John B. Hagney: Gorbachev’s glasnost rose and fell, but lingers on
By John B. Hagney
“Imagine a country that launches Sputnik and it can’t solve the problem of women’s pantyhose. There’s no toothpaste, no soap, not the basic necessities of life. It was humiliating to work in such a government.”
– Mikhail Gorbachev, April 23, 2001
In 1988, I was in the Soviet Union interviewing citizens, inviting them to share their thoughts about Mikhail Gorbachev’s revolutionary reforms.
I understood that they would be guarded given the pall of fear that permeated Soviet society. To protect their identities the interview tapes were labeled as music so when I was searched upon exit, the documents would appear to be benign. To protect interviewees, at no time did I do interviews publicly but through Soviet friends who arranged conversations in private flats.
When Gorbachev ascended in 1985 as the last leader of the USSR, the economy was atrophied by three successive corrupt, ossified gerontocracies that had mismanaged the Soviet Union since 1964.
Rather than applying the free market principles of supply and demand, the communist apparatchiks in Moscow dictated delusional industrial and agricultural production quotas. The factory or collective farm that failed to fulfill quotas was punished so managers regularly cooked the books to deceive party numbers bureaucrats. Bribes were baked into the ruse.
In the shops there were chronic scarcities as it was easier for producers to game the system rather than work. As a Moscow acquaintance quipped, “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.”
To acquire food and clothing, Soviet consumers were compelled to queue for hours – in 1986 on average six hours a day, which further eroded labor productivity. To compensate there were thriving black markets, officially illegal yet indispensable to survival.
Then there was the Soviet’s Vietnam – Afghanistan.
This is the dysfunction that Gorbachev inherited. The Soviet system was on the precipice of imminent implosion.
The crisis was so urgent that Gorbachev summoned the first All-Union Conference of the Communist Party since World War II and proposed radically new policies.
First, “perestroika,” a restructuring of the economy trashing centralized planning and replacing it with market incentives. Second, “glasnost,” essentially the First Amendment freedoms that we take for granted. Gorbachev understood that perestroika needed to be predicated on glasnost, that effective economic reform depended on the freedom to criticize. These policies were the Soviet Union’s second revolution.
If glasnost was to become a reality the Soviet Union needed to shed the shroud of Stalin’s cult of fear. “De-Stalinization” was imperative to Gorbachev’s reforms. The history of Stalin’s Great Terror in which millions of alleged “enemies of the state” were deported to the gulags, documented in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” or executed was verboten for decades.
A Kyiv linguist I interviewed said, “A boy in our village was 11 when his father was arrested and perished forever. When the boy was 16 he volunteered to fight in World War II. He fought the war being ‘the son of an enemy of the state.’ ”
Stalin was messianic in Soviet mythology as the savior of the country in World War II. When Gorbachev released dissident Nobel physicist Andrei Sakharov from internal exile in 1986, it was the first gesture that Gorbachev intended to walk the glasnost talk. Sakharov subsequently created Memorial, an organization dedicated to remembering Stalin’s victims. In 1990, I was inducted as an honorary member of Memorial. In December, the organization was shut down by Vladimir Putin.
Stalin’s atrocities were revealed in the film “Repentance” (1987) and by historians who had new access to state archives. The generation of Soviets who had survived the Great Patriot War were outraged and in denial about revelations of Stalin’s dark paranoia and resisted Gorbachev.
Outside Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) I interviewed an elderly babushka who recalled a story about Stalin’s visit to her village in the 1930s: “Stalin approaches a chicken. He grabs the chicken by the neck raising it off the ground. The chicken is hysterical. After a few minutes Stalin releases the chicken and takes grain from his pocket scattering it near the chicken. The chicken cautiously pecks at the grain. Stalin violently stomps his boot on the ground and the chicken retreats.” To the assembled villagers Stalin warns, “This is how I treat the people.”
The crucible testing Gorbachev’s glasnost was the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. For weeks after the reactor fire Gorbachev denied the accident reverting to his predecessors proclivity to manufacture alternative facts. It was only after radioactive plumes were detected in Scandinavia that Gorbachev was compelled to tell the truth.
Gorbachev also recognized that if perestroika was to succeed, the pernicious alcoholism that was diminishing life expectancies and increasing job absenteeism had to be addressed. When Gorbachev imposed higher taxes and restricted hours sold, drinkers resorted to queuing for longer periods, spending more of their incomes on liquor, and home distilling toxic concoctions creating a shortages of sugar. As one of my Russian friends lamented, “Now vodka is 80 proof, with perestroika it will be 40!”
Gorbachev realized that advocating reform domestically would inspire eastern Europeans to demand self-determination. To that end Gorbachev’s “Sinatra Doctrine” (“My Way”) liberated those subject states from the Soviet yoke.
Naturally Soviet republics that long resented Russian hegemony became restive. After some Soviet backsliding in Georgia and Lithuania the Union collapsed in 1991.
Gorbachev’s demise was ultimately caused by the subversion of perestroika by party conservatives who ferociously defended their illicit privileges. A joke in Moscow was, “Perestroika is when a dog is put on a long leash with its food bowl out of reach. Glasnost is when the dog is allowed to bark freely.” Under Yeltsin’s corrupt regime privatized state assets were rapaciously pillaged by the oligarchs.
Despite his vilification by Putin, who regards the Soviet Union’s collapse as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Gorbachev’s ideals live in the resistance to Putin’s gangster kleptocracy. Gorbachev’s glasnost survives in the audacious defiance of Alexi Navalny, Pussy Riot, Russian journalists like Marina Ovsyannikova who in March disrupted the set of Russia’s main state news broadcast with a sign, “Stop the war. Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you,” and, yes, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
John B. Hagney has a master’s degree in Russian history. His thesis on Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms was published in the International Journal of Oral History, translated in six languages. He taught history for 45 years at Lewis and Clark High School.