Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

Ligachev had a puritan’s distaste for such undesirable social phenomena as pornography and rock concerts. But what really enraged him was what he saw as the increasingly revisionist and negative attitude toward Soviet history. In his view, giving editors the green light to denounce Stalin’s “crimes” had opened the floodgates to a general “blackening” of everything the party had accomplished since 1917.

As ideology secretary Ligachev had done his best to prevent glasnost from getting out of hand. He had hit the roof in September 1987, when the weekly Moscow News dared publish an obituary of the émigré Russian writer Viktor Nekrasov, a nonperson as far as Kremlin propagandists were concerned. But Ligachev was finding his job increasingly difficult. Holding back the rising tide of anti-Sovietism was like trying to plug a leaking dike. He ran frantically from one gap in the Soviet Union’s ideological defense system to another, yelling at newspaper editors and giving speeches bemoaning the loss of traditional Communist values, but the waters kept on rising. The ideological dam had been breached in dozens of places. Unless dramatic action was taken, there was a serious danger that it would be swept away altogether.

Ligachev’s problem was that the traditional methods—a discreet telephone call here, a party reprimand there—no longer worked as effectively as they had. Once-servile mass media organs, such as Moscow News and Ogonyok , had managed to slip out of his grasp. New television programs, such as Vzglyad (Glance), aimed at the youth audience, were constantly testing the ideological limits, running items about Afghan war veterans or the spread of AIDS or hard-currency prostitutes. In the Baltic states censorship regulations were getting particularly lax. At the beginning of March a Russian-language journal in Latvia had begun publishing Orwell’s Animal Farm , the classic denunciation of totalitarianism.

The party’s monopoly over the dissemination of information was also being undermined by the technological revolution. Up until very recently every photocopier in the country had been kept under lock and key. Such tight control was no longer feasible if the Soviet Union wanted to compete in the modern world. Preventing the politically unreliable from getting their hands on the latest generation of information technology-such as VCRs, computers, laser printers, satellite dishes, and fax machines—was equally daunting.

The time had come to mount a general counteroffensive. Like a commander in chief briefing his generals, the ideology secretary intended to outline his plan of attack at his meeting with the editors in chief.

LIGACHEV’S PROBLEMS WERE COMPOUNDED by the fact that two floors below, another Politburo member was intent on taking Soviet society in an altogether different direction. An owlish figure with bushy eyebrows and a fondness for three-piece suits, Aleksandr Yakovlev was the most erudite member of the leadership, and also the most radical. By temperament and political conviction, he and Ligachev were polar opposites. Ligachev was overbearing and insensitive to others. Yakovlev was introspective and easily offended. Ligachev wanted to maintain a tight grip over what Soviet citizens should be permitted to read and say. Yakovlev favored shining the torch of glasnost on previously taboo subjects, including the holy of holies, Lenin himself. If Ligachev was the hero of the apparatchiks, Yakovlev was the darling of the intellectuals.

At sixty-four, Yakovlev was nearing the end of an epic intellectual journey. It had taken him from a tiny village on the banks of the Volga River, in the historic heart of Russia, to the heart of Soviet power; from a once-ardent faith in the “shining” socialist future to a conviction that Soviet-style communism was doomed. Back in 1985 he had believed, along with Gorbachev, that the system could be reformed. The desperate rearguard action put up by his fellow apparatchiks during the first two years of perestroika had destroyed his remaining illusions. By his own account, the turning point came in January 1987, when he and Gorbachev had come up with a proposal for competitive elections to party posts. The intention had been to introduce a degree of democracy within the party and unleash the latent energy of the Soviet elite, but the result had been a storm of protests from the nomenklatura.

“That is when it became clear to me that the system could not be reformed It had to be broken,” said Yakovlev in 1993. “At first I thought that we could achieve what we wanted to achieve by eliminating the stupidities associated with the Brezhnev version of socialism and allowing people to display some initiative. But it turned out that the system would not permit this. The system is based on fear and the lack of individual responsibility. Any attempt by an individual to use his initiative was bound to shake the system to its foundations.” 184

Yakovlev’s ideological conversion had been long and tortuous, and it involved the painful rethinking of many deeply held beliefs. The descendant of Yaroslavl serfs, he was impressed by the way in which a backward, rural country managed to transform itself into a modern industrial state, vanquishing illiteracy in the process. His father, Nikolai, had fought with the Reds in the civil war and, like Gorbachev’s grandfather, became the first chairman of the local collective farm. Unlike Gorbachev, however, Yakovlev had little direct experience of the terror. Nikolai Yakovlev managed to avoid arrest through the simple stratagem of leaving the village for several days at a time when the secret police were rounding up “enemies of the people.” Like everybody else in the Soviet Union, the NKVD had a plan to fulfill. After grabbing the required quota of “enemies” from the Yaroslavl region, it moved on. When he learned that the coast was clear, Yakovlev’s father returned home. 185

At the age of seventeen Yakovlev went idealistically to war, shouting, “For Stalin! For the motherland!” with his friends as they charged German lines. As a lieutenant in the marines he saw a lot of gruesome action. Neither side bothered with prisoners. Many of his friends were killed. He would have been killed himself had it not been for the tradition in the Soviet Marines of never leaving a wounded soldier on the battlefield. When he was riddled by Nazi machine-gun fire in a swamp outside Leningrad, his friends dragged him to safety. Four of them sacrificed their lives in the process, but Yakovlev was saved. He returned home a permanent cripple. Of his school year, only three students out of every one hundred survived the war.

Yakovlev’s first faint doubts about Stalin occurred after the war, when he saw how the regime treated Soviet prisoners coming home from Germany. Instead of being greeted as heroes and helped to begin a new life, the POWs were packed off to prison camps again—Soviet camps this time—for fear that they might be ideologically contaminated. “There was no way I could accept this. It was a terrible shame,” said Yakovlev later. His doubts were strengthened in 1956, when he sat in the balcony of a Kremlin meeting hall as Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes in his celebrated “secret speech.” The accounts of purges, deportations, and mass atrocities “turned me inside out,” Yakovlev recollected. “No one looked at anyone else. There was only silence as Khrushchev revealed fact after fact, each one worse than the last.” 186

Fate decreed that Yakovlev would witness another epoch-making event, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. By that time he had risen to become acting head of the propaganda department of the Central Committee. He arrived in Prague a day after the Red Army acted to crush Dubĉek’s experiment in socialism with a human face as the ideological watchdog for a group of Soviet journalists. It quickly became clear to Yakovlev that the official explanation for the invasion—a “Jewish-American conspiracy” to overthrow socialism in Czechoslovakia—was a lie. During his five-day visit he saw Czechoslovak citizens burn the Soviet flag and attack Soviet tanks with Molotov cocktails. He heard them chanting, “Fascists, fascists,” at the army that had supposedly come to provide “fraternal assistance.” He saw Dubĉek—reviled by Yakovlev’s fellow propagandists as a traitor to communism—being greeted as a national hero on his return from captivity in Moscow. “My visit to Czechoslovakia left a lasting impression on me,” he told me. “It was a sign that the system was doomed.” 187