Technology, here, was the prompter. Already in 1975 Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, had noted with alarm the rise of new ‘smart’ American weaponry. The ‘smart’ bombs were one aspect, but there was much more. A French historian of philosophy, himself a one-time Communist, Alain Besançon, wrote the best analysis of Soviet Communism (called ‘Anatomy of a Spectre’). It had an ‘A’ system, which was very ‘A’, an illustration that the Revolution was better at the best than the West. That was the Bolshoy, the satellites, the foreign ministry, sophisticated people speaking languages. There was a ‘B’ system, very ‘B’, which produced the consumer goods. There was a surreptitious ‘C’, which was the reality, and in which everyone lied and stole. When Communism collapsed, it was the ‘C’ system which came to the top. Now, in 1980, the ‘A’ system was under challenge. Its missiles were being frustrated in space. But the ‘B’ system was challenged as well, since ordinary people could understand how dismally ‘real existing socialism’ looked after them, in comparison with what happened in the West. Men and (they tended to be more acute in Russia) women in the intelligentsia worried, and wrote memoranda. Other citizens responded differently, and stole or lied with greater sophistication. In modern society revolution is not possible. The alternative is sabotage, and that was what was happening: a permanent
Bummelstreik
, as Stefan Wolle said of East Germany.
Alain Besançon has a passage to illustrate the problem:
Take a statement such as ‘The USSR with an annual output of 145,000,000 tons of steel is the first metallurgical power in the world’. Everyone knows that the USSR produces fewer cars than Spain, that its domestic appliances are not comparable with ours, that the railway network is hardly longer than India’s, that the motorways are far inferior to France’s, and that production of tanks, however ultra-lavish, cannot account for more than one or two million tons of steel. What, therefore, can this figure of 145,000,000 tons mean, given that it is higher than that of Germany’s and Japan’s put together, while they produce about twelve million cars and much else? The conclusion has to be drawn that these 145,000,000 tons include
(1) Production of real steel
(2) Production of low-grade steel
(3) Production of useless steel
(4) Production of steel for rust
(5) Production of pseudo-steel and
(6) Pseudo-production of steel
There were other comparisons, for instance with Spain, and on the official figures these meant something. However, again reality - a mere glance at a Moscow market selling shrivelled potatoes or dubious meat - told a quite different story. The USSR might be compared with, say, India, but even then there were problems. If you saw Soviet advisers returning from such places, their suitcases would be full of tomatoes, bunches of ballpoint pens, hams, jeans. The USSR had in fact less foreign trade than Belgium, fewer cars than Brazil, fewer telephones than Spain. The writer Boris Souvarine had said in 1938 that the very name ‘USSR’ contained four lies. He had gone on:
rights of man, democracy, freedom - all lies. Five Year Plans, statistics, achievements, results: all lies. Assemblies, congresses: pure theatre, staged. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat: a huge imposture. Spontaneity of the masses: meticulous organization. Right, Left: lie upon lie. Stakhanov: liar. Stakhanovism: a lie. Radiant life: lugubrious farce. The New Man: an old ape. Culture: barbarism. The Genius Leader: an obtuse tyrant.
Resistance took various forms. One was a strike by women. They no longer made children, and (as the writer Sonja Margolina said) complained that the system had turned the men into babies, with no pride or responsibility. From 1965 to 1985 the population had risen from 230 million to 275 million, but the average growth rate fell from 1.8 to 0.8 per cent, and there were large regional disparities. The Russian rate fell from 13.1 per cent around 1960 to 5.7 per cent in 1985, the Ukrainian from 9.4 to 4.3 per cent. Estonia and Latvia had the lowest birth rates in the world. However, the Tadzhik rate was much higher - a 50 per cent increase in a decade. Besides, the death rate rose, uniquely among advanced countries. A man died at seventy in 1969, at sixty-two in 1979, and infant deaths were not even recorded if they occurred in the first year. In 1986 a quarter of the district hospitals had septic tanks for sewage disposal, and a fifth had no running water. Yet abortions, given the absence of proper contraception, ran at 7 million cases per annum as against 4.9 million live births. Family size dropped to 3.5 persons in Russia and even less in the Baltic, though it still stood at around 5 in central Asia. Meanwhile, a woman’s lot was not a happy one: three quarters of women were involved in manual labour, including construction, and certain professions, notably schoolteaching, were feminized (75 per cent). It was they, too, who queued, losing twenty-one days per annum even in 1970.
Meanwhile there was another classic sabotage-cum-escape, alcohol, and under Brezhnev alcoholism turned into an epidemic. In 1979, perhaps 18 million people passed through the sobering-up stations (
vytrezviteli
) run by the militia, and a tenth of the population of Leningrad was arrested for drunkenness. In 1980 50,000 people died of it, and if murders are included, 200,000. It accounted for half of the divorces - in the towns of European Russia, half of the marriages - and divorce (at 250 roubles) was quite expensive. All in all, alcohol was said to take 10 per cent of the national income. In the factories business could not really be done after midday, often enough, and the Poles reckoned that there was a ‘morphology of Communism’ in that piggy-eyed, fat and flushed faces showed the results of complicated negotiations between power-wielders, left by their assistants to sort out common problems in false alcoholic concord.
One challenge to this might occur: criticism by educated people behind the scenes. It was here that the kitchen table played its part, and of course the KGB knew very well what was happening, whether because of bugged conversations or because their own families joined in. Andropov was well aware, for instance, that young people were performing the theatre of the absurd - Beckett, Ionesco or Pinter, for instance - at home, and reported as much to (of all things) the Politburo. The immediate answer was to attempt diversions, bogus controversies in journals and the like. There was also a ‘Talmud’ of 400 forbidden subjects such as the statistics of infant mortality (the census was stopped) or grain output. The relative freedom of Khrushchev’s time went. A challenging historian, Alexandr Nekrich, was exiled for telling the truth about the terrible disasters of 1941. P. N. Volobuyev, head of the Academy’s Institute of History, had impressed his Western hosts in the sixties, and was dismissed. There had been a clever historian of the central question of Tsarist Russia, the agrarian one - A. A. Tarnovsky. He had contributed to a multivolume series on Russia’s history that was not bad at all. He was packed off to Siberia as a schoolteacher, and the orthodoxy was maintained by one S. P. Trapeznikov, who recycled Lenin on radiant-tomorrow lines. Tarnovsky is said to have died of drink. Curiously enough the Central Asian historians suffered less, and rehabilitated their nations.
In 1980 Mikhail Gorbachev was elected to the Politburo, by twenty years its youngest member. There had been signs of a rethink in the system, but at the top level it carried on much as before. The Olympic Games were the last old-fashioned piece of triumphalism and by now Brezhnev was only just capable of doing his job. He died in November 1982 and was succeeded by another piece of old furniture, in this case the KGB’s Andropov, who had once crushed Budapest and in the seventies had had charge of persecuting the dissidents, especially Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was sixty-eight, and soon fell badly ill, dying in February 1984. In turn he was succeeded by old Konstantin Chernenko, the protégé of Brezhnev, himself elderly and suffering from emphysema. He died in March 1985, and Gorbachev at last emerged. His supporters were the
institutchiki
, men who made a proper study of ‘capitalism’ in the USA or western Europe, were fluent in the languages and knew the factual background. In the seventies, as part of the détente strategy, new institutes had been set up, for the study of the world economy or international relations in general, and they did not have illusions. Viktor Dakhichev became quite outspoken, as had Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexey Adzhubey before him, to the effect that West Germany could be cultivated: why wreck relations with that economic giant for the sake of useless lumber in Brandenburg and Saxony? Or Yevgeney Primakov, in the Institute of Social Sciences that trained people from the Third World, himself a fluent speaker of Arabic and Persian, who could easily see that the USSR was getting nowhere in a Middle East that found it repulsive and backward. In the Central Committee machine, the International Department, successor of the Comintern, men argued for a new course in foreign affairs. Relations with the European Left had led nowhere: NATO had survived the lengthy campaign against the placing of missiles in Germany. That department had been run for a generation by Boris Ponomarev, and no doubt its support for Gorbachev was part of a campaign to unseat that old man, which in 1985 duly happened. After that, there were new faces: Georgy Arbatov for the USA, or Aleksandr Yakovlev, sidelined in the foreign ministry, both of them fluent in English and flexible in manner; Gennady Gerasimov, Georgy Shakhnazarov and Fyodor Burlatsky had all been modernizers associated with Andropov. It was in its way ‘police liberalism’, which went back to Beria. The KGB knew how far things had gone wrong, and, with a view to shaking up the old men, saw that a degree of public criticism and respect for law would be helpful, quite apart from the good impression to be made abroad. The Party and the KGB had had a host-parasite relationship, even (terms changed) before 1914. Now, the parasite was given responsibility.
Gorbachev himself was not really as revolutionary a figure as these men sometimes claimed. He had climbed the Party ladder from the provinces - Stavropol in the south - as head of personnel in 1963, then, in 1966, as deputy secretary. He did not have foreign languages, but he did have a wife who, as the crack ran, weighed less than himself, and she was educated. His protector, Fyodor Kulakov, regularly met Soviet leaders, such as Suslov and Kosygin, as they came to the Black Sea or the Caucasus on holiday, and that put Gorbachev on their map. In 1978 he went to Moscow as a secretary of department in the Central Committee, with responsibilities of an agricultural nature, but was still quite lucky, in that Kulakov had to take the main responsibility for what went wrong in that domain, and lost his place in 1980 to Gorbachev, who became a full member of the Politburo. It was a meteoric rise. Suslov and later Andropov, for the KGB, bestowed their blessing, and Chernenko even let Gorbachev chair the Politburo in his wheezing absences. Other old men died off - Dmitry Ustinov late in 1984, having run defence for years - or finally just retired, as with the long-term prime minister Nikolay Tikhonov. At any rate, Andropov’s men did emerge in the Politburo by rapid advance, but they, or perhaps their wives, could not compete with Gorbachev. He was sent on a dramatic mission in 1984 to see Margaret Thatcher. The Western Right had recovered, and was prospering; if there was a symbol, it was the re-emergence of England in the first few years of the Thatcher period. She was back on the map again, and was the most obvious place to start if there were a new strategy, of appealing to Washington. That visit was a success. As Margaret Thatcher said, it was not what Gorbachev said: that was wooden language of the old style. It was his eyes. Upon the death of Chernenko, Gorbachev was put forward as general secretary by Gromyko, by now himself aged, who made a remark about his ‘iron teeth’. There was nothing startling about his early pronouncements: ‘we have no need to change our policy. It is correct and truly Leninist. We have to pick up speed and move forward to . . . our radiant future.’ In his first year he applied himself in the usual way to installing his own men, and in March 1986, when the 27th Party Congress elected the secretariat and the Politburo, half of the members were Gorbachev appointments. Other purgings caused the change of fifty-seven senior functionaries and 40 per cent of the Central Committee members - the second-highest turnover since the death of Stalin. The average age fell to sixty, and by June 1987 two thirds of the government had been replaced. By 1988 25,000 militia-men had been sacked, 1,500 with a conviction, and in Uzbekistan there was an almost complete turnover of the Central Committee.
Someone had said in 1956 that Communism would go on until there was an explosion at the head, in Moscow. By 1980 the empire indeed had its problems, and this time round the United States would not co-operate in keeping it going. The curious thing about this period is Reagan’s perception in 1981 that as regards the USSR the ‘last pages are even now being written’. People ostensibly far better educated took a quite different view - for instance, James Schlesinger and Paul Samuelson, quite apart from the vast majority of sovietologists, who still viewed things through the Vietnam prism. NSD(ecision) D(irective) of March 1982 (repeated in 1983) meant to ‘neutralize’ Soviet control of eastern Europe and there was a deliberate attack on the Soviet economy; in January 1983 the ambition was even to change the USSR fundamentally. This was also a return of the CIA, which had become demoralized in the Carter years, its budget and staff (14,000) run down. Now, with William Casey (who had greatly helped Reagan when, in 1980, the money was running short) and Caspar Weinberger (an old friend of Reagan’s who understood technical advances), there was a change: the cautious East Coast men were sidelined; proper studies of Soviet hard-currency flows and the like were made; and the National Security Council contained allies such as William Clark and Richard Pipes and Admiral John Poindexter (who continued until driven out in 1987 by the Iran-Contra affair). This new team was secretive - Casey flew around in a black plane with living quarters - and only two or three people around Reagan were in the picture: even George Shultz, the Secretary of State, learned of the Strategic Defense Initiative only a few hours before its announcement. Reagan himself hardly bothered with the arms-limitation business that takes such a large place in the works of Don Oberdorfer or Strobe Talbott, and dealt directly with Casey, an old hand from 1941-5, his memories going back to Allen Dulles’s time. Reagan was by now somewhat deaf, and complained that Casey’s voice sounded like a scrambler telephone.