The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  The result, as time went on, was that the majority nationalities in each republic were able to augment their dominance over other local national and ethnic groups. Stern campaigns against administrative and financial malpractice were maintained by Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia and Geidar Aliev in Azerbaijan; but neither Shevardnadze nor Aliev did much to protect the position of minorities: in Georgia the Abkhazians and the Adzharians suffered considerable discrimination; in Azerbaijan, the Armenian-inhabited enclave of Nagorny Karabakh was starved of funds. Nor were such tensions absent from the RSFSR. A glaring example was the attempt by Bashkirian communist leaders to ‘Bashkirize’ the education and culture of the Tatar population in their vicinity.16

  Ostensibly these disintegrative trends in other republics were prevented from manifesting themselves in the same fashion in the RSFSR’s Russian provinces. The RSFSR shared a capital with the USSR and was altogether too vast to be permitted to follow a line of action disapproved by the central political authorities. The RSFSR had a formally separate government, but real power was denied it; and the ban on the establishment of a separate communist party remained in force. But there had long been ambivalences in the policies of the Politburo. In particular, Russian intellectuals were accorded greater latitude for cultural self-assertion than were their non-Russian counterparts. Russia’s pride of place among the nations of the USSR continued to be officially affirmed. And whereas Russians had important posts in the local political administrations of the other Soviet republics, ethnic Russians had a monopoly in the administrative apparatus of the RSFSR’s provinces.

  The policy of stability of cadres, moreover, encouraged officials in the localities to ignore uncongenial central demands. The province-level party committee (obkom) secretary retained crucial local power and the fact that functionaries from the non-central party apparatus occupied a third of the places at the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress in 1976 was an index of their influence.17

  Thus the local ‘nests’ were also reinforced. For a manager running a factory of national significance could always threaten to appeal to his minister; and a KGB chief in a border area or a commander of a military district might easily cause trouble if the obkom secretary interfered excessively in security affairs. But few local ‘nests’ of officials were very disputatious; for a common local interest existed in keeping the ‘centre’ from prying into the locality. Ordinary Soviet citizens who wrote to the Politburo and the Secretariat exposing an abuse of power in their town or village were sometimes rewarded with a Pravda campaign on their behalf; but such campaigns were ineffectual in transforming general practice – and sometimes such citizens found themselves victimized by the local officials whom they had exposed. At any rate the central authorities remained loyal to the policy of only sacking functionaries in cases of extreme disobedience to the Kremlin’s demands.

  The old paradox endured. On the one hand, there was a frantic profusion of official demands for observance of legality, and under Brezhnev – according to one estimate – the number of ‘normative acts’ of legislation in force across the USSR had risen to 600,000;18 on the other hand, infringements of legality were pervasive. The key common goal of political leaders in the Kremlin was to minimize shifts of policy and avoid damaging internal controversy. Transfers of personnel, if they were on a large scale, would destabilize the relations among central and local public groups in the various institutions. The Soviet compound was entering a stage of degradation.

  Nevertheless this is not how it seemed to most wielders of power at either the central or local levels. Even among those of them who were minded to introduce reforms there was little acceptance that basic reform was overdue; instead they tended to believe that it would be enough to modify existing policies, to sack the most incompetent of Brezhnev’s cronies and introduce younger blood. Above all, they felt that Brezhnev himself had served in office too long. The condition of his health was in fact even worse than most of the rumours about it. The handful of officials who came into regular, direct contact with him could see for themselves that he was a dreadfully ill old man. The scribblings in his personal diary showed a lingering interest in television programmes and sport; and his punctuation and spelling would have disgraced a schoolchild.19

  Brezhnev had stayed in office after bowing to pressure from some of his Politburo associates; and this had postponed the jostling among them over the question of the political succession. Essentially Gromyko, Ustinov, Suslov and Andropov were governing the country through a consensus among themselves. Brezhnev’s closest aide and confidant, Politburo member Chernenko, had also acquired an influence. Crucial Politburo decisions were being taken by them in his absence.

  But Brezhnev’s health worsened drastically in the winter of 1981–2 and the Politburo pondered who eventually was to take his place as General Secretary. The choice would have been influenced by Suslov, who was a senior Central Committee Secretary. But Suslov died aged seventy-nine in January 1982. KGB chairman Andropov was given Suslov’s place in the Central Committee Secretariat in May, and quickly it became obvious that he would make a strong bid to succeed Brezhnev. Stories about corrupt practices in Brezhnev’s family and entourage started to circulate.20 The stories came from Andropov’s associates in the KGB. Evidently Andropov was trying to create a mood in the Politburo that would ruin the chances of one of Brezhnev’s boon companions emerging as a serious rival to his own candidature.

  By his actions Andropov showed that he no longer feared incurring Brezhnev’s hostility. Through spring, summer, autumn 1982 the General Secretary rarely appeared in public. The official pretence was maintained that he was not seriously ill; but his doctors, together with his nurse (who for years had been his mistress), despaired that he would ever recover. Brezhnev was sinking fast. On 10 November 1982, he suffered a final relapse and died.

  The Politburo instructed that he should be buried outside the Kremlin Wall on Red Square. Statesmen from all over the world attended. His wife and family were accompanied to the funeral by the central party leadership – and daughter Galina outraged spectators by refraining from wearing sombre garb. Brezhnev had been dressed in his Marshal’s uniform with all his medals. But the careless way the coffin was dropped into his grave was taken as a sign that not all Politburo leaders wished to be seen to regret that at last he had left the political stage. In truth it was hard to feel very sorry for Brezhnev. When he had succeeded Khrushchëv, he was still a vigorous politician who expected to make the party and government work more effectively. He had not been inactive; he had not been entirely inflexible. But his General Secretaryship had turned into a ceremonial reign that had brought communism into its deepest contempt since 1917.

  22

  Towards Reform (1982–1985)

  Yuri Andropov had played an astute hand in the last months of Brezhnev’s life, and it was he who was chosen by the Politburo as the new General Secretary on 12 November 1982. He had waited many years to occupy the supreme party office and had no intention of governing in the fashion of Brezhnev. Andropov believed changes in policy to be vital.

  As General Secretary, however, he had to take feelings in the Politburo into account. The Politburo contained a rump of Brezhnev’s promotees who could cause him trouble: Tikhonov, Shcherbytskiy, Grishin and Chernenko had an iron-plated complacency about current policies and disliked virtually any proposal for change. Yet several other influential members of the Politburo, Dmitri Ustinov and Andrei Gromyko, did not stand in Andropov’s way when he demanded a modification of official policies. Ustinov had been Defence Minister since 1976, Gromyko had led the Foreign Affairs Ministry since 1957. With their acquiescence, Andropov intensified his campaign against corruption. Political and social discipline, he argued, were the prerequisites for economic expansion – and economic expansion was needed if the Soviet standard of living was to be raised and military parity with the USA to be retained.

  Andropov was the brightest party leader of his generation. Born in 1914, he was of
Cossack descent.1 He had a conventional background except inasmuch as his father had been a railway administrator and not a worker. He quickly rose up the hierarchy of the Komsomol and the party; by the end of the Second World War he was second party secretary for the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Republic. The post-war purges of communist functionaries in Leningrad had repercussions in that republic and many of Andropov’s colleagues were shot.2 He counted himself lucky to survive; and in 1954 he was appointed as Soviet ambassador to Hungary. He was in Budapest during the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and stayed there until 1957, when Khrushchëv recalled him to work in the central party apparatus in Moscow. A decade later he was picked by Brezhnev to take over the KGB.

  An associate described him as having ‘an enormous forehead, which looked as if it had been specially shaven clean on both sides of his temples, a large, impressive nose, thick lips and a cleft chin’.3 He took little pleasure in food and sport and was a teetotaller. His taste for well-tailored suits was his only sign of self-indulgence, and occasionally he let himself go by penning stanzas of doggerel to his advisers – and his humour could be lavatorial.4 But generally he refrained from such ribaldry. Not even fellow Politburo members saw much of his lighter side. He would not even accept an invitation to a supper party unnecessarily.5 His ideological severity was emphatic. Andropov believed in Marxism-Leninism and was offended by the laxities permitted by Brezhnev: he could not abide the incompetent gerontocrats in the Kremlin. The problem was that he, too, was old and was troubled by ill-health. A chronic kidney complaint was becoming acute. If he was going to have an impact, action had to be swift.

  And so Andropov announced the reimposition of discipline and order as his immediate priority. He instituted judicial proceedings against leading ne’er-do-wells in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He also punished the more mundane misdemeanours of ordinary citizens: the police cleared the streets of drunks; lack of punctuality at work was also penalized and random inspections were made so that people might not leave their place of work in working hours. Conscientious fulfilment of professional duties was demanded of everybody in society, right from the central party leaders down to ordinary citizens. Such measures were stern in general, but they inflicted special hardship on Soviet wives and mothers. Most women in the USSR went out to work and yet had to undertake all the domestic chores; it was difficult for them to cope with the queuing in the shops unless they could take time off in working hours.

  Not that Andropov was a complete killjoy. He did not mind if people had a tipple; on the contrary, he permitted the introduction of a cheap new vodka, which was known as ‘Andropovka’.6 He also genuinely aimed to improve living conditions. He gave the following summary of his purposes to his physician: ‘First we’ll make enough sausages and then we won’t have any dissidents.’7

  Such a remark was not made by someone who was bent upon a fundamental revision of Marxism-Leninism. Accordingly, then, the slogan of ‘developed socialism’ was retained. But differences in style quickly appeared. For example, Andropov admitted that the party leadership needed ‘to acquire an understanding of the society in which we live’.8 This was a cognitive humility uncharacteristic of previous leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Andropov stressed that he had not come to office with ready-made, easy solutions and that he intended to learn from as many people as he could. Thus in February 1983 he visited a Moscow lathe-making factory and held brief conversations with workers.9 It was a mundane event in itself. (It was also highly contrived: the workers knew that they had to avoid saying things that would irritate the General Secretary.) But the contrast with Brezhnev’s later years was unmistakable.

  Replacements were being made in the Kremlin’s personnel. Andropov surrounded himself with personal advisers who, by contemporary official standards, were free thinkers. Typically they were academics or journalists. They were loyal communist party members; all for a long time had argued that official policies needed to be altered. Andropov also showed his impatience in his changes of political personnel at the centre. Mikhail Gorbachëv and Yegor Ligachëv were lively party officials from a younger generation for whom he secured further advancement; he also plucked Nikolai Ryzhkov from the State Planning Commission and transferred him to party duties. Gorbachëv, Ligachëv and Ryzhkov were appointed as Central Committee Secretaries so that Andropov could ensure compliance with his wishes throughout the central party apparatus. Gorbachëv retained oversight over agriculture and gained it over the entire economy. Ryzhkov, who headed a new Economic Department, was made responsible specifically for industry. Ligachëv led the Organizational Department.10

  Andropov was aiming – in his secretive way – to explore possible ways to modify the Politburo’s measures; he knew that the economy cried out for regeneration. But he was far from sure about which measures to adopt. He therefore asked Gorbachëv and Ryzhkov to conduct confidential, detailed research on his behalf and to make suitable recommendations.11

  Probably Andropov did not wish to venture far along the route of reforms. A decree was passed in July 1983 to provide industrial associations with somewhat greater autonomy from the central planning authorities.12 Yet the clauses were still not as radical as the proposals of Kosygin in 1965; and the enduring closeness of his friendship with Minister of Defence Ustinov indicated that Andropov hardly wanted to transform the entire system of power.13 He kept his more independently-minded advisers well under control. Indeed several scholars outside his entourage felt that he was entirely failing to appreciate the critical nature of the country’s problems. In particular, a group of Novosibirsk sociologists and economists under Tatyana Zaslavskaya produced its own treatise on the need for reform. The authors argued that administrative arbitrariness lay at the centre of the difficulties in Soviet society and its economy. Zaslavskaya’s mild ideas were so audacious in the USSR of the early 1980s that she was in jeopardy of being arrested when the treatise fell into the KGB’s hands.14

  At any rate, Andropov was a naturally cautious man. Certainly he gave no licence to Gorbachëv and Ryzhkov, his adjutants in the quest for economic regeneration, to take up the analysis provided by the Novosibirsk group. In short, he wanted change, but insisted that it should be undertaken at no risk to the existing state order. Domestic policy was to be revised with gradualness and with due appreciation of all possible difficulties.

  Andropov showed greater enterprise in foreign policy. On becoming General Secretary, he issued proposals thick and fast. He especially strove to reanimate the international understandings of détente which had been ruined by the Soviet military intervention in the Afghan Civil War in 1979. Andropov called for a summit with American President Reagan, for an arms reduction agreement between the USSR and the USA and for a ban on nuclear tests. At a Warsaw Pact meeting in Prague in January 1983 Andropov made a still more startling suggestion. This was that the USSR and the USA should sign an accord that each should formally undertake not to attack any country belonging to the other’s alliance or even any country within its own alliance.15 No doubt Andropov deliberately chose to make his suggestion in Prague, capital of the Warsaw Pact country invaded by the USSR in 1968.

  But Reagan was as yet of no mind to see anything positive in Soviet overtures. He regarded the USSR as an ‘evil empire’ and former KGB chief Andropov as an emperor as demonic as any of his predecessors in the Kremlin. Far from improving, relations between the superpowers deteriorated after Brezhnev’s death. On 23 March 1983, President Reagan announced he was going to finance research on a Strategic Defence Initiative (or ‘Star Wars’ Initiative, as it quickly became known). According to Reagan, this would serve no offensive purpose whatever but would be an exclusively defensive system for the detection and destruction of nuclear missiles aimed at the USA. Reagan promised that the technological developments would be shared with the USSR. Unsurprisingly Andropov felt unable to accept him at his word: there was no guarantee that the system would indeed be confided to the Soviet Union. The Politburo resolved
to subsidize a parallel research programme, and competition in military technology was set to grow fiercer.

  Tension between the USSR and the USA increased on 1 September when a South Korean airliner, KAL 007, strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down by the forces of Air-Defense Command. Furious recriminations occurred between Moscow and Washington; the diplomatic strains were intensifying to the point of rupture. Andropov was advised by Sovet intelligence organs abroad that Reagan might be about to order a nuclear strike on the USSR. The suspicion was that the imminent NATO exercise of 2 November might be used as a cover to attack Moscow. Andropov felt he had no alternative but to order his nuclear forces to assume a condition of heightened alert.16 This emergency, unlike the Cuban missiles crisis, was kept secret from the Soviet and American publics. But the politicians in the two capitals knew how near the world had come to the brink of a Third World War; and it was clear that robust, clear-sighted leadership was required if such incidents were not to recur.

  Robustness could no longer be provided by Andropov. The decay of his kidneys could not be slowed and the frequency of his attendance at official meetings was already decreasing in spring and summer 1983: colleagues had to communicate with him by letter as he convalesced at his dacha. Greater authority therefore passed into the hands of the second secretary of the Central Committee, Chernenko, who chaired the Politburo in Andropov’s absence. This job was also sometimes carried out by Gorbachëv. In the discreet struggle for the succession, Andropov’s preference was for Gorbachëv over Chernenko. He appended a note to this effect on one of his last memoranda to the Central Committee. But Chernenko’s supporters excised the note from the version presented to the Central Committee, and Andropov died on 9 February 1984 before he could consolidate Gorbachëv’s chances.17