Russia (46 page)

As for Romania, it continued to find occasion to defy Moscow. It was an effective way for leaders to advertise their patriotism to a population most of whom either resented Communists or were politically innocent. Unlike Czechoslovakia, Romania escaped punishment for stepping over Moscow’s line, but then it did not border a NATO state and it remained stable internally under the oppressive Ceausescu. It is curious, however, that after thirty years of Communism the economic pecking order of the East European countries was the same as it had been half a century, and indeed a century, earlier. The richest countries, in terms of average income per head, were still Czechoslovakia and East Germany; and the poorest were still Albania, Romania and Russia itself.

By 1970 the Soviet Union matched the United States in the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles deployed. The balance of nuclear power had reached the point of perfection. In these circumstances neither side wished to risk their use for fear of reprisal, and both now moved towards detente and to limiting the spread of nuclear weapons to other states. Anticipating this change in strategic circumstances, in 1969 both sides signed a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and talks began on Strategic Arms Limitation.
²⁹
Only China, jockeying for a better position in the race
for world power and trying to seize leadership of the Communist movement from the Soviet Union, objected vehemently both to detente and to the Brezhnev Doctrine, viewing them as breaches of Marxist principle. Ideological purity had only ever had brief tenure in the Kremlin. Indeed, reasons of state had long since tended to shape the ideological line that Moscow laid down.

Despite detente, however, competition between the Soviet Union and the USA continued. During the 1960s Moscow’s influence in Africa had waned. The ousting of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966 meant the loss of Ghana as a client; Soviet influence in the Middle East diminished sharply after Egypt’s defeat in the Six-Day War with Israel in 1967; and after Nasser died in 1970, Egypt ceased to be an ally. Yet Soviet influence in other regions grew. Concern about Washington’s courtship of Pakistan and fear of China prompted an intensification of relations with India. This culminated in a treaty of considerable strategic significance signed in 1971. It made port facilities available to Russian ships at Bombay, Goa, Cochin and the Andaman Islands, and opened up an air corridor for Soviet aircraft from Tajikistan in Central Asia down to the Bay of Bengal.
³⁰
The Soviet Union thus became a power in south Asia and the Indian Ocean.

At the same time Moscow was securing new allies on the very doorstep of its Marxist rival, China: North Korea and North Vietnam. It gave the latter significant economic and diplomatic support for its fight against the US-backed regime in South Vietnam, but gauged it carefully so as not to disrupt detente with Washington. But economic aid and a model of development that seemed more effective than market forces were not the only attractions that won new allies and friends. The Soviet Union represented an opposite ideological pole to the United States and, as such, exerted an attractive force around the world. So it was that not only Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique aligned with Moscow, but close ties were developed with the Chile of Salvador Allende.

Competition in some parts of the globe contrasted with detente in Germany, however. In 1970 Moscow granted recognition to the Federal Republic of Germany in response to friendly overtures from its leader, Willy Brandt — a development which helped to change the tone of East—West relations in central Europe from confrontation to co-operation. In Asia, however, as in Africa, competition remained the norm, and it was to become particularly fierce over Afghanistan. Russia had been anxious to secure a position there since the later nineteenth century, in order to insulate and secure her territories in Central Asia against attack and gain a lever in southern Asia. This interest was to be maintained. As early as 1927
Soviet engineers had begun work on a road through the Salang Pass over the high Panjshir range to link Samarkand and Dushanbe with Kabul, but the project had been thwarted by the Afghani revolt in the following year. Progress was resumed in the 1950s, when Moscow provided aid to develop the country’s communications infrastructure by building bridges, roads and an airport at Baghram in the east of the country, on the route to Kandahar. In this fashion the Soviet Union had built a dominant influence in Afghanistan and a strong position in the heights of Asia, with access to both friends and potential enemies to the south. The position was not yet impregnable, however. In September 1979 Hafizullah Amin was to stage a bloody coup in Kabul and prepared to switch sponsors. This prompted the Kremlin to order intervention. Soviet special forces stormed the presidential palace and, after heavy fighting took it, killing Amin in the process. A Communist, Babrak Karmal, became president, and Afghanistan changed its status from protege to satellite.
³¹

The Kremlin had been helped in the immediate post-war era by the prestige it had won in the Second World War, by the worldwide ramifications of the Communist Party, and by the effectiveness of its intelligence service. The Soviet spy network had succeeded in penetrating the secrets of the ‘Manhattan Project’ at an early stage, thanks to agents like Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May in Britain and Theodore Hall and David Greenglass in the United States. At the same time the celebrated and notorious ‘Cambridge Five’ (Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross) had penetrated the British Foreign Office and security agencies, including MI5, SIS and SOE. This had allowed them to convey essential information not only about the atom bomb, but about other weapons, codes and ciphers, and top-level political and military intelligence.
³²
The idealism which led so many brilliant young people to serve what they took to be the cause of Communism rather than their own countries was a major asset to Soviet intelligence. It gave the Kremlin significant advantages from the later 1940s, and was probably decisive in eliminating the scientific and technological gap between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers so quickly. Yet the Soviet Union was not devoid of native dynamism in these areas.

Apart from the occasional quack, like Stalin’s protege the geneticist Lysenko, it made use of many scientists who were leaders in their fields. They included the famous biochemist Aleksei Bakh, the ground-breaking physicist Petr Kapitsa, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, and the inventor of the best small arms in the world, Mikhail Kalashnikov. The roots of
the first-rate Soviet scientific establishment stretched back through two centuries of Academy of Science traditions to the Enlightenment, and its fruits were to include the development not only of the first space ships and astronauts but of the first safe heart drug. But for a strange accident at a Paris air show, when another aircraft on an unauthorized flight crossed the flight path of a prototype Tupolev supersonic airliner, causing it to crash, the Soviet Union might also have led the world in commercial supersonic intercontinental flight services. Yet the great sophistication in science and technology coexisted with simple forms of collective human life which had changed little with the passage of centuries, and the Soviet regime’s concern to ‘civilize’ native peoples stemmed from the same burning sense of mission that had fired missionaries everywhere.

All these contrasts were represented in Siberia. On the banks of the great river Ob, upriver from the ancient city of Tomsk, lies Akademgorodok -as its name suggests, a town founded for the specific purpose of serving the most sophisticated scientific research. Siberia was a land of great riches as well as tundra desolation: of diamonds, gold and oil, and great hydroelectric schemes, as on the Yenisei and Angara rivers, models for famous ‘Third World’ projects like the Aswan Dam. But Siberia was also home to peoples who, for all the ministrations of tsarist missionaries and earnest Communist educators, had hardly advanced from the Stone Age in material culture or understanding of the modern world. Although the processes of adjustment and absorption usually proceeded quietly, there were occasions when the two worlds clashed. There was the occasional squalid fight in dreary Siberian towns between drunken natives and Russian louts yelling racist abuse, and one fracas in Yakutsk was serious enough to bring troops out on to the streets. Nor were well-meaning attempts to inform native peoples always welcomed by them. ‘“What is the October Revolution?” Evenk reindeer-herders had plaintively enquired, “Who are the bourgeois elements? What is technology? What is industry?”‘ When a community of Chukchi were invited to elect a committee they resisted on the reasonable ground that ‘if they elected one, the number of walrus would not increase.’
³³
It was native practicality rather than innocence which spoke. Soviet values did not resonate with Chukchi mentality.

Despite rumblings of discontent in one or two COMECON countries, the Soviet Empire in 1980 seemed stable and reasonably successful. The Soviet Union itself had not caught up with the United States in terms of economic output as Khrushchev had boasted, but it was incontestably a
world power, its peoples more prosperous and freer than in the 1950s. True, the Communist movement was no longer a dynamic force in the world, but Moscow was still a beacon of hope for poorer countries, and also for some less poor that wished to distance themselves from American culture and the embraces of capitalism. Even though the system had not yet quite succeeded in replacing nationalism with a supranational Marxist faith, no informed observer seriously expected the vast and powerful Soviet fortress, with its huge outworks of control and influence spreading halfway round the world, to suffer any marked decline in the foreseeable future. Yet within a dozen years, as if subjected to some potent combination of strange chemical forces, it simply evaporated. The fourth, and greatest, Russian Empire was gone, never to be resurrected.

A
T MIDNIGHT ON
31 December 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The satellite states had gone their separate ways two years earlier, but now the Baltic states regained their independence and Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and all the other constituent republics started out on a new existence as sovereign states. The red flag with the hammer and sickle was run down the Kremlin flagstaff, and a blue, red and white tricolour was run up instead. Russia had again been shorn of empire.

The reasons why the Soviet Empire collapsed have been disputed ever since. Many believed that dissident activity and popular protest had brought the regime down. Others argued that President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative — otherwise known as ‘Star Wars’ — had established an unchallengeable American superiority in the arms race, and that this had forced the Kremlin to admit defeat and wind its empire down. Some who resented the passing of the old regime explained its fall in terms of conspiracy theories; economists attributed it to industrial obsolescence, political scientists to advances in computer technology which made it impossible for the regime to control the dissemination of information. Other theorists ascribed the collapse to the rigidity of Soviet institutions and their inability adapt to new conditions. (However, it seemed odd that none of the experts who explained the inevitability of Communism’s collapse had actually predicted it.)

Then there were those who said that it was the reform of the Soviet system itself which had precipitated the trouble. They held Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, responsible for a situation that a less reckless leader would have avoided. And there were some who attributed the collapse simply to ill-fortune (or act of God), to a remarkable series of unforeseeable, uncontrollable and damaging events. Each of these explanations contains some truth. None has so far gained universal acceptance among the ranks of the informed. To gain a fuller understanding of the processes involved we should retrace our steps to the mid-1970s, the high point of Soviet fortunes.
As late as the 1970s and even in the 1980s there was no obvious indication of impending disaster. Indeed, the auguries read well. The Soviet Union was as mighty in weaponry as its only rival; surprising as it may seem, its population was as contented as that of the United States; and there was hardly a ripple of dissidence or nationalism anywhere in the Empire. Its policy on nationalities since the 1920s had provided institutional recognition of ethnic nationalism, and since the Second World War a credible ‘Soviet nationalism’ had emerged. The sense of solidarity had been reinforced by millions of marriages between partners of different nationality. Furthermore, since Brezhnev had given non-Russian nationalities primacy in the constituent republics,
¹
it could no longer be argued that one had to be Russian to have a good career.

A survey carried out in 1976 found that most Russians rated their material life at as high as four points on a scale of one to five. There was, after all, no hunger, unemployment or homelessness. Standards of medical care and public order were high, and of education very high. There were shortages, and goods were often shoddy — but that had always been the case. There was a virtual absence of luxury as it was known in the West, but there was welfare at public expense for the young, the old, the sick and the disabled. Rather more Russians than Americans were satisfied with the amount of free time their work allowed them, and more Russians than Americans enjoyed both their work and their leisure. Russians might hate their local bureaucrats, but, as a leading opinion researcher (who was no friend of the regime) has concluded, most people ‘accepted the political, economic and social order, including official values such as patriotism, collectivism, respect for the Army, the Soviet empire, national solidarity and the Communist Party. Russians steadfastly supported Soviet foreign policy, including the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.’
²
Dissidents existed, but they were few, and their voices were muted by media control, warnings, imprisonment or, as in the case of the novelist Solzhenitsyn, exile in the West. Nationalists hardly stirred, and there was no sign of serious discontent.

Nor was there much restiveness in the countries of the Soviet Bloc. In 1976 a dissident playwright called Vaclav Havel was among a number of Czech intellectuals who issued ‘Charter 77’ in January that year. This petition invoked the new International Covenant of Rights to protest against the prosecution of a pop group called Plastic People of the Universe, which had infringed the government’s canons of decency In retrospect this might seem a significant blow for freedom, but it was no threat to the regime. Nor were some violent strikes by miners in Romania. Even the election
of the Cardinal Archbishop of Cracow, a long-standing thorn in the side of the Polish government, to the papal throne in October 1978 caused hardly a ruffle in the Kremlin dovecotes. Rome would be less of a restraining influence on the Polish Church, reported the Soviet ambassador to Warsaw somewhat blandly, but the election would deprive ‘the reactionary part of the episcopate … of its leader’.
³

Two years later the Solidarity movement emerged in Poland. It began as an unofficial strike in support of a dismissed woman crane operator in a Gdansk shipyard. Pope John Paul II had never feared confrontation with the government when he had been a mere archbishop, and he now lent Solidarity, whose followers were overwhelmingly Catholic, his moral support. This gave the movement an aura of religious and patriotic legitimacy in many Polish eyes. Of more practical importance, however, was the fact that militant trade unionists, primarily concerned about standards of living, and intellectuals, concerned about rights and freedoms, were united for the first time. An association known as KOR, made up of lawyers and other professionals who helped and advised the strikers, had been important in promoting this unity. So powerful was the combination that a weak government agreed to negotiate with it — live, on television. The result was a public triumph for the opposition and a series of agreements, some of them unaffordable and impractical. Even so, the complaisant government managed to hold on for many months amid rising fears of a Soviet invasion.

At last in December 1981 a new premier, General Jaruszelski, imposed martial law. Jaruszelski, however, was regarded as a patriot, and the army was Poland’s most popular secular institution. Calm was restored, and thereafter Poland remained quiet. Moreover the excitements there proved not to be contagious: there was no significant reaction elsewhere in the Soviet Bloc. The Pope’s pastoral visit to neighbouring Slovakia in 1986 did generate some excitement, notably among the young, but the effect was transient. The papacy as a factor in the collapse of the Soviet Empire has been exaggerated.

The war in Afghanistan, where the insurgents were sustained by covert US aid, had continued to soak up resources. However, since the Soviet economy was buoyant, the expense was affordable. In 1983 industrial output was 5 per cent higher than in 1982, agricultural output 7 per cent higher. Two Party secretaries, the able lurii Andropov and the despised and ailing Konstantin Chernenko, died in quick succession, but in 1985 — the year Soviet intelligence recruited a senior CIA officer, Aldrich Ames — the Soviet Empire gained a new leader.

Mikhail Gorbachev had been Andropov’s protege. He was youthful,
engaging and reform-minded. He started his reign as General Secretary by reviving some of Andropov’s policies. He launched campaigns against corruption and excessive drinking. He also called for production to be speeded up. The Russian word for this,
uskorenie,
became the new regime’s first policy principle. Others were to follow. Gorbachev was a new kind of Soviet leader. As outgoing as Khrushchev, though less crude and excitable, he was ready to engage with the public and made a point of encouraging debate. Openness, or
glasnost,
became his second watchword. The third was
perestroika,
reconstruction. This signalled his intent to reform Soviet institutions, and was to prove the most radical, and fateful.

The notion that basic reforms were necessary had been canvassed as early as Brezhnev’s time, but actions had been allowed to peter out when difficulties were encountered. Andropov, however, realized that, although there was no immediate crisis, continuing success must be based on more radical economic and administrative reforms than had been attempted in the past. Among the reports Andropov commissioned was one from an academic think-tank which recommended far-reaching changes to the central planning system.
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It was also recognized that Russia’s rich reserves of oil and natural gas were being wasted. Government had developed a tendency to buy off trouble simply by pumping them out at a greater rate. Energy was being exported at below world market prices to members of the Bloc, and was used wastefully in the Soviet Union itself. Nor were these the only problems. With the easing of East-West tensions, the Kremlin had allowed its European satellites a latitude they had not previously enjoyed, including the right to borrow money from Western banks. As a result, when interest rates rose, interest payments became a significant factor in the budgets of several Soviet Bloc countries. At the same time Poland in particular had been piling up arrears of interest and repayments to the Soviet Union as well as to the West. Moscow did not insist on payment, however, for fear of triggering a rash of cost-of-living riots, to which Poland had become prone, and precipitating a political crisis. The Kremlin was learning that imperial status could be costly.

Gorbachev soon began to look more and more like a Western politician in the run-up to an election. He promised incentives and benefits to win over any Soviet group or sector that seemed discontented. This further increased pressure on the budget. Moreover, since the range of available goods was limited and their quality variable, many people tended to save their money rather than spend it, and this stored up obligations to provide goods to satisfy consumers in the future. The conservative fiscal principles
that had characterized the Kremlin’s economic policies for decades were being eroded. Then bad luck struck - not once, but serially

In 1984 Ronald Reagan was re-elected president of the United States and proceeded with the ‘Star Wars’ project he had announced the year before; a nuclear reactor in a Ukrainian power station overheated, precipitating the Chernobyl disaster of April 1986; and there was a resurgence of nationalism. Early in 1988 there were violent clashes between Azeris and Armenians over Nagorno-Karabakh, an area in Azerbaydzhan where the majority of the population were Armenians. An independence movement began to emerge in Lithuania, and there were problems between Abkhazians and the government of Soviet Georgia. These problems required massive additional expenditures which added to Gorbachev’s existing budgetary problems and created an unpropitious setting for his radical reforms.
⁵

The chief aim of the ‘Star Wars’ programme was to create an anti-missile screen which would render the United States, and those that the USA chose to include under it, impervious to nuclear attack. The project was ostensibly defensive, but its success would enable a protected power to launch a nuclear attack on another without fear of retaliation. The programme would take years to complete, and its success was by no means certain, but the Soviet leadership was not inclined to take chances, and the maintenance of nuclear parity at this new level required an appreciable increase in expenditure.
⁶

The men in the Kremlin looked for savings. By October 1985 they were beginning to contemplate troop withdrawals from Afghanistan; by February of the following year, at the time of the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, they were ready to launch a foreign-policy initiative that would change the international atmosphere and end the Cold War. Gorbachev had met Reagan in Geneva the previous November, matched him for charm, and impressed him with his liberal intentions. It had long been clear that Stalinism was dead, but now the reins holding member countries of the Bloc in line seemed to be loosening.

In foreign policy Gorbachev gave priority to rapprochement with the countries of the European Union as well as the United States. The rationale of his approach was soon to become apparent: improving East—West relations and increasing trust between the superpowers would allow large cuts in military budgets — what was to become known as ‘the peace dividend’ — a prospect that reason suggested would be as desirable in the White
House as it was in the Kremlin. The first fruits were to be seen in the agreement to limit the deployment of intermediate-range ballistic missiles and some troop withdrawals from member countries of the Bloc. Gorbachev’s popularity abroad had soared, and cheering crowds greeted him in every capital he visited.

Meanwhile he was introducing Soviet citizens to democratic practices which chimed with Western conceptions. At the Party congress in February 1986, when the policies of
glasnost
and
perestroika
were proclaimed, Gorbachev not only undertook to promote individual legal rights but also announced that electors would in future be allowed a choice of candidates (a practice already introduced in Hungary). The idea was also mooted of creating a two-party system by splitting the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between its liberal and conservative wings and sharing the assets between them.
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In private apartments, bars and hotel lobbies across the Soviet Union crowds gathered round television sets to watch the proceedings. They were not accustomed to the sight of democracy in action, after all, and they watched with quiet fascination, wondering what it boded.
⁸

On 26 April 1986 came news of the Chernobyl disaster. The cause has been attributed to incompetent managers, who should have shut the overheating reactor down immediately instead of trying to cool it,
⁹
but Gorbachev’s ‘speeding-up’ policy may also have contributed. The power industry had been set a target of a 20 per cent increase in output under the current Plan, and managers were under pressure to attain it. This may have persuaded some to take risks. The outcome was radioactive emissions on a catastrophic scale. Extensive evacuation and decontamination programmes had to be carried out, distress alleviated, and a huge wave of concern ridden out abroad as well as at home. Moreover the incident implied systemic failures in training and procedures which had to be addressed. Nor was this the only unwelcome news. Income from the state liquor monopoly had slumped since the introduction of the anti-alcohol campaign. And government expenditure on housing and health, as well as on the military and scientific establishments, was rising strongly, threatening a sizeable budgetary deficit. Most of the production targets under the Plan seemed to be within reach in the first months of 1988, but then world oil prices, which had hit a high in 1986, began to fall, reducing hard-currency earnings and opening up a balance-of-payments deficit which began to increase with disconcerting speed.