Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  Jaruzelski ruled with a Council for National Salvation comprising a group of senior officers, not Party apparatchiks. Polish martial law seemed in many ways as much a coup against the Communists as against Solidarity, though the declared object was to ‘save socialism and national honour’. Marx and Lenin would have called Polish martial law classic ‘Bonapartism’. Newsreaders now wore uniforms. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed in all major towns. Strict censorship was placed on official newspapers. The junta tried to cut off Poland from the outside world, severing phone links. It attempted, in vain, to limit internal travel to prevent information moving around the country. In the first few days more than 6,000 people were arrested without charge and detained in dozens of internment camps. They included well-known writers, actors, academics, musicians and artists as well as trade union activists. The great philosopher Leszek Kołakowski said the martial law declaration was the moment the Polish Communists ‘declared war on their own people’ and the idea stuck. Everywhere Poles referred to the next few months as a period of war.

  The Soviets fondly imagined that they had paid a relatively small price to pacify their perennially troublesome colony. Again they had reasserted their authority, and this time the Poles had themselves done the dirty work. In the Kremlin the sight of Polish tanks, patrolling Warsaw streets, commanded by a Polish Communist, was seen as a relief and a victory. But quickly it began to look like no sort of victory at all.

  SIX

  THE BLEEDING WOUND

  Kabul, Sunday 13 December 1981

  THERE WAS ONE overriding reason why Red Army tanks were not sent to Warsaw to suppress Solidarity. It was explained by Mikhail Suslov, perhaps the most hardline apologist for Russian imperialism in the entire Moscow leadership. ‘We simply cannot afford another Afghanistan,’ he said, when the Soviet magnates agonised over what to do in Poland. By December 1981 Soviet troops had been fighting the battle for socialism on their Central Asian border for two years and it was clear they had been led to a disaster. Already about 2,000 Russian soldiers had been killed - more than the number who had died on active service in the three and a half decades since the end of World War Two. The old men in the Kremlin searched for a way out, but could not find one that did not involve international humiliation. That they would not contemplate. They were trapped by Russian nationalism, and by their own ideology. They believed that the tide of history was with them, that communism must inevitably triumph, and that no country which had seen a socialist revolution - even one as unlikely for communism to take root as Afghanistan - must ever be allowed to slide back. In hard-headed terms, they felt that if they admitted defeat anywhere it would be a sign of weakness that would give encouragement to their opponents everywhere. They allowed themselves to be sucked deeper into an unwinnable conflict in hostile, mountainous terrain, surrounded by enemies they did not begin to understand.

  The Soviets never planned a war in Afghanistan. Their intention had not been to occupy the country. The other occasions since 1945 in which Soviet troops had been sent into conflict abroad had been to Warsaw Pact neighbours, their satellite states, to reassert their dominion. Those - such as Hungary in 1956 - had essentially been police actions in countries they regarded as their possessions. Afghanistan was different. It was not in the generally acknowledged Soviet sphere of influence. Now it became part of the Cold War as a ‘proxy’ dispute between East and West. A war in Europe in the era of Mutually Assured Destruction was deemed unthinkable. But superpower rivalries spread to the Third World and, especially, to the Middle East, where both sides saw vital strategic interests at stake. If on their western flank the Soviets were worried about the Pope, in the East the leadership feared the mullahs. They were anxious about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran, as well as ‘Western imperialism’ in Afghanistan, which bordered its Central Asian republics.

  At the end of April 1978 a small group of left-wing army officers seized power in the Afghan capital, Kabul. All the coup leaders were Communists, members of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), and had close links with Moscow. The Soviet Ambassador, Alexander Puzanov, had been told about the takeover plan and opposed it. So did Moscow. The KG B begged the plotters not to proceed, but was ignored. The first the Kremlin knew that the coup had taken place was from a Reuters wire report. Swiftly, the Soviets changed their tack, started referring to the Afghan leaders as comrades and hailed the revolution as a great victory for socialism. The Russians sent a contingent of advisers - engineers, doctors, road builders as well as intelligence agents - to advance the cause of international communism.

  The new Afghan leader was a bookish sixty-one-year-old Marxist thinker, Mohammed Taraki. He began to put his theories into practice in the traditional way, despite the deeply conservative nature of the country’s Islamic society. He rounded up and executed hundreds of opponents and trod on ancient customs. He tried to force farmers to grow other crops instead of poppy and had elaborate plans to collectivise agriculture. Women were sent to schools, given literacy classes and discouraged from wearing the traditional bhourka.d As Saher Gul, a mullah in the remote Laghman Province, explained: ‘The Communists tried to change the law of God. They wanted to destroy Islamic traditions - to rid everyone of poverty and make everyone equal. This is against the law of Islam. God has decided who is rich and who is poor. It can’t be changed by Communists.’1

  Most of the country’s population agreed with Gul. Over the next eighteen months the revolution fell apart. Resistance grew and the mullahs called for jihad against the atheistic Communists. Scores of thousands of Afghans joined the Mujahideen, the Army of God, and took to the hills or fled over the porous border to Pakistan. Kabul and a few of the bigger towns were controlled by Taraki’s forces, but most of the countryside was in the hands of the guerrillas. He desperately pleaded with the Russians to send him help against ‘the saboteurs and terrorists’ who were endangering the revolution. He received a few fighter planes, some weapons and moral support. Even after a Mujahideen group killed seven Soviet advisers in March 1979, Moscow turned down requests for direct military help. Andropov said, wisely: ‘There’s a question, whose cause will we be supporting if we deploy forces into Afghanistan. It’s completely clear . . . that Afghanistan is not ready at this time to resolve the issues it faces through socialism. The economy is backward, the Islamic religion predominates and nearly all the rural population is illiterate. This is not a revolutionary situation. We can uphold [Taraki’s regime] only by Soviet bayonets and that is utterly inadmissible for us. We cannot take such a risk.’

  Gromyko agreed, using diplomatic and strategic arguments. If the USSR sent in an army it would be seen as an aggressor: ‘All that we have done in recent years with such effort in terms of detente, arms reduction and much more would be thrown back. China, of course, would be given a nice present. All the non-aligned countries would be against us . . . serious consequences are to be expected by such an action.’2

  Two geopolitical considerations changed their minds - and the bloody result of one internal Afghan squabble. The collapse of the Shah of Iran’s regime in February 1979 proved as great a blow to the Soviet Union as to the US. The Kremlin expected American intervention to prop up the Shah and, again, when dozens of American hostages were seized at the US Embassy. When no American intervention came and Revolutionary Guards began patrolling the streets of Tehran, the Soviet leadership could sense the danger posed by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic. ‘Our main concern was the security of the southern borders of the Soviet Union . . . and the spread of Islamic fundamentalism,’ according to Vasily Safranchuk, the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s chief official responsible for the Middle East. The other strategic concern for the Kremlin was that detente and the process of disarmament talks seemed to be running into the sands. Neither East nor West appeared able or willing to halt a renewed arms race. Brezhnev had made agreements in the early 1970s with Presidents Nixon and Ford to place limits on the number of intercontinental
missiles in Soviet and Nato arsenals. But the Russians had developed a new range of intermediate range weapons, the SS-20s, which they had begun to deploy in Europe in 1978. Nato intended to counter with new land-based Cruise and Pershing missiles, though it was not clear when they would be deployed.3

  The other conflict, in Kabul, required more immediate Soviet attention. There had been a power struggle among Afghan Communists since well before the revolution. Taraki’s deputy, the regime’s strong man and security chief, Hafizullah Amin, had always wanted power for himself and believed that he, a man of action, would be better able to lead the fight against the guerrillas. On 14 September he overthrew Taraki but the news was not made public until a fortnight later when the Kabul Times reported that he had ‘died of an undisclosed illness’. A member of the palace guard - in exile some years afterwards - described what had really happened. Taraki was tied to his bed with a towel and then suffocated with a pillow. His death throes had lasted a quarter of an hour.

  The vigorous and ruthless Amin, fifty, who had supervised the purges against the PDPA’s opponents, was deeply distrusted by Moscow. The KGB thought that he was playing a double game and was making diplomatic overtures to the Americans. A report sent upwards to Brezhnev said Amin might even have been recruited by the CIA. There was never any evidence against him, but Andropov became convinced that Amin had to be removed. Whatever the reservations the KG B chief held a few months earlier, he now believed that Soviet troops had to be dispatched to Afghanistan to ‘save the revolution’ and defeat ‘the terrorists’. His deputy Vladimir Kryuchkov said: ‘He felt . . . that if we didn’t go into Afghanistan then some other countries would.’4

  The two others in the Kremlin ‘troika’, Ustinov and Gromyko, agreed. The Foreign Minister’s view now was that ‘we cannot afford to lose Afghanistan’. The three of them talked round an initially reluctant Brezhnev, who still had enough faculties left to see the serious risks that he was running. He said that he had struggled hard to gain a reputation as a peacemaker and all that would be in jeopardy if the Afghan venture went wrong. The plan was to enter the country with a show of force, get rid of Amin, replace him with a more malleable and trustworthy puppet, support the Afghan army’s operations for a few weeks, and then leave once the new regime had been established. It was supposed to be a quick, surgical intervention.

  The top brass in the Soviet military were against the plan from the first and tried hard to stop it, even at some risk to their careers. The Chief of the Defence Staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov and his deputy, General Sergei Akhromeyev - both highly decorated officers from World War Two - were the senior dissenters. They raised their doubts with the Defence Minister, Ustinov, pointing out that military experience from the British in the nineteenth century and the Russians in Tsarist days should encourage caution. They were reprimanded. ‘Are the generals now making policy in the Soviet Union? Your job is to plan specific operations and carry out orders,’ Ustinov told them. They produced a detailed plan which satisfied their masters, if not themselves. On the morning of 10 December Ogarkov told Brezhnev that most of his colleagues had ‘grave reservations’ about the enterprise because of the possible ‘perils of being mired in unfamiliar and difficult conditions’. Ustinov told him to ‘shut up and obey orders’. Later in the day when other Kremlin magnates met, the Marshal bravely tried again and warned of ‘very serious fallout’ from the venture. ‘We could align the entire Islamic East against us,’ he said. Andropov cut him off. ‘Focus on military affairs,’ he was told. ‘Leave the policy making to us and the Party.’5

  The final decision was taken on 12 December 1979. The scales were tipped by Nato’s decision four days earlier to begin deployment the following year of 464 ground-based Cruise missiles and 108 Pershing missiles in Western Europe. ‘After that decision by Nato, we . . . had nothing to lose,’ one senior official commented. Brezhnev signed the order ‘with a shaky hand’, but he was optimistic in public. When a short while later he spoke to a sceptical Anatoli Dobrynin, the Soviets’ vastly experienced Ambassador to the US, one of the Soviet Union’s shrewdest servants, Brezhnev said: ‘Don’t worry, Anatoli, we’ll be out of there in three or four weeks.’6

  The operation began on Christmas Day and was bungled from the start. The initial plan had been to poison Amin, but he was left alive, albeit in pain. He strengthened the guard at his palace on the outskirts of Kabul. Soviet special forces - now without the element of surprise - eventually found him and shot him, though suffering severe casualties. What was supposed to be a swift and straightforward assassination, leaving few traces, turned into a bloodbath that produced two truck-loads of corpses.

  Amin’s replacement was Babrak Karmal, who turned out to be a chronic alcoholic and occasional womaniser. Originally one of the leaders of the revolution, he fell out with both his predecessors. He was dispatched into exile as the Afghan Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, where he lived quietly until the KGB airlifted him out of Prague and smuggled him back to Kabul two days before the invasion. The city was not deemed safe as there were still pockets of resistance from Amin supporters who feared for their lives. Karmal was installed officially as Communist Party leader on 26 December at a hastily convened meeting of the Party, under the guard of the Red Army, at the Bagram military airport, which the Soviets were using as their main base of operations.

  Two years later, around 100,000 Soviet troops occupied the country and the war continued to escalate. The Mujahideen were receiving massive shipments of arms and money from the US, whose principal aim, in which it was supremely successful, was to keep the Soviets tied down for as long as possible in a costly conflict. The Soviets changed their tactics over time. At first they engaged in large-scale armed sweeps in the most troublesome areas like Helmand Province in the south and the border areas with Pakistan, through which most of the guerrillas’ weapons were flowing. But this was not working. As an observer of the conflict explained: ‘About 99 per cent of the battles that we fought in Afghanistan were won by the Soviet side. But the problem was that the next morning we had the same situation as if there had been no battle . . . The Mujahideen were again in the village where they were - or we thought they were - destroyed a day or so before. It was . . . useless.’ The Russians adopted more brutal methods and took to the air. They bombed and strafed towns and villages, sending in commandos to ‘mop up’ afterwards, but the results were similar. The Mujahideen would melt away temporarily and then return. But an estimated million Afghans were killed in the war and between two and three million refugees left the country.

  The Russians could find no way out and their armed forces were so overstretched there was no question of deploying troops elsewhere. A junior member of the Soviet leadership, Mikhail Gorbachev, in charge of agriculture, was already in private calling the Afghan War ‘our bleeding wound’.

  SEVEN

  THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS

  Prague, June 1982

  POLAND WAS IN MANY WAYS an exception, the semi-anarchic state that even one of the Soviet leaders recognised as ‘the Achilles heel’ of communism. But to most outsiders Warsaw looked as much a capital of the Communist world as Bucharest or East Berlin. One of the first things a stranger would note, in the early 1980s as in the 1950s, from Varna on the Black Sea to Vilnius near the Baltic, was the absence of advertising hoardings or displays in shop windows designed to attract customers. It was not just that there were fewer of these things. There were none. Arguably, a visitor from the West might have thought this was a blessed relief, but it certainly gave the streets in the socialist world an identifiable look. There was an eerie darkness at night in most cities. The roads were poorly lit and there were relatively few private cars on the roads. People were clothed well by the 1980s - nobody was in rags. But there was little variety and, for the fashion-conscious, little to buy in domestic stores. The height of luxury - and of longing - was a pair of American blue jeans. ‘We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,’ was a well-worn saying throu
ghout East/Central Europe - and it was not a joke. It was a fairly accurate single-line description of the system.

  Politically, Eastern Europe was frozen in ice. Most regimes were dominated by men already in their second decade in power by the 1980s. A couple, Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria and János Kádár in Hungary, had already lasted more than twenty years by the time of martial law in Poland. They had no intention of relinquishing power either for themselves or for their overlords in Moscow. These Communist potentates believed that the quiescence of their people meant the public had accepted them - grudgingly, sullenly and unhappily perhaps, but the important thing was that the people had submitted peacefully and ceased to give the rulers much trouble.

  Generally, throughout the Soviet empire, this was so. There had been rebellions. They had ended tragically, with Soviet tanks patrolling the streets of some of the loveliest cities in Europe. The memories of the Hungarians and Czechs were still raw - in 1956 more than 2,500 people had died in Budapest in a heroic but doomed fight for freedom. The Czechs still felt crushed by the failure of the Prague Spring. The aftershocks of both experiences were deeply painful. Hundreds of Hungarians had been executed for daring to challenge the system and more than 15,000 imprisoned. In Czechoslovakia, the period of ‘normalisation’, as the regime called it, was less brutal - ‘a process of civilised violence’, the Slovakian writer Milan Šimecka called it. But it transformed the country and the ruling Party, which was thoroughly purged. Almost half the membership of around a million and a half were thrown out of the Party. All the leading academics, journalists or teachers had to sign ‘loyalty’ pledges to the State - i.e., the ruling Party - and if they refused they were fired. The Czech broadcasting station shed around 1,500 of its 3,500 employees. In the Czech capital during the 1970s and 1980s there were scores of stokers, janitors and mechanics who had been philosophers, history professors and newspaper editors before or during the Prague Spring.