The Dead Hand (35 page)

In the meeting with Sokolov and Akhromeyev, Gorbachev got his first look at the true size and scope of the Soviet defense machine, and it was enormous. As they finished, Gorbachev turned to Akhromeyev. “We begin to work together in difficult times,” he said. “I speak to you as a Communist. I know what I must do in the area of economics to correct the situation. I know where and what to do. But the area of defense is new for me. I count on your help.” Akhromeyev, who had been chief of the General Staff for only six months, and before that deputy chief, held sway over military policy and planning. He promised to give Gorbachev his help.
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Gorbachev realized that the sprawling defense establishment—the Army, Navy, Air Force, Strategic Rocket Forces, Air Defense Forces and all the institutes, design bureaus and factories that supported them—were a monumental burden on the country. How the military-industrial complex functioned, how far it ranged and how much it cost were concealed by deep secrecy, what Gorbachev called the “closed zones.”
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But Gorbachev’s travels around the country had provided him with hints. “Defense spending was bleeding the other branches of the economy dry,” he recalled. “When I visited defense plants and agricultural production complexes, I was always struck by the same picture. The defense production workshop making modern tanks, for example, had the newest equipment. The one working for agriculture was making obsolete models of tractors on old-time conveyor belts.”

“Over the previous five-year plans, military spending had been growing
twice as fast as national income. This
Moloch
was devouring everything that hard labor and strain produced … What made matters worse was the fact that it was impossible to analyze the problem. All the figures related to the military-industrial complex were classified. Even Politburo members didn’t have access to them.”
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On the staff of the Central Committee, one man knew the secret inner workings of the military-industrial complex. Vitaly Katayev had the appearance of a thoughtful scientist or professor, with a long, angular face and wavy hair brushed straight back. As a teenager he loved to design model airplanes and ships. He spent two decades in aircraft and missile design and construction bureaus in Omsk and Ukraine, and took part in some of the largest missile projects of the Cold War before coming to the Central Committee headquarters in Moscow in 1974 to work on defense issues. In private, Katayev was a funny, quirky man who loved to sing and play musical instruments.
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But in his work at the Central Committee, he was very serious and precise. The Central Committee position was located in the heart of power, perhaps roughly equivalent to serving at the White House National Security Council. Katayev worked in the Defense Industry Department, later renamed just the Defense Department, which oversaw the military-industrial complex. Over many years, Katayev kept detailed records in large bound notebooks, often jotting down rows of numbers, drawing schematics of weapons systems, recording major decisions and debates. His notebooks and writings, revealed here for the first time, offer an unparalleled window on the inner workings of the Soviet military-industrial colossus.
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Katayev described it once as “a sort of Soviet Texas—everything existed on a grand scale.” But Katayev knew it was not as fearsome as often portrayed. The defense establishment was run in a way that was extremely random, ad hoc, and subjective. Katayev knew that Soviet central planning did not work. Weapons were not built because they were needed, but rather because of the power of vested interests, of prominent designers, generals and Politburo members. To meet the artificial benchmarks of progress, everything had to increase every year, so the military was often saturated with weapons it did not need. The factories often lacked
the necessary precision and reliability to produce high-technology weapons. Katayev recalled that while the Soviet Union had advanced science and a high level of design expertise, many projects were wrecked by miserable materials and sloppy production, for which no one was ever fired. Even such a simple ingredient as metals were often of unpredictable quality, so designers had to allow for wide margins. And it was not possible to fix the problems in electronics and high technology by design alone. A circuit board couldn’t be made more reliable by making it twice as large. There was a “permanent gap,” he said, between the drawing boards and the factories. This was the underside of the Soviet military machine.

Katayev’s notes show that the military-industrial complex was indeed as large as Gorbachev feared. In 1985, Katayev estimated, defense took up 20 percent of the Soviet economy.
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Of the 135 million adults working in the Soviet Union, Katayev said, 10.4 million worked directly in the military-industrial complex at 1,770 enterprises. Nine ministries served the military, although in a clumsy effort to mask its purpose, the nuclear ministry was given the name “Ministry of Medium Machine Building,” and others were similarly disguised. More than fifty cities were almost totally engaged in the defense effort, and hundreds less so. Defense factories were called upon to make the more advanced civilian products, too, including 100 percent of all Soviet televisions, tape recorders, movie and still cameras and sewing machines.
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Taking into account all the ways the Soviet military-industrial complex functioned and all the raw materials it consumed and all the tentacles that spread into civilian life, the true size of the defense burden on the economy may well have been even greater than Katayev estimated.

Gorbachev would need deep reserves of strength and cunning to challenge this leviathan. At one Politburo meeting, he lamented, “This country produced more tanks than people.” The military-industrial complex was its own army of vested interests: generals and officers in the services, designers and builders of weapons, ministers and planners in the government, propaganda organs, and party bosses everywhere, all united by the need, unquestioned, to meet the invisible Cold War threat. For decades, the threat had been the overriding reason to divert resources to defense and impose hardship on the Soviet people.
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In title, Gorbachev was the top man in this system: general secretary of
the party, supreme commander and chairman of the defense council. But when he came to power in 1985, he was not really in control. The military-industrial complex was in the hands of Akhromeyev’s generation.

Gorbachev’s thinking about security was influenced by a group of progressives, outsiders to the military-industrial complex. They were academics from the institutes, people who, like Gorbachev, had been excited by the Khrushchev secret speech, but had grown fatigued by the stagnation in the Brezhnev years.
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They did not trust the military but knew of its immense power. Now they hoped to see reform rise again, and Gorbachev listened to them.

An important figure in this inner circle was Yevgeny Velikhov, an avuncular and open-minded physicist who was then deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. As a child, Velikhov had devoured books about science. He entered Moscow State University just after Stalin died in 1953. After graduation, he joined the institute, headed by Igor Kurchatov, leader of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Velikhov was lucky to be assigned to a famous physicist, Mikhail Leontovich, who supervised theoretical research on controlled nuclear fusion and plasma physics. “The atmosphere was wonderful,” Velikhov recalled. “Plasma physics was just emerging, and we felt that we had very few rivals anywhere in the world.” Velikhov was allowed to travel, and in the summer of 1962, he visited universities in New York, Boston and Chicago, and stopped at Los Alamos. He built his own network of contacts with American scientists.
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When Velikhov became a vice president of the Academy of Sciences in 1977, he was the youngest to hold the position. His first assignment was to focus on cybernetics and computer technology in the Soviet Union, and he found they were in “very bad shape.” One day in the early 1980s, Velikhov invited Gorbachev, then a Politburo member, to his office at the academy. He recalled telling Gorbachev about the Apple computer on his desk, which he had brought from overseas. “I showed him and I said, ‘Look, this is a revolution.’” Once in power, Gorbachev continued to listen to Velikhov.

Others in Gorbachev’s circle were Yakovlev, the reformist thinker who walked with Gorbachev in the orchard in Canada in 1983 and was now at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, and Georgi Arbatov, director of the Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and
Canada, who was a critical channel of ideas and information for Gorbachev in the early years.

Gorbachev was desperate for real information, cutting through the mountains of artificial data. “We especially need objective information, showing not what we would like to see but what really is,” Gorbachev appealed to the Politburo.
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Georgi Shakhnazarov said the military tried to manipulate the leadership. “They reported to the leadership one thing, while thinking and doing something totally different,” he said. “It was a cat and mouse game.”
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In Afghanistan, the military was sinking deeper and deeper into a losing quagmire. In Gorbachev’s first months, angry letters flooded into the Central Committee from around the country decrying the war. In April 1985, Reagan wrote to Gorbachev, “Isn’t it long overdue to reach a political resolution of this tragic affair?” Just weeks before he wrote this, Reagan signed a classified order, National Security Decision Directive 166, which provided the legal basis for a massive escalation of the CIA’s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, setting a new and more ambitious goal. Instead of just supporting resistance to the Red Army, now the CIA decided to push the Soviets out.
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Arbatov gave Gorbachev a memo that included far-reaching ideas, including that “we must cease with Afghanistan.” On June 19, 1985, Gorbachev called Arbatov to the Kremlin and told him Afghanistan was a “paramount issue” for him.
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In August, Soviet soldiers revolted on a train headed to Afghanistan; they did not want to be shipped off to a war where ten soldiers were killed every day. Gorbachev began planning a retreat, but it took years.

Looking back, Gorbachev recalled that he had to “clear up the ‘snow drifts’ left over from Cold War times.” Afghanistan was just one. In foreign policy, he said, what he had in mind were “not simply cosmetic changes, but practically a U-turn.”

Yet the outside world did not see this right away. Gorbachev’s early overtures to Reagan were given the brush-off. When Gorbachev proposed April 7 to freeze the Pioneer missiles in Europe that had stirred the West to deploy the Pershing IIs and cruise missiles, Reagan and Thatcher immediately refused, saying it was a propaganda gambit. Their deployments
were only getting started, so a freeze would leave the two sides unequal.
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“Unhelpful,” Reagan wrote to Gorbachev on April 30. “I cannot help but wonder what the purpose could have been in presenting a proposal which is, in its essence, not only an old one, but one which was known to provide no basis for serious negotiation.”
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What Reagan may not have known was that, in the Kremlin, the Pioneer missiles, also known as the SS-20s, were already viewed as a mistake. “Why do we need these SS-20s?” Chernyaev asked in his diary two weeks before Reagan’s letter. “Their installation was as foolish as Khrushchev’s missiles in Cuba in 1962.”
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On April 17, Gorbachev proposed a moratorium on nuclear tests. The United States again said no. The arms control negotiations in Geneva, which resumed in early 1985, soon stalled.
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Out of frustration, Shultz quietly put together a secret overture to Moscow. With Reagan’s approval, he met with Dobrynin in Washington in June and offered a trade-off: if both sides made deep cuts in offensive nuclear weapons, perhaps Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative could be slowed down. Shultz also proposed that negotiations be started through a confidential back channel, bypassing the deadlocked Geneva talks. In two weeks, the answer came back from Moscow: unequivocally no. “The Soviets wanted to stop SDI in its tracks, not just moderate it,” Shultz recalled.
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Dobrynin later said there was another reason: Gromyko had killed the idea because he feared the back channel would bypass him.
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It was Gromyko’s last chance to say “nyet.” On June 29, Gorbachev replaced Gromyko as foreign minister, moving him to be chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Gromyko, who held the post twenty-eight years, was a custodian of the old thinking—the world as a collision of two opposing camps—which Gorbachev was about to demolish. Gorbachev then stunned everyone by naming Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgia party leader, as foreign minister. “This was like a bolt from the blue,” recalled Chernyaev.
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Shevardnadze, who had spent his entire career in Georgia, shared Gorbachev’s understanding of the poverty of the Russian heartland. They stood out from others in the leadership—they did not have experience in heavy industry or the military-industrial complex.
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Shevardnadze had little familiarity with diplomacy, but he was a politician, and he had Gorbachev’s trust. He was promoted immediately to a full Politburo member. In the same session, Gorbachev appointed Lev
Zaikov, a Leningrad party official, to oversee the military-industrial complex. Katayev would be one of Zaikov’s key staffers at the Central Committee. “There are many obstacles in this area of our work,” Gorbachev said. “We need to fix things here.”
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Chernyaev said Soviet propaganda was so stale, no one believed it, “and the root of the Geneva deadlock is this. Revolutionary approaches to talks are needed, identical to the one Gorbachev demonstrated in Leningrad.”

“The question is about the fact that we must stop treading water,” Chernyaev concluded, “as the arms race is about to shoot out of control.”
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