Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia · CHAPTER 8 ·
Perestroika and glasnost
Chapter 8 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000: “Gorbachev’s Gamble”
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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SHORT EXPLANATION
Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader in March 1985, when he was chosen general secretary of the Communist Party at age 54. He wanted to save socialism by making it work. His first program, “acceleration”, called for more investment and discipline. But an anti-alcohol campaign reduced state vodka revenues just as world oil prices fell by more than half in 1985–86. Spending exceeded income, and the government printed money to cover the deficit. Then the explosion at Chernobyl in April 1986, concealed by officials for two days, showed Gorbachev a further danger: a government could not correct failures it kept hidden. Glasnost, or “openness”, allowed newspapers to report failures and historians to discuss past crimes, as a troubled company might open its accounts to show where its money had gone.
Perestroika, or “restructuring”, changed economic rules without replacing the system beneath them. The 1987 Law on State Enterprise let factories set wages and sell part of their output, while the state still fixed most prices. Wages rose faster than the goods available to buy, and shortages grew worse. Political reform went further. In March 1989, for the first time since 1917, voters chose among rival candidates for the new Congress of People’s Deputies; senior party officials lost, notably in Leningrad. The last troops had left Afghanistan across the bridge at Termez in February, and hundreds of thousands of coal miners struck that summer. Central commands, censorship and fear had weakened before Gorbachev had built effective replacements.
The full story
Gorbachev’s first attempt at reform did not abandon the Soviet system. It asked the system to work harder. As general secretary, and thus the country’s leader, he sought “acceleration” through investment in machine-building and tighter discipline. His campaign against drinking, launched in May 1985, reduced vodka production and raised its price. It also removed tens of billions of roubles from the budget over three years, because alcohol taxes were one of the state’s largest sources of income. Many drinkers turned to moonshine in place of state vodka.
The government was losing another source of revenue at the same time. World oil prices fell from about $27 a barrel in 1985 to around $14 in 1986, reducing export earnings used to buy grain abroad. Spending continued, and the state printed money to cover the difference. Western estimates put the budget deficit—the gap between spending and revenue—at about a tenth of national output by 1989. There was unrest as well: in December 1986 students protested in Alma-Ata after Kazakhstan’s Kazakh party chief was replaced by a Russian outsider. Gorbachev needed resources and political cooperation for his program. Both were in short supply.
The explosion of reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl on 26 April 1986 exposed a different obstacle. Pripyat was evacuated the next day, but the outside world learned of the disaster when Swedish monitors detected radiation carried northwest along the arrow on the map. Thirty-one people died within months and more than 100,000 were evacuated that year. Estimates of later cancer deaths range from about 4,000 to tens of thousands.
For Gorbachev, the concealment mattered to the prospects of reform. If officials hid failures, how could the leadership correct them? From 1987 censorship loosened rapidly. Newspapers exposed corruption, banned books appeared, and the press reopened Stalin’s crimes. Glasnost, or “openness”, was intended to rally people behind reform. It also gave them evidence with which to judge the system itself.
Perestroika, the “restructuring” of the economy, loosened some controls while retaining others. The Law on State Enterprise, passed in 1987 and effective from 1988, let firms keep profits, set wages and sell output beyond state orders. A 1988 law permitted cooperatives, member-owned businesses that were private firms in all but name. Most prices, however, remained fixed. As wages rose, more money competed for the goods on sale at those prices. Shops emptied and regions began to hoard supplies.
Economic change also met resistance from the party apparatus, the full-time officials who ran the party. In 1988 Gorbachev turned to political reform to overcome it. The March 1989 elections to the new Congress of People’s Deputies gave voters a choice of rival candidates for the first time since 1917. In Leningrad the regional party chief lost even though he had no opponent; in Moscow the dismissed reformer Boris Yeltsin won almost 90% of the vote. In July miners in the Kuzbass, the Donbas and Vorkuta struck over soap, food and pay. The party’s authority to govern by command was slipping away, before a new means of governing had taken its place.
FULL EXPLANATION
Did Gorbachev get the order wrong?
China offers an apparently attractive alternative sequence. After 1978 Deng Xiaoping freed farmers and small businesses while retaining the party’s political monopoly; in June 1989 the army crushed protest in Tiananmen Square. Minxin Pei and others argue that Soviet leaders reversed the order, opening politics before fixing the economy and losing control. Archie Brown asks us to consider why Gorbachev opened politics at all: party officials and economic ministries were blocking change, and elections offered a way around them. Chris Miller adds that military-industrial, farm and factory-director lobbies defeated efforts to cut subsidies or free prices. The Soviet Union also lacked China’s vast low-wage peasantry, which made Deng’s path easier. Most historians now see a forced choice. The apparatus obstructed economic reform, yet it was also the machinery through which an orderly reform might have been administered.
Chernobyl and the politics of openness
Serhii Plokhy’s history of Chernobyl shows officials accustomed to hiding bad news. Local authorities delayed the evacuation of Pripyat; Moscow announced the accident only after Sweden asked questions; May Day parades went ahead in Kiev under radioactive skies. Gorbachev later wrote that Chernobyl may have done more than perestroika to bring down the Union, because it destroyed trust in official information. The eventual human toll is contested. A 2005 assessment by the World Health Organisation and other United Nations agencies estimated up to about 4,000 eventual deaths among the most heavily exposed groups. Studies modelling low doses across Europe arrive at tens of thousands, while Ukrainian and Belarusian estimates are higher still. Small increases in cancer across millions cannot be measured directly, so these estimates depend on uncertain assumptions. The political consequence was clearer: the disaster strengthened the case for glasnost, which then exposed the system’s wider record to public judgment.
How the Law on State Enterprise deepened shortages
The Law on State Enterprise illustrates the difficulty of partial reform. Under the old plan, authorities controlled both wages and output, so earnings roughly matched the goods available at fixed prices. The 1987 law gave firms room to raise wages and bonuses and negotiate prices for some output. State banks continued lending, while most consumer prices remained frozen. Income rose faster than the supply of goods, and unspent savings accumulated as a “monetary overhang”, estimated at hundreds of billions of roubles by 1990. Cooperatives, often attached to state firms, bought scarce goods at state prices and sold them for more; many citizens saw legalised theft. By 1989 many regions rationed sugar and soap, and republics restricted food exports to one another. The combination of plan and market had made shortages worse and discredited reform itself.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A generational change at the top. Three general secretaries died in office between November 1982 and March 1985. Their deaths opened the leadership to a younger man whose career had taken him through regional party work in Stavropol and agriculture. Gorbachev and allies including Alexander Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze had seen the West and believed Soviet renewal was possible. The decline described in chapter 7 created the demand for change; the passing of the old guard gave them an opportunity to attempt it.
Falling oil prices and the vodka campaign emptied the budget. The government depended on alcohol taxes at home and oil and gas sales abroad, its two largest sources of income apart from enterprise profits. Gorbachev’s temperance campaign reduced the first, and falling world oil prices in 1985–86 cut the second. Afghanistan, the Chernobyl clean-up and an investment drive still required funding. Printing money covered the immediate gap but added to the excess of cash over goods that undermined later reforms.
Chernobyl discredited secrecy. At Chernobyl, failures and concealment extended from plant managers to ministries in Moscow. The accident persuaded Gorbachev that hidden problems could not be fixed and gave reformers a reason to challenge censorship. Glasnost helped him expose opponents of reform, but citizens used the same opening to criticise the party itself. The discussion soon went beyond his control.
The apparatus resisted economic reform. Ministries and regional party bosses had built careers within the plan and controlled resources through it. They diluted measures that threatened that control. By 1988 Gorbachev believed political competition was needed to overcome them. At the 19th Party Conference in June–July 1988, contested elections to a new parliament were approved. Reform would now be fought over at the voting booth as well as inside party offices.
THE TURNING POINT
The elections of 26 March 1989. The elections of 26 March 1989 gave most voters a choice of candidates for the first time since 1917. In Leningrad and other cities they rejected senior party officials; Boris Yeltsin won almost 90% in Moscow. When the new 2,250-member Congress of People’s Deputies met in May, millions watched its televised debates, including Andrei Sakharov’s attack on the party’s monopoly. A leader could now claim authority through votes, outside the party’s appointment system. Leaders of the republics would soon make claims in the name of their own peoples.
What it changed
An elected opposition gained a national stage. The new Congress gave opponents a national platform. 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 removed the constitutional article guaranteeing the party’s leading role. That spring, elections to republic parliaments brought nationalist and democratic movements to power in the Baltic states, Russia and elsewhere.
Shortages turned into a crisis of supply. Basic goods were no longer reliably delivered by the state in 1989–90. Rationing spread, while regions and republics kept food and raw materials for themselves. Perestroika left its successors with empty shops and a monetary overhang: too much unspent money relative to available goods. That was the starting point for price liberalisation in January 1992.
National movements found their voice. Glasnost opened space for national grievances as well as criticism of the party. In February 1988 the Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh, hatched on the map, voted to leave Azerbaijan. That year popular fronts formed in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. A reform begun at the centre was enabling demands to escape its authority.
DISCUSSION 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?
Gorbachev did not achieve what he set out to do. He sought a more productive socialism in a renewed Union; by 1991 the economy was in free fall and the Union had dissolved. His vodka campaign and enterprise law made deficits and shortages worse. Yet the outcome of his political choices deserves separate consideration. Archie Brown and William Taubman stress his acceptance of competitive elections, his role in ending the Cold War and his refusal to use mass force to retain power at home or in Eastern Europe. Violence occurred in Tbilisi in 1989 and Vilnius in 1991, showing that force was used, though it was not pursued to the end. Judgment requires attention to his aims and results, to economics and politics, and to what alternative leaders could realistically have done. Many see a failed economic reformer and a remarkable political one. His refusal to use force helped determine the character of the transition.
An interesting fact
The anti-alcohol campaign earned Gorbachev an unflattering nickname: “mineral secretary” instead of general secretary. It also brought a measurable health improvement. Deaths from heart disease, accidents and alcohol poisoning fell, and Russian male life expectancy reached about 65 years in 1987, its highest level during the Soviet period. After the campaign ended and drinking returned, life expectancy began to fall. Alcohol was among the factors considered in the severe decline of the 1990s; that collapse was partly a delayed bill for lives the campaign had briefly saved.
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