John-Paul Himka

In the mid-1980s everything began to change dramatically in the Soviet Union as a whole and, with some delay, also in the Ukrainian republic. The Brezhnev era, soon to be labelled “the period of stagnation,” came to an end when Leonid Brezhnev, who had served as general secretary of the Soviet Communist party for eighteen years and had been ailing for some time, breathed his last on 10 November 1982. He was seventy-five years old.

The Soviet politburo was clearly at a loss on figuring out the way forward. Two days after Brezhnev’s death, it selected sixty-eight-year old Yuri Andropov to replace Brezhnev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Andropov had headed the Soviet secret police, the KGB, since 1967, and had been one of the hardest hard liners on the Brezhnev team. Even before becoming KGB chief, he had, as Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, played a significant role in the suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956. And at the helm of the KGB, Andropov was a major advocate of the invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring in 1968, and he ruthlessly suppressed dissent within the Soviet Union itself. As general secretary, he continued his policies of persecuting dissidents and also devised a feeble scheme to reboot the Soviet economy: a “discipline” campaign, which imagined that the main problem with the USSR was that people simply weren’t working hard enough.[1] He sent agents into workplaces to take attendance – was everyone at their job? Agents also checked the cafes – were people here who should be at work? He apparently believed that extending policing to the workplace would solve the problems of the stagnant Soviet economy.

It didn’t. It was a silly idea to begin with, and employees quickly devised schemes to foil the nosy agents of dystsyplina (discipline).

Andropov, who for months had been hospitalized because of kidney failure, died in office on 9 February 1984. Four days later he was replaced by seventy-two-year-old Konstantin Chernenko. Both Andropov and Chernenko were, within the Soviet context, old men; in 1984 the life expectancy of Soviet males was only 62.4 years. Chernenko was also hospitalized soon after taking office, and died on 10 March 1985. Clearly, the choice of Chernenko had been an interim measure until the Kremlin cabal could decide on someone who could effectively grasp the reins of power and move the country forward.

On the day after Chernenko passed away, the politburo installed Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary. Gorbachev was only fifty-four years old. From the start, he announced the need for substantial reforms, and over the next two years he developed a program emphasizing two key terms: glasnost’ (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction).

Although the term glasnost’ had been used in Soviet official parlance occasionally in the past, the concept was formally endorsed at the twenty-seventh congress of the Soviet Communist party in February 1986.

Openness was soon put to the test when on 26 April of that year a reactor at the Chornobyl nuclear plant, located about a hundred kilometers north of Kyiv, exploded. There was no official announcement of the disaster in the Soviet media. On the morning of 28 April, Sweden detected increased radiation levels and directly queried the Soviet government whether anything nuclear had gone wrong on its territory. The Soviets initially denied anything had happened, but by the night of the 28th, they admitted, in a short statement, that a disaster had indeed occurred at the atomic power plant in Chornobyl.

It could not be said that the USSR had passed the first glasnost’ test convincingly.

If the all-Union response was pathetic, the response of the leadership of the Soviet Ukrainian republic was callous. The republican leadership went ahead with a parade and festivities in Kyiv (only somewhat abbreviated) on Mayday 1986, and five days later Kyiv served as the starting point of the annual bicycle Peace Race.

Glasnost’ did not begin in earnest until 1987, when indeed considerable freedom of speech became permitted.

Why did Gorbachev initiate a process of democratization in the Soviet Union?

I think we can dismiss at the outset the self-congratulatory conservative fairy tale that Gorbachev’s reforms were the outcome of the brilliant cold war politics of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. It makes much more sense to suppose that Gorbachev was trying to solve pressing domestic problems. He realized that his society and economy truly were stagnating and, as a result, falling further and further behind the West by every measure. I think he saw that the West was developing a powerful advantage in the proliferation and communication of information. Fax machines, ubiquitous photocopiers, and early desktop computers were all in use in the West in the mid-1980s. In the USSR, these same items, in small quantities, were kept under lock and key. If the country was to progress, it would have to refrain from restricting these new information technologies and, rather, introduce them into broad usage. Accomplishing that and maintaining strict censorship appeared mutually exclusive.

I believe that Gorbachev considered glasnost’ a technical adjustment to the Soviet system, one that would make it work more efficiently. I am absolutely positive that he did not realize that freedom of speech would entail the opening up of national questions in the multinational USSR and that this in short order would lead to the Union’s demise.

[1] A frequently heard quip in the 1980s was, “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”