The curse of perestroika

Congress of People's Deputies of USSR in 1989. Photo: RIA Novosti archive (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

Yet, it would probably take another 30 years to bring understanding of the inevitability of the fall of the Soviet empire; the wounds would finally heal and the Weimar syndrome would release my country.

Social divisions

Life in the Soviet Union was very different. Despite the declared equality for everybody, the stratification and division of the society was visible. People were divided into Muscovites and others; urban citizens and country folk; the working class and the intelligentsia; party members and non-party; the nomenclature and the rest. Soviet society was like a large and complex pyramid made up of smaller pyramids – every enterprise, every organisation, every sphere of life looked like a small pyramid, where the more successful people went to the top. The distribution of the benefits depended on one’s position in the pyramids.

The most curious point was that those who stayed at the bottom were the happiest and most satisfied. They had a clear and easy plan for development, while those who came to the top of their respective pyramid, saw that they had no chance to jump higher (for different reasons – sometimes ethical, sometimes because of their nationality or origin), so they felt a glass ceiling and became frustrated. It was a fact that the Soviet system changed the structure of the society greatly during the 70 years of its existence. This was partly due to changing global trends and challenges and partly shaped deliberately by the authorities. The agrarian and poorly educated society with a small ruling elite in the beginning of the 20th century transformed into an urbanised and educated one, with the obvious improvement of living standards. By the end of the 1970s, the majority of Soviet citizens could read, write and count, had a stable social security system with basic medical care, a guaranteed job and minimal income and free education. For the absolute majority there were enough reasons to feel satisfied and even happy. Many of them followed the path from powerless peasant (without passports, ownership, stable income and pension), to the city limita (workers hired by quotas to the great construction projects, called “limits”), and then to the professional blue collar workers.

“All my kids have a professional education from a technical college!” proudly said one my acquaintances who is around 70 years old. “We got a three-room apartment from the state, as we had two children, we planned to buy a Moskvich (a car made on the base of Opel models) and got land for a dacha (6 acres of land, usually in the bad swamp territory near the city was possible to get for long-term use).” At the same time the unsatisfied minority was growing larger and larger. Urban dwellers who lived in town for several generations and the indigenous citizens of some republics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, first and foremost) felt the invasion of a hostile culture to their area and were frustrated with the destruction of their surroundings.

Another bigger group was made up of the urban youth, children of the intelligentsia and nomenklatura. Their expectations were also higher and they felt their glass ceilings even in high school. They desired self-realisation and development, they wanted to participate in public life and have influence. And they felt themselves closed in the country while they had access to information about the other world – about the West. They also felt uncomfortable in the world of shortages, crowds, lines, censorship and undeveloped infrastructure.

Special access

The Soviet Union was a country of lines and shortages. The country was short of goods, prices were artificially undervalued and thus the market relations developed in a different paradigm than in the countries of the “decaying capitalism”. Money was less valuable than connections – which gave opportunities to get ahead, break through and solve problems. People had to find “their own” doctors, freezers, shop assistants in the butchers and groceries (the group “salesmen” was a special privileged caste, as they had access to goods and were able to distribute them). Every executive position had special access to a certain good: holiday products, opportunities to send children to summer camps, trips to the sanatorium, special access to medicines, or a car. There were special closed “distributers” (shops with closed access) for the nomenclature where they could order goods from special lists. They also had special ateliers to order clothes and shoes. They had “state dachas”, apartments in special “elite” apartment blocks (with a concierge and security service), cars with drivers in corporate garages. That is why one of the first initiatives of Boris Yeltsin in 1991 was to refuse all privileges (they would build new ones afterwards).

Another source of special access was connected to currency exchange. During the 1970-80s there was quiet a large group of people in the bigger cities who had access to foreign currencies while the free circulation of currencies was strictly prohibited. Officially, Soviet citizens who had foreign currency from foreign trips or work outside the country had to change it to special “bonds” which were possible to spend in special shops called Berezka. The network was originally established for foreign tourists, so they could buy some urgent common goods, but then they became a source of speculation and half-controlled currency circulation.

Foreigners, as a social group, also had a special place in the Soviet unofficial economy. As soon as the Soviet Union started developing international tourism and actively introducing western technologies to upgrade the Soviet industry, more and more foreigners came to big cities and tourist areas. Since they were limited in the communication with regular citizens, they were circled with special people who worked in the Intourist service. Hotel, restaurant employees, airport and railway staff, interpreters, guides – these people used their unique opportunities for direct contact with foreigners. They established a black market for foreign currency and illegal trade of the import of goods. The market of private services was also flourishing by the end of 1970s – special girls with higher education and knowledge of languages chose the career of “foreign currency prostitute” as a chance to live better and even to find a foreign husband and escape the country.

The majority of the people who communicated with foreigners were to some extent connected to the KGB, but the corrupted system absorbed the special services, step by step, as it gave access to goods and opportunities. Generally the incorporation of the KGB into all institutions in the country became ubiquitous. Every organisation, enterprise, university, school and small institution had secret agents and semi-official positions connected with the KGB. In the organisations with more complicated structures, those people were incorporated in every department. My parents remembered their friend who defiantly left the room or asked to stop a conversation when he felt that the topic becoming dangerous. He didn’t want to snitch on his friends. But not everybody was so sincere and the majority wrote regular reports with numerous facts against their colleagues and friends. The good reports provided career opportunities, and some of them successfully converted their positions into money or influence in modern Russia.

Blat (useful connections) were important not only in private life. It was a basic part of the Soviet economy. If you wanted to get the necessary piece or accessory for your production process, you had to have blat with the certain partners and had to do some mutual illegal business deal. Starting from the very beginning of the industrialisation process, when the system of pyatiletka (a five-year plan) was introduced, the ruling elite had impossible demands to increase growth. And they never wanted to hear about limits and barriers. What emerged was a massive system of statistic falsifications instead. First it was moved by fear (if you couldn’t report about the plan’s implementation you would be called hostis publicus and killed). After Stalin’s death and changes in the political system it turned into a profitable business.

Black market

By the end of the 1970s specialists and experts understood that the Soviet system had no future; that the model of a planned economy had completely failed. The worst point was that nobody knew how to change the situation – all attempts of the struggle with corruption threatened the security of the state. As a result, the country issued technically official statistics and public reporting in the media, which had nothing to do with reality, and a great black market – at all levels and in all spheres, where criminals, trade mafia, salesmen, state officials, law-enforcement officers and other numerous “infrastructure people” were involved. Finally the segment of unofficial workshops (tsekhs) appeared. The production of goods was sabotaged at the official state level with the falsified statistics and the goods created in these illegal workshops flowed to the official market using various manipulations of documents. The part of this black market was also developed outside the country and was connected both with illegal mafia groups and legal industries there.

As the black market wasn’t studied, it wasn’t reported publicly, so nobody could really evaluate its scale. After the collapse of the USSR the debris of this black market was divided between the interested elites and they took control of it in their republics, legalising the funds and assets in the new economy. The current oligarchic systems were born out of this Soviet system with all the bad sides of it (including the fraud and falsifications). Even now there is a lack of complex understanding of this topic, but the first investigations, started during Yuri Andropov’s time in the Central Asian republics, have showed that the corrupted system sprouted from a very low level of every state farm to the Kremlin elite.

The sophisticated level of development of the black market explains why the first changes and opportunities during perestroika led to the country’s collapse so fast. Everything was prepared, so one light push and a change of the rules was enough to open the black market and to get rid of the burdensome obligations of the planned economy. By the time of Brezhnev’s death, the elite understood the level of instability of economics and the impossibility of intense growth. The only sphere which showed regular and effective growth was the military industry and it was explained by percentages of the budget which were spent on it. In everyday life, however, goods were disappearing, more and more cities and regions had to turn to the system of ration cards, but the cards were not an effective policy. It was difficult to buy goods even with the cards.

The life of an ordinary person in the USSR consisted of standing in lines, and the most important communication tool was the spread of rumours in these lines. Taking into account that there were no cell phones at that time, children were also an important element in communication. They could quickly run home and tell other family members where goods were available or which shop was just stocked.

Reformers not by choice

The changes in the elite after Brezhnev’s death opened the first changes. Andropov tried to fix the economic issues with the instruments and skills he had available. He started with repressions to increase labour productivity, but it was impossible while the system was based on false data. By the time Gorbachev was in power there was no chance to maintain the status quo from the previous eras. He and his team were reformers because they had no choice. The economic indicators worsened, debts increased, the overall inferiority of the model and the mafia structure inside it was becoming obvious.

Uskorenie (acceleration), glasnost (openness), and perestroika (restructuring) – these three words became Gorbachev’s international mantra. The attempt to increase labour productivity revealed the level of the falsification in the statistics and accounting documents, so the acceleration demanded openness to show this information and to struggle with the ineffectiveness through the public discussions and complaints. After the level of the degradation was opened the restructuring became the only answer to the challenge. The opening of new opportunities and partial legalisation of the black market through the co-operative system (a system of small private business) caused the last point to destroy the illusion of stability for the majority of the citizens.

Perestroika spawned entrepreneurship and readiness to undertake independent actions. It broadened access to managing the country and created the ground for creativity and innovation from one side. However from the other side it opened the Pandora’s Box of social, ethnic, national, economic and territorial conflicts. It revealed the level of inequality and showed how different people lived differently. Perestroika strengthened this difference and tore the country apart.

This year is the thirty-year anniversary of the Georgian riots. They began with a series of well-known protest rallies in the national republics which were suppressed by the state. However, social and economic protests arose regularly during the whole Soviet period. There was no open information about it, but they all were spontaneous reactions to the injustice of the situation. The protests were suppressed; but it was obvious that as soon as they began in different parts of the country simultaneously there would not be enough resources to stop them. The national element of the protests in the 1980s also were not a result of Gorbachev’s action. The very first event was in Yakutia, which were riots and clashes between youth criminal gangs; between Russians and Yakut nationals (it was common for such regions to have criminal gangs of different nations). The clashes led to the protests of the Yakut youth and as a result the national issue was brought to the table.

Who gets credit

Gorbachev inherited a country which was pretending its economic and social/political well-being. Even the Chernobyl catastrophe was not a random event. The universal practice of fraud and falsification in industry brought the great catastrophe because it was impossible to maintain safety without accurate and real data. Another element of destabilisation was the emerging youth culture. The sustainable system of criminal gangs in the cities, which clashed with each other for territory and influence, started also to fight with the militia and although still lost most battles, they already felt more empowered, becoming more fearless. In the post-Soviet countries these gangs transformed into mafia groups. But they appeared before perestroika and were not caused by it. At the end, the uncontrolled mafia organisations recruited more and more people who had nothing to eat and little to lose.

Do we have Gorbachev to thank for this? He certainly should get some credit. Maybe not for the freedom and opportunities, which we would have taken anyway, but for the deliverance of Russia and other Soviet republics to the horrible 1990s; for the fast depressurisation of access to power; for the opportunity of new elites; the fast opening of the country with free access to information; and of course for the closing of the threat of a third world war, for at least 20 years, when the new generation without conspiracy theories and spy-mania could emerge.

Anastasia Sergeeva is a co-founder and member of the For Free Russia Association, based in Warsaw. She emigrated from Russia in 2012 and now lives in Warsaw working as a political consultant and analyst.

Gorbachev, Soviet Union