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Bush, Reagan, Gorbachev
in New York
Leonid Brezhnev, 1936
He feared
the capitalist
powers
more than would Communist
Party boss Mikhail Gorbachev
Andrei Sakharov, dissident
and creator of Russia's H-bomb
Gorbachev and President Reagan
The Berlin Wall
"Time will tell" makes history interesting.
From the 1930s and into the 1970s, the Soviet economy had been geared for heavy industry and the military - production with a lot of steel and cement. It was a "command" economy, directed from a central planning commission. Agriculture was mainly collective, with farm workers allowed small private plots. Technical education was vast, with the Soviet Union graduating engineers, scientists, doctors and persons of other professions in great number. Soviet manufacturing had grown to 17.6 percent of the world share in 1938 (behind a 28.7 percent share for the United States), but in 1960s the question remained concerning future growth. [note]
The Soviet Union had lost 26 million people in World War II, but by 1970 its population would be 228 million, up from 190 million in 1937. The Soviet Union was one-sixth of the land area of the world. Its arable land was equal to that of the United States and Canada combined. The Soviet Union had an abundance of natural resources, and it had been producing more oil, natural gas, iron, coal, lead, nickel, silver, copper and zinc than any other country. It had the largest long-range fishing fleet. It was second in the production of gold and chromium.
In the mid-fifties the Soviet Union was the most advanced nation in rocketry. In 1957 it was the first nation to send a satellite into space, and in 1961 the Soviet Union sent the first man into space. The Soviet leader from 1955 to 1964, Nikita Khrushchev, predicted that the Soviet Union would bury (surpass) the West economically in twenty years or so (around 1980). In this period, the Soviet economy, as measured in Gross National Product (GNP), was growing at about 6 percent a year. But in this period growth was high around the world. In 1960 the Soviet Union was producing 12.5 percent of the world's goods (from farm and factory), just under half that of the United States (25.9 percent) and the European Economic Community (26 percent). These figures would change little by 1970, while Japan's share jumped from 4.5 percent in 1960 to 7.7 percent in 1970. But the Soviet Economy was not the economic engine that Khrushchev had imagined.
From the 1960s a shift had been taking place in work. It was more toward the production of consumer items such as automobiles, electronic devices, pharmaceuticals, civilian aircraft - a production that was more knowledge intensive, more plastic and less cement. And it was more production for consumers - away from the kind of heavy industrial production that had developed under Stalin.
From 1966 to 1970, under Leonid Brezhnev, the GNP held around 5.3 per year. Then during 1971 to 1975 the GNP fell, averaging 3.7 growth per year. And after 1975 the GNP fell to a growth of between 2.6 and 2.7 percent per year. In these years production around the world was growing rapidly, rising to an average annual rate for the world of 6.2 percent in 1973. The Soviet Union was keeping up with the United States in the production of steel, pig iron, cement and oil, but the future lay in electronics and specialty chemicals. [note]
Brezhnev and his colleagues wished Soviet citizens to be as prosperous as those in the capitalist nations, and to produce more for consumers they tried to incorporate innovations from the West, including innovations involving chemicals and computers. The Soviet Union was not keeping up with sophisticated techniques in computers, software and communications electronics or the design and manufacturing of automobiles - as were Taiwan and Korea. The Soviet Union lost its second place standing in manufacturing, falling behind the losers of World War II, Japan and Germany, and falling behind Britain and Italy. The Soviet Union's biggest customer for its manufactured goods was its military, and manufacturing for the military continued to use the Soviet Union's most skilled people, to the detriment of production for civilians.
The rigid command economy created by Stalin in the 1930s was not suited for the rapid changes that were a part of technological development outside the Soviet Union in the 1970s. The Soviet Union had no independently wealthy individuals looking to bankroll a new business with a new idea. In the Soviet Union it was the central government that was doing the investing, not only in the military but also in social programs, including spending money to keep bread available and at a low price. Money to modernize manufacturing was often lacking.
In the Soviet Union, the managers at various production plants were protected from international competition, and they had no competition from within the Soviet Union. Their thinking was not geared to consumer choice, and without a free market they had little notion of what was in demand and what was not. Rather than consumers, bureaucrats were deciding what was to be manufactured. And at the center of the Soviet economy, planners could not keep up with the changing needs of various areas, which resulted in poor economic co-ordination, sometimes seen in the form of metal goods rusting away at railway sidings.
By the 1970s, low morale of the Soviet Union's work force was hurting its economy. Workers were given goals that seemed abstract or remote from tangible benefits. Common people were criticizing people in power for not responding to their needs. Common people still lived in cramped housing and were seeing little material progress for themselves. Cynicism was high among Soviet workers and alcoholism prevalent. People were taking less pride in their work than people did in some other nations.
Skilled workers were also demoralized. The massive effort in the Soviet Union in education to create a skilled work force could not compensate for an economy that functioned poorly. Instead, education was producing poorly employed talent.
The agricultural sector of the Soviet economy was also functioning inefficiently. Under Brezhnev, most farming remained collectivized, with four percent of the Soviet Union's arable land being farmed on the side, as privately owned plots - with this four percent producing around twenty-five percent of the Soviet Union's agricultural output. Before World War I, Russia had been one of the greatest food exporters in the world, but now it had become one of the world's greatest importers of food. After decades of collective farming, agricultural workers in the Soviet Union had developed poor work habits. And with distribution and transportation a problem, some harvests rotted on their way to market, and sometimes as much as forty or fifty percent of a crop might rot in the fields.
During the Brezhnev years supplies of oil and natural gas were becoming more costly, these supplies now deeper in the ground or located in permafrost regions. The Soviet Union had not been using its energy efficiently, and scarcer supplies of fuel were now adding to the cost of production.
A decline in sales of its oil abroad and the purchasing of food from abroad was a trade imbalance that was costing the Soviet Union hard currency and gold. Within the Soviet Union, government agencies were involved in more deficit spending than bureaucrats were admitting. And increases in the printing of money were contributing to the declining value of Soviet money - the ruble.
What grew during the Brezhnev years were bureaucracy and the size of the Communist Party - with many Party members working in bureaucracies. And growing too were the number of vacation residences, pensions, perks and privileges for Party members. In the eyes of the common Soviet citizen, corruption was growing alongside economic stagnation.
And the Brezhnev years included aggressive moves to defend the Soviet Union's position with its neighbors. Brezhnev was concerned that the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia was becoming too liberal - the Communist leader in Prague, Alexander Dubcek, having talked of creating a "socialism with a human face." Brezhnev saw Soviet hegemony in East Europe as threatened. He spoke of all the sacrifices that the Soviet people had made in World War II and, in August 1968, he sent tanks into Czechoslovakia to quell liberalization.
Brezhnev wanted to maintain the Soviet Union's standing in Europe and to maintain good relations with the West. He made himself a champion of Détente, and as a sign of his desire for good relations with the U.S. he kissed President Carter on the cheek. Then in December 1979, Brezhnev sent troops into Afghanistan, to support a friendly socialist regime there against guerrilla insurgents.
Brezhnev died in November 1982 and was replaced as Party leader by Yuri Andropov, a "no nonsense" disciplinarian who had been in charge of the Soviet police (the KGB). Andropov attacked what he saw as moral rot. He launched a campaign against corruption and alcoholism. People were arrested who should have been at work but were in drinking places. And Andropov criticized industry managers for poor supervision of their work force. Andropov knew of the underground economy and corruption that was interfering with government economic organization - corruption that had reached into the upper ranks of the Communist Party itself - to Brezhnev's daughter - and he wished to do something about it.
Large companies were more like welfare institutions than they were enterprises concerned with productivity and the costs of production. Andropov explored the issue of incentives and decision-making for enterprise managers, but little came of it, and he died after only thirteen months in office. He was replaced by Konstantin Chernenko, who continued Andropov's objective of reforming the economy but he also died, and only after a year in office. The day after Chernenko's death - March 15, 1985 - the Politburo and a few others elevated the Party's second-in-command, Mikhail Gorbachev, to the position of Partly leader - his official title being General Secretary of the Central Committee. Like Chernenko, Gorbachev had also been associated with Andropov's desire for economic revitalization - to be known as perestroika.
However oppressive the Soviet system, the Soviet Union's communists still believed in the kind of democracy that Karl Marx had wanted. The goal of Marxism was the masses ruling themselves and eventually producing an abundance that allowed "to each according to his needs and from each according to his abilities." The Communists did not believe in the authoritarian state as had the fascists, and after Stalin's death, the more liberal Khrushchev denounced Stalin's authoritarian ways. With Gorbachev, the Soviet Union had a leader who believed that more liberalism was the answer to the Soviet Union's economic and social problems.
By now the Soviet economy had a negative GNP. In other words, rather than the Soviet economy growing more slowly than others, it was in decline. Gorbachev and his allies in the Party felt compelled to do something to reverse the economic decline and decay. Gorbachev believed that the Soviet Union needed, as he put it, "radical change." Like his predecessors he wanted his nation to catch up with the economic advances being made in the capitalist nations. Gorbachev wanted to prove that socialism could adapt, innovate, and be as productive as capitalism.
Gorbachev's perestroika was a command, or top-down, process, lacking the power of imagination rising from individuals outside of government bureaucracy - imagination that was sometimes lacking in the United States by the CEOs of the largest of corporations, but overcome by newcomers such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computer or Bill Gates of Microsoft. The Soviet economy was not giving opportunity to start up enterprises. Sticking to his belief in socialism, rather than radically change the Soviet economy Gorbachev tried tinkering with it. He denounced "unearned incomes." To improve the Soviet work force he began another crackdown against alcohol, and orders were given that embassy receptions and parties had to be alcohol free. He raised the price of alcohol, reduced supplies and the hours of sales. Then Gorbachev tried to create greater incentives for people of talent - scientific and technical personnel - whose wages were increased fifty percent. And in August 1985 the salaries of others were adjusted to the quality of their work.
Still believing in central planning, Gorbachev wished to increase the efficiency in central planning management. To make economic planning more effective and efficient, new super-agencies were created to oversee economic developments. In October 1985, Gorbachev published his plan to increase production of consumer's goods and to increase services. His plan called for a 30 percent increase by 1990 and an 80 to 90 per cent increase by the year 2000. He estimated that labor productivity in this period would more than double. With diminishing natural resources for energy, the Soviet Union had been looking toward the nuclear, and Gorbachev was planning to increase the production of nuclear power by 400 and 500 percent.
Gorbachev believed that advancing the Soviet Union's economy required mass participation, higher morale among the Soviet Union's work force, and more freedom and openness - glasnost. He likened the economy to a family's home, and democracy to ownership of the home. "A house," he said, "can be put in order only by a person who feels that he owns this house." He spoke of the goodwill necessary in making an economy work. And regarding corruption versus worker morale, he complained of leaders having placed themselves beyond the reach of criticism and of some who had become accomplices in, if not the organizers of, criminal activities.
As a part of freedom to express oneself, Gorbachev started releasing political prisoners. The Soviet Union's most outspoken dissident, Andrei Sakharov (the father of the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb) was allowed to return to Moscow from the city of Gorky, where he had been exiled for speaking out against Soviet troops being sent to Afghanistan. The Gorbachev regime allowed more openness in newspapers and on television. Gorbachev's popularity with the Soviet masses was rising.
A part of Gorbachev's plan to improve the economy was to reduce military spending. He believed that the Soviet military was absorbing too much wealth and scarce resources, and he believed that one way to reduce military spending was to make an arms agreement with the United States. The President of the United States at this time happened to be Ronald Reagan. He had been calling the Soviet Union an evil empire. He was afraid of nuclear war and was committed to developing a perfect defense system called Star Wars. Reagan's critics complained it would seem to the Russians to give the U.S. a first strike capability - a perfect defense eliminating the possibility of retaliation. But Reagan did not scare Gorbachev. Gorbachev had a different view about defense than had Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Khrushchev and Brezhnev had believed that Soviet military prowess was necessary to restrain the capitalist powers from attacking the Soviet Union and its satellites. They believed that foreign policy should be a part of the class struggle. Gorbachev saw U.S. leaders as rational, as not interested in destroying the Soviet Union through war and as wanting to avoid a nuclear holocaust. Gorbachev believed that the capitalist powers were not in need of restraint provided by the Soviet Union. He remained a Marxist but rejected applying the class struggle to foreign policy. There were many who had favored belligerence and threats against the Soviet Union in order to diminish communism. But the opposite was happening. It was a friendly U.S., represented by Reagan, that was producing what the anti-communists wanted.
Some were to describe Reagan as having forced Gorbachev to adopt his new policy toward the Cold War - in other words, to back down because of the Soviet Union's inability to keep up with U.S. advances in military spending. But no evidence exists that Gorbachev's policies were motivated by this. It was his military that wanted to keep up with the U.S., and Gorbachev argued with them. Reagan's Star Wars idea and his hostile attitude toward the "evil empire" made Gorbachev's arguments more difficult, but Gorbachev remained convinced that reductions in military spending were necessary to improve the Soviet economy, and Gorbachev let military spending decline with the decline of the Soviet economy in general.
Back in April, 1985 - his first month in office - Gorbachev had announced his first unilateral initiative: a temporary freeze on the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Gorbachev met Reagan at Geneva a few months later, in November 1985, and again in October 1986 at Reykjavik in Iceland, and yet again in May 1988 at a summit meeting in Moscow. Gorbachev and Reagan became friends, Gorbachev recognizing that Reagan sincerely wanted to avoid a nuclear holocaust, that he was a man of decency and sincerity, a former actor who was not faking it. And Reagan saw Gorbachev as something other than an evil communist robot. Gorbachev convinced Reagan that he was sincere in wanting to end the arms race and in collaborating with the West in restructuring relations. Reagan became the leading "dove" in his administration while anti-communist Republican hardliners called Reagan "a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda" and "an apologist for Gorbachev."
Gorbachev stunned Reagan's advisors by agreeing to disarmament proposals that these advisors had put forth merely as a bargaining ploy. Meanwhile, Gorbachev's attitudes were making him popular in Western Europe and the United States, where people were calling him "Gorbie." And soon Gorbachev would win the Nobel prize for peace.
On April 25 1986, the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl (in the Ukraine 90 kilometers north of Kiev) exploded, the radiation killing hundreds of women and children, contaminating rivers and streams and ruining local agriculture. A French satellite photographed it, and the French transmitted news of the blast to the world, including the Soviet Union. The damage measured in dollars was in the billions. In the Soviet Union, public mistrust of nuclear plants dashed hopes of nuclear energy as an inexpensive source of power, and plans were laid instead for building new natural gas pipelines.
Grain harvests were good in the Soviet Union in 1986 and 1987, allowing the Soviet Union to reduce grain imports, but the economy continued to decline. Gorbachev's policy on alcohol was of little help. People were now waiting in longer lines for the diminished supply of drink. Retail stores sold less alcohol, the government was receiving less from sales taxes, and brewing booze at home was increasing.
In response to reduced oil sales abroad, the government reduced the importation of consumer goods. This left soviet citizens with less to buy and reduced revenues from sales taxes. The incomes of consumers had been rising, but with too little on the shelves for people to buy, and too much money chasing too few goods, prices were rising. It was the opposite of what capitalist nations had faced in the Great Depression, when too little money was in the hands of consumers compared to what was available for purchase.
Deficit spending - government spending more money than it was acquiring in revenue - was a disaster for the Soviet economy. To make up for the insufficient tax revenues the government continued to print more money, increasing inflation. People were putting the money they could not spend into state savings banks - a bad place for money during inflation and a waste in that it was money not being invested in worthy enterprises.
Monetary policy was of little concern to Gorbachev and his advisors. New bureaucracies were created to oversee planning and investing at a more local level. Decrees were issued on quality production and completing projects on time. New laws were passed allowing managers to have more initiative. Producer cooperatives were allowed. Some joint ventures with foreign companies were authorized. But none of these were destined to turn the economy around.
The government tried to increase private farming by offering land to farmers for that purpose - land that could be farmed but not sold. But, unlike China, few people in the Soviet Union were interested in venturing into independent farming, some not sure that government favor toward private enterprise in agriculture was permanent. In 1987 the number who accepted the land grants increased, but many who accepted failed to make a success of it. Many of those who did succeed merely produced enough for their own subsistence. Overall, the move toward private farming remained unsubstantial, and the Soviet Union's agriculture remained largely collective.
With Gorbachev's new bureaucracies the Soviet economy was even more of a tangle of confusion. After fifty years of being told what to do in petty detail, and afraid of initiative and risk, managers were not ready to take full advantage of production opportunities. There was ineptitude in investing. Demands made by planners were not in tune with production capabilities. Growth targets were missed by wide margins and projects remained uncompleted.
Until 1986 the Soviet Union had been criticizing China's economic reforms, but Soviet economists were now wondering why Chinese reforms were working better than Soviet reforms. One Soviet economist complained that the Chinese worked hard and that the Russians talked hard. One difference between China and the Soviet Union was that reforms in China began in the countryside with peasants taking to free enterprise with confidence.
In 1987 individual enterprises were given more freedom to make their own decisions regarding investments in production, hoping for a closer marriage between investment and production. In 1988, new priorities were given to the construction of housing and to modernizing industries that produced consumers goods.
Also in 1988, Gorbachev made new political moves. His reforms were being opposed and frustrated by opposition with the Communist Party and local bureaucracies, and Gorbachev responded by emasculating the power of the Central Committee Secretariat. He removed the Party from overseeing the economy, leaving this to local soviets. Meanwhile, Gorbachev was preparing to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan.
Sakharov continued to agitate for the release of "prisoners of conscience." He wrote of "well-known prisoners" having been released, but he complained that people were still serving time in psychiatric hospitals and that people who were not well known were still serving time on "trumped-up charges." Soviet television helped to make Andrei Sakharov well known, and Sakharov was respected as he appeared to be without bitterness or political ambition. Sakharov worked with many others who were as dedicated to reforms as he, and he agitated for giving real political freedom to the various nationalities within the Soviet Union. To a degree, Gorbachev agreed. Gorbachev looked forward to "modernizing" the relationship between the nationalities and central Soviet power, hoping to make that association more genuine.
Sakharov called for an end to the Communist Party's monopoly of power and for freeing the economy from what he saw as excessive bureaucratic dictates. He praised Gorbachev's "courage" in reducing the Soviet Union's armed forces and for his new liberal attitude toward the rest of Eastern Europe. But Sakharov believed that greater cuts would be beneficial, and he advocated a fifty-percent reduction in military spending.
In May 1989, Sakharov attended the Soviet Union's newly created legislative body, a 2,250 member Congress of People's Deputies - an event that was televised and presided over by Gorbachev. There, Sakharov and a few others argued for more reform. Sakharov spoke of his being "increasingly troubled" by the government's domestic policies and by the gap between word and deed. He spoke against real power being in the hands of the Communist Party, against retreats in freedom of information and of ideology being turned over to men who were "enemies of perestroika."
Sakharov spoke of the economic crisis in the Soviet Union. He observed that the crisis was accompanied by distrust, and he described the public's confidence in Gorbachev as having fallen "to almost zero." Despair, he said, was a barrier to evolutionary development. He complained that moves toward a market economy had been half-measures and "impractical." People, he said, cannot wait any longer with nothing but promises to sustain them. A middle course in a situation like this, he said, "is almost impossible." Either accelerate reforms toward economic freedom, he complained, or retain administration of the command economy in all its aspects. Gorbachev answered, saying that "many big leaps" had been taken and that the results had always been "tragedy and backtracking." As for public support, Gorbachev said that he expected the people to understand his policies.
Sakharov and his allies were a minority at the Congress. One delegate who spoke against him was a veteran who had lost his legs in Afghanistan. The delegate spoke of problems veterans were having, and referring to words Sakharov had spoken recently during a visit to Canada, he described Sakharov as having committed slander. Sakharov had described the Soviet Union as waging a cruel and horrible war in Afghanistan and had called for a negotiated settlement of the war. The veteran ended his criticism of Sakharov by saying there were three matters that "we must all fight to protect." These were, "state power, our motherland, and Communism." This appeal to patriotism brought the delegates to their feet, and applause rocked the hall.
At the Congress, Sakharov's allies listed their complaints. Economic reforms were described as only cosmetic, and the complaint was lodged that reforms were being stalled by a wave "of retrograde measures." A complaint was voiced against agricultural subsidies and against inflation, against "a bureaucracy that rules without accountability." A complaint was lodged against the economy's focus: the production of too little in plastics, the dearth of computers and of scientists still using the abacus. Someone proposed investing only in things that would satisfy consumer demand in the near term. Someone also proposed a one-shot importation of consumer goods to achieve a balance between supply and demand. Also suggested was a cut in the importation of grain, allowing farmers to sell part of their produce for hard currency and allowing them to spend their hard currency as they wished. And it was suggested that the six to eight billions being spent in Latin America - mainly subsidies to Cuba - be stopped.
A biologist complained that 20 percent of the population lived in areas that were ecological disasters and that another 35 to 40 percent lived under unsatisfactory ecological conditions. He spoke of the infant mortality rate in the Soviet Union being higher than in many African countries, of the average life span in the Soviet Union being four to eight years less than it was in developed nations. And he spoke of one-fifth of the sausages and 42 percent of children's dairy products produced in the Soviet Union in 1987 containing a dangerous amount of chemicals.
In December, 1989, Sakharov died, at the age of sixty-eight. Four days of national mourning were declared. Sakharov's popularity had been bolstered by his death. A poll taken in the Soviet Union shortly after Sakharov's death placed him as the most popular person in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century.
By now Gorbachev had withdrawn troops from Afghanistan. By the end of 1989 each of the Soviet republics had acquired its own parliament, with its own president. But tensions in the Soviet Union had increased. The declining economy was producing strikes by labor - something that would not have been tried under Stalin. There were episodes of ethnic violence, with people in some of the Soviet republics blaming their misery on the Russians. In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia a move toward independence was underway. All those years of Russian control had failed to erase a desire for self-rule among these peoples. And by now, Soviet hegemony was evaporating in Eastern Europe.
The socialist economies in Eastern Europe had been suffering along with that of the Soviet Union, with Gorbachev looking toward glasnost (openness) as a remedy for their economic troubles. In Hungary, one of the more economically advanced satellite nations, twenty-five percent of the population was living in dire poverty. In December 1988, Gorbachev announced in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly that by 1991 he intended to pull Soviet tanks and troops out of East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. For Hungarians this was encouraging news, and the Hungarians demonstrated for the freedom to create a political party, or parties, independent of Hungary's Communist Party.
1989 began in Czechoslovakia with the Communist government's judicial system prosecuting the playwright Vaclav Havel for his having incited illegal protests. The court sentenced Havel to remain in prison until September or October. Others dissidents in Czechoslovakia were also being tried and sentenced. But with the populace restive and in sympathy with the dissidents, the government thought that leniency would be prudent, and in May they released Havel.
In Poland the Communist regime had been compromising with public opinion. Failing to crush the dissident movement called Solidarity, the government tried to absorb Solidarity into a legitimate part of national affairs. The leaders of Solidarity agreed to cooperate with the Communist regime, and the regime allowed Solidarity to run candidates in coming elections. Some dissidents opposed collaboration with the Communists. They wanted to boycott the elections on the grounds that the elections were not entirely free. But Solidarity argued for participation, and at the polls Solidarity won an overwhelming victory, becoming the first freely elected opposition party in a country with a Communist regime.
Some anti-Communists in the United States had argued that Communists would never liberalize. They had claimed that Communism had to be overthrown by force. Now they were being proved wrong.
In early July, Gorbachev pledged that the Poles and Hungarians were free to determine their own future. Gorbachev believed that Communist leaders in the Warsaw Pact countries should try hanging onto power by being good Communists, that is, by winning the support of the masses. It may also be that Gorbachev believed that the Warsaw Pact countries were not worth hanging onto, that they were costing the Soviet Union more money than value being received in return.
In Hungary, Communist leaders were seeing "the handwriting on the wall." Conservative Party leaders were being replaced by younger, more liberal Communists. The Communist Party in Hungary recognized the rising in 1956 as legitimate, and the Communist leader who supported Hungarian national aspirations then, Imre Nagy, who had been executed by Khrushchev's regime, was exonerated and given a proper burial.
The Hungarian Communist Party changed its name to Socialist Party, to bridge a gap between doctrinaire Marxists and European Social Democrats. Hungary declared itself a republic, and Hungarians were free to travel abroad without the special permission that had been previously required. President Bush (the elder), who had been visiting Poland and celebrating developments there, also visited Hungary, and he promised the Hungarians economic help. And a U.S. company, General Electric, bought into lightbulb manufacturing in Hungary - the largest western investment in Hungary since World War II.
Advances in freedom in Poland and Hungary was encouraging people in neighboring Czechoslovakia. On August 21, the twenty-first anniversary of Soviet tanks rolling into that city, people in Prague demonstrated. The former Communist leader, Alexander Dubcek, who in 1968 had led what was called the Prague Spring, spoke encouraging words to the crowd.
Communist Party leaders in Czechoslovakia were more conservative than were those in Hungary. They had risen with the Soviet invasion and Dubcek's fall, and now they were slow in adjusting to what was taking place. Under the illusion that more repression would work, they began jailing demonstrators and rounding up dissidents, including Vaclav Havel.
The hope for more freedom had also spread to East Germany. The regime there, led by Eric Honneker, had been appalled by Gorbachev's liberalizations, and since 1988 Soviet publications had been banned in East Germany. But it was to no avail.
East Germans had been free to travel within the Warsaw bloc. That is where many of them went for their annual vacation. And with freedom of travel within Hungary, some from East Germany were fleeing across the Hungarian border into Austria - the slow-thinking East German regime having failed to block travel to Hungary. Many Germans wanting to flee to West Germany crowded into the West German embassies in Prague and Hungary, demanding entry to West Germany. The flight of Germans from Hungary into Austria increased to the thousands, and the Communist regime in East Germany panicked as its economy became threatened by the loss of educated and talented young people.
In mid-October 1989, mounting dissent in East Germany was followed by the Politburo there replacing Eric Honneker, hoping this would quiet dissent. But Honneker was replaced with another hardliner, and the dissent continued. On October 25, Gorbachev announced that the Warsaw Pact nations "were doing it their way," described by some as the Sinatra Doctrine - as opposed to the Brezhnev Doctrine. Under pressure from a more rebellious public, the East German regime tried appeasing public opinion. To reduce the "contradiction" between the Party line and public perceptions, and the Party admitted publicly that its regime was not popular.
On November 9, 1989, the Communist regime in East Germany went further in appeasing public opinion by announcing liberalized travel regulations. Inept in its communications, the regime led people in East Berlin to believe that this meant they could journey freely into West Berlin. A hoard of people massed at border crossing points, overwhelming the guards, who let the joyous crowds pass. The happy East Germans flocked to West German stores to make purchases and they rejoiced with West Berliners.
The freedom to cross into West Germany further encouraged people in East Germany, and the Communist regime surrendered to an aroused populace. In November, Berliners began what would become weeks of tearing down the wall that separated East and West Berlin - to Gorbachev's surprise. President Reagan had called on Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," but Gorbachev had left that as the business of the East Germans.
In Prague, the strategy of Communist leaders remained that of repression, despite what was happening in Berlin. In mid-November, 1989, on the fourth consecutive day of demonstrations, the police in Prague attacked demonstrators. Thirteen were admitted to hospitals and dozens were arrested. The following day the number of demonstrators increased, to approximately 10,000 persons. This inspired a greater demonstration the following day: an estimated 200,000 demonstrators. The leader of Czechoslovakia's Communist Party, Milous Jakes, known and ridiculed for his awkward use of language, resigned. Encouraged, an estimated 500,000 people marched for the end of Communist Party rule. And millions of Czechs went out on a two-hour general strike to express solidarity with the demand for political freedom. It was a demonstration too massive for the Communist regime, and the regime responded with a pledge of free elections within a year.
In early December, the Politburo of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia declared the Soviet invasion to have been a mistake. And rather than waiting months for elections, the promised elections were held after only a few days. By the end of December, Czechoslovakia had a new parliament. Its president was Vaclav Havel, and the chairman of parliament was Alexander Dubcek.
By the end of 1989 the Berlin Wall had been torn down. A reform-minded communist, Hans Modrow, had risen to power within East Germany's Communist Party, and Party officials continued to appeal to the public. In mid-December marchers in Leipzig held a candlelight vigil commemorating Stalin's victims. And in a Party Congress, many Communists made speeches of confessions and demanded an absolute break with the Stalinist past. Hans Modrow promised the public multi-party elections for May, and the Communist Party (originally the coalition party, or SED) created by Stalin, changed its name to the Reformed Party of Democratic Socialism. Then the elections were moved up to March, and in these elections the Reformed Party of Democratic Socialism suffered a crushing defeat. A new government was formed in East Germany, and it began lobbying for unification with West Germany - a move that was to be formally achieved in October, 1990, not with great enthusiasm by the government or people of West Germany.
The economy in the Soviet Union was not a good argument for Soviet republics to stay in the Soviet Union. Instead, some were eager to break with Moscow on the ground that their republic could organize their economy better than could bureaucrats in Moscow. Also, nationalism was alive within the republics - where many Russians lived and considered home. There was some hostility towards these local Russians, who tended to be opposed to breaking away from Moscow. Gorbachev was on their side. He wished to keep the Soviet Union together. On the other hand, in 1990, elections in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania gave overwhelming victories to political parties favoring independence. And the biggest republic in the Soviet Union, Russia, was also threatening to break away.
The President of the Russian Republic's parliament was Boris Yeltsin - a former Communist who had been dismissed from the Party's Politburo by Gorbachev and others in 1987. Yeltsin had been described by Sakharov as a man he liked but of a "different caliber" than Gorbachev - meaning lesser. Of a different caliber he may have been, but he appealed to the Russian people, and he took advantage of the new freedom in the Soviet Union to denounce the Communist Party and the policies of Gorbachev. As a rival to Gorbachev, Yeltsin owed at least some of his popularity to Gorbachev's unpopularity.
In July, 1990, Yeltsin convened the Russian Republic's Supreme Soviet and called for economic sovereignty for the republic, in other words, taking control of the economy away from Gorbachev. Other republics wished to follow suit. The Ukraine called for the return of all Ukrainian soldiers from the Soviet military and the creation of an independent Ukrainian military. In the new atmosphere of freedom and democracy, the Soviet Union was unraveling.
The Communist Party was split between reformers and conservatives, and both were critical of Gorbachev, who was trying to steer a middle ground between state control of the economy and free enterprise. Gorbachev spoke of his belief in socialism and of his being a Communist. He was holding Lenin's New Economic Policy of the early 1920s as his model for what should be done. [note]
To many in Russia, Gorbachev seemed weak and unable to make up his mind. One moment Gorbachev was praising a conservative Communist such as Ligachev, and another moment he was praising the liberal Yakovlev. People were wondering whether he knew where he stood, and they were holding him responsible for the continuing failure of the economy.
In 1991 Gorbachev's popularity in the West was at an all time high, but his approval rating in the Soviet Union was at an all-time low - not only because of the economy but also because of the fall of Communism in the satellite countries. Many in the Soviet Union were angry with Gorbachev for having allowed Germany to unite again. Some, including conservative and patriotic Communists, saw Gorbachev as having disarmed the Soviet Union. They saw him as having thrown away the victory in World War II that had cost twenty million lives.
In 1991 more Soviet factories were closing down. The parliament in the Russian Republic passed a few reforms in the direction of a market economy, and Yeltsin cut funding to various Soviet agencies based on Russian soil. Gorbachev was being destroyed by the new freedoms he had helped to create. He saw the power of the Soviet government as falling away, and he turned his strategy in the direction of preservation - what some would call a turn to the right. Gorbachev's ally, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, resigned, warning that "a dictatorship is coming." Around this time Gorbachev suggested to the conservatives around him, including the leader of the Soviet Union's military, that they were free to take whatever extraordinary action was necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In August, 1991, they obliged him and staged what appeared to be a coup, while Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, were vacationing in the Crimea. Leaders of the coup claimed that Gorbachev was ill. Gorbachev played along. He was, it appeared, under house arrest, but he had a telephone with which he could call anyone he wished.
The coup was a shock to Russians, who saw their nation as something different from what they thought was a Latin American banana republic, and many of them went into the streets to protest. Their cry was for the protection of what people in the United States believed they had never had: democracy. Yeltsin stood with people who were in the streets against the coup. Ideologically, the masses were much respected in the Soviet Union. Military men were easily persuaded to side with Yeltsin and the people in the streets. Coup leaders did not believe in the coup to the extent that they would commit themselves to a military takeover. Gorbachev's turn to the right and the coup were colossal failures. Gorbachev pretended to be liberated, and Yeltsin was more of a hero, overshadowing the hapless Gorbachev. (See book review on Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders.) In triumph, Yeltsin, by presidential decree, banned the Communist Party in the Russian Republic and seized all its property.
At the end of the year, the other former Soviet Republics followed the Russian Republic into independence. Abroad, all Soviet embassies and consulates became Russian embassies and consulates. The Soviet Union had ceased to exist as a legal entity, and Gorbachev was now out of a job, and bitter, blaming Yeltsin for breaking up his beloved Soviet Union.
The collapse had come after years of attempts by non-Communist governments to "peacefully coexist," to negotiate, sign agreements and to have cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union - opposed by those who demonized the Communists and falsely equated bargaining and befriending the Soviet with appeasing Hitler at Munich. Relaxed tensions between the Soviet Union and the capitalist West had paid off. The Cold War was over. Communism had not died, but it had declined dramatically. The Soviet Union fell apart not at a height in belligerence by the United States but when relations were good.
Additional Online Reading
BBC: Lech Walesa Recalls Solidarity
Triumph (Aug 29, '05)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4194204.stm
Recommended Book
Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders, by George W. Breslauer, 2002
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