Something of a Russian cultural revival got under way, with, in 1965, a society for the preservation of old buildings (something vastly needed) with 15 million members. A cult of Andrey Rublev developed; Suzdal was restored as a ‘museum city’ and the Golden Ring towns, little Moscows, complete with jewel-like Kremlins of their own, such as Uglich or Rostov, followed. Historians who wished to avoid overt politics could work on medieval themes, and there were writers who lamented what was happening to the language and to nature itself (particularly Valentin Rasputin, but also a Kirghiz, Cingiz Aitmatov, who, later on, was promoted as an instance of multinationalism). There was always at least potentially an anti-semitic element in this, given that Jews were crudely accused of hating old Russia. Religion was, again, potentially involved in this, and the regime kept a close eye upon it, not a single bishop being appointed without Central Committee say-so. Orthodox clergymen sent to the West, for the World Council of Churches, were straightforwardly agents, spouting Moscow’s lines on peace. A council of religious affairs and KGB oversight meant infiltration and control, though in Central Asia (and especially in Chechnya) resistance was stoutly managed, the more so as Islam was a way of life and not just a cult. Khrushchev, in pursuit of modernization and the creation of ‘new Soviet man’, persecuted religion, and since it could buttress nationalism closed churches. In 1981 another atheist campaign brought about the demolition of 300 of them, mostly in the Ukraine, while the devout might also lose their jobs, and monks were sometimes sadistically persecuted. Khrushchev had also been quite harsh as regards lesser nationalities, and little Siberian peoples could almost be wiped out with drink. Under Brezhnev, there was some lightening, and ethnographic institutes studied the lesser nationalities quite thoroughly. Brezhnev himself spoke, at the 23rd Congress in 1966, of the need for ‘solicitude’ as regards ‘peculiarities’; he also claimed that ‘the national question is now resolved completely and irrevocably’; Andropov remarked that Russian ‘has entered quite naturally into the lives of millions of people of all nationalities’. Brezhnev’s policy had been to appoint loyal ‘natives’, which led to some odd outcomes.
There was even a weird descant on the old French line, applicable in a surprisingly large number of countries, that ‘the south governs and the north works’: Ukrainians made up over 80 per cent of the Politburo in 1979. Under Petro Shelest and then Vladimir Shcherbitsky, a Ukrainian but also a Russifier, Kiev went its peculiar way as the Moscow centre came to rely on local ‘barons’ who could promote their own nationality, though in the form almost of a freemasonry. In this way, Haydar Aliev in Azerbaidjan or Leonid Kravchuk in the Ukraine were able to emerge as national leaders when the USSR itself disintegrated; in Central Asia the transition was even smoother. There, a system not far from apartheid developed, as Islam was a way of life almost independent of institutions, and there was almost no way of controlling, say, circumcision (although a fatwa pronounced it unhealthy in 1962). The four Sufi
tarikat
flourished surreptitiously, and Murids avoided contact with non-Moslems; after 1970 the proportion of the European population declined, and Moslems rose from one eighth to one fifth of the whole. Only in Kazakhstan did the Russian element rise, in proportion. To placate the locals, the great Uzbek monuments at Tashkent and Samarkand were restored, partly as a gambit in foreign policy, given Moscow’s closeness to the Arabs. But mosques were also closed down, and only twenty men were allowed to go on the Mecca pilgrimage every year. This was not reflected in Moscow, where there were few non-Slavs, but, short of Stalinist methods, there was no way to run the localities except through these locals, even if Andropov tried to break the system in the Caucasus by having ‘workers’ representatives’ somehow pushed in.
In the early 1970s, while accepting the Germans’
Ostpolitik
, Andropov had told the Politburo what, in effect, the strategy was. The Soviet Union was falling behind the United States, and in areas that mattered, as distinct from kitchen equipment. He even hinted that, one day, the Soviet Union might just abandon central and eastern Europe, as a liability. Get rid of the Berlin Wall, cultivate good and profitable relations with Germany, fall back within the Soviet borders, and use the respite to recoup: it was not bad, as Leninist strategy, and in effect the various coups of 1989 were in some degree provoked or stage-managed, though none quite as obviously so as that in Romania. So far so good: Gorbachev was hero of the hour in the West, which, Germans in the lead, did indeed offer a great deal of money. However, Andropov’s strategy went wrong: he had clearly utterly underestimated the threat that would come, within those borders, from separatist nationalism, and officials had always claimed that Communism had solved the problem. But in 1990 this began to spread - in the event, overnight destroying the entire Soviet Union.
The process was devious, but the main lines were clear enough. Already in the later 1970s there had been a great many detailed studies as to how reform should be conducted, and at the 27th Congress, early in 1986, these had been implemented. After ‘acceleration’ there was to be ‘reconstruction’, the famous
perestroyka.
Great slabs of prose were then written about this, but the Party shrank back from any sort of private property, and the most that emerged was permission for a few small co-operatives. Later on, there was talk of ‘joint ventures’ with the West, a scheme by which the West supplied capital and knowledge, and the Soviet side the land. For the moment very few of these emerged, and they did not last for long, as the Western investors soon found themselves losing money through this or that administrative trick, what the French call
chicane
. Then there was the even more famous
glasnost
, ‘openness’ or perhaps just ‘criticism’: the intellectuals, the periodicals, the press were now free to discuss earlier taboo subjects. Ridiculous pieces of censorship were set aside, as for instance with the great writer Mikhail Bulgakov, and the historians were supposed to become less dishonest. This, welcomed universally, was not quite what it seemed: Bulgakov had been quite widely read in pirated editions, and no-one really needed to be told about the crimes of Stalin all over again. It can even be said that when, later on, some archives were opened, there were remarkably few ‘revelations’, or at any rate there was very little that came as a surprise. Still, what there was, in a Soviet context, was remarkable enough, and in Germany there was ‘Gorbymania’. By 1989, under pressure to show democratic credentials, Gorbachev did allow a Congress of People’s Deputies, in which roughly a fifth of the members had been freely elected. In that context, Russian nationalism now emerged in great strength, as the figure of Boris Yeltsin took the lead.
Yeltsin was an odd hero, yet another of those sinister clowns whom Russian history throws up. His background was pure Party, and he was mayor of Moscow from 1985 to 1987; there he criticized Party privileges, and attacked Gorbachev himself. He was then humiliated and sacked. However, he had his friends, and they were now advancing the cause of Russian nationalism: Russians were poor, and blamed the ungrateful empire for this; get rid of it, and keep the fabulous material resources of Siberia. Yeltsin was elected to Gorbachev’s Congress in 1989, and now set about conquering the power structures of Russia, as distinct from the Soviet Union: he became in effect president of a ‘sovereign’ Russia in 1990 (though formally only in 1991). Russians were supposed to obey him, and not Gorbachev; there were clashes. However, quite obviously, he knew how to manage powerful Russians, such as Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad, and these powerful Russians were responding to the evidence of collapse. By 1990 the economy was running down, as there was an explosive increase in paper money, translated into a black market that occupied more and more of output. Worse, the various regions had developed their own networks, independently of Moscow, and these were now pushing ‘sovereignty’ - the first, Estonia in September 1988, the pebble announcing the avalanche. Panic-buying emptied the shops; by spring 1991 there were demonstrations of 150,000 people in Moscow, and Yeltsin took the lead. By this time the Party’s sharper men (there were not many women) were preoccupied with their own survival, and took up shadowy contacts with Western banks: thousands of millions went abroad, and the gold reserve disappeared (when the whole system fell apart in August 1991, the two men most obviously in the know as to this, Nikolay Kruchina (the treasurer) and Georgy Pavlov (the finance minister), committed suicide in circumstances that, for Kruchina, might suggest murder).
As nations declared ‘sovereigny’ -
i.e.
would not obey Soviet laws - and as mass demonstrations caught the attention of the Western media, Gorbachev responded initially by repression. Of course, once nationalism was released in this system, it expressed the frustration and rage that Communism produced; it was doing precisely the same in Yugoslavia, itself a little version of the USSR, complete with its Western subsidies. Troops were used in Lithuania, in January 1991, as had happened in Baku, in the Caucasus; but this time round, they were answered by mass demonstrations in Moscow itself, let alone in Baku. It was Yeltsin who now held the cards, and Gorbachev attempted to sort out a new constitution for the various peoples of the USSR; but this did not solve anything, the more so as there were now quite serious strikes, even in Byelorussia. In August came a mysterious affair: the putsch. Men whom Gorbachev had recently appointed, including the head of the KGB, appeared on 18 August, with tanks, on the streets, while Gorbachev was ostensibly on holiday on the Black Sea. They would take power, and to begin with the world took them seriously. However, this was almost a farce. One of the plotters, at a press conference, had obviously been calming his nerves with drink; fingers rapped nervously on the table. The tanks, on their way to Yeltsin’s headquarters in the Russian parliament, stopped at traffic lights, where old women with shopping bags banged on their sides, shouting at the drivers. Yeltsin was not even tracked to his country house; Sobchak in Leningrad was not touched, and rallied that city at once; the Yekaterinburg KGB came out for Yeltsin. In the event, the putsch disintegrated within three days, and the plotters flew to see Gorbachev, asking what to do. It had all been a clumsy manoeuvre, to make out that Gorbachev must be supported against ‘dark forces’. The whole affair ended within a week, allowing Yeltsin to appear as saviour of his country, as he stood on a tank and denounced the plotters; but the probability is that he had tricked them into thinking he would support them. At the end, Russia became independent, and the Communist Party was banned. But it left a country in many ways ruined, and bright men and women all over now wondered how they could turn it into a normal European country. Quite naïvely, to begin with, they looked at the Western model.
28
‘Ending History’
As the Iron Curtain collapsed, there was much interest in the causes and consequences. The Left was mainly taken by surprise, and was (and, again mainly, is) quite unable to account for what had happened: Susan Sontag remarked honestly and pertinently that
Reader’s Digest
had been closer to the truth all along. But the academic observers of the bloc scene were also caught napping. A British expert on international relations, Philip Windsor, remarked, seeing the fall of the Wall on television, that it was the end of an empire; when his companion asked whether he meant the Soviet one, he said, no, political science. Very, very few people in the West had foreseen the end - the first was a 25-year-old Frenchman, Emmanuel Todd, whose
The Final Fall
(1976) seems to have been inspired by rock music, listened to in a shabby student flat in Budapest. Earlier, in 1970, a very brave Russian, Andrey Amalrik, had guessed, on the basis of day-to-day impressions, that the end was coming, though he got the date wrong. Grave seniors, the world over, shook their heads at such perversity, and when Gorbachev appeared, there was a sort of parade of guards of ‘useful idiots’, including J. K. Galbraith, who thought that the achievement of full employment was the great strength of the USSR. This writer will not plead innocence, having informed students until 1986, though not in print, that the Soviet Union had ‘solved the nationality problem’. But it is clear now that the most reliable guides all along had been the shunned ‘Cold Warriors’, men such as Alain Besançon, Robert Conquest or Vladimir Bukovsky, whose accounts (in
Jugement à Moscou
) of his dealings with American foundations read tellingly: when he explained to them, back in the 1970s, what was really going on in the Soviet Union, he was no longer welcome, and was even missed off the Christmas card list. In the same way, most of West German academe and much of the media was entirely taken aback when East Germany imploded. There is a counterpart in economics, where the ‘supplysiders’ of the early eighties had been widely dismissed, with derision, and had then turned out to be right, in so far as economics is about prosperity.
In 1991 there was much triumphalism on the Right, the more so as, by a quirk of history, the fall of the Berlin Wall more or less coincided with the fiftieth anniversaries of the Marshall Plan and NATO or, for that matter, of the German Federal Republic itself (celebrants of which could often only mumble a half-remembered and rather soppy version of the old national anthem). It was an Atlantic hour, a triumph of American power, soft, as exemplified by CNN, and hard, as exemplified by the IMF. The Fukuyama thesis, that the West, catchily described as free market and democracy, had won, had captured Japan and South Korea, and would go on turning all countries of the world into versions of Denmark, sounded quite convincing. But which ‘West’? For most of the world, it was Reagan’s United States - and not the European countries that practised the minor virtues, such as thrift, failing to make babies and padding their pensioners.