Michael Dobbs: Down with Big Brother

There was another reason for Andropov’s caution. A premature power struggle could damage his own chances of becoming general secretary. In Chazov’s view, Andropov was “terrified” of other strong figures in the leadership, such as Aleksei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny. As their power dwindled and his own position grew stronger, Andropov dropped his objections to informing the Politburo about Brezhnev’s state of health.

A tall, ascetic-looking figure with steel-rimmed glasses and brushed-back silver hair, Andropov ran a worldwide network of spies, informers, and agents provocateurs. The successor to Lenin’s Cheka and Stalin’s NKVD, the KGB was an empire within an empire. Known as the “sword and shield” of the Soviet Communist Party, the KGB was responsible for everything from rooting out dissidents and electronic eavesdropping to foreign intelligence gathering and providing protection for the leadership.

For the leader of such a seemingly all-powerful organization, Andropov had a remarkably keen sense of the fragility of Soviet power. His younger associates talked about his “Hungarian complex.” 21As a rising apparatchik in his early forties he had been dispatched as ambassador to Budapest. There he had experienced the seminal event of his career, an armed uprising in 1956 against the Communist regime and its violent suppression by Soviet tanks. From the windows of his embassy he had seen Communists strung up from lampposts. He himself had come under fire, on his way out to the airport to greet a senior Soviet emissary. His wife, Tatyana, had suffered a breakdown, from which she never fully recovered. 22Andropov was stunned by the speed with which the apparently well-entrenched Stalinist regime in Hungary was swept away. It took just a few weeks for the dissatisfaction of a handful of intellectuals and military cadets to build up into a mighty protest movement. The secret police was disbanded in a matter of hours. Supposedly loyal Communist Party members transformed themselves overnight into fanatical anti-Communists.

There was another lesson that Andropov drew from the Hungarian uprising. Military power, ruthlessly applied, can stop a counterrevolution in its tracks. Furthermore, a successful demonstration of overwhelming force would deter future rebellions. As Soviet ambassador to Budapest Andropov had played a key role in crushing the uprising, persuading a former Hungarian prime minister to sign a letter “inviting” Soviet troops into the country. 23Nearly a quarter of a century later he proposed applying the Hungarian scenario to Afghanistan.

Andropov’s closest ally in the Politburo was Marshal Ustinov. Like the KGB chief, Ustinov spoke in the name of a tremendously powerful institution. With more than 180 divisions, and five million men under arms, the armed forces were an awe-inspiring colossus. Without the Red Army there would have been no Soviet Union. No sacrifice was too great for the institution that had won the civil war for the Bolsheviks, driven out the German invader, and transformed a backward country into a global superpower. The army was both a source of national pride and an instrument for holding together a vast multinational empire. Every year more than a million eighteen-year-old Uzbeks and Russians, Lithuanians and Georgians were thrown into an ethnic melting pot for two years’ compulsory military service. The army had the task of transforming these raw recruits into both good soldiers and good Soviet citizens.

An engineer by profession, Ustinov personified the military-industrial complex. At the age of thirty-three he had been picked by Stalin for a crucial task, supplying the Red Army with the weapons it needed to defeat the Wehrmacht. As people’s commissar for armaments Ustinov had supervised the evacuation of the defense industry from European Russia to Siberia. Within six months of Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941, more than fifteen hundred defense factories had been physically transplanted one thousand miles to the east. The plant and equipment filled some one and a half million railway wagons. 24It was one of the most stupendous organizational feats of World War II and a vital precondition for the Soviet Union’s eventual victory. After the war Ustinov oversaw the construction of delivery systems for the Soviet atomic bomb. In short, he brought the Red Army from the age of cavalry to the age of nuclear weapons.

By the time Ustinov became Soviet defense minister in 1976, Soviet factories were churning out an average of five fighter planes, eight tanks, eight artillery pieces, and one intercontinental ballistic missile every day. 25In Politburo discussions Ustinov routinely demanded greater resources for the military—and usually won the argument. It was clear to everyone in the leadership that military spending was draining the Soviet Union’s economic resources, but no one had the courage to call a halt. Negotiations with the imperialists could be conducted only from a position of strength. As Brezhnev liked to say, “The people will understand us. For peace, it is necessary to pay a price.” 26

The defense minister had the qualities of a strong-willed Russian muzhik, or peasant. He was big-hearted and gregarious. With the possible exception of Andropov, he was the hardest-working member of the Politburo, regularly putting in fifteen-hour days when he was well over seventy. 27Like many of the older generation of Soviet leaders, however, he was a Stalinist at heart. He never forgave Khrushchev for defiling the memory of the tyrant with his secret speech to the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in 1956. By condemning Stalin’s crimes, Khrushchev had dragged Soviet history through the mud and undermined the faith of the people in Communist ideology. “No enemy brought us as many misfortunes as Khrushchev,” Ustinov told the other members of the leadership. “It’s no secret that the Westerners have never liked us. But Khrushchev gave them enough arguments and ammunition to keep them well supplied for many years.” 28

The third member of the national security troika was Gromyko. For many people in the West, Gromyko was the physical embodiment of Soviet foreign policy. His dour demeanor—he was known on the diplomatic circuit as Grim Grom—seemed to sum up the Kremlin’s approach to international relations. A talented linguist, the foreign minister had been around for so long that he had practically become a one-man institution. He had run errands for Stalin at Potsdam and Yalta, while the fate of postwar Europe was being decided, and helped draft the founding charter of the United Nations in San Francisco. He had sat next to Khrushchev when he banged his shoe on his desk at the UN General Assembly. He had negotiated with Charles de Gaulle and Zhou Enlai, Henry Kissinger and Ho Chi Minh.

Western newspapers had christened Gromyko Mr. Nyet because of the series of twenty-six vetoes that he delivered in the UN Security Council between 1946 and 1948 as the first Soviet representative to the world body. In the Kremlin, however, he was known as Comrade Yes because of his servility to his superiors. 29A professional diplomat, Gromyko had climbed to the top of the Soviet bureaucracy by dint of loyalty and long service. He had achieved his ambition by becoming a full member of the Politburo in 1973 and would do nothing to jeopardize his privileged position. While Brezhnev’s illness had significantly increased his policy-making responsibilities, Gromyko was reluctant to cross swords with more powerful Politburo figures, such as Ustinov and Andropov. On crucial national security questions, the opinions of the minister of defense and the chairman of the KGB were usually decisive. 30

The last visitor to Zareche that day, Konstantin Chernenko, had little to do with the formulation of foreign policy. He was there by courtesy of his relationship with Brezhnev, whom he had known for more than three decades. He was the Kremlin’s chief paper shuffler, responsible for drafting Politburo minutes. He performed a series of indispensable chores for the general secretary, such as compiling laudatory press clippings, doling out cigarettes, and swapping old war stories. Chernenko was such a dullard that aides and bodyguards laughed at him behind his back.