Just as quickly, I became convinced that the Soviet revolution, for all its ugliness, had succeeded in transforming Russia into a modern, urbanized, industrial society. Most people I met were highly capable, sophisticated professionals — the products of an extraordinarily effective system of mass education. The central problem, which Gorbachev identified, was that the regime dictated all terms of their public lives. That doesn’t mean they lived in terror, as their parents had under Joseph Stalin. After being viciously clubbed with Kalashnikov rifle butts by Yeltsin’s police in 1993, my friend Boris would sometimes speak nostalgically of his Soviet-era incarceration, and even of his kgb interrogator, “with whom one could discuss things intelligently.”
People certainly had no fear of opening up in private, usually over lengthy, vodka-soaked meals at their kitchen tables. It was through many such boisterous yet often deeply philosophical discussions with friends that I learned just about everything I think I know about Russia, not least of which was that these people were perfectly capable of running their own lives and, by extension, their own country. Gorbachev’s message resonated with me because that’s exactly what he was saying, almost as though he was trying to rule the country from one of those kitchen tables.
My own dispatches to the Tribune were mostly stories about how well Gorbachev’s plan was working out. I travelled in cramped, smoke-filled Aeroflot jets across the Soviet Union, from Leningrad to Vladivostok, and everywhere found people waking up to new possibilities. The first miracle was the transformation of the Soviet media, which sprouted a full political spectrum almost from the moment Gorbachev began to relax censorship. Previously unheard-of political criticism and social investigation exposed the harrowing facts of Soviet history, most of which were easily found in any standard Western text on the ussr but were news to the Soviet public. “It was like sixty years of memory suddenly sprang into view. It was exhilarating,” says Sergei Strokan, then an intensely idealistic young reporter for Moskovskie Novosti, the flagship of perestroika. “People would start queuing at 6 a.m. to buy a copy of our paper.”
Gorbachev also moved to revive the existing Bolshevik system of legislatures at all levels, through open and competitive elections. In 1989, the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies was created, with one-third of its representatives chosen by the people. The body, scheduled to meet twice a year, pulled from its ranks a regular sitting parliament, the Supreme Soviet. I was thrilled to see a huge banner hanging across the Kremlin Wall with the old Bolshevik slogan “Vsya vlast Sovietam!” (“All power to the Soviets!”), which actually seemed to be coming true. The next year, a Russian congress (with its own Supreme Soviet) was elected entirely by popular mandate, and freely elected local soviets were springing up everywhere. Gorbachev bluntly told Communist Party functionaries that if they hoped to retain executive power, they’d have to get elected. I recall one particularly painful interview in Kaluga with a local party secretary, who sat white knuckled and red faced behind his desk, contemptuously ignoring my questions about his future plans, if any, to run for office.
Around this time, I also conducted two cross-Canada tours, to publicize the Tribune and my book of essays on Gorbachev’s reforms. Even in the West, perestroika seemed to be a magic formula that disintegrated old sectarian lines on the left. I found myself chatting with Trotskyists without quarrelling over Stalin, and ndpers quizzed me earnestly about the potential of socialism. Indeed, just about everyone I met was intrigued by the momentous changes overtaking the old ussr.
At the Toronto headquarters of the Communist Party of Canada, however, there was also some disquiet at the processes in the ussr that were aggressively reshaping the views of history and definitions of socialism party members had long defended. I held a couple of private meetings in the book-lined office of the party’s long-time leader, Bill Kashtan, a grizzled, Soviet-trained apparatchik of my uncle’s generation, who listened to my glowing reports of burgeoning people’s power with narrowed eyes.
Perhaps I was naive, but it isn’t as though I had failed to notice that the garden was crawling with snakes. I found highly organized, though democratically minded, nationalism in the Popular Fronts of the Soviet Baltics. Down in Uzbekistan, I was shocked to see women wearing the veil, discouraged since the 1920s, and even more so to hear a party satrap explain it to me as part of “perestroika’s new opening to Islam.” In the Caucasus, I encountered simmering ethnic hatreds. By loosening the grip of the Communist Party, Gorbachev had opened up possibilities, but these were taken very differently by peoples across the vast patchwork state that was the ussr.
Meanwhile, the Soviet economy was crashing. A lack of central planning had resulted in the foundering of industry, and massive shortages began to cripple life in the cities (e.g., those insufferable lineups at the shops). Gorbachev spoke in almost utopian terms of “workers’ democracy” — turning the factories over to elected councils — but attempts to implement it merely aggravated the chaos. The only part of the economy that worked was the “co-operatives,” basically private businesses, which quickly expanded beyond consumer services into manufacturing, banking, and farming. Most of my acquaintances, members of the educated elite, grew sick and tired of the lofty chatter in the “theatre of democracy,” increasingly at odds with the dreary realities of life, while exposure to the West and the example of rich co-operative owners stimulated dreams of becoming successful Western-style businesspeople.
Sometime in the spring of 1991, I realized how far they had taken this. I was invited to a garden party at the country home of Andrei Brezhnev, nephew of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, in Zhukovka, an elite dacha settlement outside Moscow. One of the guests, whom I’d known for years as a functionary of the Komsomol (the Young Communist League) rolled up in a shiny white Volvo and told me he was now president of an import-export firm. Another, whom I’d often dealt with as an official of the Tribune’s fraternal newspaper, the Soviet Communist Party organ Pravda, boasted that he’d just been hired at a private bank. A third, even more surprising because he was the son of renowned Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, leaned over the table and handed me a card that announced him as an “international business consultant.”
I poured out my confusion over a bottle of vodka with Vladimir Pozner, a fellow red diaper baby who’d laboured much of his life in the bowels of the Soviet propaganda system, and then achieved a brief perestroika-era stardom in the West, as a Soviet spokesman who spoke flawless, New York–accented English. We sat on the terrace of his dacha, eating and drinking by candlelight, thanks to one of the frequent power outages. “Socialism and the Soviet Union are probably finished,” he told me. “But we’re a democratic country now, and nobody will be able to roll that back.”
