Parting Shots

by Matthew Parris

  It is ironic, and illustrative of the enduring gulf between ruler and ruled in this country, that it apparently took a Party Conference and a more recent factory visit to make Gorbachev aware of that central feature of Soviet daily life, the queue. The complaint of a female worker that she spent two or three hours daily queuing in shops was apparently a revelation to the General Secretary – who then demonstrated that his education still has some way to go by adding: ‘And this, comrades, was in Moscow, where you can buy anything.’ Tell that to the Muscovites, whose larders have been particularly bare this summer.

  Gorbachev’s acquaintance with Soviet reality may be belated, and still incomplete, but at least he now has his sights trained on the right targets. He has recognised the limitations of the traditional Russian phenomenon of revolution from above … This is the first leadership to show constructive concern for the welfare of the Soviet people rather than treating it simply as a dumb instrument for the achievement of national and Party objectives. It is also, of course, the first leadership to question the canons of classical Soviet communism and tacitly to admit the failure of the Soviet system as it has developed over the past sixty years. In an ideal world, these political virtues would produce early results and create the prospect of a more prosperous and more democratic Soviet society this century. I fear, however, that the legacy of the past sixty years will not be cast off so easily.

  Gorbachev’s plan for political reform already bears evidence of the difficulty of persuading a ruling party to give up some of the powers which it has gathered and consolidated over the years. The theory is to transfer the day-to-day business of government and local administration to the Soviets,3 elected by and accountable to the whole people: while the Party, self-selected and electing its own elite, resumes the broader guiding, inspirational role which Lenin originally had in mind for it, sloughing off the executive functions which have accreted to it. But any bureaucrat knows that it is precisely in the day-to-day execution – or perhaps more importantly non-execution of policy that real power lies. The Party’s reluctance to relinquish these levers is likely to impose a substantial brake on the reform process. Local Party First Secretaries who are (as is planned) elected to be Chairmen of their local Soviets will not easily become obedient, accountable servants of the people. Officials from the dissolved economic and other functional departments of Party Committees will, in the euphemism of the relevant Revolution of the recent Plenum, be deployed in ‘strengthening the apparatus of the Soviets of Peoples Deputies’: in other words, they will move their desks across the road. In so heavily conditioned a society, the habits of authority and obedience will continue to die hard. In Soviets, ministries, factories and farms the Party man or woman will continue to call the shots for some time to come; and will remain, therefore, in a position to frustrate any changes which could threaten the power and privilege which attracted them to the Party in the first place. At the very top, if the General Secretary does become President of the Supreme Soviet, the Politburo will be concerned to ensure that the elected state body does not get ideas above its station and that their man keeps it in order. If he fails to do so or, worse, tries to use the Supreme Soviet to impose his will on a divided Politburo, the fate of Khrushchev4 will await him.

  Gorbachev’s campaign to create incentives to better economic performance by improving the lot of the Soviet consumer also faces inherited obstacles. The ‘Law on Cooperatives’ and the promised law to protect leaseholders cannot in themselves generate the activity which they are designed to encourage. The human material is unpromising: two Soviet generations have been brought up to eschew risk, suspect individual initiative and despise profit. A family or small group which wishes to farm a cooperative or to lease land together with the wherewithal to cultivate it – and to work long hours to make their enterprise profitable – is all too likely to encounter obstruction and hostility from their neighbours and their local Soviet. If they persevere and create a going concern, their success will be the target for the malice and envy of those to whom equal misery has always been a higher good than unequal happiness. If any intrepid cooperator or leaseholder overcomes these obstacles he still has to contend with the same poverty of infrastructure as his less efficient state-owned competitors – poor or non-existent roads and communications, inadequate storage, primitive distribution arrangements: and, at the end of the line, a customer whose income – especially if fixed – is geared to the tradition of low quality at low prices and who regards a premium for good quality as evidence of immoral rapacity. The Praesidium5 of the Supreme Soviet and the Council of Ministers6 have just, in an encouragingly enlightened move, rescinded the tax law introduced last March which threatened, and may well have been designed to, strangle the renascent cooperative movement at birth. But those operating outside the state system are likely – whether from greed or as a prudent hedge against the risks they run in uncharted waters – to over-charge until Soviet society has learned to accept the realities of market economics.

  I do not believe that any of these difficulties, political or economic, are permanent or insuperable. The Party Conference demonstrated the extraordinary degree to which the capacity for political thought and debate has survived sixty years of repression and anaesthesia under Stalin and his successors. I would expect a new political generation to accept the new political structure which Gorbachev has mapped out – including the modified role of the Party – to exploit the enhanced role of the Soviets and even, perhaps, to tolerate a degree of licensed opposition … In the economy, too, I believe that a healthy degree of pluralism will come to be accepted: even Abalkin, the eminent economist who was castigated at the Party Conference for his pessimism (ie for telling the truth) about perestroika’s failure so far to produce results, forecast in a recent interview that by 1995 cooperatives would account for 10–12% of turnover in goods and services and for 15–18% by 2005. This, quite apart from a possibly equivalent growth in leaseholding and individual economic activity, could solve the problem of the supply of food and consumer goods to a sufficient extent to fuel the regeneration of the economy as a whole. The services sector is likely to take the lead and to set the example.

  This prognosis is nevertheless based on a timescale of twenty years, perhaps of a generation. I do not believe that Gorbachev and his allies can bring about a moral, social, psychological, political and economic revolution in the Soviet Union more quickly than that. The length of time over which he and his policies will be at risk from random extraneous factors, before they have been able to produce results, is therefore uncomfortably long. The re-invigoration of a moribund, stagnant society – such as this still was when I returned to it three years ago – can release inconvenient forces with unpredictable consequences: I have just commented on one of them, in my despatch of 2 August on the nationalities problem. The radicals can become impatient, the conservatives nervous and vengeful. The traditional Russian fear of anarchy remains potent. The process of change in the Soviet Union and that of change – or the lack of it – in Eastern Europe could interact explosively: in Russian as well as Soviet history, reform at the centre of the empire has always led to trouble on the periphery. An international crisis endangering Soviet interests could arrest the process of change in this country overnight. Gorbachev himself will, under his own new rules, be obliged to retire in 1999 – some time before, in my view, his reforms will have been able to take root and produce results: his eventual successor is, in every sense, an unknown and uncertain quantity. Risks, therefore, abound …

  Short of initiating a holocaust, there is nothing the West can do to prevent the Soviet Union from realising, at last, its proper human and material potential. As I have suggested, it will in any case take some considerable time to do so. The long period of internal change will generate numerous domestic problems to preoccupy the Soviet leadership and will produce a more complex society requiring more sophisticated political management than hitherto. The years ahead will nevertheless pose problems
for the West. The progressive diminution, which seems likely, of the ‘Soviet threat’ in its classic form will make Western defence expenditure harder to sustain: and the new generation of Soviet policy makers is much less likely than its predecessors to make the contributions to Western cohesion which the latter provided in Berlin, Korea, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan …

  In facing up to these novel perspectives the West can only, I believe, cleave fast to two basic truths which no amount of perestroika is likely to change. The first is that the Soviet Union has permanent interests dictated largely by geography, including the establishment of a predominant political influence in Western and Southern Europe, which run directly counter to Western interests. The second is that even if Soviet political society and the Soviet economy undergo radical change during the next twenty years, the Russian character will not. Russians have many attractive qualities but they are and always have been natural bullies. They despise weakness and rarely resist the temptation to abuse strength. Along with his intelligence and charm, there is plenty of evidence that Gorbachev possesses these attributes in full measure. Taken together, these two propositions argue that, however great the political difficulty of doing so during the long period of perestroika, the West must somehow maintain its capacity to deter the Soviet Union from throwing its weight about when it has more economic and political, as well as military, weight to throw.

  Envoi

  My secretary warns me that I have already exceeded my allotment of column inches for a farewell despatch. I hope that I may be allowed a degree of licence if, in return, I spare you my views on Britain’s place in the world, the British economy, the future of the Diplomatic Service, our working conditions and other traditional ingredients of valedictories. It has been a privilege to serve in the Soviet Union during three of the most remarkable years of its history: I can imagine no more rewarding conclusion to a diplomatic career. I am happy that our bilateral relationship with this country has improved to an extent which would have been inconceivable at the nadir of the expulsions crisis7 almost exactly three years ago – a recollection which prompts the thought that the ultimate touchstone of perestroika will be the dismantlement of the KGB as an instrument of subversion and repression. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the staff at this Embassy, now widely dispersed, whose good humour and resilience saw us through those difficult days. But I also record my thanks to all those members of the Service and their wives with whom I have had the good fortune to serve in Moscow and who have so effectively maintained the best traditions and high standards of this Embassy.

  I am sending copies of this despatch to HM Ambassadors in Eastern European capitals, Washington, Bonn, Paris, Peking, Tokyo, Helsinki and Ulan Bator; and to HM Permanent Representatives to NATO (Brussels) and the United Nations (New York).

  I am, Sir,

  Yours faithfully

  Bryan Cartledge

  1. Central Committee Plenum: A meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The Central Committee elected both the Politburo and the General Secretary (Party leader).

  2. Supreme Soviet: USSR parliament.

  3. Soviets: Local workers’ council.

  4. fate of Khrushchev: Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s reign of terror, introduced reforms so that fewer dissidents were prosecuted for political crimes, and let more ordinary Soviets travel outside the USSR. In 1964 he was forced to resign in a bloodless putsch led by Brezhnev, his successor. Khrushchev was allowed to go peacefully into retirement, unlike some previously deposed Russian leaders.

  5. Praesidium: The permanent, standing staff of the Supreme Soviet.

  6. Council of Ministers: Cabinet.

  7. expulsions crisis: Tit-for-tat expulsions in 1985 of Russian and British diplomats, precipitated by a hard-line consensus between the FCO and Number 10 in Britain, leading to twenty-five expulsions by London, then twenty-five by Moscow (and then another six by both sides), which followed the defection of KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky to the West.

  ‘The Bolshevik horrors were a crude and brutal satire on the Russian political tradition, not a fundamental departure from it’

  SIR RODRIC BRAITHWAITE, HM AMBASSADOR IN MOSCOW, MAY 1992

  A big hitter, Sir Rodric became foreign policy adviser to John Major after leaving Moscow, and went on to chair the Joint Intelligence Committee. This masterly and beautifully drafted despatch, one of the finest we have come across, and which we reprint in extenso, is fascinating in its diagnosis of the Russian condition. The footnotes here appear as they do in the original.

  Arriving in 1988, Braithwaite presented his credentials to the Soviet Union. It was from the Russian Federation that he took his leave four years later. Literally speaking, his immediate predecessor as British Ambassador to Russia was indeed an envoy to the Court of Tsar Nicholas II. In practice Braithwaite actually had the ambassadorial baton passed to him in Moscow by Sir Bryan Cartledge, whose valedictory features above. Both Cartledge and Braithwaite make forecasts in their last despatches about the demise of Communism and the prospects for democratic rule. In this, Braithwaite was apparently the luckier (but see the note in the foreword to Cartledge) in that when his time came the direction of travel was clearly signposted, if not quite certain. In 1992 the old certainties in Russia had been swept away. The economy was reeling from the side effects of a transition through ‘shock therapy’ to capitalism. Standing on a tank the previous year Boris Yeltsin had already faced down one final attempt by Communist hardliners to turn back the clock. After Braithwaite left Moscow tanks rolled on to the political scene once again, shelling the Russian parliament in 1993 in a constitutional crisis the culmination of which saw Yeltsin safe in power for the rest of the decade. Sir Rodric makes clear that his prophecy is for the longer term; but it remains true that his optimism, if not discredited, has yet to be vindicated.

  THE OBSESSION WITH RUSSIA

  (Final Despatch of 17 May 1992)

  ‘It is a matter of doubt whether the brutality of the people has made the prince a tyrant or whether the people themselves have become brutal and cruel through the tyranny of the prince’.

  (Baron von Herberstein, Rerum Moscoviticarium Commentarii, 1549)

  ‘A people passing rude, to vices vile inclinde …

  In such a savage soile, where lawes do bear no sway,

  But all is at the king his wille, to save or els to slay.’

  (George Turbervile, Secretary at the British Embassy, Moscow 1568)

  On Sunday, 11th October, 1552, the soldiers of Ivan the Terrible stormed the Tatar stronghold of Kazan: a spectacular victory after an arduous siege. Thus the Russians ended three centuries of domination by the Horde, and took their first step towards the creation of their landbased empire. By the end of the next century they had reached the Baltic and the Black Sea, and constructed cities across Siberia which are older than St Petersburg. Thus too the Russians began their halting return to the European civilisation from which they had been forcibly sundered when Baty Khan destroyed Kiev in 1240. The Tatars remained in sullen resentment, dreaming of the day when they too would be able to reassert their rights against an infidel and despised enemy. The problems which attend the collapse of the Soviet system were already set four and a half centuries ago.

  With Ivan’s victory Western European diplomats, traders, and technical advisers flocked to Russia in increasing numbers. Their judgements were universally harsh. They disliked the monotony of the landscape, the impassability of the roads, the ramshackle dirt of the towns, the morals of the women, the drunkenness and dishonesty of the men. But they agreed above all on the unacceptability, by the standards of civilised Europe, of the Russian political system: the secretiveness, incompetence, corruption and sycophancy of the officials of state; the instability of the law*; and the unbounded tyranny of the absolute ruler, his position sustained by an all-pervading political police and the liberal use of terror to atomise society and make it impossible for anyone, at any level, to combine against
him.

  These were not simply the prejudiced judgements of foreigners: they have been echoed by generations of Russian writers as well. Asia, the foreigners said. Many Russians agreed with them; and still do.

  If one looks for an explanation, it lies no doubt in the impossible size of the country. To hold together a political system on the scale of a continent with the techniques of communication – physical, oral, administrative – which existed until the last few decades of the twentieth century may well have been impossible without the use of the methods of repression perfected by the Tsars and their successors. The effect on Russian society was devastating. In the Russian police state no independent political activity was possible, no unorthodox expression of view was permitted, and the penalties for both were horrific. No-one dared trust his neighbour, no-one dared cross a superior, no-one risked speaking to a foreigner. Delation and betrayal flourished.

  And the great Russian lie was borne, initially as an essential instrument of self-preservation: to tell the truth was as likely as not to be fatal, in the most literal sense. But it goes much beyond that. All those who have dealt with the Russians over the centuries have commented on their indifference to the truth. The lie in Russia has indeed gone far beyond its original purpose and has become an art form. Russians lie when they feel they need to, as the Russian military lied to the West and to Shevardnadze about the purpose of the Krasnoyarsk radar.1 But they also lie without reason, by some inner compulsion, even when they know that their listener knows that they are lying. The Russians have a word for it – ‘vranyo’ – which in their usage has acquired almost benign overtones. The latest example I have come across occurs in hotels frequented by foreigners: the notice in five languages on the lavatory: ‘Disinfected for your comfort and safety’. Every Russian knows that this cannot be true. Only the most naive of foreigners would think any different. Yet in a great country, you disinfect the lavatory seats. So the notice has to go up.