Before Gorbachev, Soviet security leader Andropov ‘wanted reforms’

Events 30 years ago in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991.

So far, there are many ways to see why the ‘fortress of socialism’ collapsed.

In addition to economic issues such as the long period of stagnation of Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev, the oil price crisis, the challenges of internal nationalism, the Afghan war … there is a lot of talk about the role of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Criticisms of Mr. Gorbachev, including various theorists in Vietnam, considered the young leader of the Soviet Union at the time either “naively believed that communism could redeem itself and be reformed”, or “knowingly betrayed communist ideology.”

In fact, later sources point to other important figures in the Soviet Union before Gorbachev who wanted to reform the Soviet system, and the reform trend they chose had brought Gorbachev to the throne.

Already in the middle of the Cold War, some renowned Soviet intellectuals, such as the academic Andrei Sakharov (1968), asked Soviet intellectuals to “live with conscience”, not to obey the ideology of the Communist Party.

In 1974, the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn again asked the system to distance the national interest from the socialist doctrine.

But even in the Soviet political system, high-ranking figures recognized the problem that the economic paradigm of planning and social control was problematic.

None other than the KGB security chief, former head of the Party Central Organizing Committee and later General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov (1914-1984), had a very early reformist mindset.

The Richter scale on “How the KGB Personage Reshaped Russia”, comparing Vladimir Putin with Yuri Andropov and praising the level of knowledge of the former KGB leader from the days of the powerful of the Soviet Union, at least from outside :

Andropov is a very educated, cultured and tough person who reads a lot. He is believed to have read everything dissidents in Russia read that the KGB banned from the public. He understood that communism would die without comprehensive reform. ”

According to James Rodgers, author of “Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin” (IB Tauris, 2020), a former BBC Moscow correspondent, as soon as he became general secretary in 1982, Andropov wanted to reform the system. economic system and Party apparatus in the Soviet Union.

Although Andropov’s name is seen as very ugly in Eastern Europe due to his leading role in suppressing the Budapest uprising in 1956 and because he held the KGB for many years, in fact, according to Richard Sakwa (The Soviet Collapse): Contradictions and neo-modernization, Journal of Eurasian Studies 01/2013) Yuri Andropov had a reputation for being an outspoken leader.

“Since the late 1950s, Yuri Andropov promoted a generation of more open-minded and critical figures in the Party when he took over the Central Cabinet from Nikita Khrushchev’s period.”

Andropov’s close team of collaborators includes Alexander Bovin, Yuri Shakhnazarov, Georgy Arbatov and Nikolai Shishlin.

They published seminars within the Party, seeking to broaden the framework of Leninist doctrine that the Soviet Union had pursued since its founding.

Unfortunately, in the Brezhnev era, internal reform initiatives were ordered to cease.

The economic reform preparations, which Andropov’s team compiled, resulted in a modest job, which was turned over to Prime Minister Andrei Kosygin, an economist, to begin implementation.

But in the 1960s, all those primitive reforms were abolished, and Mikhail Suslov, the leading Soviet Communist Party theorist, who played a key role in the overthrow of Khrushchev, brought Brezhnev to power. , did everything possible to stifle discussions to reform this Party.

It is noteworthy that Andropov himself, from internal affairs and security, and directly leading the repression of the Budapest uprising, encouraged the Soviet Union to study Hungary’s semi-private economic reforms since 1958, for the public. Private companies can operate.

Not only that, but later declassified documents also show that Andropov wanted the Soviet Union to adopt a Communist Party reform model.

It is not that he wants to abolish the Party, but that he is very interested in the European model of communism (Eurocommunism, the Marxist communist party that participates in the parliament of France, Italy and Greece).

As the head of the KGB’s spy activities in Europe, including Western Europe, Andropov has more information about the parties in the West than a normal leader in the Soviet Union.

According to the Russian writer Andrei Konchalovsky wrote about OpenDemocracy, in the 1980s it was not Gorbachev, but Andropov, the “main reformer” of the Soviet Union.

And James Rogers argued that the position of the security apparatus, which broadly targeted the entire Soviet Union, showed Andropov the true picture that the mistakes of the Soviet system were too great and needed urgent reforms to avoid collapse.

One of Andropov’s important decisions was to bring Gorbachev from a provincial official back to Moscow to fill important federal positions.

But Gorbachev was not the only one chosen by Andropov.

When he became the supreme leader of the Soviet Union in 1982, Andropov immediately invited Heydar Aliyev, the leader of Azerbaijan, to Moscow to be deputy prime minister in charge of economic reform.

Before that, encouraged by Andropov, Aliyev learned a Hungarian economic reform model for limited application in the Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan, including private public companies, product contracting.

This detail shows that some of the solutions of the Doi Moi movement in Vietnam or the ‘initiative’ to contract products were applied before by the Soviet Union, on a narrow scale.

As Vice President Sovmin (Council of Ministers), Aliyev was unable to do much before he became seriously ill.

According to Konchalovsky, it was only because Aliyev was unable to take on a major role that the Soviet leadership decided to allow the younger figure, Gorbachev (born 1931), to rise to the top, after Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko took office. they died each other.

Still, according to this author, Andropov met Gorbachev while on vacation, treating kidney disease in southern Russia.

Andropov brought Gorbachev from the post of party secretary in Stavropol to Moscow and introduced him to Brezhnev for assignment as secretary of the agricultural sector when Gorbachev was in his early 40s.

Later, however, Andropov did not believe that Gorbachev could occupy the highest position in the Soviet Union.

What today’s commentators are saying is that Gorbachev failed because he believed too much in reform.

When he came to power (1985), many other Russian leaders believed that Gorbachev’s reform program was launched and that countless slogans had been announced, no one believed them.

Unexpectedly, Gorbachev did the real thing and eliminated the role of the propaganda apparatus, allowing limited internal dialogue to seek political reforms.

He wanted to save communism in the Soviet Union, but Perestroika only highlighted its paradoxes and mistakes, and “killed communism,” writes the Hungarian-English historian Victor Sebestyen. in “Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire” (2009).

Gorbachev wanted to abolish the dogma that many generations of party members and Communist Party leaders had unconsciously repeated.

Given that Andropov died before Gorbachev, it cannot be known whether he is still pushing for slightly more aggressive internal reforms. Will Andropov do exactly what Gorbachev did?

In fact, Andropov had only done so little and the Soviet Union in the 1980s exposed many internal contradictions.

It is true that not only Andropov and many of the most important figures in the Soviet Union at that time knew very well that their political model was difficult to bear in the face of internal and external challenges.

It is now suggested that in fact the Soviet Union disintegrated due to being hit by the first wave of globalization in the late 20th century, with the advent of computers, the flow of information increased rapidly around the world, exchanging the goods they grow everywhere.

Another change in the world rigidified the model of planned economy and the way to control people’s minds uniformly, which the Moscow-style Communist Party cadres applied at that time were no longer appropriate.

The last Soviet leaders, whoever they are, are just victims of an outdated model and many of them no longer believe in the “superiority” of the Soviet Union after a long time. year of existence.

We invite you to read the next article about Alexander Yakovlev, the main Soviet theorist of the Gorbachev era, and also the man after the 1968 Czechoslovak event, he realized that the Soviet Union could not hold on to Eastern Europe forever.