Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

Akhromeyev made a first, bungled attempt to kill himself a few minutes after Natasha’s phone call. He tied a noose to the window frame, but the rope broke after he put his weight on it. He wrote a note at 9:45 a.m. describing what had happened. Later that morning he was seen wandering around the Kremlin corridors, apparently on his way to the canteen. At midday he called his driver at the car pool, saying he needed a car by 1:00 p.m. The driver waited and waited, but the marshal never showed up.

Shortly before 10:00 p.m. the Kremlin duty officer making his rounds of the main government building saw the door of room 19A slightly ajar. It seemed very late for someone to be working. He pushed the door open and saw Akhromeyev’s thin, wizened body slumped over a radiator beneath a window. Around the neck of the corpse was a white nylon cord, the other end of which was attached to the metal handle of the window. A wooden chair lay off to one side. The corpse was dressed in the uniform of a marshal of the Soviet Union. 142

The investigators found half a dozen notes on Akhromeyev’s desk. One envelope contained a fifty-ruble bill and a note to his aide, asking him to settle a bill at the Kremlin canteen for food and drink consumed during the coup. Another note asked his colleagues in the army to help his family with the funeral arrangements. There was a private letter for his wife. And there was a note that was apparently meant to serve as his political epitaph:

I cannot live when my motherland is dying and everything that I ever believed in is being destroyed. My age and my previous life give me the right to leave this life. I fought to the end.

Nikolai Kruchina returned to his office in the Central Committee on the evening of Sunday, August 25, for a meeting with the building’s new administrators. He seemed calm enough as he talked about the transfer of Communist Party property to the Russian government and the social needs of a thousand or so unemployed bureaucrats. As the meeting broke up, a little after 9:00 p.m., Shakhnovsky happened to say: “And, of course, we will need to have a special discussion about the party’s finances.” 144

The business manager’s face went pale. “Okay, okay, let’s talk about it tomorrow,” he said, abruptly ending the conversation. He collected some belongings from an anteroom and departed. Shakhnovsky was left with the impression of an honest, hardworking bureaucrat who had some reason to feel ashamed. Perhaps it had something to do with the use of party money to establish covert commercial structures, he thought.

Kruchina was driven to his home on Pletnev Lane in the city center, one of several luxury apartment blocks reserved for top party officials. At around 10:30 p.m. he said good night to his wife and retired to his study, saying that he had “a little work” to do. He scribbled a couple of letters and put his affairs in order.

“My conscience is clear,” he told his family, in one of the notes. “I am not a criminal. I am a coward.” He underlined the word “coward.” 145

As dawn broke over Moscow, suffusing the city of gold-domed churches, crumbling tenements, and pompous “wedding cake” skyscrapers in a red glow, he went out onto the fifth-floor balcony, climbed over the railing, and hurled himself to his death.

NEARLY SEVENTY-FOUR YEARS after seizing power in an armed insurrection, the Soviet Communist Party had ceased to exist. At the time of its demise it had fifteen million members. Not a single one of them put up any resistance. All it had taken to shut down the building that had served as the headquarters of a worldwide revolutionary movement were a dozen militiamen and several pounds of stamped paper. When the end came, the Communists were too exhausted and too dispirited to fight back.

Terminal exhaustion had set in after a period of “threescore years and ten,” the biblical life span of the human organism. The Communists had exhausted the land they had ruled for nearly three-quarters of a century, a land as bountiful in many ways as North America. They had exhausted their capacity to expand the frontiers of socialism. They had exhausted their own people with unfulfilled promises of an unattainable utopia. In short, they had exhausted their own great idea, an idea that had moved millions by its grandeur and simplicity, the idea of building paradise upon this earth.

The durability of communism and the speed with which it collapsed were two sides of the same coin. There came a point at which the strengths of the system—massive repression, rigid centralization, an all-embracing ideology, the obsession with military power—turned into fatal weaknesses. By ruthlessly suppressing all manifestations of nationalism and political dissent, the Bolsheviks created the conditions for the simultaneous collapse of communism and the Soviet state. When the end came, nobody was prepared to help them.

History will identify many claimants to the title of vanquisher of communism. Pope John Paul II exposed the moral failings and political isolation of Communist leaders; Andrei Sakharov emphasized the universality of human rights at a time when most of his compatriots kept silent; Lech Wałęsa led a workers’ rebellion against the workers’ state; the Afghan mujahedin proved that the Red Army was not invincible; Ronald Reagan challenged Soviet leaders to an armaments race they could not possibly win; Boris Yeltsin shattered the monolithic unity of the Soviet Communist Party; Mikhail Gorbachev allowed millions of Soviet citizens to confront their tragic past.

All these contributions were significant, but none of them was decisive. Communism was not defeated by any one individual or even a combination of individuals. In the last resort communism defeated itself.

BY THE TESTIMONY of those who knew them, Sergei Akhromeyev and Nikolai Kruchina took their own lives because they were unable to conceive of a place for themselves in the new post-Communist order. The collapse of the party each had served loyally for more than four decades represented the collapse of all their beliefs. There were other such personal tragedies during the twilight days of communism—both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe—but they were the exceptions rather than the rule. For the most part the apparatchik class was remarkably successful in adapting to the changing times.

The archetype of the Communist-turned-nationalist was the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. By the fall of 1991 he was well on the way to achieving the goal of a Greater Serbia that he had outlined back in March, shortly after the student riots that almost toppled him from power. Serb separatists supported by Milošević had seized control of roughly 20 percent of the neighboring republic of Croatia. The Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), the largest military force in the Balkans, was rapidly turning into an exclusively Serbian army. The Croatian town of Vukovar, on the Danube, was under siege by a combined force of the JNA and Serbian militia. It was at this point that Milošević turned his attention to the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where 1.5 million Serbs lived alongside 2 million Muslims and 800,000 Croats.

A patchwork quilt of different ethnic groups and religious traditions, straddling the centuries-old divide between Rome and Byzantium, Austro-Hungary and Turkey, Bosnia was Yugoslavia in miniature. It was also the proverbial Balkan tinderbox, waiting for the match that would ignite a much larger explosion. Everybody remembered how a few shots fired by a young Serb student in Sarajevo in June 1914 had ignited World War I. Three-quarters of a century later Bosnia no longer held the strategic importance it once did for the great powers. But it seemed destined to play a decisive role in the outcome of the Yugoslav civil war and the larger question of whether a “new world order” could be constructed on the rubble of communism.