Five Years that Shook the USSR

...In addition, like Andropov, Gorbachev vigorously exercised his power to renovate the Party structure by removing old adversaries among the provincial bosses and promoting his own men...

...Reviewed by Robert V Daniels Professor emeritus of history, University of Vermont...

...He called for radical economic reform that would decentralize the cumbersome planned economy and put State-owned enterprises on a profit-and-loss basis...

...If there is any guiding theme to their work, it is Gorbachev's recurring battle with the conservative bureaucrats of the Communist nomenklatura, the old patronage elite...

...He emerges as a "strong leader who defied the old Russian saying, 'The tsar wished but the boyars will not allow,'" a pragmatist in his aims and a populist in his style...

...Though the malcontents regularly affirmed their support for perestroïka, their Andropovite conception of reform was merely to heighten incentives, fight alcoholism and corruption, and otherwise tighten up the nuts and bolts of the old machine...

...Doder and Branson recount in detail how this bureaucratic opposition crystallized around Central Committee Secretary Yegor K. Ligachev, himself another protege of Andropov...

...Between 1986 and '88 he forged ahead with innovations that challenged the still prevailing Stalinist orthodoxy in every area of policy...

...The September Revolution turned out to be crucial to the reconstruction of the Soviet political system and to Gorbachev's consolidation of personal power...

...Ironically, as Doder and Branson show, democracy within the Party worked mainly to the advantage of the conservatives, and Gorbachev could not get the shakeup he sought at the conference...

...He reopened the investigation of Stalin's crimes and blunders, started under Nikita S. Khrushchev but hushed up by Brezhnev...

...In the present volume Doder and Branson follow the extraordinary unfolding of Gorbachev's initiatives in both domestic and foreign affairs from the time he took over through all the incredible developments during 1989 in the Soviet Union as well as in Eastern Europe...

...Thanks to glasnost and Gorbachev's victory over the Party hierarchy, the whole totalitarian structure of political, economic and social control crumbled, and with it the psychology of fear and submission that had weighed down the Soviet populace for many decades...

...We find it obvious, at least in retrospect," they write, "that his thinking has undergone radical evolution in the course of the '80s...

...On September 30 he succeeded in getting the Central Committee to demote or retire most of the remaining conservatives in the Politburo, including those who had voted for him in March 1985...

...When I joshed some of the participants uttering this refrain about echoing the Menshevik heresy, they laughed...

...Heretic in the Kremlin is an exciting, fast-paced narrative—week by week and sometimes day by day—of Gorbachev's first five years at the helm...

...The next day the old rubber-stamp Supreme Soviet elected him President, theretofore a purely honorific office, and voted in his constitutional changes...

...To this end he convoked a special conference of local delegates in June 1988 midway in the five-year span between Party congresses...

...The authors depict him in the tradition of a "tsar-reformer" doing battle with the entrenched nobility...

...author, "Is Russia Reformable...

...This set the stage for the "September Revolution," as Soviets privately termed the events of September 30 and October 1, 1988...

...They have produced the best running report yet to appear of this tumultuous era in what used to be the Soviet bloc...

...Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, veteran Moscow correspondents of the Washington Post and the London Sunday Times respectively (now both reporting from Beijing), come down emphatically for the latter interpretation after examining Gorbachev's record...

...This was when he enlisted the press and the intelligentsia, under the banner of glasnost, in his campaign to rein in the bureaucracy...

...But he did secure a pro forma endorsement of certain constitutional changes that he wanted to see implemented...

...Did Mikhail S. Gorbachev come to power in 1985 with a ready-made plan for the transformation of the Soviet Union...

...Looking at the Gorbachev reforms in historical perspective, one can appreciate how fundamental they are...

...Early in 1988 he struck a symbolic blow at the bureaucracy, as Doder and Branson remind us, bytakinggovernmentcarsaway from 400,000 officials...

...These called for a new Congress of People's Deputies to be chosen in competitive democratic elections, but with special representation for the Communist Party and other "public organizations," plus a streamlined Supreme Soviet, elected by the Congress from among its members, that would become a permanently functioning legislature—a novelty for the USSR...

...On the foreign policy front, under the "New Thinking" slogan, he rejected the Kremlin's time-honored confrontationist stance and its class-struggle rationalization...

...Not long ago, too, a Soviet journalist predicted to me, "Our future national holidays will be the First of May, the Seventh of November and the 26th of March"—the last being the date of the first more or less democratic election the Soviet Union has had since its inception...

...Political debate was heard, "informal groups" and "popular fronts" sprang into existence all along the political spectrum, and the press suddenly reflected the proclivities of particular editors and staffs...

...He then proceeded to remove Party control of the media, cultural life and historical truth, and attacked the Stalinist apparatus' dominationof the Party membership...

...It took him only a few months to get rid of the Brezhnevites in the Politburo who had voted against his ascension to power—the former Leningrad boss Grigory V. Romanov, the Moscow boss Viktor V. Grishin, and the aged Prime Minister Nikolai A. Tikhonov...

...The disaster is what drove Gorbachev from the path of reform within the system, along the lines of his mentor Andropov, to reform against the system...

...Yet apparently the more his pragmatic assessment of the country's problems drove him to question the basics of the old system, the more even his own new subordinates questioned his leadership...

...Once Gorbachev determined that he could not rely on the very Communist Party apparatus that had enabled him to rise to the top, the rest of his revolutionary program followed with logical inevitability, whether preconceived or not...

...It is a sequel to Doder's Shadows and Whispers (1986), an account of what happened in Moscow from the demise of Leonid I. Brezhnev in 1982, through the brief geriatric administrations of Yuri V. Andropov and Konstantin U. Chernenko, to the selection of Gorbachev as Communist Party General Secretary in March 1985 amid hopes for invigorated leadership and national renewal...

...At a conference with Soviet historians a few months ago, I heard it said over and over again that Russia fell under dictatorship and suffered the horrors of Stalinism because at the time of the Revolution the country was too backward for the socialist experiment...

...Now Doder and Branson write, "Gorbachev's views resembled those held by the Menshevik leader Martov rather than those of Lenin...

...The Soviet leader has, so to speak, put history into reverse, undoing the policies and institutions of Stalinism step by step...

...He answered, "In December 1988, when they opened the campaign for the Congress and started to show real debates on television...

...Eventually Gorbachev began to dismantle not only Stalinism but Leninism, by tolerating political and intellectual pluralism and introducing real electoral competition into Soviet political life...

...Unlike most of the recent spate of books on the Soviet President, Doder and Branson are less interested in the abstract analysis of historical processes and future prospects than they are in the interplay of personalities and events...

...Gorbachev, meanwhile, hoped to appeal over the heads of the bureaucrats to the millions of rank-and-file Party members...

...he also shook up the leadership of the KGBand eased his chief rival, Ligachev, into the unenviable job of heading the commission on agriculture...

...During a recent conversation with a Soviet student I asked, "When did you first begin to feel free to speak out...

...They believe "trial and error" brought him around to embracing democracy, albeit of a special kind that would leave him with important prerogatives: "Gorbachev has sought to become a Soviet-style de Gaulle...

...Changes since the September Revolution have come so thick and fast that no work of current history can do justice to them...

...Picking up where Khrushchev left off with his condemnation of Stalin's terror, Gorbachev started by rejecting the Stalinist principle of a centrally planned economy (though he has been slow to effect any workable alternative...

...Doder and Branson correctly highlight the Chernobyl nuclear explosion in April 1986, together with the subsequent bureaucratic bungling, as a watershed...

...Even the ideological premises of Marxism, down to the primacy of the class struggle, have been called into question...

...Have Gorbachev's maneuvers, extensive as they are, really addressed the grave weaknesses of the Soviet system...

...Certainly the country's economic crisis has not abated, and relations among the Soviet nationalities continue to deteriorate...

...Gorbachev has just in the nick of time shifted his power base from the Party to the presidency, against loud but misdirected criticism from the radical reformers...

...Whether the heretic in the Kremlin will survive, or be crushed between the extremes in an increasingly polarized country, only time will tell...

...Or has he simply been flying by the seat of his pants, responding to the country's seemingly insuperable problems with ever more revolutionary expedients...

...With the latest split in the Communist ranks and the electoral victories of the Democratic Platform movement and Boris Yeltsin, what remains of the Party will be dominated by the conservatives...

...In the spring of 1988 they threw down their gauntlet to Gorbachev by having the conservative newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya publish the so-called "Andreyeva letter," in which a Leningrad teacher complained of the violation of old socialist values...