Michael Dobbs: Down with Big Brother

THIS BOOK IS THE OUTCOME of reporting tours in Yugoslavia, Poland, and the Soviet Union between 1977 and 1993. But my interest in the former Communist world goes back long before that. I was eight weeks old when I first went to Russia, courtesy of my parents, Joseph and Marie Dobbs, who had met at the British embassy in Moscow in 1948. I was to visit Russia, in one capacity or another, under all Russian leaders from Stalin to Yeltsin. When I went to work in Yugoslavia and Poland, I was also following in the footsteps of my peripatetic parents. I therefore have them primarily to thank for ushering me into the shadow of Big Brother and getting me to write about the experience.

While gathering material for this book, I have benefited from the stimulating conversation and hospitality of friends, colleagues, and sources in many different countries. I mention many of these sources in the endnotes, but I would particularly like to thank a few people who assisted directly in my research. In common with other Washington Post reporters in Moscow, I was fortunate to be able to draw on the advice and assistance of Masha Lipman, a talented Russian journalist who has gone on to become managing editor of the news magazine Itogi . Here in Washington, I would like to thank two research associates, Brian Sloyer and Marian Alves, who spent long hours at the Library of Congress on my behalf. I am also indebted to Mark Kramer, of Harvard University, who supplied me with many interesting documents from Soviet and East European archives.

My agent, Rafe Sagalyn, and my editor at Knopf, Ashbel Green, played key roles in encouraging me to write this book and shepherding it to completion. Other people who made helpful comments on the manuscript were Jeff Frank, now with The New Yorker , my former Moscow colleague Fred Hiatt, and David Brown, a medical reporter for the Post . Responsibility for any remaining errors rests with me. I would also like to thank Don Oberdorfer, a former diplomatic reporter for the Post and author of The Turn , for making available the transcripts of two Princeton University conferences on the end of the Cold War. These proved very helpful.

The collapse of communism was one of the great news stories of the twentieth century. I will always be grateful to the editors of the Washington Post , particularly Jim Hoagland and Michael Getler, for assigning me to cover many of its most dramatic episodes, beginning with the Polish labor unrest of August 1980. My understanding of the story was greatly enriched by talks with present and former Post reporters, including Bradley Graham, Jackson Diehl, Robert Kaiser, Dusko Doder, Celestine Bohlen, Gary Lee, Fred Hiatt, Margaret Shapiro, David Hoffman, Lee Hockstader, Dan Southerland, Blaine Harden, Mary Battiata, John Pomfret, Christine Spolar, and especially David Remnick. Nobody could wish for better colleagues.

I am happy to acknowledge the support of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. The Kennan Institute provided me with both a fellowship and a congenial place to work, when I returned to Washington from Moscow in August 1993.

Most of all, I am grateful to my family for sharing in my adventures and putting up with my frequent absences. My wife, Lisa, has been my most attentive reader and perceptive critic. My children, Alex, Olivia, and Joseph, are not quite sure what communism was all about, but they know that it took up a lot of their father’s time, long after it had been pronounced dead and buried. One day, they will read this book and understand what those tanks were doing roaring past our front entrance on August 19, 1991.

THE HAULING DOWN OF THE RED FLAG from the Kremlin at 7:35 p.m. on December 25, 1991, marked the end of the Soviet era, as surely as the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg on November 7, 1917, marked its beginning. But who can say, for certain, when the collapse of communism began?

One possible starting point for the story might be April 26, 1986, when the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station demonstrated the technological incompetence of the Soviet regime. Another is March 11, 1985, when the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev was elected general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. There are good arguments to be made in favor of August 31, 1980, when a Communist government formally surrendered the right to represent its own working class to an independent trade union. Or you could go all the way back to the death of Josef Stalin on March 5, 1953. After Nikita Khrushchev started destroying the reputation of the “Greatest Genius of All Times and Peoples,” belief in a Communist utopia gradually waned.

For me personally, the anti-Bolshevik revolution began on May 8, 1980. This was the day I got my first close-up look at the guardians of Stalin’s legacy. My only previous view of these men had been from a distance, through the prism of a propaganda machine that depicted them as the exalted representatives of an infallible party, chosen by history to implement the will of the masses. Viewed up close, I was reminded of Hannah Arendt’s phrase about the leaders of the Third Reich: the “banality of evil.” The aura of bureaucratic anonymity—the ultimate source of their authority—was shattered.

I was living in Belgrade at the time. Josip Broz Tito, the father of Communist Yugoslavia and the last surviving legendary figure from World War II, had just died. On the day of the funeral, the Yugoslav capital was awash with foreign dignitaries. With the exception of President Carter, who did not wish to be seen shaking hands with Leonid Brezhnev less than five months after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, anybody who was anybody was there. The Soviet bloc sent its top leaders. The mourners included a Communist demigod, Kim II Sung of North Korea, and one of the great mass murderers of the twentieth century, Pol Pot of Cambodia.

Through a security lapse, I managed to gate-crash the VIP enclosure on the strength of a simple press pass. For the next half-hour I was able to chat and mingle with the assembled high priests of Marxism-Leninism. There, in one corner of the VIP pen, stood the builder of the Berlin Wall and the undertaker of the Prague Spring, exchanging pleasantries, two cogs in a vast machinery of state repression. A few feet away, the president of Bulgaria was fussing over his fellow dignitaries, like some overeager waiter, desperate to please. While standing in line to view Tito’s coffin, I found myself gazing into the dull, evil-looking eyes of the self-styled “Genius of the Carpathians.” Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania had one of the most unpleasant faces I have ever seen: deep, black lines around a long, pointed nose; a high forehead; crinkly gray hair. As a general rule, the more grotesque the personality cult surrounding this or that “Great Leader,” the more mediocre its beneficiary turned out to be.