Gorbachev's revolution, 1985-1991 PDF
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GORBACHEV'S REVOLUTION, 1985-1991 Also by Anthony D' Agostino MARXISM AND TIlE RUSSIAN ANARCHISTS SOVIET SUCCESSION STRUGGLES Gorbachev's Revolution, 1985-1991 Anthony D' Agostino © Anthony D' Agostino 1998 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1998 All rights reselVed. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 1998 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire R021 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-14407-5 ISBN 978-1-349-14405-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-14405-1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10987654321 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 To Alexander Leo Contents Acknowledgements viii 1 A Gorbachev Epiphany? 1 2 The Old Regime of the Soviet Communists: Foreign Policy in the Cold War 11 3 Hero of the Harvest 49 4 'Acceleration of the Perfection', 1985-87 77 5 Gorbachev Bound: The Emergence of the Ligachev Opposition 100 6 The Thought of Mikhail Gorbachev: A Treatise and a Speech 126 7 Between Yeltsin and Ligachev 148 8 Another Escape Forward, 1988 174 9 Dropping the Pilot: Gorbachev Retires Gromyko 198 10 1989: The Year of Anger and Remembering 219 11 From the Wall to Stavropol: Gorbachev's German Policy 260 12 The Second Russian Revolution Gathers 280 13 From the Coup to the End 306 14 Conclusion: Utopia and Repentance 339 Notes 356 Index 380 Vll Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to recognize intellectual and other debts incurred in the writing of this study, much of it done as the events themselves were un folding. During those years it was sensed everywhere that world history was passing a divide. We had to change every predisposition and throw out all our old maps, especially the intellectual ones. Every thinking per son in the world breathed the air of the Gorbachev revolution - as their counterparts must have in the days of the French Revolution. It made sense to say: 1789, 1848, 1917-18, 1989-9l. So in a larger sense than usual, this work bears the imprint of valuable encounters with students, friends, colleagues and, as well, people in the media and the world of affairs, Soviet glasnost intellectuals, and internet contacts. I can mention by name only a small number of them. Jack Boas, Marek Chodakiewicz, Jerald Combs, and Norair Taschian read the whole manuscript and gave me the benefit of copious comments. Walter LaFeber contributed thoughtful remarks about the chapter on the Soviet side of the Cold War, while Theodore Karasik, Boris Kagarlitsky, Ronald Bee, Ciro Zoppo, and Maziar Behrooz took me up on various other chapters and topics. My notions about Gorbachev and the ex-USSR were probed by Michael Krasny, Kevin Pursglove, Philip Maldari, Chris Welch, and Bill Shechner in searching radio and television interviews. Generous support for the research and writing was provided by the offices of Faculty Affairs and Professional Development and of Research and Sponsored Programs of San Francisco State University. Dariusz Salata, Attila Gabor, Virginia Wright, Kevin Clarke and Karen Graham helped me to locate and copy many important items. Many thanks also to my editors at Macmillan, T. M. Farmiloe, Aruna Vasudevan, and John Smith, and to the intrepid copy-editor, Penny Dole. In the transliteration of Russian names, the approach that I have adopted is to use a newspaper system for the text (thus Yeltsin rather than EIt'sin) and a modified Library of Congress system for the notes. Countries whose names were changed are given according to the name prevalent at the time in question (for example, Belorussia up to 24 August 1991 and Belarus thereafter). My thanks to the Russians, Belarusians, and BaIts who showed me around the ex-Soviet Union and helped me to better understand the end of the Soviet era. My wife Susan Fiering and our children helped me to keep things in perspective in their own way. My daughter Martine gladdened my heart by turning toward the study of American literature rather than some less Vlll Acknowledgements ix promising alternative, such as a life of following the Grateful Dead. And most of all, my son Alexander lightened things by regarding my deepest thoughts with the high irony that only eight-year-olds seem to be able to muster, and by pressing his points home physically with his highly inef fectual wrestling. 1 A Gorbachev Epiphany? Somebody asked the American President whether he still considered the Soviet Union to be an 'evil empire.' He said no, and he said that within the walls of the Kremlin, next to the Tsar cannon, right in the heart of the 'evil empire.' We take note of that. As the ancient Greeks say, 'everything flows, everything changes. Everything is in a state of flux.' The confident words were those of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who was speaking in Moscow in June 1988 to a gathering of journalists and assessing his just-concluded summit meeting with American President Ronald Reagan. Only five months before, the two leaders had signed a treaty on inter mediate range nuclear forces, an important benchmark in the history of US-Soviet relations, one that appeared at the time to have closed off what some had called 'Cold War Two' - the period of tense confronta tion between the superpowers in the early eighties - and opened up a new period of understanding, not the Detente of the Nixon-Kissinger period, but perhaps 'Detente Two'. These days we have no Detente, no Cold War, no Soviet threat. Soon it will be necessary to teach young people the meaning of these musty historical terms. Nevertheless, I ask the reader to think back on that frightful time and its unique menaces, when half a million Soviet troops stood over eastern Europe, backed by weapons with more than ten thou sand nuclear warheads. The problem of the western 'Euromissiles' had then been at the centre of the worries of the Soviet leaders since the NATO decision in 1979 to match the Soviet missile buildup in eastern Europe by new western missiles. Soviet defence specialists were concerned about the American Pershing Two rocket, part of the NATO deploy ment, with its reputed ten minute flight time from a European site to a Moscow target. They also feared the ground-launched cruise missiles that were to be put into western positions, weapons that were invisible to Soviet radar and seemingly perfect for a surprise attack against 'time urgent targets'. Worst of all was a dangerous logic that they thought was being set in motion. The Soviet side reserved the right to match all the NATO nu clear weapons in Western Europe, including British and French ones, while the Americans reserved the right to match the Soviet weapons, irrespective of the British and French. This seemed to be a formula for a perpetual ratcheting-up of the arms race in its crucial European theatre. 1
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