Down with Big Brother (23 page)

Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes came as a huge shock to Gorbachev, who had been brought up to revere “the Father of the Peoples.” But it also enabled him to bring his political ideals into line with the reality he saw around him. Now, once again, he had something to believe in. If the Communist Party could succeed in ridding itself of the “Stalinist filth,” it would lead the country to the promised utopia.

Gorbachev was a delegate to the Twenty-second Communist Party Congress in 1961 that voted to remove Stalin’s body from the mausoleum in Red Square, where it had lain alongside Lenin’s. Held in the new Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin, the congress was infused with a spirit of optimism that reflected the mood of the times. Khrushchev had just defeated a Stalinist
clique in the Politburo, led by former Foreign Minister Molotov. The Russians had beaten the Americans into space; one of the delegates to the congress was Yuri Gagarin. Russia was still a poor and backward society, but it was making rapid strides in all areas. Economic growth rates were high. Internationally, colonial empires were falling apart. Imperialism was in obvious retreat. The faithful gathered in the Kremlin had no difficulty believing Khrushchev when he assured them the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in per capita production by 1970 and achieve full communism by 1980.

The hopes of the
shestidesyatniki
generation received a shattering blow in August 1968, when Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia to crush Dubĉek’s experiment in “socialism with a human face.” The invasion set the cause of reform back by a generation not only in Eastern Europe but also in the Soviet Union, where there was an abrupt shift back to neo-Stalinist policies. Gorbachev visited Czechoslovakia a year after the invasion, as a member of a Soviet Communist Party delegation that also included Ligachev. It was an uncomfortable, disquieting experience for him. “When we went into factories, nobody wanted to talk to us,” he later recalled. “The workers did not reply to our greetings, they demonstratively turned away. It was an unpleasant sensation.”
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Gorbachev kept his feelings under tight control. It was at this point that his political career took off, thanks in large measure to his friendship with Dmitri Kulakov, a former Stavropol Communist Party chief, who was the Politburo member for agriculture.
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Other powerful patrons were Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Suslov.

T
HE SHESTIDESYATNIKI INHERITED
from Khrushchev a conviction that the Communist Party could be cleansed of its impurities and lead the masses to a better life. It was this belief that sustained them during the long years of stagnation, when the world’s largest country seemed to be drifting aimlessly. When Gorbachev told Raisa on the eve of his election as
gensek
that “there has to be change,” the last thing he had in mind was the kind of revolutionary change that actually took place. In a speech to Communist Party activists less than three months previously, he had spoken of the need for a technological revolution that would allow the Soviet Union “to enter the new millennium as a great and flourishing state.”
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He wanted to strengthen the Communist system, not to bury it. It was to take him almost eight years to acknowledge publicly that this hope had rested on an “illusion.”

“We were like Khrushchev. We wanted to improve the system, to give it more oxygen, a second breath,” Gorbachev recalled in 1993, two years after the failed Communist coup. “When I felt that the post of
gensek
would be offered to me, I racked my brains about what to do. I knew what was wrong with the country. We couldn’t just go on as before. There was already a big budget deficit; national income was falling; our machinery was obsolete; our technology was outdated; there were no goods in the shops; oil production was declining. And what did we have to export? Only oil and vodka. I saw all this very clearly. We understood that there had to be reforms, that more freedom should be given to producers, to the regions. We knew that it was necessary to free society of many restrictions. We thought we could do all this within the framework of the existing system.”
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The goal that Gorbachev set himself was without precedent in Russian history. Other Russian rulers—Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Stalin, to name but a few—had attempted to jolt Russia out of its backwardness and catch up with the West. But all had relied on the coercive power of a centralized state to mobilize the masses. The whip and the executioner’s block were the instruments of choice for Russian reformers. Gorbachev and his allies understood that the repressive tradition was a large part of the problem; a technological revolution could not be carried out by an alienated, apathetic workforce. Russia’s new leader wanted to realize the “immense potential of socialism” by releasing the energies of individual human beings.

Gorbachev knew that his revolution would have to start from above. In contrast with a country like Poland, with its long history of struggle against totalitarian rule, Soviet society lacked an independent voice. But the latest successor to Lenin and Stalin realized very quickly that the revolution would have to be continued from below. Otherwise it would be smothered by the army of bureaucrats, just as Khrushchev’s thaw had been smothered.

THE KREMLIN
March 14, 1985

I
N ORDER TO IMPRESS
their foreign guests with the majesty and might of holy Russia, the tsars ordered a temple of military glory to be built in the heart of the Kremlin. Constructed from the finest marble and parquet, the two-hundred-foot-long room was known as St. George’s Hall, after the highest military decoration that imperial Russia could bestow. The white and gold walls bore lists of Russian military conquests, from Poland to Alaska, the coats of arms of provinces that had been absorbed into the empire, and the names of the commanders who had defeated Napoleon.

The Communists had continued the tsarist tradition of marking great occasions with splendid banquets in St. George’s Hall. It was here that Stalin feted the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 and here that Khrushchev welcomed Gagarin on his return home from man’s first journey into space. It was here too that Kremlin receptions were held following the funerals of general secretaries and world leaders formed their first impressions of the new masters of a country that stretched across eleven time zones and possessed more than thirty-five thousand nuclear missiles.

The initial assessment of most of the foreign guests was that Gorbachev would make a formidable opponent. The new
gensek
appeared in the hall flanked by his seventy-nine-year-old prime minister and his seventy-five-year-old
foreign minister. In addition to being younger and more energetic than these men, he had a much more engaging personal style. He mingled easily with the guests and had a Western politician’s way of looking his interlocutor sincerely in the eye. But he seemed to be cut from essentially the same ideological cloth as the men by his side. Most of the foreigners who met with him that day concluded that Gorbachev’s emergence as Soviet leader amounted to little more than a face-lift for a totalitarian state.

The sense of Western unease was expressed by the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose country would benefit most dramatically from the policies of the new Soviet leader. He later compared Gorbachev’s public relations skills with those of the Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels. East European politicians were equally skeptical. They were unimpressed when Gorbachev told them that the Kremlin would respect the “sovereignty” and “independence” of the socialist camp. “Brezhnev used to use very similar words. It didn’t mean very much at the time,” recalled Wojciech Jaruzelski, after the empire had collapsed.
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Gorbachev told the Polish leader that any “attempt to undermine the socialist order” in Eastern Europe would be completely unacceptable. There could be no relegalization of Solidarity.

The American delegation, led by George Bush, was ushered into a nearby room for an eighty-five-minute private audience with Gorbachev. The vice president was weary of Kremlin funerals: “You die, we fly” had become the unofficial motto of the Bush entourage. This was the third time in forty months that he had watched the Byzantine farewells in Red Square. After his return to Washington he described Gorbachev as an “impressive idea salesman” but made it clear that he expected little change in basic Kremlin policies. The shift was one of style, rather than substance. Five weeks later the American ambassador to Moscow, Arthur Hartman, flew to Washington to deliver an initial progress report on Gorbachev to Ronald Reagan. “Hartman confirms what I believe,” the president noted in his diary, “that Gorbachev will be as tough as any of their leaders. If he wasn’t a confirmed ideologue, he would never have been chosen by the Politburo.”
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Perhaps the most perceptive comment about the new Soviet leader came from Margaret Thatcher. Gorbachev had visited London three months earlier and had impressed the British prime minister with his agile mind and willingness to talk about any subject under the sun. “We can do business with Mr. Gorbachev,” she had declared then. They shared some similar traits, notably a supreme self-confidence and a restless desire for change.
Unlike many Western leaders, Thatcher realized that Gorbachev was sincere in his desire to reform the Communist system, but she doubted he would be successful. “Gorbachev thinks that there are problems with the way the system works,” she told George Shultz, the American secretary of state. “He thinks he can make changes to make it work better. He doesn’t understand that the system is the problem.”
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NIZHNEVARTOVSK
September 4, 1985

T
HE SCALE OF THE TASK
confronting Gorbachev soon became evident. Within months of his election the Soviet Union received another economic jolt: For the first time in many years oil production had begun to decline. The fall received little attention in the West, where people were more interested in the personality of the new leader, but it was destined to shape the whole course of Gorbachev’s reform effort. His ambitious industrial modernization schemes depended on large-scale investment. If the oil boom turned into a bust, none of this would be possible. His perestroika reform movement, at least as originally conceived, was doomed to fail.

The discovery of vast oil reserves in western Siberia in the late sixties had given the economy and the regime a new lease on life. The oil came on stream at a particularly fortunate time for Brezhnev and his colleagues. The Stalinist command-and-administer system had ceased to work effectively but could not be jettisoned without undermining the foundations of the Communist state. Scared by the Prague Spring, Soviet leaders were opposed to anything that smacked of free market economics. Thanks to the windfall gains from oil exports, economic reform could be postponed almost indefinitely. Equally fortunately the boom coincided with a severe energy crisis in the West, caused by the explosion of oil prices in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Soviet propagandists seized on pictures of angry motorists besieging
gas stations in America and Western Europe as evidence of the terminal bankruptcy of capitalism. Seen through their eyes, the energy crisis was a purely capitalist phenomenon that could not happen in a “planned” economy.

The oil bonanza had allowed the Kremlin to finance grain imports, service its rising foreign debt, and bankroll its Third World allies. Soviet petrodollars had covered the costs of the war in Afghanistan, the stationing of Cuban troops in Angola and Ethiopia, and the salaries of more than 150,000 technical advisers in seventy-six countries. In the decade that followed the first oil shock, the Soviet Union earned some three hundred billion dollars from oil exports to the West.
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Huge as this figure may seem, it represented only a small slice of the pie. Roughly 75 percent of Soviet oil production was reserved for domestic consumption. A further 10 to 15 percent was earmarked for client states. From Warsaw to Havana, from Hanoi to Managua, corrupt and inefficient Communist regimes were kept afloat by plentiful supplies of cheap Siberian energy. On the domestic market, oil cost even less: a few cents a gallon. As long as the oil kept flowing, factory managers had little incentive to change their ways.

“The oil money was a kind of drug,” said Stanislav Shatalin, a Soviet economist who later became an adviser to Gorbachev. “Like any drug, it created the illusion of strength, while destroying the body even more and making the disease even more fatal.”
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In retrospect, the energy crisis was a blessing in disguise for the West. By forcing factories to cut costs and introduce new energy-saving techniques, it had the effect of speeding up the technological revolution already under way in many Western countries. The Soviet Union, by contrast, wandered further into an economic fantasy land, where the laws of supply and demand were replaced by bureaucratic decree. Soviet managers became accustomed to apparently limitless supplies of cheap raw materials. By the mid-eighties the average factory was consuming two or three times as many raw materials as an American plant to make a vastly inferior product. When the energy crisis finally caught up with the Communist world, the impact was devastating.