Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  Zhivkov was not seriously worried about a few environmental campaigners, though he detested the idea of a free trade union that might stir up the workers. He still held all the levers of power in his hands. He and a few cronies of his own age retreated further into their own world, in Uncle Tosho’s case increasingly fuelled by alcohol. When, in the late 1980s, a French journalist, Sylvie Kaufmann, went to interview him the appointment was fixed for 10 a.m. Zhivkov began by offering his interviewer a brandy. She refused, having just finished breakfast. He drank several. During their talk he was often incoherent. ‘It was embarrassing,’ she said. ‘When he meant to say Gorbachev he would instead say Brezhnev. The translator would try to correct him but he said Brezhnev again anyway.’8

  NINETEEN

  HUMBLED IN RED SQUARE

  Moscow, Thursday 28 May 1987

  ON A WARM SPRING EVENING, almost shirt-sleeve temperature, everything seemed calm, still and normal in Red Square. An amateur artist had set up an easel at one of the traditional positions to capture rays of sunlight on the onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral. A few tourists were milling around the entrance to Lenin’s mausoleum. Others were investigating the windows of the GUM department store to see if anything new or interesting had arrived recently to buy. But, as usual in the Russia of those days, it had not. What was unusual, shortly after six o’clock, was a faint buzzing sound above downtown Moscow and the sight of a small, low-flying, light propeller plane. No private aircraft existed in the Soviet Union, so its presence was a mystery. The white plane disappeared from view for a short while. Then, suddenly, it reappeared on the ground. Its wheels were heard on the cobblestones outside the Spassky Gate leading to the Kremlin and it came to a halt almost in the middle of Red Square.

  The painter thought it was some sort of aeronautical display or sports event, as this was Border Guards Day, a minor national holiday. Some foreign visitors became excited as they imagined it might be Mikhail Gorbachev’s plane. His office was only about 300 metres away. A few security men stood about, looking bemused but doing nothing. The aircraft’s engine switched off, the propeller blades stopped turning and out stepped a slim, intense, dark-haired young man wearing spectacles and a red aviator’s suit. He announced himself as Matthias Rust, a nineteen-year-old bank clerk from Hamburg, who had come to the Soviet capital on a ‘mission of peace’. A friendly crowd gathered around him and he signed autographs, munching bread that well-wishers had thrust into his hands. Looking earnest, he explained that he had brought with him a twenty-two-page plan to abolish all weapons and to end the Cold War. He said he wanted to meet the Soviet leader to discuss it. After about three-quarters of an hour of total confusion he was finally taken away by police.1

  The brave and bizarre adventure of Matthias Rust had begun a fortnight earlier. On 13 May he rented from his flying club outside Hamburg a Cessna 172-B, one of the smallest commercial planes on the market, and headed first across the Baltic to Norway. He stayed there a few days and then flew to Finland. Just after 1 p.m. on 28 May he took off from Helsinki’s Malmi Airport, telling Finnish air traffic control that he was heading for Stockholm. Immediately after his final contact with them he turned east. Helsinki controllers tried to reach him to tell him he was off his course to Sweden, but he had switched off his radio. Soviet military radar spotted him at 14.29 as soon as he crossed into their air space on the Finland/Estonia border, flying at around 1,800 feet. They assigned his plane a ‘contact’ number - 8255 - used by suspected enemy planes. But then a series of confusing accidents, mistakes and misjudgements led to one of the most humiliating embarrassments for the Soviet military since World War Two.2

  A MiG-23 interceptor jet was sent to investigate Rust’s plane as soon as it was picked up by Russian air defence. The pilot reported that it was a ‘light sports plane flying just below the clouds’. That did not seem very likely to the air force command, but since the Korean Flight 007 disaster of four years previously Soviet air defences were expressly forbidden from acting aggressively towards any civilian aircraft. As Rust flew further east towards Moscow, two other interceptors were sent to track the plane, but they lost sight of his Cessna amid the low clouds. When radar picked Rust up again, his plane was mistaken for a weather balloon. Then he was ‘lost’ for a second time, and tracked again a quarter of an hour later when senior officers of the national air defence system decided the Cessna was ‘a formation of birds . . . we concluded that it was geese’. For the last crucial twenty minutes before Rust reached Moscow, the capital’s central air defence district was closed down while routine maintenance work was carried out on some radar equipment, so he was not picked up at all.n3 ‘My plan was to land in Red Square,’ he said. ‘But there were too many people there and I thought I’d cause casualties. I had thought about landing in the Kremlin but there wasn’t enough space. I circled Red Square three times looking for somewhere to land. It had to be somewhere very public.’ He finally set down on Vasilevsky Spusk, adjoining the Kremlin walls, and he taxied around 300 metres before coming to a halt. He had flown more than 600 kilometres over Soviet territory and was permitted to land, unchallenged, at the seat of Soviet power.4

  The Soviet leader was not in Moscow when Matthias Rust’s plane landed. Gorbachev was in Berlin at a Warsaw Pact summit, and was already in a bad mood when he heard the embarrassing news. He had just endured several hours in the company of Erich Honecker, Gustáv Husák and other old Stalinist throwbacks of East European socialism who depressed and bored him. The Chief of the Soviet General Staff, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, had not been told anything about the Rust fiasco until the young German was already in an interrogation cell and facing questions from the KGB. Akhromeyev had fought on the Leningrad front during the war and was a highly bemedalled Hero of the Soviet Union. But he was dreading telling Gorbachev of the extraordinary events in Moscow that evening. The leader exploded in fury. All his entourage knew that Gorbachev frequently used colourfully foul language in private. This was an occasion the expletives flowed freely. ‘It’s a national shame . . . as bad as Chernobyl,’ he raged. The old soldier could only agree. Gorbachev told aides that he suspected the military leadership - which disagreed with him on arms control and reducing defence budgets - had deliberately let the plane land in Red Square as a way of embarrassing him politically. He said they would not be allowed to get away with a trick like that. ‘They have disgraced the country . . . humiliated our people. Well, so what, let everybody see where power lies in this country. It lies with the political leadership . . . We will put an end to this hysterical chatter about the military being in opposition to Gorbachev.’5

  He cut short his time in Berlin and returned to Moscow, where the next day he summoned the military top brass for a dressing-down, in front of all the other Kremlin potentates. Gorbachev was brutal. He addressed General Pyotr Lushev, the army commander responsible for Moscow’s defence: ‘This went on for two and a half hours, while the offending plane was in the zone of the Sixth Army . . . was this reported to you?’ Lushev replied: ‘No. I knew when the plane landed in Moscow.’ Gorbachev responded with biting sarcasm: ‘I suppose the traffic cops told you?’ He spoke for more than an hour, accusing the Defence Ministry of ‘complete hopelessness . . . laxness, professional inadequacy’ and senior generals of attempting to sabotage his reforms. Looking at the Defence Minister, Marshal Sergei Sokolov, he said: ‘Under the circumstances, if I were you, I’d resign at once.’ Sokolov, who had commanded the Soviet troops which invaded Afghanistan, stood erect, saluted, and resigned on the spot. He was replaced immediately by General Dmitri Yazov, a congenial and hearty figure with a reputation as a ‘yes man’, who leapfrogged over a number of more senior and apparently better-qualified candidates. Alexander Koldunov, the commander of Soviet air defence, a former World War Two fighter ace, was not allowed to resign or retire. He was summarily dismissed for ‘negligence’. Gorbachev concluded: ‘An event has occurred that surpasses everything that has happened before in terms of its pol
itical consequences . . . We are talking about the people’s loss of faith in the army, for whose sake people have made many sacrifices . . . for a long time. A blow has also been struck against the political leadership of the country, against its authority.’6

  Akhromeyev survived, as did Lushev, but more than 150 officers were removed, some of them court-martialled, for their part in the Rust affair. Most, though, were soldiers who had been identified as opponents of perestroika. Humiliating it may have been but, ever an opportunist, Gorbachev used the incident to crush the military. Within a year, the entire top echelon of the Soviet Defence Ministry, the General Staff, the Warsaw Pact commanders and all the military district commanders had been changed. ‘Even during Stalin’s bloody purge of the Red Army in 1937-8, the percentage of change in top-level posts was not as high,’ one military observer pointed out. Gorbachev became ever more contemptuous of the army chiefs. Often from now on at meetings he would sneer ironically and make comments to anyone around him in a uniform such as: ‘So, Comrade General, whom do we plan to invade today then?’ The military bitterly resented such treatment. In the short term it appeared as though he had scored a victory over them. But they found ways to wound him in return.7

  TWENTY

  THE GANG OF FOUR

  Moscow, June 1987

  THE DICTATORS OF Eastern and Central Europe took a long time to realise they were on their own. Even when they were clearly told that the Russians would no longer defend communism and the Soviet empire in the traditional way, with tanks and troops, they remained in a state of denial. Men like Honecker, Zhivkov and Husák were accustomed to taking orders from Moscow and showing obedience. Ceauescu was more independent-minded, but was trapped in the ideological orthodoxies of the 1950s. They had been permitted a certain limited degree of autonomy. Generally, the bigger the satellite country, the greater freedom of manoeuvre it was allowed. This had increased over the years, but ultimately all the East European leaders had accepted their colonial status and had tried to avoid offending their feudal masters. They had no legitimacy in their own countries, a fact they had always well understood. They had been placed in power by Soviet force, against the wishes of their people, and could continue in their positions only with the support of the USSR. They served at the Kremlin’s pleasure.

  But now the mood in Moscow was changing. When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power and warned the satellite leaders that they must ‘assume greater responsibility’ for their own countries, they did not at first take him seriously. They saw it as a ritual declaration, which the new man in charge was making for form’s sake. Over the decades, other Soviet leaders had said similar things but then, soon, the orders from above would follow, and the daily interference on a whole range of matters, great and small. Now the number of instructions from the Soviets had declined to a trickle and the whole mechanism of empire was breaking down. Soviet advisers, who had wielded enormous power and influence in every government department and Party secretariat from Berlin to Sofia, were ordered by Moscow to stay on the sidelines. Their advice tended to be ‘Well, comrades . . . you can do what you think best’. It confused and unnerved the dependent Gang of Four to be on such unfamiliar terrain.

  Gorbachev had little experience of Eastern Europe when he assumed supreme power. He had travelled around the satellite countries on short visits when he was in charge of Soviet agriculture, but had not thought in any depth about the relationship between the USSR and its European colonies. One of his best friends from Moscow University days was the Czech ‘reform Communist’ Zdenk Mlynár, a leading figure in the Prague Spring. But he had been purged after the Soviet invasion in 1968 and exiled himself to Vienna. Years later Gorbachev said that the Soviet Union’s ‘biggest mistake was when we did what we did in 1968 against the democratic reforms in Prague . . . if all these countries had, then, embarked on roads to reform their societies, it would have led to different results’. There is little evidence that he thought so at the time. Certainly he did not utter such heretical opinions within Party circles when he was climbing the greasy pole towards leadership. When he took charge in the Kremlin, he regarded the Soviets’ imperial possessions as stable. Poland was traditionally difficult to control but General Jaruzelski had, it appeared, imposed peace and order there. Romania went its own way, but was fundamentally loyal. ‘Elsewhere the tranquillity suggested that at least in the near future there would be no surprises,’ Gorbachev’s aide, Andrei Grachev, said. ‘Having received the formal expressions of fealty [from the satellite leaders], Gorbachev ceased to think about Eastern Europe.’1

  After about a year and a half, he began to consider the matter anew, heavily influenced by Shevardnadze and Yakovlev, who firmly believed the Soviets should relax their grip yet further in the ‘outer empire’. Gorbachev was now convinced that the satellite states were a burden on the Soviet Union that the country could no longer afford to carry. ‘In order to buy loyalty and political reliability - and guarantee minimum internal stability - the Soviet Union was subsidising a standard of living in the East European countries largely superior to that of the majority of the Soviet population,’ Grachev said. The costs had risen. Each time there was a political crisis in one of the satellites, it had to be smoothed over afterwards with extra cash. Gorbachev was told that it was costing about US$ 10 billion a year in security to keep the East European countries ‘stable’. Some economists advised him that the drain on the Soviet economy from additional financial subsidies was a further US$ 30 billion above that. He was shocked when he was presented with these figures and became determined that from henceforth the ‘socialist brothers’ would pay their way. In November 1986 he summoned the rulers of the satellite countries to Moscow for a summit that convulsed the socialist world.2

  He announced a revolution in the rules of exchange between the colonies and Moscow that had lasted since Stalin’s time. The system had depended on a flow of raw materials from the Soviet Union to the satellites, in return for manufactured goods moving in the other direction. Now Gorbachev declared that ‘trade must be built on a mutually beneficial basis and under real market conditions’. He meant that they would have to pay world prices for their imports - and the Soviet Union would have more choice about whether or not to buy the low-quality manufactured goods that were produced in Poznan, Leipzig or Bratislava. He made it entirely clear, too, that there was no way the USSR would guarantee the loans from Western banks that the East Europeans had racked up over the past years. Not all of his listeners immediately grasped the enormity of the implications. Overnight, the Soviets had transformed the socialist empire - or ‘killed it’, as an East German official at the talks recognised. ‘It was the economic equivalent of withdrawing Soviet troops from Eastern Europe,’ said one of the other apparatchiks who had heard the announcement.3

  Gradually, the consequences began to sink in and the other leaders were appalled. They could no longer look forward to lives of relative ease, protected by guaranteed credits from Moscow and the flow of cheap oil and gas from the East. At the same time, Gorbachev gave them all a long lecture on the changes he was making in the Soviet Union, on perestroika and glasnost. The Gang of Four looked increasingly uncomfortable as they listened. He imagined that his example would encourage a wave of imitators to appear on the scene in the satellite states. He hoped to see a number of ‘little Gorbachevs’ in Eastern Europe, all pursuing reforms in step with his own, because its elites had become so used to following the Soviet Union. ‘The inertia of paternalism had made itself felt for a long time,’ Gorbachev said. ‘In the socialist countries . . . the traditions of dependency and obedience to the leader, the desire to agree with “big brother” on nearly every step, so as not to call down the wrath of the Kremlin had . . . deep roots.’ Above all, he was convinced that, given the choice, people in the socialist commonwealth would choose to remain in the familiar system, within the Soviet orbit. It was a naïve assumption from a man still so committed to his beliefs that he seemed to forget that communism
had been imposed on the satellites by his predecessors, at the point of bayonets. He did not believe he was taking any major risks by loosening the Soviet grip.4

  Gorbachev ‘despised’ most of the East European leaders, except Jaruzelski whom he liked and Kádár whom he respected, according to Valeri Musatov, deputy head of the Soviet Communist Party’s powerful international department. He had utter contempt for the obsequious Zhivkov and thought Honecker and Husák were tiresome bores. ‘They’re reactionary leftovers, relics from Brezhnev times,’ he often said privately. With slightly more circumspection, he said later: ‘It was not yet senility, but the weariness of leaders who were . . . seventy and who had been at the helm for two or three decades was quite obvious.’ He had a particular loathing for Ceauescu, whom he called ‘the Romanian führer’. Gorbachev said: ‘Anyone could see his delusions of grandeur . . . [Romania] was wholly subordinate to its ruler’s great power ambitions and was coming to look more and more like a horse being whipped and driven by a cruel rider. I have encountered many ambitious people in my life . . . It is hard to imagine a major politician without his share of vanity. In this sense, though, Ceauescu was in a class of his own.’5

  He was unenthusiastic about visits anywhere in the socialist bloc and several of his aides said it was always a troublesome business getting an itinerary together as Gorbachev would drag his heels about agreeing whom he would see and whom he would not. When he did go, he would remain polite, but wanted to make sure that the public wherever he went knew that he was encouraging the leaders to reform. But he did so by tacking and weaving. He did not always make his intentions clear. Touring Czechoslovakia in April 1987, he was careful to avoid saying that the Russian invasion in 1968 had been wrong. That disappointed the dissident underground. But as his entourage was leaving Prague, his spokesman was asked by a Western reporter what Mr Gorbachev thought was the difference between the Prague Spring reforms of Alexander Dubek and the current Soviet ideas of perestroika and glasnost. ‘Nineteen years,’ came the reply. That gave a huge fillip to the opposition and was a blow to the regime.