Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

Like many of his colleagues, Yakovlev took care to conceal his personal views. Without an ability to lead a double life, he would not have survived in the bureaucracy, much less prospered. He claims that he gave Brezhnev an accurate account of the “real state of affairs” in Czechoslovakia. But his report must have been couched in extremely diplomatic terms since he was given a state award for his work in Prague and remained in his propaganda job for several more years. It was only after the collapse of communism and his retirement from high office that he talked about his Czechoslovak experiences in public.

The other great intellectual influence on Yakovlev was foreign travel. He was the only Politburo member with detailed personal knowledge of life in Western countries. As a rising apparatchik he had spent a year at Columbia University in 1958, in the first Soviet-American student exchange. Although he was impressed by American hospitality and technological achievements, he reacted negatively to moralizing lectures from his hosts about the inherent superiority of capitalism. Decades later he still smoldered at the memory of the Manhattan store clerk who asked him to remove his hat to check if it really was true that Communists had horns. He vented his resentment in a series of stridently anti-American tracts, with such titles as The Ideology of the American Empire, The U.S.A.—from Great to Sick , and On the Edge of an Abyss .

After getting into a literary brawl with Russian nationalists in 1972, Yakovlev was sent into gilded exile as ambassador in Canada. He remained there for ten years, observing the workings of a Western democracy from up close and the tragicomic goings-on of the late Brezhnev era from afar. The Canadian experience gave Yakovlev the ability to view the problems of his own country with a degree of intellectual detachment. It also provided a relaxed setting for a remarkable series of conversations with Gorbachev in May 1983, during which the two men explored many of the ideas that ultimately led to perestroika. Gorbachev, then the youngest member of the Politburo with responsibility for agricultural affairs, was making his international debut with a ten-day visit to Canada. Yakovlev had the job of showing him around.

Yakovlev had met Gorbachev on several occasions in the early seventies but did not know him well. However, they had a very close friend in common, a man called Mark Mikhailov, who was from Stavropol, Gorbachev’s hometown, and had worked for Yakovlev in the Central Committee. Thanks to this mutual friend, they knew that they could be frank with each other. The informal nature of Gorbachev’s trip also helped. Hopping around Canada in an old prop-driven Convair plane, they discovered that they had remarkably similar views. At one stop their Canadian host failed to show up, and they had a long two-hour walk through the cornfields until they were caught in the rain. “I took advantage of the circumstances and told him what I really thought. He did the same,” said Yakovlev. 188Far from KGB eavesdroppers and their doddering Kremlin colleagues, they talked about the “stupidities” of Soviet foreign policy and the need for a radical change of direction at home.

Gorbachev brought Yakovlev back from his Canadian exile and helped him become director of a prestigious Moscow think tank, the Institute for World Economy and International Relations. After he became general secretary, he promoted Yakovlev to the Politburo and made him his closest confidant. Yakovlev was Gorbachev’s ideas man, the intellectual powerhouse behind perestroika.

Although Yakovlev and Ligachev were political opposites, in one respect they were very similar. They both were skilled apparatchiks, accustomed to wielding power behind the scenes. On the basis of long experience, they had an intuitive feel for the backstage intrigues of the Central Committee bureaucracy. Although Yakovlev had a following among Moscow intellectuals, he lacked the populist instincts of a man like Yeltsin. Yakovlev believed that the real fight was in the Politburo, not on the streets, and that Yeltsin was harming the cause through his emotional, erratic behavior.

The supreme operating rule of big-time Kremlin politics was the principle of plausible deniability. Instructions were given verbally, often by telephone, in such a way that they could not be traced back to their source. Sometimes they consisted of little more than a wink and a nod. Like Ligachev, Yakovlev exerted his influence through a network of well-placed allies. He acted as the political patron of the self-proclaimed “kamikazes of glasnost,” the radical newspaper editors who were constantly probing the ideological limits. They took responsibility for what appeared in their newspapers, but it was understood that he would protect them in a crisis.

A typical example of Yakovlev’s methods came in October 1986 with the release of the anti-Stalinist film Repentance , one of the major breakthroughs of glasnost. A Felliniesque allegory set in Stalin’s native Georgia, Repentance dealt with some of the most explosive issues of Soviet history as well as contemporary politics. Yakovlev knew that it would be difficult to get such a work approved by Politburo conservatives. In order to skirt around this obstacle, he reached a confidential understanding with the director of the film, Tengiz Abuladze. Repentance would not be officially released. Instead it would be shown by private invitation to select audiences. The number of screenings grew and grew until virtually the whole country had seen the film. Repentance became a nationwide sensation.

Once censorship was relaxed, Soviet journalists and filmmakers needed little encouragement from above to expose the dark secrets of the past. Nevertheless, conservatives like Ligachev soon began to view Yakovlev as the evil puppeteer, pulling the strings of his glasnost puppets. They blamed him for all their setbacks. In his memoirs Ligachev denounces Yakovlev as the éminence grise who distorted the true course of perestroika through his manipulation of the media. Doing battle with such a man was like fighting shadows. “We had no idea what a powerful and dangerous weapon the media could be in [conditions of] glasnost and pluralism. Aleksandr Yakovlev, who had spent many years in the West, naturally had a much better understanding of this than other members of the Politburo. From the very beginning he established a personal control over the right radical press.” 189

If socialism was to be saved, Ligachev knew that he had to fight back.

LIKE YAKOVLEV, LIGACHEV HAD his network of like-minded editors, who regarded him as their political patron. In March 1987 one of these editors, Valentin Chikin, launched a journalistic broadside against glasnost in his newspaper, Sovietskaya Rossiya . It came in the form of a full-page article, headlined I CANNOT BETRAY MY PRINCIPLES, signed by an obscure Leningrad chemistry teacher named Nina Andreyeva. The headline was borrowed from a recent Gorbachev speech, but the article itself was the antithesis of practically everything the general secretary stood for. Andreyeva defended Stalin, called for a “class struggle both at home and abroad,” and denounced the informal political groups that were springing up around the country. It was, Gorbachev said later, a direct assault “against perestroika.” 190

Exactly who was behind Andreyeva’s tract later became a matter of great controversy. The radicals immediately suspected that Chikin was acting with Ligachev’s protection and encouragement. The two men were certainly in close contact during this period. Ligachev repeatedly denied that he had anything to do with the article before publication, and the case against him has never been proved. Given the way such matters were handled, it is unlikely that a “smoking gun” will ever be found. In a sense it is irrelevant because the real issue with the Nina Andreyeva article was what happened after publication.