The Dead Hand

by David E. Hoffman

  In the early spring of 1943, Gorbachev was with other children, roaming the countryside, when they came to a remote stretch of forest between Privolnoye and a neighboring village. “There we stumbled upon the remains of Red Army soldiers, who had fought their last battle there in summer 1942. It was an unspeakable horror: decaying corpses, partly devoured by animals, skulls in rusted helmets, bleached bones, rifles protruding from the sleeves of rotting jackets. There was a light machine gun, some hand grenades, heaps of empty cartridges. There they lay, in the thick mud of the trenches and craters, unburied, staring at us out of black, gaping eye-sockets. We came home in a state of shock.”

  Gorbachev was fourteen years old when the war ended. “Our generation is the generation of wartime children,” he said. “It has burned us, leaving its mark both on our characters and on our view of the world.”

  After the war, Gorbachev worked in the fields each summer, “back-breaking labor twenty hours a day.” In high school, he was a good student and threw himself into the drama club and sports. School records showed Gorbachev had received top grades in Russian literature, trigonometry, history of the Soviet Union, the Soviet constitution, astronomy. He graduated in 1950 with a silver medal.15 For those long summers in the fields, he had also won an award, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. This was a rare award for a schoolboy and most certainly helped Gorbachev win a place at Moscow State University, the most prestigious in the country, in the law department.16

  Arriving in the capital in September 1950, at nineteen years old, the peasant boy was disoriented for the first few months in the bustling metropolis. Freshmen students lived twenty-two to a dorm room; for a few kopeks they could buy tea in the cafeteria, with unlimited free bread on the tables.

  Gorbachev joined the Communist Party in 1952. To be a Communist then was to be a Stalinist. The first two years of his university life coincided with Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign, aimed at Jewish scholars and writers. This was an eye-opener for Gorbachev. He recalled that one morning, a friend, a Jew, had been confronted by a shouting, taunting mob and then crudely shoved off a tram. “I was shocked.”

  By his own account, Gorbachev was taken with Soviet ideology, like many of his generation. “Communist ideology was very attractive for young people then,” he recalled. “The front-line soldiers came back from the war, most of them young people, filled with the pride of victory.” The younger generation hoped that war, famine and the Great Terror were things of the past, and believed they were building a new society of social justice and people power.17

  Stalin was part of this fabric of belief. Stalin’s “Short Course” of the history of the party was held up to students as “a model of scientific thought,” Gorbachev recalled.18 The students “took many of the professed theses for granted, sincerely convinced of their truth.” Gorbachev was a leader of the Communist Youth League, known as the Komsomol. In high school he had written a final exam paper in which the title was borrowed from a song, “Stalin—our combat glory.”

  But Gorbachev also was restive, and twice caused a stir by mildly speaking out against authority at the university. Once he wrote an anonymous note to a lecturer who mechanically droned on by reading Stalin’s work verbatim to the class. This was disrespectful to the students, Gorbachev said, since they had already read the book. Gorbachev admitted to writing the note, which touched off an investigation, but no action was taken.

  When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, Gorbachev joined the huge mourning crowds in Moscow’s streets. He was “deeply and sincerely moved by Stalin’s death.” But in the years that followed, Gorbachev came to see Stalin differently. On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev delivered his famous “secret speech” at the 20th Party Congress denouncing Stalin’s personality cult and use of violence and persecution. Only after the speech, Gorbachev recalled, “did I begin to understand the inner connection between what had happened in our country and what had happened to my family.” His grandfather Pantelei had said that Stalin didn’t know of his torture. But maybe Stalin was the one responsible for the family’s pain.

  “The document containing Khrushchev’s denunciations circulated briefly within the party, and then it was withdrawn. But I managed to get my hands on it. I was shocked, bewildered and lost. It wasn’t an analysis, just facts, deadly facts. Many of us simply could not believe that such things could be true. For me it was easier. My family had itself been one of the victims of the repression of the 1930s.”19 Gorbachev later frequently called Khrushchev’s speech “courageous.” It was not a total break with the past, but it was a break nonetheless. He felt once again as if illusions about the system were falling away. Gorbachev saw this as a reason to be hopeful, but he was also aware that many people, especially those in an older generation, were skeptical and downright confused. Not everything was clear for Gorbachev, either. How could everything they had believed in be wrong?

  While at the university, Gorbachev met and married Raisa Titorenko, a bright philosophy student. In the two years after Stalin’s death, Moscow began to open up to new ideas, often expressed in literature. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw, a title that came to define the era, was published in 1954. Gorbachev met a young Czech student at the university, Zdeněk Mlynáář, who became Gorbachev’s best friend in those years, and they enjoyed stormy debates late into the night in their dormitory room. The university experience began to open Gorbachev’s eyes, but at the same time, “for me and others of my generation the question of changing the system in which we lived did not arise.”

  Upon graduation in the summer of 1955, Gorbachev returned to Stavropol, where he found new evidence of the gap between rhetoric and reality. Many saw this but did nothing; what was different about Gorbachev was his capacity to be shocked by it. During his university days he held a summer job in a local procuracy in Stavropol, but was appalled by the arrogant behavior of the apparatchiks.20 In a letter to Raisa written then, he described them as “disgusting.” He added, “Especially the manner of life of the local bosses. The acceptance of convention, subordination, with everything predetermined, the open impudence of officials and the arrogance. When you look at one of the local leaders you see nothing outstanding apart from his belly.”

  Gorbachev decided on a career with the Komsomol, the party’s youth division, as deputy head of the “agitation and propaganda department.” This was a conformist career path. Gorbachev threw himself into the work, honing his speaking skills, often making trips around the region to exhort young people to believe in the party.21 The job brought him face-to-face with the bleakness of daily life, especially in the backwater rural corners of the Soviet Union. On one trip, he went to the most remote cattle farm in the region. After hiking through thick mud, Gorbachev arrived at a village of low, smoke-belching huts and blackened fences along the River Gorkaya Balka, and was shocked at what lay before him: poverty and desolation. “On the hillside, I wondered: ‘How is it possible, how can anyone live like that?’” Gorbachev’s impressions were shaped and deeply reinforced by his strong-willed wife, Raisa, who researched and wrote a thesis on peasant life in these years. She may have seen more of these desolate villages than he did. She trudged in boots and rode by motorcycle and cart through the bleak Russian countryside to carry out her research.22

  Gorbachev moved up in Stavropol, first through the city organization and then to become the highest-ranking party official in the region. In these years, in the 1960s and 1970s, he again felt the disparity between the way people lived and the empty party slogans and rhetoric. In farming and industry, the heavy hand of the state stifled individual initiative. Theft, toadying, incompetence and malaise were everywhere. Central planning was both intrusive and woefully inefficient. Once, he toured a collective farm in Stavropol. There were “magnificent crops of both grain and fodder.” Gorbachev was pleased, but asked the chairman of the collective farm, “Where did you get the pipe to do the irrigation?” The man just smiled. He had diverted the pipe from somewhere, on his own
, and Gorbachev knew that his success had nothing to do with socialism.23

  It is important to recall that the most daring changes in the centrally controlled Soviet economic system at the time were extremely modest, such as demonstrations of self-financing, or khozraschyot, the idea that a factory or farm could retain its own profits. Sweeping challenges to the system were just not possible; even minor experiments in individual initiative were snuffed out. This is the world Gorbachev knew. The bureaucrats at central planning in Moscow arrogantly issued orders to do this and that, and on the ground in farms and cities, the orders often made no sense. The demands were ignored, statistics faked, budgets swallowed up with no result, and anyone who deviated was punished. From 1970 to 1978, Gorbachev was first secretary of the Communist Party in Stavropol, the highest-ranking official in the region, an expanse between the Black and Caspian Seas with the most fertile lands in all of Russia. Gorbachev was essentially the governor, but wielded much more power than an American governor. Regional party bosses were a key power bloc in the Soviet system and could affect how Moscow decisions were implemented. As first secretary, Gorbachev joined an elite group at the pinnacle of Soviet society. He was eligible for special privileges—good housing, food, transport—and was a full member of the Central Committee in Moscow. In the Brezhnev years, a party first secretary was “a prince in his own domain,” as Robert G. Kaiser of the Washington Post described it.24But Gorbachev was something of a populist. By one account, he often walked to his office and informally listened to people on the streets. He was a regular at theater performances and encouraged the local press to be less driven by party ideology.25 Gorbachev was “as pragmatic an innovator as the conservative temper of the times allowed.”26 For example, he supported a farming plan to give autonomy to groups or teams of workers, including families, even though it was viewed with suspicion by the Moscow bureaucrats. In 1978 Gorbachev wrote a lengthy memo on the problems of agriculture that called for giving “more independence to enterprises and associations” in deciding key production and money issues. But there is no evidence that these ideas ever took root very widely, and Gorbachev was definitely not a radical. He joined other party bosses in lavishing obsequious praise on the 1978 volume of Brezhnev’s ghostwritten memoirs of war, Malaya Zemlya, a blatant effort at self-glorification. Words of the state and party lost their meaning, but it was mandatory for Gorbachev and others to keep repeating them.

  Gorbachev realized as regional party boss that something much more serious was wrong with the Soviet system than just inefficiency, theft and poor planning. The deeper flaw was that no one could break out with new ideas. Gorbachev bridled at being “bound hand and foot by orders from the center.”27 He concluded that a “hierarchy of vassals and chiefs of principalities was in fact the way the country was run.” In a reflection many years later, he said bluntly, “It was a caste system based on mutual protection.”

  The outside world, too, offered Gorbachev fresh evidence of the contrast between reality and the party line. When his university friend MlynááY visited Stavropol in 1967, he surprised Gorbachev with a warning that Czechoslovakia was “on the verge of a major upheaval.” In the year that followed, MlynááY became a figure in the liberalizing movement in Czechoslovakia, headed by Alexander Dubček, which led to the Prague Spring and the drive to create “socialism with a human face.” This fling with democracy was crushed by Soviet tanks and Warsaw Pact troops on the night of August 20–21, 1968. Gorbachev has acknowledged that in 1968 he supported the invasion as a party official in Stavropol. But Gorbachev saw a different reality a year later when he visited Prague. On this trip, he did not see MlynááY, but he realized people sincerely believed in the liberalization and hated the Soviet leadership in Moscow. While the KGB line was that external factors were at work, Gorbachev saw that the impetus was internal. On a factory tour in Brno, workers refused to even talk to Gorbachev. “This was a shock to me,” Gorbachev said. “This visit overturned all my conceptions.” In Bratislava, he saw walls densely covered with anti-Soviet slogans. “From that time on, I began to think more and more about what was going on in our country, and I came to an unconsoling conclusion: there was something wrong…” But he kept these thoughts to himself, and Raisa.28 Throughout the 1970s, Gorbachev traveled several times to the West, including Italy, France, Belgium and West Germany. What he saw in these relatively prosperous democracies was far different from what he had been shown in Soviet propaganda books, films and radio broadcasts. “People there lived in better conditions, and were better off than in our country. The question haunted me: why was the standard of living in our country lower than in other developed countries?”

  The Stavropol town of Kislovodsk was favored by the Soviet elite for its soothing spas and mineral springs. The Soviet KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, who suffered kidney ailments, often retreated to a KGB lodge there. He and Gorbachev shared a holiday at the mineral springs in August 1978. Andropov had taken notice of Gorbachev as a potential future leader. They climbed in the nearby mountains, and spent many hours sitting around an open bonfire, cooking shashlik under the star-studded skies. Andropov, who had wide-ranging interests, often talked to Gorbachev about affairs of state, and they listened to tape recordings of Vladimir Vysotsky and Yuri Vizbor, who strummed a seven-string guitar and sang of people’s everyday problems. This must have been an amazing scene: two party bosses enjoying the music of bards whose works were largely distributed on bootleg tapes. Andropov, head of the secret police since 1967, became one of Gorbachev’s mentors and tutors.

  In Moscow, Gorbachev was elected a secretary of the Central Committee and put in charge of agriculture.29 Full of enthusiasm, he went to see Brezhnev about farm policy. But Gorbachev, forty-eight years old, found the Soviet leader, then seventy-one, almost lifeless in his Kremlin office. “Not only did he not take up the conversation, but he showed no response at all, neither to my words nor to myself,” Gorbachev recalled.

  As a junior member of the Soviet ruling elite, Gorbachev soon discovered that the final years of Brezhnev’s rule were filled with such scenes. Some Politburo meetings lasted no longer than fifteen or twenty minutes, so as not to tire the chairman. “It was a sad sight,” recalled Gorbachev. The country was in serious trouble economically as the oil boost of the late 1970s began to give out. The war in Afghanistan, launched by a coterie around Brezhnev, turned into a quagmire. The hopes of détente in the 1970s evaporated, and the superpower tension escalated. Food shortages grew at home. During the first four years that Gorbachev was secretary for agriculture in Moscow, there were four successive bad harvests and massive Soviet grain purchases abroad.30

  From the time Gorbachev arrived in Moscow in November 1978, through the early 1980s, a simmering power struggle unfolded between an old guard, bastions of the party and military, and a handful of reformers, most of whom were academics with fresh ideas but no power base. When Brezhnev died, Andropov promoted a group of younger officials, including Gorbachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov, an experienced factory manager from Sverdlovsk. Andropov put Gorbachev in charge of economic policy for the whole country. Gorbachev solicited ideas from the academic reformers. Now, at least the reformers had an umbrella—Gorbachev would listen to them.31

  True to his background in the KGB, Andropov tried to rejuvenate the country with police-state methods, such as arresting people seen as loafers on the street during working hours. Gorbachev told him this was a dubious practice, that people were making jokes about it, but Andropov wouldn’t listen. He brushed Gorbachev off, saying, “When you get to my age, you’ll understand.”

  What brought these two men together was a shared understanding of the plight of the system. Gorbachev recalled that Andropov was determined to root out the ills of the Brezhnev era, including “protectionism, in-fighting and intrigues, corruption, moral turpitude, bureaucracy, disorganization and laxity.” But as historian Robert English pointed out, it was extraordinarily hard to make change “in an ossified, militarized Party-state
system,” especially given the latent power of the hard-liners.32In the end, Andropov ran out of time. Gorbachev wrote later that Andropov could not have really carried out drastic change; the years with the KGB left him unable to break out. “He was too deeply entrenched in his own past experience; it held him firmly in its grasp,” Gorbachev said.

  It fell to Gorbachev to become the agent of change, and his time was coming.

  A turning point came in May 1983, when Gorbachev went to Canada for a seven-day visit as head of a parliamentary delegation. Alexander Yakovlev, the Soviet ambassador there, saw an opportunity to show Gorbachev how the West worked, and to offer his own deep concerns about the direction of the Soviet Union. In Alberta, Gorbachev was fascinated by a discussion with a wealthy farmer who had a 4,942-acre spread. Gorbachev quickly got to talking and discovered the farmer’s herd produced a milk yield of 4,700 kilograms each cow per year. The yield of Soviet cows was 2,258 kilograms.33 The farmer had two homes, cars and aluminum grain towers, and told Gorbachev he worked a long, hard year without vacations. Canada offered Gorbachev a prosperous counterpoint to Soviet agricultural failure.

  The key moment of the visit was out of public view, on the evening of May 19, at the Ontario farm of Eugene Whelan, the Canadian agriculture minister. Whelan had invited Gorbachev for dinner, but was delayed in arriving. His wife, Elizabeth, greeted the Soviet guests after they drove in on a long, bumpy dirt road. Waiting around, Gorbachev and Yakovlev decided to take a private stroll, alone, in a nearby orchard. Yakovlev had been the Central Committee propaganda chief in the early 1970s, but had written an article with radical ideas for a newspaper—and was sent to diplomatic exile in Canada. He was a reformist whose enthusiasm for change only deepened as he witnessed the collapse of détente and the stagnation of the late Brezhnev years. Yakovlev, then fifty-nine years old, was angered by the over-militarization of Soviet society, and he believed markets could offer improvements to socialism. Most of all, he later recalled, he had made freedom his “religion.” In the walk in the orchard, it all spilled out.