Gorbachev and the Soviet “new thinking”

Young, educated, and urban members of the Communist elite came gradually to recognize the need for radical change if the Soviet Union was to survive, much less hold its own with the capitalist world. They waited in frustration as Brezhnev was followed by Andropov, then by Chernenko. The reformers finally rose to the pinnacle of party leadership, however, when Mikhail Gorbachev was named general secretary in 1985. A lawyer by training and a loyal Communist, Gorbachev did not begin his tenure by urging a relaxation of the Cold War. He stressed economics instead: a crackdown on vodka consumption, laziness, and “hooliganism” said to be responsible for “stagnation”; and, when that failed, a far-reaching perestroika, or restructuring, of the economy. It was in connection with this economic campaign that surprising developments in foreign policy began to occur. Not only were the costs of empire—the military, KGB and other security agencies, subsidies to foreign client states—out of all proportion to the Soviet GNP, but the U.S.S.R., no less than in earlier times, desperately needed Western technology and credits in order to make up for its own backwardness. Both to trim the costs of empire and to gain Western help, Gorbachev had to resolve outstanding disputes abroad and tolerate more human rights at home.

As early as 1985 the “new thinking” of the younger Communist apparatchiks began to surface. Gorbachev declared that no nation’s security could be achieved at the expense of another’s—an apparent repudiation of the goal of nuclear and conventional superiority for which the Soviets had worked for so long. Soviet historians began to criticize Brezhnev’s policies toward Afghanistan, China, and the West and to blame him, rather than “capitalist imperialism,” for the U.S.S.R.’s encirclement. In 1986 Gorbachev said that economic power had supplanted military power as the most important aspect of security in the present age—an amazing admission for a state whose superpower status rested exclusively on its military might. He called on the Soviets to settle for “reasonable sufficiency” in strategic arms and urged NATO to join him in deep cuts in nuclear and conventional weapons. He reiterated Khrushchev’s remark that nuclear war could have no winners and de Gaulle’s vision of a “common European house” from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains. Finally, Gorbachev hinted at a repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine—i.e., the assertion of the Soviets’ right to intervene to protect Socialist governments wherever they might be threatened.

Western observers were divided at first as to how to respond to this “new thinking.” Some analysts considered Gorbachev a revolutionary and his advent a historic chance to end the Cold War. Others, including the Reagan administration, were more cautious. Soviet leaders had launched “peace offensives” many times before, always with the motive of seducing the West into opening up trade and technology. Gorbachev was a phenomenon, charming Western reporters, crowds, and leaders (Thatcher was especially impressed) with his breezy style, sophistication, and peace advocacy. He published two best-sellers in the West to enhance his reputation, which for a time caused Europeans to rate Reagan and the United States the greatest threats to peace in the world. What convinced most Western observers that genuine change had occurred, however, was not what Gorbachev said but what he allowed others to say under his policy of glasnost, or openness.

As Western experts had predicted, perestroika, an attempt to streamline a fatally flawed Communist system, was doomed to failure. What the Soviets needed, they said, was a profit motive, private property, hard currency, real prices, and access to world markets. But Gorbachev, still thinking in Communist categories, blamed bureaucratic resistance for the failure of his reforms and thus declared glasnost to encourage internal criticism. What he got was the birth of a genuine Soviet public opinion, a reemergence of autonomous organizations in society, and more than 300 independent journals (by the end of 1989) publicizing and denouncing Communist military and economic failures, murder and oppression, foreign policy “crimes” such as the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact and the invasion of Afghanistan, and even Communist rule itself.

By 1987 most Western observers still called for deeds to match the words pouring forth in the Soviet Union, but they were persuaded that an end to the Cold War was a real possibility. The Reagan administration made its first show of trust in Gorbachev by engaging in negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons from Europe. In 1987 Gorbachev surprised the United States by accepting the earlier American “zero-option” proposal for intermediate-range missiles. After careful negotiation a treaty was concluded in Geneva and signed at a Washington summit in December. This controversial Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons and allowed, for the first time, extensive on-site inspection inside the Soviet bloc. Critics still feared that stripping Europe of nuclear missiles might only enhance the value of the Soviets’ conventional superiority and called for parallel agreements through the mutual and balanced force reduction talks on NATO and Warsaw Pact armies. In Moscow in mid-1988, Reagan and Gorbachev discussed an even bolder proposal: reduction of both strategic nuclear arsenals by 50 percent. A mellower Reagan, interpreting the Soviets’ new flexibility as a vindication of his earlier tough stance and having thereupon repudiated his “evil empire” rhetoric, now seemed eager to bargain as much as possible with Gorbachev.

Finally, Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, reached out in all directions—China, Japan, India, Iran, even South Korea and Israel—in hopes of reducing military tensions, gaining access to trade and technology, or just creating new possibilities for Soviet statecraft. Gorbachev’s most celebrated moment came in December 1988 at the United Nations, when he announced a unilateral reduction in Soviet army forces of half a million men and the withdrawal from eastern Europe of 10,000 tanks. Henceforth, he said, the U.S.S.R. would adopt a “defensive posture,” and he invited the NATO countries to do the same.

Throughout his first four years in power Gorbachev inspired and presided over an extraordinary outpouring of new ideas and new options. Western skeptics wondered whether he meant to dismantle Communism and the Soviet empire and, if he did, whether he could possibly avoid being overthrown by party hard-liners, the KGB, or the army. He had maneuvered brilliantly in internal politics, always claiming the middle ground and positioning himself as the last best hope for peaceful reform. His prestige and popularity in the West were also assets of no small value. In June 1988 he persuaded the Communist party conference to restructure the entire Soviet government along the lines of a partially representative legislature with a powerful president—himself. Was the Gorbachev phenomenon merely an updated version of earlier, limited Russian and Soviet reforms designed to bolster the old order? Or would Gorbachev use his expanding power to liquidate the empire and Communism?

In truth, Gorbachev faced a severe dilemma born of three simultaneous crises: diplomatic encirclement abroad, economic and technological stagnation at home, and growing pressure for liberal reform in Poland and Hungary and for autonomy in the non-Russian republics of the U.S.S.R. Thoroughgoing détente, perhaps even an end to the Cold War, could solve the first crisis and go far toward ameliorating the second. His policy of glasnost, deemed vital to economic progress, had the fatal side effect, however, of encouraging repressed ethnic groups, at home and in eastern Europe, to organize and express their opposition to Russian or Communist rule. Of course, the Soviet government might simply crush the nationalities, as it had in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, but that in turn would undo the progress made in East–West relations and put Gorbachev back where he had started. If, on the other hand, the Soviet government relinquished its satellites abroad, how could it stop the process of liberation from spreading to the subject nationalities inside the U.S.S.R.? If it repudiated its Marxist-Leninist global mission in the name of economic reform, how could the regime legitimize itself at all, even in Russia?