Abstract
How much did popular disaffection with communism, Soviet imperialism, and the Establishment in general contribute to the collapse of the USSR? This complex question has not, as yet, been sufficiently researched by scholars. Why not? First, few researchers have studied closely the at least partially visible roots of some sorts of disaffection — expressed by so-called dissidents — in the period from the mid-1950s to 1987. Second, when a wider range of types of discontent came into public view in 1988–89, some observers tended to misperceive them as being mostly reformist and pro-Gorbachev in nature,2 rather than, in large measure, anti-Establishment, anti-imperial, or opposed to communism — at least in its familiar, oppressive form. And third, when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, some scholars like Martin Malia misinterpreted events in an opposite way. They saw the disaffection as constituting an authentic, popular, anti-communist revolution,3 not as being, mostly, waves of anti-Establishment protest against a corrupt elite class that was failing to deliver what it promised. This disaffection made an important contribution to the collapse of an empire. But it was not, in my opinion, an authentic revolution. Not only was Russia’s class structure changed only at the margins. In addition, personnel turnover in the higher levels of the political institutions and the government bureaucracy was limited, with new members coming mostly from within the existing privileged elites.
I am grateful to Catherine Dale for her valuable help on the research for an earlier version of this article. Her diligence is reflected especially in the analysis of the elections of 1989–91.I am likewise grateful to Dmitri Glinski for his insightful comments on the same version, and also for his enormous input into his and my book, input that has helped me in writing this chapter. The book is The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press, 2001).
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Notes
See, for example, Stephen Cohen, ‘Gorbachev and the Soviet reformation’, in Stephen Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel (1989), Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers (New York and London: Norton), pp. 13–32.
Robert Byrnes (1983), After Brezhnev (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). The authors were Robert Byrnes, Seweryn Bialer, Robert Campbell, Coit Blacker, Gail Lapidus, Maurice Friedberg, Andrzej Korbonski, and Adam Ulam.
For an exceptionally stimulating and wide-ranging discussion of this question, which used as a springboard a symposium on the reasons for the Soviet collapse in The National Interest, no. 31, Spring 1993, see Dominic Lieven (1994), ‘Western scholarship on the rise and fall of the Soviet regime: The view from 1993’, The Journal of Contemporary History, XXIX, 195–227.
Alexander Yakovlev (1983), The Tate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp.228, 211.
Nearly 80 issues of this voluminous privately circulated journal were compiled between 1964 and 1971. Many of them were published in Russian by the Alexander Herzen Foundation in Amsterdam, in two volumes, Politicheskii dnevnik, 1972 and 1975. Selected articles make up Stephen F. Cohen (ed.) (1982), An End To Silence (New York: Random House).
See P. Reddaway, ‘Soviet policies towards the early dissent of Andrei Sakharov (up to 1973)’, October 2008, Andrei Sakharov Foundation website, http//asf.prime-task.com/asfconf2008/asfconf_panl.pdf, pp.16–24. For a valuable collection of 203 annotated archival documents from the years 1968–89 on the Soviet leadership’s policy towards Sakharov, see Joshua Rubenstein and Alexander Gribanov (eds) (2005), The KGB Tile of Andrei Sakharov (Yale: Yale University Press). Rubenstein’s lengthy introduction is also valuable.
T.H. Rigby, ‘Reconceptualizing the Soviet system’, in Stephen White, Alex Pravda, Zvi Gitelman (eds) (1992), Developments in Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2nd edition), pp.312–13.
Robert Horvath has performed a service by focusing on the political and ideological influence in late communist and early post-communist Russia of the ideas and to some extent activities of four key dissidents of various stripes: Andrei Sakharov, Sergei Kovalev, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Igor Shafarevich. While conceding that only a little such influence can be directly documented, he argues that the impact of these men on events was in fact — in diffused and largely unacknowledged ways — extensive. Regrettably, there is no space in this chapter to pursue this fascinating and elusive topic at the length it deserves. See Robert Horvath (2005), The Legacy of Dissent: Dissidents, Democratization, and Radical Nationalism in Russia (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon).
See the description by the chief editor of Ogonek, Vitaly Korotich, of some of the mechanisms used in ‘Press freedoms: New dangers’, his chapter in Uri Ra’anan, Keith Armes, Kate Martin (eds) (1992), Russian Pluralism: Now Irreversible? (New York: St. Martin’s Press), pp.141–2. When I took part in a round-table on perestroika at Ogonek in November 1988, editors of the journal explained in private that continuing party-run censorship meant that the published transcript of the proceedings would have to omit certain points, for example, any criticism of party leaders. Some idea of the amount of censorship involved can be seen by comparing the transcripts published in Ogonek, 50, December 1988, 10–14, with those in the American journal Soviet Economy, IV, 4, 1988, 275–318.
On how the first political groups and parties were formed, see Michael McFaul and Sergei Markov (1993), The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press)
Geoffrey Hosking, Jonathan Aves, Peter Duncan (1992), The Road to Post-Communism: Independent Political Movements in the Soviet Union, 1985–1991 (London and New York: Pinter).
See Donna Bahry (1993), ‘Society transformed? Rethinking the social roots of Perestroika’, Slavic Review, LII, 3, 513. Bahry used primarily the results of the Harvard Project of the 1950s, the Soviet Interview Project of the 1980s, and the Times-Mirror surveys of the early 1990s.
See, for example, the following books by dissidents and defectors: Valéry Chalidze (1974), To Defend These Rights (New York: Random House)
Arkady Shevchenko (1985), Breaking With Moscow (London: Cape)
Petro Grigorenko (1983), Memoirs (London: Harvill)
Ilya Dzhirkvelov (1987), Secret Servant: My Life with the KGB and the Soviet Elite (New York: Harper & Row)
Michael Voslensky (1984), Nomenklatura (New York: Doubleday). Let me note that Voslensky’s book was badly translated into English and poorly edited (see my review-article ‘Nomenklatura: The Soviet ruling class’, L.S.E. Quarterly, I, 1, Spring 1987, 115–26), and that it was later published in a longer and amended Russian edition as Nomenklatura — Gospodstvuiushchii klass Sovetskogo Soiuza (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1990).
The dissident Ludmila Alexeyeva describes well this evolution in herself and her friends. See her and Paul Goldberg’s book, The Thaw Generation (Boston-Toronto-London: Little, Brown, 1990), esp. chapters 3 and 4. For guidance on the thousands of samizdat documents and books and their authors see S.P. de Boer, E.J. Driessen, H.L. Verhaar (eds) (1982), Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents in the Soviet Union, 1956–1975 (The Hague-Boston-London: Nijhoff), which has entries on 3,400 individuals;
Ludmila Alexeyeva (1987), Soviet Dissent (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press)
Peter Reddaway (1972), Uncensored Russia: The Human Rights Movement in the USSR (London: Cape); and the full translations of the samizdat journal of 1968–82, A Chronicle of Current Events, published by Amnesty International Publications, London, and distributed by Routledge. The full Russian texts are available on the website of Memorial, the independent historical research organization in Moscow, at www.memo.ru/history/diss/chr.index.htm. This organization has also published books and compiled extensive files on many aspects of dissent and opposition in the Soviet period.
P. Reddaway, ‘Patterns in Soviet Policies Towards Dissent: 1953–1987’, to appear in an upcoming book edited by Wolfgang Eichwede of Bremen University; and Rubenstein and Gribanov, The KGB Tile. For the first wide-ranging and painstakingly edited collection of archival documents on dissent policy issued in the years 1970–85 by the party’s Politburo and Secretariat and the KGB, see A.A. Makarov, N.V. Kostenko, and G.V. Kuzovkin (eds) (2006), Vlast i dissidenty: Iz dokumentov KGB i TsK KPSS (Moscow: Moskovskaia khel’sinkskaia gruppa).
1958 saw the prosecution of 1,416 citizens on the one charge alone of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. P. Reddaway (1993), ‘Sovietology and dissent’, RTE/RL Research Report, II, 5, 14.
The stimulus given to Soviet dissenters by the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 is documented in Natalya Gorbanevskaya (1972), Red Square at Noon (London: Andre Deutsch, London); Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, chapters 4–6. In response to the Polish upheavals of 1980–1 the Kremlin intensified a crackdown on dissent at home that it had begun for other reasons in 1979. Going further, it was so disturbed by the Polish developments that it launched a high-level, semi-public debate on how, in certain circumstances, contradictions under socialism might lead to a revolutionary situation in the USSR. See Ernst Kux’s analysis of this debate, in which various euphemisms and veiled references do not conceal the essence of the concern, ‘Contradictions in Soviet socialism’, Problems of Communism, XXXIII, 6, 1984, 20 ff.
This is one of the points made by several authors in Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich (eds) (1998), The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insiders’ History (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe).
Valery Boldin (1994), Ten Years That Shook the World (New York: Basic Books), pp.238, 272. Although Boldin turned against Gorbachev in the 1991 coup, and his book reflects his disenchantment, these quotations ring to me.
See Michael Dobbs, ‘Politics on the front line of Perestroika’, The Washington Post, 26 March 1989, p. A1. See also Vladimir Brovkin (1990), ‘Revolution from below: Informal political associations in Russia 1988–1989’, Soviet Studies, XLII, 2, 235–6; Hosking, Road to Post-Communism, p.75. According to Blair Ruble (personal communication), who has studied the politics of Yaroslavl since the late 1980s, the KGB in Yaroslavl had a strong grudge against Loshchenkov, evidently because of his Mafia ties. This may have facilitated the actions taken against him by the KGB’s local boss, Major-General Alexander Razhivin, who gave a long interview to Dobbs. Thus it appears that a corrupt party boss and the local mafia were defeated by a coalition of the KGB, Gorbachev’s group, and some activist Yaroslavl citizens.
On Yeltsin’s populism, his humiliation, and his triumphant resurrection in the CPDU elections, see Timothy Colton (2008), Yeltsin: A Life (New York: Basic Books), pp.118–67.
A.V. Berezkin, V.A. Kolosov, M.E. Pavlovskaya, N.V. Petrov, L.V. Smirnyagin (1989), ‘The geography of the 1989 elections of people’s deputies of the USSR (preliminary results)’, Soviet Geography, XXX, 8, 624.
This article is a forerunner to a book on the 1989 elections from which I have taken some facts, V.A. Kolosov, N.V. Petrov, L.V. Smirniagin (eds) (1990), Vesna ’89: Geografia i anatomiia parlamentskikh vyborov (Moscow: Progress).
See, for example, Brovkin, ‘Revolution from below’; V. Brovkin (1990), ‘The making of elections to the congress of people’s deputies in March 1989’, The Russian Review, XLIX, 417–42.
See, for example, Thomas Remington, ‘Towards a participatory politics?’, in White, Developments, pp. 147–73; Tolz (1990), The USSR’s Emerging Multiparty System (New York and London: Praeger).
Some of these press materials, especially those in Pravda, were helpfully analysed in Max Mote (1989), ‘Electing the USSR congress of people’s deputies’, Problems of Communism, XXXVIII, 6, 51–6.
Stephen White and Gordon Wightman (1989), ‘Gorbachev’s reforms: The Soviet elections of 1989’, Parliamentary Affairs (London), XLII, 566.
Brendan Kiernan (1993), The End of Soviet Politics. Elections, Legislatures, and the Demise of the Communist Party (Boulder: Westview), p.67.
John Morrison (1991), Boris Yeltsin: Trom Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton), p.93. This point was made for me anecdotally when, just before the election, I was in Tarusa in the Russian provinces and met the director of a large government rest home. Although he was not a party member, he had just been summoned and told by the local communist authorities to throw a party for all his employees. When enough alcohol had been consumed, he was to give a short speech instructing them to vote for Yeltsin’s main rival, Nikolai Ryzhkov. If he refused to do this, the party would have him prosecuted for one of the many violations of the law that any Soviet manager was compelled to commit, if he were to operate effectively. The director had not yet decided whether to comply. He speculated, though, that if he did comply, his speech would probably be counter-productive from Ryzhkov’s point of view: he would in fact increase Yeltsin’s vote, because most of his employees now resented official manipulation of this sort.
Jeffrey Hahn (1990), ‘Boss Gorbachev confronts his new congress’, Orbis, XXXIV, 2, 169.
See a partial analysis of these meetings in P. Reddaway (1989), ‘Is the Soviet Union drifting towards anarchy?’, Report on the USSR, I, 34, 2–3.
Speech by Vladimir Melnikov, Pravda, 27 April 1989.
E.K. Ligachev (1992), Zagadka Gorbacheva (Novosibirsk: Sibirskii tsentr SP ‘Interbuk’), pp.76–7, 94. Ligachev may not be exaggerating greatly about the Central Committee’s directives, but, as we have seen, local party organizations nonetheless showed an instinct for survival and were far from completely paralysed.
See the evidence of the legislative preparations in Peter Reddaway, ‘The threat to Gorbachev’, The New York Review of Books, 17 August 1989, pp.19–24. For evidence of the crackdown planned for the provincial cities of Ryazan and also, apparently, Novokuznetsk, see Pilar Bonet (1992), Figures in a Red Landscape (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, and Baltimore MD:Johns Hopkins University Press), pp.86, 115.
For a penetrating insider’s account of the whole episode, and of the Establishment’s success in preventing anyone being held accountable for the deaths, see Anatoly Sobchak (1991), Khozhdenie vo vlast (Moscow: Novosti, 2nd edition), pp.77–104. Sobchak was the chairman of the Congress’s commission of enquiry.
Nadia Diuk and Adrian Karatnycky (1990), The Hidden Nations: The People Challenge the Soviet Union (New York: William Morrow)
Diuk and Karatnycky (1993), New Nations Rising: The Fall of the Soviets and the Challenge of Independence (New York: John Wiley).
Ada Finifter and Ellen Mickiewicz (1992), ‘Redefining the political system of the USSR: Mass support for political change’, American Political Science Review, LXXXVI, 4, 860, 861, 866.
On the 1990 elections see Remington, ‘Towards a participatory politics’; Kiernan, End of Soviet Politics; Timothy Colton (1990), ‘The politics of democratization: The Moscow election of 1990’, Soviet Economy, VI, 4, 285–344; on Yeltsin’s election in Ekaterinburg, see Colton, Boris Yeltsin, pp.177–9; Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, pp. 150–5;
Gavin Helf and Jeffrey Hahn (1992), ‘Old dogs and new tricks: Party elites in the Russian regional elections of 1990’, Slavic Review, LI, 3, 511–30.
Evidently to try to appease them, in September 1990 Gorbachev apparently sanctioned some military manoeuvers that were designed at least to be a rehearsal for dealing with the opposition. See Bonet, Figures, p.117; P. Reddaway (1990), ‘The quality of Gorbachev’s leadership’, Soviet Economy, VI, 2, 132, note 13.
John Dunlop (1993), The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp.32–3, 51, 107.
Arkady Vaksberg (1991), The Soviet Mafia (New York: St Martin’s Press), p.255.
Other notable books which shed light on the subject and include various amounts of theoretical analysis are Maria Los (ed.) (1990), The Second Economy in Marxist States (London: Macmillan)
William A. Clark (1993), Crimeand and Punishment in Soviet Officialdom: Combating Corruption in the Political Elite, 1965–1990 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe)
Federico Varese (2001), The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy, pp.109–18, 303–7
Vadim Volkov (2002), Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Cornell: Cornell University Press). The last three books trace the Mafia through to the late 1990s.
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Reddaway, P. (2010). How Much Did Popular Disaffection Contribute to the Collapse of the USSR?. In: Fortescue, S. (eds) Russian Politics from Lenin to Putin. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230293144_7
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