First of two parts
The way he tells it, Mikhail Gorbachev rushed headlong into perestroika 10 years ago this week, giving his colleagues in the Politburo 2 1/2 hours' notice.
When Konstantin Chernenko, the third ailing Soviet leader in the Kremlin in three years, died on the evening of March 10, 1985, Gorbachev, the favorite to succeed him, wasted no time.
"I had just come home to the dacha after work and suddenly the telephone rang and they told me that Chernenko had died," Gorbachev related. "I quickly got on the telephone."
It was already 7:30 p.m., but Gorbachev, the highest-ranking member of the Politburo, called a meeting for 10 p.m. At the meeting they delayed appointing a successor until the next day, but Gorbachev said he was already confident that as the "representative of the new generation" the prize would be his.
Gorbachev got home to the dacha at 3 a.m.: "Raisa Maximovna was waiting up for me. We went out, we walked, we walked until morning and I said that the next day the question would probably be about me."
He told Raisa that night, he said, that the only man who could reform the country was the general secretary of the Communist Party: "I had to make major decisions and to do that I had to take the post of general secretary. However hard it might be, there's no other way of living. It was that night that I uttered those words."
Gorbachev dates the beginning of perestroika -- his policy of economic, social and political restructuring -- to those words, expressing a strong, but vague conviction that the system somehow had to be reformed.
But the reforms that he started went further than any of its pioneers dreamed. Like Christopher Columbus, they began with a few islands and stumbled on the New World.
Six years later the country was witness to free elections, a robust press and a huge historical reappraisal. By the end of 1991, the Communist Party had collapsed and the Soviet Union along with it. The speed of change amazed even the people at the heart of it.
"It was a huge distance which he traveled between 1985 and 1990, 1991," reminisced Anatoly Chernyayev, who worked closely with Gorbachev as his foreign policy aide.
Ten years later, the debate on perestroika centers on whether Gorbachev could have done things differently and still achieved his aims.
Conservative critics say he gave the country too many political freedoms too early, dooming it to chaos; liberals say he wasted time and reserves of goodwill by not proceeding fast enough and ended up impeding the reforms he himself started.
Gorbachev himself, who never actually ran in a contested election in his seven years in office, now puts the emphasis on perestroika as a process of democratization. He says his project was sabotaged by the hardliners and derailed by radical reformers.
"Perestroika was interrupted," he said again and again in a visit to Novosibirsk at the end of last month, which was widely seen as the beginning of an election campaign. It is a message that strikes home with many audiences, particularly members of the intelligentsia, who are disillusioned with President Boris Yeltsin.
In 1985, perestroika had much more limited objectives and was strictly an internal audit of the existing system. Gorbachev argues that it could not have gone any differently.
Gorbachev told reporters in Novosibirsk that 102 academic reports on reforming the system lay in Kremlin safes when his mentor Yury Andropov was in power, and "there was a huge amount of work, a lot of closed meetings.
"But although they all contained recommendations to improve the system, not a single one proposed going beyond the system, changing the political system," Gorbachev said. "There wasn't any of that for a long time."
Ninety percent of the population in 1985 had been born under the Soviet regime, he said, and people were so accustomed to the system that radical reform or some kind of "Chinese option" of quick economic reform was simply unthinkable.
But the logic of events produced the need for one more radical recipe after another. All the problems they faced turned out to be intertwined, according to his aide, Chernyayev. The first attempt at limited economic reform led to the realization that the military industrial complex was a "black hole" sucking in the resources of the country. That in turn led to a reappraisal of foreign policy.
A defining moment came with the summit with U.S. President Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik in Iceland in October 1986. It was then, Chernyayev said, when he met Reagan and the U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, "the first statesman who really trusted Gorbachev," that the Cold War "game" ended and genuine dialogue began.
"At the summit, he still used the old diplomatic tricks, but after Reykjavik he gave them up," Chernyayev said.
But at the same period, the fall of 1986, Gorbachev traveled the country and saw the scale of the problems facing him at home.
"He went to the Far East, to the Kuban region and other places too," Chernyayev remembered. "People reached out to him and shouted that 'in Moscow it's all fine, we read the papers, we listen to the radio and television, you have big changes going on but here nothing is going on at all.'
"Then he understood that these people who stayed in power, the regional parties, the district parties, they didn't intend to change anything, they understood perestroika as the latest nonsense from the general secretary."
The crux of perestroika came to be the role of the Communist Party itself. Gorbachev tried to use it as the engine of change, and instead it became the focus of resistance to change.
The former general secretary now concedes that he tried to inject new blood into the party and it made no difference.
"New people came in and again they were exactly the same people as the ones before them," Gorbachev said. "It seemed we had a queue of nomenklatura stretching back decades. The same people with the same set positions came in."
But the implications of this sank in on Gorbachev very slowly. He abolished the party's monopoly on power only in March 1990 and resigned as general secretary of the party only on Aug. 24, 1991, after the collapse of the attempted putsch.
"Even after the August coup, Gorbachev was extremely pained by our decision to suppress the party," Yeltsin, who left the party in 1990, wrote in his memoirs. "The fall into the abyss was inevitable."
Chernyayev agrees that Gorbachev should have abandoned the party earlier.
"Sakharov raised the question -- 'Whose side are you on, Mikhail Sergeyevich? Are you with the democrats or with the nomenklatura?'" Chernyayev remembered.
"And to some extent he had caught Gorbachev's inconsistency. Because Gorbachev wanted to force the nomenklatura to be for democracy and perestroika. Clearly that was not a realistic idea."
Asked what mistakes he made, Gorbachev said that "in tactics there were a great many" but he insisted the main lines of his policy were correct.
His main regret, he says, is that he did not prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is a theme he returns to constantly. He blames Yeltsin and the coup plotters for undermining his union treaty, but he also blames himself.
"In nationalities policy we acted very late," he said. "We underestimated how many problems had built up."
Summing up the character of the man he worked with in the Kremlin for six years and still works with now, Chernyayev lighted on the "softness" of Gorbachev, his flexibility. It was his greatest asset, but also his greatest failing, Chernyayev said, because he did not fire colleagues who stood in his way.
"He was a paradoxical figure, of course, acting in a paradoxical situation," Chernyayev said. "Gorbachev has very strong human qualities, decency, loyalty to his comrades, to his friends he started with and met every day, he couldn't call them in and say 'you have to go,' he couldn't do it. It was a good streak, a human one, but it damaged him as a reformer of the state, who should be merciless on a personal level."
But it could not have been otherwise, Chernyayev said.
"It is a contradiction, but if Gorbachev had not had that softness, that inner sympathy for people there would have been no perestroika," he said.
Wednesday: Gorbachev in Novosibirsk; what chance a political comeback?
PERESTROIKA: THE KEY DATES
March 10, 1985. Konstantin Chernenko dies. The next day Mikhail Gorbachev is elected general secretary of the Communist Party.
April 23, 1985. Gorbachev announces sweeping changes at Communist Party plenum.
April 26, 1986. World's worst nuclear accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine forces a new phase of glasnost.
Oct. 11 - 12, 1986. Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan hold their second summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Dec. 16, 1986. Gorbachev announces that Andrei Sakharov is free to leave house arrest in Gorky and return to Moscow.
Nov. 11, 1987. Boris Yeltsin dismissed as first secretary of the Moscow Communist Party.
March 26, 1989. Communist Party candidates routed in first round of elections to new Congress of People's Deputies.
March 12 - 15, 1990. At an extraordinary session of the Congress of People's Deputies, the leading role of the Communist Party is abolished and
Gorbachev is elected executive president.
Jan. 13, 1991. Soviet paratroopers storm the television center in Vilnius and kill 14 Lithuanian protestors.
Aug. 19, 1991. A group of hardliners declares Gorbachev ill and attempts to seize power. The putsch collapses three days later.
Aug. 24, 1991. Gorbachev resigns as general secretary of the Communist Party.
Dec. 8, 1991. Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, agree to form the Commonwealth of Independent States to replace the Soviet Union.
Dec. 25, 1991. Gorbachev resigns as Soviet president. The red flag is lowered over Kremlin, marking the final demise of the Soviet Union.
The way he tells it, Mikhail Gorbachev rushed headlong into perestroika 10 years ago this week, giving his colleagues in the Politburo 2 1/2 hours' notice.
When Konstantin Chernenko, the third ailing Soviet leader in the Kremlin in three years, died on the evening of March 10, 1985, Gorbachev, the favorite to succeed him, wasted no time.
"I had just come home to the dacha after work and suddenly the telephone rang and they told me that Chernenko had died," Gorbachev related. "I quickly got on the telephone."
It was already 7:30 p.m., but Gorbachev, the highest-ranking member of the Politburo, called a meeting for 10 p.m. At the meeting they delayed appointing a successor until the next day, but Gorbachev said he was already confident that as the "representative of the new generation" the prize would be his.
Gorbachev got home to the dacha at 3 a.m.: "Raisa Maximovna was waiting up for me. We went out, we walked, we walked until morning and I said that the next day the question would probably be about me."
He told Raisa that night, he said, that the only man who could reform the country was the general secretary of the Communist Party: "I had to make major decisions and to do that I had to take the post of general secretary. However hard it might be, there's no other way of living. It was that night that I uttered those words."
Gorbachev dates the beginning of perestroika -- his policy of economic, social and political restructuring -- to those words, expressing a strong, but vague conviction that the system somehow had to be reformed.
But the reforms that he started went further than any of its pioneers dreamed. Like Christopher Columbus, they began with a few islands and stumbled on the New World.
Six years later the country was witness to free elections, a robust press and a huge historical reappraisal. By the end of 1991, the Communist Party had collapsed and the Soviet Union along with it. The speed of change amazed even the people at the heart of it.
"It was a huge distance which he traveled between 1985 and 1990, 1991," reminisced Anatoly Chernyayev, who worked closely with Gorbachev as his foreign policy aide.
Ten years later, the debate on perestroika centers on whether Gorbachev could have done things differently and still achieved his aims.
Conservative critics say he gave the country too many political freedoms too early, dooming it to chaos; liberals say he wasted time and reserves of goodwill by not proceeding fast enough and ended up impeding the reforms he himself started.
Gorbachev himself, who never actually ran in a contested election in his seven years in office, now puts the emphasis on perestroika as a process of democratization. He says his project was sabotaged by the hardliners and derailed by radical reformers.
"Perestroika was interrupted," he said again and again in a visit to Novosibirsk at the end of last month, which was widely seen as the beginning of an election campaign. It is a message that strikes home with many audiences, particularly members of the intelligentsia, who are disillusioned with President Boris Yeltsin.
In 1985, perestroika had much more limited objectives and was strictly an internal audit of the existing system. Gorbachev argues that it could not have gone any differently.
Gorbachev told reporters in Novosibirsk that 102 academic reports on reforming the system lay in Kremlin safes when his mentor Yury Andropov was in power, and "there was a huge amount of work, a lot of closed meetings.
"But although they all contained recommendations to improve the system, not a single one proposed going beyond the system, changing the political system," Gorbachev said. "There wasn't any of that for a long time."
Ninety percent of the population in 1985 had been born under the Soviet regime, he said, and people were so accustomed to the system that radical reform or some kind of "Chinese option" of quick economic reform was simply unthinkable.
But the logic of events produced the need for one more radical recipe after another. All the problems they faced turned out to be intertwined, according to his aide, Chernyayev. The first attempt at limited economic reform led to the realization that the military industrial complex was a "black hole" sucking in the resources of the country. That in turn led to a reappraisal of foreign policy.
A defining moment came with the summit with U.S. President Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik in Iceland in October 1986. It was then, Chernyayev said, when he met Reagan and the U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, "the first statesman who really trusted Gorbachev," that the Cold War "game" ended and genuine dialogue began.
"At the summit, he still used the old diplomatic tricks, but after Reykjavik he gave them up," Chernyayev said.
But at the same period, the fall of 1986, Gorbachev traveled the country and saw the scale of the problems facing him at home.
"He went to the Far East, to the Kuban region and other places too," Chernyayev remembered. "People reached out to him and shouted that 'in Moscow it's all fine, we read the papers, we listen to the radio and television, you have big changes going on but here nothing is going on at all.'
"Then he understood that these people who stayed in power, the regional parties, the district parties, they didn't intend to change anything, they understood perestroika as the latest nonsense from the general secretary."
The crux of perestroika came to be the role of the Communist Party itself. Gorbachev tried to use it as the engine of change, and instead it became the focus of resistance to change.
The former general secretary now concedes that he tried to inject new blood into the party and it made no difference.
"New people came in and again they were exactly the same people as the ones before them," Gorbachev said. "It seemed we had a queue of nomenklatura stretching back decades. The same people with the same set positions came in."
But the implications of this sank in on Gorbachev very slowly. He abolished the party's monopoly on power only in March 1990 and resigned as general secretary of the party only on Aug. 24, 1991, after the collapse of the attempted putsch.
"Even after the August coup, Gorbachev was extremely pained by our decision to suppress the party," Yeltsin, who left the party in 1990, wrote in his memoirs. "The fall into the abyss was inevitable."
Chernyayev agrees that Gorbachev should have abandoned the party earlier.
"Sakharov raised the question -- 'Whose side are you on, Mikhail Sergeyevich? Are you with the democrats or with the nomenklatura?'" Chernyayev remembered.
"And to some extent he had caught Gorbachev's inconsistency. Because Gorbachev wanted to force the nomenklatura to be for democracy and perestroika. Clearly that was not a realistic idea."
Asked what mistakes he made, Gorbachev said that "in tactics there were a great many" but he insisted the main lines of his policy were correct.
His main regret, he says, is that he did not prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is a theme he returns to constantly. He blames Yeltsin and the coup plotters for undermining his union treaty, but he also blames himself.
"In nationalities policy we acted very late," he said. "We underestimated how many problems had built up."
Summing up the character of the man he worked with in the Kremlin for six years and still works with now, Chernyayev lighted on the "softness" of Gorbachev, his flexibility. It was his greatest asset, but also his greatest failing, Chernyayev said, because he did not fire colleagues who stood in his way.
"He was a paradoxical figure, of course, acting in a paradoxical situation," Chernyayev said. "Gorbachev has very strong human qualities, decency, loyalty to his comrades, to his friends he started with and met every day, he couldn't call them in and say 'you have to go,' he couldn't do it. It was a good streak, a human one, but it damaged him as a reformer of the state, who should be merciless on a personal level."
But it could not have been otherwise, Chernyayev said.
"It is a contradiction, but if Gorbachev had not had that softness, that inner sympathy for people there would have been no perestroika," he said.
Wednesday: Gorbachev in Novosibirsk; what chance a political comeback?
PERESTROIKA: THE KEY DATES
March 10, 1985. Konstantin Chernenko dies. The next day Mikhail Gorbachev is elected general secretary of the Communist Party.
April 23, 1985. Gorbachev announces sweeping changes at Communist Party plenum.
April 26, 1986. World's worst nuclear accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine forces a new phase of glasnost.
Oct. 11 - 12, 1986. Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan hold their second summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Dec. 16, 1986. Gorbachev announces that Andrei Sakharov is free to leave house arrest in Gorky and return to Moscow.
Nov. 11, 1987. Boris Yeltsin dismissed as first secretary of the Moscow Communist Party.
March 26, 1989. Communist Party candidates routed in first round of elections to new Congress of People's Deputies.
March 12 - 15, 1990. At an extraordinary session of the Congress of People's Deputies, the leading role of the Communist Party is abolished and
Gorbachev is elected executive president.
Jan. 13, 1991. Soviet paratroopers storm the television center in Vilnius and kill 14 Lithuanian protestors.
Aug. 19, 1991. A group of hardliners declares Gorbachev ill and attempts to seize power. The putsch collapses three days later.
Aug. 24, 1991. Gorbachev resigns as general secretary of the Communist Party.
Dec. 8, 1991. Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, agree to form the Commonwealth of Independent States to replace the Soviet Union.
Dec. 25, 1991. Gorbachev resigns as Soviet president. The red flag is lowered over Kremlin, marking the final demise of the Soviet Union.
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