Individual Democratic Institutions Research Fellowships 1994-1996

The research reports reproduced here are the responsibility of the individual authors. Their reproduction does not imply any form of official or unofficial endorsement by NATO. The reports are offered in unedited form, as presented by their authors, with a view to make their findings available to a wide audience. Tendencies Towards Authoritarianism: A Comparative Analysis of Russia and Bulgaria Georgi Dimitrov, Petia Kabakchieva, Jeko Kijossev [Back to Index] III. Prerequisites for the Collapse of the Communist Regimes 2. Perestroika as impasse "Perestroika" necessarily had to come to a head in Russia and its local - Russian - temporal logic was entirely superficial for the other national societies in erstwhile Eastern Europe. That is why we are wholly justified in referring to the made-up, politically voluntaristic European year 1989. By the time the agents (exponents of the idea) of perestroika came to the levers of leadership, society had decayed to an incredible point(3). The visible mass catastrophes that occurred in Gorbachev's first years in office were only the superficial symptoms of the scale of the tendencies rising from the rubble of an already collapsing Russia. Furthermore, the very election of Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) indicated that part of the ruling elite - Politburo, the KGB and the Military-Industrial Complex - had already realized that economization of the whole system was inevitable. As E. Albatz(4) appropriately notes, Gorbachev would not have been elected leader of the USSR if social productivity of labour had not already been found incapable of sustaining the three pillars of power in the Soviet Union. This means that 1985 saw the one and only absolutely unreplenishable resource run out: time. For the agent-exponent of innovation, "time was up." To make matters worse, they were not agents exercising power in the full sense of the word. They neither had effective instruments to change society nor were exponents of a clear strategy of change. Gorbachev's team was under constant fire for lack of clear guidelines of the change even in the course of the perestroika - especially from anti-perestroichiks. This could suggest that there had been a strategy but that strategy had been known to Gorbachev's team only. Hence the exceptional importance of the memoirs(5) on the course of perestroika by V. Medvyedev, the official ideologue in Gorbachev's team. The way the writer talks about the actual process of restructuring rather than his direct admissions show beyond any doubt that there had been no general strategy. Medvyedev's attitudes to social reform are most symptomatic. Recounting how he had reported to the party's top functionaries to whom he had to explain the goals and tasks of perestroika, the only thing he deems necessary to discuss are not the proposed actions and objectives themselves. The most important thing must have been (that is why it figures in the memoirs) that "the report had been well-received by the comrades." This means that the course and substance of restructuring was not defined by the needs of society but by the readiness of the party's top apparatus to accept one thing or another. In other words, strategy had been wholly replaced by tactics. The problem is why? The answer that this was due to inexperience is correct but superficial. Something much more important was missing: resources of power which would implement the economization of Soviet society. Strong and stable central power is a sine qua non for a "revolution from above." Architects of perestroika in the ex-USSR, however, did not have effective power: they did not have an obedient executive apparatus. For creating a society subordinate to economic self-regulation would have eliminated precisely the party apparatus that had to effect the social transition. The CPSU apparatus had known this ever since Khrushchev and would have fought tooth and nail against it. The initiators of perestroika thus had to solve three mutually exclusive tasks: to assert themselves in the structures of power, to change the very structures of power (cadres, objectives, mechanisms) and to change society itself. Needless to say, as the ultimate objective changing society came secondary to the need of creating the means of doing that. The strategy was never verbalized since it consisted of degree rather than principle. In substance, the objective was ambivalent: to conduct "sufficient reforms" which would stabilize social reproduction in the Soviet Union and thus stabilize the authority of the new state-and-party leadership. Gorbachev and his team realized only that there was some "threshold of changes" beyond which the attainment of the first objective would remove them from government. All his efforts concentrated on barring the tactics of creeping perestroika from that threshold. However, the time that was running out in the late 80s should have been spent precisely on such social restructuring - yet it was wasted on infighting within the power apparatus (still under way). This produced a vicious circle: the scramble for power postponed social change which, in turn, made the need of change all the more imperative. For its part, that radicalized demands on the scope of the changes, which multiplied their opponents in the circles of their executors. This complicated the struggle as social paralysis intensified. And so on and so forth. What could have been the way out of that absurd situation? We know from the theory of modernization that all successful 20th century attempts at "revolution from above" have inevitably culminated in one form of dictatorship or another which, however, has consistently pursued a course towards democratization. In other words, modernization of the economy and political democracy are in inverse proportion. Which is understandable - democracy presupposes that the different social interests are represented in power. Yet modernization intensifies and polarizes the antagonism of interests. In addition, the modernization elite is up against the joint front of the old political elite and the masses, which always pay the price of modernization themselves (B. Moore - M. D. Apter). Gorbachev's perestroika tried to invert the logic of "revolution from above" by making relative democratization in the form of glasnost a prerequisite for economic liberalization. Back in 1986 researchers familiar with the logic of modernizational developments, predicted that such "new thinking" would fail in practice. Where did Gorbachev's political voluntarism come from: well-meaning ignorance or by force of circumstances? If we decide to be sentimental, we might assume that "Gorby"(6) was simply a nice guy who wanted and succeeded in going down in history as one of the key statesmen of the 20th century. Being capable of launching a revolution "from above" only and reluctant to go to its logical culmination - dictatorship, he decided give something unprecedented a try. Come what may... Sentimental reflections, however, could be ascribed to a Russian partocrat only by people who have never had direct contact with that breed of politicians. If we use our common sense, we will realize that going against the logic of elitist modernization was not a subjective well-meaning whim but the only possible way out. Any formal head of state, i.e. a head of state who holds the title but not the levers of power, is forced to pursue a certain course - creation of his or her own social base - as a resource of power that is alternative to the administrative one. That is precisely why glasnost and, more generally, the sanctioned pluralism in the public sphere, had to fortify the social position of "the leader" who was at odds with the traditional power structure. Glasnost legalized already existing alternative civil structures - religious, youth, intellectual circles. On the one hand, this led to the emergence of a multitude of actors in public affairs saving time and resources that would have been necessary for their creation. On the other, those actors had direct and active influence on public opinion-making. At the same time, they were "subjects" denied political representation and doomed to support the "leader" that had legalized them. The other political move, denial of international confrontation, was analogical and had more to it than consistence with the economic exhaustion of the USSR (in this sense it saved resources for social reform). Above all, new foreign political thinking gave Western countries a direct stake in the domestic political struggle in the Soviet Union - at that, unconditionally on Gorbachev's side. In other words, the change in foreign policy was an attempt at stabilizing Gorbachev's personal position within the pyramid of party power. Both moves achieved their objective: they made "the young," by gerontocratic standards, "leader" immensely popular both at home and abroad. Yet they did not make him a leader since there was still no socio-group agent of the economic reform. Both moves failed to increase the head of state's real power, only intensifying resistance by partocrats (military, police, administration). In other words, the internal resistance forces of Russian society against the inertia of communist mechanisms and stereotypes were still token in the mid-80s. Especially against the background of the years of "stagnation" which were, for many people, one big never-ending party. Perestroika remained a problem entirely of the intelligentsia. Let us note something else of paramount importance. A quasi-party elite of managers of major economic groupings had started emerging even in Russia in the 70s. They were the very people on whom the tendency towards economization (emancipation of the economy from ideology) could rely on. Those powerful groupings, however, were practically illegal and, in most cases, directly associated with the underworld. (Let us remember that communism mercilessly persecuted "economic crime," i.e. abuse of high office in the administration for individual gains higher than the state redistribution tables. Those offences were punished much more harshly than offences against the person or private property.) Besides, the economic elite remembered NEP (New Economic Policy) in the mid-20s all too well, when economic liberalization had gone quite farther than today even. The "NEPman" class, however, was physically exterminated at the end of the period. So were economic reformists under Khrushchev. That is why this potential and powerful social agent did not support Gorbachev and preferred to remain in the shadows(7). While the communist framework of the perestroika remained doubtless, this potential social agent did not support the course towards reform. Thus it was not an abstract good will, but coercion under the pressure of the internal failure to change the socio-economic structure that dictated the shift in political strategy - naturally, outwards; beyond the international borders which also proved the borders of the politically feasible change. Besides, let us recall that the idea at the core of this shift was not basically new. As is known, the so-called "GOSR" (Great October Socialist Revolution) was conducted by the Bolsheviks with the clear awareness that they had to cling on to power in Russia for a few years only, until they kindled "the fire of proletarian revolution in Europe." Only after victory there would the West - as a gesture of international friendship - import the necessary technological arsenal in Russia so as to revolutionize its economic base (lagging behind in modernization). Gorbachev, as a consistent Leninist, decided to relaunch the operation of export/import of revolutions that had failed in the 20s. He must have been well aware that the Russian grip alone had frozen evolution towards "socialism with a human face" for which the empire's satellite countries had been ripe even decades ago. Staking on bloc "socialist unity," the Russian quasi-leader apparently hoped that his domestic political chill had deep-frozen the other national societies and that they would defreeze in their erstwhile state - by now seen as "good," i.e. not counter to the principles of communism. The idea was to legally change Russia's internal party structure under pressure from the situation within the bloc. Hence the accelerated (and not too careful) preparations for winter 1989. The idea failed due to wrong fundamental assumptions: albeit handicapped, national modernization processes proved to have pursued their course. That is why the easing of "Warsaw Treaty" military-political pressure did not revivify "socialism with Dubcek's face" but found historically heterogeneous national societies that are increasingly harder to conceive of in general categories in the 90s. The single bloc has disappeared and, hence, so has Gorbachev's last lever in restructuring communist structures of power. The rest is a painful but irreversible departure from the political scene(8).