Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

With sensible conservation techniques, the Samotlor field could have continued to produce large amounts of oil for many decades. But the oil was extracted in such a slipshod fashion that the natural life of the field was unnecessarily shortened. By the time Gorbachev came to power, production had already entered a sharp decline.

Scarcely any of the oil wealth trickled down to the people of Nizhnevartovsk. Home to more than three hundred thousand people, the city had a transient, makeshift quality about it, as if the flimsy apartment blocks and potholed streets would be abandoned to the taiga as soon as the oil wells dried up. An entire quarter of the city consisted of nothing but metal wagons designed as temporary accommodation for oil workers. Frequently three or four families were forced to share a single outdoor toilet, despite sub-zero temperatures for more than half the year. For serious shopping, residents were obliged to fly to Moscow, three hours away by plane. Recreational and cultural facilities were practically nonexistent.

AS GORBACHEV STEPPED OUT of the bulletproof Zil that had been specially flown in from Moscow, the crowd surged forward. The Kremlin security men had trouble preventing the grimy oil workers from sweeping the general secretary and his fashionably coutured wife, Raisa, off their feet. Wherever they went, the couple was greeted by a wall of cheering, inquisitive people. The local party bureaucrats, anxious to avoid an embarrassing scene, hovered uneasily in the background. The expressions on their faces suggested an unctuous desire to humor the new leader, combined with alarm over his unpredictable ways.

It was an encounter between two different worlds: the apparatchiks in their homburgs and heavy overcoats and the unshaved, unwashed masses in their threadbare anoraks and woolen ski caps. And there, bobbing up and down in the middle of this tableau vivant, was the smiling face of the Soviet Union’s new leader, arm outstretched to the people, like a modern-day tsarbatyushka (little father).

The sight of a Communist Party leader rubbing shoulders with ordinary people seemed miraculous to the inhabitants of Nizhnevartovsk, as it did to the rest of the country when it was broadcast on television that evening. The propaganda machine had done its best to drain of any individuality the men who waved feebly from the top of Lenin’s tomb on national feast days. Like the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church, Communist leaders derived their authority from participation in endless rituals, rather than their ability to impress the masses with their brilliance. The aura of mystery and anonymity that surrounded these men was one of the principal sources of the durability of the regime.

In order to achieve his goal of pushing the world’s second superpower into the twenty-first century, Gorbachev knew he had to extricate himself from the grasp of the conservative party apparatus, which had no interest in challenging the status quo. If he allowed himself to become a prisoner of the bureaucracy, change would be glacial. The solution was to forge a direct link with the long-suffering Russian people, the narod , over the heads of the apparatchiks. This would provide him with the independent power base he needed to push through his program of reform.

“Let us put them [the bureaucrats] under control. You from one end, and us from the other,” he told an appreciative audience at one of his stops. “Without the support of the workers, no policy is worth anything. If it is not supported by the working people, it is no policy, it is some farfetched thing.” 63

By the time he arrived in Nizhnevartovsk, Gorbachev had already discovered a magical tool for awakening the slumbering masses. He was the first general secretary to understand the power of television. As a rising apparatchik he had seen how television had helped destroy public confidence in leaders like Brezhnev and Chernenko by broadcasting their obvious infirmities to an increasingly disillusioned nation. Now he proposed using the same medium to project himself as a dynamic new leader tackling the problems of ordinary people. The state-run television network gave him a captive audience. Every evening, at precisely nine, across the eleven time zones of the Soviet Union, 150 million people tuned in to the news show Vremya , broadcast on all main channels. The lead story during those early days was almost always Mikhail Gorbachev, hectoring local officials, diving into crowds, explaining his policies to attentive workers. He combined the roles of newsmaker and news editor. Vremya producers often received a telephone call from Gorbachev or one of his close aides with detailed instructions on what to include in the show and what to delete. 64

Television cameras accompanied Gorbachev practically everywhere he went in western Siberia. Here he embraced the notion of the “human factor” as the decisive element in the revolution that he was attempting to unleash. Like many visitors to Siberia, he was struck by the contrast between the riches that were pouring out of the ground and the squalor in which people were forced to live. As he toured supermarkets, drilling rigs, and gas compressor stations, he was besieged by complaints about shoddy housing, poor food supplies, air pollution, outdated equipment, and the lack of consumer goods. The ends had clearly not justified the means. The Stalinist system of economic management had created a monster that fed on itself, producing little benefit either for the country or for its inhabitants.

The new gensek was shaken to learn that for all the billions of rubles that it had contributed to the central treasury, Nizhnevartovsk did not possess a single public movie house. Movies were screened occasionally at a Communist Party youth club, but tickets were hard to acquire. All this troubled Gorbachev as he flew to the regional capital, Tyumen, for a meeting with local party officials. The next morning he got up early to revise the text of the speech that his aides had prepared for him. 65He agreed with the planners that urgent measures had to be taken to reverse the decline in oil production. But there was another message he wanted to convey: The entire economy had to be reoriented toward the individual.

“It is embarrassing for us to talk about the millions of tons of oil and cubic meters of gas when a drilling foreman says to us that the greatest incentive in Nizhnevartovsk is to be given a ticket to see a film,” he told party workers, gathered in front of him like dim-witted schoolchildren. “Why, at the end of the day, do we need to extract millions of tons of oil and gas? Not so that we can simply talk and brag about such quantities, but so that people’s lives can be improved, so that the economy becomes stronger, so that our defenses can be strengthened, so that the people’s living conditions can be improved. That is why all this is necessary.” 66

During those early barnstorming trips around the country Gorbachev frequently discarded the speeches that had been prepared for him in advance. He modeled his speaking style on the early Bolsheviks, who could keep audiences spellbound through the sheer force of their oratory. Speaking extemporaneously provided a contrast with his immediate predecessors, who were barely able to read from prepared texts. On the other hand, it caused him to ramble, the occupational disease of an all-powerful leader who is rarely contradicted. The points he was trying to make could easily get lost in an avalanche of words. Sometimes he got carried away with his own rhetoric, forgetting the point that he intended to make.

While the new tsar had a very clear sense about what was wrong with the Russian economy, he had a much hazier idea of how to put it right. Stripped of their revolutionary rhetoric and good intentions, his early policies often boiled down to more of the same. He still proclaimed an undying faith in the socialist system of centralized distribution. His attitude to Lenin remained deeply reverential. On the subject of market economics, Western visitors found that he was practically illiterate. Given these ideological limitations and the ingrained habits of Soviet bureaucrats, it was not surprising that the party bosses in western Siberia responded to the new leader’s criticisms and exhortations in the traditional way. They drilled hundreds more wells and increased the pressure on work crews to meet plan targets. Little attention was paid to the maintenance and repair of existing wells or the rational, long-term development of oil fields. Only token efforts were made to improve the living conditions of oil workers. Uskorenie (acceleration) became the slogan of the day.