Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

Soviet soldiers discovered the two bodies in a pool of blood. Evidently, they were caught in the crossfire. As they lay dying, the tyrant hugged the boy’s head close to his chest. 49After the fighting died down, a member of a rival Afghan faction insisted on carrying out a formal death sentence on Amin “in the name of the Party and the people.” 50The fact that the dictator was already dead did not deter him from pumping several more bullets into the corpse.

WHILE THE SOVIET COMMANDOS were mounting their assault on the Dār-ol-Amān Palace, the man who was shortly to succeed Amin as president of Afghanistan was cowering in a bunker on the other side of Kabul. Vain, garrulous, and a chronic alcoholic, Babrak Karmal had been one of the original leaders of the Afghan “revolution.” After quarreling with Taraki and Amin he was sent into exile as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia. The KGB had smuggled him back into Kabul on December 23, 1979, four days before the invasion. 51

Karmal later boasted that he had directed a “popular uprising” against the tyrannical Amin. In fact he had virtually nothing to do with the fighting. The first meeting of the new Afghan Politburo took place at the Soviet military base at Bagram Airport under the watchful eyes of Karmal’s KGB bodyguards. It was here that Karmal appointed himself general secretary of the Central Committee of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. It was here that he listened to his own prerecorded radio address to the Afghan people broadcast from a transmitter in the Soviet border town of Termez, in which he denounced Amin as an “agent of American imperialism.”

“The day of freedom and rebirth has arrived,” declared the new Afghan leader. “The tyrannical torture machine of Amin and his supporters—the savage butchers, hangmen, usurpers, and murderers of tens of thousands of our compatriots—has been smashed.” 52

Late that night, after Amin was dead, Karmal climbed into a Soviet armored car. The armored car joined a Soviet convoy, guarded by three tanks, moving cautiously in the direction of the city. As dawn broke, the convoy drove into the center of Kabul. It was a clear, crisp morning. Armed men were everywhere. Tanks and armored vehicles roared down streets littered with burning vehicles and the debris of bombed-out buildings. Karmal and his bodyguards were deposited at the Interior Ministry building, now firmly in the hands of Soviet troops.

As Afghanistan’s new president was arriving in Kabul, another convoy was moving in the opposite direction. At the Kabul airport coffins containing the remains of the twelve Soviet commandos killed during the assault on Dār-ol-Amān were loaded onto transport planes. 53There were special honors for Boyarinov, who was given the posthumous award of Hero of the Soviet Union. They were the first casualties of a war that was to last nearly ten years and take the lives of more than thirteen thousand Soviet servicemen, in addition to half a million Afghans.

As they watched the coffins of their dead comrades being stacked on transport planes at Bagram Airport that wintry morning, the survivors of the attack on Amin’s palace were convinced that the war was over. In fact it was just beginning.

The long-term results of the invasion were almost the exact opposite of the goals of Politburo leaders. Instead of crushing the Afghan opposition, they gave it new life. Instead of striking a blow against the imperialists, they provoked an unlikely coalition of the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia. And instead of defending the prestige of world socialism, they encouraged a generation of Soviet citizens to question where the world’s second superpower was heading.

When the coffins were eventually unloaded on Soviet soil, there were no salutes and no marching band. The Kremlin did not want anyone to know that Soviet citizens were being killed in combat operations in Afghanistan. The funerals took place in secret. A standard formula was adopted to explain the fatalities of a nonexistent war to the families of the victims. Boyarinov and the others had died “while fulfilling their internationalist duty.”

A WOODED PENINSULA JUTTING OUT into the Black Sea, the Georgian resort of Pitsunda has been known for its natural beauty since ancient Greece. Centuries-old pine trees stretch down to the water’s edge, providing shelter from the sudden winter storms and harsh summer sun. In the first century A.D. the Greeks established a fortified trading settlement on the narrow peninsula, with strong walls to scare away pirates. A thousand years later the rulers of Byzantium transformed the fortress into a kind of medieval health spa with magnificent baths.

After Georgia had been incorporated into the Soviet Union, Pitsunda became a holiday resort for the Communist nomenklatura. Nikita Khrushchev liked the place so much that he had a luxurious villa built by the seashore, surrounded by an ugly concrete wall. Recreation facilities included an Olympic-size swimming pool, a gymnasium, and tennis courts. Two other, slightly less grandiose villas were built on adjacent plots of land for more junior leaders. 54It was at Pitsunda, in October 1964, that Khrushchev learned of the Kremlin coup that forced him out of office.

As they walked down the winding paths of Khrushchev’s old dacha that wintry afternoon, the two youngest members of the Politburo recognized that the Soviet Union was headed in the wrong direction. Both Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze were convinced Communists, completely loyal to the system that had sponsored and promoted them. What distinguished them from the older members of the Politburo was a still-youthful energy and optimism, an almost naive belief in socialism’s further perfectibility. There was a word for their generation in Russian: shestidesyatniki , “men of the sixties.” Their formative years had been marked by Khrushchev’s thaw, the brief interlude between the terror of Stalinism and the stagnation of the Brezhnev period. The previous generation, as represented by Brezhnev, had been brought up in an atmosphere of all-pervasive fear. Conservative to the core, they were loath even to tinker with the system, for fear of bringing the whole structure crashing down. The shestidesyatniki , by contrast, were full of confidence in their own abilities and itching for the chance to put things right. They had little firsthand experience of war and terror.

The generational differences between Soviet leaders were summed up by a joke that became popular during Brezhnev’s twilight years. Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev are seated in a compartment of a train that breaks down in the middle of Siberia. After hours of waiting, an argument breaks out between the passengers over how to get the train moving again. “Let’s shoot one of the drivers,” suggests Stalin. “Then the other drivers will know that we mean business.” “No, that’s inhumane. We must abide by socialist norms,” says Khrushchev. “Let’s offer the drivers higher wages.” Unable to agree, the two older men ask Brezhnev to adjudicate. He ponders the question for a long time. “I know,” he replies finally. “Why don’t we just close the blinds and pretend the train is moving? No one will know the difference.”

The Soviet Union had been practically immobile now for fifteen years. Although Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had no clear idea how to get the train moving again, they understood that the first priority was acknowledging that it had stalled. That meant raising the blinds, letting in some fresh air, and ending the pretense about the country’s advancing from one socialist triumph to another.

As the Politburo member in charge of agriculture Gorbachev had an excellent vantage point for observing the ruinous effects of central planning. The world’s largest country—a country that possessed more acres of bountiful farmland than Canada and the United States combined—was unable to feed itself. A net exporter of grain before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Russia was now compelled to scrounge for grain every year from the capitalist West. Russian peasants, corralled into vast state-run farms during Stalin’s collectivization campaign, had forgotten how to farm. Instead of producing goods for a market, they fulfilled the orders of bureaucrats. Prices were established by administrative fiat and bore little relation to real costs. The distorted price structure gave rise to many absurdities. Since the price of bread was heavily subsidized by the state and was lower than the equivalent price of grain, it made perfect economic sense for farmers to use loaves of bread as animal fodder.