The Dead Hand

by David E. Hoffman

  “We had a lot of time together,” Yakovlev recalled. “So we took a long walk on that minister’s farm and, as it often happens, both of us were just kind of flooded, and let go. I somehow, for some reason, threw caution to the wind and started telling him about what I considered to be utter stupidities in the area of foreign affairs, especially about those SS-20 missiles that were being stationed in Europe and a lot of other things. And he did the same thing. We were completely frank. He frankly talked about the problems in the internal situation in Russia. He was saying that under these conditions, the conditions of dictatorship and absence of freedom, the country would simply perish. So it was at that time, during our three-hour conversation, almost as if our heads were knocked together, that we poured it all out.”34

  Two weeks later, Yakovlev was asked to return to Moscow to head up a prestigious think tank, the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, where he would become a pioneer of the new thinking.

  The Kremlin paralysis under Chernenko was grave. Politburo meetings were difficult to convene. Fifteen or twenty minutes before the start time, 11 A.M., a phone call came and Gorbachev was told that Chernenko was so sick he could not attend. Would Gorbachev take the chair? This left Gorbachev little time to prepare, and it was awkward in front of the other, more senior members. By the end of 1984, “Chernenko had dropped out altogether,” Gorbachev recalled. With no one in charge, the suspicions and infighting worsened. According to Yakovlev, hard-liners launched an offensive against some of the liberal think tanks, threatening a purge that would have silenced them.35

  Gorbachev’s sense of gloom was reinforced at a December soul-searching talk with Eduard Shevardnadze, who was the first secretary of the party in the republic of Georgia, just to the south of the Stavropol region. Like Gorbachev, Shevardnadze was a high-ranking official and a man with clear vision about the country’s problems. They met at a barren park on the deserted shore near the Black Sea’s Cape Pitsunda. Strolling down a path beneath the trees, they talked openly, holding nothing back. “Everything’s rotten,” Shevardnadze said. “It has to be changed.”36

  That winter was terrible. Yegor Ligachev recalled that because of massive snows and bitter cold, industry in the country began to break down. Fifty-four of the largest electric plants were on the verge of shutdown because 22,000 freight cars carrying coal were stopped dead on the tracks, their cargo frozen solid.37

  In early December 1984, Gorbachev prepared to give a critical speech at a party conference on ideology. The Soviet elite was dejected and Gorbachev wanted to offer badly needed new ideas. Months of work had gone into refining his speech, with help from Yakovlev. The participants had already arrived in Moscow. Then Gorbachev got a call from the ailing, cautious Chernenko at 4 P.M. Alarmed at the new ideas Gorbachev planned to offer in the speech, Chernenko insisted the conference should be postponed for some vague reason about not being fully prepared. Gorbachev was indignant. The participants had already arrived! What was Chernenko thinking? “OK,” the Soviet leader backed down. “Have it, but don’t make too much noise.” In fact, Gorbachev’s December 10 address offered hints of dramatic change to come. He talked about restructuring—perestroika.

  On February 24, 1985, Chernenko was shown voting on television in an election. Chernenko was seen accepting his ballot, voting, accepting flowers from a well-wisher and shaking hands. He raised his hand up to his brow and said “Good.” End of broadcast. Anatoly Chernyaev, the deputy of the International Department at the Central Committee, watched with disgust. “A man half-dead. A mummy,” Chernyaev wrote in his diary. Two days later, Chernenko was shown on television again. This time he appeared wan and held on to a chair for support as an election official handed him a document. He was wheezing. “It was a terrible show,” Chernyaev wrote.38 The only other official in the room in both broadcasts was Viktor Grishin, seventy, the Moscow party chief, a member of the Politburo’s old guard who seemed to be making a bid for power, positioning himself standing next to Chernenko. But Grishin’s move swiftly backfired. The sight of the ill Chernenko was a reminder, if one was needed, that it was time for change.

  On the evening of Sunday, March 10, Gorbachev returned home from work and took a call from the Kremlin doctor, Yevgeny Chazov. Chernenko had died of heart failure and complications from emphysema at 7:20 P.M. Gorbachev, who had been passed over in the transition after Andropov, wasted little time. A Politburo meeting was called at the Kremlin for 11 P.M. Three voting members, including two old Brezhnevites, were out of the country and would not make it back.

  About twenty minutes before the meeting started, Gorbachev met Gromyko, the foreign minister, lion of the old guard, in the Walnut Room, where full voting members of the Politburo often gathered before formal sessions. Gromyko was the key figure in deciding who would be the next general secretary. Earlier, Gromyko had sent a private emissary to Gorbachev with the message that he would back him in the succession struggle, in exchange for being allowed to retire as foreign minister and take up a sinecure position as chairman of the Supreme Soviet. The back channel was through Gromyko’s son, Anatoly, and Gorbachev’s reformist adviser, Yakovlev.39

  When Gorbachev and Gromyko met in the Walnut Room, they reconfirmed the understanding reached earlier.

  “Andrei Andreyevich, we have to consolidate our effort, the moment is crucial,” Gorbachev recalled saying to Gromyko.

  “I believe everything is clear,” Gromyko replied.

  When they had all assembled, Gorbachev informed the Politburo of Chernenko’s death. Usually, the person chosen to head up the funeral commission was the one who would be the next general secretary. The question of the funeral commission arose. There was momentary hesitation in the room: Would Grishin make a play for it?

  In fact, before the meeting, Gorbachev had already made a gesture to Grishin, who declined to head the commission.

  “Why the hesitation about the chairman?” Grishin said now, in front of the Politburo members. “Everything is clear. Let’s appoint Mikhail Sergeyevich.”

  The old guard had died. Gorbachev became head of the commission and the next day would become the new general secretary. Precisely why Grishin did not fight is not known, but he may well have realized, or sensed, that he had no chance, that Gromyko would support Gorbachev.

  Gorbachev was a shining light in a dusky hall. Five of the ten voting members of the Politburo that day were over seventy, three in their sixties and only two in their fifties. Not only was Gorbachev, at fifty-four, the youngest member of the Politburo by a full five years, he was thirteen years younger than the average age of the voting membership.40 Plans were hurriedly made through the night for the transition, which would include a Politburo meeting and then a Central Committee plenum March 11 to ratify the choice.

  Gorbachev went home at 4 A.M. He was then living at a large dacha outside of Moscow. Raisa was waiting up. Suspicious of KGB listening bugs, they went out in the garden, as they did almost every day. They strolled the paths for a long time just before dawn. Spring had not yet come, there was snow on the ground. Raisa recalled the air felt very heavy. They talked about the events and the implications. Gorbachev told her he had been frustrated all the years in Moscow, having not accomplished as much as he wanted, always hitting a wall. To really get things done, he would have to accept the job.

  “We can’t go on living like this,” he said.

  At the next day’s session, Gromyko delivered a strong testament to Gorbachev, speaking in a way that was not customary on such occasions, without notes and without hesitation. “I shall be straight,” Gromyko began. Gorbachev is the “absolutely right choice.” Gorbachev had “indomitable creative energy, striving to do more and do it better.” Gorbachev respected “the interests of the party, the interests of the society, the interests of the people” above his own, he said. Gorbachev would bring experience of work in the regions and the center, and ran the Politburo while Chernenko was ill. This required knowledge and stamina. �
�We won’t make a mistake if we choose him,” Gromyko said.

  After the agonizing years of stagnation, death and disappointment, Gorbachev was chosen first and foremost as the best hope to get the country moving.41 Georgi Shakhnazarov, who had served Andropov and would later advise Gorbachev, recalled that Gorbachev’s rise was not a certainty. Gorbachev did not have a sterling biography that made him the natural choice, and the Politburo might have chosen another, such as Grishin, to muddle through. But Shakhnazarov felt there was one factor that, while not official, could not be ignored. “People were desperately tired of participating in a disgraceful farce… They were tired of seeing leaders with shaking heads and faded eyes, knowing the fate of the country and half the world was entrusted to the care of these miserable semiparalytics.”42

  ————— 9 —————

  YEAR OF THE SPY

  When Reagan was awakened March 11, 1985, at 4 A.M., with word that Chernenko had died, he asked Nancy, “How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?” Four leaders—Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev—had guided the Soviet Union over its first six decades. Now it had the third new leader in three years. Perhaps no one really knew at this early point that Gorbachev would become a revolutionary. But at first, Reagan missed the signs. He was blinkered by his own deep anti-communism and his own long-held ideas about the Soviet system, and hampered by lack of good intelligence. To the United States, the Kremlin remained a black box. Reagan and many of those around him could not imagine a Soviet leader carrying out radical reform from above. Shultz saw promise in Gorbachev, as had Thatcher in Britain, but Reagan’s circle was riven by disagreement, and there was no consensus that this was a man they could do business with.

  Among the hard-liners, Robert Gates, then the deputy CIA director for intelligence, felt that Gorbachev was a tough guy wearing a well-tailored suit. Underneath, he saw trouble, and did not want to be fooled. In the weeks before Gorbachev took power, in February 1985, Gates wrote a memo to one of the CIA’s leading Soviet experts. “I don’t much care for the way we are writing about Gorbachev,” Gates said. “We are losing the thread of what toughness and skill brought him to where he is. This is not some Gary Hart or even Lee Iacocca. We have to give the policy-makers a clearer view of the kind of person they may be facing.” Gates said he felt that Gorbachev was the heir to Andropov, the former KGB chief, and to Suslov, the onetime orthodox ideology chief. Thus, Gates said, Gorbachev “could not be all sweetness and light. These had been two of the hardest cases in recent Soviet history. They would not take a wimp under their wing.”1

  Reagan found this analysis very appealing. The assumption was based on years of imagining a Soviet monolith—that all leaders were alike, that the system could not change. Reagan met with U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Arthur Hartman. “He confirms what I believe that Gorbachev will be tough as any of their leaders,” Reagan recalled. “If he wasn’t a confirmed ideologue he never would have been chosen… by the Politburo.”2

  Yet Reagan was capable of holding multiple views at the same time. He still dreamed of eliminating nuclear weapons, even if he had doubts about the new Soviet leader. He mentioned elimination of nuclear weapons as “our common goal” in one of his first letters to Gorbachev.3Reagan also listened to Shultz, who urged him to use “quiet diplomacy” with the new Soviet leader. As Reagan recalled it, this meant “the need to lean on the Soviets but to do so one on one—not in the papers.”4

  Five years into his presidency, Reagan was still surrounded by intense feuds and conflicts among those who served him. Tempers were raw over a Soviet blunder in East Germany. On March 24, an American army officer, Major Arthur D. Nicholson Jr., was shot by a panicky Soviet sentry while in a restricted area. As with the Korean airliner, the clumsy Soviet response to the incident made it even worse. The shooting “has to be called murder,” Reagan wrote in his diary.5

  At a White House breakfast April 27, Reagan’s top cabinet members argued over whether to allow the secretary of commerce to visit Moscow on a trade mission. Casey and Weinberger were opposed. Shultz wanted to engage Moscow, and thought Reagan did too. “The scene was bizarre,” Shultz said. “Here was the president ready to lead the charge to engage with the Soviets. At the same time, his secretary of defense and director of central intelligence were leading their own charge in exactly the opposite direction.”6 Tired of the disputes, Shultz told Reagan he wanted to resign by summer. Reagan talked him out of it, saying he needed Shultz to deal with the Soviets.7 Reagan decided to let the trade mission go ahead, but sent a tough, private message to Gorbachev.8

  The Central Intelligence Agency devoted about 45 percent of its analytical manpower to the Soviet Union.9 But for all the attention to weapons and research programs, the agency had little understanding of the new man in the Kremlin. Shultz later recalled that “our knowledge of the Kremlin was thin, and the CIA, I found, was usually wrong about it.”10 Gates acknowledged that the CIA had scant inside knowledge. “We were embarrassingly hungry for details” from the British and Canadians who had met Gorbachev on his visits, and others who knew him, Gates said. These sources described Gorbachev as stylistically more open than Soviet leaders had been, but “unyielding” on the issues. Gorbachev was “an innovative, dynamic communist, not a revolutionary,” Gates concluded. The CIA’s first assessment of Gorbachev, titled “Gorbachev, the New Broom,” was sent to Reagan on June 27. The study portrayed Gorbachev as gambling on a campaign against corruption and inefficiency, but “not radical reform,” at home. The study said Gorbachev had already demonstrated that he was “the most aggressive and activist Soviet leader since Khrushchev.”11 When this paper went to Reagan, however, Casey attached a cover note that was far more skeptical. Casey wrote that Gorbachev and those around him “are not reformers and liberalizers either in Soviet domestic or foreign policy.”12

  He could not have been more wrong.

  Inside the Kremlin, the tune was changing. Gorbachev demanded a rewrite of a Communist Party program. “It must not be propagandistic babble about endless achievements,” Gorbachev wrote on the document, “the kind of stuff that you used to write for Brezhnev and Chernenko, but rather include specific proposals for a truly radical transformation of the economy.”13 This was just the beginning. Anatoly Chernyaev, the deputy head of the International Department of the Central Committee, who received this note, wondered, “Is this really happening? It’s too good to be true.”

  The day after Gorbachev became general secretary, on March 12, he received an important memorandum from Alexander Yakovlev, the reformist thinker who had the soul-searching talk with Gorbachev in the orchard in Canada. The title was simply “On Reagan.”14 In tone and substance, Yakovlev offered a stark contrast to the Soviet rhetoric of the past. Yakovlev’s analysis of Reagan, while imperfect, was pragmatic, not ideological. He described Reagan as striving to grasp the initiative in international affairs, to go down in history as a peacemaking president. He said Reagan had fulfilled his promises to rebuild the American military; Reagan “practically gave to the military business everything he promised.” This reflected an early misconception of Yakovlev and Gorbachev about the power of the defense industry in the United States. But Yakovlev did not make Reagan out to be a reckless cowboy, as Soviet propaganda had done so often. Rather, he said, the president was seeking to improve his political standing, facing off against many different forces, including global competition from Japan, domestic budget pressure and restive European allies. Reagan had invited Gorbachev to a summit, and Yakovlev told Gorbachev, “…from Reagan’s point of view, his proposition is thoughtful, precisely calculated, and contains no political risk.” There had not been a superpower summit in six years. Yakovlev’s advice to Gorbachev was: go to a summit, but not hastily. Make it clear to Reagan, he said, that the world does not spin every time he pushes a button.

  This was a moment when Reagan could have used fresh and penetrating insights into Gorbachev’s thinking a
nd life experiences. If he had seen Gorbachev’s notes about radical economic reform, if he had read Yakovlev’s memo, he might have realized immediately that Gorbachev had people around him who were thinking in new ways. The United States deployed remarkably accurate satellites to collect technical data on missiles, but it lacked the textured and revealing intelligence on the new leader that came only from human sources. Reagan would have benefited from knowing that Gorbachev nurtured a lifetime of lessons and convictions about the gap between the Soviet party-state and society. Reagan would have found fascinating Gorbachev’s comment to Raisa that “we can’t go on living like this.” Reagan would have been surprised to know of Gorbachev’s reluctance to use force, and his determination there would not be another Prague Spring.15 But Reagan did not know these things. The United States had never recruited a spy who provided political information at a high level inside the Kremlin.16 And just when the United States could have used some good human intelligence about the new leader in Moscow, the CIA suffered a series of blinding catastrophes.