Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  It was a next-to-useless statement that raised far more questions than it answered. Predictably, as the world’s media was getting so little officially from Moscow, and no Western journalists were allowed anywhere near the disaster site, some stories were becoming increasingly lurid. Reports told of thousands of deaths from the explosion and vast numbers more from radiation poisoning in Ukraine. Some in the Soviet leadership seemed more concerned with the press coverage in the West than the radiation cloud. The KGB chief Viktor Chebrikov thought there was a plot to ‘smear’ the USSR and he proposed to use traditional methods to deal with it. He reported to Gorbachev on Tuesday 30 April, four days after the disaster: ‘Measures are being taken ... to control the behaviour of foreign diplomats and correspondents, limiting their opportunities to collect information about . . . Chernobyl and to break up their efforts to use it for mounting an anti-Soviet campaign in the West.’

  That Tuesday Pravda was allowed to report on the disaster for the first time, but the story was carefully censored and brief. It claimed that ‘eighteen people are in a serious condition’. On the same day a secret report to Kremlin officials said that 1,882 people were treated in hospital and that 204 people (sixty-four of them children) were suffering from high levels of radiation poisoning. The Soviets were losing the propaganda war. The aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster was not Gorbachev’s finest hour. He did not go there to meet and greet victims, or to show that he was in charge. He did not ensure that his policy of openness was followed. Rather, he conspired to keep the truth from the public and the outside world. He did not say anything about it until eighteen days after the accident - and then he gave a lacklustre performance. He spoke of a ‘great misfortune that has befallen us’, but misled the public about the casualty figures and about efforts to control the damage. When he spoke on TV on 18 May the reactor core was still burning and would do so for another three weeks. He did not mention that as he lambasted the West, with old-fashioned Cold War rhetoric, for attempting ‘to defame the Soviet Union . . . with a wanton anti-Soviet campaign . . . and a mountain of lies’. This did not sound like ‘new thinking’.

  Chernobyl had a profound effect on Gorbachev. It was a devastating blow to the public’s trust in him, and to his trust in those who worked for him. It was a tragic reminder of how badly the Soviet system functioned, and spurred him on to try reforming it with renewed vigour. He handled the crisis poorly, but he was determined to learn from it. He had been lied to by complacent officials who were protecting their own backs. Three key managers at Chernobyl were tried and sent to jail for periods of up to ten years for their misjudgements, errors and deceptions on that fatal night: the Director of the plant, Bryukhanov, his deputy, Dyatlov and the chief engineer Nikolai Fomin. But the entire system was to blame, as Gorbachev well knew: the plant had been rushed into service too quickly under pressure to fulfil the Plan; safety regulations had been abandoned; the reactors had a defective design. A concrete and steel containment structure around the reactor, such as American, West European and Japanese plants possessed, would almost certainly have confined the explosion. But Soviet reactors were not built with them. They were too expensive and took too long to construct. Chernobyl was a failure of the Soviet way of doing things. Nevertheless, he needed to blame some more individuals. He was seething against the scientific establishment and the nuclear chieftains who were refusing to accept any of the responsibility, and officials in the Energy and Planning ministries whom he thought incompetent. Nine weeks after the explosion, on Monday 3 July 1986, he summoned a group of about twenty of them for a dressing-down. He did not mince his words:For thirty years you told us that everything was perfectly safe. You assumed we would look up to you as gods. That’s the reason why all this happened, why it ended in disaster. There was nobody controlling the ministries and scientific centres. Everything was kept secret . . . Even decisions about where to build nuclear power stations were not taken by the leadership. The system is plagued by servility, bootlicking, secrecy, favouritism, clannish management. And there are no signs that you have drawn the necessary conclusions. In fact it seems as though you are trying to cover up everything . . . We are going to put an end to all this. We have suffered great losses, and not only economic ones. There have been human victims and there will be more. We have been damaged politically. All our work has suffered. Our science and technology has been compromised by what has happened . . . From now on, what we do will be visible to our people and to the world. We need full information.

  He said the scientists, and the military, would require some independent control and they would have to learn to explain themselves.5

  Chernobyl turned Gorbachev into a far more passionate nuclear disarmer. From now on a constant refrain was how nuclear war would be ‘infinitely worse than a thousand Chernobyls’. He redoubled efforts to reach arms limitations deals with the Americans. ‘Its effect was the single biggest event on the Soviet leadership since the Cuban Missile Crisis,’ one of Gorbachev’s aides said. For the first time the most secret, most sacrosanct, impenetrable part of the Soviet system - its nuclear programme - became the target of criticism.

  It had a deep personal impact on Gorbachev, too. There were officials around Reagan who doubted whether he would push the nuclear button under any circumstances. There were soldiers in the Soviet Union who knew Gorbachev would not, and some of them had contempt for him as a result. Shortly after the Chernobyl disaster Gorbachev was taking part in a simulated war games exercise in the Kremlin bunker. It came to the point when a Soviet response was required to a supposed American attack. As he told one of his officials later, ‘From a central control panel came the signal: missiles are flying towards our country, make a decision. Several minutes passed. Information pours in. I have to give the command for a strike of retaliation. I said “No. I will not press the button even for training purposes.’”6

  EIGHTEEN

  ETHNIC CLEANSING

  Sofia, June 1987

  THEY USED TO COME at the dead of night. Bulgarian armoured vehicles would circle a village, the bright glare of searchlights and the shouts of soldiers would wake peacefully sleeping people from their beds, and then the terror would start. Militiamen, as witnesses recorded later, would burst into every home occupied by ethnic Turks. Guns at the ready, they would thrust a piece of paper in front of the man of the house. It was a form on which he was ordered to write a new Slavic name for himself and the rest of his family to replace the Muslim names they were born with. If the men refused or visibly hesitated they were beaten. In many cases they were made to watch as their wives or daughters were raped. If they still refused - for Islamic names are considered holy - they were taken away to prison camps or simply murdered on the spot. This was all necessary, as the Bulgarian Prime Minister Georgi Atanasov said in private to other Communist Party chiefs in Sofia, ‘in order to finish with the Turkish question, by flame and by sword, once and for all’.1

  Most Bulgarians were not aware there was a ‘Turkish question’. Ethnic Turks comprised about 900,000 people, 10 per cent of Bulgaria’s population, concentrated in two main areas in the north-east and the far south of the country. They were descendants of the Ottomans who had ruled Bulgaria for centuries, though now they were a powerless minority. They had lived at peace with their neighbours for many generations on good agricultural land where they had been industrious and efficient farmers. Though Islamic in some customs, few practised any religion. They were well educated and seemed an integrated part of Bulgarian society. ‘It was hard to tell who was an ethnic Turk and who wasn’t, except by name,’ said Ionni Pojarleff, a physicist who lived in Sofia but for years had a country home in one of the so-called Turkish villages. ‘We were all oppressed together. But then from the mid-1980s the regime went for the Turks - and that changed everything. ’2

  It was a brutal campaign launched by the Bulgarian dictator in a cynical attempt to take the minds of his subjects from the grim and decaying condition of the country. Todor Zh
ivkov had held power since 1954. While he seemed on the surface still to have an iron grip and he was as feared by the people as ever, there were signs in the mid- 1980s that he was starting to ail. Bulgaria, like neighbouring Romania, had never been a democracy. It had gained independence only in the 1870s and was run along the lines of an ancient Eastern-style despotism as much as a Communist one. Zhivkov’s rule was absolute and personal, like that of a pasha or occidental potentate. Though he was not a monster on the scale of Ceauescu, he could be vicious. There were harsh camps in his Balkan gulag, such as the notorious two at Skravena and Belene, where thousands of political prisoners had been sent until the mid-1960s. Zhivkov had murdered hundreds of opponents and possessed a loyal secret police force, the Sigmost, as his sharp sword and hefty shield.

  Before he became the supreme leader he was in charge of the Party’s private army, the People’s Militia, and had organised the purges in the late 1940s against ‘deviationists’. He knew how to use brute force. But he never sought to be a living god. He just wanted to stay in power, where he could continue to embezzle money on a grand scale which he could stash away in Switzerland, and tour the country at his leisure staying at the two dozen well-appointed mansions that he had appropriated for his family’s use. A short, squat, pug-faced figure, he could be ‘Uncle Tosho’, with some folksy charm when he chose to display it, who spoke the language of common Bulgarians. But as his long-time Foreign Minister, Petar Mladenov, used to say in private, ‘Zhivkov is morbid, suspicious and maniacally ambitious.’3

  He had emerged as an orthodox Stalinist, but for three decades he tacked and trimmed when that was required. It was when he felt threatened that he played the nationalist card and began the barbaric forced assimilation of the Turks. Earlier, in the 1970s, the regime had compelled Bulgaria’s 100,000 or so Slavic Muslims - known as Pomaks - to change their Islamic names. That had been accompanied by relatively little trouble or overt opposition. Though around 500 Pomaks were jailed for refusing to comply with the law, there had been limited violence. In 1985, Zhivkov banned education in Turkish, closed down Islamic cultural centres and said he was ‘encouraging’ the Turks to change their names. Hundreds of thousands had done so by the middle of 1987 when the campaign was said to be completed. A Zhivkov aide said it had been ‘entirely voluntary because a spontaneous groundswell of pride in Bulgaria swept throughout the country’. Away from the capital, and any publicity, the truth about the assimilation campaign emerged later. The militia had conducted their night raids on hundreds of villages, nearly 1,000 ethnic Turks had been killed and more than 25,000 imprisoned.4

  While Turkish villages were being despoiled, major building works were proceeding apace in another part of rural Bulgaria. Pravets, around 120 kilometres east of Sofia, was being turned into a ‘model village’ of some 4,200 inhabitants. One of the few motorways in the country linked it directly with the capital. Some light industrial plants were established there for the first time. New equipment was provided for the collective farm and for a few private plots where individuals were - exceptionally in Bulgaria - allowed to work on their own land. Many homes were rebuilt, including the once-modest house where Todor Zhivkov was born on 7 September 1911. It was opened as a museum eulogising the heroic role played by the leader in Bulgaria’s struggle for socialism, his sacrifice as a partisan fighter during the war and his inspirational leadership of the country over the decades. Zhivkov, a printer in the state-owned stationery office for most of his early life, had in fact been a minor functionary in the Communist underground in the 1930s, and never took part in any partisan action during the resistance against the Nazis. He became a leading figure in the Communist movement only after the war when he was the much-loathed head of the Sofia police.

  Nationalism was a double-edged sword for the dictators in the satellite regimes. It was hard for a Communist leader who had been placed in his position by the Soviet Union to wield it effectively for long. The public would remain silent from fear, but in private people would ask inconvenient questions about the country’s colonial status as part of the Soviet empire. In Bulgaria’s case there were further complications. Bulgaria had long and close cultural ties with Russia. The Tsars had liberated the Bulgarians from Ottoman rule and the two countries were traditional allies. The languages were similar. They both used the Cyrillic alphabet. Historically they had both been Orthodox in religion. After World War Two, Bulgaria seemed the most slavish of all the satellite states. Its first Communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov, was born Bulgarian but had been exiled for nearly two decades. He was an astute Bolshevik activist who became world-famous after he was accused (wrongly) by the Nazis of starting the Reichstag fire. He lived in the USSR for many years as the feared head of the Comintern. He was a Soviet citizen when Stalin sent him back to Sofia to turn Bulgaria into a Communist state along Soviet lines.

  After Dimitrov died in 1949 a vicious power struggle ensued in Sofia. Zhivkov was selected, with Moscow’s backing, as the Bulgarian leader in 1955. When Zhivkov took power he outdid any of the other socialist leaders in obsequious greasing to whomever held power in the Kremlin. The joke often went around Sofia that when Khrushchev (later it was attributed to Brezhnev) met Zhivkov he asked, ‘Todor, do you smoke?’. The reply came quick as a flash: ‘Why, should I?’ It was no joke when in 1972 Zhivkov approached Brezhnev and requested that Bulgaria should be allowed to join the Soviet Union as the sixteenth republic. Brezhnev wisely turned the idea down.5

  Zhivkov had remained in power for three decades by the straightforward expedient of doing whatever Moscow requested of him. But now his relationship with the Soviet Union was cooling. The main reason, though not the only one, was financial. The Soviets gave the Bulgarians, along with the other COMECON countries, a giant subsidy in the form of cheap oil. Bulgaria immediately turned round and sold it to the West at world market prices and pocketed the difference in hard currency. When the Soviets found out about the scam they were furious. The Bulgarians, like most of the other satellite states, were heavily indebted to the West - by more than US$ 10 billion in the mid-1980s. The Bulgarians used their debt levels as an excuse, which infuriated the Soviets further. When oil prices were high and rising, the Bulgarian wheeze was an annoyance. The Soviets were themselves receiving high revenues. But after oil prices started to collapse in the mid-1980s the Soviet Union lost almost half of its foreign earnings. It began heading towards economic catastrophe and Moscow’s resentment of Bulgaria mounted. Officials in the Kremlin never forgave Zhivkov, least of all Mikhail Gorbachev, who said it was ‘entirely unacceptable that Soviet citizens should make sacrifices this way to help Comrade Zhivkov’.6

  To Gorbachev, the Bulgarian dictator was one of what the Soviet leader’s aides called a ‘gang of four’ hardline men, hangovers from a different era, who refused to move with the times and embrace the ‘new thinking’ that would save communism. The Soviet leader linked him with Honecker, Husák and Ceauescu. He was losing patience with them. Gorbachev was an enigma to Zhivkov, now in his mid-seventies and long corrupted by power and lavish living. Initially Zhivkov did what he had always done and imitated the top man in Moscow. He welcomed perestroika and glasnost. He spoke admiringly of Gorbachev and came up with his own reform plans, grandiloquently called ‘Keynotes of the Conception about the Further Construction of Socialism in Bulgaria’. The proposals went further than the Soviet Union’s, particularly about liberalising trade and introducing private enterprise. But he did not mean any of it. His big mistake was that he did not think Gorbachev believed any of the reform ideas either. He imagined it would be enough simply to make sweeping statements, agree with the Soviet leader whenever he was asked an opinion, but in reality do nothing. When he realised Gorbachev was serious he tried to distance himself from the Soviets. But it was too late.

  Domestically, he was beginning to face the kind of opposition he had never encountered before. It was still muted, but he now had to find new ways of dealing with dissent. Zhivkov had been adept a
t cultivating and flattering the intelligentsia to keep them on his side. Occasionally he would revert to the brutal methods of the past, but on the whole, as the essayist and historian Maria Todorova said, ‘he was successful at corrupting and dividing . . . us while not creating martyrs’. That mixture of bribery and intimidation had worked for a long time. No longer. There was still no samizdat publishing in Bulgaria, but for the first time dissidents ceased their isolation. They began to hold meetings, if not to form even semi-official groups. They did not dare, yet, to talk about dismantling communism, let alone attack the supreme leader. That was too dangerous. But they discussed forming independent trade unions like Solidarity and, particularly, they talked about the environment. A beautiful old border town on the Danube in the north of the country, Ruse, was being destroyed by pollution from Giurgiu, a chemical plant in Romania that was spewing poison into the air. Scores of people from the town and nearby villages were suffering from severe lung disease. The historic monastery at Rila in the south-west of the country, one of Bulgaria’s most important tourist destinations, was threatened by a scheme to dam two tributary rivers of the Danube for a hydroelectricity plant. The Traika plain, near the border with Greece, once had the best agricultural land in Bulgaria. For the last decade it was being polluted by a ferrous metal plant. Bulgarian cities were clogged with air pollution seventeen times the European average. Protest was beginning to grow under a loose organisation calling itself Ecoglasnost.7