When Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the Soviet Union in 1985 almost no one in the West suspected that he would embark immediately upon a sweeping reform program, let alone that within three years that reform program would have developed a life of its own beyond his control.  Subsequently, there have been various attempts to explain the appearance of perestroika--in terms of a worsening of the economic crisis, or Gorbachev's character and intentions, or the impact of the Reagan arms build-up--but they all see it as having appeared suddenly and essentially without antecedents.  Indeed, the idea of the Soviet system having the capacity for radical self-reform--self-transformation even--was foreign to Western thinking, which tended to be very impressed by the system's capacity for, and will toward, self-perpetuation.  It was commonly believed that only dissidents--who were, by definition, outside the system--advocated systemic reform of the Soviet Union.

Yet evidence is now accumulating that, independent of the dissidents, a group of party apparatchiks with powerful sponsorship began working to effect reforms from within the system over thirty years ago.  The advent of glasnost and the publication of memoirs and interviews by the people who surround Gorbachev have made it clear that perestroika itself was merely the most dramatic expression of the long-standing desires of the intra-party reform group, or perestroikists, and that the chaos that has followed is, in part, their legacy.

The most important of the new documents to appear are the memoirs of Fyodor Burlatsky, now editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, and a set of interviews given by Ivan Frolov, the editor-in-chief of Pravda, and Georgi Arbatov, head of the prestigious Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada.  Their testimony shows that Gorbachev is in fact the heir of Yuri Andropov, former chairman of the KGB, general secretary of the CPSU, and leader of the intra-party reform movement.  As Frolov told the Italian newspaper La Republica in April 1989:

The section [of the Central Committee Secretariat for relations with fraternal socialist countries] headed by Andropov was [a] training school for future Gorbachevites, and it was Andropov himself, many years later, who introduced Gorbachev--newly arrived in Moscow from Stavropol--to some of those later to become his close aides, including Shakhnazarov, Bovin, and Arbatov.(1)

Burlatsky supplies a more detailed account of Andropov's long sponsorship of and participation in the intra-party reform movement.  The recently published Voices of Glasnost by Stephen Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, for example, quotes Burlatsky as follows:

Andropov was absolutely a reform-minded person.  He was a man of the Twentieth Party Congress.  I remember the first speech he gave after Khrushchev was removed.  He said, "Now we shall move more firmly and consistently along the road charted by the Twentieth Congress."  It turned out that he was wrong.  But that was his hope.  Even back in the mid-1960s Andropov expressed in his speeches and articles reformist ideas about modernizing the economy and changing the way the party and state functioned.  He understood the need for major reforms as well as his group of young advisers, which I headed.  But unlike us, he knew even then how hard it would be to carry out such reforms.  When he finally became general secretary in 1982 it was too late.  His health failed him.  Even so, look at how much he began in that short time. (2)

Similarly glowing descriptions of Andropov and his importance in guiding the movement which was to spawn perestroika are provided elsewhere by Alexander Bovin, a political commentator for Izvestia, by Arbatov, who worked with Andropov in the Secretariat, and by Vladimir Kryuchkov, who assisted Andropov for twenty-nine years in various posts.(3)

These new documents--particularly Burlatsky's memoir, After Stalin, which appeared in 1988 in Novy Mir--make clear that perestroika is the fruit of a much older movement, born of the Khrushchev "thaw" and the de-Stalinization of the late 1950s.  Burlatsky reveals for the first time the whole story of the birth of the intra-party reform movement in the Soviet Union.

Leninist, Stalinist, Reformer

The story really goes back much further than Andropov.  It begins as early as 1881 when Otto Wille Kuusinen was born in a small village in the Autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, then part of the Russian Empire.  Kuusinen grew up during the reigns of Czars Alexander III and Nicholas II and passed the early part of his life in the peaceful, western land of Finland.  He received an excellent education culminating in 1905 with a degree in history and philology from the University of Helsinki.  He read Adam Smith and Rousseau, among other Western philosophers, but he became particularly enamored of Hegel.  He saw in Marxism the appropriate development of Hegel and joined the Finnish Social Democratic Party, part of the All-Russian Communist Party, or Bolsheviks, in 1905 (some say 1904).  By 1907 he headed The Worker, the Finnish Communist Party's official organ, and in 1908 he was elected to the Finnish Diet as a deputy for the Social Democrats.

In 1912 Kuusinen began what was to become a lifetime involvement with the international communist movement as a party delegate to the Socialist International Congress at Basel.  He served as Lenin's man in Finland during the October Revolution and as People's Commissar for National Education in the Finnish Soviet Republic in January 1918.  He helped found the Finnish Communist Party when Finland was separated from Russia, and when this attempt to create a communist Finland proved abortive, Otto Wille Kuusinen became Otto Vilgelmovich Kuusinen and moved to the Soviet Union.  He was present as a delegate and speaker at the founding congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919, and by 1921 had become general secretary of that organization.  He remained a leading figure in it until he himself signed the act dissolving that body in 1943.

Kuusinen served Stalin loyally throughout his reign, and Stalin rewarded him with security.  Stalin hoped that Finland would one day fall into the hands of the Soviet Union, and Kuusinen, a respected member of the Finnish intelligentsia, was designated to be its head.  When the Red Army attempted to impose communism on Finland by force in 1939, Stalin created an alternate communist government and named Kuusinen its president.  The Finnish armies resisted bravely, however, and Stalin had to make do with a much smaller piece of Karelia, on which he established the Karelo-Finnish Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, with Kuusinen as its first president from 1940 until 1956.

The first important date in the history of perestroika is 1940.  That year, Yuri Andropov was transferred to the Komsomol in the Karelo-Finnish Republic and met Kuusinen.  The two men--later to become the most powerful progenitors of reform--had come together.  Born in 1914 in what is now the Stavropol Krai, Andropov, unlike his Finnish mentor, did not receive formal higher education.  Between 1930 and 1932 he served as a telegraph operator and boatman on the river Volga.  In 1936 he graduated from the Rybinsk Water Transportation Technicum and went to work in the Komsomol as a secretary in the Yaroslavl Oblast.  He rose rapidly through the ranks, benefiting in part from Stalin's continuing purges, and became first secretary of the Komsomol in the Karelo-Finnish Republic.  Andropov remained in the Karelo-Finnish Communist Party apparatus, rising to become second secretary to Kuusinen in 1947.

Kuusinen's power enabled him to promote the careers of his proteges, especially Andropov.  It was almost certainly Kuusinen who engineered Andropov's transfer in 1951 to the Central Committee Secretariat, presumably to serve under him in the International Department.  In 1952, Kuusinen reached the pinnacle of his career when Stalin made him a full member of the Politburo.  The triumph was short-lived, however, for when Stalin died in March 1953, Khrushchev and Malenkov purged this loyal servant of the dead tyrant, removing him from his posts on the Politburo and the Central Committee.  Kuusinen's setback also cast a shadow on the career of Andropov who was shunted off to Hungary in 1953 and soon after became Soviet ambassador there.

Andropov's time in Hungary proved important for his political career, because the Khrushchev leadership was satisfied with his performance and loyalty during the crisis of 1956.  Meanwhile, Kuusinen, though down in the Kremlin power game, was still important enough to help Khrushchev defeat the "anti-party" group in 1957, and Khrushchev rewarded him with his old post in the Secretariat and on the Politburo.  Andropov was recalled from Hungary in the same year to work again under Kuusinen in the International Department of the Central Committee Secretariat.

The Re-Writing Begins

The next critical year in the history of perestroika was 1958 when Kuusinen undertook official revision of the textbook, Foundations of Marxism-Leninism.  Last produced under Stalin, it needed to be revised to reflect the principles of de-Stalinization announced by the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956.  Kuusinen was assigned a writers' collective to assist him, but chose to form a new one.  In Voices of Glasnost, Arbatov tells the story:

The old [textbook], pardon me, was bullshit.  Kuusinen was dissatisfied with the group of people assigned to work with him and decided to recruit his own people.  He had noticed me at New Times and asked me to be one of his principle assistants.  The book we produced--it came out in 1960--wasn't bad considering when it was written.  In fact, there were many interesting things in it.(4)

Arbatov also describes the importance of this writers' collective:

...I worked as leader of a group of advisers in the section [of the CPSU Central Committee] headed...by Yurii Vladimirovich Andropov (by the way, I was introduced to him by Kuusinen, who knew him through his work in Karelia).  I am much indebted to these people as teachers.(5)

Burlatsky was also an important part of the new writers' collective.  He describes why Kuusinen rejected the group he was originally offered and chose his own:

These were people not capable of approaching the problems deeply disturbing the development of the contemporary world in any sort of new, fresh, and out-of-the-ordinary way.(6)

And so the intra-party reform movement began, as Burlatsky and Arbatov joined the writers' collective for the textbook on Marxism-Leninism under the direction of Kuusinen.

The textbook they produced in 1960 is relatively dry and, to a reader some thirty years later, not obviously reformist.  Yet Burlatsky and Arbatov both believe that the intra-party reform movement finds its earliest roots in this work.  Burlatsky's vivid description of his first meeting with Kuusinen helps explain why and deserves to be quoted at length.

[The first speaker is "Matkovskii," one of Kuusinen's aides, who brought Burlatsky to speak with the "old gentleman."]

"...Otto Vilgelmovich will tell you [Burlatsky] about his thoughts on the writing of a chapter about the state for our textbook.  It must be an entirely unusual chapter, perhaps the central chapter in the book.  Well, I have fulfilled my mission and I will shut up."

"Yes, yes, precisely, precisely," squeaked out the old gentleman, "I invited you to attempt...To attempt to approach this question anew.  You have correctly stated it in the article: we must develop soviet democracy.7  But what does this mean?  What do you think?"

I began to reiterate the bases of the position of my article.  But Kuusinen stopped me with his glance.

"Yes, yes, precisely...But what do you think, is it necessary for us to retain the dictatorship of the proletariat when we have already constructed socialist society?  Or is the transition to some sort of new stage in the development of the state necessary?"

This question, I must say, embarrassed me.  Not because I had not thought about it, but because the answer to such a question, as they said in our editorial board, is fraught with unforeseen consequences....But is it possible to speak about this to a person who represented the highest leadership of the country?  It is true, by the very fact that he posed the question he gave a hint of the possibility of some sort of new judgement....However I had not even thought out to its conclusion this thought under the attentive, searching look which he was calling for from me demanding not my formal, but my most sincere opinion.

"If I were to speak openly, Otto Vilgelmovich, then it seems to me that the dictatorship of the proletariat has already played out its role in our country.  It must be transformed.  This process, strictly speaking, is already underway, and the task lies in consciously accelerating it."

"Precisely," the shawl was moved, which, as I later understood, signified the utmost degree of excitement, "But this is the question: into what is it, this dictatorship, being transformed?..."

"I think into a state of the whole people, into socialist democracy."

"Yes, yes, precisely, but perhaps an all-national [obshchenarodnoye] state?  Marx at some point criticized the slogan `national state.'  But this was a long time ago and, besides, applied to a different state entirely.  Lassalle thought to replace the junkers' bourgeois power with a national state.  This was an illusion.  This was a deception.  But we have an entirely different situation now, when the dictatorship of the proletariat has already played out its historical role."

Here he made a pause, which lasted so long because I did not know if I was supposed to add something to his remarks.  But he, evidently, was continuing to consider what he said, as if a word, having separated from him, took on some sort of independent meaning and sound, so that it was necessary to evaluate it anew.

"So in this spirit am I supposed to write this chapter for the textbook?" I could not hold back.

"Precisely, precisely in this spirit.  It is necessary to ground it theoretically.  It is necessary to quote from Lenin--for what and why the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary--and to prove that now it has played out its role."

"Are we speaking only about theory, or also about practice?" I asked.  "Do we have in mind introducing some sort of large-scale changes into the political system?"

"Yes, yes, precisely," answered Kuusinen.  "In the beginning theory and then," here he made a motion with his hand toward somewhere in the distance, "and then even practice...." 8

As this account reveals, Otto Kuusinen was clearly a man who believed that major systemic reforms were necessary in the Soviet state.  Their necessity emerged not from practical but from ideological considerations.  Thus, contrary to the dominant opinion today--that perestroika was begun in response to the dreadful performance of the Soviet economy--the movement in fact has its roots in a belief that the Soviet system itself must be changed.

New Recruits

Burlatsky does not tell us what this obshchenarodnoye state of Kuusinen's was to be like.  Would it have been democratic?  Would it have had a free economy?  There is no way of telling and the textbook itself does not help.  Burlatsky's chapter quotes from Lenin to show the necessity of the dictatorship and describes how the conditions which formed this necessity no longer exist.  It then calls for the establishment of an obshchenarodnoye state.  But it goes no further, and therefore sheds no more light on the meaning of "reform."  We are left with the impression of an imperfectly thought-out plan to move on to the next step in Marxism-Leninism--a step whose character no one, not even Marx or Lenin, had ever worked out.

Nor did Kuusinen himself, as far as we know, produce a detailed account of exactly what was wrong with the old system.  He, too, proceeded from abstract principles to advocate another abstract principle--the obshchenarodnoye state.  Khrushchev adopted this idea enthusiastically, and proclaimed in 1961 that it was time to end the dictatorship of the proletariat and bring about the obshchenarodnoye state.  The concept Khrushchev described under this heading, however, is a meaningless philosophical abstraction of infinite plasticity and accompanied by careful qualifiers.  Khrushchev was not a part of the intra-party reform movement; Kuusinen and Andropov, in fact, seem to have worked against him immediately prior to his downfall.  His adoption of Kuusinen's term the year after the textbook came out indicates, however, the basic point of agreement of all reformers in the Soviet Union at the time: anti-Stalinism.  Khrushchev snatched, as Kuusinen had, at the idea of "transcending" the developmental stage in which Stalin's Soviet Union had found itself--so as to do away with Stalin's Soviet Union.  Even Brezhnev shared the fear of certain aspects of the Stalinist system, and acted on it by introducing the notion of "stability of Party cadres."  This anti-Stalinism, however, did not and could not serve by itself as the basis for a coherent reform platform.  Besides, in the 1950s and 1960s the issue of anti-Stalinism was still very controversial, and neither Khrushchev nor the intra-party reform movement ventured to analyze past sins thoroughly or to determine what precisely they would replace the old system with.

The writers' collective broke up when the book was finished in 1960, but the intra-party reform movement continued.  Kuusinen and Andropov remained in their places, and Andropov recruited Arbatov and Burlatsky to serve him in the Central Committee apparatus.  He instructed Burlatsky to create a group of advisers for him in the International Department.  Burlatsky recalls:

In 1960 [Andropov] asked me to come to work in his department as a consultant.  To tell you the truth, I had real misgivings.  I've never liked a regular office job, and I felt no urge to work in the party apparatus.  But when Andropov assured me that my job would be to write theoretical articles, I accepted the position.  Then he asked me to create a group of consultants under him, so I brought in a number of people who are now very prominent--Georgii Shakhnazarov, who's a personal aide to Gorbachev; Gennadii Gerasimov, who's the spokesman of the Foreign Ministry; Oleg Bogomolov, who is director of the Institute on the Economics of the World Socialist System; Georgii Arbatov and Alexandr Bovin...and others.  It was a very unusual group of young party intellectuals, perhaps the first ever in the Central Committee.(9)

And so 1960 became the next pivotal year in the history of perestroika.  By then most of the people who were to become key advisers to Gorbachev had been co-opted into the intra-party reform movement.

Just as the movement was a faction within the Communist Party--the dominant faction under Khrushchev and the minority faction under Brezhnev--so that movement itself rapidly developed two divergent views of reform.  One was epitomized by Burlatsky, the other by Andropov himself.  Burlatsky is a maverick.  As he himself points out, he was not well suited to serve in the Soviet government, always much more radical than most of his colleagues, asserting that changes should be more rapid and more far-reaching.  Andropov was quite different.  He seems to have been something of a Burkeian reformer, believing that changes are necessary but that they must be introduced slowly and carefully so as to avoid disruption and the chaos that is worse than any tyranny.  "Do your measurements seven times," Andropov cautioned in 1983, "for you can only make one cut."(10)

The conflict between the two is illustrated by an anecdote Burlatsky relates.  He had written an article about Yugoslavia's movement toward the free market in the 1960s.  It was, by the standard of the times, radical, for it took a positive view of these new developments.  Andropov sent Burlatsky a long note asking him to withhold the article.  He argued that it was not time, that the article would be incendiary and counterproductive.  Burlatsky yielded.

I did not agree with him, but I believed that, as distinguished from us, the young advisers coming from scientific or journalistic circles, [Andropov] understood politics as the art of the possible.  He knew not only what it was necessary to do, but also how it may be achieved in concrete conditions....(11)

The disagreement did not prevent Burlatsky from working with Andropov, but it points to a division within the intra-party reform movement that appears to have continued through the years.

The Reformist Diaspora

In the early 1960s the intra-party reform movement began to fall on hard times.  In May 1964 Kuusinen died.  His power could not have been great by the end, but his death removed Andropov's support in the Politburo.  When Khrushchev was ousted in October 1964, all powerful support for reform of any kind disappeared.  Andropov and his group of advisers found themselves in an exposed position.  Burlatsky decided that he could not write the sort of hard-line dogma that the Brezhnev-Kosygin government wanted and quit the Central Committee apparatus, much to Andropov's dismay.  His place as head of the group of advisers was taken by Georgi Arbatov in 1965.  Early in 1967, however, Arbatov accepted a position as head of the newly-formed Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada and he, too, left the group.  Alexander Bovin replaced him.  As he makes clear in Voices of Glasnost, Bovin shares Burlatsky's enthusiasm for Andropov unreservedly.

Andropov was the first major political figure in my life--a kind of mentor.  You see his picture on the shelf here in my office.  Andropov was a born politician...but he was also an undogmatic, knowledgeable intellectual.  We'd spend hours arguing about some problem, he with his coat off and his shirtsleeves rolled up....(12)

Bovin's service under Andropov was to be short, however, for within a few months Andropov was transferred to the post of chairman of the KGB and separated from the advisory group.  Burlatsky makes it very clear that Andropov's transfer was unwelcome.

As for Andropov becoming head of the KGB in 1967, I'll tell you what really happened.  He was forced to leave his post as a Central Committee Secretary and go to the KGB.  Under Khrushchev, Andropov was being groomed to become the successor to Mikhail Suslov....The first thing Suslov did after Khrushchev's ouster was to demand that Brezhnev remove Andropov as a Central Committee Secretary by sending him to the KGB.  Suslov thought this would make it impossible for Andropov ever to return to leadership politics because after Stalin's death there was no precedent for a KGB chief becoming a Central Committee Secretary.  Suslov wanted to end Andropov's political career.  But Brezhnev was a man of grand compromises.  He agreed to Suslov's demand, but at the same time promoted Andropov to candidate membership on the Politburo.  Eventually, after Suslov's death in 1982, that made it possible for Andropov to return.  It was always his dream while he was at the KGB.  I remember when he left the Central Committee in 1967, he gathered his associates and pledged, "I will return to the Central Committee."(13)

It must have been an emotional scene.  Burlatsky had gone into a self-imposed exile, Arbatov had left to head a new institute of dubious power, and Andropov pledged to his remaining allies that he would return to a position of power one day.

The interim was a bad time for the members of the advisory group.  Burlatsky went to work for Pravda as a political commentator, but lost his job in 1967 for being too radical.  He then went to work with Alexander Rumyantsev at the Institute for World Economics and International Relations.  Rumyantsev was also a radical reformer and was trying to gather a group similar to Andropov's around himself, but the Brezhnev mafia caught up with him, fired him, and broke up his group in 1972.  Burlatsky went to head a section at the Institute for State and Law.  In 1975 he became head of the Institute of Social Science and in 1976 vice president of the Soviet Political Science Association.  He remained at that post until 1982.

Alexander Bovin, a more flexible man than Burlatsky, fared somewhat better.  He remained head of what had been Andropov's group of advisers until 1972, when he went to work for Izvestia as a political writer.  In all probability he was transferred from the Central Committee against his will.  As he puts it today, "Sometimes the Communist Party feels that an individual ought to have a new assignment somewhere else.  In my case, it was suggested to me that I ought to go to Izvestia as a political writer."(14)  He remains there to this day.

Georgi Arbatov proved most successful of all.  He still heads the USA-Canada Institute.  This is technically under the control of the USSR Academy of Sciences, but the KGB relies heavily upon it for information and disinformation about the United States.  It is likely that Arbatov was able to maintain contacts with Andropov in a much more normal fashion than any of the other consultants during Andropov's years as head of the KGB.

The Long March

Andropov's own position was also difficult.  Since Stalin's rise in the 1920s, the position of supreme power in the Soviet Union has been that of general secretary of the Central Committee (CC) of the CPSU.  No one has ever held that position who did not rise through the ranks of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU.  Andropov's transfer to a position outside of the Secretariat seemed an insurmountable obstacle to his progress to ultimate power.  Also, no previous chairman of the KGB had ever risen to supreme power.  He could only hope to succeed by so pleasing those in power that they might call him back from exile.  He could please them, however, only by pursuing policies which flatly contradicted his own sentiments.  The ample evidence suggests that Andropov became a model "hardliner" for a time, not out of conviction but simply in order to attain power.

His willingness to compromise was tested almost immediately.  In 1968 he helped crush brutally the Prague Spring, impressing his overlords with his ability and loyalty.  He then turned on a dissident movement (the so-called "law-defending" movement), exaggerating its importance and twisting its meaning so that it appeared to aim at the overthrow of the Soviet state--which it did not.

In 1979 Andropov appears to have actively supported the invasion of Afghanistan.  The KGB maintains a system of spies and informants within the armed forces for the purpose of monitoring on unit morale, cohesiveness, and effectiveness, as well as combating any "spies" who may have crept into the ranks.  The KGB also performs some of the intelligence assessment functions carried out in America by the CIA and the NSA.  It is hard to imagine, therefore, that any Soviet general secretary would go to war without the active support of the chairman of the KGB.  At the very least, he would surely replace a reluctant chairman in such a critical position.  There is therefore good reason to believe that Andropov must have supported the invasion.

Part of the explanation for Andropov's contradictory behavior is sheer opportunism, which has characterized the whole Kuusinen-Andropov-Gorbachev reform movement.  The earliest reformer, Kuusinen, not only survived Stalin's regime but managed to advance his political career during that reign of tyranny.  What doing so involved--the way he conducted his life--is graphically illustrated by one episode.

In the 1930s, Kuusinen's son and his wife, Aino, were arrested and imprisoned by Stalin.  One day while talking with Kuusinen, Stalin asked him why he did not try to get his son released.  "Evidently there were serious reasons for his arrest," Kuusinen responded.  "Stalin grinned and ordered the release of Kuusinen's son."(15)  Kuusinen had not protested the imprisonment nor fought for the release of his wife and son.  Such a struggle might have led to his joining them in prison to no effect.  Despite this personal proof of Stalin's cruelty, however, the father of the intra-party reform movement continued to serve Stalin loyally for all the dictator's days.

Georgi Arbatov has displayed the same cool opportunism in his twenty-three year tenure as head of the USA-Canada Institute, through the stewardships of KGB heads Andropov, Fedorchuk, Chebrikov, and under the new chairman, Kryuchkov.  He has collected a small group of friends at the Institute, some of whom, like Nikolai Shmelyov, are now prominent reformers, but there is no indication that Arbatov has refused to take part in the Institute's many shady functions.

Fyodor Burlatsky stands distinct from the other reformers.  Always dubious about his role in government, he left as soon as he felt he could no longer produce what the government wanted.  (And when he left rather than sacrifice his principles, Andropov was angry with him.)

Uninhibited opportunism of the sort demonstrated repeatedly by the intra-party reform group, however, would not have been possible if the group had possessed a clear idea of exactly where it was heading.  Maneuverings of the sort used by Kuusinen, Andropov, Arbatov, and the others to maintain and improve their positions tell us more about the character of their thought than about the individuals themselves.  If the perestroikists had had a concrete goal, a vision of the society they were striving to create, a principle on which to base their projected improvement of Soviet society, there would have come a point around which they were unwilling to maneuver, a principle which they could not sacrifice.  Yet in the event, their maneuverings do not seem to have been in the least limited by any concrete value, and their nebulous ideas allowed them to perform whatever contortions their survival seemed to require.  Indeed, it might seem that the one goal that was clear in their minds was gaining power.

In 1982, all this paid off and Andropov returned to the CC Secretariat.  Soon the death of Brezhnev offered him the chance for supreme power.

Andropov out-maneuvered Brezhnev's chosen successor, Konstantin Chernenko, and took the party leadership.  He immediately offered Burlatsky the post of political observer for Literaturnaya Gazeta, the journal which he now edits.  Andropov began a series of cautious reforms in an attempt to revitalize the now crippled Soviet economy.  He continued the anti-corruption campaign he had begun as chairman of the KGB, and called for the increased application of new technology in industry, better use of robotics and applied chemistry, and a general speeding-up of the economic mechanism.  Such calls were not new--Khrushchev first made them in the 1950s--but they were a sharp break from the conservative stagnation of the Brezhnev era.  It is hard to know exactly where Andropov's reforms would have gone.  His announcements were cautious and ambiguous, and his actions even more so.  After a little more than a year he fell ill, never to recover.

Just as the debilitated Lenin had done, Andropov hid his illness as best he could and tried to rule from his sickbed.  His strongest and most loyal ally at this time was Mikhail Gorbachev.  They had met in the late 1970s, and Andropov had been deeply impressed by him.  He told Arbatov, "There is a brilliant man working in Stavropol."(16)  According to one of Gorbachev's biographers, "There can be no doubt that even before [Andropov's] brief time as General Secretary, Andropov was one of Gorbachev's patrons....It seems likely...that in the prolonged and thorough preparations for his own accession, Andropov included Gorbachev in his plans as his principle organizer and `crown prince.' "(17)  During Andropov's final illness, Gorbachev served as his confidant and assistant, visiting his bedside daily.(18)

The ailing Andropov, however, was not able to place his "brilliant man" on the throne; Brezhnev's heir, Chernenko, was selected instead.  He represented the old guard which still had considerable influence throughout the country, though he himself was not expected to make any important policy decisions during his expected short tenure.  It seems possible that Gorbachev and Andropov's other allies compromised with the Brezhnevites and agreed to place the aged Chernenko on the throne with the proviso that Gorbachev would be his successor.  However that may be, Chernenko died in 1985 and Gorbachev came to power.

The Wages of Opportunism

The proximate cause of the collapse of the Soviet economy was clear--the "stagnation" of the Brezhnev years had destroyed the incentive structure of Soviet society.  Whereas Stalin had made the economy perform through fear of the blood purge and Khrushchev had achieved his goals through the administrative purge, Brezhnev introduced the concept of "stability of cadres," assuring all party apparatchiks that neither their lives nor their jobs were in danger, however incompetent they might be.  The predictable result of over fifteen years of this policy was to set the Soviet economy on the downward spiral along which it is continuing to spin.

Gorbachev attempted to turn to the traditional Soviet remedy for a problem such as this--the purge.  Unwilling to use physical force to achieve his aims, he sought to develop new allies--the intelligentsia and popular opinion--in his struggle against entrenched and inefficient party bureaucrats through the policy of glasnost.  Gorbachev expected that Soviet intellectuals, allowed to speak their minds for the first time in twenty years, would point out both the deficiencies in the system and those mid-level bureaucrats who were to blame for the deficiencies.  Gorbachev could then remove these culprits through a combination of administrative fiat and the force of popular indignation.

The intellectuals did not disappoint.  Slowly at first, then with increasing frequency and force, the Soviet intelligentsia began to speak out against the recalcitrant bureaucracy.  Many of the members of the intra-party reform group were well prepared to assist in this endeavor.  Ivan Frolov was made editor first of Kommunist, an important ideological journal, and then of Pravda, where he remains today.  Burlatsky was appointed to the Soviet Union's Committee on Human Rights and, somewhat later, made editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, from whose tribune he continues to speak forcefully and frankly in defense of reform.  Alexander Bovin remained in his post as political commentator for Izvestia, and both Georgi Arbatov and his son, Aleksei, have led the charge from the USA-Canada Institute.

The purge, however, did not occur.  Partly because the bureaucracy was extremely well entrenched and partly because the intellectuals failed to direct enough of their energy to uprooting corruption, wasting it instead on petty squabbles, by 1988 it had become clear that Gorbachev had not succeeded in bending the party to his will.  He embarked, therefore, upon a series of rapid, ad hoc attempts to induce change in the Soviet system.  He tore down the old administrative structure, changed the number of ministries and their duties, and moved as many people as he could to positions from which they could less easily resist him.  Only after Gorbachev began increasingly radical reforms did such moderate reformers as Viktor Chebrikov and Yegor Ligachev, who had supported the initial drive for perestroika, desert to join with the hardliners in opposing further reform.

Two factors then conspired to create the chaos which now reigns in the Soviet Union.  The first was that as hardline opposition grew, more and more radical reforms became necessary to oppose it, which drove more and more moderates out of the reform movement and into the hardline camp.  The second was that by inviting the intelligentsia and popular opinion to play a novel role in government, Gorbachev empowered many groups he did not intend to empower.  The rise of nationalist movements within the Soviet Empire, for example, though an obvious result of loosening the reins of a multinational state, came as a rude surprise to Gorbachev, who had other goals in mind when he created the pre-conditions for these movements.  The overall consequence is that Soviet society has become highly polarized and all authority has been brought into question.

Gorbachev's failures--the inability to formulate even a systematic description of the ills of the Soviet system, let alone give an account of their causes; the absence of clearly formulated goals; the opportunism and evasiveness; the vacillation between timidity and recklessness--are not merely personal failings but reflect the character of the intra-party reform group from which he came.  Indeed, the very choice of Gorbachev as the group's candidate for leadership establishes the connection between the two.

From Kuusinen's obshchenarodnoye state through Andropov's timid and uncertain tinkering with the system to Gorbachev's bold but poorly thought-out and increasingly frantic efforts, the need for reform has been clearly felt, but the program of reform has been practically non-existent.  Gorbachev has shown that, intentionally or unintentionally, he can destroy the Soviet system comprehensively.  It remains doubtful whether, given the intellectual barrenness of the intra-party reform group, he can replace what he has destroyed.

Frederick Kagan is a senior at Yale University majoring in Soviet and East European Studies.

1.  Reported in FBIS-SOV-89-74: April 19, 1989, p. 83.

2. Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989), pp. 182-3.

3. For Bovin see Voices of Glasnost, p. 214; for Arbatov see his interview in Nedelya, March 23, 1988, as reported in FBIS-SOV-88-73: April 15, 1988, p. 19; for Kryuchkov see FBIS-SOV-89-201: October 19, 1989, p. 45.

4. Voices of Glasnost, pp. 308-9.

5. See footnote 3.

6. Posle Stalina, in Novy Mir, October 1988, p. 168.

7. Burlatsky had published a much criticized article calling for the further development of "socialist" or "soviet" democracy.

8. Posle Stalina, p. 170.

9. Voices of Glasnost, p. 176.

10. New York Times, August 16, 1983, p. A4.

11. Novy Mir, October 1988, p. 183.

12. Voices of Glasnost, p. 214.

13. Ibid., p. 183.

14. Ibid., p. 217.

15. Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 547, note 39.

16. Voices of Glasnost, p. 312.

17. Christian Schmidt-Hauer, Gorbachev, The Path to Power (London: I.B. Tauris, 1986), p. 64.

18. Baruch Hazan Baruch, From Brezhnev to Gorbachev: Infighting in the Kremlin (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), p. 93.