Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  Gorbachev preferred visits to the more glamorous capitals of the West, where he quickly became a political superstar. Invariably he was greeted by tremendous cheering crowds of people keen to catch a glimpse of a Russian leader who could smile, talk without reading from prepared notes, and looked distinctly like a human being. There was a good political reason for turning his attention to the West. He needed to lower international tension, so that he could cut military spending and then address the pressing issues at home. But many people who worked closely with him agree that his stunning personal success abroad - the ‘Gorbymania’ that continued for his first years in power - went to his head. No other Soviet leader had cut such a dash or behaved like a Western politician. The press and television in America and Europe treated him like a celebrity. They covered his appearance, his manner and his gestures, if not his speeches, which were often of inordinate length and contained much waffle. For a while the Western press fell in love with his wife. Journalists wrote endlessly about her wardrobe, her make-up, her hairstylist. She adored the attention. He enjoyed meeting world leaders, foreign ambassadors and Western journalists, while he was bored to distraction when he saw Party functionaries from Warsaw or Berlin. He cultivated his image and understood how to manipulate the media in the West. He could be verbose, but he realised the value of a good soundbite. He, or rather his chief spokesman and public relations adviser, the tall, dark-haired, easy-going and witty former Ambassador to Portugal, Gennadí Gerasimov, coined a phrase to describe Gorbachev’s policy regarding the Soviet Union’s satellite states. The Brezhnev Doctrine, he said, was dead. Now the Soviets proceeded on the Sinatra Doctrine. ‘You know the song “My Way”. Well . . . these countries - they can all do it Their Way.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  GORBACHEV’S VIETNAM

  Washington DC, Tuesday 19 April 1988

  AT CIA HEADQUARTERS in Langley, Virginia, there was a group of senior officials known as ‘the Bleeders’. They took the name from Mikhail Gorbachev’s term for the Afghanistan war, which they knew he used often - ‘our bleeding wound’. Their objective was to keep the Soviet forces tied up in the Afghan mountains for as long and expensively as they could. Officially, the Americans declared that they wanted the Soviets to leave Afghanistan. At the Reykjavik summit in autumn 1986, President Reagan had pleaded with his Russian counterpart to withdraw Soviet troops. Dramatically, in Iceland the two said they had come close to a bold and visionary agreement abolishing all nuclear weapons. Reagan’s insistence on pursuing the Star Wars project put paid to that idea, though it has since become clear there were so many other stumbling blocks that no such deal was ever a real option. Still, from then on Gorbachev ceased calling the Americans ‘that gang’ or Reagan ‘a caveman’ and the pair grew to trust each other more.

  Not, however, on Afghanistan. From a trickle, the flow of American arms delivered to the Mujahideen via Pakistan became a flood. ‘It was a war fought with our gold, but their blood,’ the CIA’s officer in charge of dealing with the guerrillas, Frank Anderson, said. From the end of 1986 onwards the holy warriors were sent highly sophisticated, up-to-date equipment, such as Stinger ground-to-air missiles, that changed the nature of the conflict. The Russians could no longer conduct low-level bombing runs on Mujahideen bases or strafe Afghan villages without serious risk of losing planes and pilots. Inside the Company ‘the Bleeders’ had won the argument, enthusiastically supported by CIA Director Casey, and, after he died in May 1987 following a sudden and harrowing illness, by his deputy, Robert Gates. ‘Here’s the beauty of the Afghanistan operation,’ Casey mused shortly before his death. ‘Usually it looks like the big bad Americans are beating up on the natives. Afghanistan is just the reverse. The Russians are beating up on the little guys. We didn’t make it our war. The Mujahideen have all the motive they need. All we have to do is give them help - more and more of it.’1

  They were not aware how desperate the Soviets were to find a way out of the quagmire. But the CIA had always been lamentably ill-informed about Soviet intentions in Afghanistan. Repeatedly in the months leading up to the Soviet invasion the Agency said the Russians would not send in troops. On Monday 17 December 1979 the then CIA Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, confidently told President Carter that although there was movement of Soviet troops close to the border, ‘we do not see this as a crash build-up’ and there was nothing significant to be concerned about. Two days after that the President’s National Intelligence Daily - his brief that supposedly told him everything important about foreign issues - had predicted that ‘the pace of Soviet deployments does not suggest . . . urgent contingency’. Three days later, scores of thousands of Soviet troops crossed the border and began to take control of the country.2

  The agony of Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was long-drawn-out. A new leader in 1985 could have simply pulled out the troops and declared a ‘victory’ for international socialism, or, more honestly, withdrawn the armies, accepted the debacle and blamed it on his predecessors. Gorbachev would have earned widespread plaudits throughout the world if he had done so within weeks or months of taking office. But he lacked the will or the courage. Even his greatest admirers knew he was making a fateful error. Yakovlev, and Gorbachev’s chief foreign policy adviser, Anatoli Chernyaev, continually told him that ending the Afghanistan War should be the top priority. But Gorbachev vacillated and hesitated, unwilling to confront the Kremlin conservatives, the KG B and the military. ‘It was our Vietnam,’ said Chernyaev. ‘But worse. It was a huge weight . . . on his reforms and greatly restricted his freedom of manoeuvre.’3

  Babrak Karmal, whom the Soviets had installed as Afghan leader when they invaded in 1979, was removed in May 1986. He was replaced by Mohammed Najibullah, a handsome and intelligent thirty-nine-year-old doctor from one of the wealthiest aristocratic Pashtun families in Afghanistan, who had been the ruling Party’s ruthless security chief for several years. Though ‘Najib’ was sober most of the time, unlike Karmal, he was as ineffective as his predecessor at attracting support for Kabul’s Communist regime or waging war against the guerrillas.

  Repeatedly, Gorbachev said he had made a definite decision to withdraw the troops. ‘We have been fighting in Afghanistan for six years now,’ he told his Kremlin colleagues on 13 November 1986. ‘If we don’t start changing our approach we’ll be there another twenty or thirty years. We have not learned how to wage war there. We had a clearly defined goal - to get a friendly and neutral regime in Afghanistan. We don’t need socialism there, do we? We must end this process as quickly as we can - to finish everything, pull out the troops in one, maximum two years.’ The last of the old guard who made the decision to invade in the first place, Andrei Gromyko, was still an influential figure among the Moscow power-brokers. He had changed his mind about the war: ‘We underestimated the difficulties when we . . . agreed to give the Afghans military support,’ he said. ‘It is necessary now to actively pursue a political settlement. The people will feel relieved if we go down this route.’

  Now the army accepted that the war was unwinnable. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, head of the armed forces, was a contradictory figure. For years he had revered as his patron the long-serving Defence Minister Ustinov. Akhromeyev was a passionate Communist and invariably in favour of increasing military spending to counter ‘imperialist expansion’. But he held heretical views about the Soviet Union continuing to waste money on propping up regimes in Third World troublespots like Ethiopia, Angola and Nicaragua. A tall but stooping, bespectacled figure, sixty-three years old, he looked more like a Russian intellectual than a soldier. He had played a key role in planning the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, as he had been ordered to do, despite many doubts. Summoned into Gorbachev’s presence, he now said it was not possible to win the war. ‘There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier at one time,’ he said. ‘Nevertheless, most of the territory remains in the hands of the rebels. We control Kabul and the provincial centres. But we
cannot control political authority on the territory that we seize. We have lost the struggle for the Afghan people. Only a minority of the population supports the government.’ Soviet soldiers were not to blame, he insisted. They had fought bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily had little value in such a vast land where the Mujahideen could disappear into the hills, wait for the Soviets to leave, and then return. Winning was an ‘impossible mission. We can maintain the situation as it exists now. But under such conditions the war will continue for a long time.’4

  Despite all his intentions, Gorbachev continued to procrastinate, and raise doubts. No definitive orders were given for Soviet forces to retreat for more than a year after the decisions were made to withdraw. The Kremlin chieftains continued to deliberate. For a superpower to admit defeat is a bitter pill. ‘The situation is not simple. We’re in . . . but how to get out racks one’s brains,’ Gorbachev despaired at one point:We could leave quickly, not thinking about anything else . . . But we can’t act that way. Our friends in India would be concerned . . . and in Africa. They think this would be a blow to the authority of the Soviet Union . . . And they will tell us that imperialism will go on the offensive if we leave Afghanistan. How will we justify ourselves to our people if, soon after we leave, there’s a real slaughter and the establishment of a base hostile to the Soviet Union? The domestic aspect is important too. A million of our soldiers have been in Afghanistan. And all in vain, it turns out . . . They will say: you’ve forgotten about the sacrifices and the authority of the country. It provokes a bitter taste. They will ask: what did those people die for?5

  Talks in Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations to end the war started at the beginning of 1987. They progressed at a snail’s pace. The Soviets wanted to ensure that a government ‘friendly’ to them remained in charge in Kabul. Shevardnadze continually pleaded with the Americans to halt their arms shipments to the Mujahideen, but in vain. The Americans wanted to keep the Soviets fighting so they could extract the highest possible price from the USSR. It is arguable that the US prolonged the war unnecessarily by making it difficult for the Soviets to pull out of a Cold War battleground. ‘American arms supplies only dragged out the war,’ said Alexander Yakovlev, the principal thinker behind perestroika. ‘Gorbachev, Shevardnadze and I were . . . convinced that we did not need Afghanistan and had no business being there. We would have lost the war anyway. We should have learned from the British that Afghanistan is a country that cannot be conquered. But the struggle between the two political systems drove us and the Americans to do stupid things.’6

  The argument of ‘the Bleeders’ was simple: they did not believe that the Soviets were serious about withdrawing. When Shultz reported at a meeting of Reagan’s advisers that Shevardnadze had told him the Russians would definitely pull out - ‘and I believe him’ - the CIA Director Robert Gates was contemptuous. ‘Well I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I don’t see they have any real intention of pulling out.’ He offered Shultz a US $10 bet that the Russians would be staying put in Afghanistan ‘for the foreseeable future’.7 Finally, in April 1988, the Soviets produced a timetable for their departure. They would start removing formations from the 109,000 troops stationed in Afghanistan on 15 May. All the soldiers would be out by 15 February the following year. Gorbachev remained furious that the Americans ‘are not going to help us’. But eventually he saw that there was little reason from Washington’s perspective why they should. ‘We’re going to pull out whatever the Americans do,’ he told his fellow magnates in the Kremlin. ‘It would have been better with an agreement, but the primary concern is that our boys are still dying there. Not to mention the billions it is costing us each year.’ It took him three years to reach a final decision, and it would be nearly another year before the last Soviet soldier was out. But he was insistent that somehow it had to be spun correctly. ‘We must say that our people have not given their lives in vain.’8

  TWENTY-TWO

  OLD MEN’S TALES

  Bonn, Monday 7 September 1987

  IT WAS THE PROUDEST MOMENT of Erich Honecker’s life. At around 11 a.m. his Ilyushin jet touched down at the airport in Bonn after a fifty-five-minute flight from Berlin. He walked down the steps on to the tarmac, shook hands with the dignitaries who greeted him, and inspected the guard of honour. Then the East German national anthem was played, the German Democratic Republic’s flag with its Communist emblem was ceremoniously hoisted, and the usually earnest visage of the GDR’s ruler softened into a broad, satisfied smile. He beamed bonhomie. He was the first East German leader to be received in the Federal Republic and at last his country was getting the international status it most desired. ‘It was his crowning achievement, as he saw it,’ Günter Schabowski, the Berlin Communist Party chief, one of the most powerful oligarchs in the GDR, said. ‘His main concern was that East Germany should be recognised. But the most important thing, more important than recognition by the rest of the world, was recognition by West Germany . . . it was a declaration of East Germany’s right to exist, its unassailability.’

  Honecker remained in the best of humours throughout his five-day tour. Even when Helmut Kohl, an immense man who towered over him, raised the supposedly taboo subject of German reunification in a speech widely broadcast in the East, Honecker kept his cheerful countenance. He said nothing in public about the Berlin Wall, or the borders question, and simply adopted the formula he invariably used when asked: ‘The two systems, socialism and capitalism, are like fire and water.’ In private, he categorically denied that he had issued East German border guards orders to ‘shoot to kill’ people who tried to escape to the West. He smiled as he told Kohl that this ‘simply is not so. We enforce the regulations on the border . . . as you do.’1

  He made an emotional visit to his birthplace in the Saarland, and to the nearby town of Trier, where Karl Marx was born and raised. His hosts were less delighted with the trip. As Dorothee Wilms, the Minister in charge of relations between the two Germanies, said: ‘It was bitter for us . . . Kohl said it was one of the most galling points of his political life. But we had to do it - to achieve further improvements for our fellow Germans.’ The historic tour had nearly not taken place. For many years, despite numerous requests from Honecker, the Soviets would not allow him to go because East/West relations were so poor. Honecker, it appeared, shared at least one discomfort with his people: he could not travel to West Germany. But Gorbachev finally relented, as one of his principal aims was to forge close ties with the West. His new favourite soundbite in Western capitals was to speak of ‘our common European home’.2

  When Honecker returned to Berlin, he might have rested on his laurels and enjoyed his triumph. Instead, he set to work with renewed confidence, convinced that his cause was right and that age had not diminished his abilities physically or mentally. He had always been a fitness fanatic. He had built a gym which he used every day at his mansion in Wandlitz, the suburb twenty-five kilometres north of Berlin reserved entirely for the top two dozen or so Party oligarchs. The leader would not listen to talk of economic or liberal reforms. Quite the reverse. He retreated into Stalinist certainties. He had spent a lifetime subservient to Moscow and the Soviet Communist Party. Now, for the first time in his life, he began to be critical of the Kremlin leadership and he grew contemptuous of Gorbachev. He told confidants: ‘If Gorbachev goes on like this, socialism will be dead in two years.’ Though he was one of the few people who knew the parlous state of the GDR’s economy, he behaved as though the country was the success story of the Soviet bloc. Soon after his West German visit, Honecker was in the Soviet Union and accompanied Gorbachev on a trip to the industrial town of Sverdlovsk (now, as before the 1917 Revolution, Yekaterinburg, where the last Tsar and his family had been executed). He lectured the Russian leader about where the perestroika project was heading: ‘Look, here in the shops people have nothing to buy, not even toilet paper,’ he told Gorbachev. ‘That is the result of the reforms. We don�
��t need them in the GDR.’ He told the East German counter-intelligence chief Markus Wolf clearly, ‘I will never allow here what is happening in the Soviet Union. Never.’3

  There were a few younger voices within the Berlin leadership who favoured some modest measures to liberalise control of the media. Their views were ignored. Honecker and his fellow oligarchs - whose average age at the time was sixty-nine - decided to stamp hard on dissent. Censorship was tightened. One of Honecker’s chief henchmen, Joachim Hermann, was in charge of propaganda, an important role in the People’s Democracies. He had formerly been editor of the main Party organ, Neues Deutschland. He had a phone on his desk linked directly to red telephones by the editors of every newspaper, radio station andTVnewsroom in the country. Hermann’s office would be in touch at least once a day with each of these media. Their instructions would follow a daily meeting between Hermann and Honecker, who would frequently pass the proofs of the first two pages in the main papers such as Neues Deutschland, change layouts he did not like and even crop pictures. It did not appear strange to any of the regime’s functionaries or to the GDR’s journalists that the leader of the country would find time to proof-read the morning newspaper. As Schabowski, himself a one-time ND editor, explained about journalists under ‘actually existing socialism’: ‘Their role was [to be] apologists for the authorities. Their overriding function was not the provision of information, but propaganda and indoctrination. There was much direct falsification of facts, but that was not the case at all times and in all situations. The socialist media’s most devastating effect was the way it . . . ignored reality.’4