Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev on the 12th of November 1982. He had been chairman of the KGB from 1967 to 1982, which gave him an unusually detailed knowledge of the country's actual condition (the KGB's internal reporting was, by long Soviet tradition, considerably more candid than the party's official accounts). His brief tenure as general secretary (fifteen months, of which much was spent in hospital) was characterised by a programme of "labour discipline" — public crackdowns on absenteeism, drunkenness, and corruption — that produced visible enforcement actions (officers checking the identification of pedestrians during work hours; arrests of senior figures including Brezhnev's son-in-law) but no substantive reform of the system. Andropov died of kidney failure on the 9th of February 1984, aged sixty-nine.
He was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, a seventy-two-year-old Brezhnev loyalist with advanced emphysema, whose thirteen-month tenure (February 1984 – March 1985) was a deliberate Politburo holding action. Chernenko died of multiple organ failure on the 10th of March 1985, at seventy-three. The Politburo, on the 11th of March, elected as his successor the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev — the youngest member of the body, the protege of Andropov, and the only major Soviet political figure not associated with the Stalin or Brezhnev generations. The choice was substantively contested — Andrei Gromyko's nomination speech was the decisive intervention — and substantively understood, by all participants, as the choice of a reformer.
Perestroika
Gorbachev's reform programme developed in stages. The initial campaign, announced at the April 1985 plenum, was for the "acceleration" (uskorenie) of economic growth through investment in machine-building, labour discipline, and management efficiency. A simultaneous anti-alcohol campaign — substantially restricting the production and sale of vodka and beer — was perhaps the most unpopular Soviet policy of the period (the campaign cost the state budget about a hundred billion roubles in lost excise revenue, was widely circumvented through home distillation, and was effectively abandoned by 1988). The acceleration policy did not produce the intended results. The Soviet economy continued to slow.
The second-stage programme of perestroika ("restructuring") was announced at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February-March 1986. The intent was a more thoroughgoing reform of economic management, with limited price reform, the introduction of small private cooperatives (the so-called law on cooperatives of May 1988 legalised, for the first time since the NEP, private enterprise of up to a few dozen employees), and a shift of decision-making authority from central ministries to enterprise management. The reform was insufficiently radical to produce a working market economy and sufficiently disruptive to break the existing planned economy's coordination mechanisms. Soviet consumer-goods shortages, which had been a chronic but tolerable feature of Brezhnev-era life, became severe by 1989.
Glasnost
The reform programme that produced the most visible political consequences was glasnost — "openness," "publicity" — Gorbachev's policy of allowing public discussion of subjects that had previously been forbidden. The initial intent was instrumental: a more candid public discussion of the country's problems would, the leadership hoped, generate political support for the reforms and pressure against the entrenched bureaucratic interests that opposed them. The effect was substantially more far-reaching than that.
From late 1986, the Soviet press began publishing on a sequence of subjects that had been formally prohibited: the Stalin Terror (the rehabilitations of Bukharin, Rykov, and other 1930s defendants in 1988; the publication of Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, and previously prohibited works by Vasily Grossman, Andrei Platonov, and Solzhenitsyn); the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (acknowledged by the Soviet government in 1989); the Katyn massacre (the Soviet murder of about 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia in spring 1940, acknowledged in 1990 after fifty years of official Soviet denial); the conditions of the Soviet army in Afghanistan; the scale of Soviet environmental damage (Chernobyl, which had been the proximate trigger of glasnost's expansion in May 1986, was the most visible case; the Aral Sea desiccation and the radioactive contamination of the Mayak production complex were others). The cumulative effect was a public reassessment of the Soviet past on a scale that would have been unthinkable in 1985.
The constitutional reforms
In summer 1988, Gorbachev pushed through a series of constitutional and political reforms intended to give the Soviet system a more representative character. A new Congress of People's Deputies was established with directly elected (though partly party-reserved) seats; elections in March 1989 — the first contested Soviet elections in modern history — produced about a third opposition deputies, including the dissident Andrei Sakharov, the former Politburo member Boris Yeltsin, and a substantial number of national-front candidates from the non-Russian republics. The first Congress (May-June 1989) was televised continuously, an event without precedent in Soviet political life. Its proceedings were watched by tens of millions of Soviet citizens. The political legitimacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the unchallenged ruling institution was, by the end of the first Congress, visibly broken.
The autumn of 1989
The third phase of Gorbachev's reforms — the abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine and the willingness to let the Eastern European Communist regimes find their own political settlements — produced the most dramatic geopolitical event of the late twentieth century. The Brezhnev Doctrine, announced in November 1968 to justify the invasion of Czechoslovakia, had committed the Soviet Union to using military force to preserve Communist rule in any socialist country. Gorbachev's gradual disavowal of the doctrine — announced in different forms through 1988 and confirmed in his speeches in Belgrade (March 1988) and Strasbourg (July 1989) — meant that the Eastern European regimes could no longer count on Soviet military support against their own populations.
The 1989 transitions followed in rapid sequence: Poland's Round Table Talks of February-April produced semi-free elections in June, leading to a Solidarity-led government in September; Hungary opened its border with Austria in May, started its own Round Table Talks in June, and changed its constitution in October; East Germany's Honecker regime collapsed in October, the Berlin Wall fell on the 9th of November; the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution ran 17 November – 29 December; the Bulgarian regime fell in November; and Romania's Ceauşescu regime fell in a violent revolution on 21-25 December (the only one of the 1989 transitions to involve substantial bloodshed). By the end of the year, the Soviet Union no longer had a single Communist ally in Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Pact would formally dissolve in 1991. The Soviet Union's strategic position in Europe was over, and the country itself would now begin to unravel.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union itself is the subject of the next chapter.
"We cannot live the old way any longer." — Mikhail Gorbachev, address to the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, 25 February 1986
End of Chapter VIII