Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  In 1953, at a ballroom dancing class early in his third year at the university, Gorbachev met Raisa Maximova Titorenko, a petite, pretty, dark-haired philosophy student a year younger than he was. She was a clever, cultivated and chic young woman - as convinced a Marxist and politically active as himself. For the young Gorbachev it was love at first sight, though she told friends later that it took her a little longer. They were married the next year and remained a devoted couple until she died in 1999. Her influence on him, and on the future of the USSR, was to become immense.

  Gorbachev was sent back to his own province at Stavropol, where he was fast-tracked by the Party and destined for high positions. While Raisa taught Marxism at the polytechnic and worked on a PhD thesis on conditions among the peasantry in the collective farms of the Kuban, Gorbachev was rising through the Party ranks at unprecedented speed. One great influence on his career was the ‘secret speech’ in February 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev, who exposed the monstrous crimes of Stalin. It shook the world of Communists such as Gorbachev who, despite their family backgrounds and personal experience, had regarded Stalin as almost a god-like being. Khrushchev attempted to introduce a range of reforms to revive Russia’s already creaking industry and agriculture but encountered so much resistance that he gave up. The couple learned as much from two long holidays in Western Europe during the mid-1960s - the first a 3,000-mile motoring tour around France and the second a Party-sponsored trip to Italy. In the Soviet Union at the time, for a low-to-middle-ranking official and his lecturer wife to be allowed opportunities to travel so freely showed total faith in his loyalty.

  In 1967, aged just thirty-five, Gorbachev was promoted to be Party boss of the Stavropol region - effectively ruler of nearly three million people, with a direct line to the top men in the Kremlin. It was still a thousand miles from ‘the Centre’, as Moscow was always called by Party men, but here Gorbachev was a prince in his own domain. Apart from his youth, vigour and efficiency, he had earned a reputation as an incorruptible official in a bureaucracy that was a byword for sleaze and graft.

  He must have been insufferably bored surrounded by second- and third-rate bureaucrats in the provinces, but life in Stavropol had benefits and opportunities. The area was regularly visited by many of the senior and sickly men from the Kremlin for its curative waters. The most exclusive spas and clinics for top Party officials were in his region - and Gorbachev made it his business to get to know his celebrity visitors. Among his gifts was an ability to charm and impress older and more powerful men. Two frequent visitors to the Stavropol spas became Gorbachev’s chief mentors - Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Suslov. Word of the younger man’s talents, his energy and above all his Partinost (a uniquely Communist word with no precise definition but meaning ‘Party spirit’) spread around Moscow. Gorbachev helped it on its way. He said later that ‘In those years we all licked Brezhnev’s ass, all of us.’

  Sycophancy is a vital ingredient of success in all bureaucracies, but never was it as important as during the latter years of the USSR.There are some grotesque examples of Gorbachev ingratiating himself with his superiors in the Kremlin. In May 1978 he wrote a review of a turgid, almost unreadable book produced by Brezhnev’s ghostwriters. Only those with hearts of stone could fail to snigger: ‘L.I. Brezhnev has revealed a talent for leadership of the Leninist type,’ Gorbachev gushed:His titanic daily work is directed towards strengthening the might of our country, raising the well-being of the workers and strengthening the peace and security of nations . . . in the pages of Comrade Brezhnev’s remarkable book, Little Land, . . . the legendary heroes of the battles of the North Caucasus are portrayed in letters of gold . . . In the number of its pages, Little Land is not very long, but in the depth of its ideological content, in the breadth of the author’s opinions, it has become a great event in public life. It has evoked a warm echo in the hearts of Soviet people . . . Communists and all the workers of Stavropol are boundlessly grateful to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev for this truly Party-spirited literary work . . .

  Both Andropov and Suslov made sure that Brezhnev was shown the article and had an opportunity to meet its author. Less than six months later Gorbachev was summoned to Moscow to take on one of the top jobs in the Kremlin. He was put in charge of Soviet agriculture, following the sudden death of the powerful magnate Fyodor Kulakov, who had also been a patron of Gorbachev. Gorbachev was now at the centre of power in Moscow on the top leadership rung - nearly a decade younger than any of his colleagues. Raisa was eased into a prestigious academic job as a senior philosophy lecturer at her alma mater, Moscow State University.8

  The ambitious men around Gorbachev could all see that he was clever, sharp and able, but nobody knew what he was thinking. As Anatoli Sobchak, who was a rising apparatchik at the same time, said:Gorbachev could tell us much we do not know about how a man feels, doomed to daily renunciation of his own will in favour of that of his superiors, compelled to daily self-abasement for the sake of career. To me the greatest mystery is how Gorbachev managed to retain his individuality, the ability to shape his own opinion and set it against the opinion of others. Evidently it was to preserve his own self that he developed his almost impenetrable mask. He learned to conceal his disdain for those he must have despised, to speak with them in his own language.9

  Andropov groomed his favourite protégé for the top job, though he suspected that Gorbachev would be considered too young to be chosen immediately after him. But he gave him more responsibility and experience and helped to ensure that when the next vacancy occurred, Gorbachev would be the logical choice. In the brief Chernenko interregnum he was doing much of the day-to-day work running the country. But he needed to raise his profile on the domestic and international stage in order to place the seal on his succession, which he felt sure would not be long. He wanted to organise a visible foreign trip that would get him talked about - and would help to answer some of the criticism from Soviet officials who were worried that as the heir apparent in the Kremlin he had little experience of foreign affairs. He wanted to visit Washington. But that was impossible with the chill in Soviet/US relations, so he angled for a visit to America’s closest ally, Britain, in an attempt to charm an ideological enemy every bit as fervent as Ronald Reagan: the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher.

  She was as keen on receiving him as he was to go. ‘We wanted to get an idea of what the next generation of Soviet leaders might be like and this was a great opportunity,’ said Charles Powell, Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser. ‘We did not know for sure at that stage that Gorbachev would certainly be the man, but it was looking like it. The visit was extraordinary. You could tell from the first moment between Thatcher and Gorbachev that they were very interested in each other . . . there was real chemistry between them.’ He was willing to talk - at great length - about any subject and though he did not say anything new or particularly significant about the state of the world, it was the way he said it that counted. Thatcher famously declared, ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together’ and his two-day visit to London in November 1984 marked the beginning of Gorbachev’s seduction of the Western media. He was clearly a novel kind of Soviet politician, personable, amusing, approachable, rather than grim-faced and lugubrious like the figures the West had come to know. Raisa, elegant, stylishly dressed and visibly his consort, was entirely different from the traditional frumpy Kremlin wife usually kept carefully in the background.10

  Gorbachev had a few weeks earlier impressed the French President, François Mitterrand, who was visiting Moscow, for his cleverness and agile mind, but also for his sense of humour and wit, not normally associated with Russian officials. Gorbachev arrived a little late to a meeting at the Kremlin attended by Mitterrand and the French Senator Claude Estier, who was accompanying the French leader. ‘Gorbachev bustled in, sat down at the table and apologised for being late,’ Estier recalled. ‘He said he had been trying to sort out a problem in the Soviet agricultural sector. I asked him when the problem had arisen and he q
uipped in a flash: In 1917.’11

  But the Kremlin potentates had not chosen the new supreme leader for his repartee. They believed he was a Party man and thought that with his relative youth and energy he would defend with vigour the interests of the Soviet empire. That was what he promised to do in his brief acceptance remarks after he was anointed: ‘There is no need to change policy,’ he said. ‘The existing course is the true, the correct and genuinely Leninist one . . . the most important thing is to keep our relations strong with the rest of the great socialist camp.’ His colleagues were prepared for some modest reforms. They were not expecting years of revolutionary change. Mikhail Gorbachev was a Communist through and through. He did not seem then like the man who would do more than anybody else to destroy communism.

  Four days after his accession, Gorbachev presided over his predecessor’s traditionally lavish funeral in Red Square and hosted a magnificent banquet in the vast, marble St George’s Hall in the Kremlin. That was the first glimpse most world leaders had of the new Soviet Tsar. He met some of the more important dignitaries in private, including a session of about an hour and a half with the American Vice President, George Bush, and Secretary of State George Shultz. Often, people who met Gorbachev came away thinking about him whatever they wanted to believe. This was a valuable gift for a politician to possess. A fine example was the contrasting cables President Reagan read the next morning from his emissaries at the Moscow funeral. Shultz was enthusiastic and gushing with hope about the new man in the Kremlin: ‘In Gorbachev we have an entirely different kind of leader in the Soviet Union,’ he wrote. ‘Gorbachev was quick, fresh, engaging and wide-ranging. I came away genuinely impressed with his quality of thought, the intensity and the intellectual energy of this new man on the scene.’ Bush was more cautious. He described Gorbachev as ‘an impressive ideas salesman’ but doubted whether there would be any significant changes in the Soviet Union:He will package the Soviet line better for Western consumption, much more effectively than any of his predecessors. He has a disarming smile, warm eyes and an engaging way of making an unpleasant point . . . and then bouncing back to establish real communication with his interlocutors. He can be very firm. For example, when I raised the human rights question with him . . . he came back with the same rhetorical excesses we have heard before - ‘within your borders you repress human rights’ (referring to African Americans). But along with this he would say the following . . . ‘we’ll be prepared to think it over . . . let’s discuss it’.12

  In the days following his succession, Gorbachev had spoken on the phone to each of the Communist leaders in Eastern Europe. They had all rung Moscow to pledge fealty, as to an overlord. Now, immediately after the funeral, he met them in a group and told them he wanted ‘relations on an equal footing with them . . . [with] more respect for their independence and sovereignty. I told them they should take more responsibility for the situation in their own countries.’ Gorbachev declared that he ‘had the feeling that they were not taking it altogether seriously’. He should not have been surprised. As General Jaruzelski said: ‘Brezhnev used to use very similar words. It didn’t mean very much at the time.’13

  TWELVE

  THE SWORD AND SHIELD

  East Berlin, April 1985

  EVERY TUESDAY AFTERNOON at three o’clock the two most powerful men in East Germany met in an ornate office on the second floor of the Communist Party headquarters in Werderscher Markt, central Berlin. Party boss, Erich Honecker, and his secret police chief, Erich Mielke, talked usually for about an hour and a half in private. There was always just one subject on the agenda: the security of the state, interpreted by these two ageing Bolsheviks as the security of the Party, officially called the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, the SED).

  In the spring of 1985 Honecker approved an ambitious, if Orwellian, plan to start collating computerised files and reports on every citizen in the country - around sixteen and a half million people. The dour Honecker, now seventy-three, had by then already been the supreme leader in East Germany for fourteen years. He was highly enthusiastic about a computerised snooping system. It chimed with his view of East Germany as a go-ahead country, progressive, on the cutting edge of modernity. Mielke, seventy-seven, a squat, bull-necked man seldom without a sneer on his face, was more sceptical. He did not altogether like the idea, conceived by young and keen juniors at the Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit, the Stasi, which he had run almost as a personal fiefdom for more than a quarter of a century. Mielke believed in card indexes and paper files. He said they were preferable to computers, not least when there was a power cut - an important consideration under ‘actually existing socialism’, which was the politically correct way East Germans described the condition of their state.

  Under Mielke the Stasi held a staggering number of files. The sheer volume was barely conceivable. By the late 1980s they took up 125 miles of shelf space, each mile containing seventeen million sheets of paper weighing fifty tons. Every country in the Soviet empire had a secret police force closely linked in a symbiotic partnership with the KGB. None was as thorough or had as high a reputation for well-oiled efficiency as the Stasi. Most East Germans called it by its euphemism, The Firm. ‘Even when it wasn’t watching you or listening to you, we thought it might be,’ recalls Dr Matthias Mueller, who grew up in East Berlin in the 1970s. ‘We imagined it knew everything. That was its mystique, its power and its reach.’1

  It did not know everything. But it knew a lot. The Stasi was one of the single biggest employers in a country where there was no official unemployment and the staffing levels of some enterprises were enormous. In the middle of 1975 the Stasi had 59,478 full-time paid staff. A decade later there were 105,000, not counting the part- time informers of various levels of activity. There were about 15,000 full-timers in the hideous Normannenstrasse headquarters, a group of several heavily fortified buildings in the Lichtenberg district of East Berlin. More than half a million ‘active informers’ were recruited by the Stasi over the years. At the height of the Third Reich it is estimated that there was a Gestapo agent for every 2,000 citizens. In the mid-1980s there was a Stasi officer or regular informer for every sixty-three. The opening-up of East Germany to the West from the 1970s was welcomed by Honecker and his henchmen. Ending the GDR’s isolation was considered a triumph for the supreme leader’s diplomacy. It reduced Honecker’s paranoia on the international stage, the sense that the world did not regard East Germany as a legitimate country. But in many ways it meant that internal surveillance was perceived by the Party as even more important.

  When citizens retreated into their private lives the Stasi pursued them. Those who for whatever reason became the agency’s targets were never alone. The Stasi corrupted their relationships and undermined trust within families. A top-secret directive from the highest levels close to Erich Mielke made clear in stark terms what was expected. Agents, it decreed, ‘should seek the disintegration of opponents by means of systematically discrediting reputations . . . the systematic organisation of professional and social failure to undermine self-confidence . . . the creation of doubts . . . sowing mistrust and mutual suspicion . . . determined exploitation of personal weaknesses’.

  Officers performed tasks that ranged from the banal to the utterly chilling. They seemed to think of everything. Even the smells of individuals were collected. At every police station and Stasi interrogation room in the country the chairs had an extra adhesive layer of foam on the seat. These collected the odours of everyone brought in for questioning. They were preserved in jars and used to assist tracker dogs in pursuit of their quarry. A mere handful of people were captured this way. But nothing was too much effort for state security, which was given four billion Marks a year to spend - not much below 5 per cent of the country’s budget.

  Gone were the days, by the 1980s, when people were locked up for long periods, physically tortured and left to rot in camps. But there was twenty-four-hour surveillance of thousands o
f people. Most of the information painstakingly recorded in every detail in the tonnage of the Stasi’s files was mind-numbingly boring and irrelevant. The writer Lutz Rathenow, who was working on a guidebook of Berlin, was followed for months. His secret service minders rarely got anything more significant than this:Rathenow then crossed the street and ordered a sausage at a stand. The following conversation took place.

  RATHENOW: A sausage, please.

  VENDOR: With or without a roll ?

  RATHENOW: With, please.

  VENDOR: And mustard?

  RATHENOW: Yes, please.

  Further exchanges did not take place.

  The Stasi produced 40,000 pages of reports on Wolf Biermann before he was exiled to West Germany. Most were entirely unhelpful in protecting the state from subversion; Biermann was a notorious womaniser, but he would never say anything of political significance at his home because he knew eavesdropping equipment was placed in every room. ‘W.B. had sexual relations with a woman. Afterwards he asked her if she was hungry . . . she replied that she would like a drink of cognac. She is Eva Hagen. Then it was quiet inside.’2

  Ulrike Poppe was one of a very few political activists in the GDR. She belonged to a peace group and an environmental group that was looking at pollution levels in Berlin. Her husband Gerd was a highly regarded physicist. ‘We had a microphone in our apartment,’ Ms Poppe said. ‘It was not a small device - a big one connected to a cable that led to another apartment two floors below where the receiver must have been. There was a video camera installed in the building opposite us, which was trained on our window. Every private word we said, every dispute about who had to do the dishes, every argument with the children was listened to and noted down. Everyone who entered the house was videotaped.’3