by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] Forty years ago, in May 1985, the recently elected General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev arrived in Leningrad. Judging by the Central Television reports that we watched on black-and-white and color "boxes", the trip to the cradle of the revolution began routinely. At Pulkovo Airport, Comrade Gorbachev was met by pioneers, as well as party and economic activists led by the First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee, Comrade Zaikov... And then something unexpected happened.
Having arrived in the city, the General Secretary began "communicating with the people" on the streets. The demonstrative democracy of the new leader and his ability to speak without a crib sheet were no longer a sensation. But many remembered this episode - his appearance in front of the people on Vosstaniya Square.
Then the impression arose that Gorbachev was not speaking with the “best people” specially selected by the Leningrad Regional Committee and the KGB Directorate for the city and region, but rather with genuinely random passers-by.
“We are now doing very serious work to develop a clear program and raise the pace of economic development in such a way as to accelerate the movement of the entire country, not just for the next five years, but for the remaining 15 years until the year 2000,” Gorbachev said, announcing the party’s recently adopted slogans of “acceleration” (the leading comrades would talk about perestroika and glasnost a little later).
"Stay close to the people, we will never let you down," a female voice rang out from the crowd. "You couldn't get any closer!" Gorbachev immediately responded. And everyone present laughed quite sincerely.
This caused, perhaps, no less of a shock than the anti-alcohol campaign that had begun a week earlier.
It was from this moment, shown on TV, that many counted the beginning of irreversible changes. No one knew what awaited the country in some five or six years, not to mention the year 2000.
"THE MAIN THING IS TO START!"
Forty years ago, in the spring of 1985, the author of these lines had just turned 18. When a new General Secretary was elected in Moscow, he had to be distracted from his studies and more interesting activities, whether he wanted to or not, and conduct political information sessions (and more than one) for his classmates at the Kharkov Polytechnic.
At that time, two events were on everyone's lips: the recent Central Committee plenum and the upcoming celebration of the 40th anniversary of Victory. The anniversary was, of course, more exciting. Everyone was waiting for the broadcast of the troops marching across Red Square, a very rare event. After all, the previous Victory Parade had been held in 1965, for the 30th anniversary. Post-war generations were preparing to honor veterans (the youngest of them were entering retirement age at that time).
The appearance of a new first person at the head of the party and the state was, of course, important news, but not "number one". People had already become accustomed to the fact that power in Moscow had changed once again during the previous "five years of lavish funerals", when Leonid Brezhnev, then Yuri Andropov and finally Konstantin Chernenko were sent off from the post of General Secretary and simultaneously from life.
And so, in March 1985, comrades from the Politburo, on the initiative of “Mr. No” Andrei Gromyko, put forward a new first person - against the background of the previous leaders, the very young (54 years old) and energetic Mikhail Sergeyevich.
What exactly Gorbachev talked about at what was commonly called the historic April plenum of the Central Committee and what I had to convey to my classmates, I now have to recall.
But it was clearly imprinted in my memory: it is not known what was a greater shock - the "fight against drunkenness and alcoholism" announced in May, or the General Secretary among the people, saying: "the main thing is to start!" with the emphasis on the first "a". And so it began, or, as he liked to repeat, "the process has begun!" - and it began with acceleration.
This term from a school physics course (even inveterate humanities students remembered the “acceleration of free fall”) migrated into everyday life, which really did feel like it was accelerating.
GUIDING AND DIRECTING EMPIRICISTS
But, by the way, it was not Mikhail Sergeyevich who came up with the idea of “accelerating development,” but Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, whose protégé Gorbachev was considered. On November 22, 1982, Andropov said at the same historic plenum, the first after his election to the post of General Secretary: “It is planned to accelerate the pace of economic development, to increase the absolute size of the growth of national income… ”
Chernenko, who replaced him briefly, also reported on the “intensification of the economy,” but this was somehow uncertain. Like everything else in the final year of stagnation, about which there was a joke: “After a long and protracted illness, without regaining consciousness, Comrade Chernenko began to perform the duties of General Secretary…”.
Those leaders of the "guiding and directing force of Soviet society" who still retained a clear mind understood that "somehow" and "something" had to be changed. The phrase attributed to Andropov has remained in the collective memory: "We still do not know the country in which we live." In fact, the head of the KGB, who became General Secretary, expressed himself (in 1983) even more curiously:
"To be honest, we still haven't studied the society in which we live and work to the proper extent, haven't fully uncovered its inherent laws, especially economic ones. That's why sometimes the party and the state are forced to act, so to speak, empirically, by a very irrational trial and error method." That's exactly how the leadership of the party and government headed by Gorbachev began to act - by trial and error. And we, those of that time, soon felt it.
In the same school physics course, we studied not only mechanics with its acceleration of free fall, but also optics with its law of refraction of light. And translated into layman's terms, it said: if those at the top decide to accelerate something, then expect consequences.
And the experience of Andropov's short rule made one recall the campaign to fight for labor discipline, when vigilantes and district police officers went to bathhouses and movie theaters during the day and asked everyone: "Why aren't you at work?" True, the raids then included a "bonus" in the form of vodka at 4.70 (under the late Brezhnev, the cheapest was 5.30). Everyone was impatiently waiting to see what, as Saltykov-Shchedrin said, "good nonsense" would happen this time.
OVERTAKE AGAIN
If we put aside memories and turn to dusty "historical decisions" - everything looked good on paper. There was no talk of political reforms (or they were not openly declared). But there was talk of accelerating progress along the socialist path based on the effective use of scientific and technological progress, activating the human factor and changing the planning procedure.
Gorbachev defined the intensification of the planned economy and the acceleration of scientific and technological progress as his main task.
First of all, it was about increasing the growth rate of industrial production and its renewal. The luminaries of economic science, headed by Academician Abel Aganbegyan (head of the Commission for the Study of Productive Forces and Natural Resources created in 1985 at the USSR Academy of Sciences) counted and counted: growth of 4% per year is what is needed. And at the same time, the introduction of new models corresponding to the world level. That is, not a leap forward, but a race on the heels of capitalist countries. Those who lived through Khrushchev's time immediately recalled the slogan "Catch up and overtake America!" and noticed that then there was Nikita Sergeevich, and now Mikhail is also Sergeevich.
OBJECTIVE REASONS
But what people did not expect was that not factories and plants would speed up, but prices for alcohol (more than one and a half times), queues for vodka would intensify - the sales time would be from 2:00 PM to 7:00 PM. There was a ditty about this: "At six in the morning the rooster crows, at eight - Pugacheva. The store is closed until two, the key is with Gorbachev!"
As an anti-bonus, the age for selling alcohol will be raised from 18 to 21.
The author of these lines was directly affected by this measure and had to celebrate his alcoholic majority twice. So it turned out that you had to join the army, you could get married, but you couldn't dare join the wine and vodka industry.
And the Soviet people learned a lot more on May 7, 1985, when the Central Committee issued a decree “On measures to overcome drunkenness and alcoholism” and the accompanying document from the government No. 410 “On measures to overcome drunkenness and alcoholism, and eradicate moonshining.”
But to be fair, this fight against the green serpent was not a manifestation of voluntarism in its purest form. There were objective reasons. The annual mortality rate in the Union by 1984 had increased to 1 million 650 thousand, with 1 million 525 thousand deaths in 1980. By the end of the 1970s, alcohol consumption had grown to a record level in Soviet history of 10.5 liters of pure alcohol per person, or one hundred bottles of vodka per average Soviet citizen. As they used to say then, the issue was pressing. But they began to solve it using the usual command-and-control methods.
And if it all came down to only tough measures like increasing disciplinary and administrative liability for drunkenness at work and on the streets... The fact that fruit and berry wines disappeared from sale upset, of course, many alcoholics, but rather removed the lowest-quality goods from retail sale, but the destruction of winemaking (30% of vineyards were destroyed) and a sharp reduction in vodka production (halved in three years) is a blow not to the liver, but to the state budget.
Of course, such drastic steps led to people using surrogates (from dichlorvos to denatured alcohol) or various kinds of medicine instead of cheap alcohol. And besides discontent, there was also popular humor. Gorbachev himself recalled that he was called the "mineral secretary" and the lines for vodka were called "Mishkin's tails". They also laughed at alcohol-free weddings, where vodka was hidden under the table, and at the temperance society, whose leadership included famous drinkers.
The people's favorite verse was a parody of the megahit of that time, "Komarovo": For a week until the second, We'll bury Gorbachev, Dig up Brezhnev - We'll start drinking as before.
As they used to say back then, "but there is good news too." The number of deaths in the first year of prohibition had already decreased by 12%, mainly due to able-bodied men. The birth rate after the required 9 months had increased by 8%. And overall, in 1986-1989, the USSR experienced a demographic mini-surge, and not only in the southern republics - by 10.4 million people in four years. Compared to the monstrous collapse of the 1990s, this is a more than optimistic result. But the clumsy (literally, if we recall the mass cutting of grape vines) fight against drunkenness obscured all the benefits of this fight and remained in the collective memory as another example of the despotism of the authorities.
"LIKE A FAIRY TALE"
But even the news of the destruction of vineyards from Moldavian Cricova to Krasnodar Anapa (Crimean Massandra was miraculously saved - saved by the personal intercession of the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR Vladimir Shcherbitsky ) - even this then almost did not undermine the optimistic mood that we spoke about at the beginning of the article.
The 290-million country from Tallinn to Kushka and from Uzhgorod to Vladivostok seriously expected something from the new (“he walks himself! he talks himself!”) Secretary General.
Workers want higher production standards, engineers want faster implementation of their inventions and rationalization proposals in production, enterprise managers want replacement of outdated equipment, collective farmers want more “chiefs” from the city to harvest, and the creative intelligentsia want shorter distances between manuscript and book, workshop and exhibition.
Almost everything that comes to mind about that time happened later. And films - new and taken off the shelves (the first of them was "Agony" by Elem Klimov ), and magazine publications, and man-made disasters, and interethnic tensions that shook the "Unbreakable Union". And the vacillations back and forth from the "fight against unearned income" to "individual labor activity" and cooperation. In general, the acceleration of not the economy, but the entire surrounding reality occurred - there were more events around, and they turned out to be, let's say, diverse. As the popular saying went (and got into perestroika cinema ): "We live like in a fairy tale - the further, the scarier."