Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (10 page)

reviving the dream

Andropov, who was seen as a vigorous leader, but after just three months at the helm, he became bedridden. By the autumn of 1983, his lungs and liver, on top of his kidneys, had ceased working.

Sick as he was, Andropov managed to put in place a new potential ruling team. Evidently seeing the uncorrupt, close-to-the-soil Gorbachev as the man who could ‘bear our hopes into the future’, Andropov instructed his protégé while he was still CC secretary for agriculture to assume responsibility for the entire economy.
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To back Gorbachev up, Andropov transferred Nikolai Ryzhkov from Gosplan to a newly revamped economics department within the CC Secretariat. Andropov also summoned Yegor Ligachev, a Gorbachev acquaintance, from western Siberia to take charge of the critical CC department for personnel. Ligachev, an acclaimed arm-twister, writes that he assumed ‘the unpleasant mission’ of appris-ing numerous officials of their enforced retirements, while Gorbachev informed those to be promoted.
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With Andropov having lost every bodily function except his mind, whispers of a Gorbachev succession brushed the corridors of power. In February 1984, Andropov fell into a coma and died.

Behind the scenes, Ustinov, Tikhonov, and Gromyko rallied around Chernenko, by then an invalid dying of emphysema. Gorbachev was crestfallen, but Chernenko tapped him to become number two and chair the Secretariat. At the politburo meeting to rubber stamp the recommendation, however, the 80-year-old Tikhonov 52

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pointedly asked if there were no other candidates. Someone else suggested they could all rotate. The 75-year-old Gromyko, appearing the conciliator, proposed that, since there was disagreement, the question should be postponed. Gorbachev was not allowed to move into Chernenko’s (and Suslov’s) old office, and was never confirmed as second secretary. He performed the duties anyway, including chairing politburo meetings when Chernenko became bedridden. Thus, despite the intrigues, the Andropov-assembled Gorbachev–Ligachev– Ryzhkov team remained in place. But the old guard held on, reduced—after the December 1984 death of Ustinov—to the triumvirate of Chernenko, Tikhonov, and Gromyko. The trio had a concealed escalator built so they could still ascend Lenin’s mausoleum for holiday parades.

‘We were ashamed of our state, of its half-dead leaders, of the encroaching senility,’ recalled Nikolai Leonov, then a top analyst of the post-war generation in the KGB, which since the 1970s had been preparing memoranda for an indifferent politburo on the widening technological gap with the West, increasing alcoholism at home (with attendant crime, low productivity, and birth defects), and the unsustainability of global adventurism.

Many a time we discussed these questions in a circle of the closest colleagues . . . We all sincerely and unshakeably believed in socialism as a higher and more humane system than capitalism. We were also convinced that all our troubles derived from the so-called subjective factor—the personal qualities 53

reviving the dream

of our leaders. We hoped and believed that a new, young, anointed generation of party and state leaders would come to power.
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The unavoidable generational shift

On 10 March 1985 at 7.20 p.m., Chernenko, after having been in a coma, died. First to be notified by the Kremlin doctor was Gorbachev, who instructed the apparat to convene a politburo meeting that same evening at 11:00. The man rumoured to be Gorbachev’s principal rival, Viktor Grishin, the head of the powerful Moscow city party committee and an intimate of Chernenko, learned of Chernenko’s death from Gorbachev. Provocatively, Gorbachev suggested to Grishin that the latter should chair Chernenko’s funeral commission. In the past, the funeral commission chair had always become the general secretary. Grishin demurred, proposing that Gorbachev be chair. The message was clear: Grishin did not have the forces to challenge Gorbachev. But at the politburo meeting itself, with top position finally within his grasp, Gorbachev brushed aside a motion by Grishin to be named funeral commission chairman. No one else was nominated. Strangely, no vote was taken.
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The succession seemed, that night, still up in the air. But it was not. As
de facto
Secretariat chief, Gorbachev assumed responsibility for arranging the funeral, the next day’s 54

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afternoon meeting of the politburo, and the same day’s follow-up plenary session of the CC; indeed, it was Gorbachev who had decided to call the initial politburo meeting. Together with Yegor Ligachev and KGB Chairman Viktor Chebrikov, Gorbachev worked at party HQ

until the wee small hours. Later that morning, 11 March, prior to the second politburo session, Gromyko suddenly telephoned Ligachev to indicate he would back Gorbachev. As was agreed, at the second politburo meeting Gromyko dramatically stood up, pre-empting the others, and, like a kingmaker, nominated Gorbachev for general secretary. Tikhonov seconded the nomination. Fifteen others tripped over each other to concur. At the CC

gathering that would formally vote on the politburo’s recommendation, Gromyko again stood up first, and his disclosure of the choice for Gorbachev drew resounding applause.

Could the outcome have turned out differently? Was there a succession struggle?

Back in 1978, when Andropov had contrived Gorbachev’s transfer into the inner circle, the next youngest CC

secretary was Chernenko, twenty years Gorbachev’s senior.

Inevitably, the gerontocrats began to die off: Suslov (1982), Brezhnev (1982), Andropov (1983), Ustinov (1984), and Chernenko (1985). In March 1985, the two surviving elder statesmen, Tikhonov and Gromyko, both entertained notions of their own candidacy.
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But, even if one had agreed to step aside for the other, age considerations would have dictated only another Chernenko-like 55

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interregnum. Slightly less senior men—notably the 70-year-old Grishin—had made no secret of their aspirations.

But Grishin was dogged by charges of corruption.
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His nomination of the 54-year-old Gorbachev to chair the funeral commission demonstrated that the latter held all the cards: the mantle of Andropov, the
de facto
director-ship of the crucial party Secretariat, the weighty logistical support of the KGB, and relative youth. Why, then, would Gorbachev not have leapt at Grishin’s motion the first night to become funeral commission chairman, settling the question immediately? It seems his ego was waiting on the purely formal blessing of the old guard, above all Gromyko.

In his memoirs Gorbachev does not even mention the supposedly decisive next morning phone call of support from Gromyko. What he does disclose is that the previous evening, twenty minutes prior to the politburo’s first meeting, he had arranged a secret
tête-à-tête
with Gromyko, but the senior figure remained noncommittal.
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Gromyko’s
‘waffling’ was the entire ‘succession struggle’
. In the two years following Andropov’s death, Gromyko had schemed to sustain his own impossible chances by joining forces with Tikhonov, who engaged in all manner of nasty tricks, such as blocking a confirmation vote of Gorbachev’s status as second secretary under Chernenko, and instigating a covert search for compromising material on Gorbachev’s days in Stavropol. But these desperate manœuvrings could have little effect, other than ruining Gorbachev’s nerves.

He was the lone representative of a younger generation in 56

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the politburo, and ultimately a generational change could not be avoided.

Unlike the septugenarians and octogenarians of the ever-narrowing inner circle, the former country bumpkin from Stavropol—the youngest Soviet leader since Stalin— would prove to be a tactical virtuoso. Even more unlike the men he replaced, Gorbachev would show himself to be resolutely committed to renewing socialist ideals. All this may make him appear highly unusual. But belief in a better socialism marked most ‘children’ of the party’s 1956

Twentieth Congress. Gorbachev’s beliefs, as well as his supreme self-confidence, were only deepened by first-hand experience of the men who had consolidated their power around the infirm Brezhnev (and then, one by one, filled urns in the Kremlin wall cemetery). Far from an aberration, Gorbachev was a quintessential product of the Soviet system, and a faithful representative of the system’s trajectory as it entered the second half of the 1980s. His cohort hailed him as the long-awaited ‘reformer’, a second Khrushchev. They were right. Belief in a humane socialism had re-emerged from within the system, and this time, in even more politically skilful hands, it would prove fatal.

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3

The drama of reform

I don’t understand how we can fight the Communist Party under the leadership of the Communist Party . . . I don’t understand why perestroika is being carried out by the same people who brought the country to the point where it needs perestroika.

(Mikhail Zadornov, Russian satirist, 1989) Liberalization and democratization are in essence counter-revolution.

(Leonid Brezhnev, May 1968, confidential politburo discussion)

‘At first, the personality of Mikhail Gorbachev aroused delight,’ wrote KGB General Vladimir Medvedev, Gorbachev’s chief bodyguard, and before that, one of Brezhnev’s. The voluble new general secretary, the only full politburo member at Brezhnev’s death to have completed a full course of study at a major university, showed himself to be a ‘volcano of energy’, added the bodyguard.

‘He worked until 1.00, 2.00 a.m., and when various 58

the drama of reform

documents were being prepared—and they were limitless, for congresses, plenums, meetings, and summits—he would go to bed after 3.00, and he always rose at 7.00 or 8.00.’
1
Just the fact that Gorbachev showed up at his office, rather than work out of the hospital, signalled a profound change. No more walking corpses waving from atop a mausoleum!

Political power in the Soviet system was hyper-centralized, and dictated not only what people could see on television or learn at school, but also what the economy produced or did not produce. The general secretary, if he so desired, could initiate measures affecting the lives of 285 million people. But he could not implement new policies alone. Gorbachev selected Yegor Ligachev, eleven years his senior, to be the unofficial number two and run the nerve centre CC Secretariat. He brought the Levia-than economic ministries under his watch by promoting Nikolai Ryzhkov to replace Tikhonov as head of government. Foreign policy was taken from Gromyko (after twenty-eight years) and given to Georgian party chief Eduard Shevardnadze, a one-time police official whose lack of diplomatic experience ensured Gorbachev a free hand.

Alexander Yakovlev, returned from a ten-year exile as ambassador to Canada, was made CC secretary for ideology (formally under Ligachev). This new inner circle, inherited from Andropov, continued to puzzle over the reformist generation dilemma: how to bridge the gap between socialism’s ideals and its disappointing realities, within the context of the superpower competition.

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the drama of reform

Technically, party discipline made all officials beholden to party pronouncements, but to generate ‘support’ and pre-empt possible foot-dragging in the CC, state ministries, regions, and republics, Gorbachev appealed directly to rank-and-file party members, the intelligentsia, and working people, through a campaign for openness (glasnost) in public life. After several televised trips around the country and abroad that showcased the energetic new general secretary, strict efforts to combat alcoholism, a nuclear accident at the Chernobyl power plant that radiated millions of people, the freeing of the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov from internal exile, the renewal of Jewish emigration, the shuffling of editors at key peri-odicals, and the appearance of a few previously banned films and novels, people began to see that the changes were serious. Andropov-style ‘discipline’ campaigns in factories, however, brought no positive results. A push for ‘acceleration’—intensive growth in select industrial branches, rather than the usual extensive growth—also fell flat. In early 1987, Gorbachev placed economic reform on the agenda of successive politburo meetings.

Following the ill-conceived anti-alcohol campaign, which drove production underground (thereby draining state coffers of major tax revenue) and aroused public ire, much care went into the 1987–8 economic reforms. Prime Minister Ryzhkov’s draft proposals, prepared by the planning bureaucracy, were criticized as too timid by politburo member Yakovlev, who cited the views of prominent academic economists. The general secretary, appearing to 60

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steer a middle course, shepherded through a series of far-reaching laws on enterprise ‘autonomy’, direct relations among firms, and small-scale service-sector ‘cooperatives’.

Top social scientists brought into the policymaking process had also singled out ‘social activism’ as the sine qua non of successful economic reform, and Gorbachev permitted the formation of ‘unofficial’ associations as well as the workplace election of managers. A democratized, re-energized Communist Party was supposed to lead the whole reform process. And facilitating overall success was a world campaign to transcend the superpower confrontation.

Soviet budget expenditures on the military, whose full details politburo member Gorbachev learned only after becoming general secretary, accounted for a stunning 20– 30 per cent of GDP. Initially, he allocated
more
money to defence, and sanctioned an offensive to break the stale-mate in the Afghanistan War. Some Soviet generals, whose top ranks Gorbachev had not appointed or changed, may have been tired of the war, but just as many were leery of disarmament talks with the US. Be that as it may, a good third of Gorbachev’s memoir is taken up with his goading not of the Soviet military establishment but of President Ronald Reagan (and after 1988, George Bush) into accepting steep reductions in nuclear arsenals, to ‘free up’