The World Was Going Our Way
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The crumbling of the Soviet system ultimately did far more than Soviet Cold War policy to persuade the apartheid regime that its time was up. For the ANC, none the less, Soviet support in the early stages of the armed struggle, at a time when the United States and many of its allies held it at arm’s length, was of real significance in sustaining it during its most difficult years. ‘The cynical’, said Mandela later, ‘have always suggested that the Communists were using us. But who is to say that we were not using them?’88 Ultimately, the ANC gained more than Moscow from the once close relationship between them.
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Conclusion: The KGB in Russia and the World
Only a decade before the Soviet Union fell apart, the Centre leadership still remained optimistic about the success of its forward policy in the Third World. Andropov confidently told the Vietnamese interior minister, Fam Hung, during his visit to Moscow in October 1980:
The Soviet Union is not merely talking about world revolution but is actually assisting it. The USSR is building up a powerful military and economic potential which is a reliable defence for the socialist countries and other progressive forces in the world . . . Why did the USA and other Western countries agree on détente in the 1970s and then change their policies? Because the imperialists realized that a reduction of international tension worked to the advantage of the socialist system. During this period Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Afghanistan were liberated.1
The future DCI, Robert Gates, noted at the same time, ‘The sense that the Soviets and their surrogates were “on the march” around the world was palpable in Washington’2 as well as in Moscow. The victorious Sandinistas in Nicaragua secretly informed Moscow of their intention to turn themselves into a Marxist-Leninist ‘vanguard party’ which, in alliance with Cuba and the Soviet bloc, would spread the revolution through Central America.3 Andropov was in no mood to suspend the onward march of ‘world revolution’ in the hope of restoring the détente of the early 1970s. His hostility to, and suspicion of, the United States reached an extraordinary climax after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as President in January 1981. Four months later the KGB and GRU jointly embarked on operation RYAN, the largest Soviet intelligence operation of the Cold War, designed to detect the - in reality non-existent - plans of the Reagan administration for a nuclear first strike.4
By the time RYAN began, Brezhnev did little more than rubber-stamp policies decided by others. When Valeri Boldin became assistant to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1981, he was shocked to observe Brezhnev at Politburo meetings sitting with a vacant stare:
More often than not he would read out a note prepared for him by his assistants, printed in very large characters on a special typewriter. He often got so confused that he read the same sentences over and over again, and then looked around pathetically, as if acknowledging his helplessness.5
As Brezhnev entered the final, demeaning phase of his long physical and mental decline, Andropov was driven by the determination to succeed him as Soviet leader, end the ‘era of stagnation’ (as it was later called) at home, stand up to the supposed nuclear menace of the Reagan regime, and consolidate the Soviet victory over the Main Adversary in the Third World. To prepare for the more dynamic era which he intended to inaugurate, Andropov took the unprecedented decision to embark on what were in effect the first Soviet active measures ever to be implemented against a Soviet leader. Andropov cynically proposed that Brezhnev’s personal authority should be enhanced by more frequent appearances on television - with the real intention of exposing the increasing infirmity and confusion of the General Secretary to public view and thus demonstrating the need for his own more vigorous leadership. Brezhnev’s decrepitude became the dominant theme in the privately circulated political jokes which for most Soviet citizens were the only available form of political dissent. Among them was this version of Brezhnev’s daily schedule:
9 a.m.: reanimation
10 a.m.: breakfast
11 a.m.: awarding medals
12 noon: recharging his batteries
2 p.m.: lunch
4 p.m.: receiving medals
6 p.m.: signing important documents
8 p.m.: clinical death
9 p.m.: reanimation
As well as having more opportunities to observe the General Secretary’s failing health, Western journalists and intelligence services were also fed sensational stories revealing that the KGB was investigating members of Brezhnev’s family and inner circle for corruption. Brezhnev’s daughter Galina, for example, was reported to be having an affair with a Moscow playboy nicknamed ‘Boris the Gypsy’, who was alleged to be part of a diamond-smuggling ring including members of the Moscow State Circus. Galina’s husband, General Yuri Churbanov, was sacked as Deputy Minister of the Interior, and rumours were spread of suicides and even murders among those caught up in the web of corruption.6
When Brezhnev finally expired in November 1982, Andropov became the first KGB chief to be elected Party leader by the Politburo. 7 He began, as tradition demanded, by paying a hypocritical tribute to the dear, departed Leonid Ilyich, whose reputation he had been secretly undermining: ‘We, his close friends who worked with him in the Politburo, saw the great charm he possessed, the great force that bound us together in the Politburo, the great authority, love and respect that he enjoyed among all Communists, among the Soviet people and the peoples of the world.’
Andropov’s own health, however, was already failing fast. Within three months he was in considerable physical discomfort, receiving regular dialysis for kidney failure and forced to do much of his work sitting in a dentist’s chair with a button in the armrest which allowed him to shift his position frequently in an attempt to ease the pain. The seriousness of his illness was a closely guarded secret. ‘Soviet ambassadors,’ recalls Dobrynin, ‘myself included, had no idea how grave his illness was.’8 Andropov’s fourteen months of power, so far from marking, as he had intended, the climax of Soviet success among developing nations, marked the moment when the Centre’s cherished belief that the Cold War could be won in the Third World began to disintegrate. Soviet forces were bogged down in Afghanistan in a war they could not win and Soviet Third World allies, especially in Africa, were visibly unable to turn their socialist rhetoric into reality. Andropov’s own mood had changed dramatically since the beginning of the decade. In June 1983, in one of his last speeches before ill-health forced him to disappear completely from public view, he told the Central Committee Plenum:
It is one thing to proclaim Socialism as one’s aim and quite another thing to build it. For this, a certain level of productive forces, culture and social consciousness are needed. Socialist countries express solidarity with these progressive states [in the Third World], render assistance to them in the sphere of politics and culture, and promote the strengthening of their defence. We contribute also, to the extent of our ability, to their economic development. But on the whole, their economic development, just like the entire social progress of those countries, can (of course) only be the result of the work of their peoples and of a correct policy of their leadership.9
The Soviet forward policy in the Third World, however, was held back not merely by the low level of local ‘productive forces, culture and social consciousness’, but also by the catastrophic failure, whose scale Andropov could not bring himself to acknowledge, of the Soviet economy. The widespread hopes in the Third World during the 1950s and 1960s that the Soviet model offered a blueprint for the modernization of their own economies had all but disappeared.10 Andropov’s supposedly reformist leadership merely continued Brezhnev’s ‘era of stagnation’. The election as Party leader after Andropov’s death in February 1984 of Brezhnev’s former crony, the seventy-two-year-old, terminally ill Konstantin Chernenko, the very model of an unreconstructed apparatchik with none of Andropov’s intellectual gifts, epitomized the sclerosis of the system. At Andropov’s funeral, Chernenko was barely able to stumble through the short graveside speech which had been written for him
. Dr David Owen, who attended the funeral as leader of the British Social Democratic Party, correctly diagnosed that he was suffering from emphysema.11 Chernenko had only thirteen months to live. The physical decrepitude of the Politburo as a whole had become probably the dominant theme in underground Soviet political humour; for example:
Question: What has four feet and twenty-four teeth?
Answer: A crocodile
Question: What has twenty-four feet and four teeth?
Answer: The Politburo
The physical weariness of much of the Politburo seemed to match the mood of Soviet policy towards the Third World. Under Andropov and Chernenko, Moscow increasingly saw its Third World friends and allies as burdens on its over-stretched economy rather than allies marching towards the global triumph of socialism. Nikolai Leonov, once a confident supporter of a Soviet forward policy in the Third World, had come to regard Soviet aid to developing countries as ‘a cancerous tumour, sapping the strengths of the ailing organism of our own state’.12
It took the rise to power in March 1985 of an energetic and relatively youthful reformist, Mikhail Gorbachev, for this growing disillusion with the Third World to be reflected in a fundamental change of Soviet policy. There is no more convincing evidence of Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy during his first year as General Secretary than his denunciation of the traditional bias of FCD reporting. The fact that the Centre had to issue stern instructions at the end of 1985 ‘on the impermissibility of distortions of the factual state of affairs in messages and informational reports sent to the Central Committee of the CPSU and other ruling bodies’ is a damning indictment of the KGB’s subservience to the standards of political correctness expected by previous Soviet leaders.13 Henceforth it became easier for FCD reports to acknowledge the futility of much of the Soviet aid to its friends and allies. Gorbachev was well aware that the forward policy in the Third World over the previous quarter-century had imposed unacceptable strains on the ailing Soviet economy as well as doing serious damage to relations with the United States.
Even Gorbachev did not immediately interrupt the ruinously expensive flow of arms and military hardware to Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Syria, South Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, Algeria and elsewhere. In May 1986, over a year after he became General Secretary, the Politburo agreed ‘to supply free of charge uniforms, food and medical supplies to 70,000 servicemen of the Sandinista army’ - despite the fact that the Sandinista regime already owed the Soviet Union $1.1 billion.14 The 1986 CPSU programme, however, barely mentioned the Third World.15 Gorbachev’s decision in November 1986 to withdraw all Soviet troops from Afghanistan by 1988 signalled a major reassessment of Third World policy.16 One of the main reasons for not announcing an immediate withdrawal, he told the Politburo in February 1987, was to limit the extent of the Soviet Union’s humiliation in the eyes of its friends in the Third World: ‘India would be concerned, and they would be concerned in Africa. They think this would be a blow to the authority of the Soviet Union in the national liberation movement. And they tell us that imperialism will go on the offensive if you flee from Afghanistan.’17 Gorbachev still hoped to salvage as much as possible of the Soviet Union’s prestige in the Third World, but did not know quite how it was to be done.
By the time the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan, the Centre leadership sensed that its international network of intelligence friends and allies had begun to crumble. At the final meeting of Soviet-bloc intelligence services (also attended by the services of Cuba, Mongolia and Vietnam) in East Berlin in October 1988, the speeches included examples of black humour unthinkable before. One delegation leader asked the question, ‘What is socialism?’ - then gave the politically incorrect answer: ‘The most difficult and tortuous way to progress from capitalism to capitalism.’ Only a decade earlier, a Czechoslovak minister who had dared to display disrespect to a hagiography of Brezhnev and other official propaganda by discarding them in his Moscow hotel room had been reported to Andropov personally, as well as to the KGB liaison officer in Prague so that he could make an official complaint.18 Though the 1988 intelligence conference was held over a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the mood was already so pessimistic that, for the first time, no date or location was fixed for the next meeting. On the final evening, as participants were treated to a boat trip on the canals and lakes around Berlin, they were already gloomily aware that they might not meet again. ‘In many cases’, recalls Kirpichenko, ‘one was saying farewell for ever. The commonwealth of intelligence services of socialist countries had ended its existence.’19
Soon after becoming US Secretary of State early in 1989, James A. Baker III noted privately that the Soviet Union was ‘showing signs of willingness to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem’ in the Third World. Moscow was using its influence to persuade Vietnam to withdraw its troops from Cambodia and to bring to an end the long and destructive civil wars in Namibia and Angola.20 In April 1989, during a state visit to Cuba, previously the chief ally of the Soviet forward policy in the Third World, Gorbachev formally announced that Moscow had renounced its traditional policy of exporting socialism in favour of the principle of non-intervention. He declared in a speech in Havana, ‘We are resolutely opposed to any theories and doctrines justifying the export of revolution or counter-revolution.’ An outraged Castro retaliated in public with a barrage of misleading statistics on Cuba’s socialist achievements and in private with barbed comments on Soviet workers’ fear of unemployment and the strange absence of sugar (Cuba’s main export) from Soviet shops. Though Gorbachev and Castro had clasped each other in the usual ritual embrace at the beginning of the visit, the two leaders exchanged only a frosty handshake when they said goodbye.21
In October 1989, only a few weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, formally acknowledged in a major policy speech to the Supreme Soviet that Soviet intervention in Afghanistan had violated accepted norms of international relations and human behaviour. Withdrawal from Afghanistan was merely the most striking example of a more general retreat from the Third World. During the final years of the Soviet Union, maintaining influence with impoverished former ideological allies from Angola to Nicaragua had lower priority than strengthening relations with wealthier countries outside its sphere of influence such as Brazil, Japan, South Africa and Thailand, which had more to offer as trading partners.22
In the immediate aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, a disoriented KGB continued to go through the sometimes surreal motions of maintaining its Third World connections. In 1990 Vadim Kirpichenko led a KGB delegation to celebrations marking the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of DISA, the Angolan KGB. He found DISA, and the Ministry of State Security which ran it, better organized with ‘more order and discipline’ than during his previous visit nine years earlier and reconciled to the need for negotiations with UNITA to bring the long-running civil war to an end. In keeping with the traditional KGB rituals on such occasions, Kirpichenko solemnly handed over a painting of Red Square to his hosts as if nothing in Moscow had changed. When Kirpichenko had made a speech to the Angolan Ministry of State Security nine years earlier, he had been annoyed that much of his audience quickly nodded off. On this occasion, the Minister of State Security spoke for two hours to an audience sitting in the full glare of the tropical sun. The KGB delegation tried to remain politely attentive while - according to Kirpichenko - privately longing for shade and cold beer, but suffered afterwards from severe sunburn.23