January 01, 2008

Six Years That Shook the World

20 years ago, Russia began to walk down the path of reform.

It was a short walk. Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika lasted just six years. Still, it was enough to turn the world upside down.

Gorbachev’s reform plan was not constructed about a neatly formulated ideology, but around the desire to fix a country that had a stagnating, isolated economy. The energetic new General Secretary of the Communist Party (CPSU) attacked many (but far from all) of the sacred cows of communism. He shoved the country toward a market economy, renounced the dictates of hard-liners by allowing demonstrations and lifting censorship, withdrew Soviet troops from Europe and Asia, buried the Bolsheviks’ dream of World Revolution and ended the decades-long Cold War.

And then there was the putsch – the attempt by conservative communists to restore the Soviet Union in its previous guise. This turned out to only speed the USSR’s demise, leading to the Yeltsin era. And after Yeltsin’s resignation there was Vladimir Putin, whose tenure has been longer that of Gorbachev.

Russian Life asked Marina Latysheva to look back on the six years that were perestroika, check in on some of its key personalities, and offer brief updates on where they are now.

Mikhail Gorbachev

In the Soviet communists’ highest organ, after three aging leaders died in as many years, the choice was made to put a younger politician on the throne. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was a typical functionary from the Russian provinces, having risen to power through the Brezhnev era. In April 1985, he set the tone for his rule with a speech at the 27th Communist Party Congress, on the need for reform and transformation. He would rule for just over six years: in 1991, while Gorbachev was on vacation, hard-line communists unsatisfied with his leadership tried to execute a putsch. But they were hindered by Boris Yeltsin, who, after the coup was thwarted, took advantage of events to take the reigns of power and hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union.

During perestroika, Gorbachev lifted censorship, took on drunkenness, transformed the industrial and banking systems, and obtained important credits from the West (which turned out to be more than Russia could handle). He made the State subject to electoral mandate and ended the communist monopoly on power. In his reign, the Soviet Union saw shortages and hunger, but business developed. He withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan and ended the Cold War, but his policies also led to an increase in separatism and armed conflict within the USSR.

Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize while still in power. In 2004, he received a Grammy for his narration of a recording with the Russian National Orchestra. Today he spends most of his time traveling, lecturing and working for the Gorbachev Foundation. He also seeks to play an important role in politics, but with little success. He has always been more popular outside Russia than within. His wife Raisa died in 1999, from leukemia, and after her death it was if he had lost a part of himself. As Margaret Thatcher once said, “She and her husband were an indivisible pair. Raisa’s constant support to a large degree enabled the president’s political rise and the great reforms which he brought about.”

Nikolai Ryzhkov

An economist and high-ranking Gosplan bureaucrat, Nikolai Ryzhkov became prime minister during perestroika, overseeing the practical implementation of reforms. He was the first and most important adviser to Gorbachev among the other young members of the Politburo. In 1988, he lobbied for the cooperative movement, trying to convince everyone to go into business.

Ryzhkov tried to use his position to change the monster that was the planned economy – monster which he himself had helped lead for many years. But with little success. Even back then, Ryzhkov understood that everything was not going as the leadership would have liked, yet he spent government meetings complaining about objective problems and difficulties, rather than addressing root causes. At one of these meetings, Leningrad Mayor Anatoly Sobchak called him the “crying Bolshevik” (from a Mayakovsky poem), because he wept when his reform program was not accepted. The nickname has stuck to Ryzhkov ever since.

In 1990, at a Supreme Soviet session, the premier declared that prices for food products were too low, and that they would probably rise. As a result of this careless phrase, there was a run on stores; shelves were emptied across the USSR. A rationing system had to be enacted, reminding Soviets of the worst days of the War.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ryzhkov wrote his memoirs and headed up several commercial entities, and has served as a deputy in the Russian Duma. Today he confirms that perestroika was something that the younger Politburo members had been working on for some time, and that analysis on the introduction of aspects of a market economy into the Soviet Union had begun as early as 1983 (when Ryzhkov was both a leading bureaucrat at Gosplan and a Central Committee Secretary). Thus, perestroika was not Gorbachev’s personal initiative, but the fruits of a collective investigation.

Vadim Medvedev

He is rarely remembered in books and articles. Subdued and reticent, Vadim Medvedev did not have the outward qualities of a leader. As a result, few recall that he was, for a time, one of the country’s leading individuals, heading up the team of economists that advocated a radical transformation of the Soviet planned economy.

Actually, two teams of reformers were laying the groundwork for change: one group was led by Medvedev, the other by Nikolai Ryzhkov. Ryzhkov was prime minister and fully in charge. He really didn’t want to hear from people who sought to draw on the experience of other countries. In other words, people like Medvedev.

Medvedev sought to make the economy more independent and succeeded in initiating privatization. In contrast to Ryzhkov, he had a good understanding of the larger picture, of what needed to be done. Yet he was not in a position to force through needed price reforms, only to propose them. In 1987, he proposed economic “shock therapy.” The idea was rejected by everyone, even the members of his own team. The consequences were not long in coming. Within three years, most of the Soviet Union’s food products were in short supply or completely absent. Shock therapy finally came in 1992, when Yegor Gaidar was Russian prime minister and the Soviet Union was gone.

Medvedev seemed to be the lone perestroika leader on the Politburo who was so persistent in his views, who had a clear vision of the economic reforms that were necessary. At the time, his rigidity seemed primitive. Now, 20 years on, it has become clear that Soviet economic reforms of this era failed in large measure due to a lack of persistence and consistency. Medvedev was an economist of unusual tenor, who might have been able to transform the Soviet economy, but, surrounded by better known and more powerful colleagues, he was isolated and alone. Today he works alongside his former boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the Gorbachev Foundation, continuing to labor in politics and public affairs.
As before, his presence is little noticed.

Yegor Ligachev

A committed communist, he became (at Gorbachev’s initiative) head of the ideological department of the Central Committee during perestroika. In other words, the country’s leading ideologist. Yet Ligachev and Gorbachev began to differ in their views as early as 1986. Ligachev was against giving any of the Party’s power to the people and tried to hinder the lifting of censorship and the introduction of a multiparty system. He likely recognized early on that perestroika was not for him. Yet he and Gorbachev did agree on one thing: the need for an anti-alcohol campaign. Needless to say, this campaign failed ignominiously, turning from a war against drunkenness into a war on wine, in which ancient vineyards in Georgia and Moldavia were cut down.

By the end of the Gorbachev era, Ligachev was leading the Commu-nist Party’s opposition to democratic forces. Yet, ironically, it was Ligachev who had brought Boris Yeltsin from Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) and put him in charge of Moscow’s party organization. And then, with his famous phrase at a party meeting: “Boris, you are incorrect,” he launched the open conflict between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, between the conservative and radical forces in the party leadership, which inevitably led to the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Even after Yeltsin came to power, Ligachev stayed active in politics. He has been a Duma deputy and today remains a leader of Russia’s Communist Party. Looking back today on the perestroika era, he says that today he can freely go wherever he likes, peacefully traveling on public transport, and that he has nothing to fear from “the people.” “But,” he said of his former perestroika colleagues and their democratic heirs, “just let them try to be out among the people without bodyguards.”

Eduard Shevardnadze

Having made his career in the Georgian Komsomol and Communist Party, Eduard Shevardnadze eventually rose to lead that party by combating corruption (with patronage from General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev). He was one of the first republican party leaders to support perestroika and in 1985 was unexpectedly appointed to the post of Foreign Minister, becoming Gorbachev’s eyes and ears outside the Soviet Union over the ensuing tumult of the next half-decade.

In December 1990, Shevardnadze suddenly resigned, saying “reformers have gone and hidden in the bushes. Dictatorship is coming.” He left the Communist Party at the same time.

In November 1991, after the coup he had predicted and at Gorbachev’s behest, he returned to head the Foreign Ministry, but soon thereafter the Soviet Union collapsed and Shevardnadze, one of the first to accept the Belovezh Accords, returned to Georgia.

Back in Tbilisi, Shevardnadze effectively stage-managed a government coup that deposed Zviad Gamsakhurdia and led to his own inauguration as president of Georgia, sparking a civil war. Relations with Russia soured during Shevardnadze’s tenure (1993-2003), as he sought to unite the country and return Abkhazia to Georgia.

Shevardnadze was forced to resign the Georgian presidency in 2003 after a rigged election led to mass protests and the “Rose Revolution.” He did not get along with the new leaders (whom he had himself protected and groomed), who are fiercely anti-Russian, and announced that he was retiring from politics and would write his memoirs.

During a recent visit to Berlin, in a rare interview, Shevardnadze (who turns 80 in January 2008) gave a rather modest assessment of his role in the makeover of the world’s maps. “I was Foreign Minister, and all of the duties I had to fulfill flowed from that fact. This included dealing with the issue of the Cold War, which the Soviet Union sought to end. I served the Soviet Union.”

Georgy Shakhnazarov

Like Vadim Medvedev, Georgy Shakhnazarov was less known in society at large than other perestroika politicians. But he was exceedingly influential as an adviser to Gorbachev, as one of the main ideologists of reform during the sunset era of the Soviet empire, and as the founder of Russian political science.

If Medvedev was Gorbachev’s main economic advisor, then Shakhnazarov was his chief political advisor. It is widely thought that Shakhnazarov supported Gorbachev and his desire to give greater freedom to the countries of Eastern Europe, even as those countries were swiftly moving away from communism. But it is more likely that it was Shakhnazarov who convinced his boss to leave Eastern Europe alone (i.e. not intervene militarily). Just as it was he who likely suggested to Gorbachev the need to reform the Soviet political system, in fact to liquidate it.

Shakhnazarov made his political and academic career climbing the Party’s ladder. Yet he also managed to preserve his own opinions. In the pre-Gorbachev era, he used his position in the Party to protect independent-minded political scientists from the Soviet scientific institutes. And even earlier, in 1972, at the peak of the Brezhnev Era of Stagnation, he wrote a book which called for giving Soviet citizens freer access to information, in other words calling for an end to the “iron curtain.”

As a matter of fact, Shakhnazarov came from a rather remarkable family. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, his father worked for Nobel Industries, which had established a petrochem company in Baku. He is a distant relative of the famous Russian religious philosopher Pavel Florensky, and his son Karen became a famous Russian film director. Of the liberal politics in his son’s films, Georgy Shakhnazarov said, “For our group, freedom is the most important thing; we are not for the oppression of others. So there is nothing surprising in this.” When Shakhnazarov died in 2001, the newspapers wrote that he was the man who “helped Gorbachev declaw the dragon.”

Nina Andreyeva

In March of 1988 an article titled “I Cannot Abandon My Principles” appeared in the communist newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya. The article was about the Soviet Union’s achievements… about how Stalin’s actions will be justified with time, and how it was Stalin who brought economic prosperity to the country… about how perestroika was a rebellion led by liberal-westerners who did not understand the significance of all that the USSR achieved. The article was quickly declared to be a manifesto of anti-perestroika forces and provoked a split in Russian society. It was perhaps the most discussed text of the perestroika era. And it appeared to be the first salvo from committed communists who were dissatisfied with the country’s departure from communist ideals.

The article’s author was a 50-year-old chemistry teacher from Leningrad, Nina Andreyeva. To this day, Andreyeva adheres to the arguments she put forward 20 years ago. “I am the leader of the Russian Bolshevik Party, and although they are trying to ban us even today, we will struggle on. Recently, Sovietskaya Rossiya declared that my article was one of the best texts the paper had published during its entire history, which should answer your question of how contemporary society feels about the idea of abandoning principles,” Andreyeva said. “Today’s leaders promise plenty, but do nothing and talk plenty of nonsense. In this sense, Putin is very similar to Gorbachev. The Powers That Be destroyed industry, crushed the proletariat and deprived them of the possibility of organized resistance. But I have no doubt that our country will return to the socialist path, because the protest movement is growing and Russia is seething. And Russia is not alone. In Europe, due to leaders’ swing to the right, the workers movement is moving to the left, such that we – all of Europe, the entire world – are living on the threshold of a massive socialist upheaval. Socialism will be established. This is an objective historical process.”

Twenty years have passed since the publication of Andreyeva’s article. Time and space have changed radically in the world surrounding this woman, but she remains unchanged, as if she is not a person, but an historic monument.

Yegor Yakovlev

A writer and journalist, Yegor Yakovlev effected a true revolution in the Soviet press. In 1986, he was second in command at one of the Soviet Union’s largest information agencies – APN Novosti [then publisher of Soviet Life magazine – Ed.] – and at the same time headed the newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti, which became the mouthpiece for perestroika for Muscovites. He made the newspaper the first truly free newspaper since soon after the Bolsheviks took power. Moskovskiye Novosti was extraordinarily popular and had print runs comparable to that of the state organ Izvestia.

After perestroika, Yakovlev remained a spiritual leader among his journalist colleagues. He headed up Ostankino, the country’s main television channel, and created another national newspaper, Obshchaya Gazeta. But all of this was before the Putin era. When the former counterintelligence agent rose to the presidency, Yakovlev gradually began to leave journalism, as if he were a symbol of an era that had faded into history. He stopped working in television and Obshchaya Gazeta was purchased by a businessman loyal to the Kremlin and shuttered shortly thereafter.

Yakovlev also cooperated with Yukos, such that Yukos financed Moskovskiye Novosti for several years. After Yukos collapsed, when its founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was imprisoned, Moskovskiye Novosti went bankrupt and was bought up by another Kremlin acolyte. Yakovlev stayed on to head a public council advising the paper, but soon came to understand that the new owners had little use for outside advice. A few days after the final incident in a recurring row with the owners of Moskovskiye Novosti, Yakovlev died of a heart attack. Mikhail Gorbachev said of Yakovlev: “This person did a lot, and gave of himself to the very end, so that we would create some kind of real, democratic freedom.”

Vladimir Zhirinovsky

Soon after Mikhail Gorbachev abolished the communists’ monopoly on power and allowed a multi-party system in the Soviet Union, the Liberal Democratic Party established itself as one of the first (and most enduring) opposition parties. LDPR was created by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a strong-willed, potentially dangerous personality whose bombast and demagoguery have been second to none on the Russian political scene.

A trained specialist on the East who speaks five languages and is author of several books, Zhirinovsky does not shy from profanity and politically incorrect language in public, starts fist fights in parliament, proposes the legalization of polygamy, sings at concerts, and sells vodka and ice cream branded with his family name. At first glance, he seems to be a comical character. Yet over the past 20 years he and his party have been a constant fixture of Russian politics, and far from an unsuccessful one.

Zhirinovsky is the only politician to have taken part in three Russian presidential elections (1991, 1996, 2000). In 2004, he put forward his bodyguard, a professional boxer, as the LDPR’s presidential candidate. The boxer received more votes than any of the widely-accepted democratic politicians.

The LDPR fraction in the Duma has always been one of the largest, and Zhirinovsky has been deputy speaker of the Duma and a member of the Council of Europe. His secret is actually rather simple: for all of his vociferous opposition, at the decisive moment he always supports the Powers that Be. Through him, those Powers can sound out society and get a sense whether people are ready for this or that of the regime’s harsh policies. Zhirinovsky is a phantasmagorical chameleon and a superb actor – quite possibly the most successful and unique invention of the entire post-Soviet period.

Anatoly Lukyanov

An eternally glowering bureaucrat and a lawyer whose political career took him to the pinnacle: the post of Chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet, Anatoly Lukyanov never garnered much public sympathy. Yet he was a very significant figure, one whose role in Soviet history should not be underestimated.

Lukyanov first appeared on television screens in the Brezhnev era, handing Leonid Brezhnev boxes with medals as the General Secretary bestowed them on honorees. Lukyanov was also one of Brezhnev’s speechwriters, vetting legal aspects. And yet, like Gorbachev, he was a child of perestroika. Occupying top posts in the Supreme Soviet, he rendered the president invaluable political service. Thanks to Lukyanov’s flexibility and cunning, the Russian parliament, which teemed with a wide variety of voices and opinions, was uncommonly amenable to government initiatives. But this flexible and cunning man thus condemned himself to being a shadow leader, from whom no independent personal opinions were expected. Yet he certainly had them. Prior to the 1991 putsch, which many had expected and predicted, Lukyanov was tapped as Mikhail Gorbachev’s successor as Soviet president. To this day, it is still unclear what Lukyanov’s role was in the plotting of the putsch.

Today, Lukyanov lives and works in Moscow and is a well-known activist in the Communist Party. He also publishes poetry under the pseudonym “Osenev.” Here are a few lines:

But here, behind the heavy wall,

That, in longing, weighs on my shoulders,

I say: There is nothing to regret,

I was always for my country.

My soul is open to her.

I will ever be in her debt,

She is my genius and judge,

My comforter and defender.

Grigory Yavlinsky

When perestroika began, the young economist Grigory Yavlinsky was working in a scientific institute. But by 1989 he had ended up in a section of the Council of Ministers. There, as the sun of perestroika was setting, is where the 500-Days plan for reforming the Soviet economy was born.

Yavlinsky (together with Stanislav Shatalin) proposed the ambitious program to Yeltsin and the leadership of Russia – then still part of the Soviet Union. At that time, it seemed as if the economist was set for a meteoric rise. His program was approved by the government and he became deputy chair of the Russian Council of Ministers. Yet, for the reforms to begin, they had to receive approval from the USSR Supreme Soviet – the parliament. And the Soviet apparatchiki (led by Nikolai Ryzhkov) had prepared an alternative program. The parliament tried to forge a compromise plan out of the two alternatives and Yavlinsky did not like the result. In October 1990, he resigned in protest, yet during the August 1991 putsch, he was one of the first to arrive at the White House and support the resistance.

After the USSR collapsed, Yeltsin offered Yavlinsky the opportunity to revisit the compromise of his plan and one put forward by Yegor Gaidar. Yavlinsky refused and Gaidar became prime minister, leading Russia into a new, dark era of chaotic and painful reforms.

Yavlinsky in 1994 founded the Yabloko party, which garnered some 7% of votes in the first Russian Duma elections of that year, a level of support that remained fairly constant over the ensuing decade. This low level of support for the party – which some call “the party of the intelligentsia and failure” – is ascribed by some to Yavlinsky’s own principles. He has consistently spoken out against the war in Chechnya, against Gaidar’s reforms, and against Putin’s economic policies. He remains a marginal, unpopular political figure. “It is sad if anyone defines the intelligentsia as unsuccessful,” he said. “Among our number are both successful and unsuccessful people. But for us and for others, real moral values have primary importance.”

We will never know if the 500-Days plan might have fixed the Soviet system, or if it would have led into an alternative dead end. It never got its chance. Yet Yavlinsky endures, to this day widely considered to be “a deeply proper, well educated and cultured person, quite different from our ruling elite.”

Yuri Afanasyev

For almost 70 years Russia had a one-party system; all opposition movements were destroyed, and there were not even fractions in the singular party. Yuri Afanasyev broke this tradition.

A professor in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a historian who entered politics and became a deputy in the first Congress of People’s Deputies, Afanasyev boldly took it upon himself in 1989 to create the first open fraction in the Communist Party: the Interregional Group of Deputies (IGD). The members of IGD were considered to be the country’s intellectual elite, but its standard bearers (and more radical members) were Andrei Sakharov, who had just returned from his long exile in Nizhny Novgorod (Gorky), and Yuri Afanasyev. Thus did these two have immense influence on the development of Russia’s political opposition, the dissolution of a one-party system, the lifting of censorship and development of legislation on land and private ownership.

After Andrei Sakharov’s death in 1989, Afanasyev was alone. He soon left politics to apply himself to a different sphere: education. In 1991 he created a private university: the Russian State Humanitarian University, on the foundation of the State Historical-Archive Institute, which he had headed since the start of perestroika. Apparently, he felt there was more value to be gained in educating future generations than in politics.

Afanasyev stayed at RSHU until 2006, when he resigned his post as rector and university president after coming out in support of the embattled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Speculation was that he did not want to jeopardize the university with his private stance.

“We cannot escape an autocratic regime. Everything is repeating itself,” Afanasyev said with sadness after his resignation. “There is some diversity and this diversity can sometimes dazzle you. Yet if we dig deeper, then it is clear that it is all the same tyranny, all the same lawlessness, and all the same autocracy of power.”

Gavriil Popov

To a modern Muscovite, it truly seems as if life did not exist in the capital before the current mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, and that Yuri Mikhailovich was Moscow’s first popularly elected mayor. As a matter of fact, this is not true.

Moscow was ruled from 1991-1992 by Gavriil Popov, an economist and coiner of the famous term, “command-administrative system” (even during perestroika, people tried not to use the word “totalitarianism”), whose articles were widely read by the intelligentsia.

Popov, like Yuri Afanasyev, worked in the IGD. As a university professor, he had taught the Russian premier, Yegor Gaidar. As one of the “stars” of perestroika and as a dependable person, was appointed to the office of mayor. But the economist-globalist had no idea what to do with a city of nine million. And then there was the entrenched bureaucracy of the Moscow City Council, then headed by the city’s long-time de facto administrator, Yuri Luzhkov. Yet Popov nonetheless sought to achieve two goals during his tenure: to strengthen the power of local mayors and to make the mayor’s post an elected one. He succeeded in both, and in the city’s first free election, the Popov-Luzhkov ticket triumphed. But soon thereafter, under still-murky circumstances, Popov resigned. Vice-mayor Luzhkov became mayor, a post he has now held for 15 years.

Today, Popov continues to work as an economist, writing articles and books and acting as a consultant to the UN. In his words, what happened with the Soviet Union is what was supposed to happen. “We traveled the worst of all possible paths,” he said. “We achieved the worst of all possible results. Yet even if, 20 years ago, I could have seen the future, I still would have gone down the same path. There was simply no other.”

Laskovoy May

In 1986, a group of teens in a Russian orphanage created a rock group they called Laskovoy May (Tender May). After recording some of their songs onto a cassette, they gave it to a music store at a train station. Soon they were famous all across the country.

Andrei Razin, a sharp employee at the recording company Rekords, brought the kids to Moscow and, within a few months, the group was touring Russia. At the same time, Razin created several clone groups to make recordings. He represented himself as a bureaucrat and relative of Mikhail Gorbachev, and since they were in fact from the same village, people helped him, fearing the ire of a influential person. Critics scorned Laskovoy May for its banality, but millions of young girls flocked to its concerts. It signalled the rise of super-groups, a phenomenon that kick-started show business in the country.

Laskovoy May broke up after Razin decided he had earned enough money. And for the boys the run ended there.

The ideologist of the orphanage group, Sergei Kuznetsov, lives in the city where he was born and continues to write songs. But no one in the modern show business world has any need for Laskovoy May. Pianist Sasha Priko is an alcoholic and sometimes plays jazz in a train station cafe in Nizhny Tagil. Vocalist Kostya Pakhomov sings May’s songs at corporate parties. Bass guitarist Igor Igoshin committed suicide in 1992 because of a girl who dumped him when the band fell from glory. Keyboardist Misha Sukhomlinov took up business, by the age of 18 had bought himself a Cadillac, and at 19 was gunned down at the entrance to his home. Yuri Shatunov is still invited on TV programs, but rarely. And Andrei Razin has transformed from a thin entrepreneur into a balding, chubby VIP – a successful businessman. He once said to his boy band: “Never consider yourselves poor. No one in this country needs the poor.”

Yuri Polyakov

One morning in 1985, Yuri Polyakov – journalist and teacher of Russian language and literature – opened his post box to find the latest copy of Yunost, the popular journal for Soviet youth. The issue included his story, “A Regional State of Emergency,” a story about the depraved lives of provincial Komsomol leaders.

For the country, which had never uttered a word about what went on in the world of Komsomol bureaucrats, the article was a shock. Polyakov was stopped on the street, asked to speak at meetings and conferences all over the country, and attacked in angry articles in the official papers. The most vicious attack was one by the journalist Victor Lipatov in Komsomolskaya Pravda. But it was too late. The people seemed to have suddenly grasped that the leaders were people just like everyone else. And soon Polyakov published a new story, “One Hundred Days Before the Decree,” about illegal abuse and hazing in the army. The shock following this article’s publication was greater still. It set off a steady stream of articles and analyses about what was actually happening in the army and what could be done about it. The Soviet military leadership was enraged, but again, it was too late.

Perhaps Yuri Polyakov was simply in the right place at the right time and was merely the first to express what everyone already knew, but about which no one had yet dared to write. Be that as it may, he was the one who did the writing. Today his stories are required reading for students and he is the editor in chief of the country’s most prestigious literary journal, Literaturnaya Gazeta, originally founded by Alexander Pushkin. (Toward the end of the 1990s, Victor Lipatov was made editor in chief of Yunost, whence he led the journal to its collapse and closure.)

“My stories, contrary to the author’s expectations, played a role in the collapse of Soviet civilization, about which I have experienced complex, but far from hostile feelings,” Polyakov says today. “Smart people back then, with their high ideals, were not able to comprehend that it is much easier to hide the truth in the pluralistic muddle of opinions, than in the emasculated columns of official press organs. The P.R. guys of the Yeltsin era understood this well, and bludgeoned us into a stupor with unanimous discord.”

Telman Gdlyan

This brave individual’s name was known across the Soviet Union even before perestroika began. A rank-and-file investigator working in the prosecutor’s office in Uzbekistan, he uncovered a case of corruption and the ensuing inquiry became the most important case in the Soviet Union, as if it were a serialized TV detective story. Gdlyan is probably lucky that perestroika began when it did, else he would have been fired or even killed before his case could reach its conclusion. Instead, his investigative group grew from 35 to 200 persons, and the infamous “Uzbek Case” led to the arrest at the end of the 1980s of 11 high-ranking Uzbek functionaries.

The investigators further discovered that the Uzbek officials’ corruption had been covered up by political leaders in Moscow. And the detective story shifted its focus to the capital. It eventually resulted in the arrest and trial of Leonid Brezhnev’s son-in-law, Yuri Churbanov. Nonetheless, in 1990, Gdlyan was fired from the prosecutor’s office. Apparently, his investigation had started to endanger the Powers That Be; the threads of corruption had led back to persons who had remained in power even through perestroika.

Demonstrations were held in Moscow in support of the fired prosecutor. Then there was the August 1991 putsch, and Gdlyan was one of the first to be arrested by its organizers. He was let go as soon as the putsch was defeated, but he was not restored to his position in the prosecutor’s office. Perhaps this is some indication that the criminals long pursued by this simple investigator are still in power? No one can know, even Telman Gdlyan.

Today, Gdlyan is a lawyer, a fate typical of many brave investigators who, at some critical point in their lives comprehend how truly underdeveloped the Russian legal system is, and decide to switch sides, spending their time defending ordinary citizens against a rigged system. Gdlyan is reluctant to reminisce about his past cases, preferring to live in the present, to think about the future and not return to the past.

Victor Tsoy

Rock music existed in Russia before Victor Tsoy and his group Kino. There was, for instance, Mashina Vremeni and Aquarium. But for some reason Tsoy and Kino have become the symbols of Russian rock.

Tsoy began his music career by giving concerts in the basements of St. Petersburg and even recorded several albums. One of these was given to Mikhail Gorbachev, who personally ordered that the musician be left alone.

Tsoy was beloved by his colleagues and by his millions of fans, none of whom seemed to understand the reasons for his charm. His music was simplistic, the arrangements artless, his voice strange. His poems were unrefined: truth in its pure form, the naked subconscious of youth anywhere. And yet, when he sang his famous song, “We’re Waiting for Change,” it became the hymn for perestroika.

Viktor Tsoy worked in a legendary Leningrad apartment building boiler room, where several famous Petersburg rockers were officially employed tossing coal into the furnace. He was filmed in the movies Assa and The Needle, recorded albums in France and Japan, and had a triumphant tour of Europe. In 1989, the crowd was so rowdy at one of his concerts, that the organs for protection of social order tried to cut the concert short. But Kino sang to the end and for a year was barred from performing in Moscow.

In 1990, Kino was preparing for a concert in Moscow, to be followed by a tour of Europe, when Tsoy died in a car accident after falling asleep at the wheel. His secret, the secret of his incredible energy and his influence on the public, disappeared with him.

In one of his final albums, Tsoy sang: “And we know this is how it’s always been, that we love more those who live by other laws, those who die young.” Tsoy’s followers concluded that he had foreseen his fate. In Moscow, fans filled a wall along the Arbat with his quotations and with devotions to him. The Powers That Be dared not paint over the wall or tear it down. Among the inscriptions is the simple notation, “Tsoy lives.”

Alexander Kabakov

His was the typical fate of a Jewish child from a good family: born in the provinces, studied at Moscow University, worked as an engineer in a design bureau, and, in his spare time, penned articles for Moscow newspapers. Eventually, however, his love of writing overtook everything else, and he made a career for himself as a journalist at Moskovskiye Novosti, under the wing of Yegor Yakovlev, who immediately recognized Kabakov as a talented author.

In 1988, Kabakov published his novella, The Man Who Did Not Return (Nevozvrashchenets) and became famous overnight. The times were ripe: Russians were fervently reading everything they could get their hands on, and Kabakov had chosen a genre entirely new to Russian literature – the anti-utopian novel. His novel was considered by many to be one of the best political novels ever written in Russia. In point of fact, his novel was distinguished by the fact that it was prophetic in its prediction of the 1991 and 1993 coups. And, in an eerie twist of fate, a television adaptation of the book was broadcast one day before the 1991 putsch.

The book was translated and published in numerous foreign languages, and Kabakov’s success was a testament to his being a talented re-translator of the era of transition, to his surprising ability to capture the mood of the country. Today, his first novel is viewed in hindsight as a rather middling literary work, and Kabakov has since written other more interesting and intellectual works (including Everything is Corrigible, which took second place in 2006’s Booker Prize competition). But he has yet to repeat the success of his first novel.

Today, Kabakov heads up a fashionable intellectual journal (SakVoyage) and writes journalistic articles and columns. Films are made of his books and he has even headed up the Booker Prize jury. Yet he says he is convinced that, despite nostalgia for the Soviet Union, there is no going back – to do so would lead to a revolution even bloodier than the one in 1917. And today this is impossible, he says, because there would not be enough people willing to shed blood. This from a man who predicted tanks in the streets of Moscow long before anyone expected them, and certainly before anyone believed it could happen.

Sergei Solovyev

When the period of stagnation was limping to its end, Sergei Solovyev was a successful movie director. Even the circumstances of his birth were lucky: his father was a ranking party official, and was well-acquainted with the future leader of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung, such that, as a child Sergei often played with Kim Il-Sung’s son and the present leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-il.

Solovyev graduated from the Russian Institute for Film Arts, studying under the famous director Mikhail Romm, and immediately went to work at Mosfilm, where he made several successful films. During the Brezhnev era, he received prestigious prizes from the Berlin and Venice film festivals and was even on the Venice festival’s jury in 1981.

Yet this child of the nomenklatura embraced perestroika. What is more, he initiated reforms among the Union of Cinematographers, turning it into a democratically governed association, and was instrumental in saving Soviet movie archives from being sold off. Second, he created the film Assa — a very important and popular film in the second half of the 1980s. The film was part of a trilogy on life during the fall of the USSR, and became a cult hit for lovers of rock music (the film included footage of all Russia’s major rock stars). In his film, Solovyev managed to capture the mood of the country, conveying the communal sense of a coming explosion, reflecting life as it was unfolding and offering a non-moralistic film that contradicted the long-reigning Socialist Realism.

Solovyev remains a popular filmmaker to this day, yet he is far from being a member of the new cultural nomenklatura. He says, by the way, with complete sincerity, that his role in the events of perestroika has been seriously overstated.

Vzglyad

This TV program ran from 1987 to the mid-1990s, and it was the first on Soviet TV in which about a dozen hosts appeared in jeans and tshirts.

Vzglyad (Viewpoint) typically tackled a wide variety of subjects, say from a report about a fat cat whose owner pulled it around on a cart, to an interview with Andrei Sakharov. The most popular tele-journalists of the new Russia were born on Vzglyad and, as a TV show, it was more popular than any TV show before or since. Except with the Powers That Be.

Vzglyad had problems with Power from the very beginning. In March 1988, the hosts were removed from their jobs for two months. In December 1990, Gosteleradio cancelled the show’s New Year’s program, since its main theme was the scandalous resignation of Foreign Minister Shevardnadze. In February 1991, there were demonstrations in Moscow in support of the program, in April the program began to come out secretly, distributed on VHS cassettes. A few months later, it was back on the air. And it was to Vzglyad that Mikhail Gorbachev sent a videotape of his speech after the August 1991 coup attempt.

The program shut down of its own accord, because its time had passed. Even the show’s hosts, who had seemed inseparable, split up. Alexander Lyubimov and Konstantin Ernst are senior managers at Rossiya Channel and 1st Channel, respectively, both of which entities have fawning attitudes toward Power. Ivan Demidov, who was the first in Russia to show clips of foreign pop music, is today the head of Young Guard, an Orthodox youth group which supports Putin. Alexander Politkovsky recently lost his wife, Anna Politkovskaya. Sergei Bodrov and Artyom Borovik have both died. Vlad Listyev, the most popular Russian tele-journalist, was murdered.

Back then, the founder of Vzglyad and Gosteleradio functionary, Anatoly Lysenko, said to his former wards, “Others could be in your places; you simply were in the right place at the right time.” To which one of the Vzglyad-ites replied, “And for this we are thankful to Fate.”

January 01, 2008

Six Years That Shook the World

See Also

A Short History of the USSR

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