Down with Big Brother (38 page)

Events in Estonia, and the other Baltic states, now moved with breathtaking speed. That summer hundreds of thousands of Estonians—out of a population of 1.5 million—took part in patriotic song festivals. The mass outpouring of national sentiment was dubbed “The Singing Revolution.” By October Estonian nationalists and reform-minded Communists had formed a mass political movement, or popular front, ostensibly to “support perestroika.” Niklus was chosen as one of the founding delegates to the Congress, taking his place alongside doctors and factory managers. Within weeks similar mass movements had been launched in the neighboring republics of Latvia and Lithuania. It soon became clear that the real goal of these “pro-Gorbachev” movements was the restoration of Baltic independence.
Once-reactionary Communist Party officials scrambled to lead the revolution or get left hopelessly behind. By November the hitherto pliant Estonian Parliament had declared what amounted to home rule and legalized private property.

T
HE HARD-LINERS IN
M
OSCOW
could scarcely contain their anger. The head of the KGB reported to the Politburo that “nationalistic forces” were consolidating their positions in the Baltic states, and the situation was getting out of hand. At Gorbachev’s suggestion, the Politburo voted to send Aleksandr Yakovlev on a fact-finding trip to Lithuania, to see what could be done to rein in the pro-independence groups. To the conservatives’ dismay, Yakovlev delivered a remarkably sanguine report, depicting events in the Baltic republics as totally in keeping with perestroika. People were drawing attention to social and economic grievances that had festered for decades and taking power into their own hands, he insisted. There was no cause for alarm.
²⁰⁵

The behind-the-scenes political crisis came to a head in late November in the Walnut Room of the Kremlin, the place where the inner leadership gathered prior to Politburo sessions. Ligachev and his allies complained that the country was falling apart. Estonia had taken the first step to real independence. Ethnic disturbances had broken out in the Caucasus, between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Crowds had set alight several Soviet tanks in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, and two Russian soldiers had been killed. Demonstrators had carried portraits of the ayatollah Khomeini through the streets.

“Where are we going?” asked Vorotnikov, the Politburo member who had praised Nina Andreyeva’s article.

“I said back in March that it is time to show our power, to restore order, to show these bums. How much can we tolerate?” said Ligachev. “Everything is falling apart. Discipline has broken down. The state is beginning to collapse.”
²⁰⁶

At first Gorbachev listened to Ligachev’s ranting with a slightly ironic expression on his face. According to his foreign policy adviser, Anatoly Chernyayev, his political intuition told him that the Baltic states would probably break away. He did not want this to happen, but he felt powerless to prevent it. Unlike the conservatives, he would not allow himself to abandon perestroika, which he regarded as his life’s work. He concluded that the best form of defense was attack.

“Why are you trying to frighten me all the time, Yegor? You keep on asking what this perestroika of ours has brought us? Where are we going? What’s happening with us? This does not scare me.”

Gorbachev felt politically stronger now than he had in March, during the Nina Andreyeva affair. Two of Ligachev’s allies, Gromyko and Solomentsev, had retired from the Politburo. Ligachev himself had been shunted aside. For the first time since his election as general secretary, in March 1985, Gorbachev threatened to resign.

“If you consider that we have chosen the wrong path, that I am doing something wrong, then let’s go next door.” He nodded in the direction of the Politburo Room, on the other side of the tall walnut doors. “I will resign. On the spot! And I won’t express a word of resentment. Choose who you want, and let him run things as best he can.”

Gorbachev got his way once again. But there was a price to be paid for his stubbornness. Politburo unanimity—the method by which the Communist Party had imposed its will on a recalcitrant nation for more than seventy years—was a thing of the past. By now the split in the leadership had become impossible to hide.

NEW YORK
December 7, 1988

T
HE PEASANT BOY
from Stavropol had come a long a way. Rarely in the thirty-three-year history of the United Nations had a visiting dignitary been accorded such a reception by the General Assembly. At the end of his address, presidents, foreign ministers, and ambassadors from 158 countries gave him a standing ovation. Mikhail Gorbachev sat in a thronelike white chair, as the applause of the world community echoed in his ears. For once the Soviet showman seemed nervous, as if overwhelmed by all the attention. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his mouth. Then, a little stiffly, he rose to his feet to acknowledge the applause.

During the course of his one-hour speech Gorbachev effectively abandoned seven decades of Bolshevik ideology. He renounced the Marxist-Leninist idea of a never-ending “class struggle,” substituting instead the “primacy of universal human values,” including individual rights that had long been denied by Moscow. He declared an end to the “Cold War” that had consumed the energies of two superpowers for as long as most Americans and Russians could remember. He insisted that the Soviet Union could no longer remain a “closed society,” isolated from the world economy. And he paved the way for the political liberation of Eastern Europe by pledging to respect the “freedom of choice” of other peoples and renouncing the use
of force in international relations. As a token of the Kremlin’s new intentions, he announced a unilateral reduction in the size of the armed forces by half a million men.
²⁰⁷

Normally jaded New Yorkers greeted the general secretary like a latter-day Messiah. The welcome exceeded all expectations. Gorbachev’s aides had warned him that New York was a cynical city, indifferent to the comings and goings of even the most distinguished foreign visitors, except when they tied up traffic.
²⁰⁸
The forty-five-car Soviet motorcade was greeted by cheers and smiling faces wherever it appeared.

There were chants of “Gorbie, Gorbie” and handmade placards hailing “the peacemaker.” His name was in lights on Broadway. W
ELCOME
, C
OMRADE
G
ENERAL
S
ECRETARY
G
ORBACHEV
, announced the electronic signboard in Times Square, flashing the Communist hammer and sickles like an advertisement for a soft drink. On Wall Street dealers tore themselves away from their computer screens to applaud the leader of world communism. In the media frenzy surrounding the visit, anyone touched, or spoken to, by Gorbachev shared in his reflected glory. “He was standing right here,” marveled elevator operator Gary Benaccio, still shaking his head as he told CBS how he had escorted the Soviet leader 107 stories to the top of the World Trade Center. “He looked like a regular tourist.”

The popular adulation had a double-edged effect. The cheering crowds left an indelible impression on everyone in the Soviet delegation, most notably the general secretary himself. Gorbachev had seduced the West, but the West had seduced him in its turn. The triumphant reception strengthened his conviction that perestroika was right and necessary, not just for the Soviet Union but for all humanity. He was no longer just another Soviet leader with a thick neck; he was a man who could change the world.

Foreign trips offered Gorbachev a respite from his growing domestic problems. On this occasion, however, the respite was short-lived. As the Soviet leader’s Zil sped away from the United Nations, he received a telephone call from Moscow over the scrambled Kremlin communications network. On the other end of the line was a very agitated Ryzkhov. There had just been a terrible earthquake in Armenia. Entire cities had been destroyed. There were thousands of victims. Gorbachev listened to the prime minister in grim silence as the crowds in the streets continued to chant his name. That evening a gloomy and dejected general secretary told his aides that he was cutting short his foreign tour and returning home.
²⁰⁹

YEREVAN
December 11, 1988

T
HERE COULD HARDLY HAVE BEEN
a greater contrast between the bright lights of Manhattan and the wrenching misery of Armenia. “In my entire life, I’ve never seen one-thousandth of the suffering I’ve seen here,” said Gorbachev, after picking his way through the rubble of Leninakan and Spitak.
²¹⁰
The grief-stricken survivors greeted him with indifference, even hostility. They wanted to know why high-rise apartment blocks had collapsed so easily, why scientists had been unable to predict the devastating tremors, why the rest of the country was slow in sending help.

Had the Armenian earthquake occurred in a Western country, it would have caused enormous damage and significant loss of life. But what would have been a manageable natural disaster in the West became an overwhelming man-made catastrophe in the Soviet Union. Shoddy construction practices and corruption among local officials caused the casualty toll to rise to the tens of thousands. Nearly half a million people were left without housing. Few buildings in the affected area had been constructed to withstand powerful tremors, despite the fact that earthquakes are commonplace in the Caucasus region. A subsequent investigation showed that steel rods that should have been used to reinforce concrete structures had been stolen and sold on the black market, leaving multistory apartment blocks as flimsy as matchboxes.

In the aftermath of the earthquake Soviet civil defense organizations proved hopelessly overstretched and ill equipped. Although they had the means to blow up the world and intimidate their neighbors in Europe and Asia, Soviet leaders were unable to organize an efficient relief effort in their own country. Troops were rushed to the area but were unable to provide assistance to the population because they lacked suitable equipment for removing the piles of rubble. In conditions of glasnost, it was impossible to conceal the inefficiency of the transportation system, the lack of decent medical care, the appalling housing conditions. Like Chernobyl, the Armenian earthquake became a metaphor for a sociopolitical system that was militarily powerful but economically crippled, technologically advanced but socially backward.

The abrupt transition from international triumph to domestic tragedy highlighted the challenge facing Gorbachev. Persuading Reagan and the American people to take a more benign view of the “evil empire” was easy compared with the awesome task of getting the Soviet Union back on its feet. The man who had been acclaimed as a miracle worker on the international stage seemed to have little to offer his own people except lectures and exhortations. In the West Gorbachev was applauded as the leader who had put an end to the Cold War and slashed the Soviet armed forces. At home his countrymen were beginning to refer to him as a
boltun
(chatterbox), a man of fine phrases devoid of practical meaning.

Nowhere had political support for Gorbachev plummeted so far, so fast as in Armenia, a small Christian nation that had traditionally looked to Russia for protection from the Turks. A year earlier the Armenians had looked up to Gorbachev as a hero. Thanks to glasnost, they had been permitted to give vent to a long-standing national grievance: Stalin’s decision to make the mountainous region of Karabakh part of Turkic Azerbaijan, against the wishes of its predominantly Armenian population. A series of huge demonstrations had taken place in the streets of Yerevan to demand self-determination for Karabakh. At first Gorbachev had seemed sympathetic to the Armenians. After watching a KGB tape of the rallies in February 1988, he told his Politburo colleagues that there was “nothing anti-Soviet” about the protests.
²¹¹
He was impressed that many of the demonstrators even carried his own portrait as they marched.

By December, however, Gorbachev’s views had radically changed. The upsurge of national feeling in Armenia had provoked a counterreaction in Azerbaijan. There had been anti-Armenian riots in Sumgait, an Azerbaijani town with a large Armenian minority. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians
and Azerbaijanis had been forced to flee from their homes. It was the first sign of a new, and ominous, political trend that would accompany the collapse of communism: ethnic cleansing.

The general secretary displayed his mounting political frustration at the end of his visit to Armenia. He used an interview with Soviet television about the earthquake to lash out at Armenian nationalists as “adventurists” and “political gamblers,” who were exploiting the misery of their people for their own ends. Shortly afterward he ordered the arrest of the leadership of the Karabakh committee, which had organized the rallies in Yerevan.

Something profound had happened in the Soviet Union in the two and a half years since Chernobyl. It was no longer just the “inanimate objects” that were revolting against Communist rule, in Adam Michnik’s phrase. In the Caucasus and the Baltic states the revolt had been joined by “animate objects.” Soon the wave of popular discontent would spread to the politically somnolent Slavic heartland of the Soviet Union. The “revolution from above” had become a “revolution from below.”

Gorbachev was no longer in control of his own revolution.