Down with Big Brother (30 page)

“We’re going to put an end to all this,” Gorbachev pledged. “We have suffered great losses, and not only economic ones. There have been human victims, and there will be more. We have been damaged politically. All our work has been compromised. Our science and technology have been discredited as a result of what has happened.… From now on, what we do is going to be visible to our entire people and the whole world. We need full information.”

As the expanded Politburo meeting wore on, horrifying facts began to emerge about safety standards in the Soviet nuclear power industry. At Chernobyl alone there had been an average of twenty accidents a year. Most were attributable to design defects. “We were heading toward a major disaster,”
acknowledged Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzkhov. “If it hadn’t happened now, it could have taken place at any moment.”
¹²¹

The
gensek
was in no mood for excuses. When a deputy minister insisted that the reactor was structurally sound except for one small detail—the lack of a containment structure—he gave vent to his anger. “You astonish me. Everybody is saying that the reactor has shortcomings and is dangerous, but you are still defending the honor of the uniform.” The apparatchik was fired two weeks later, along with several other ministers and deputy ministers.

In public Gorbachev continued to defend the system that made such disasters possible. He placated the Politburo old guard by attacking the West for an “unrestrained anti-Soviet campaign” and insisted that the Soviet Union would continue with its ambitious nuclear power program. In private, however, he was radicalized by the traumatic experience of Chernobyl. In conversations with aides, he complained more and more frequently that perestroika was proceeding too slowly and would have to be accelerated. He still saw the Communist Party as the spearhead of his revolution, but there would clearly have to be a vast shakeup in its ranks before it could become an effective instrument of change. The party, like the nuclear industry, could no longer be answerable only to itself. It would have to submit to some form of outside control.
¹²²

His weapon in this battle was glasnost (openness). First and foremost, Gorbachev wanted more information for himself and the Politburo. But he also saw the need for more information for the general public, which would be his ally in his struggle to reform the party. In the weeks since Chernobyl, he had been bombarded by complaints from newspaper editors about the lack of glasnost.
¹²³
Designed to prevent panic, the ban on information had had precisely the opposite effect, in the view of the editors. Rumors spread by word of mouth. In Kiev, a city of 2.5 million people, ninety miles south of Chernobyl, panic-stricken residents had camped out at railway stations for days on end, storming departing trains. Everybody knew that Communist Party officials responsible for censoring the news media were evacuating their own families from the capital.

In response to these protests and the outcry in the West, the flow of information about Chernobyl gradually increased. Gorbachev also used the crisis as a pretext to appoint new editors to magazines and journals, such as
Ogonyok, Moscow News
, and
Novy Mir
, which quickly became standard-bearers for glasnost.

F
OR THOSE WHO DEALT
with Chernobyl, the disaster was a turning point in their lives and professional careers. For Marshal Akhromeyev, who sent tens of thousands of conscripts to clean the mess up, it was an event comparable to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Legasov, the nuclear scientist who committed suicide, compared Chernobyl with such epoch-making catastrophes as the destruction of Pompeii. For Prime Minister Ryzkhov, struggling to cope with collapsing oil prices and falling alcohol revenues, the disaster represented another blow to the nation’s finances. For Grigori Medvedev, a nuclear engineer who wrote the first detailed account in Russian of the disaster, Chernobyl marked “the final, spectacular collapse of a declining era.”
¹²⁴

The effect on Gorbachev was summed up by his foreign policy aide Anatoly Chernyayev. Chernobyl, he writes in his memoirs, was a “time bomb” that exploded on Gorbachev’s watch but had been ticking away for decades beneath the foundations of Soviet society.
¹²⁵
There would be many more such explosions. Gorbachev was fated to pay for the mistakes of his predecessors.

JALALABAD
September 25, 1986

W
HAT
R
UDYARD
K
IPLING CALLED
the Great Game had been played out in the inhospitable mountains around the Khyber Pass for more than two centuries. The object, according to the nineteenth-century British strategists who drew up the rules, was nothing less than “the domination of the world.”
¹²⁶
Successive British viceroys of India had nightmares of Russian troops pouring through the pass and achieving the age-old tsarist dream of a warm-water port on the shores of the Indian Ocean. To prevent this geopolitical nightmare from taking place, it was essential to control the northern approaches to the pass.

In the updated twentieth-century version of “the Game,” everything was reversed. The Kremlin gerontocrats were plagued by visions of an “imperialist” threat to their Central Asian republics, the soft underbelly of the Soviet empire. In order to forestall this threat, they had invaded Afghanistan only to encounter unexpectedly strong opposition from the descendants of the same tribesmen who had spent years fighting the British. Determined to make things difficult for the Russians, the “imperialists” secretly supplied the tribesmen with weapons and provided training bases on the southern side of the Khyber Pass. The Soviets responded by attempting to seal the border with Pakistan.

Like the British before them, the Soviets established a strong garrison in Jalalabad, halfway between the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the Pakistani border town of Peshawar. A brigade of two thousand elite
spetsnaz
(special assignment) troops was camped out around the airport. By intercepting rebel communications with mobile eavesdropping equipment, they were able to locate mujahedin caravans crossing over into Pakistan. Once a caravan had been pinpointed, a squadron of Mi-24 helicopter gunships would be dispatched to strafe the area with rockets and machine-gun fire. Paratroopers would arrive aboard Mi-8 transport helicopters, protected by the Mi-24S. After several hours of bombardment, a column of tanks, armored cars, and mortars would move in to finish the job.

Operation Curtain, as it was dubbed by the Soviets, was launched in April 1984. Inevitably there were setbacks as well as successes. Supported by the local population, the mujahedin possessed a superb intelligence network and were often able to turn the tables on their Soviet tormentors. But the results were sufficiently impressive to persuade Gorbachev to authorize an escalation in the war in the spring of 1985, shortly after he came to power.
¹²⁷
For the first time in six years the Soviets seemed to have a chance of winning “the Game”—provided, of course, that the “imperialists” did not succeed in turning one of their pawns into a queen.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
1986 a small band of mujahedin led by a Commander Ghaffar left a guerrilla training camp in Pakistan and crossed the Khyber Pass. They crawled undetected to within a mile of the Jalalabad airport. From a well-hidden position, on a small hill overlooking the airfield, Ghaffar’s men could observe Soviet soldiers moving around inside the perimeter fence. Soviet tanks and armored personnel carriers stood at each end of the runway. The mujahedin had split into three teams of three men each, deployed in a rough triangular formation, within shouting distance of one another. They had been waiting, crouched behind the bushes, for more than three hours now. Each team was equipped with one of the most sophisticated pieces of electronic gadgetry yet devised by the U.S. Army, the Stinger missile, a portable air defense system capable of downing an enemy aircraft from a distance of three miles.

In midafternoon, as the shadows were lengthening over the mountains, Ghaffar’s patience was finally rewarded. No fewer than eight Mi-24 helicopter gunships—the most hated weapon in the Soviet arsenal—were approaching for a landing. The commander gave a shout. The three marksmen hoisted the launchers onto their shoulders and trained the sights onto the
approaching Mi-24S, with their telltale glass-covered noses and rocket pods hanging down beneath the fuselage. With a flick of his left thumb, each marksman punched a button that instructed the missile’s electronic brain to sense the infrared heat being emitted from the helicopter engines. There was a series of loud pinging sounds, the signal that the missiles had locked on to their targets. Ghaffar shouted, “Fire,” and the marksmen pulled the triggers. Ecstatic chants of
Allah o Akbar
(God is great) rose into the air as the missiles whooshed into the sky at a speed of more than twelve hundred miles per hour.

Seconds later two of the helicopters burst into flames and plummeted to the ground. There was a wild scramble as the firing parties reloaded. Two more missiles were fired, downing another helicopter. The first five Stinger missiles ever fired in combat had resulted in three kills and two misses, a 60 percent success rate. The mujahedin were jubilant. An Afghan cameraman attempting to record the scene for the benefit of the spymasters in Peshawar was so excited that his film consisted mainly of blurred shots of sky, stony ground, and black smoke pouring from the wreckage.
¹²⁸

There was jubilation too in the White House and the Pentagon when news of the ambush reached Washington. The Stinger missile had become a well-publicized symbol of U.S. clandestine support for the Afghan rebels in their struggle against the Soviet invader. The “most overt covert operation in history,” somebody called it. Together with the decision to supply satellite intelligence and other high-tech American weaponry to the mujahedin, it helped change the course of the Afghan War.

From now on it would be much more difficult for the Soviets to conduct the kind of low strafing of rebel positions that had proved so effective in 1985 and early 1986. The scope of
spetsnaz
hunt-and-destroy missions was much reduced. Soviet pilots would change their operating procedures, flying at high altitude, beyond the range of the mujahedin. When they came in to land, they adopted a curious corkscrew technique, descending in a tight spiral and firing flares every few seconds to confuse the homing devices of the Stingers. The Soviet Defense Ministry was so taken aback by the new weaponry that it promised the title “Hero of the Soviet Union” to the first soldier to capture a Stinger from the mujahedin. The first batch of intact Stingers was delivered to Moscow in the fall of 1986.
¹²⁹

B
Y INVADING
A
FGHANISTAN
in December 1979, Brezhnev and his colleagues handed the West a diplomatic victory that had hitherto proved way beyond the reach, or even the imagination, of the smartest policy makers in
Washington, London, or Paris. The spectacle of Soviet aggression against a Muslim Third World country—one of the founding members of the non-aligned movement—brought the most unlikely political bedfellows together. In the space of a few months a remarkable anti-Soviet coalition had taken shape. It spanned the entire ideological spectrum: American capitalists and Chinese Communists, conservative Saudi princes and Iranian Islamic fundamentalists, Pakistani generals and European peaceniks. The only people left in Moscow’s camp were diehard Kremlin clients.

The Politburo was aware that there would be near-universal condemnation of its action. A few days after the invasion a prominent Moscow think tank warned Soviet leaders that they were up against “the united resources of the U.S., other NATO countries, China, Australia, the Islamic states and an army of Afghan insurgents.”
¹³⁰
Such warnings fell on deaf ears. Soviet leaders were convinced that the international hue and cry would soon die down, just as it had after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

In addition to howls of outrage, the invasion of Afghanistan caused an immediate toughening in Western policies toward Moscow. The American president, Jimmy Carter, reacted to Brezhnev’s adventure with the fury of a jilted suitor. He believed he had done his best to improve relations with the rival superpower, but his good intentions had been mistaken for weakness. He had been duped and betrayed by his would-be Soviet partners. He commented bitterly that he had learned more about the real nature of the Soviet Union in a few days than in the previous three years of his presidency. Describing the invasion as “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War,” he authorized a series of actions designed to punish the Soviets and bolster American defenses.
¹³¹
Publicly announced sanctions included a ban on high-technology exports to the Soviet Union, an embargo on grain sales, a delay in ratifying the SALT-2 arms treaty, and a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Privately Carter also approved covert arms supplies to the Afghan resistance and military consultations with China.
¹³²