part of the general programme of perestroika launched in 1987, Gorbachev had hoped that the introduction of market elements into the Soviet economy would promote growth rather than decline. His contemporary models came in the form of social democratic economies such as Sweden, which combined successful markets with high levels of welfare. In terms of historical precedent, he looked again to Lenin and NEP’s revitalisation of the 1920s economy. Both of these analogies were fundamentally flawed. The Scandinavian economies may have provided a target for which to aim, but their experience provided no precedent for the transition from a command system to price-led markets. The permissive policies of NEP may have hinted that dismantling the command economy could be a good in itself, by allowing previously suppressed markets to flourish. However, the fact that the Soviet economy, society and demography had all changed so completely by the late 1980s curbed the value of this lesson from the past.

Gorbachev’s economic reforms between 1987 and 1990 served to demonstrate that simply removing Communist Party control over the economy would not be enough to restore steady growth. In September 1988 Gorbachev abolished the Central Committee departments responsible for supervising the economic ministries. Archie Brown criticises the effectiveness of this measure, arguing that “even if it removed one layer of high-level bureaucracy, it left the ministries more unchecked than ever”. Brown is right to point out that the tentative nature of Gorbachev’s reforms was in part due to his “having to weigh what was economically desirable against what was politically feasible”, but the reforms he did pass went some way to removing old economic structures without erecting any in their place. The law On the Enterprise, introduced in 1987, attempted to provide incentives by giving enterprises a certain amount of freedom to introduce productivity related wage differentials, and to vary prices in consultation with their ministry. The result of devolving extended control of output and prices to the enterprises was only to worsen shortages further. Workers and enterprise managers often colluded in the production of more profitable and more expensive alternatives to everyday consumer goods. By June 1989 even Moscow was experiencing serious shortages of matches, salt and soap. The introduction of market elements into the Soviet system had brought all the ills of a capitalist system without any of its benefits. Inflation was particularly dangerous in the context of the Soviet economy because it had been previously unknown, and as a result the network of prices became hideously distorted. Stephen White provides the example of a Leningrad pensioner who complained to Pravda about the price of toothpaste, in response to which a Petrozavodsk reader pointed out that bread was dearer but no better.

The insurmountable pressure for action resulting from accelerating economic collapse was enough to make Gorbachev consider radical reform in the face of likely conservative opposition. In an interview with Izvestiya the economist Stanislav Shatalin argued that “the risk of going over to a market economy is less than the cost of marking time”. Gorbachev demonstrated his agreement with the sentiment by his attempt to create enough consensus to support a radical ‘500 Days Programme’, drafted by leading economists including Shatalin, for the rapid transition to a market economy. Yet it is unlikely that even this radical plan could have saved the Soviet state and the Soviet system. Even the ‘shock therapy’ applied to the economy by Boris Yeltsin after the events 1991 did not result in automatic recovery. The timetable of the Shatalin-Yavlinsky programme itself contained absurdly ambitious goals, and Gorbachev’s former chief economic advisor Abalkin remarked sardonically in an interview that if they managed to achieve them in five hundred days, he would raise them a monument and lay flowers at it. Economic transition from the Soviet system to a market economy was simply unachievable in the short term.

One of the major reasons the plan was not eventually adopted was the inability to get the party apparatus to agree to new economic arrangements with the Soviet republics. Attempts to create a genuinely federal relationship while maintaining the supremacy Soviet Union were constantly thwarted. This was partly because the republics mounted a genuinely effective challenge to Soviet rule after the weakening of central authority brought about by perestroika. As mass nationalist movements began to participate in and dominate new democratic institutions, the regional cadres that had been fostered throughout the Brehznev era often chose to form alliances with emergent Popular Fronts. Suny argues that the success of the national movements was direct the result of inherent weakness in the Soviet state. In his view the Karabagh crisis, and particularly the armed invasion of Baku which killed over 160 people, “revealed the inadequacies of the Soviet constitutional order and the growing weakness of cohesive elements within the federation other than armed force”. The Soviet Union’s history of reliance on military might rather than genuine consensus to maintain its empire was clearly underestimated by those who sought to legitimise its rule. Once this authority was removed, the sheer strength of mass nationalist movements particularly in the Baltic States (but also in Georgia, Armenia, and Moldavia) made any relationship with the Union other than complete independence unlikely.

The possibility of making a Union Treaty radical enough satisfy the demands the republics was hamstrung by conservative opposition. On 29 August 1990 Central Committee Secretary O.S.Shenin (who would be one of Gorbachev’s Crimean guards a year later), wrote a report on the situation in Lithuania. The report demonstrates well the reactionary and imperialist attitudes that persisted within the Kremlin, desperately warning that the Lithuanian Popular were preparing further subversive legislation concerning:

“Specifically the forcible decollectivisation of the rural economy, the complete dismantling of Soviet power, and the restoration of the totalitarian bourgeois dictatorship in Lithuania”

Pro-Soviet Russian minorities within the republics often compounded the problem. For example the confrontation between Lithuanian Committee of National Salvation and the nationalist government provided the pretext for the storming of the Vilnius Press House by the MVD in January 1991. The fact that Gorbachev was ignorant of this decision until the following day, despite his constitutional responsibility for the armed forces, was indication of how much he had become a ‘hostage to the right’. One consequence of this political shift had been the withdrawal of some of the last supporters of a federal democratic Union, particularly Shevardnadze and Yakovlev, from Gorbachev’s advisory circle.  This situation forced Gorbachev to negotiate the ‘9+1’ Union Treaty in complete isolation from his newly appointed conservative colleagues, who would not peacefully accept terms that so stripped the centre of its power. For this reason many, including Yakovlev himself, predicted that the proposed signing of the treaty 20 August 1991 would provoke counter-revolution. The August coup was the last desperate bid for the survival of the unreformed imperial Soviet Union, and it destroyed the last desperate bid for a reformed federal Soviet Union.

In these circumstances creating democratic market socialism and a genuinely federal state without the accompanying collapse of the Soviet Union was an unrealistic aim. The successes of democratisation fundamentally undermined the cohesive elements of the Soviet system, the basis of which was inherently undemocratic. This dismantling of central authority became a direct cause of both the economic chaos of 1990-1 and the revolt in the republics. In turn both crises served to fundamentally undermine the democratic Union by means of stimulating the development of opposition from both left and right, while simultaneously discrediting the policies of the centre. The Soviet state and the Soviet system proved not to be a malleable constitutional framework, but a mixture of interrelated political, economic and imperial networks deeply ingrained by long and bitter experience. In this sense John Gooding was right to argue that “the origins of the Russian revolution of 1991 lie in the attempt begun seventy-four years previously to create socialism”. The nature of the Soviet Union’s collapse was by no means pre-determined, but the achievement of democratic market socialism and a federal state required the complete rejection of its system and the legacy of its past.

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