Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

By prior arrangement, Gorbachev and Gromyko had agreed to meet in the Walnut Room a few minutes before the arrival of everyone else. The younger man used the occasion to solicit Gromyko’s support openly.

“We have to unite our forces. This is a critical moment,” said Gorbachev.

“It seems to me that everything is clear.”

“I am counting on the fact that you and I will cooperate.” 32

Confident that he had Gromyko’s backing, Gorbachev then approached Grishin to offer him a consolation prize, chairmanship of the Funeral Commission. The Moscow Communist Party boss was an astute enough politician to understand that the apparently courteous offer concealed a trap. If he accepted the prestigious, but purely honorific, position of head of the Funeral Commission, he ran the risk of appearing to make another unseemly grab for power, without gaining anything concrete in return. Cautiously he replied that the post had traditionally gone to the person who had been standing in for the general secretary. He urged Gorbachev to take the job, hoping perhaps that he would encounter opposition from older Politburo members. 33

“There’s no need to hurry,” said Gorbachev, calculating that his own support would build, as the wishes of regional party secretaries became known. “Let’s think about this carefully overnight.”

Entering the Politburo Room, Gorbachev moved his chair a little to one side of the place traditionally occupied by the general secretary. Proprieties had to be observed. The mood in the room was still “The king is dead,” rather than “Long live the king.” The Politburo attended to a number of seemingly minor details, such as listening to a medical report on Chernenko, preparing the obituary, picking a date for the funeral, and summoning members of the policy-making Central Committee to Moscow. Then Gromyko spoke. He was adamant that Gorbachev be appointed chairman of the Funeral Commission. This was his way of signaling that he supported the younger man’s candidature for gensek . While there were a few murmurs about unnecessary speed, no one opposed the proposal. 34

In addition to Gromyko, Gorbachev had another very influential supporter. While working in the Central Committee apparatus in Moscow, he had forged an alliance with Yegor Ligachev, the secretary in charge of cadres. A Siberian with an authoritarian manner and appetite for hard work, Ligachev had been chosen by Andropov to purge the party of incompetent officials. Like Gorbachev, Ligachev was disgusted with the drift of the Brezhnev years. Over the past three years he had been traveling round the Soviet Union, replacing longtime Brezhnev cronies with younger men. He kept his finger on the pulse of the network of party officials who controlled the nation on a day-to-day basis. These regional chieftains, who held some 40 percent of the seats on the Central Committee, had played a key role in getting rid of Khrushchev in 1964. If there was a deadlock in the Politburo, as there would be if Grishin pushed his own candidature, their word would be decisive. Ligachev had counted heads. They were practically unanimous for Gorbachev.

Two members of the old guard who might have come out in support of Grishin were absent from the crucial Politburo meeting. The party boss of Kazakhstan, a Brezhnev holdover named Dinmukahamed Kunayev, arrived in Moscow only on the following day. The Ukrainian Communist Party chief, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, was stranded in San Francisco on an official visit. His flight home was mysteriously delayed until after the leadership question was settled. The delay may have been entirely coincidental, but Kremlin conspiracy theorists automatically suspected a plot by the pro-Gorbachev forces. 35

At around 3:00 a.m., after settling organizational matters with Ligachev, Gorbachev went home to his dacha in the Moscow countryside, one of the many perks of a Politburo member. His wife, Raisa, was waiting up for him. However late he returned from work, it was their invariable custom to take an evening walk together. This was partly Gorbachev’s way of unwinding after a long day in the office. But it was also a way of talking things over with his closest confidante in a place where they could be sure that there were no microphones.

As they strolled through the snow-covered garden, Gorbachev blurted out that there was a good chance that he would be elected gensek the following day. Despite some doubts, he thought he should take the job. He had worked hard as the Politburo member in charge of agriculture but had not been able to achieve “anything substantial.” Championing reform in the present political climate was like beating one’s head against a brick wall. The Soviet people were “full of hope,” and he had no right to disappoint them.

“We can’t go on living like this. There has to be change,” added the fifty-four-year-old peasant boy from the rolling plains of southern Russia. 36

While Gorbachev was talking with Raisa, his allies were busy summoning the three hundred members of the Central Committee to Moscow from every part of the Soviet empire. They gathered, the following afternoon, in their marble-paved conference hall, on the opposite side of Red Square from the Kremlin. For perhaps the first time since the overthrow of Khrushchev in 1964, there was a sense of real political tension in the air. The Politburo had just met for a second time, and nobody knew what had been decided. It was clear to everybody that the Soviet Union stood at a crossroads. In private conversations in the lobby, younger party officials discussed what they would do if the Politburo blocked the general desire for change. Some threatened to organize a collective protest if Gorbachev was not the official candidate for gensek .

A door on the left of the stage opened, and the Politburo members filed into the room, in order of seniority. As they took their places on the podium, beneath a thirty-foot mosaic of Lenin in red and orange, the hubbub of conversation died away. As second secretary Gorbachev called for a moment of silence in honor of the departed leader. Then Gromyko walked to the rostrum. The tension mounted. Could the veteran foreign minister be making his own bid for the leadership? There was a heart-stopping preamble as Gromyko paid the ritualized tribute to Chernenko. Then the words that everybody had been waiting for:

“The Politburo has unanimously agreed to recommend,” he rasped, staring stone-faced at the hall, as if he were delivering another nyet to the UN Security Council, “Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev—” 37

A roar of applause burst from the hall. Suddenly everyone was on his feet, clapping and smiling. Everybody in the room, even the tough old party bosses who had wanted desperately to stop his nomination, was a Gorbachev supporter now. The tension of the last twenty-four hours had burst. The new general secretary, the youngest Soviet leader since Lenin, sat alone on the podium, head bowed, as if embarrassed by the adulation. He made a gesture to stop the cheering, but it went on and on.

The world’s first socialist state had a new tsar.

OVER THE NEXT SIX YEARS, as the assumptions of the postwar world were turned upside down, Western analysts were to marvel over how a man like Mikhail Gorbachev had emerged from the obscurity of the Russian provinces. After a succession of geriatric genseks , the sight of a Soviet leader who could talk without notes and walk unassisted was itself cause for wonder. The fact that the new leader was willing to challenge ideas and habits sanctified by more than sixty years of Communist tradition seemed nothing short of miraculous. How had the Soviet system, the most durable totalitarian regime of the twentieth century, produced such a man?

The truth was that Gorbachev did not emerge out of nowhere. He represented a generation of political activists who grew up in the shadow of a great tyrant and lived all their lives in a socialist state. It was a generation whose Communist faith had been severely tested but never entirely undermined, a generation that had become accustomed to endless political and moral compromises, a generation waiting patiently for the chance to correct its predecessor’s mistakes. The new general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union shared the dreams and nightmares of the shestidesyatniki generation, its strengths and failings, its beliefs and illusions.