Thirty-five years ago, the communists of the Soviet Union gathered for their final party forum.
“Let`s get to work, comrades! We have entered the most crucial phase of perestroika; major reforms are next…” These final words from the last speech of the last General Secretary of the CPSU at its last, the XXVIII Congress (July 2-13, 1990), are hard to hear without irony today. The comrades had very little time left to work—just over a year. Nevertheless, this congress, seemingly of political bankrupts who lost the country and the system, can paradoxically be called the `congress of winners`.
And this time, without any irony. Back then, the XVII Party Congress (January 26 – February 10, 1934) received this name. Here, a sardonic twist of history is evident: out of 1966 delegates, 1103 were repressed during the Great Terror, with 848 shot. Of the 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee elected at the congress, 98 were arrested and shot. Thus, a second, more accurate name for this forum is the `congress of the shot`.
The party `guard` was decimated by two-thirds, but the party itself and the state it created survived. The abundant bloodletting, on the contrary, strengthened the regime. This is easily explained: since the main `secret` ingredient ensuring the solidity of the state-political foundation was fear, this `porridge` could not be spoiled by such `butter`. The more blood, the stronger.
Half a century later, everything was the exact opposite: the state collapsed, but the `guard` fared no worse than before. And some part of it fared incomparably better. Having lost the country, the `guards` – for the most part – did not lose power. But all this became clear much later. Then, in the summer of 1990, many party bosses had a premonition of the impending catastrophe, which, as it soon turned out, did not deceive them at all.
Signs of Agony Appeared
“The XXVIII Congress loomed ahead,” Alexander Yakovlev, an `architect of perestroika` (at that time, a member of the Politburo, Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU), described his feelings on the eve of the forum in memoirs published many years later. “The mood was terrible. Signs of this power`s agony appeared.” Yakovlev also gave perhaps the most accurate and vivid description of the last CPSU congress.
“It (the XXVIII Congress) was strikingly different from others: it was turbulent, resembling a drunken peasant lost on the way home,” Alexander Nikolaevich wrote. “Falling, getting up, crawling again, and cursing all the time. Everyone rushed to the microphones and the rostrum. Incredible activity, as if they wanted to avenge themselves for 70 years of fear and silence. Of course, there were many sound, intelligent speeches, but they were drowned out by the stomping of bipedal creatures. In other words, both wings of the party activated – the reactionary and the democratic.”
All true: the `patient` was extremely uninhibited, active, but certainly did not give the impression of recovering. His activity was more frightening than reassuring. Well, for those who were worried about the `patient` and still hoped that he would recover.
The last CPSU congress was the first in many decades that did not follow a predetermined script, where real political struggle unfolded. In terms of democracy, it surpassed not only previous congresses but perhaps all subsequent congresses of domestic systemic parties, and most non-systemic ones. This is evidenced by the very beginning of the XXVIII Congress. The scene that played out in its first minutes is completely impossible to imagine at today`s orderly party meetings.
After Mikhail Gorbachev opened the congress and proposed discussing the composition of the presidium, delegate Vladimir Bludov, assistant section chief at the Kadykchanskaya mine (Magadan Oblast), took the floor and asked to put the following proposal to a vote: “Declare the resignation of the Central Committee of the CPSU headed by the Politburo and not elect them to the leading bodies of the congress for the failure of work on implementing the Food Program, decisions of the XXVII Congress of the CPSU and the XIX Party Conference. Provide a personal assessment of each Secretary of the Central Committee, member of the Politburo at the congress.”
And the audacious man was not expelled from the hall. “We will return to this question later,” Gorbachev calmly reacted. “And now we will continue to work according to the program.” And indeed, they returned. `Rebel` Bludov spoke several more times at the congress, continuing to insist on his proposal, and partially succeeded: it was decided to hear personal reports from members of the Politburo and Secretaries of the Central Committee.
“This topic became, in essence, the main plot of the entire first part of the congress discussion,” Gorbachev recalled. “The fundamentalists, eager to `smear against the wall` those they saw as the culprits of their removal from power, managed to insist on `reports`… But they failed to impose scoring – a humiliating procedure that was conceived as a way of `public flogging` of reformist figures.”
Between Hitler and Gorbachev
The main target for the `fundamentalists` was, naturally, Yakovlev. However, criticism against him also came from delegates who could hardly be attributed to the conservative camp.
The atmosphere prevailing at the congress and its emotional intensity are well illustrated by the questions asked to the `architect of perestroika` by Alexander Lebed, the future Secretary of the Security Council of Russia, the future governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai: “Alexander Nikolaevich! There is an unpublished book `My Vision of Marxism` in existence. You are the author. How to understand your expression that you will be `hanged on the first aspen` for its publication, and who are the hangmen? You have declared Kunaev, Aliyev, and the like victims of the regime, unfortunate people. How do you feel about placing Comrade Brezhnev in this row? And generally, how many faces do you have, Alexander Nikolaevich?”
However, his opponents failed to make Yakovlev a `whipping boy`: the `architect of perestroika` skillfully parried the blows and at times launched tough counterattacks. “A xerox copy of an article from the newspaper `Russian Voice`, by the way, sold in Moscow kiosks, is being distributed at the congress,” he said from the rostrum on July 9, 1990. “It contains calls: `We need a new Hitler, not Gorbachev. A military coup is urgently needed. In Siberia, we still have many undeveloped places waiting for their enthusiasts who failed the cause of perestroika.` My surname is also mentioned… I would like to tell the organizers of this coordinated campaign, those who are behind this: you can shorten my life, but you will never silence me!”
The article quoted by Yakovlev quite accurately conveys the dilemma facing the party and the country at that moment: it was a choice between Hitler, i.e., dictatorship, and Gorbachev, i.e., further democratization with an increasingly clear prospect of disintegration. True, Gorbachev himself until the end of his life believed in the possibility of a third way – democratization without disintegration. And he categorically rejected the scenario of reforms `under the reliable shield of strong authoritarian power` proposed by some thinkers of that time.
“We were by no means simpletons not to understand that it is impossible to carry out any significant transformations without having levers of power in hand, the ability to overcome the inevitable opposition to the planned reforms,” wrote Gorbachev. “The calculation then was made that the `shield` necessary for the implementation of reform ideas would be provided by the gradual transfer of power from the hands of the party to the hands of elected state leadership, figuratively speaking – from Staraya Square to the Kremlin…
We saw perestroika not as a violent revolution, but as a peaceful process of reforms, excluding cataclysms and associated destruction of the productive forces of society, disasters, and suffering of people. It requires the greatest art to optimally choose the moment of power transfer… To our great regret, we did not manage to complete this decisive operation at the optimal moment.”
Was this idea inherently utopian? A philosophical question. “Anything is possible in this world,” wrote Mikhail Gorbachev, answering another, but very closely related question – about the possibility of reforming the CPSU. And it is difficult to argue with this: politics is not mathematics. It is impossible to establish a precise limit to the possible in this area. But what happened happened: the collapse of the country, the party, and the reforms, including political reforms.
The level of political freedoms achieved in the USSR at the time of its collapse was not surpassed in any of the `fragments of the empire`, and in most `fragments`, there was a significant rollback. In some places – in Central Asia, for example – they rolled back not even to the `era of developed socialism`, but much further, to `developed feudalism`.
Formally, however, the congress ended with a victory for Gorbachev and his policy. In the election for General Secretary, 3411 delegates voted for him, against – 1116. Yes, far from unanimously. But, considering that the elections this time were absolutely free, unrehearsed, it was quite a good result. Gorbachev`s only rival, the secretary of the Kiselyovsk city committee of the CPSU (Kemerovo Oblast) Teimuraz Avaliani, received almost seven times fewer votes – 501.
The Party Draws
By the way, such elections were also a first in the party: until then, the General Secretary was elected, or rather, approved by the new composition of the Central Committee at the first plenum of the Central Committee, which met after the regular party congress. Gorbachev frankly told in his memoirs why he decided to break with tradition: “For him (the General Secretary) to feel confident, he must be elected by the representatives of the communists themselves, the delegates of the congress. This minimized the possibility of any `palace coups` in the party.”
But in the end, the victory turned out to be illusory, imaginary. Something that, by all accounts, Gorbachev himself understood. “We managed to defend the perestroika line, confirm the adopted course, including market reforms,” he summarized the results of the congress in his memoirs. “But at the same time, the orthodox consolidated, gaining support in the leadership of the Communist Party of Russia. And among the members of the Politburo, Secretaries of the Central Committee of the CPSU, there were quite a few people with traditional party-conservative views.”
In essence, the clash between conservatives and reformers ended in a draw. From this point of view, the result of the congress was zero: neither for us, nor for them. This was reflected, among other things, in personnel decisions: Alexander Yakovlev, who personified the liberal beginning in the party leadership, and Yegor Ligachev, the standard-bearer of the orthodox wing, simultaneously left the Central Committee and, accordingly, the Politburo.
But the main problem of the party was not this. The problem was that the CPSU and its leader were rapidly losing levers of influence on the situation in the country. This process had been underway since the beginning of perestroika, accelerating more and more. “The authority of the CPSU fell immediately as soon as people stopped fearing it, believed that the party`s dominance was no longer backed by violence,” Mikhail Gorbachev explained the nature of this phenomenon. And after the adoption in March 1990 of an amendment to Article 6 of the Constitution of the USSR, the `decommunization` of the USSR took on a landslide character.
For reference: according to the original version of the sixth article, the CPSU was proclaimed the “leading and guiding force of Soviet society, the core of its political system, state and public organizations.” In the new version of the article, although the CPSU was mentioned, it was no longer given any advantages over other political parties and public organizations, which received exactly the same rights to “participate in the formulation of the policy of the Soviet state, in the management of state and public affairs.”
“The party`s monopoly on absolute power in the country was put to an end,” Alexander Yakovlev wrote about the significance of this step. “Henceforth, the CPSU could only act within the framework of the Constitution and legislation, on an equal footing with other parties. And even if there were no comparable rivals, the principle itself was important. In legal and political terms, the CPSU committed an act of `abdication`.”
After this, it was essentially irrelevant for the country who was winning in the CPSU – the orthodox or the liberals, or vice versa. Power – and therefore the struggle for power – shifted to another level. The litmus test that fully revealed the party`s changed position was August 1991. Gorbachev was not without reason afraid of a palace coup, but trouble approached from where he least expected it. From other `palaces`.
The August Test
Contrary to popular opinion, the party played no significant role in the events of the putsch. Suffice it to say that among the members of the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP), there was not a single member of the Politburo. Another notable point: the putschists stripped Gorbachev of his presidential powers, citing his `inability due to health reasons` to perform his duties, but no one encroached on his powers as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU.
At the XXVIII Congress, the General Secretary acquired a deputy: Vladimir Ivashko was elected, who previously held the post of Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR (his successor in this post was Leonid Kravchuk). And the `party vice-president`, unlike the `secular` one, did not betray Gorbachev from a formal point of view. He did not try to take his chair. But he also, to put it mildly, did not rush to help the leader of the party blocked in Foros.
The beginning of the putsch found Ivashko 30 kilometers from Moscow, in a Central Committee sanatorium, where he was recovering after a recent operation. The reason to interrupt the recovery procedures seemed more than serious, but the deputy General Secretary decided to continue rehabilitation. And something suggests that it was not only about his health condition.
It is known that none of the GKChP members contacted the second-ranking person in the party during these days, and he himself did not show any initiative either. Ivashko returned to Moscow only late in the morning on August 21, on the third day of the putsch, when it was already clear that the GKChP had lost. And then he developed a vigorous activity. Calling Yanayev, the nominal leader of the putschists, the deputy General Secretary demanded an opportunity to meet with Gorbachev. And in the end, he got it: he flew to Foros with a delegation of GKChP members, returning to Moscow with Gorbachev that night.
On the same day, August 21, a statement from the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU appeared, which, although not directly, condemned the actions of the GKChP: the document spoke of the inadmissibility of `using temporary emergency powers to establish an authoritarian regime, create unconstitutional bodies of power, attempts to use force`.
“Neither I nor the vast majority of my comrades in the Secretariat of the Central Committee knew anything about the preparation of the coup,” Ivashko assured in a newspaper interview given in the autumn of 1991. These justifications, as is known, did not save the party from being banned, but both Ivashko himself and most of his `comrades in the Secretariat` survived those harsh days relatively well. Of the entire party elite, only Oleg Shenin, Secretary of the Central Committee and member of the Politburo, was arrested.
In fact, only Shenin could be accused of participating in the coup. On August 19, 1991, he sent a coded message to the first secretaries of the Central Committees of the Communist Parties of the union republics, heads of regional committees, area committees, and district committees of the CPSU, instructing them to take measures for `communists` participation in assisting the State Committee on the State of Emergency in the USSR`. Shenin clearly exceeded his authority: sending a document signed `Secretariat of the Central Committee` was his sole decision, not coordinated with other leaders of the party apparatus.
In short, at that moment, the party was already a fifth wheel in the wagon of state administration, largely unnecessary to anyone, even its own members. In fact, that is why the ban passed so easily: none of the multi-million army of Soviet communists – as of January 1, 1991, the CPSU numbered 16.5 million people – stood up for the `native party`, or went out to protest in the streets.
The Nomenklatura Changes Skin
Essentially, by that time, the party had turned into an empty shell, a worn-out `snake skin` that the more insightful part of the party nomenklatura began to shed, without waiting for the end of the CPSU`s history.
The name of the party functionary pioneer, the first to feel that a party card was turning from a means of career growth and/or maintaining power into a burden and decided to get rid of it, cannot be reliably established. But if we talk, for example, about the leaders of the `fraternal` republics, then the laurels of primacy, apparently, belong to Arnold Rüütel – Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Estonia, future President of the republic.
According to biographical sources, Rüütel left the CPSU back in 1989. And he was not just an ordinary communist: at the time of his departure, he was a member of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia and the Central Auditing Commission of the CPSU. The next, apparently, was Mircea Snegur – Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian SSR, future President of the Republic of Moldova (at the time of departure – Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Moldova): his parting with the party dates back to June 1990.
Well, the third person to consider his party card redundant was the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, Boris Yeltsin (at that time – a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU). His departure was perhaps the most resonant and spectacular: he announced his decision…
