Vladimir Yakunin: The Treacherous Path: An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

Though that is not to say we hadn’t been able to tell that there were cracks in the USSR’s edifice. By the end of the 1970s, there was a growing sense that something was going wrong. People did not go out onto the street to demand change; nobody, with the exception of a few scattered groups of dissidents, was screaming or waving placards (perhaps we would have done well to remember that sometimes it is enough if even a small portion of the apple is rotten – before long the whole fruit will be spoilt). But, when our front doors were shut and we knew we were among friends, we discussed the setbacks of the system. No matter what we were told by the Politburo, or read in the pages of Pravda , we knew that living standards were falling – people in the provinces could go for years without seeing fresh meat – and it was manifestly obvious that the nation was no longer able to meet the economic targets it had set itself. Perhaps, we began to wonder, it never had. Then rumours began to circulate. Some were fairly benign – nobody was too bothered by the allegedly gilded lives led by those who were known as the ‘Golden Kids’, the children of party bosses. And there was nothing that new or surprising about the dark mutterings regarding links between the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) hierarchy and men involved in illicit forms of entrepreneurship. But we were electrified by whispers, which began tentatively before steadily becoming more insistent, about the use of force in Novocherkassk twenty years beforehand to suppress a protest by workers there. We tried to stitch the whispers we heard, the little shreds of information, into something we could understand. Though everything had been hushed-up by the authorities, little by little it grew apparent that there had been a demonstration there in 1962 and that the military had fired on the protestors, killing many. What kind of state did this to its own people?

We watched streams of men coming back from Afghanistan – still believing them to be hero veterans – the body bags hidden from public view; we watched our government on television, grey decrepit men stiffly reading pre-prepared statements that told us nothing, that meant nothing. Leonid Brezhnev presided over years of stagnation, Yuri Andropov was clever and resourceful, but only rose to the top once he was already critically ill, and then there was Konstantin Chernenko, who crept into view, blinked for a moment, then crept off stage to quietly die.

But what you need to understand is that there was nothing inevitable about what occurred next, under Gorbachev. It is too easy to look through the wrong end of the telescope and assume that just because something happened, then it had to happen. You can find all the things that contributed to an event and call them symptoms, and before you know it you have what looks like a scientific thesis – but this is a dangerous game.

The Chinese have shown that it is possible to navigate the complex and challenging path that leads from a monolithic socialist state to something that at least has the appearance of a market economy. Of course, counter-factual history is an inherently treacherous business, but if you consider how much more advanced the Soviet Union was in comparison to China at the time, it is hard not to regret that this was a path we never travelled down. (Perhaps we would be living in a different kind of world today if the gifted Kazakhstani politician Nursultan Nazarbayev, an extraordinary, shrewd, cultured personality, who eschewed the nationalism that infected many of his contemporaries, had agreed to become the Soviet Union’s Prime Minister when he was asked in 1991. His refusal marks another fork in the road of history.)

The vast majority of the USSR’s citizens, including myself, still believed that the Soviet system should be modified, even quite substantially, but we did not want to see the whole edifice dismantled. And it would be a mistake to assume that the party itself was blind to the urgent need for change. In 1978, while I was still a young officer, I attended a special lecture delivered to a group of senior KGB officers and intelligence staff by a representative of the regional CPSU’s headquarters. It expressed ideas that no dissident would have been brave enough to articulate at the time. We were told that if the CPSU did not take serious steps towards the reform of the social and economic structure of the Soviet Union in the next ten years, we would face a systemic crisis. (A lot of people do not know that the privatisations enacted in the ’90s were inspired by theories originated in a research institute established by the then head of the KGB, Andropov, and members of the CPSU Politburo a decade earlier, to map out how to reform the Soviet system. The liberal reformers who came to prominence in the ’90s, men like Anatoly Chubais, were just fledglings who came from a nest created by Andropov.)

Outside those privileged circles I witnessed a lot of criticism concerning the way in which our society was run, and yet I never was exposed to a purely anti-Soviet attitude. Of course, being young and sceptical we could not help but be perturbed by some of what we heard about the party elite. Most of the senior apparatus remained ideologically persistent Communists, and in theory their capacity for corruption was curtailed by the unofficial rule that meant they couldn’t earn a salary in excess of that of a highly trained worker. Nor were they permitted to hold valuable private assets. But they occupied completely different houses, lived in separate villages, and obtained their clothes and food from special department stores (sailors, who had the access to foreign currency denied to the rest of the population, enjoyed this same privilege, but almost nobody else did). It was no wonder that Andropov was once moved to confess that the party leadership was running a country that it barely understood. These men spent their lives urging others to give more, to work harder, but they never took responsibility on their own shoulders; I do not think they ever truly understood the burden they were placing on the people’s shoulders.

So we were sick and tired of the elderly leaders who we felt were not entitled to the huge power they wielded. The majority of the population remained supportive of the ideas of socialism and brotherhood with which we had grown up, but we also appreciated the necessity of reform; we wanted to change the crippled management system. This meant that paradoxically the jokes and tales we heard that reflected the weakness and inability of the old men who ruled the USSR – for example that Brezhnev mistook the Japanese ambassador for his Chinese counterpart and spoke to him for four hours without realising – were a kind of reassurance: we could persuade ourselves that as soon as we had new leaders, all would be well again.

And then came Gorbachev. He was the first senior figure in Russia I’d ever seen who could talk for hours to the people without stopping to refer to a script. When he said something it was as if he was taking the thoughts out of your own head; he appeared in public with his wife (which would have been anathema to his retiring predecessors); everything about him seemed unprecedented and fresh. I would later come to understand that he only masqueraded as a symbol of hope, but at the time millions of people were willing to follow him, as though he was the Pied Piper.

Though he was well educated in comparison to his comrades in the Politburo, they did not know that he was illiterate in terms of state governance, and naïve to the point of imbecility in his relations with the United States and its allies. They did not know that he had no idea what consequences would attend his reckless actions, which only had a thousand to one chance of success; that he would destroy the system he had set out to save, along with the lives of millions of ordinary people who existed within it. They did not know that he was unaware of his own limitations and of the gaps in his own knowledge, or that he had no intention of taking responsibility for any of this. (They did not realise, perhaps none of us did, that once a man was installed at the top of the system he attained something like papal infallibility, which meant that his capacity to effect monumental change, without checks or balances, was enormous; there was no one with authority to challenge the leader’s wrong assumptions or ignorance. And even if we had, who could have suspected this young, benevolent-seeming man, who always said the right thing, of being capable of abusing this power?)