The Leninist-Stalinist Legacy |
187 |
These improvements notwithstanding, the Soviet leadership under Brezhnev refused to employ Khrushchev’s more pragmatic approach to the economy and society at large. Although the economy had improved somewhat since the 1950s, the Brezhnev government encouraged a culture of corruption, whereby the informal economy permeated all aspects of society. Armenia’s economy remained underdeveloped with no significant advances beyond servicing the Soviet republics. For instance, in 1970 “Armenia produced 42 million pairs of stockings and socks, about 60 million items of linen and underwear, and 10.3 million pairs of shoes. The production of consumer goods and commodities grew significantly, and Armenian production was able to meet a considerable part of the demand of the Soviet consumer goods market.”57 Production of socks and shoes however could hardly enable Armenia to achieve modern technological capabilities with competitive advantages within and beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union. The economic problems were further complicated by the fact that Armenia’s economy could not experience liberalization and technological modernization so long as the Communist Party maintained its monopoly over the Soviet political economy. The Communist elite rejected calls for political liberalization and self-criticism. The younger generation, however, trained and educated in the Khrushchev era of de-Stalinization, believed in the desirability and even inevitability of fundamental changes in Soviet institutions. Statements such as “everything has grown rotten” and “we can’t go on living this way” were heard with increasing frequency in private conversations among younger bureaucrats. Such criticism of the Soviet system, however, did not consider the challenges associated with the nationalities, as most Soviet leaders in the mid-1980s continued to assume that the New Soviet Man had overcome parochial identities.58 Equally important, economic stagnation and political repression, now combined with leadership instability inside the Kremlin, unleashed centrifugal forces that at first appeared as demands for structural reforms but subsequently led to secessionist movements. After Brezhnev’s death in November 1982, leadership instability in Moscow magnified the existing political and economic structural deficiencies. Yuri V. Andropov, Brezhnev’s successor, died in office in February 1984. Konstantin U. Chernenko, who succeeded Andropov at the age of seventy-two, also died in office the following year. As Mikhail Gorbachev, the new Communist leader at the Soviet helm, observed in his memoirs years later, “The very system was dying away; its sluggish senile blood no longer contained any vital juices.”59
GORBACHEV’S GLASNOST AND
PERESTROIKA, 1985–1991
Upon assuming power in March 1985, Gorbachev and his close advisers— Leonid Abalkin, Abel Aganbegyan, and Nikolai Petrakov—experimented
188 |
The History of Armenia |
with ideologically unorthodox policies in hopes of invigorating the Soviet economy. Yet such a course, their Communist conservatives at the Kremlin cautioned, could undermine the very political system they aimed to rescue. Gorbachev surrounded himself with advisers, such as Aganbegyan and Tatyana Zaslavskaya, author of the now-famous “Novosibirsk Report” in 1983, who advocated radical economic and political reforms in order to strengthen the Soviet system. The report criticized the Stalinist model as sheer anachronism and proposed “a qualitative restructuring”—perestroika (restructuring).60 The advent of glasnost (openness) and perestroika led to fundamental questions regarding the ideological foundations as well as the structural arrangements of the Soviet regime.61 The emergence of Gorbachev as the Communist Party leader in Moscow and his policies encouraged greater freedom.
Although Gorbachev, like his predecessors, was not inclined to entertain separatist sentiments or demands for redrawing of interrepublic boundaries, Armenian nationalism had already been radicalized and transformed into a powerful popular force in spite of Soviet policies and priorities. Most Armenians demanded less Russian political and cultural influences and pressed for the Armenianization of Armenia, which at first entailed democratization and greater local autonomy. For example, School No. 183 in Erevan, radically altered its educational curriculum in order to revive Armenian culture. “In other republics,” one observer wrote in the early 1990s, “people dreamed about revamping their schools; here people were doing it.” School No. 183 was “more than a center of cultural renais- sance—it [was] a hotbed of political rebellion.”62
Moscow’s inadequate responses to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986––when a nuclear power plant reactor exploded and its fallout contaminated large parts of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, causing the resettlement of more than 336,000 people––and to the earthquake in Armenia in 1988, which, according to official data, claimed at least 25,000 lives, destroyed fifty-eight villages, and severely damaged twenty-one cities and regions, including hundreds of educational and cultural institutions and more than 200 manufacturing facilities––only served to amplify the ineptitude of the Communist leadership and to galvanize the opposition forces.63 Gorbachev’s public pronouncements for glasnost and perestroika gave rise to expectations, but the continuation of the disastrous military engagement in Afghanistan begun under Brezhnev in 1979, the failure to improve relations with the satellite states in eastern Europe, and the failure to eradicate the ills of maladministration and corruption further diminished the already tenuous and increasingly attenuated legitimacy of the Communist Party. Thus, a combination of factors—including the Stalinist legacy, mismanagement, and corruption—rent the system beyond repair.64
The Leninist-Stalinist Legacy |
189 |
The western economies, from West Germany to the United States, had proved far more successful in their capacity to modernize and to adapt to the rapid globalization of markets and finance, while the Soviet bloc economies lagged behind despite the enormous human sacrifices since the accelerated industrialization policies under Stalin. Gorbachev believed that through glasnost and perestroika the Soviet economy could overcome “everything that was holding back development.”65 The Kremlin, according to his plan, would guide political and economic liberalization through public mobilization, the economy would lean toward market socialism, price liberalization, and a certain degree of private ownership, while scientific and technological modernization would facilitate economic growth. In his speech at the plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee in January 1987, Gorbachev called for democratization and the institution of free elections. The speech was followed by the release of political prisoners, in demonstration of good faith.66
Beginning in the summer of 1987, Gorbachev’s promises for democratization were put to the test. Crimean Tartars, who had been forced into exile to Uzbekistan by Stalin in 1944, demanded permission to return to their homeland. The Kremlin for decades had rejected such claims and refused to permit public debate on the matter, and in July 1987, when the Tartars held a protest demonstration at the Red Square, their demands went unheeded.
In addition, divisions within the party also became more visible. In October 1987 the removal of Boris Yeltsin from the Politburo signified a deeper divisions within the Kremlin than publicly recognized. By 1988 centrifugal tendencies in nearly all areas of the Soviet polity began to transform the political and economic structures, placing enormous pressure on Gorbachev to press for greater democratization. Yet Gorbachev and the Kremlin policymakers failed to gauge accurately the velocity and the trajectory of the public mood and continued to believe that their implementation of glasnost and perestroika would reform the system. As Gorbachev has noted, “We talked not about revolution, but about improving the system. Then we believed in such a possibility.”67
Moreover, in addition to the problems of instituting a more open and democratic system, economic stagnation and political paralysis prevented Gorbachev from building a more viable system. In fact, the problems confronting Gorbachev necessitated a complete ideological, cultural, and institutional overhaul, which neither he nor his hard-line Communist colleagues would countenance. The events rapidly unfolding across the Soviet bloc made it obvious that the existing institutional mechanisms could not accommodate transformations of such magnitude and could not absorb the shocks of further economic and political disorder. The Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in 1986 and the secrecy imposed by the Communist leadership and bureaucracies regarding the catastrophe
190 |
The History of Armenia |
amplified the urgent need for liberalization at all levels and spheres of government. Thus, a number of closely intertwined factors led to the crisis in the Soviet Union, including economic stagnation, political atrophy, and secessionist movements in the republics.68
The growing secessionist movements represented an integral part of the various social and psychological consequencs of the hardship endured as a result of the economic stagnation and of the civil crisis experienced as a result of political atrophy. In Soviet Armenia, while some Armenians called for a declaration of independence, the ruling Communist elite remained hesitant at best. The Armenian National Movement (Hayots Hamazgayin Sharzhum) led the opposition to the Soviet regime. Headed by such intellectuals as Levon Ter Petrosyan engaged in the Karabagh movement, the Armenian National Movement, initially known as the Pan-Armenian National Movement, sought to represent all Armenian interests, with particular attention to the crisis unfolding in Karabagh. Indeed, beginning in 1988 and for the next two years, events in that Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan became closely intertwined with developments in Armenia proper.
Prior to the escalation of the conflict in Karabagh, in 1987 Armenian political and intellectual leaders petitioned the Kremlin for the annexation of the region, but after failed appeals, Armenians in Stepanakert and Erevan took their cause to the streets. Armenians in Karabagh numbered about 145,450, or 76.9 percent of the population, while Azerbaijanis numbered 40,668 (21.5 percent). Years of discrimination and repression in the dual structures of Soviet and Azerbaijani control, coupled with economic stagnation, had left the Armenians miserable and hopeless.69 On February 20, 1988, the Soviet of People’s Deputies of Karabagh voted in favor of reunification with Armenia, and in doing so it in effect nullified the decision rendered under Stalin on July 5, 1921.70 The vote was followed by mass demonstrations in Erevan during the next week, when in successive decisions first Demirchyan, the head of the Communist Party in Armenia, and then the Kremlin vetoed the February 20 decision.71 The Communist leadership in Moscow, according to former Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, considered the Karabagh Committee as a manifestation of “nationalist extremism” that radicalized the opposition toward the Kremlin.72 On February 21 Azerbaijanis attacked Armenians in the town of Gadrut in Karabagh. No sooner had Gorbachev calmed the two sides with promises for negotiations than on February 28 a pogrom was launched against the Armenian inhabitants in the Azerbaijani cities of Sumgait, Baladzhary, and Kirovabad.73 After three days of mass murder, which claimed the lives of thirty people, the Soviet military intervened to put an end to the bloodshed. During the pogrom, in one instance as an Azerbaijani mob rushed through the streets, an Armenian woman attempted to escape but was “chased down by a gang wielding bicycle chains, knives, and hatchets.
The Leninist-Stalinist Legacy |
191 |
The Azerbaijanis came, all dressed in black . . . . They went through every building, looking for Armenians and shouting slogans—‘Death to Armenians,’ ‘We’ll annihilate all the Armenians. Get them out of here.’”74 While not all Azerbaijanis supported such violence and some even protected their Armenian neighbors, the collective historical memories of the genocide colored the Armenian perception of the massacres as a repeat of the bloodshed and suffering their parents and grandparents had experienced at the hands of the Turks in the Ottoman empire. The local Azerbaijani police participated in the looting and murder, while firefighters and ambulances refused to lend assistance to the Armenian families.75
The Kremlin initially claimed to pursue a balanced approach to the crisis but failed to act immediately. The declaration in late March 1988 by the Politburo in Moscow that the Karabagh Committee acted illegally, on the one hand, and the policy directive by Politburo member Yegor Ligachev rejecting calls for boundary reforms, on the other, only fueled further resentment and hostilities in Armenia and Karabagh, leading to mass demonstrations demanding their unification. Communist Party leaders in Moscow during the preceding three years had received 500 letters from Armenians expressing their discontent regarding conditions in Karabagh, but the Kremlin considered the Karabagh question as potentially triggering a “domino” effect, with unpalatable ramifications across the Soviet Union. Beginning in May 1988, the Karabagh Committee in Erevan and the Krunk (Crane) Committee in Stepanakert led the popular movement for greater autonomy from Moscow. (The Karabagh Committee included Levon Ter Petrosyan, Vazgen Manukyan, Ashot Manucharyan, and other intellectuals and activists.)76 On May 28, 1988, on the seventieth anniversary of the independence of the first republic in 1918, the Association for National Self-Determination organized a mass rally, when about 50,000 people waved the banned tricolor of the 1918 republic and demanded official recognition of the day as a national holiday.77 Gorbachev commented at a Politburo meeting in early July 1988 that “reviewing boundaries is unrealistic; that would mean going down a disastrous path, and not only in these regions.”78 A few days later, on July 19, he noted that in the case of the clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis “passions are to some extent running out of control. There appear slogans of anti-socialist, antiSoviet, and anti-Russian character.”79
Matters deteriorated further when the Nineteenth Party Conference, mired in accusations of abuses of power in the selection of delegates, failed to offer a workable alternative or a solution to the Karabagh conflict. Armenian protests at the Zvartnots airport near Erevan escalated into a brief armed clash with the Soviet military. While anti-Soviet sentiments heightened, the Karabagh Committee held a mass demonstration in September explicitly demanding independence. It intended to pressure the