Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  Bush had never been a favourite of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. He was a moderate, a traditionalist, who did not wear his religion on his sleeve. He was not a romantic, like Reagan, who he said privately had become ‘too sentimental about the Soviets’. He was prosaic and pragmatic. Bush was no hawkish neo-conservative like the ideologues who had surrounded Reagan in his first term, men he described as ‘marginal intellectual thugs’. But he was a conventional man, who believed that nuclear weapons had kept the peace for forty years. He thought that disarmers like Reagan were reckless dreamers who could wreck the global superpower balance. He was sceptical about the agreement signed in Washington DC the previous year which Reagan thought was one of the high points of his presidency. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty was the first time an entire range of nuclear weapons was abolished. In public Bush supported the deal, under which hundreds of European-based, land-launched missiles from both sides were destroyed. But he expressed some doubts in private. He was not convinced that the Soviets were prepared to cede their East European empire and he thought that all their talk of the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’ was mere public relations spin. He was contemptuous of the ‘theatre’ that the Reagan/Gorbachev roadshow, as he put it, had become. One scene he watched on television when Reagan visited Moscow earlier in the year angered him. The President was on a walkabout around Red Square. Gorbachev suddenly picked up a small boy and asked him to ‘shake hands with Grandfather Reagan’. A reporter asked the President if he still thought the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire and he smiled. ‘No, I was talking about another time, another era.’ From that point on Bush deliberately began to sound more sceptical about the Soviet Union and during the election campaign he declared many times ‘that the Cold War is not over’.1

  Bush had known many CIA operatives for years even before he became Director of the Agency under President Ford. He took what the CIA said seriously. Reagan, on the other hand, believed what the Agency said when he wanted to believe it. He had made up his mind that Gorbachev was a man who could be trusted, who genuinely wanted radical changes in the Soviet empire. He thought Gorbachev needed enthusiastic encouragement. His top intelligence agents were giving him different advice. The CIA’s deputy head, Robert Gates, had for many years been one of the Agency’s leading analysts on the Soviet Union. He was extremely dubious about Gorbachev’s motives and prospects and regularly advised Reagan not to make agreements with him. On 24 November 1987, a fortnight before the INF Treaty was signed, he wrote a top-secret memo to Reagan:There is general agreement among the Soviet leaders on the need to modernise their economy - not so much for its own sake or to make Soviet citizens more prosperous, but to strengthen the USSR at home, to further their own personal power and to permit the further consolidation and expansion of Soviet power abroad. There clearly are great changes underway . . . in Soviet diplomacy. Yet it is hard to detect fundamental changes, currently or in prospect, in the way the Soviets govern at home or in their principal objectives abroad . . . The Party certainly will retain its monopoly of power . . . A major purpose of economic modernisation - as in Russia in the days of Peter the Great - remains the further increase in Soviet military power and political influence. Westerners for centuries have hoped repeatedly that Russian economic modernisation and political reform - even revolution signalled an end to despotism and the beginning of Western isation. Repeatedly since 1917 the West has hoped that domestic changes in the USSR would lead to changes in Communist coercive rule at home and aggressiveness abroad. These hopes have been dashed time and again . . .2

  Just two months before the election, in September 1988, the CIA confidently ruled out any substantial changes in the satellite states. In a confidential report on the future of the Warsaw Pact states, presented to Reagan, it said:There is no reason to doubt [Gorbachev’s] willingness to intervene to preserve Communist Party rule and decisive Soviet influence in the region. For Gorbachev, as for his predecessors, the importance of Eastern Europe can hardly be exaggerated. It serves as a buffer zone, military and ideological, between the USSR and the West, a base for projecting Soviet power and influence throughout Europe and a conduit for Western trade and technology. It is a key external pillar of the Soviet system itself . . . There is no reason to doubt ultimate Soviet willingness to employ armed force to maintain Party rule and preserve the Soviet position in the region . . . Gorbachev’s vision of a ‘Common European Home’ of growing intra European co-operation implies a degree of national autonomy far beyond what he or any other Soviet leader would countenance . . . Moscow would find it increasingly difficult to promote this line in the West without introducing new divisions in Eastern Europe as well. The Berlin Wall will stay . . .3

  Reagan dismissed most of the CIA’s scepticism. As an old Cold Warrior he understood whence it came. Gates said later that there could have been only one explanation for ‘the Gipper’ to ignore the CIA’s advice: he was beginning to go senile. ‘As his second term wore on we would hear [his old stories] told over and over again with no point at all,’ Gates said. ‘I thought he was still on top of the issues, at least the important ones, but a quality I believed was . . . magical was waning day by day.’ Talking to him by 1987, said Gates, ‘I had the sense that he could not have recalled my name five minutes later.’4

  Bush appointed equally moderate and pragmatic people to senior posts in his administration. His Secretary of State was a close friend from Texas and Republican politics, the subtle and sharp-witted scion of an old-established Houston law firm, James Baker III. He was a fair-haired, loose-limbed fifty-eight-year-old who had served as Reagan’s Chief of Staff in the first term and Treasury Secretary in the second, before he ran Bush’s presidential campaign. In the previous administration he earned a reputation in Washington as a tough negotiator and consummate deal-maker. His first words of advice to the new President Bush were ‘to avoid rashness . . . The biggest mistakes, particularly at the beginning of an administration, were frequently those of commission, not omission.’ The new National Security Advisor, General Brent Scowcroft, had been an air force commander and Henry Kissinger’s deputy on the National Security Council in the Nixon presidency. He was a far more hawkish figure who advised Bush to be careful before he invested any further in Mikhail Gorbachev. ‘When the leaders in the Kremlin selected Gorbachev . . . clearly they did not think they were selecting someone who would overturn the system, but one who would get it back on track,’ he said. ‘The character of the chief sponsors of his rise through the ranks seemed to confirm their choice. Were they all wrong? . . . I didn’t think so.’5

  In contrast and for balance he listened to other voices who were more enthusiastic about doing business with the Soviets. Jack Matlock was Ambassador to Moscow and a brilliant young academic from Stanford, Condoleezza Rice, was appointed, aged just thirty-four, as his NSC adviser on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TRIUMPH IN MANHATTAN

  New York City, Wednesday 7 December 1988

  IN TIMES SQUARE the lights blazed the message WELCOME COMRADE GENERAL SECRETARY GORBACHEV. Below the words, in garish red, flashed the hammer and sickle emblem. Throughout Manhattan, the Mecca of world capitalism, the streets were lined with New Yorkers waving the flag of the Soviet Union waiting to catch a glimpse of the forty-seven-car motorcade accompanying the world’s most prominent Communist. Thousands of people were chanting ‘Gorby, Gorby’. Hundreds of placards were visible through the crowds reading ‘Blessed is the Peacemaker’. On Wall Street, optimism was expressed in the traditional way. The markets experienced a surge. Inside his Zil limousine Gorbachev, as he confessed, was feeling mixed emotions. Part of him was exhilarated. He was too intelligent to miss the irony of the ecstatic greeting he had received in the US. Yet he revelled in the cheering crowds and on this occasion he was convinced that he deserved their adulation. He had that morning achieved one of his greatest triumphs.

  In a dramatic speech to the United Nations, he ab
andoned much of the ideology that had defined the Soviet Union over the past seven decades. The concept of ‘class struggle’ - the basis of Marxist understanding of history - was dead, the Soviet leader announced, now replaced by ‘universal human values’. These would include the civil rights and individual freedoms which he admitted had sometimes been denied by Moscow. The Cold War that had consumed the energies of the superpowers for forty years was over: ‘We are witnessing the emergence of a new historic reality - a turning away from super-armaments to the principle of reasonable defence sufficiency.’ He renounced the use of force to settle international problems. He talked of general principles, and then he announced the nitty-gritty. As a token of Soviet sincerity, he said, the Red Army would unilaterally be reduced by half a million men. He announced that 50,000 troops and 5,000 tanks would soon be taken out of the Soviet armies stationed in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. He said that the people of Eastern Europe would be allowed to choose their own destiny. ‘Everyone must have the freedom to choose. There must be no exceptions. ’ He spoke for just over an hour - brief by his standards - but it had been an exceptional performance. For a few seconds there was silence. Then, slowly, his audience of presidents, prime ministers and ambassadors rose to applaud in a standing ovation. Long-serving UN hands said they had never seen such an emotional reception given at the General Assembly to anybody.1

  Gorbachev could not bask in the glory for long. While he was being driven from the UN building on the East River to a lunch on Governors Island with President Reagan and President Elect Bush, he received an urgent phone call from the Kremlin. The Russian Prime Minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, told him of a devastating earthquake that had struck Armenia a short while earlier that morning measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale. Details were still sketchy, Ryzhkov said, but many thousands had almost certainly died. At first Gorbachev stuck to his itinerary. When he met Reagan a few minutes later, the President offered American aid for Armenia. Gorbachev thought for a moment and then, in a historic about-face for a Soviet leader, accepted with gratitude. It was the first time since Hitler invaded the USSR that the Russians had sought foreign help. Gorbachev had intended to stay in the US for another day and then go to London for a visit that would include talks with Margaret Thatcher, with whom he had built up a close, if argumentative, relationship. But throughout the day he was being updated with further grim news about the devastation in Armenia. Early that evening he decided to cut short his tour and return to the Soviet Union. He flew straight from the bright lights and the applause of New York to the human misery of Leninakan and Spitak, the two Armenian towns almost entirely destroyed by the earthquake. ‘In my entire life I’ve never seen one thousandth of the suffering I’ve seen here,’ he said, soon after he arrived and witnessed the devastation.2

  The relief effort was a tragic fiasco. It showed the Soviet Union to be a Third World state rather than a true superpower - ‘Upper Volta with nukes’, as the former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt pithily described it. A mixture of incompetence, corruption and poverty led to needless loss of life and misery. Troops reached the spot fairly quickly, but with so little heavy equipment which could lift rubble there was a limited amount they could do. They patrolled the hills, weapons at the ready, as though they were expecting an invasion instead of reacting to a natural disaster. Some tents arrived for survivors, but nowhere near enough for the half a million or so made homeless by the earthquake. There was not enough transport to reach the rural areas badly affected in a cold winter. Few doctors and nurses were sent to the scene for several days, and pitiful quantities of medicines. The civil defence authorities were simply unable to cope. It quickly became clear why the scale of the disaster was so enormous. Virtually none of the buildings in the stricken towns were able to withstand even a modest earthquake. It turned out that the steel rods that should have been used to reinforce the concrete had been stolen and sold on the black market. Government and Party officials knew, but allowed apartment blocks, hospitals and schools to be built anyway, aware of how flimsy they could be in an area of the Caucasus well known as a potential earthquake risk. Most of the 25,000 people who died were buried under rubble. It was, as a Kremlin official observed later, ‘a very Soviet disaster’.3

  Even the radical decision to accept outside aid backfired. Gorbachev and the Kremlin leaders might have been keen to see British, American, West German and French assistance. But the bureaucrats in remote Armenia did not know how to deal with these foreigners, who included Vice President Bush’s younger son Jeb, speedily dispatched on a goodwill mission from the US. Aid workers encountered endless red tape before they could enter the afflicted area. One aspect of Gorbachev’s reforms was working, though: glasnost. The quake was covered as no domestic disaster had been before by Soviet television and newspapers. On prime-time TV Ryzhkov, co-ordinating relief work, was shown berating Soviet Foreign Ministry officials for not giving foreign volunteers enough help. ‘Some of the foreign groups are leaving now with heavy hearts,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘Not because of what they have seen, but because of the treatment they received here.’ Aid worth millions of dollars sent from abroad - and from Moscow - never got further than the airport in the Armenian capital, Yerevan. There, much of it was stolen and found its way to the black market.

  While Gorbachev was enjoying celebrity status throughout the rest of the world, his popularity was plummeting at home. A New York Times editorial soon after his triumphant UN speech asked readers: ‘Imagine that an alien spaceship approached earth and sent the message “Take me to your leader?” Who would that be? Without doubt Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.’ Yet in the Soviet Union, his appearances now were at best treated with indifference or at worst, as in Armenia following the earthquake, with downright hostility. ‘We promised things would get better, but they were getting worse,’ Yakovlev admitted after the first years of ‘restructuring’. Living standards were falling rapidly. The sharp drop in oil prices and in revenues from alcohol was having a devastating effect on the economy. The Soviet Union was much more free, but much more chaotic. Gorbachev found it increasingly hard to carry his reforms through the country, and especially within the Soviet Communist Party. Even some of his enthusiastic supporters saw a weakness in Gorbachev’s style and his ‘project’. It was high on inspiring rhetoric, but low on practical details. ‘Gorbachev never thought through a plan,’ said Anatoli Dobrynin, who liked and greatly admired his boss but was often exasperated by him. ‘You can’t just stand on the Kremlin porch and declare that from tomorrow we are starting a market economy. Gorbachev never had a programme. He jumped from one idea he liked to another. One day he “reforms” one thing and the next day he jumps to something else.’4

  Another great admirer who worked for Gorbachev over many years said his entire method of governing was ‘to bob and weave’. He was unable to chart a clear course and stick with it for any length of time. Often he would declare a radical new policy but then wait too long before implementing it. An obvious example was the withdrawal from Afghanistan. But he was similarly hesitant elsewhere. He failed to start any meaningful economic reforms when he had the chance, according to his aide Anatoli Chernyaev. Then he became engulfed in such economic crisis that it became impractical to try. One reason is that he had little understanding of how a market economy operated. Gorbachev once told the American Secretary of State, James Baker, that it was dangerous to decontrol prices because ‘it will take money out of people’s pockets’. Baker, who had been US Treasury Secretary, replied with a simple free-market argument: precisely the opposite should happen in the long run, he said. Letting prices float to their market level will stimulate production and growth and put more money into people’s pocket. Gorbachev did not seem to grasp the concept.5

  Some of the influential Communist oligarchs who had chosen him began to regret it. Gromyko had done more than anyone else to ease Gorbachev into office. For the past year he had been telling Party officials that he had made a ‘mistak
e’ and called the team around Gorbachev ‘the Martians’ for failing to understand the world most people inhabited and for their ignorance of realpolitik. ‘I wonder how puzzled the US and other Nato countries must be . . . It is a mystery for them why Gorbachev and his friends . . . cannot comprehend how to use pressure for defending state interests.’6

  He overcame a series of bruising encounters with Party traditionalists. A month before Gorbachev’s United States trip, the Party leaders discussed restoring Russian citizenship to the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was living in exile in Massachusetts. The KGB boss, Viktor Chebrikov, was adamantly against the idea. He advised Gorbachev: ‘We must leave in force the decree stripping the citizenship of a traitor to the Motherland.’ Gorbachev replied: ‘Yes, Solzhenitsyn is a staunch and irreconcilable enemy of the regime. But highly principled. And in a law-governed state, we won’t prosecute people for their convictions. As for “treason” there’s really no substance to the charge. And in general, all the procedural norms were violated in this case, there wasn’t even a trial . . . so this proposal won’t do.’ Chebrikov growled: ‘But he did betray . . .’ and left the sentence unfinished. Gorbachev just cleared his throat, expressing annoyance. But it was two years before he signed the decree restoring the writer’s citizenship.7