Rather, Gorbachev used the powers of patronage open to the general secretary to promote certain people and retire others, while his allies would use the issue of corruption to displace other opponents for instance, the then Moscow party leader, Grishin, and the Kazakh party secretary, Kunaev. One of these allies was the secretary of the central committee responsible for party organisation, Ligachev.
He pushed through many of the personnel changes and, as a frequent visitor to the Writers Union house, encouraged a degree of liberalisation in the Moscow press in —6. By the end of this period, Ligachev was generally reckoned to be the second most powerful person in the party hierarchy. There was no disagreement about the need for restructuring among the new generation of politburo and secretariat members; nor about the need to get rid of the Brezhnevites to achieve this. But it is now clear that by the middle of there were disagreements about the character of the economic measures to be pushed through and the political consequences that followed from them.
Two fundamentally opposed positions seemed to have been presented among those at the top of the power structure. The first, generally thought to emanate from Ligachev, held that now the personnel changes had eliminated the corrupt and inefficient elements associated with the Brezhnev period, all that was necessary was a highly centralised campaign from the top of the party for greater efficiency.
Changes in the mechanisms of economic control would be necessary, but these should be based on the form of centralisation that prevailed in East Germany rather than the market model adopted in Hungary and Yugoslavia. The rival position insisted that restructuring would only work if the old form of economic organisation was changed from top to bottom. There had to be moves in the direction taken by Hungary and Yugoslavia.
But this meant a massive confrontation with the old guard in the party and state machine at every level. This required lifting restrictions on the media sufficiently to enable them to hound out these opponents of reform. We wanted to restructure the economy radically without going beyond changes in the economic sphere — without affecting the political sphere, social relations or spiritual and ideological life Only a package of transformations in all spheres of life is capable of making cardinal and fundamental changes to the economy. Most popular accounts of what is happening in the USSR identify Gorbachev with the more thorough-going calls for glasnost openness and democratisation.
But in fact he seems to have wavered between the two approaches. He has often used top-down campaigning methods which fit the Ligachev approach. This is true, for instance, of his campaign against drunkenness, which has depended upon dictatorial decrees from above increasing the price of alcohol, restricting outlets where it can be bought and sending the police in to seize home-brewing equipment they made , such seizures last year! Acceptance of the output of industry depends upon the state committee for standards Gosstandart ; since 1 January 1, major enterprises and associations have come under its stringent quality controls.
The second phase, from late through to the present, has, by contrast, involved bitter wrangles between previous allies. In the first half of the radical reformers tried to assert their control, believing they had at least partial support from Gorbachev. But it was also in these months that resistance to perestroika really began to grow within the party leadership.
Those associated with Ligachev decided that now the Brezhnevites in the leadership had been disposed of, it was time to reassert centralised, authoritarian control. The rows between the two sides seem to have half paralysed the leadership.
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The Central Committee meeting due for October was postponed three times because of this, and eventually was held in January Even then it was a disappointment for Gorbachev. One example of these was the retirement of officials at all levels over a certain age. Compulsory re-election of members of party committees was restricted to the lower levels only. The more radical reformers were furious and frightened at the sudden growth of resistance. Typical of their reactions was that of Anatoli Strelyani, who told the Moscow State University Komsomol, there are two parties in the party.
It is necessary to take sides openly, from top to bottom Gorbachev is being slow about expanding the base for perestroika, and this will lead to the defeat of our cause and of Gorbachev himself. Meanwhile, the opponents of reform began to assert themselves ever more strongly. Yeltsin seemed destined for one of the very top positions in the politburo, and was charged with giving a keynote speech to the October central committee meeting.
The tone of this Moscow meeting was set by Gorbachev himself. I must say that I cannot refute this criticism. I am very guilty before the Moscow city organisation, lam very guilty before the City Party Committee, before the bureau and, of course, before Mikhail Gorbachev whose prestige is so high in our organisation, in our country and throughout the world. The sacking of Yeltsin was a substantial victory for the opponents of reform.
The impact of it was seen in the speech Gorbachev gave on the anniversary of the October revolution. Billed in advance as an important statement of policy, it was, in fact, a considerable retreat from the commitment to wide-ranging reform embodied in his book Perestroika. The months that followed were supposed to prepare the special party conference and to resolve the arguments once and for all. But this required sufficient unity in the politburo for there to be agreement on measures to be put to a Central Committee meeting and then to the conference.
Six months later such agreement still had not been achieved. Instead, the Central Committee discussed a document by Ligachev on education policy. Meanwhile, the local conferences called to report on the progress of perestroika and choose delegates to the national conference went ahead without producing any radical changes: The party leadership might have been paralysed from October onwards, but in this period the ferment below in Russian society grew.
As in Hungary and Poland in and Czechoslovakia in , a section of the intellectuals played a key role. They have been allowed to raise issues that were previously taboo. The opponents of reform have sought to defend themselves by glorifying the Stalin era; even mild proponents of reform like Gorbachev have had to take issue with them over that — although Gorbachev still justifies the general line Stalin pursued. Some of the best examples of the way the press has been let loose relate to the non-Russian republics.
Here Gorbachev has had considerable difficulty dislodging some of the Brezhnev generation, especially Shcherbitsky in the Ukraine and Demirchyan in Armenia. So the Moscow press has often acted as a megaphone for the views of their opponents in the local party apparatus. But any government which gives the go-ahead to intellectuals to criticise its predecessors faces a problem. It is very difficult to prevent the criticism taking on a momentum of its own and coming to reflect other interests besides those of the government. But when society is in deep crisis at least some intellectuals will try to give expression to the feelings of the population at large, even if they try to reconcile these feelings with the existing order.
Under these conditions, a relaxation of control over the media leads to a sudden flourishing of all sorts of ideas and arguments. So it is that issues that three years ago could only be raised in the underground samizdat press are now discussed in legal journals and papers with print orders of hundreds of thousands or even millions. The last year has seen the first official admissions that prostitution occurs in Russia, that corruption exists on a large scale, that famine in the s killed millions of people in the Ukraine, that homosexuality is something other than a problem to be left to psychiatric institutions.
It has also seen the first reopening, since the ousting of Khrushchev, of discussion on the rise of Stalinism, with reference to the ideas of Bukharin and, to much lesser extent, Trotsky. This discussion has been one of the main reasons those, like Ligachev, who worked with the reformers to get rid of the Brezh-nevites, have now swung against further reform. They have been able to address themselves to the fears bureaucrats at all levels have about the effects of unlimited opening up. There have still been quite tight limits on what can be said by the media.
The Moscow press were not, for instance, allowed to print the one and a half hour speech that Gorbachev made on Armenian television at the time of the big demonstrations. Representatives of the official press attended a meeting of samizdat editors in Leningrad in October, but no reports of it were printed.
The foreign editor of Ogonek was sacked after publishing details of an opinion poll on the popularity of perestroika. The Armenian correspondent of Pravda was sacked for protesting after his name was put to completely untrue reports. Yet a divided leadership has a very real problem imposing such limits. For who is going to decide what they are? The radical reformers or the conservatives?
The extent of the problem is shown by the most recent infighting in the leadership. The letter was, in effect, a manifesto of the anti-reform tendency. The letter was a signal for the opponents of reform to move into action. It was, according to one writer in Izvestia ,. What did we do to protect and defend perestroika?
Maybe there was a wave of angry and ardent party and Komsomol meetings to give a rebuff to Sovietskaya Rossiya? Nothing of the kind. In Leningrad, they held party conferences in support of that article. One was even shown on television. Similar meetings were held in Moscow and more than 40 newspapers around the country republished the article.
They were not published. Then, three weeks after the original article appeared, on 5 April, a major editorial article in Pravda , probably written by someone in the politburo, launched a massive counter-attack. Such a stance has its roots in command and edict based bureaucratic management methods. Conservative opposition to restructuring is composed of The long article, I cannot waive principles The issues raised are The article is primarily aimed at setting off certain categories of Soviet people against one another It has been repeatedly said at meetings of the Party Central Committee them the Soviet press it not a private concern In this case the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya The response to the Sovietskaya Rossiya article shows how infighting within the leadership opens the door to arguments which go beyond what either section of the leadership really wants.
The Pravda article begins by seeing more than one threat to the reform strategy. Some people see it as just another cosmetic repair job. Yet others get carried away with radical phraseology, nurturing I in themselves and others the illusion of skipping necessary stages. In other words, the reform leadership faces enemies to its left as well as its right. Later it repeats the point, recognising that some intellectuals do raise questions it would prefer them not to:.
Some authors, as if they were apostles of truth, pontificate and instruct everyone on what must be done and how. Democratism is impossible without freedom of thought and speech, without the open, broad clash of opinions and without keeping a critical eye on our life. Our intelligentsia has done much to prepare public awareness to understand the need for profound, cardinal changes. It has itself become actively involved in the restructuring. The message was quickly taken up by the media. Sovietskaya Rossiya reprinted the Pravda article.
But those who joined in the attack often went much further than the Pravda writer.
Upcoming Events
A good example is the speech which the dramatist Aleksandr Gelman made in opening the party assembly of the board of the Russian Union of Cinematographers, important both because it would have laid down the guidelines within which film makers operate and because it was printed in Sovietskaya Kultura and referred to favourably on the radio. Our concern with the fate of restructuring must be transformed into real action. Not only into books, screenplays, plays and films, but also into real, direct, political action. The progress of preparation for the conference cannot wholly be assigned to the party apparatuses Finally he made what seems to be an oblique reference to the Yeltsin affair:.
We cannot allow it, as has frequently been the case in the past, that society and the party should suddenly learn of the shortcomings and errors of a Particular party figure. There have already been enough of those information shocks, those blows at the head, when at first someone is for a long tune considered a really good man and then suddenly — bang! This speech, it is important to stress, was from a reformer who did not want things to go too far. In many heads everything has become confused. Alongside the fair, justified, necessary demonstrations and protests we can observe, and there may be more of them in future, protests connected with thoughtlessness, false certainties and extremist feelings.
In addition to the danger that restructuring may be halted by its direct opponents, there is also a danger from the extremist forces who support restructuring Yet again, this last warning was more a marker for the future thanl an operational guide for the present. The film makers listening will have drawn the conclusion that they should be more radical, not less so.
The fact that Moscow television has since shown film of the Armenian demonstrations shows the extent to which sections of the media are taking the message seriously. Other contributors to the attack on the conservative right went considerably further even than Gelman. They were the flower of the intelligentsia, of military and technical specialists and scientists. Does the author of the Sovietskaya Rossiya letter take account of their losses as the result of forced collectivisation?
My mother suffered too. Having fought in the war, in I myself was repressed It was an alien system which deformed economic, political and social relations. Glasnost from above has extended the fight over future policy from the top leadership of the party into the ranks of those who control the levers of intellectual life, those who determine the content of newspapers, radio and TV broadcasts, films, plays, novels, educational syllabuses, and so on. But once arguments begin to occur in such milieus they cannot be restricted to the issues laid down by the rival leadership factions.
Glasnost from above opens the door for something much more profound — glasnost from below. Such groups have been in existence for a number of years. Even under Brezhnev there were Helsinki monitoring groups. By December it was claimed that there were 30, groups throughout the country. The groups are not independent of the state. They have to register with the local authorities, submit membership lists and state the aims of their organisation. That is not complete independence.
Nevertheless the existence of the groups has been a central element in the explosion of the current unrest. There is a huge range of different informal groups. A recent article in Pravda , for instance, mainly talked about groups thrown up, more or less spontaneously, by young people, for instance those associated with different sorts of music e. Beatles and Heavy Metal , those with a hippy orientation and those with an ecological bent.
For the Pravda writer the important thing about them was that they had somehow tapped the activism which 30 or 40 years ago would have gone into Komsomol, when its members still saw themselves as committed to the economic transformation of a backward country. Clearly one of the aims of the legalisation of the groups was to try to influence their development. Some of the groups are explicitly political. A conference of some of these, entitled Social Initiatives in Perestroika , was held in Moscow last summer.
The proposal for the conference arose from the Social Initiatives Club. By the end of the conference, as more people arrived from the provinces, this number rose to delegates representing 50 groups. Since the conference there have been reports of the growth of the informal clubs in every part of Russia. The clubs do not adhere to any one political line.
This is shown most clearly by the fact that one of the best-known informal organisations in Pamyat, ostensibly committed to honouring Russian national monuments, is in fact bringing together those who hark back to an authoritarian, centralist Russian nationalism with Stalinist undertones. There is a wide diversity of views among the clubs supporting change.
This was shown at the Moscow conference. There was a sharp disagreement between the groups mainly committed to peres-troika and the human rights activists. An examination of the groups and the results of the conference show why the state allowed them to meet. Pelman and Boris Kagarlitsky, the journalist G. Pavlovsky and the philosopher M. The group was involved with the state-run Komsomolskaya Pravda but later became independent. Kagarlitsky had been involved with the young socialist groups, an underground organisation, and served time in prison.
Pavlovsky had edited the samizdat journal Poisky Quests and was also imprisoned. Malyutin is a member of the party. In May the club split in two when the Fund for Social Initiatives was set up. A month later the KSI split again but the two parts soon grew larger than the original group — demonstrating the fast spread of the autonomous groups. It produces its own samizdat, Merkur — but it is now not as far underground as it used to be and has even received favourable references in the official press.
It had its conference in Moscow in May Unfortunately, according to his report, splits have prevented the group from working. The August conference ended with Kagarlitsky reading out the declaration of socialist social clubs on the last day. The declaration commits the clubs to constitutional opposition within the framework of the present system. It does not call for free trade unions or the right of nations to secede from Russia. This essentially accepts the superiority of the market economy. The importance of the informal groups, however, does not depend in the main on their ostensive politics, but on the fact that, in a situation where the party leadership is split, they can provide foci around which forces outside the bureaucracy can organise without immediate fear of the KGB.
The present political diversity of the groups is an expression of a mass of weird and wonderful ideas that are bound to be thrown up when a variety of different social forces first begin to find legitimate channels for self-expression after six decades of enforced ideological monolithism. For the moment, however, the clubs can be a very important bridge to the masses for intellectuals beginning to go beyond the units of discussion laid down by the party hierarchy. This is shown most vividly by what has been happening in some of the non-Russian national republics. Half the population of Russia is non-Russian.
Gorbachev writes of the nationalities in glowing terms: The Russian nation played ark outstanding role in the solution of the nationality question. Meeting people during my tours of republics and national regions of the Soviet Union, I see for myself over and over again that they appreciate and take pride in the fact that their nations belong to one big international family. But the harsh reality of life for many non-Russians is very different to this. The ruling bureaucracy is overwhelmingly made up of Russians and, to a lesser extent, other Slavs.
So of the 12 members of the politburo, only two Shcherbitsky and Shevardnadze are non-Russian. Russians make up just under half of the population, yet they are Although the first secretary of the party in the non-Russian republics is usually although not always a member of the local ethnic group, the powerful second secretary is usually Russian. And non-Russians who want to make a career for themselves have to do so by adapting. This means there are various degrees of discrimination against the non-Russian half of the population throughout society.
In 4, periodicals appeared in Russian compared to for all the other languages. The problems are often particularly acute for people from a rural background who migrate to the cities. In Kirghizia 52 per cent of the people speak Kirghiz, but Russians predominate in the cities.
In urban areas inhabited by the indigenous population there is not a single kindergarten which uses their language — in other words, discrimination because of language begins at the age of three! The fastest population growth today takes place among the Asian peoples of the country. But the main industrial expansion is in Russian populated areas, and Asians who want, for instance, to get jobs in the Moscow area have to accept the status of temporary, immigrant workers rather like guest workers in West Germany.
The non-Russian nationalities first came under Russian rule with the expansion of the Czarist empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Czarist bureaucracy pursued a policy of ruthless Russification, encouraging Russian colonists to settle in the conquered lands and attempting to destroy local languages and customs. The Russian revolution of briefly changed all that. The Bolsheviks were only able to beat back counter-revolution and foreign intervention by combining with the struggle of workers against capitalists and peasants against landowners the struggle for national rights for the oppressed ethnic groups — including the right to secession a right which was exercised by the Finns and the Baltic states.
There were complex and bloody struggles as sections of the local bourgeoisie intrigued with white Russian, German, British, French and Polish invading forces. But the bureaucratisation of the revolutionary regime recreated conditions for renewed national oppression. As the party increasingly worked with and absorbed sections of the old Czarist bureaucracy, it began to succumb to its methods.
This was already clear in when, to the anger of the dying Lenin, Stalin used the crudest methods, including violence, against the Georgian Bolsheviks. The bureaucracy itself had to be fashioned into a monolithic instrument, capable of forcing through industrialisation and collectivisation, regardless of the level of hardship it caused to the local workers and peasants, with whom all links had to be broken.
Russification of the apparatus in the non-Russian areas achieved this. At the same time as the bureaucracy and the party were purged of those members who might be soft on workers or peasants, it was also purged of all those who might defend the rights of Ukrainians, Georgians, Azers, Byelorussians and so on.
For Stalin Russification failed the added bonus that, by eliminating a whole layer of office holders, it created increased opportunities for Russian speakers who wanted to rise in the bureaucracy. Finally it established an ideology of Russian supremacy which could be used to bind Russian, intellectuals and workers to the regime. The repression of the nationalities was part of the more general strengthening of authoritarian ideology. In homosexuality became punishable by a 5—8 year prison sentence. It was also the year when a decree on teaching history was passed.
The Czarist expansionism of previous centuries was hailed as progressive and in the interests of the subjugated peoples. Several measures were used to enforce Russian superiority. The teaching of Russian was made compulsory in schools on 13 March The languages of the peoples of central and eastern Russia were Russified — the Cyrillic alphabet was forced on them whereas in the s there had been a move to use the Latin alphabet and Russian words were substituted for Arab, Turkish or Persian words.
In one nationality after another, the cream of the local intelligentsia were dragged into the camps or the execution chamber. In the biggest of the non-Russian republics, the Ukraine, this occurred as famine was wiping out millions of people, as many as seven million according to some estimates. As Russian-speaking bureaucrats and a Russian army seized the crops from starving peasants, national resentments grew massively. With the Hitler-Stalin pact of , the reversion to the methods of the Czarist empire went a stage further. Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Moldavia the Rumanian-speaking area also known as Bessarabia were absorbed into Russia.
So was Eastern Poland as it was then known. Whole populations were deported to prevent the risk of rebellion against the new rulers. On the night of 14—15 June around 60, Estonians, 34, Latvians and 38, Lithuanians were deported. Russians were sent in to take their property. Four hundred thousand Volga Germans as well as a million other German speakers who lived in other parts of Russia were exiled to the east in A decree was passed in December deporting every citizen in the Kalmyk republic to Siberia, some quarter of a million people.
Whole nations were deported in — the , Chechens, , Crimean Tartars, , Karachi. The Balkars were also deported. All their autonomous republics and regions were wiped off the map. The main lines of the nationalities policy have not changed radically In the governments of the Asian republics, newly appointed in , of the ministers no fewer than 38 were Europeans — and these usually held key portfolios such as those of state security, planning and the chair or deputy chair of the council of ministers.
The idealisation of the Czarist annexations continued and the Russian language continues to edge out the national languages, even in the schools in the national republics Although non-Russians constitute about half the population of the USSR, the circulation of papers in non-Russian languages constituted in only 18 per cent of the total circulation.
The tendency towards Russification continued so that today, for instance, the proportion of pupils in the Ukraine educated using Ukraine has fallen by 20 per cent in the last two decades [70] and the victories of the Czarist armies are still praised. At the same time local first secretaries were allowed to build a base for themselves by the odd reference to ethnic traditions as well as by allowing corruption to flourish. The intelligentsia in the non-Russian republics was tolerated, but hardly encouraged, in these years.
One other thing needs to be added before there can be any understanding of the complexity of the national question in Russia. It also meant dividing the non-Russian peoples against each other. While the majority local population faces discrimination in favour of Russians, it will often discriminate against its minorities.
So it is that the , Armenians in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan were denied any television programmes in their own language. The national question is particularly difficult for the reforming wing of the leadership because perestroika and glasnost have opposite implications for the nationalities. Restructuring the economy means cutting out inefficiency and corruption. According to the present leadership, some of the worst instances of this arose during the Brezhnev era among the different non-Russian republican governments — in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia and Georgia.
Restructuring also means directing resources to intensify growth in the, most profitable enterprises, which is likely to mean those in the most advanced part of the country, rather than extensive development of new industry. This means the centre helping enterprises tea break free of restraints imposed by local bureaucratic interests at the republic level.
The Gorbachevites see breaking the hold of many of the old republic leaderships as a precondition for all this. So Gorbachev has replaced the party chief Kunaev in Kazakhstan and Kotandzhyan in Uzbekistan, has persuaded the leading Azer, Aliyev, to resign, has criticised the Armenian boss Demirchyan for failing to back perestroika sufficiently, and is thought to be after the scalp of the year-old Ukrainian first secretary, Shcherbitsky.
But in attacking such people, Gorbachev can easily provoke national resentments. Their corruption has often been used to cultivate local roots, including certain vaguely nationalist sentiments. What can happen was shown when Gorbachev sacked Kunaev, the Kazakh first secretary, and imposed a Russian on the republic late in This protest was eventually suppressed by the intervention of the army.
In an effort to discredit the demonstrations, the Moscow press claimed they were organised by elements associated with the sacked leader, and, using scarcely veiled racist language, that it was only intoxication with hashish that brought them on to the streets. By contrast, glasnost provides an opportunity for the indigenous intelligentsia of each ethnic group to organise openly and for people who were previously persecuted for their dissident opinions to begin to exercise some local influence.
So informal groups have been spreading at great speed in virtually all the republics. Often these have been able to find hundreds, if not thousands of local supporters. In Latvia on 14 June , around 5, people demonstrated commemorating the deportation of the Latvians to Siberia on 14 June The demonstration was allowed to continue unmolested by the police.
A demonstration of Latvians to the freedom monument on 27 December was followed by a bigger demonstration a week later. An official press report stated that 2, youths with knives and clubs were involved. Demonstrations of Crimean Tartars were widespread last year. On 2 August 5, are estimated to have demonstrated near Tashkent in Uzbekhistan, where most of them were deported. The demonstration was broken up by police. Between 23 and 26 July some Tartars sat-in by the Kremlin wall. After a delegation had met president Gromyko another demonstration followed on 3 August.
In January demonstrations by Tartars were reported in several cities in the republic of Uzbekhistan. In the republic of Kirghizstan Tokombaev, an year-old poet told Pravda of disturbances that might lead to an Alma Ata. In Tajikistan in central Asia there was a report of the arrest of a mullah, Abdullo Saidov.
The Revenge of the Past: Socialism and Ethnic Conflict in Transcaucasia
A group of adventurers and idlers of the town also joined them, disturbing social order on the streets and disrupting the work of state departments. Most of the local national groups are not yet mobilising on the streets, but their influence spreads everywhere, especially among the youth. But even where the organised activities are so far at a low level they can cause immense worry to the party leadership. Sixty years of national oppression have created a mass of frustrations and bitterness.
The splits within the central party leadership in Moscow and between the Moscow leaders and the local bureaucrats are loosening the tight control that used to exercise over the local media and allow some nationalist ideas to find expression. And the local leaders are not averse, on occasions, to playing the nationalist card in order to protect themselves. Under such conditions, local nationalisms — and the informal associations which embody them — can become a focus for a whole range of other discontents and bring very large numbers of people into confrontation with the central state apparatus.
This is shown most clearly by the Armenian agitation of February, March and April of The first demonstration took place in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, on 1 September Two hundred people gathered outside the Nairet chemical plant to protest at toxic emissions that were damaging the health of local people.
This followed the signing, the year before, of an open letter to Gorbachev by Armenian intellectuals over the pollution and leaks from the nearby Medzamov nuclear power plant. A second demonstration followed on 17 October. This was 2, to 4, strong. Big enough to attract considerable attention in a city of one million, it ended in a rally where speakers included the journalist Zori Balayan. Meanwhile a small group of Armenians from the Karabakh circulated a petition calling for unity with the Armenian republic. This obtained 90, signatures, out of a Karabakh population of , The Moscow press printed a number of statements by critics of Armenian party organisation.
Such was the situation in mid-February when the mass petition caused the Soviet in the Karabakh region to vote to leave Azerbaijan and to unite with the Armenian SSR. People who were picketing a proposed chemical plant site heard of this and went to join a meeting over the issue in Yerevan city centre.
According to accounts from Yerevan, Karen Demirchyan, the Armenian party chief, was greeted by boos and whistles from a crowd gathered outside the opera house in the city centre as he appealed for a return to normal. Gorbachev spoke for an hour and a half on Armenian television, politburo members rushed to Armenia and Azerbaijan from Moscow, and twenty-nine plane loads of troops were flown in and deployed in the city.
But the demonstrations continued for several days until Gorbachev agreed to unprecedented negotiations with representatives, such as the poet Silva Kaputikyan and the journalist Zori Balayan, elected at a huge mass meeting. They then suspended their protests for a month. Meanwhile, there was a sudden unexplained outbreak of communal rioting in the Azerbaijan industrial port of Sumgait, on the Caspian sea near Baku.
Azer crowds set out on what was, in effect, a pogrom of Armenian inhabitants, killing at least The illusions of the Armenian demonstrators in Gorbachev did not last long. The issue of whether the Karabakh should be in Azerbaijan or Armenia might seem a minor one. But Gorbachev soon realised that if he were to make concessions over this issue, not only would he anger possible allies in the Azerbaijan bureaucracy, but he would also open the way for a mass of similar demands right across the USSR, such was the complex of national antagonisms left by 60 years of divide-and-rule. The politburo used the month-long suspension of demonstrations in Yerevan to make preparations for repression.
Pravda printed a discussion between its correspondent and an Armenian historian, Gevorg Garibdjanyan. The correspondent insisted strikes were not part of glasnost. Repression prevented demonstrations in Yerevan. But it could not stop a general strike in the Karabakh. The city of Stepanakert seems to have been paralysed for nearly a fortnight.
The Armenian events show very clearly how the national question can suddenly explode in the face of the Russian leadership and present them with situations they find it very hard to control. They might eventually have succeeded in regaining the initiative in Armenia and Azerbaijan, but it has taken much more time and effort than the last massive explosion of discontent, in Kazakhstan 18 months ago.
They must live in fear of an explosion not among the million or so Kazakhs or the three million Armenians, but the fifty million Ukrainians. As it is, the Armenian events greatly complicated things for Gorbachev in the run up to the special party conference. It will have made it much harder for him to get rid of those opponents of perestroika who have a base in the national republics, and it will have strengthened the conservative forces inside the Russian-speaking bureaucracy who see glasnost as threatening the whole structure of bureaucratic control and who rely on great Russian chauvinism as a weapon to use against it.
It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the Sovietskaya Rossiya attack on reform appeared on 13 March, right after the Yerevan demonstrations, or that the reformers in the leadership did not feel confident to launch their counter-attack in Pravda until 6 April, when they had shown they could halt the demonstrations and strikes. In the long term the question of the working class can be even more worrying for both wings of the bureaucracy than the national question.
Any restructuring of industry, whether carried through in the centralised, authoritarian manner favoured by Ligachev or by reliance on the market favoured by the radical reformers, or by some combination of the two, involves attacks on the working conditions and wages of important sections of workers. This is bound to provoke resistance. Yet the infighting between the different wings of the bureaucracy can paralyse the old mechanisms of repression. The bureaucracy need workers to feel that they have some stake in the present system. It cannot increase productivity and cut back on waste and inefficiency unless it can increase the sense of identification of the direct producers with the production process.
Only then can it begin to get the feedback of information it needs to be able to judge what the real resources are at its disposal.
Chris Harman/Andy Zebrowski: Glasnost - before the storm (Summer )
And only then can it begin really to identify who the inefficient managers are and to eliminate them. For this reason it has introduced a number of new mechanisms. First there is the electoral reform. The normal procedure was for there to be no choice at all. In June the rules were changed for the local elections to the Soviets.
Nine hundred and thirty-nine candidates stood in seats. The reform only applied to 5 per cent of the seats, and there was no question of allowing the candidates to stand on alternative policies. Secondly, the election of managers in the factories has received wide publicity in the media in Russia. But the rules for the elections make it clear that the workers will not have any real control. And, finally, in the elections which have taken place so far, workers have lot been allowed to campaign for or against individual candidates, as workers in the Latvian factory of RAF cars have complained.
Gorbachev himself has no doubts as to what he wants from the workers. At the January plenum in he spoke about the role of trade unions thus:. During restructuring I see the new role of trade unions to be, first and foremost, one of preventing technocratic half efforts in the economy, which I must say have become quite widespread in recent years, and of increasing the social monitoring of decisions that are adopted.
There is already evidence from sources in Russia that workers have far less illusions in glasnost and perestroika than the middle classes. A poll conducted in 1, enterprises in the Urals found that a quarter of the workers believed that perestroika would only make a difference to their lives after five years, and seventy percent thought it would mean an increase in work. The quality controls have already led to wage cuts for workers in a number of plants.
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Virtually all reform economists believe there have to be massive price increases. Many hint that restructuring will mean redundancies an unemployment. How will workers react to the attacks on their conditions? The conservative section of the bureaucracy may well try to con workers into siding with it, claiming that it has stood for working-class interests in the past.
There are some left-wing analysts of Russia who partially go along with this, claiming that workers have been able to compensate for their lack of political or trade union rights by a kind of collusion with management which gives them a privileged position in the system. This has had a corrupting influence on working-class consciousness and explains the lack of strikes since Stalin took power. For instance, there is the pripiska writing in of work that has not been done, and output that has not been produced , to fool the central planners. In fact, the birth of the Stalin period witnessed very large strikes.
Those workers who did try to fight back were dragged off to labour camps, if not executed, and Stalin carefully used the show trials to try to deflect bitterness to individual lower level bureaucrats and away from the regime itself. Under these conditions, whatever strikes took place were isolated and easily smashed. Even under the less repressive post-Stalin governments, those who have organised strikes have ended up in labour camps and those, like the miner Klebanov, who have tried to establish independent unions, have been locked away for years and are still locked away, not benefiting horn the more liberal regime allowed to dissident intellectuals.
With few possibilities of collective struggle, individual workers turned to individual methods of improving their lot — such as Moving from one enterprise to another in a search for higher pay which managers could grant by regrading them. Full employment was not a consequence of a bureaucratic attempt to placate workers, but rather of the labour shortage created by the flat-out expansion of an economy with a very high level of arms expenditure every five year plan absorbed several million more workers than it was intended to.
This is shown by the way unemployment has existed in areas without great economic growth; for instance, a recent police census in the town of Ossetin revealed 7. What is true is that fear of provoking a mass, spontaneous outburst of working-class anger prevented the bureaucracy in the post-Stalin period taking certain measures to make the economy more efficient, in particular from an all-round increase in price. Yet without this it could not stop an inefficient use of labour in many parts of the economy and an aggravation of labour shortages.
And where there is a labour shortage, anywhere in the world system, there are degrees of collusion between managers and workers whose services they want to keep. This is why, although Russian workers are very suspicious about perestroika, it is unlikely that many of them will identify with the conservative bureaucrats who have lived off them for so long.
In any case, it is difficult to get an accurate picture of Russian strikes. The regime has always kept a tight grip on information about them, even when it has ended them through making concessions. Typically it has sealed off areas affected by strikes while rushing in extra supplies of food to placate the workers involved.
So it is that even the giant Novocherkassk strike in the Ukraine in the early s was not known in the West until two or three years afterwards. There must have been very many smaller strikes never reported. The Novocherkassk strike took place after meat and dairy prices were doubled and there was a 30 per cent cut in piece rate in the Budenny electric train factory, involving all 20, workers. Police shot down demonstrators in the town square after they unfurled banners calling for the prices to return to normal. Dozens of people were killed.
The strikes spread to fifteen other cities [94] and lasted for three days 1—3 June. There has been more recent outrage over food price increases in Minsk where riots were reported after meat sold by cooperative stores increased in price in the summer of A study by Ludmilla Alekseyeva records two strikes between and , 17 for the s, 25 in the s, and 31 for the years — But this does not necessarily reflect an upturn in strike activity but the increase in the numbers of samizdats that record them.
The rise of Solidarnosc in Poland in —81 exerted some influence over the western part of Russia, especially in the most militant early months. Mobilisation took two weeks to complete because of repeated desertions on such a scale it was impossible to punish individuals. The strike was over demands that included non-interference in the internal affairs of Poland. It reflected the influence of nationalistic emotions in many Russian strikes. A Swedish reporter asked a road crew which stopped work for half an hour why they did it.
The Swede had been the only reporter allowed in by the authorities. Telephone links were cut off for the day and police reinforcements were brought in. Solidarnosc was also responsible for the massive increase in coverage given by the Russian official press to trade union matters. The first strike to be mentioned in the official press seems to have been the one at Narva on 1 June , reported in quite a lengthy article in Izvestia on 11 July.
Both the management and workers were blamed, although the word strike was not used. Several similar strikes followed as bonus payments were slashed when workers were penalised for the poor quality of the goods they produced. Bus drivers in Chekhov, 45 miles from Moscow, struck when their workload was increased because of perestroika in September [99] , and there was a week-long protest by workers at the Yaroslav tractor engine plant against plans to make them work Saturdays in December. This article is being written before the special party conference in June which is supposed to decide the next step in reform.
This makes it impossible to comment on details of the infighting in the party leadership. But a few things can be said with a degree of certainty. The reformers are very unlikely to achieve more than a small part of what they were hoping for a year ago. The power of resistance of the conservative wing of the bureaucracy was shown by the Sovietskaya Rossiya affair: The reformers have since regained the initiative, but it is very unlikely that they have done so on a sufficient scale to flush out both the open opponents of perestroika and the very large section of the bureaucracy that mouths support for perestroika while hoping that it will go away.
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