Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  ‘Let’s not mythologise the role of the Church,’ Michnik said soon after Popiełuszko’s murder. ‘Its support for the opposition was . . . by no means absolute. The Church may have been anti-Communist but it did not believe that communism was about to collapse. On the contrary, [it thought] communism was going to survive and this required judicious adaptation on the part of the Church. I don’t blame the bishops . . . It was quite rational on their part. What I object to . . . is the history of the Church presented as an unbroken wave of democratic opposition.’10

  The generals were unable to run Poland any more efficiently than the Party apparatchiks could. They were given massive handouts by the Soviet Union to stabilise prices, which the Kremlin magnates admitted ‘stretched us to the limit - yet they are still making more requests’. The military regime resorted to the same methods as its predecessors and touched Western bankers for further loans, stoking up greater problems for the future. Jaruzelski was beginning to see that Poland’s plight was insoluble without abandoning Marxist theory. But he was not yet ready to do the unthinkable and find a way to share power with his opponents.

  PART TWO

  THE THAW

  ELEVEN

  THE NEW TSAR

  Moscow, Sunday 10 March 1985

  FOR THE THIRD TIME in less than three years the most powerful potentates in the Soviet Union met to anoint a new Red Tsar. Konstantin Chernenko finally gave up the ghost at 7.20 p.m. after a painful battle with pneumonia and emphysema. He had barely been seen for the last few weeks, except by the Kremlin doctors and his closest intimates. His death probably came as a relief to him and his family - and certainly to the USSR. Immediately, the Party elders left their country dachas, Moscow apartments and their own hospital beds to make a historic choice for the Soviet empire and for the cause of communism. Some of the eighteen men who began gathering at around 10 p.m. had been in power for so long they had worked in the same building for Stalin. Now they were greeted in the walnut-panelled room on the third floor of the ornate Senate - the room adjoining the Party leader’s private office - by the youngest of their number, fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.

  Instinctively the Party elders would have preferred a candidate of their own vintage, a supposedly safe bet who would be no threat to their positions and perquisites. But even they had heard some of the jokes going round the city - ‘The Congress has begun. Delegates are asked to stand. We will start as traditionally with the carrying-in of the General Secretary.’ More importantly, there was not a plausible older man remaining who could do the job. Ustinov had died a few months earlier and Gromyko had made it clear he did not want the position. Gorbachev had been standing in for Chernenko ably and energetically when the leader was indisposed and he seemed the best-qualified candidate. But he had been the best man for the job just over a year ago when he was blocked by a group of diehards who were still in positions to thwart him if they wished. This time the ambitious younger man had a powerful ally. Though Gromyko did not want to be king, he did wish to be kingmaker. The two cut a deal, though they never met to make it.

  The arrangements were handled by their emissaries. Gromyko’s son Anatoli, himself a rising Party functionary, represented the Foreign Minister. Gorbachev’s second was a close friend who was to become one of his key aides over the next few years, Alexander Yakovlev. Earlier that afternoon, when it became clear Chernenko had not long to live, the young Gromyko went to Yakovlev’s office. ‘So as not to beat about the bush, I’ll explain what I have in mind,’ he said. ‘If it’s not acceptable we’ll consider it nothing more than my own personal proposal on my own initiative. My father is sure that only Gorbachev can lead the Party under the circumstances. He is ready to support that idea and take the initiative . . . At the same time he is fed up with working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and would like to change his job. He is thinking of the Supreme Soviet.’ The meaning was clear. Gromyko would propose Gorbachev for the top job if the older man was given the largely ceremonial but grand-sounding post of President (technically Chairman of the Supreme Soviet). Gorbachev thought about the proposal briefly in his office and then told Yakovlev to take a message to Gromyko fils. ‘Tell Andrei Andreyevich that it has always been pleasant working with him. I will be pleased to do so in whatever position we may hold in the future. And tell him I know how to keep my promises.’1

  The rival candidate was another elderly man, Viktor Grishin, seventy-one, who had been Moscow Party chief for the past eighteen years. He was a throwback to the stagnation years - an embodiment of all that was wrong with the Brezhnev era, dull-witted, ponderous, lazy and mired in sleaze. It was well known that he was Chernenko’s choice to succeed him, but his claims were seen off quickly. Over the last few hours, the head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, had called several of the magnates and told them that at the meeting later he would be bringing a thick dossier detailing Grishin’s involvement in massive graft in Moscow over several decades. There was also the question of some unsavoury family links that would not necessarily disqualify him as a national leader but were certainly embarrassing. These were connections with Lavrenti Beria, the thug who had enthusiastically murdered countless people in Stalin’s purges and was himself discredited and killed in 1953. Beria’s illegitimate daughter was married to Grishin’s son.2

  Gromyko and Gorbachev talked briefly before the other magnates sat down to start their deliberations.

  ‘We have to unite our forces. This is a crucial moment,’ Gorbachev said.

  ‘It seems to me that everything is clear,’ the older man replied.

  Gorbachev responded: ‘I am counting on the fact that you and I will co-operate.’

  Then Gorbachev took the chair, as he had been doing in Chernenko’s absence for the past months. The chief Kremlin physician, still Dr Chazov, delivered a formal report on the causes of Chernenko’s death and then left the room. Gorbachev began: ‘We first of all have to decide the question of who is to be General Secretary . . . I would ask comrades to express their views on this matter.’ There was an established ritual at all such meetings of the Soviet leadership and, as always in the Kremlin, ritual was followed carefully. The unwritten rule since Lenin’s death had been that nobody disagreed with the man who spoke first to propose a name as the new General Secretary. Andrei Gromyko began immediately. He had not finished half a sentence before it was clear who the next leader would be: ‘I will speak frankly,’ he said. ‘When one thinks about a candidate . . . one thinks immediately, of course, about Mikhail Sergeyevich. That would in my opinion be the absolutely correct choice . . . When one looks into the future - and I will not hide the fact that for many of us that is hard to do - we must have a clear sense of the outlook. And that consists of the fact that we don’t have the right to permit any damage to our unity.’

  Gromyko halted. Nobody hinted at any objection so he continued.

  He has been doing much of the work already, and performing brilliantly. He has a deep and sharp mind, an ability to distinguish the primary from the secondary. An analytical mind . . . he’s a man of principle and conviction. He’ll uphold his views in the face of opposition and he won’t hesitate to speak his mind for the Party . . . He’s straightforward to people. If you’re a true Communist, you’ll leave satisfied, even though he might have said things that are not to your liking. But he can get along with different people when necessary . . . He does not see things in black and white. He can find an intermediate shade of grey in the interests of reaching a goal. For Gorbachev, maintaining a vigilant defence is a sacred duty. In our present situation, this is the holy of holies.

  Gromyko concluded: ‘He has a nice smile, but Comrades, Mikhail Sergeyevich has iron teeth.3

  The other established tradition was that, following a nominating speech, agreement had to be unanimous. Everyone was expected to speak and some of the unction of the occasion embarrassed Gorbachev, who sat with his head bowed, taking desultory notes and occasionally looking up with an uncomfor
table smile. Prime Minister Nikolai Tikhonov, who was no friend of Gorbachev and had been influential in blocking his appointment the last time round, said: ‘He is the first secretary who can understand economics,’ which was not generous to Gorbachev’s predecessors who, presumably, the Premier thought were incompetent. Nikolai Ryzhkov, who would soon be appointed Prime Minister in his place, explained, simply, the general view: ‘We knew that if we chose an old man again, we would have a repeat of what we had for three years in a row - shaking hands with foreign leaders at a funeral.’4

  At around three a.m. Gorbachev returned to his dacha in the country half an hour from Moscow. His wife, Raisa, was waiting up for him. Their habit every night, almost without fail, was to take a short walk together before going to bed - to relax and unwind but also, as Gorbachev said once, because it was only then that they could talk privately together without the KG B eavesdropping devices listening in to their every word. He told her the job was his and that he would take it. ‘All those years . . . it’s been impossible to do anything important, on a large scale. It’s like a brick wall. But life demands action. We can’t go on living like this,’ he said.5

  The next day there was genuine excitement in Moscow. At 7 a.m. Soviet radio was broadcasting Chopin on all stations, which was the first indication that something significant had happened. No news was officially declared, but the gossip spread throughout the city that Chernenko had died. It was hardly a surprise. There was still no word for certain about the succession even in the Party bureaucracy, the apparat, until mid-afternoon when an announcement would be made at the marble-paved conference hall opposite the Kremlin on the other side of Red Square. Anatoli Chernyaev was in the audience that afternoon. He was a senior Party official who would later play a major part in government, a man desperate for change and reform in the Soviet Union. ‘There was a mood of “waiting for Gorbachev” ever since Andropov died,’ he confided to his diary. ‘Under Brezhnev the country was already an embarrassment. Under Chernenko it became a shameful farce.’

  Nearly a thousand people were crammed into the hall. Just before four p.m. the most senior magnates emerged on to the podium and sat under a ten-metre-high mosaic of Lenin in garish red and orange. Andrei Gromyko walked up to a lectern on the stage. He paid tributes to the ‘dear departed Comrade Chernenko’ and then hesitated briefly before declaring that the leadership had ‘unanimously recommended . . . Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev’. The hall erupted in applause. Almost everyone under seventy was smiling and cheering in genuine enthusiasm. ‘The ovation went on in waves and didn’t stop for a long time,’ Chernyaev recorded. ‘The uncertainty is over . . . now it’s time for Russia to have a real leader.’6

  In Washington, Ronald Reagan’s principal adviser on the USSR, Jack Matlock, shared some of the enthusiasm people felt in Moscow: ‘Both at home and abroad everyone was tired of watching the Soviet empire floundering under infirm incompetents,’ he said. ‘Gorbachev was like a breath of fresh air. He walks, he talks, his suit fits . . . so he dazzled the world.’7

  It was extraordinary that Mikhail Gorbachev should have reached the pinnacle of power in the Soviet Union. On the whole, people of intellect and imagination were weeded out by a system that favoured toadies and the mediocre. Yet Gorbachev rose almost seamlessly and - a greater achievement still - he kept the better part of his character intact.

  He was born on 2 March 1931 in Privolnoye, a tiny village in the fertile steppes north of the Caucasus mountains known as the Kuban. The word privilnoye means free (as in free and easy) and traditionally the people of the Kuban were famed for their independent spirit. They were Cossacks who, unlike the peasantry almost everywhere else in Russia, had never been serfs. Under the Tsars they were allowed to keep their freedom; in return they were expected to defend the southern border of the Russian empire from incursion by Muslim marauders. After the 1917 Revolution many Cossacks refused to accept Bolshevik rule and fought against the Red Army in the Civil War. Gorbachev’s native village was dirt poor - a ramshackle collection of mud huts and outhouses set amidst vast open plains. His mother, Maria Panteleyevna, was a forceful, outspoken woman who domineered over the young Gorbachev’s mild-mannered father, Sergei Andreyevich. It was the baby’s maternal grandmother Vasilisa who insisted that the boy should be baptised, at a time when the Communists were suppressing the Orthodox Church.

  His birth coincided almost exactly with Stalin’s brutal drive to col lectivise the land, part of the great dictator’s vision of turning backward semi-feudal Russia into the modern, industrial Soviet Union. It was accompanied by appalling suffering throughout the country, but in few areas as terrible as in the north Caucasus, where an estimated one million people died from the famine of the 1930s. The ‘harvest of sorrow’, as it came to be called, was entirely a man-made disaster. Scores of thousands of better-off peasants, the derided kulaks who owned smallholdings, were driven off the land or killed. Hunger carried away the others. Gorbachev would later often recall the many ruined houses in his own village where entire families had died from starvation. In the area around Privolnoye a collective farm was established in the summer of 1931 and its first chairman, an important man in the neighbourhood, was Panteley Yefimovich Gopkolo, the new baby Mikhail Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather. He was a strong supporter of socialised farming from conviction as well as from opportunism. When Gorbachev was three, in 1934, his paternal grandfather Andrei was accused of ‘sabotaging the spring sowing plan’. He had refused to join the collective farm - the kolkhoz - and a kangaroo court sent him to Siberia to cut trees. He left behind ‘a tormented family’ that soon became destitute, Gorbachev said. ‘Half the family died of starvation.’

  He survived mainly due to the position held by his other grandfather. But in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge in which millions were murdered or sent to prison camps, Panteley Gopkolo was arrested in the middle of the night by the secret police, the NKVD, and, in the usual language of the time, charged with belonging to ‘an underground right-Trotskyist counter-revolutionary organisation’. Gorbachev recalled later that his grandfather was jailed ‘and interrogated for fourteen months . . . he confessed to things he had not done, and so on. Thank God he survived.’ But home in Privolnoye had ‘become a plague house’ which nobody dared to visit for fear of being associated with an ‘enemy of the people . . . even the neighbours’ kids refused to have anything to do with me. This is something that remained with me for the rest of my life.’ Gopkolo was released and around the time the Germans invaded Russia in 1941 he was rehabilitated. He served for nearly two further decades as chairman of the local collective farm. He insisted until the end of his days that ‘Stalin had no idea what the NKVD is doing’. Gorbachev kept quiet until the 1990s about these skeletons in the family cupboard, as did so many ambitious people of his generation who had similar backgrounds. It would have done no good to his impeccable Party record. Gorbachev’s father was drafted into the army at the start of the war on the eastern front. Gorbachev was only ten and he did not see his father again for more than five years. The nearest big town, Stavropol, was occupied by the Germans, but only for five months. Privolnoye was spared the destruction and barbarity visited on so much of Russia during the Great Patriotic War.

  He harboured ambitions at an early age. It was at his own insistence that, aged less than fourteen, he went from the small village school to the bigger secondary school in Krasnogvardeiskoye (Red Guard Town) ten miles away. He walked there each Monday morning, stayed during the week with an elderly couple from whom he rented a room, and walked back on Friday afternoon. At the weekends he worked in the fields with his mother. He shone at school academically, and, as important for his future, politically. The Party spotted his talent and clutched him in an embrace. The Party made him - and he was a true believer, even after the Soviet Communist Party ceased to exist. His main pastime outside school and political work was the stage. He loved acting and was good at it. For a fleeting moment, he thought of a
theatrical career. His schoolfriends remember that from a young age he was a natural leader and was highly popular. They recall also that he was remarkably self-assured and confident. Even from adolescence he had a manner that told others he always knew he was right. ‘I remember him correcting teachers in history class,’ his sweetheart at secondary school, Yulia Karagodina, said. ‘Once he was so angry at one teacher he said “Do you want to keep your teaching certificate?” He was the sort who felt he was right and could prove it to anyone.’ How his teachers liked this priggish and pompous part of him we do not know. But, with the support of the Party, he was sent from a tiny, second-rate provincial school to Moscow State University, by far the most select in the country, to study law.

  His dissertation for entry to the university was on the subject ‘Stalin is our battle glory, Stalin is the Flight of our youth’. In school holidays he worked on the land and in the summer before he started university he performed two months of arduous back-breaking work in the fields bringing in the harvest, for which he was given an important state honour, the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. But he was not a star when in 1950 he arrived in Moscow. At first he was treated like a country bumpkin. Most of the students were children of the Soviet nomenklatura, more sophisticated and better-connected than he. He worked hard on smoothing out his rougher edges. He was one of the most active members of the Communist Youth organisation, the Komsomol, where his political views, according to his best friend at university, the Czech foreign exchange student Zdenek Mlynár, were strictly orthodox - ‘He was a straight Stalinist, like everyone else at the time.’