More Russians now see value in Gorbachev''s reforms

By William Pfaff

 Paris – Twenty years after, what do the Russians think of perestroika?
Nearly half of them think that it probably was necessary.  Only a third (35%) say otherwise.  This represents a small but significant change since ten years ago.  Then, only 40% of Russians said perestroika had been necessary or desirable.
 Perestroika is generally thought in Russia to have started in November 1982, with Yuri Andropov’s one-year tenure as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.  The need for state and economic reform was nonetheless already evident to some members of the ruling elite. 
Andropov was too briefly in office to impose a coherent line of change, but he did make his belief clear that the economic system had to be reformed before the state structure should be changed. 
This is what the leaders of Communist China have thought, but for a different reason. 
The Chinese leaders have forced economic growth and wealth-creation – telling the Chinese to make themselves rich – out of fear for their own power.  So far as one can tell, the party leadership has never seriously accepted the desirability (or inevitability) of positive political reform. 
Crushing the demonstrations at Tiananmen was their response to the spontaneous reform impulses arising from the Chinese people and elites.
Andropov knew that political change was essential.  He believed that it should be delayed in order not to interfere with an enabling economic reform.
According to an interesting study of perestroika’s development, prepared by Victor Kuvaldin for the Gorbachev Foundation, there were members of the Soviet leadership in Andropov’s time who doubted that economic reform could be separated from political change. 
Georgi Shakhnazarov – later one of Gorbachev’s inner circle advisers – did not think it would succeed.  He believed that the Communist nomenklatura would use the power it retained in order to prevent reform.
Under Gorbachev the intended reform sequence became “revolution in consciousness” (meaning glasnost: truth-telling about past and present), “followed by political reform, followed by economic transformations.”
Gorbachev accelerated perestroika, creating “a leap to freedom,” in order to overwhelm entrenched obstacles and make existing reforms irreversible.
Thus by the second half of 1986, perestroika and glasnost increasingly were recast as implicitly revolutionary in nature, seeking rapid and decisive democratization and reform.  The authors of Gorbachev’s policies were also much influenced by the western emphasis on individualism and the still-fashionable American idea that democracy is a spontaneous market phenomenon.
However the Soviet Union proved unready for market economics or market democracy.  Its society lacked the entrepreneurial tradition and spirit, the “civil society” values of accommodation and cooperative organization, and the institutional and legal structures able to contain the new forces. 
The dislocations and distortions produced by economic change threatened to destroy the reforms.  Gorbachev, in Kuvaldin’s account, then decided that mere renovation or overhaul of the Soviet system was useless.  It had to be entirely replaced. 
In January 1987, the Plenum of the Central Committee opted for radical change and accelerated democratization.  Controlled and authoritarian modernization was abandoned.
At this point, the key issue was whether groups at the peak of the Soviet power structure would support Gorbachev, recognizing in his program the outline of a new structure in which they would still have their place.  Or would they conclude that Gorbachev’s changes threatened them.  “The most influential stratum of party bosses,” Kuvaldin writes, turned increasingly against Gorbachev. 
By the end of 1989, Gorbachev had produced great achievements in foreign relations and arms control, transforming relations with the Reagan administration in Washington, ending the occupation of Afghanistan and terminating the Communist monopoly of power in Central and Eastern Europe. 
But he had failed to produce needed and expected economic progress, and he had set loose those non-Russian nationalisms that had been suppressed for generations by Russian imperial power and then by Soviet power.  The breakup of the U.S.S.R. had become inevitable. 
The ruling position of the Communist Party was no longer perceived as legitimate, and party rule was ended in March 1990.  The immense and terrible political and human adventure that began with Lenin’s seizure of power in the October Revolution had come to an end.
A social sciences institute of the Russia Academy of Sciences questioned a representative selection of Russian citizens about perestroika during January and February of this year.  The findings were that the greatest amount of sympathy for historical perestroika is felt today by the young and middle generations of Russians, and by the educated and active elites.
 The initial stage of reform (1985-88) is viewed favorably by the majority of all Russians.  Gorbachev himself is now judged more favorably than perestroika itself.  The final stage (1989-91) is seen positively by less than a fourth of the population.
The survey found a huge consensus of belief that “significant losses” were experienced during the perestroika period.  There was “loss of stability; decline in morals; loss of the feeling of security and confidence in the future; erosion of order in the country....”  These, of course, are the losses to which Vladimir Putin in 2005 attempts to respond.

Tribune Media Services International, March 15, 2005