Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

During the fall of 1990 the radicals watched in dismay as Gorbachev appeared to move steadily to the right. In early December he dismissed his progressive interior minister, Vadim Bakatin, who had incurred the wrath of the conservatives by failing to crack down on Baltic separatism. A few days later he issued a decree ordering all state enterprises to abide by the instructions of the central planners. In a speech to the Soviet parliament he called for “resolute measures” to keep the country together. But the biggest shock was yet to come.

EDUARD SHEVARDNADZE WAS particularly alarmed by the growing influence of the conservatives. The foreign minister considered himself a political soul mate of Gorbachev and one of the intellectual fathers of perestroika and “new thinking.” He recalled his talk with Gorbachev on the beach at Pitsunda in the early eighties. In his emotional Georgian way Shevardnadze had blurted out that everything was “rotten” in the Soviet Union, and it was impossible “to go on living like this.” In a sense, everything had begun with that conversation.

It was difficult for Shevardnadze to keep track of his old friend’s constant zigzags, but one thing seemed clear: Gorbachev was drifting away from him. The president had chosen to surround himself with representatives of the traditional power structures—the Communist Party, the military, the KGB. As the conservative attacks mounted, the foreign minister thought he was being made to shoulder the blame for the Kremlin’s international setbacks, while the president basked in the praise. One incident in particular rankled with him. On October 15, the day Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a rancorous “Who lost Germany?” debate erupted in the Soviet parliament. Shevardnadze later complained that he had been left to fend off the attacks of the reactionaries for permitting a reunited Germany to become a member of NATO. “The only thing I needed, wanted, and expected from the President was that he take a clear position: that he rebuff the right-wingers, and openly defend our common policy. I waited in vain.” 137

After a sleepless night Shevardnadze made his decision. He wrote out his resignation statement, by hand, in the early-morning hours of December 20, 1990. He informed his daughter in Tbilisi and his two closest aides at the Foreign Ministry. They expressed their support for the action he was about to take. Then he left for the Kremlin. 138

A stunned silence fell on the Congress of People’s Deputies as Shevardnadze embarked on what he described as “the shortest and most difficult speech of my life.” Thumping the air with his right fist, his Georgian accent thicker than ever, he berated the “comrade democrats” for scattering “into the bushes” while the fate of perestroika was being decided. Then came the disjointed words that made headlines around the world: “Dictatorship is coming; I state this with complete responsibility. No one knows what kind of dictatorship this will be and who will come—what kind of dictator—and what the regime will be like. I want to make the following statement: I am resigning…. I cannot reconcile myself to the events taking place in our country, and to the trials awaiting our people. I nevertheless believe that the dictatorship will not succeed, that the future belongs to democracy and freedom.” 139

As Shevardnadze delivered his bombshell, Gorbachev listened impassively from his seat on the podium a few feet away. He later acknowledged he was “hurt” by his friend’s failure to inform him in advance, but his face betrayed no emotion at the time. 140When the speech was over, he clutched his forehead and looked down at his papers.

The team that had launched the Soviet Union on its great experiment back in 1985 had gone its separate ways. Yegor Ligachev had joined the hard-line opposition after accusing Gorbachev of presiding over the dismantling of socialism. Aleksandr Yakovlev, the ideological brains behind glasnost, had effectively retired from active politics. Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzkhov had become a victim of the government’s rock-bottom popularity. Now it was Shevardnadze’s turn to quit. Gorbachev had never been so alone.

The filmmaker Ales Adamovich summed up the Soviet leader’s predicament in a speech to the congress. “By losing such allies as Shevardnadze, you are losing your own strength, your prestige,” he told Gorbachev. “If this process goes on, the president will soon be surrounded by colonels and generals. They will surround the president, making him a hostage. Gorbachev is the only leader in Soviet history who has not stained his hands with blood, and we would like to remember him for that. But a moment will come when they will instigate a bloodbath, and later they will wipe their bloodstained hands against your suit, and you will be to blame for everything.” 141

It did not take long for Adamovich’s prediction to come true.

EDUARD SHEVARDNADZE HAD BASED his warning about an “approaching dictatorship” on his acute political intuition. He had watched the conservatives mobilize their forces to oppose the five-hundred-day plan, and he feared Gorbachev might be wilting under the pressure. He regarded the Tbilisi massacre of April 1989 as a dress rehearsal for a much broader armed crackdown. There had been an intensive parliamentary investigation into the Tbilisi events, but no one had ever been punished. The foreign minister began to suspect that there were “hidden forces… lurking behind the president’s back” who were ready to resort to “criminal actions.” The fact that Gorbachev was willing to shield these people was deeply disturbing to him. One day he could bear it no longer and decided to confront his old friend with his suspicions.

He reached the president over the vertushka as he was being driven to the Kremlin from his country dacha. The twenty-five-minute drive was always a good opportunity to catch Gorbachev alone, before he got submerged in daily business.

“Acts of violence are the end of perestroika, and of your reputation…”

“What are you thinking?” Gorbachev exploded. “How can it even occur to you that I would allow something like that to happen?” 1

Shevardnadze’s suspicions were well founded, even though he had no concrete evidence to back them up. By the time he delivered his bombshell to the congress, the machinery of repression was already in motion. Plans for a nationwide crackdown were already being hatched in the Lubyanka Prison, headquarters of the Committee for State Security. Surveillance of opposition activists had been intensified. KGB agents were following Yeltsin around the clock and had even bugged his favorite sauna with a remote-control radio. In an effort to gather incriminating information, wiretaps were ordered against hundreds of people, from the prime minister of Russia and the mayor of Moscow to Yeltsin’s tennis coach and Raisa Gorbachev’s hairdresser. Eventually the net was widened to include many of Gorbachev’s own advisers, such as Shevardnadze, Yakovlev, and the author of the five-hundred-day plan, the economist Stanislav Shatalin. 2Transcripts of these intercepted conversations were later discovered in the safe of Valery Boldin, Gorbachev’s chief of staff.

In the fall of 1990 the KGB chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, began bombarding Gorbachev with letters, outlining alleged plots by the “democrats” to seize power. 3He urged the president to agree to the imposition of a nationwide state of emergency. At a Politburo session in late November he called for the establishment of direct presidential rule across the entire Soviet Union and the suspension of parliamentary institutions. 4Gorbachev opposed the plan but did agree to the drafting of emergency legislation and to KGB preparations for a crackdown.