Michael Dobbs: Down with Big Brother

Seated in the middle of the gathering, like a medieval emperor receiving the homage of his vassals, was Big Brother himself. Leonid Brezhnev seemed to have trouble focusing on events around him. His face was bloated. He clung to Andrei Gromyko, his indispensable foreign minister, like a child clings to his nanny. “Where’s Andrei Andreyevich,” he murmured, in apparent panic, when Gromyko disappeared for a few seconds. He was surrounded by sycophants. “I want to thank you for your work for peace,” fawned the president of Bangladesh, almost groveling on the red carpet. Brezhnev lifted his vast eyebrows. “We try our hardest,” he croaked. “We are ready for anything in the struggle for peace.”

At midday, the city of 1.5 million people fell silent in tribute to the man who had ruled Yugoslavia since 1945. All that could be heard in the normally noisy city were the chimes of clocks and the chirping of birds. Then, equally suddenly, the silence was interrupted by the wailing of factory sirens and the horns of ships on the nearby Danube and Sava rivers. A military band struck up a slow funeral march. Eight generals appeared on the steps of the Yugoslav parliament building, carrying the numerous medals of their commander in chief. The coffin itself was escorted by Tito’s political heirs, the eight members of the new collective presidency, representing the ethnically diverse components of the Yugoslav federation. Vain to the end, Tito had decided that no single individual could possibly take his place. Instead, he was to be succeeded by a committee, each of whose members had a veto over the actions of all the others. It was a recipe first for paralysis, later for civil war.

When the procession reached Tito’s residence, on a hill overlooking the Sava, the band began playing the “Internationale,” the anthem of the worldwide Communist movement. The coffin was lowered into the vault, to be sealed with a marble slab inscribed with gold lettering, JOSIP BROZ TITO 1892–1980. The nonentities of the collective presidency shuffled self-importantly past. They were followed by kings and princes, presidents and prime ministers, Communist Party secretaries and Third World dictators—pillars of a seemingly permanent world order that was about to crumble.

BEFORE 1980, reporting from the Communist world had been an introverted pursuit. Our sources of information were limited to Western diplomats, official propagandists, a handful of brave dissidents. To hold an honest conversation with an ordinary person was practically impossible. Factories were completely off-limits, unless you were accompanied by a government chaperone. Censorship was so tight that we usually never heard of protests until they were long over. Our job was to put together a coherent picture of an entire society on the basis of isolated scraps of information. It was like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, with hundreds of missing pieces.

This sedentary way of life disappeared virtually overnight. Within a few months of running into Poland’s Edward Gierek at Tito’s funeral, I was filing dispatches on his overthrow. Soon, I found myself covering strikes, hunger marches, coups, wars, and the remaking of the map of Europe. As a reporter from the Washington Post , first in Eastern Europe and then in the Soviet Union, I had a grandstand view of the “decade that shook the world.” Indeed, in a minor way, my colleagues and I became part of the revolution. Our reports were beamed back into the Soviet bloc by Western radio stations, breaking the information monopoly of one-party regimes.

My travels around the disintegrating Communist world took me from the Berlin Wall to Tiananmen Square, from tropical Nicaragua to the windswept island of Sakhalin. I visited places I had never dreamed of visiting, from a freezing orphanage in Bucharest to the inner corridors of Kremlin power. I wandered around KGB headquarters in Moscow, inspected the sites of nuclear explosions, and walked through the ruins of once graceful towns like Tbilisi and Vukovar. I was fortunate enough to meet most of the principal actors in the fall of communism, from Andrei Sakharov to Mikhail Gorbachev. I was the first Western journalist to be admitted to the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk during the great strike of August 1980 by a then unknown Lech Wałęsa. A decade later, when Boris Yeltsin jumped on the tank outside the Russian parliament to rally resistance to an abortive Communist coup, I was in the crowd of one hundred or so Muscovites standing right in front of him.

The unraveling of the Communist empire was a great human drama, as great a drama in its own way as the original Bolshevik revolution. It changed the lives of millions of people, including many who had never lived in a Communist country but who had been touched by the Cold War. Some were inspired to acts of greatness; others were driven to their deaths. In the space of a decade, playwrights and electricians were magically transformed into presidents, dissidents into prime ministers, Marxists into nationalists, and general secretaries into jailbirds. Strategic assumptions that had shaped the thinking of a generation of diplomats and politicians were turned upside down. A superpower disappeared, and twenty new nation-states joined the United Nations. The familiar and seemingly petrified Cold War world—the world of Checkpoint Charlie and Dr. Strangelove—vanished forever.

JUST AS COMMUNISM cast a long shadow over the twentieth century, the consequences of the failed experiment in utopia will be felt well into the next century. Many of the disaster scenarios that could threaten the future of humankind—nuclear blackmail, environmental catastrophe, a large-scale war, the rise of a Mafia state—originate in the former Communist world. Integrating the post-Communist societies into the modern world is perhaps the biggest challenge facing the international community today.

In order to deal with this challenge, we must first understand how it arose. The convulsions that have swept Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union reflect the disintegration of a totalitarian ideology. The explosion of primitive nationalism has its roots in attempts by the old nomenklatura to preserve its power and privileges. The halting nature of economic reform in Russia is due, in large measure, to the inefficient structure of the Soviet economy, with the military-industrial complex grabbing the lion’s share of the nation’s resources. The cutthroat capitalism and Mafia-like mentality of the new bourgeoisie can be traced back to the systemic corruption of the Communist regime.

It will take the passing of at least one generation, and possibly two or three, to exorcise the ghosts of totalitarian rule. The rivers and steppes of the vast Eurasian landmass will be poisoned for decades from the fallout of nuclear accidents caused by the arbitrary and irresponsible decisions of Communist leaders. The Berlin Wall was breached in a single day, but many years will go by before East Europeans are accepted as citizens of the new Europe. Tens of thousands of Romanian orphans—the product of Ceauşescu’s bizarre social policies—will grow up physically and intellectually stunted. Ethnic wars between Serbs and Croats, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Russians and Chechens, will provide the fuel for massacres and countermassacres for many generations.

Big Brother may be dead, but the specter of communism will continue to haunt us for decades to come.

THE BLACK ZIL LIMOUSINES raced over the ice-bound Moskva River, past the pompous wedding-cake structure of the Ukraine Hotel, and down the rectilinear expanse of Kutuzov Avenue. Bundled up in long winter coats as protection against fifteen degrees of frost, militiamen ordered motorists to the side of the road with frantic waves of their white nightsticks. Plainclothes agents loitered along the sidewalk, scanning the crowd for signs of suspicious activity. Tightly drawn white curtains and tons of bulletproof armor shielded the occupants of the speeding Zils from the curious stares of pedestrians, picking their way through the gray-brown sludge of the dreary Moscow winter. 1