Soviet Stalinism and secrecy: Gorbachev's revelations

Around a year ago, while reading the memoirs of Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the USSR and General Secretary of the CPSU, I came across a passage that left a profound impression on me:

Andropov and I were drawn even closer together in our work during his early months as General Secretary. I sensed his trust in me and his support. At the very end of 1982 he suggested meaningfully: 'You know what, Mikhail, don't limit your work to the agrarian sector. Try to look at other aspects.'

He fell silent and then added: 'In general terms, act as if you had to shoulder all the responsibility one day. I mean it.'

The first question we had to grapple with after Andropov's election concerned a decision which had been taken by the Politburo when Brezhnev was still alive, to increase prices for bread and cotton fabrics. Andropov asked Ryzhkov and me to examine the matter once more and to report our conclusions to him. Trying to understand the essence of the whole business, we asked for access to the budget, but Andropov simply laughed that off: 'Nothing doing! You're asking too much. The budget is off limits to you.'

I must say that many 'secrets' of the budget were so well kept that I found out about some of them only on the eve of my stepping down as President. (Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs, trans. Georges Peronansky and Tatjana Varsavsky, Doubleday, New York, October 1996, pp. 146-7)

Gorbachev’s striking revelations portray a profoundly bleak and thought-provoking picture of how the Soviet regime functioned -or, more accurately, failed to function. Let us list his disclosures one by one and take a closer look at each.

In this context, the first point to be made is this: the USSR was ruled by a regime so opaque that even members of the Politburo -the country’s highest political decision-making body- had no access to the state budget, the most fundamental piece of financial information. When two Politburo members requested to see the consolidated figures for revenue and expenditure, the General Secretary of the time bluntly refused with a curt “Nothing doing!” Even more remarkably, these very members had been asked to reconsider a highly sensitive decision [*] to increase the prices of essential goods such as bread and cotton textiles—yet they were being kept entirely in the dark about the financial context behind it.

Ironically, the very same General Secretary who denied Gorbachev access to the budget figures was whispering in his ear that he should begin preparing to take over the post himself.

Indeed, around two and a half years after this astonishing episode, in March 1985, Gorbachev -the very man who had once been denied access to the consolidated budget- rose to the highest position in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, becoming General Secretary, just as Andropov had predicted. (That same year, Ryzhkov was appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers.) Yet even Gorbachev, who now wielded supreme authority -first as Party leader and later as President of the state- would only gain full insight into the meticulously guarded budgetary "secrets" in 1990 or 1991, by which point the USSR was already in irreversible decline. Notably, Gorbachev refrains from specifying the exact year.

Andropov and Gorbachev, side by side. Andropov died of kidney failure at the age of 70, not long after this photograph was taken. Not a single report about his illness appeared in the Soviet press.

Yet the problem ran far deeper than the excessive secrecy surrounding the budget or the thick veil drawn over other crucial data. Much of the information -whether kept classified, selectively disclosed, or officially presented to domestic and international audiences alike- was manipulated, incomplete, misleading, and therefore ultimately unreliable.

But what of the Soviet working class and the other sections of the labouring population—those officially proclaimed to be the true bearers of power? What role were they able to play in this dystopian regime, where all avenues for political participation had been systematically sealed off? The harsh truth is this: Stalinism had politically lobotomised them long before. Indeed, without this calculated incapacitation, the rapid restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev’s leadership would scarcely have been possible.

[*] In 1962, in the Soviet city of Novocherkassk, a 30–35% cut in workers’ wages, combined with a 35% rise in the prices of essential foodstuffs such as meat and dairy, sparked protests amidst deepening economic hardship. During the demonstrations, Soviet security forces opened fire on unarmed civilians, killing 26 and injuring 87. This uprising served as a sobering lesson for the Stalinist regime, prompting the authorities to adopt a far more cautious approach to food price increases. The Novocherkassk massacre—an emblematic instance of Stalinist secrecy—was concealed from both the Soviet public and the outside world for thirty years, only coming to light after the collapse of the USSR.