Michael Dobbs: Down with Big Brother

As members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the men inside the curtained limousines belonged to the Kremlin’s inner elite. Their expressionless faces stared down from hoardings all across the Soviet Union. Their turgid speeches filled bookstores from Kaliningrad to Khabarovsk. Their physical needs were satisfied by the Ninth Directorate of the KGB security police, which supplied them with everything from country houses and pornographic movies to tailor-made suits and topflight medical attention. Cosseted by a powerful propaganda machine and a ubiquitous security apparatus, they were insulated from the kind of pressures Western politicians deal with every day: public opinion polls, protest demonstrations, a hostile press. They were the faceless representatives of an infallible party.

The lights were green all down Kutuzov Avenue, one of a dozen highways that radiate outward from the Kremlin. Designed by Stalin as a grand entrance into the Soviet capital, with luxury apartment buildings for senior party officials on either side, Kutuzov Avenue led direct to Minsk, Warsaw, and Berlin. It was along this route that both Napoleon and Hitler had invaded Russia, losing everything in a fateful gamble with the vastness of the Russian landscape and the harshness of the Russian winter. The Zils and their police escort vehicles hugged the crest of the road, traveling at eighty miles an hour in the lane permanently reserved for the “big pine cones,” shiski , as Muscovites referred to their leaders. A few hundred yards after the Triumphal Arch, commemorating Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of General Kutuzov in 1812, the motorcade reached the city limits.

During the seventies the Soviet capital had grown to engulf vast tracts of surrounding pine forest. The city had expanded in all directions except one: westward, along the meandering Moskva River. Here, hidden among gentle hills, billowing birch trees, and picture book villages, was the playground of the ruling class. In the elaborate reward-and-punishment system devised by Stalin for maintaining control over his labyrinthine bureaucracy, there was no greater prize than a country house in this bucolic setting. For the Soviet elite—government ministers to nuclear scientists to prima ballerinas to army generals—a dacha was not only a place of rest but a form of escape from the oppressive atmosphere of the capital, with its noxious pollution and paranoid sense of being under constant surveillance.

The line of Zils turned left off the highway, ignoring several No Entry signs, onto an immaculately maintained country road that disappeared into the snow-covered forest. The motorcade traveled along the bank of the icebound Setun River and entered a private estate, surrounded by a ten-foot-high green wooden fence. Some twenty minutes after leaving the center of Moscow, the Zils pulled up in front of a mock neoclassical palace. Decorated in the ornate bourgeois style favored by Soviet leaders, it looked like a cross between an office building and a museum. The complex boasted indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts, and a private movie theater. 2

The inhabitants of the curtained limousines had come to inform the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party of the final plans for the invasion of Afghanistan.

IT WAS DIFFICULT to tell it now, as one looked at his puffy face, parchment-colored skin, and dull, lifeless eyes, but Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev had once been a vigorous and gregarious politician. He had received little formal education. In fact, he had scarcely read a book in his life. Outside politics, his main interests were hunting, driving fast cars, and watching ice hockey games on television. He showed little enthusiasm for paperwork and was a poor public speaker. But in the Bolshevik phrase, he was “good with cadres.” He took care of his own. His intellectual limitations had been outweighed by a remarkable instinct for the uses of power and patronage and a talent for forming alliances with his fellow apparatchiks. His intuitive sense of whom to flatter, whom to manipulate, whom to bribe, and, when necessary, whom to trample underfoot had taken him to the highest rungs of the Soviet bureaucracy.

His Politburo colleagues had consistently underestimated him. One of the main reasons why they had elected him general secretary to replace the disgraced Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 was that they were sick of strong, charismatic leaders. They wanted a malleable stopgap, and Brezhnev—nicknamed “the ballerina” because of his ability to change positions in line with prevailing opinion—seemed to fit the bill. They were correct in thinking that the new leader would be more easygoing than Khrushchev and would put an end to the upheavals that had shaken the party apparatus. But they seriously misjudged his staying power. Brezhnev had outlasted, and outmaneuvered, them all.

As he entered the sixteenth year of his reign, Brezhnev was a mixture of Communist demigod and national buffoon. The personality cult surrounding the general secretary, or gensek , had reached ludicrous proportions. Not content with depicting the doddering seventy-three-year-old leader as a wise and far-seeing statesman, the official media also presented him as a brilliant military strategist, a distinguished man of letters, and an outstanding contemporary thinker. Propagandists compared him with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state. He was the proud holder of Party Card No. 000002. (Card No. 000001 was reserved for the dead Lenin.)

The more infirm and senile Brezhnev became, the more honors and accolades he received. By the end of his life he had accumulated more awards than Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev combined. Soviet history books had been rewritten to transform his undistinguished wartime exploits into a decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany. His boastful ghostwritten reminiscences about World War II, Malaya Zemlya (Little Land), had been acclaimed a literary masterpiece by Soviet critics and printed in millions of copies. They were read out on radio and television, serialized in magazines, and “studied” in schools and party meetings.

All this was the cause of great ridicule among ordinary Soviet citizens. In public they joined in the officially orchestrated adulation of the general secretary, adopting resolutions to support his political initiatives and holding ceremonies to celebrate his birthday. In the privacy of their own homes they joked about his poor Russian and his narcissistic habits. After the publication of his memoirs in 1978, the villagers of Zareche began referring to the walled-in Brezhnev compound as Malaya Zemlya. 3

Although his sayings and doings filled the front pages of Soviet newspapers, Brezhnev usually worked for no more than one or two hours a day. By the late seventies he was barely able to look after himself, let alone the affairs of a mighty superpower. Politburo meetings had been reduced to fifteen or twenty minutes. The general secretary rarely visited his Moscow apartment or his Kremlin office. He spent weeks at a time cooped up in the Zareche dacha or his favorite hunting lodge at Zavidovo, at the confluence of the Moskva and Oka rivers. Family life had become a burden to him. His tearaway daughter, Galina, had scandalized Moscow by her luxurious lifestyle and affairs with shady circus performers. His son-in-law, Yuri Churbanov, had become a front man for the Uzbek cotton Mafia. Brezhnev would shut himself up for hours in his study with his personal bodyguard, an old wartime buddy named Aleksandr Ryabenko, playing checkers or dominoes.

Brezhnev’s true state of health was one of the Kremlin’s most closely guarded secrets. It was clear to anyone who observed his stumbling gait, slurred speech, and vacant expression that he was a chronic invalid. But the extent of his physical and mental ailments was known only to three or four senior Politburo members and a handful of doctors, bodyguards, and relatives. The truth was that the world’s largest country had been without an effective ruler since at least 1974, when the general secretary suffered a series of mild strokes caused by the medical condition known as arteriosclerosis of the brain. 4