Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

Predictably enough, Gorbachev’s early attempts to boost agricultural production met with complete failure. In 1979 the grain harvest was a disastrous 179 million tons, 40 million tons below target. The shortfall would have to be met by imports. As usual, Soviet leaders blamed the weather. But Gorbachev knew perfectly well that the real problem was with the way Soviet agriculture—and, by extension, the entire Soviet economy—was organized. Labor discipline was so poor that hundreds of thousands of kolkhozniks failed to show up for work every day. One-third of the food harvest was lost because of inadequate storage facilities, an outdated transportation system, and general mechanical failures. Tractors and combine harvesters left factories in such poor condition that they invariably had to be repaired as soon as they arrived on the farm. 55

In public Gorbachev maintained the pretense that all was well. But he talked frankly with Shevardnadze, whom he had known for more than two decades. The two men had much in common. As young men Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had climbed the greasy pole of Soviet politics together, making their early career in the Komsomol, the Communist youth league. Gorbachev became first secretary of the Communist Party in his home region of Stavropol in 1970. At the age of thirty-nine he had in effect become Kremlin plenipotentiary for a predominantly agricultural district roughly the size of Illinois. Two years later Shevardnadze was chosen as Communist Party chief in his native republic of Georgia, on the other side of the Caucasus mountain range.

The two party bosses took their winter vacations together at Pitsunda. During a long walk through the pine woods Shevardnadze described his attempts to increase agricultural production in Georgia by offering peasants financial incentives. The experiment had horrified doctrinaire Marxists, who feared the reemergence of the so-called kulak class, the prosperous, stubbornly independent peasantry destroyed by Stalin. Shevardnadze had taken Gorbachev to meet one of the new kulaks, who kept ten dairy cows at his farmstead. The question now was what to do with this ideological monstrosity.

“If you like, we can de-kulakize him,” said Shevardnadze in his thick Georgian accent. “Then there won’t be any farm, milk, or livestock.”

The party’s new agriculture secretary laughed. “We could de-kulakize him, of course, so that your theoreticians won’t get angry. But how are we going to improve rural life without this kind of kulak?” he replied. 56

On another occasion Shevardnadze blurted out that everything was “rotten” in the Soviet Union. “We cannot go on living like this. We must think what we can do to salvage the country,” he told Gorbachev. 57

Both Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were experienced apparatchiks, adept in the ways of Soviet politics. They knew how to camouflage their “experiments” behind innocuous-sounding names. In return for occasional flashes of personal honesty, they joined the rest of the Soviet leadership in ritualistic displays of public hypocrisy.

Gorbachev had honed his sycophantic skills on the important visitors who passed through Stavropol. With its warm weather and mountain spas, the Stavropol region was a favorite vacation destination for the “big pine cones” from Moscow. The local Communist Party chief was responsible for humoring the big shots and helping them unwind from the burdens of office. Party bosses from places like Stavropol were even occasionally referred to as resort secretaries. The opportunities for corruption were immense. The party secretary in the neighboring Krasnodar region, Sergei Medunov, was a notorious bribe taker with close links to the local mob. Gorbachev, by contrast, had a reputation for relative honesty. All the same, for his own political survival, he was obliged to ply his visitors with gifts and cater to their various whims. 58

An amateur actor in his youth, Gorbachev was particularly good at feigning sincerity. When he praised Brezhnev or spoke about the glorious future awaiting the next generation of Soviet citizens, his deep brown eyes seemed to light up with enthusiasm and conviction. At Politburo meetings he always deferred to his elders. When his turn came to speak, he would invariably support the leader’s position, however absurd or hard-line. When the entire country was called upon to critique Brezhnev’s memoir positively, Gorbachev displayed the required enthusiasm. At an ideological conference in Stavropol he praised the decrepit general secretary for his “titanic daily work,” “deep philosophical penetration,” and “talent for leadership of the Leninist type.” “Communists, and all the workers of Stavropol, are boundlessly grateful to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev for this truly party-spirited literary work,” Gorbachev declared. He ordered all local newspapers to serialize the turgid volume “in response to the innumerable requests of the workers of Stavropol.” 59

If Gorbachev was a talented flatterer, Shevardnadze was a virtuoso. In the Georgian tradition, he groveled at the feet of the powerful. At the Twenty-fifth Communist Party Congress in 1976, he lauded Brezhnev’s “high competence, breadth of vision, concreteness, humanity, uncompromising class position, loyalty, principled position, skill at penetrating the soul of his interlocutor, and ability to create an atmosphere of trust between people.” He expressed his nation’s undying loyalty to its big Russian brother in unctuous tones. “They call Georgia a sunny land. But for us, comrades, the real sun rises not in the East, but in the North, in Russia, the sun of Leninist ideas.” 60

While resting at Pitsunda the future general secretary and his future foreign minister heard an announcement that was to cast a long shadow over their efforts to chart a new course for the Communist superpower. On the morning of December 28 Radio Moscow began retransmitting the speech by Babrak Karmal proclaiming the dawn of a new “day of freedom.” A few hours later the radio reported that the Afghan government had sent an urgent request to the Soviet Union for “immediate political, moral, and economic aid, including military aid.” “The government of the Soviet Union has met the request of Afghanistan,” the announcer added, without elaboration. 61

As candidate, or nonvoting, members of the Politburo, neither Gorbachev nor Shevardnadze had been informed about the plans to invade Afghanistan. Both men later claimed that they were shocked by the decision, which they described as a “fatal error” and a “crime against humanity.” 62In June 1980, however, they joined other Central Committee members in unanimously endorsing a resolution claiming that the Red Army had foiled “imperialist” plans to turn Afghanistan into a “bridgehead for military aggression” against the Soviet Union. Shevardnadze went out of his way to praise Brezhnev once again for his far-sighted leadership, hailing the invasion as “a brave, uniquely loyal, uniquely courageous step… that has been received with approval by every Soviet citizen.” 63

By sending troops to Afghanistan, Kremlin leaders imagined that they had bought a few years’ peace and quiet, just as they had with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. They could not have been more wrong. While Gorbachev and the other Central Committee members were raising their hands to approve the provision of “fraternal assistance” to Afghanistan, even more serious trouble was brewing at the opposite end of their empire: in Poland.

THE GATES OF THE LENIN SHIPYARD were locked shut when I arrived on the second day of the strike that was to foreshadow the downfall of communism. A portrait of John Paul II, the Polish pope, had been attached to the front of the gate, like a talisman protecting the strikers from the fury of the Communist regime. The white and red Polish flag hung limply from the top of the gate. STRAJK OKUPACIJNY, “Occupation Strike,” proclaimed a nearby placard. Workers in grimy overalls clutched the gray metal railings with their fists, gazing out at a crowd of several hundred sympathizers and relatives. The gate was adorned with freshly cut red and white flowers.