Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

Rage and frustration had been building up inside Gorbachev for weeks. Apart from the immense destruction and suffering that it had caused, Chernobyl had been a public relations catastrophe. It could not have occurred at a worse time. Naturally the West had seized on the catastrophe, and the initial cover-up, as evidence that nothing had really changed in the Soviet Union. His own reputation as a dynamic new leader was in tatters. Western commentators had made much of the fact that it had taken eighteen days for him to go on Soviet television with a personal account of the disaster. They had described his eighteen-minute speech as “defensive” and “uninformative.”

Gorbachev was angry with the Western media and the Reagan administration for criticizing his performance and questioning his commitment to reform. He was depressed by the stories of bureaucratic heartlessness and incompetence that had come to his attention. Most of all, he was furious about the difficulty of obtaining fast and accurate information from his own subordinates. He believed that the leadership had been misled about the reliability of the Chernobyl type of reactor, radioactivity levels in the disaster zone, and much more. He accused the nuclear chieftains of using a cult of secrecy to safeguard their vested interests, refusing to share information even with the Central Committee and the government. Free from outside control, they had created a mini-empire riddled with “the spirit of servility, sycophancy, persecution of dissidents, window-dressing, personal connections, and clans.”

“We’re going to put an end to all this,” Gorbachev pledged. “We have suffered great losses, and not only economic ones. There have been human victims, and there will be more. We have been damaged politically. All our work has been compromised. Our science and technology have been discredited as a result of what has happened…. From now on, what we do is going to be visible to our entire people and the whole world. We need full information.”

As the expanded Politburo meeting wore on, horrifying facts began to emerge about safety standards in the Soviet nuclear power industry. At Chernobyl alone there had been an average of twenty accidents a year. Most were attributable to design defects. “We were heading toward a major disaster,” acknowledged Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzkhov. “If it hadn’t happened now, it could have taken place at any moment.” 121

The gensek was in no mood for excuses. When a deputy minister insisted that the reactor was structurally sound except for one small detail—the lack of a containment structure—he gave vent to his anger. “You astonish me. Everybody is saying that the reactor has shortcomings and is dangerous, but you are still defending the honor of the uniform.” The apparatchik was fired two weeks later, along with several other ministers and deputy ministers.

In public Gorbachev continued to defend the system that made such disasters possible. He placated the Politburo old guard by attacking the West for an “unrestrained anti-Soviet campaign” and insisted that the Soviet Union would continue with its ambitious nuclear power program. In private, however, he was radicalized by the traumatic experience of Chernobyl. In conversations with aides, he complained more and more frequently that perestroika was proceeding too slowly and would have to be accelerated. He still saw the Communist Party as the spearhead of his revolution, but there would clearly have to be a vast shakeup in its ranks before it could become an effective instrument of change. The party, like the nuclear industry, could no longer be answerable only to itself. It would have to submit to some form of outside control. 122

His weapon in this battle was glasnost (openness). First and foremost, Gorbachev wanted more information for himself and the Politburo. But he also saw the need for more information for the general public, which would be his ally in his struggle to reform the party. In the weeks since Chernobyl, he had been bombarded by complaints from newspaper editors about the lack of glasnost. 123Designed to prevent panic, the ban on information had had precisely the opposite effect, in the view of the editors. Rumors spread by word of mouth. In Kiev, a city of 2.5 million people, ninety miles south of Chernobyl, panic-stricken residents had camped out at railway stations for days on end, storming departing trains. Everybody knew that Communist Party officials responsible for censoring the news media were evacuating their own families from the capital.

In response to these protests and the outcry in the West, the flow of information about Chernobyl gradually increased. Gorbachev also used the crisis as a pretext to appoint new editors to magazines and journals, such as Ogonyok, Moscow News , and Novy Mir , which quickly became standard-bearers for glasnost.

FOR THOSE WHO DEALT with Chernobyl, the disaster was a turning point in their lives and professional careers. For Marshal Akhromeyev, who sent tens of thousands of conscripts to clean the mess up, it was an event comparable to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Legasov, the nuclear scientist who committed suicide, compared Chernobyl with such epoch-making catastrophes as the destruction of Pompeii. For Prime Minister Ryzkhov, struggling to cope with collapsing oil prices and falling alcohol revenues, the disaster represented another blow to the nation’s finances. For Grigori Medvedev, a nuclear engineer who wrote the first detailed account in Russian of the disaster, Chernobyl marked “the final, spectacular collapse of a declining era.” 124

The effect on Gorbachev was summed up by his foreign policy aide Anatoly Chernyayev. Chernobyl, he writes in his memoirs, was a “time bomb” that exploded on Gorbachev’s watch but had been ticking away for decades beneath the foundations of Soviet society. 125There would be many more such explosions. Gorbachev was fated to pay for the mistakes of his predecessors.

WHAT RUDYARD KIPLING CALLED the Great Game had been played out in the inhospitable mountains around the Khyber Pass for more than two centuries. The object, according to the nineteenth-century British strategists who drew up the rules, was nothing less than “the domination of the world.” 126Successive British viceroys of India had nightmares of Russian troops pouring through the pass and achieving the age-old tsarist dream of a warm-water port on the shores of the Indian Ocean. To prevent this geopolitical nightmare from taking place, it was essential to control the northern approaches to the pass.

In the updated twentieth-century version of “the Game,” everything was reversed. The Kremlin gerontocrats were plagued by visions of an “imperialist” threat to their Central Asian republics, the soft underbelly of the Soviet empire. In order to forestall this threat, they had invaded Afghanistan only to encounter unexpectedly strong opposition from the descendants of the same tribesmen who had spent years fighting the British. Determined to make things difficult for the Russians, the “imperialists” secretly supplied the tribesmen with weapons and provided training bases on the southern side of the Khyber Pass. The Soviets responded by attempting to seal the border with Pakistan.

Like the British before them, the Soviets established a strong garrison in Jalalabad, halfway between the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the Pakistani border town of Peshawar. A brigade of two thousand elite spetsnaz (special assignment) troops was camped out around the airport. By intercepting rebel communications with mobile eavesdropping equipment, they were able to locate mujahedin caravans crossing over into Pakistan. Once a caravan had been pinpointed, a squadron of Mi-24 helicopter gunships would be dispatched to strafe the area with rockets and machine-gun fire. Paratroopers would arrive aboard Mi-8 transport helicopters, protected by the Mi-24S. After several hours of bombardment, a column of tanks, armored cars, and mortars would move in to finish the job.