Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

Gorbachev’s formative years coincided not with the war but with the death of Stalin in March 1953 and the Khrushchev thaw. At the time he was an impressionable young law student at Moscow State University. He had arrived in the capital in 1950, with little more than the clothes on his back. The collective farm chairman’s grandson was exactly the kind of person that the party wanted to recruit for the most prestigious educational institution in the country. He had the right “class” background. At high school near Privolnoye, he had completed his graduating exam on the subject “Stalin Is Our Battle Glory, Stalin Is the Flight of Our Youth.” 46He was an active member of the Communist youth organization, the Komsomol, and had even won a state decoration, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, for his work as a combine operator. It was at the university that he met his future wife, Raisa Titarenko, a stylish young philosophy student from Siberia.

While Gorbachev’s political opinions were entirely orthodox, he did display a certain intellectual independence. Precocious and self-confident, he would argue with his teachers, both in high school and at the university. He joined in the freewheeling debates in the student dormitory. Comments that he made to his Czech roommate, Zdenek Mlynář, show that he was well aware of the gulf between Communist ideology and Soviet reality. On one occasion the two students were watching a propaganda film, entitled The Cossacks of Kuban , that glorifies the collective farms of the northern Caucasus. When the film showed peasant tables groaning with food and drink, it was too much for Gorbachev, who told Mlynář how little the kolkhozniki really had to eat. On another occasion, after a lecture on “kolkhoz law,” Gorbachev made clear to his Czech friend that the most important law for the kolkhozniki was brute force. 47

A few months after Stalin’s death, Gorbachev returned to the Stavropol region to help out with the harvest and train in the local prosecutor’s office. After the heady atmosphere of Moscow State University, he was struck by the “passivity and conservatism” of provincial life. “I am so depressed by the situation here,” he wrote his future wife. “Especially the manner of life of the local bosses. The acceptance of convention, subordination, with everything predetermined, the open impudence of officials, and the arrogance. When you look at one of the local bosses, you see nothing outstanding apart from his belly. But what aplomb, what self-assurance, and the condescending, patronizing tone!” 48

Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes came as a huge shock to Gorbachev, who had been brought up to revere “the Father of the Peoples.” But it also enabled him to bring his political ideals into line with the reality he saw around him. Now, once again, he had something to believe in. If the Communist Party could succeed in ridding itself of the “Stalinist filth,” it would lead the country to the promised utopia.

Gorbachev was a delegate to the Twenty-second Communist Party Congress in 1961 that voted to remove Stalin’s body from the mausoleum in Red Square, where it had lain alongside Lenin’s. Held in the new Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin, the congress was infused with a spirit of optimism that reflected the mood of the times. Khrushchev had just defeated a Stalinist clique in the Politburo, led by former Foreign Minister Molotov. The Russians had beaten the Americans into space; one of the delegates to the congress was Yuri Gagarin. Russia was still a poor and backward society, but it was making rapid strides in all areas. Economic growth rates were high. Internationally, colonial empires were falling apart. Imperialism was in obvious retreat. The faithful gathered in the Kremlin had no difficulty believing Khrushchev when he assured them the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in per capita production by 1970 and achieve full communism by 1980.

The hopes of the shestidesyatniki generation received a shattering blow in August 1968, when Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia to crush Dubĉek’s experiment in “socialism with a human face.” The invasion set the cause of reform back by a generation not only in Eastern Europe but also in the Soviet Union, where there was an abrupt shift back to neo-Stalinist policies. Gorbachev visited Czechoslovakia a year after the invasion, as a member of a Soviet Communist Party delegation that also included Ligachev. It was an uncomfortable, disquieting experience for him. “When we went into factories, nobody wanted to talk to us,” he later recalled. “The workers did not reply to our greetings, they demonstratively turned away. It was an unpleasant sensation.” 49

Gorbachev kept his feelings under tight control. It was at this point that his political career took off, thanks in large measure to his friendship with Dmitri Kulakov, a former Stavropol Communist Party chief, who was the Politburo member for agriculture. 50Other powerful patrons were Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Suslov.

THE SHESTIDESYATNIKI INHERITED from Khrushchev a conviction that the Communist Party could be cleansed of its impurities and lead the masses to a better life. It was this belief that sustained them during the long years of stagnation, when the world’s largest country seemed to be drifting aimlessly. When Gorbachev told Raisa on the eve of his election as gensek that “there has to be change,” the last thing he had in mind was the kind of revolutionary change that actually took place. In a speech to Communist Party activists less than three months previously, he had spoken of the need for a technological revolution that would allow the Soviet Union “to enter the new millennium as a great and flourishing state.” 51He wanted to strengthen the Communist system, not to bury it. It was to take him almost eight years to acknowledge publicly that this hope had rested on an “illusion.”

“We were like Khrushchev. We wanted to improve the system, to give it more oxygen, a second breath,” Gorbachev recalled in 1993, two years after the failed Communist coup. “When I felt that the post of gensek would be offered to me, I racked my brains about what to do. I knew what was wrong with the country. We couldn’t just go on as before. There was already a big budget deficit; national income was falling; our machinery was obsolete; our technology was outdated; there were no goods in the shops; oil production was declining. And what did we have to export? Only oil and vodka. I saw all this very clearly. We understood that there had to be reforms, that more freedom should be given to producers, to the regions. We knew that it was necessary to free society of many restrictions. We thought we could do all this within the framework of the existing system.” 52

The goal that Gorbachev set himself was without precedent in Russian history. Other Russian rulers—Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Stalin, to name but a few—had attempted to jolt Russia out of its backwardness and catch up with the West. But all had relied on the coercive power of a centralized state to mobilize the masses. The whip and the executioner’s block were the instruments of choice for Russian reformers. Gorbachev and his allies understood that the repressive tradition was a large part of the problem; a technological revolution could not be carried out by an alienated, apathetic workforce. Russia’s new leader wanted to realize the “immense potential of socialism” by releasing the energies of individual human beings.

Gorbachev knew that his revolution would have to start from above. In contrast with a country like Poland, with its long history of struggle against totalitarian rule, Soviet society lacked an independent voice. But the latest successor to Lenin and Stalin realized very quickly that the revolution would have to be continued from below. Otherwise it would be smothered by the army of bureaucrats, just as Khrushchev’s thaw had been smothered.