1The Communist Party and the Soviet system

How the Party ruled. After 1917 the Communist Party became the state. Article 6 of the 1977 Constitution called it "the leading and guiding force of Soviet society". At the top sat the General Secretary, the Politburo and the Secretariat; below them the Central Committee of some 300 members, and Party committees in every republic, city and factory. Democratic centralism meant that once the leadership decided, everyone obeyed. The nomenklatura system meant that every important post, from factory director to newspaper editor, was filled from Party lists. The state's own institutions, the government (the Council of Ministers), the soviets (councils) and the courts, carried out Party decisions. The KGB watched society and the Gosplan planned the economy. In 1986 the Party had about 19 million members, around one adult in ten, and joining was the road to a career.

Brezhnev and the "years of stagnation". Leonid Brezhnev led from 1964 to 1982. He offered stability: his colleagues kept their posts and the living standard rose slowly. Critics later called his years zastoi, "stagnation". By the early 1980s the leadership was old (the Politburo's members were mostly in their seventies), corruption was widespread (the cotton scandal in Uzbekistan involved Party officials and Brezhnev's own relatives were linked to scandals), and the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan had become a costly war with no end. When Brezhnev died in November 1982 the Party picked Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB, who started a campaign for discipline and against corruption but was ill and died in February 1984. His successor Konstantin Chernenko was already old and ill and died in March 1985. Three funerals in under three years showed a leadership that had run out of men.

Gorbachev's start. On 11 March 1985 the Politburo chose Mikhail Gorbachev, aged 54, the youngest member. He was a lawyer from Stavropol, a protégé of Andropov, and a believer in socialism who thought it could be run better. In his first two years:

• He replaced the old guard: Andrei Gromyko was moved to the largely ceremonial presidency, Eduard Shevardnadze became foreign minister (July 1985), Nikolai Ryzhkov prime minister (1985), Boris Yeltsin was brought from Sverdlovsk to run the Party in Moscow (December 1985), and Aleksandr Yakovlev, the reformers' chief thinker, was promoted.
• His first slogan was uskoreniye, "acceleration": more investment in machine-building and a campaign for discipline, including an anti-alcohol campaign (May 1985), which cost the state a large share of its revenue from vodka and produced sugar shortages and home-brew.
• At the 27th Party Congress (February–March 1986) he spoke of the need for perestroika, "radical reform".
• After the Chernobyl explosion (26 April 1986) the authorities kept quiet for days, and Gorbachev only spoke on television on 14 May. The cover-up made glasnost a necessity: he said later that Chernobyl was a turning point.
• By late 1986 political prisoners including Andrei Sakharov were being freed, and in January 1987 a plenum of the Central Committee talked of democratisation, with secret ballots and a choice of candidates inside the Party.

The Party as obstacle. The Party's machine, millions of officials whose jobs depended on the old way, was the force that Gorbachev needed to carry out reform and the force most likely to resist it. In October 1987 Boris Yeltsin told the Central Committee that reform was too slow and the leadership still lived on privilege; he was forced out of his Moscow post a month later and became a hero to those who thought Gorbachev was too cautious. From the other side, Yegor Ligachev, the second man in the Party, thought glasnost was going too far; in March 1988 a conservative chemistry teacher's letter in Sovetskaya Rossiya, "I cannot forsake my principles", became a rallying point for Party traditionalists. Gorbachev was caught between the two.

The Party gives power away. To get round the Party machine Gorbachev decided to build a power base outside it. The 19th Party Conference (June–July 1988) voted to separate Party from government and to create a new parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies. In March 1989 there were the first competitive elections since 1917: of 2,250 seats 750 were reserved for the Party and other bodies, but in the rest many leading Party figures were defeated, including the Leningrad Party chief. The Congress, televised live in May–June 1989, let millions watch their rulers criticised in public. In March 1990 it repealed Article 6 and elected Gorbachev President of the USSR, a post that gave him power not based on the Party. Having made the Party's monopoly a thing of the past, he had put in its place a new kind of government that he did not control.

The Party was both the cause and the victim. It caused the stagnation, because it controlled everything and could not be corrected. Gorbachev tried to correct it, and by doing so removed the one structure that held the 15 republics and the whole system together.

2Stagnation and the failure of economic reform

The system. The Soviet economy was centrally planned. Gosplan set output targets in five-year plans; prices were fixed by the state, not by supply and demand; nearly all industry and farmland belonged to the state or to collective farms. It had been good at building heavy industry and a vast army quickly in the 1930s and 1950s. It was bad at quality, at novelty and at giving workers a reason to be efficient: a factory was rewarded for meeting its target in tons or numbers, not for making something that people wanted.

The signs of stagnation by the early 1980s.

• Slowing growth. On Western estimates (the CIA's and others') annual growth fell from around 5% in the 1950s to about 2% by the late 1970s and early 1980s; Soviet statisticians themselves later admitted growth had been close to zero in the early 1980s.
• Shortages and queues. Shops lacked meat, soap, spare parts and decent clothing; much of daily life ran through queues, connections (blat) and a second economy of illegal trade.
• A heavy burden of arms. A very large part of industry worked for the military: on Western estimates defence took perhaps a sixth or more of national output, far more than in the USA.
• Weak agriculture. Despite huge investment the USSR had to import grain, a symbol of failure.
• Technology falling behind. The computer and information revolution in the West and in Japan was hardly reaching a society where copiers were kept locked up.
• Dependence on oil. Oil and gas sales brought in the hard currency used to buy grain and machinery. When the price of oil fell sharply in 1986 to about a third of its earlier level, the USSR lost a main source of income.

Earlier reform had failed. Kosygin's reform of 1965 gave enterprises a little more independence and faded after 1968 as the Party's leaders feared losing control. By the 1980s many Soviet economists wrote that the system had to change; a critical report from Novosibirsk in 1983 was passed round Gorbachev's circle.

Gorbachev's economic reforms, 1985–1990.

Why it failed. Gorbachev tried to give enterprises freedom without ending state prices, and so ended up with the worst of both systems.

• Wages rose faster than output, so people had more roubles but there was nothing to buy: shortages grew worse, and in 1989–90 many towns introduced rationing coupons for sugar, tea and soap.
• The budget deficit rose to close to a tenth of national output, with the government printing money to cover it, and hard-currency earnings fell with the oil price.
• The central planners lost control of enterprises before the market could replace them: supply chains broke, and republics began holding back goods for themselves.
• In July 1989 about 400,000 miners went on strike in Siberia, Ukraine and Vorkuta, demanding better supplies and pay, and showed that workers, supposedly the ruling class, no longer trusted the Party to look after them.
• In 1990 output began to fall.

By 1990 the reforms had made no one satisfied: the planners were angry at losing control, reformers at the half-measures, and the public at the empty shops. The economy became the weakest part of the case for the Party.

3Challenges to communism in Eastern Europe

The bloc. After 1945 the USSR set up communist governments in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. They were tied to Moscow by the Warsaw Pact (a military alliance) and Comecon (an economic one). The Brezhnev Doctrine, stated after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, claimed the right to intervene to save socialism anywhere in the bloc. Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland had each been shaken before: Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1980–81, when the independent trade union Solidarity reached 10 million members before General Jaruzelski imposed martial law in December 1981, which he said was to prevent a Soviet invasion.

New thinking. Gorbachev's foreign policy, "new thinking", gave up the idea that communism needed arms to survive. He was in a hurry to end the arms race, which the economy could not support, and to end the war in Afghanistan, from which the last Soviet troops left in February 1989. In his speech at the United Nations on 7 December 1988 he announced that the USSR would cut its forces by 500,000 and said that each country had a right to a "freedom of choice". In 1989 the Soviet foreign ministry spokesman joked that the Brezhnev Doctrine had been replaced by the "Sinatra Doctrine": the countries could do it their way.

1989: the bloc falls.

At the Malta summit (2–3 December 1989) Gorbachev and the American president George H. W. Bush spoke of the Cold War ending. In 1990 he accepted German reunification inside NATO (3 October 1990) in exchange for loans and promises. The Warsaw Pact's military structure was dissolved in March 1991 and Comecon in June 1991.

What it did to the USSR.

• The demonstration effect. If a communist party could be voted or marched out of power in Warsaw and Prague, why not in Vilnius or Moscow? Within months, in the Baltic republics, a human chain of around two million people stretched across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on 23 August 1989 (the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact), and Lithuania declared independence on 11 March 1990. A Soviet crackdown in Vilnius in January 1991 killed 14 people but did not reverse it.
• A lost security belt and a lost victory. Hard-liners in the Party and army saw the loss of countries conquered by the Red Army in 1945 as a betrayal; they would remember it in August 1991.
• Ending the cost, losing the tie. Cutting Soviet subsidies to Eastern Europe saved money but ended the trade system of Comecon, which hurt the Soviet economy too.
• A different idea of legitimacy. Gorbachev refused to use force in Eastern Europe, so he had given up the one argument that had always held the system together: that in the end the army would defend it.

4Why did it happen? The historians

The honest answer in a Paper 1 essay is usually a combination: structural problems made reform necessary, Gorbachev's choices decided what form it took, and Eastern Europe and the republics showed how fast control could slip. A source from 1985 and a source from 1990 are evidence of different moments: do not read the end into the beginning.