Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

“I will never allow you back into big-time politics,” the general secretary added. 180

Rarely have more fateful words ever been spoken by a Russian leader.

THE OFFICIAL BLACK CARS deposited the men responsible for molding Soviet public opinion outside an imposing portico on Staraya Ploshchad (Old Square) emblazoned with the words “Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” Uniformed KGB guards snapped to attention as the editors in chief entered the building, flashing the little red booklets that identified them as members of the nomenklatura. The visitors checked their coats into the ground floor cloakroom and then took the elevator to the fifth floor, where the party’s ideology secretary had his office.

If the Kremlin was the symbolic heart of the Soviet Union, the place where the Politburo held its regular Thursday meetings and foreign leaders were received, Old Square was the political nerve center. For decades the virtually unchecked authority of the totalitarian state had been concentrated in a labyrinth of buildings between the Lubyanka Prison and the Kremlin. Everything of significance that happened in the Soviet Union—from the approval of five-year plans to the appointment of a factory director in faraway Siberia—was grist to its bureaucratic machinery. Central Committee departments issued binding instructions to ministers and newspaper editors, army officers and Russian Orthodox bishops, factory managers and ambassadors. A special communications system, nicknamed the vertushka , linked the Central Committee with every important decision maker in the country.

Occupying a city block, the Central Committee was a luxuriously appointed bureaucratic machine. No expense was spared to ensure that everything was in perfect running order, in stark contrast with the rest of Moscow, with its crumbling facades and potholed streets. Every office was repainted once a year. A special furniture factory produced the desks, cupboards, lecterns, and long conference tables that adorned the offices of the apparatchiks. An entire section of the Ministry of Health—the Fourth Directorate—looked after the health of Soviet leaders. The Central Committee’s own farm supplied ecologically uncontaminated food for the staff restaurants, thus ensuring that the “servants of the people” did not have to eat the same poisoned food products as the people they served. When a senior official needed a new suit or a pair of shoes, he was outfitted by a special Central Committee tailor or shoemaker. Lower-level employees had access to a special section of the Gum department store on Red Square.

In the Communist utopia created by the apparatchiks for their own benefit, every rung on the bureaucratic ladder had its own special privileges and rewards. Dachas, medals, clothing allowances, and even cemetery lots all were distributed according to a Byzantine table of ranks. Instructors had the right to a new fur hat once every two years, while secretaries and drivers were limited to one every three years. A visitor could tell where power lay in the Central Committee by following the carpet runner in the hallway. It glided past the offices of ordinary apparatchiks but made right-angle detours into the suites of the top leaders. Another telltale sign was the portraits of the Communist deities. When a bureaucrat reached the rank of deputy head of department, he was automatically allocated a portrait of Marx instead of the standard portrait of Lenin. Heads of department had large portraits of both Marx and Lenin on their walls. Then there was the question of how tea was served. A lower-ranking official was served tea on a plain tray. Once he reached the rank of chief of sector, the tray suddenly sprouted a napkin. In apparatchik-speak, the promotion was referred to as “receiving the napkin.”

The fifth floor of the old Central Committee building, where the editors in chief alighted from the elevator, was the inner sanctum of the Communist cathedral. The carpet runners were thicker here than on other floors of the building, the brass lamps in the corridors had a special sheen that came from daily polishing, and the walnut-paneled offices were large enough to accommodate entire committees. Voices were kept to a respectful hush. This was the only place in the building where an official was permitted to sit directly beneath the portrait of Lenin. (Elsewhere the portrait was placed a little to one side.) It was as if the founder of the Soviet state were speaking to future generations through the occupants of these offices. Everything was done to bolster the impression that they were his spiritual heirs.

Apart from the chief ideologist, only two other people had offices on the fifth floor: the secretary in charge of the Soviet economy and the gensek himself. The ideology secretary’s office was in a front corner of the building, with a fine view of KGB headquarters and the towering statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police. For more than a quarter of a century the “gray cardinal” of Kremlin politics, Mikhail Suslov, had held court in this office, defending the purity of Marxist-Leninist dogma. Suslov, a stern figure of unbending rectitude, with the manner of a dried-up professor, had struck fear into an entire generation of Soviet and foreign Communists with his withering denunciations of anyone who dared think differently. Suslov was to ideology what Gromyko was to foreign policy: Comrade Nyet. As far as he was concerned, all change was bad, almost by definition. When Suslov finally died, in 1982, Office No. 2 was inhabited in turn by Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The latest occupant of the office was Yegor Ligachev.

Together with many senior apparatchiks, Ligachev had unpleasant memories of Office No. 2. He himself had been the target of some of Suslov’s tirades. 181In many ways, however, the former party secretary from Tomsk was a worthy successor to the “gray cardinal.” He was energetic, incorruptible, and ideologically blinkered. His entire adult life had been spent in the service of the party. Like Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Ligachev had direct experience of the Stalinist terror. His father-in-law, a Red Army general, had been arrested in 1936 on the absurd charge of being an “Anglo-Japanese-German spy” and executed at the end of a ten-minute trial. As a Communist youth leader in 1949 Ligachev himself had come under suspicion of “Trotskyism” and had been lucky to escape arrest. 182But his faith in socialism had never wavered. His subordinates were sick of hearing him talk about his seventeen years in Siberia—that “severe but wonderful land”—as the happiest and most satisfying period of his life. Ligachev was a short, gruff man, with the face of a pugilist, who had an imperious manner and a voice that brimmed with moral certainty. When he opened his mouth, it was as if he were speaking for the entire Central Committee.

In the early days of perestroika, Ligachev and Gorbachev had seen eye to eye. Dismayed by the stagnation of the Brezhnev era, they shared a common determination to breathe new life into socialism. Ligachev was happy to serve as Gorbachev’s hatchet man, purging the party of incompetent and corrupt officials and whipping its regional organizations into line. If glasnost meant diagnosing the defects of the planned economy and putting them right, he was all for it. As time went on, however, he became increasingly alarmed over the direction that glasnost was taking and the party’s inability to control events. He later said that he began having serious doubts about the political course being followed by Gorbachev from late 1987 onward. “At some point this man became something else. He underwent a political rebirth. As our economic difficulties mounted, he began to look for solutions that led to the destruction of everything we believed in.” 183