In Czechoslovakia objectors to the scheme were suppressed. The moment the Husák regime heard of the formation of any protest groups it closed them down and jailed their leaders. In Hungary, at first, objections were permitted. The Party was careful to burnish its liberal image for Western consumption and did not immediately see that an environmental protest would become a political threat. It allowed objectors to argue publicly in the state-owned press that the scheme would have serious consequences. Várgha formed the Danube Circle in 1984 after he began to write a series of articles about the potential ecological impact of the scheme. He discovered that 150,000 hectares of land would be flooded, including riverbanks, the wetland habitats of 200 species of animals, and prime agricultural fields. The beautiful, medieval town of Visegrád would be destroyed, wonderful scenery would be marred by huge and hideous power plants and the shipping industry along the river would be severely dislocated. At first the Danube Circle remained a small group that received more attention outside than inside Hungary. But when details of the Austrian deal emerged in late 1985, and now three governments seemed determined to press ahead with the scheme despite the protests, support grew fast. Here, at last, was a popular issue that could galvanise Hungarians. ‘This could unite people,’ the dissident activist Miklós Haraszti said. ‘We could say look, these are real concrete issues about the environment, about health, the land. It wasn’t about largely theoretical things like civil rights, human freedoms and so on.’4
Dissident opposition groups in Hungary had been allowed increasing freedom since the mid-1960s, but were tiny and had little influence. They operated in a climate not so much of fear but of officially encouraged amnesia. The Communists ruled, as in Czechoslovakia, on ‘silent memories of a stolen past’, as one of the underground writers put it. For three decades the country had been led by a clever, subtle and masterly political tactician, János Kádár. He was the only East European Communist who merited an ‘ism’ after his name. Kádárism depended on people appearing to forget about the trauma of 1956 and particularly Kádár’s own less than heroic role in those dramatic events. Hungarians had to accept the basic tenets of socialism - even if they did not believe any of them - and they had to accept colonial status with 75,000 Soviet troops stationed in the country. In return Kádár would provide material benefits, peace, stability and as little visible interference from the Russians as he could negotiate from Moscow.
Dissidents were permitted to operate - within carefully circumscribed limits. Intellectuals in the centre of Budapest were allowed to produce samizdat publications and hold meetings. They were watched, of course, by the secret police. But that was not a particularly onerous job. Haraszti estimated that in the mid-1980s there were probably no more than a thousand regular opposition activists in the entire country. The main groups published two magazines, Beszélö (Speaker) and Hirmondó (Messenger), but there were dozens of smaller ones. Every Monday night a ‘samizdat boutique’ was held at the Budapest apartment of the architect László Rajk. The various publications would be laid out on a long table. The ‘customers’, whose names would never be taken, would say which magazine they wanted, and Rajk’s team of ‘copiers’ would produce the texts in time for them to be collected the following week. It was a remarkably efficient system.
Every now and then a writer or activist would be picked up by the police and interrogated, but on the whole the dissidents were left alone as long as they stayed in the capital and talked amongst themselves or within the Communist Party, where a reform wing was starting to grow. If they began stirring up labourers on the land or industrial workers they were stopped. The last political prisoner was Haraszti in 1973, who took a job in a factory for six months and wrote a compelling book, A Worker in a Worker’s State, about the dreadful conditions in Hungarian industry, and its woeful inefficiency. He was jailed for eight months after the book was circulated in samizdat. The social contract between Kádár and his cowed people worked - up to a point. Over time he became a popular and widely admired figure. But the deal was now disintegrating.
János Kádár was still in his mid-seventies a good-looking man, tall, sandy-haired, with an ascetic manner. He was born János Czermanik, illegitimate, on 25 May 1912 in the port town of Fiume, now Rijeka in Croatia. His mother was a Slovak servant girl and his father, a private soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, abandoned them both at his birth. He always remembered his tough childhood. He left school at fourteen and trained as an apprentice toolmaker. He drifted into the Communist Party in his early teens, when it was a banned organisation under the authoritarian rule of Admiral Miklós Horthy. He found a faith he never lost. As an underground Party organiser, he was jailed in 1937 for nearly three years. During the war, he ran the Communist underground, under the pseudonym Kádár (meaning a cooper, or barrel-maker) which he kept for the rest of his life. When the Communists took over Hungary, he rose through the Party ranks as an able apparatchik. The ruler Stalin placed in charge of Hungary, Mátyás Rákosi, ran at that time, in the early 1950s, the most brutal regime in the Soviet imperium. Kádár was always careful to give little away about his opinions. He had a dry sense of humour but was too circumspect to show it often in public. An apparently cheerful man with a frank look, it was during the purge years, when Communists turned on each other, that Kádár displayed the shiftiness and untrustworthiness that lay in his character. He betrayed his best friend, László Rajk, in a macabre and chilling manner.j He was then forced to witness Rajk’s execution in 1949. A couple of years later it was Kádár’s turn to be a victim. Arrested on bogus treason charges, he spent three years in jail.
In 1956 Kádár was initially on the side of the revolution. He became Communist Party boss, but a few days later turned coat. When the Russians dispatched tanks to crush the Uprising with overwhelming force, he was installed as head of the puppet Soviet regime. At first his methods were brutal. Around 300 so-called ‘rebels and counterrevolutionaries’ were executed. Kádár ensured that the political leader of the revolution, his rival Imre Nagy, was hanged - initially against the wishes of Moscow. For years he was the most hated man in Hungary. But over time and in stages he relaxed his iron grip. He declared often from the early 1960s that ‘those who are not against us are with us’, and he tried to gain as much independence as he could from Moscow. He developed the brand of communism that eventually attracted the interest of reformers such as Gorbachev, though the ‘merry barracks’ had the highest suicide rate in Europe. Kádár hardly ever talked about the tragedy of 1956 and his social contract with Hungarians depended entirely on the people keeping their silence too. It was the one big taboo subject for dissidents and Party reformers. Kádár became crustier as he grew older and more forgetful.
As the economic news worsened he tried to row back from the reforms he had inspired and led. He tried to crack down on the Danube Circle, though when he realised how popular the group had become he shied away from a serious confrontation. He declared in private that he had little time for Gorbachev - ‘an upstart’. He was beginning to look like an old-fashioned Stalinist and the young, ambitious Communist Party apparatchiks around him were beginning to say more and more openly that Comrade Kádár had hung around too long.5
FIFTEEN
‘WE CANNOT WIN’
Moscow, January 1986
TWO MONTHS AFTER Mikhail Gorbachev took power he handed one of the cleverest generals on the Soviet high command a highly secret and sensitive task. Anatoli Zaitsev, a tall, lean, dark-haired forty-four-year-old, was ordered to Kabul to produce an honest answer to the question: can the Soviet Union win the Afghanistan War? Zaitsev was a highly skilled military planner and though he had seen some action in the Afghan War, he was not responsible for the debacle the Russians faced on their south-eastern border. Zaitsev returned to Moscow with, essentially, a one-word answer: no. He concluded that the only way the war could end on Soviet terms was hermetically to seal Afghanistan’s borders with Pakistan and Iran, to prevent shipments of arms
to the Mujahideen and keep the guerrillas trapped inside the country. That was impossible without sending hundreds of thousands of additional soldiers into a conflict that had already dragged on for five and a half years and had by now cost the lives of around 7,500 Soviet soldiers.1
Gorbachev had already decided that the war must be ended. The Zaitsev report simply furnished him with an additional argument against the few diehard militarists around the Kremlin who still believed in the mission. ‘The question was not whether to pull out, but how,’ one of Gorbachev’s closest aides, Andrei Grachev, said. ‘It had become obvious (to most of the leadership) that we could not go on paying such a heavy price - in casualties, expenditure and isolation on the international scene.’ Gorbachev frequently fumed to his associates in private ‘This can’t be delayed. We can’t let the Brezhnev /Andropov war become the Gorbachev war.’ Yet he continued to delay. Fearing resistance at home from his conservative critics, he could find no way to secure peace with honour - or without what he saw as humiliation.2
Andropov had realised the Afghan invasion had been a mistake soon after he had so forcefully recommended that it go ahead. During his short tenure at the top in the USSR, he tried to negotiate a deal with the Pakistani President, Zia-ul-Haq. The Soviets would withdraw, he offered, if the Pakistanis ended their support for the Islamic guerrillas - ‘the terrorists of the Mujahideen’ he called them. But as he approached death the talks came to nothing. Now Gorbachev was determined to seek a way out. In mid-October 1985 he summoned the Afghan Communist leader, Babrak Karmal, secretly to Moscow and gave him a stern warning: ‘By next summer, 1986, you will have to figure out how to defend your cause on your own,’ he said. ‘We will help you, but only with arms, no longer with troops.’
The Soviets had become disappointed with Karmal soon after they had installed him as head of the Afghan regime. Gorbachev had been sent numerous KG B reports saying he was weak, capricious and indecisive. Gorbachev often used to say ‘Karmal walks like a pretzel’ - a Russo/Yiddish phrase meaning someone is drunk. Inside Afghanistan, the Communists controlled the capital and the other cities, but even with Soviet armies helping them, large areas of the remote and mountainous land were in the hands of the rebels. Gorbachev now lectured Karmal on how to run a largely Muslim country: ‘If you want to survive you’ll have to broaden the base of the regime. Forget socialism. Make a deal with the truly influential forces in the country, including the Mujahideen commanders. You’ll have to revive Islam, respect traditions, and try to show the people some tangible benefits from the revolution.’3
Two days later Gorbachev met his fellow Kremlin magnates and came straight to the point: ‘It is time to take a decision on Afghanistan,’ he said. ‘With or without Karmal’s consent we take a firm line on the matter of our rapid withdrawal.’ He came well prepared. Gorbachev began reading from a series of emotional letters he had received from mothers of dead and wounded soldiers. ‘They ask: “International duty? in whose name?” Do the Afghan people want it? Is it worth the lives of our boys, who don’t even know why they were sent there. What are they defending?’ Gorbachev got his way. Not a single voice now seemed in favour of Soviet troops remaining in Afghanistan. Yet pulling out became an agonisingly slow process.4
A key ally and friend became Gorbachev’s creative partner in radical changes to the Soviet empire. In July 1985, Andrei Gromyko, for so long the stern face of Soviet diplomacy, was kicked upstairs to the powerless post of President. Gorbachev confounded the entire Soviet political class when he named a successor: Eduard Shevardnadze. It shocked the new Foreign Minister, too, who could scarcely believe what he was being told when Gorbachev ordered him to take the job. ‘But I am not Russian and have absolutely no experience in foreign affairs,’ he said hesitantly. Gorbachev waved all the doubts aside: ‘As to your nationality, it’s true you’re a Georgian, but above all you’re a Soviet man,’ he said. ‘No experience? Perhaps in this case it’s a good thing. Our foreign policy is in need of a fresh approach, it needs courage, dynamism and innovation.’ Gorbachev was not always a great picker of advisers, aides or colleagues to trust. But Shevardnadze was an inspired choice. They had known and liked each other for many years, but, more important, they agreed on the essentials. Neither had been a party to the decision to invade Afghanistan. They had been junior members of the Kremlin leadership at the time and were not informed about it until the day after the troops had arrived in Kabul. At their meeting when Shevardnadze accepted his new post both of them used the same word to describe the war almost simultaneously - ‘criminal’.5
Shevardnadze, like Gorbachev, often used to say war formed him. He was thirteen when the Germans invaded the USSR and one of his brothers was killed in the first days of fighting. One of his other two brothers was almost immediately sent to replace him and stayed on the front for the duration. His father, a teacher, survived Stalin’s Great Purge, but only just. He had been a Menshevik around the time of the 1917 revolution, and joined the Bolsheviks only during the Civil War. He was arrested in 1937, on the usual suspicion of ‘deviationism’, but by chance was recognised amidst the other prisoners by a NKVD officer who had been a pupil, and he was released. Shevardnadze, from Mamati, a remote village about 150 miles west of Tbilisi, used Georgian as his native tongue and always spoke Russian with a strong accent. He became a Party member in 1948 and was a zealot. ‘Communism was my religion,’ he said, and it brought him material rewards. He joined the apparat, and swiftly rose through the ranks in posts involving internal security. As, successively, police chief in Georgia and then Interior Minister, he had close links with the intelligence service - ‘the organs’ as the forces of repression were called. In 1951 he married a petite, beautiful and glamorous young woman, Nanuli Tsargareishvili. During the purges she had seen her father, a general noted for his bravery, arrested in the middle of the night. He was taken away and shot. She recalled how for a long period afterwards she cried herself to sleep. Later she remembered weeping genuine tears when Stalin died, for she too became a committed Communist.6
During the ‘stagnation’ years the Georgian Communist Party was one of the most corrupt in the Union. In 1972 the Party chief in the Republic, Vasily Mzhavanadze, was removed in a well-publicised bribes scandal and Shevardnadze replaced him, with orders to clean up the mess. He was highly respected as a man of integrity and stories abound of how he campaigned hard against the endemic Caucasian diseases of crime and graft. He once called for his colleagues in the Georgian leadership to vote at a Party gathering with their left hands. When they raised their hands he noted how many were wearing fancy and expensive Western watches, which at that time must have been dubiously acquired. Dressed in peasant clothes, he once took off north from Tbilisi and headed towards Moscow in a battered old car whose boot was stuffed full of tomatoes. Rules had recently been introduced in Georgia that no vegetables should be exported from there. As he drove, he counted the number of policemen he bribed when he was stopped, so the story went, and then purged the Georgian police.
He was relatively liberal, but could act in traditional Soviet ways. He had scores of dissidents arrested and jailed during the crackdown on human rights campaigners in the 1970s, including the distinguished scientist and writer Zviad Gamsakhurdia. When required, he could outdo Gorbachev as a crawler to those higher up the chain of command, once praising Brezhnev in a speech for his ‘breadth of vision, humanity, uncompromising class position, loyalty, principles and skill at penetrating into the soul of his interlocutor’. Georgia, he said, ‘would always be loyal to its Russian brother . . . They call Georgia a sunny land. But for us . . . the real sun rises not in the East, but in the North, in Russia, the sun of Leninist ideas.’7
He was promoted to a ministerial job in Moscow in 1976, a couple of years before Gorbachev, but continued in relatively obscure posts. He had met Gorbachev often when they were both regional Party bosses, but they became close family friends as they worked together in Moscow. They were discreet and careful
Party men but it became clear as they talked that they both saw the flaws in the system which, Shevardnadze said, could ‘reduce a person to a cog who could be crushed with impunity’. They agreed on the kind of domestic reforms needed and the only way they could be introduced. ‘Gorbachev said to me there are two roads we can take’, according to Shevardnadze. ‘Either we tighten our belts very tightly and reduce consumption, which the people will no longer tolerate - or we can try to defuse international tension and overcome the disagreements between East and West - and . . . free up the gigantic sums we spend on arms.’ They met privately twice a week for long sessions and at several formal government and Party meetings. For many years it was an exceptionally close bond, unusual in Soviet politics.8
Shevardnadze was a fast learner with an extraordinary memory, his closest aide, Sergei Tarasenko, said. He had to be. Within three weeks of his appointment he had a scheduled meeting in Helsinki with the US Secretary of State, George Shultz - a highly experienced foreign affairs expert - when he made no bones about his ignorance of the details of arms limitations talks and other technicalities. Shultz was impressed by the Georgian’s honesty and candour. In a memo to President Reagan immediately afterwards he wrote: ‘The contrast between him and Gromyko was breathtaking. He could smile, engage, converse. He could persuade and be persuaded.’9
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