GLASNOST AND PERESTROÏKA

Brezhnev died in 1982, and was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, the powerful successor to the NKVD. Andropov succumbed to kidney failure in February 1984; the new head of the party was another member of the old guard, Konstantin Chernenko, who died a year later. In 1985 the younger generation of communists could no longer be put off; they elected fifty‑four‑year‑old Mikhail Gorbachev first secretary of the party. Gorbachev and his colleagues in the new leadership believed that fundamental change in domestic and foreign policy was long overdue.

Many of these people had come of age under Khrushchev and they sought, as he had, to make Soviet socialism succeed by reforming it. They began that process, as Alexander II had, by loosening controls on intellectuals and the communications media in order to encourage criticism of the status quo and thereby build support for reform. They called this process glasnost (openness). They also undertook a program of economic restructuring (perestroika) that included decentralization of economic management, experimentation with private ownership of small businesses, and encouragement of foreign investment.

There was resistance to reform from the very beginning, openly from conservative party leaders, more covertly from factory and collective farm managers, directors of scientific institutes, and many others whose encrusted power and privileges were threatened. Gorbachev headed a shifting coalition of party leaders; as they encountered resistance, they pushed for more democratization in hopes that mobilizing public support would increase the pressure on entrenched interests. Demonstrations and strikes were permitted. New political parties began to form. A fairly representative legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies, was elected in 1989.

At the same time, the government was pursuing a radically altered foreign policy. Gorbachev and foreign minister Edvard Shevardnadze negotiated disarmament treaties with the United States. In 1986 they began withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan, ending a bloody war that had begun when the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1979. Three years later, as political ferment spread in Eastern Europe, Soviet leaders made it clear to the unpopular communist governments of Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland that they were not going to deploy Soviet troops to prop them up. Poland was the first country to establish democratic government in 1989, the other Eastern Bloc countries quickly followed, and these developments emboldened independence movements within the Soviet Union itself. In March 1990 a newly elected legislature in Lithuania declared that republic’s independence. Kazimiera Prunskiene, the female prime minister of the breakaway government, wryly observed in May 1990, “Freedom, like a genie that’s been let out of the bottle, doesn’t necessarily want to listen to the dictates of the person who uncorked the bottle.”³⁹ Early the next year there were bloody confrontations between protesters and army troops in Vilnius and Riga.

Perhaps Gorbachev and his allies could have survived the upwelling public discontent had they improved the economy. They had been more cautious with economic changes than with political reforms and foreign policy, because they wanted to preserve socialist structures and because they feared the disruptions that would come from dismantling the centralized system. Their indecision made things worse. By the end of the 1980s shortages were growing and the gross national product was falling. For women, for all Soviet people, this meant ever longer lines, ever more hardship, and ever greater discontent with the politicians.

By 1991 the Kremlin leadership was split between those who thought they could manage the swelling pressures for change and those who wanted to curtail, if not reverse, the reforms already granted. This conflict built to a crisis in August, when a small group of conservatives in the Politburo ordered military units in Moscow to arrest the reformers. Most of the generals, reluctant to get involved in a coup, hesitated, and as they stalled, the parliament of the Russian republic, led by its popular president, Boris Yeltsin, forced the conspirators to back down. Gorbachev, who had been held captive in his vacation home in the Crimea, returned to Moscow, weakened by his association with the fallen conservatives. Less than a month later a new leadership, headed by Yeltsin, ordered the Communist Party to suspend operations and seized control of the party’s property. The leaders of the republics then rushed to declare independence. The process was completed in December 1991, when the presidents of the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian republics announced the abolition of the Soviet Union and its replacement by a loose confederation of independent states.

The difficulties of women’s lives were on Gorbachev’s agenda. He reaffirmed the importance of women’s domestic duties, and, like Khrushchev before him, criticized the double shift and pledged to improve social services. The new leadership also authorized the creation of still more social‑science study groups to consider women’s problems. It charged the Soviet Women’s Committee, an organization that represented the Soviet Union at international women’s meetings, to take over leadership of the zhensovety and discuss the woman question. Gorbachev also appointed a female party official, Alexandra Biriukova, to the Politburo, and he sought the advice of a female economist and sociologist, Tatiana Zaslavskaia.

TATIANA ZASLAVSKAIA (b. 1927)

Zaslavskaia had earned her doctorate in economics in Moscow in the 1950s and, from the 1960s onward, had worked in a research institute in Novosibirsk, Siberia, which was home to a group of reformist economists. In 1982, asked to brief Gorbachev, then a Politburo member specializing in agricultural policy, Zaslavskaia delivered a frank report on the hardships of peasant life and the failures of government policy. It was soon leaked to the press, and Zaslavskaia and her colleagues were reprimanded by the administrators of their institute. For his part, Gorbachev had been impressed, not offended, by the Novosibirsk economists’ critique, so when he became party secretary, he brought them to Moscow to design reforms.⁴⁰

Zaslavskaia quickly became a prominent advocate for democratizing the Soviet system. “It is not only impossible for top people to regulate everything from above but stupid of them to have insisted that they could,” she declared in 1987. She publicized perestroika at home and abroad through interviews, articles, and a book, The Second Soviet Revolution (1990). As the political struggle intensified, Zaslavskaia’s criticism sharpened. By 1991 she was denouncing the Communist Party for oppressing the working class.⁴¹

Zaslavskaia also argued passionately for the freeing of sociologists from ideological controls. To govern effectively, she argued, officials needed to understand how people felt and how society functioned, which they could only do if they consulted sociologists and pollsters who were free to tell them what they did not want to hear. To promote the development of such information, Gorbachev authorized the creation of the first national polling organization, the All‑Union Institute for the Study of Public Opinion, in 1987 and appointed Zaslavskaia its head. Conservatives pushed back with articles attacking her, but she managed to get the institute up and running. Soon public‑opinion polling was being done, for the first time in Soviet history.

After the Soviet Union ended, Zaslavskaia decided to go back to academe. “I am convinced that the personal qualities of a scientist and of a politician are diametrically opposite,” she said in 2005. “Politicians must be sly, dodgy, today say one thing and tomorrow contradict it. A scientist, on the contrary, must be straight, critical… but he will never succeed in politics, this is for sure.” She continued to call for reform in the years that followed and to defend her discipline from politicization.⁴²

WOMEN IN POLITICS

Zaslavskaia was one of a handful of professional women who rose to political prominence in the late 1980s. Another was Kazimiera Prunskiene, an economist and prime minister of Lithuania’s secessionist government. In Azerbaijan, Elmira Gafarova, a philologist, chaired that republic’s parliament. Zaslavskaia, Prunskiene, and Gafarova were the exceptions. As usual in women’s history, the personal successes of a few individuals did not weaken male control over politics. Sixteen percent of the people elected to the national Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989 were women, because the Communist Party leadership, true to its commitment to encourage women to speak up, had allotted some of the seats to women. Far smaller percentages of women served in the more democratically elected legislatures in the Soviet republics.⁴³

Women did participate in political life in the late 1980s, even though, as in 1917, most did not join political parties. They voted in large numbers for reform candidates; Boris Yeltsin, for example, claimed to have drawn much of his support from the women of Moscow. Women joined men in petitioning, demonstrating, and striking, as they had in 1917, and were active in the resistance to the coup attempted in August 1991.