Michael Dobbs: Down with Big Brother

A decade after the crushing of the Czechoslovak experiment in “socialism with a human face,” the Soviet regime appeared both unchanging and unchangeable. There was a similar immutable quality about international affairs. The world seemed permanently split into two, ideologically opposed camps. Restrained by a balance of nuclear terror, neither side possessed the means to secure victory over the other.

In reality, the state of Soviet society and economy was more brittle than practically anyone imagined. With his vacant gaze and shuffling walk, Brezhnev was the public face of a vast multinational empire already sinking into irreversible decline. By the fall of 1979 the Soviet Union had become a sclerotic giant. Its bureaucratic arteries had shriveled and hardened. Years of ideological indoctrination, or, more simply, years of lies, had produced an atmosphere of total cynicism. Edicts were issued from the center and promptly forgotten; grandiose projects were announced and never completed; statistics had ceased to have any meaning. In the surrealistic atmosphere of the late Brezhnev era, the government allocated billions of rubles to building imaginary factories and nonexistent railway lines. Years later it was discovered that the leaders of the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan had been routinely reporting a fictitious cotton crop to Moscow and distributing the receipts among themselves.

Even the military-industrial complex—the leadership’s number one priority—was not immune from the ills afflicting the rest of the economy. The Soviet Union might be ahead of the United States in tanks and rockets and number of men under arms, but it was losing a much more important race. Soviet generals had begun to voice serious concern about the lack of “smart weapons” capable of matching the sophisticated weaponry under development in the West. Although some official U.S. studies claimed to show that the Soviet Union was “ahead” or “catching up” in key areas of military technology, such as cruise missiles or antisubmarine warfare, Soviet scientists knew very well that this was not an accurate picture. 11The Soviet Union was in danger of missing out altogether on the technological revolution that was transforming Western societies.

Unable to summon up the energy for internal renewal, Soviet leaders sought legitimacy through external expansion. They had become hostages to their own ideology. The dogma of the irreversibility of history meant that no part of the empire—however useless, however costly—could ever be surrendered. In his quest for global influence, Brezhnev had forgotten one of the cardinal lessons of realpolitik, knowing when to stop. In the words of Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, “You have to understand that there are limits to everything. Otherwise, you can choke.” 12

THE CRISIS CONFRONTING the most powerful men in the Soviet Union had been building for months. In April 1978 a small group of radical intellectuals and left-wing army officers had seized power in Afghanistan, a mountainous country of fifteen million people on the Soviet Union’s southern border, and proclaimed a socialist regime. Kremlin leaders found out about the coup from a dispatch by Reuters news agency. 13Nevertheless, they began referring to the Afghan leaders as “comrades.” Giddy with success, the ideologists pointed to the Afghan “revolution” as another triumph over the forces of imperialism. “Today, there is no country in the world that isn’t ready for socialism,” declared one apparatchik enthusiastically. 14

With its clanlike political structure, almost medieval way of life, and 90 percent illiteracy rate, Afghanistan seemed an unlikely candidate for a workers’ paradise. Within eighteen months of the rising of the red flag over Kabul, the “revolution” was on the verge of falling apart. The mullahs had called for a “holy war” against the godless Communists. Most of the countryside—and some big towns—were already under the control of antigovernment guerrillas. The army was disintegrating. The man who had proclaimed himself the “Great Leader of the April Revolution,” a dreamy Marxist theorist named Mohammad Taraki, had issued numerous appeals for Soviet assistance.

Brezhnev had given Taraki much of what he wanted—tanks, helicopters, military advisers—but had drawn the line at direct Soviet involvement in the Afghan civil war. In early September he had publicly hugged and embraced Taraki at a ceremony in the Kremlin. Soon afterward came news that the Afghan president had been overthrown in a palace coup and arrested on charges of terrorism. When Brezhnev returned to Moscow from East Berlin on October 9, he was greeted by even more distressing news. Taraki was dead. The Kabul Times reported laconically that he had been suffering “for some time” from a “serious illness.” In fact, he was murdered on the orders of his successor, Hafizullah Amin. A member of the palace guard later described how he had helped tie the “Great Leader” to a bed with a towel and had then suffocated him with a pillow. The death throes had lasted for fifteen minutes. 15

Soviet leaders had grave doubts about the loyalty of the man now described by the Afghan mass media as the “Brave Commander of the Revolution.” According to Soviet intelligence reports, Amin was pursuing sectarian and repressive policies that could trigger a truly popular revolt. In addition, he was suspected of planning diplomatic overtures to Washington. Amin had studied in the United States, and there were rumors that he might have been recruited by the CIA. While there was no hard evidence to support the allegations, Kremlin leaders had paranoid visions of the “imperialists” establishing electronic listening posts along their southern borders, monitoring everything that moved in Soviet Central Asia. 16By November the KGB residency in Kabul had concluded that the “revolution” could be saved only through Amin’s forcible removal from power. That in turn would require a Soviet military intervention. 17

THE MEN WHO GATHERED at Brezhnev’s dacha that cold December day in 1979 all had been born before the Bolsheviks staged their coup d’état in Petrograd. Like the general secretary himself, they were the products of their times. Peasant boys from the vast Russian plain, they owed their careers and positions entirely to the Soviet Communist Party. Their formative years had been marked by war, famine, and revolution. They all had felt what one of them later described as the “merciless… relentless gaze” of a great tyrant, who possessed the power of life and death over 250 million people. 18The seemingly arbitrary disappearance of millions of Soviet citizens—including some of their own relatives and friends—had cleared the way for their own upward progress through the Soviet bureaucracy. Now old men, they were finally experiencing the rewards of a lifetime of unquestioning political obedience.

Apart from Brezhnev himself, there were four men in the room: the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov; the defense minister, Dmitri Ustinov; the foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko; and the general secretary’s closest aide and confidant, Konstantin Chernenko. 19Each of these men owed his place in the Politburo to Brezhnev, and each had a personal interest in perpetuating the rule of a chronic invalid. In return for symbolic tribute, Brezhnev allowed his barons to run their fiefdoms as they pleased and bathe in his reflected glory.

As head of the KGB, the Committee for State Security, Andropov had been the first Politburo member to learn about the deterioration in Brezhnev’s health. The Kremlin doctors reported directly to him. For a long time he had refused to share the information with his colleagues because he feared it could provoke a vicious struggle for power. “For the sake of peace in the country and in the party, for the well-being of the people, we must keep silent. Indeed, we must try to hide these failures of Brezhnev,” he told Chazov. “If a struggle for power begins in conditions of anarchy, at a time when there is no strong leadership, it will lead to the collapse of the economy and the entire system.” 20