Down with Big Brother (4 page)

Unable to summon up the energy for internal renewal, Soviet leaders sought legitimacy through external expansion. They had become hostages to their own ideology. The dogma of the irreversibility of history meant that no part of the empire—however useless, however costly—could ever be surrendered. In his quest for global influence, Brezhnev had forgotten one of the cardinal lessons of realpolitik, knowing when to stop. In the words of Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, “You have to understand that there are limits to everything. Otherwise, you can choke.”
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T
HE CRISIS CONFRONTING
the most powerful men in the Soviet Union had been building for months. In April 1978 a small group of radical intellectuals
and left-wing army officers had seized power in Afghanistan, a mountainous country of fifteen million people on the Soviet Union’s southern border, and proclaimed a socialist regime. Kremlin leaders found out about the coup from a dispatch by Reuters news agency.
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Nevertheless, they began referring to the Afghan leaders as “comrades.” Giddy with success, the ideologists pointed to the Afghan “revolution” as another triumph over the forces of imperialism. “Today, there is no country in the world that isn’t ready for socialism,” declared one apparatchik enthusiastically.
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With its clanlike political structure, almost medieval way of life, and 90 percent illiteracy rate, Afghanistan seemed an unlikely candidate for a workers’ paradise. Within eighteen months of the rising of the red flag over Kabul, the “revolution” was on the verge of falling apart. The mullahs had called for a “holy war” against the godless Communists. Most of the countryside—and some big towns—were already under the control of antigovernment guerrillas. The army was disintegrating. The man who had proclaimed himself the “Great Leader of the April Revolution,” a dreamy Marxist theorist named Mohammad Taraki, had issued numerous appeals for Soviet assistance.

Brezhnev had given Taraki much of what he wanted—tanks, helicopters, military advisers—but had drawn the line at direct Soviet involvement in the Afghan civil war. In early September he had publicly hugged and embraced Taraki at a ceremony in the Kremlin. Soon afterward came news that the Afghan president had been overthrown in a palace coup and arrested on charges of terrorism. When Brezhnev returned to Moscow from East Berlin on October 9, he was greeted by even more distressing news. Taraki was dead. The
Kabul Times
reported laconically that he had been suffering “for some time” from a “serious illness.” In fact, he was murdered on the orders of his successor, Hafizullah Amin. A member of the palace guard later described how he had helped tie the “Great Leader” to a bed with a towel and had then suffocated him with a pillow. The death throes had lasted for fifteen minutes.
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Soviet leaders had grave doubts about the loyalty of the man now described by the Afghan mass media as the “Brave Commander of the Revolution.” According to Soviet intelligence reports, Amin was pursuing sectarian and repressive policies that could trigger a truly popular revolt. In addition, he was suspected of planning diplomatic overtures to Washington. Amin had studied in the United States, and there were rumors that he might have been recruited by the CIA. While there was no hard evidence to support the allegations, Kremlin leaders had paranoid visions of the “imperialists” establishing electronic listening posts along their southern borders,
monitoring everything that moved in Soviet Central Asia.
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By November the KGB residency in Kabul had concluded that the “revolution” could be saved only through Amin’s forcible removal from power. That in turn would require a Soviet military intervention.
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T
HE MEN WHO GATHERED
at Brezhnev’s dacha that cold December day in 1979 all had been born before the Bolsheviks staged their coup d’état in Petrograd. Like the general secretary himself, they were the products of their times. Peasant boys from the vast Russian plain, they owed their careers and positions entirely to the Soviet Communist Party. Their formative years had been marked by war, famine, and revolution. They all had felt what one of them later described as the “merciless … relentless gaze” of a great tyrant, who possessed the power of life and death over 250 million people.
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The seemingly arbitrary disappearance of millions of Soviet citizens—including some of their own relatives and friends—had cleared the way for their own upward progress through the Soviet bureaucracy. Now old men, they were finally experiencing the rewards of a lifetime of unquestioning political obedience.

Apart from Brezhnev himself, there were four men in the room: the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov; the defense minister, Dmitri Ustinov; the foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko; and the general secretary’s closest aide and confidant, Konstantin Chernenko.
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Each of these men owed his place in the Politburo to Brezhnev, and each had a personal interest in perpetuating the rule of a chronic invalid. In return for symbolic tribute, Brezhnev allowed his barons to run their fiefdoms as they pleased and bathe in his reflected glory.

As head of the KGB, the Committee for State Security, Andropov had been the first Politburo member to learn about the deterioration in Brezhnev’s health. The Kremlin doctors reported directly to him. For a long time he had refused to share the information with his colleagues because he feared it could provoke a vicious struggle for power. “For the sake of peace in the country and in the party, for the well-being of the people, we must keep silent. Indeed, we must try to hide these failures of Brezhnev,” he told Chazov. “If a struggle for power begins in conditions of anarchy, at a time when there is no strong leadership, it will lead to the collapse of the economy and the entire system.”
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There was another reason for Andropov’s caution. A premature power struggle could damage his own chances of becoming general secretary. In
Chazov’s view, Andropov was “terrified” of other strong figures in the leadership, such as Aleksei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny. As their power dwindled and his own position grew stronger, Andropov dropped his objections to informing the Politburo about Brezhnev’s state of health.

A tall, ascetic-looking figure with steel-rimmed glasses and brushed-back silver hair, Andropov ran a worldwide network of spies, informers, and agents provocateurs. The successor to Lenin’s Cheka and Stalin’s NKVD, the KGB was an empire within an empire. Known as the “sword and shield” of the Soviet Communist Party, the KGB was responsible for everything from rooting out dissidents and electronic eavesdropping to foreign intelligence gathering and providing protection for the leadership.

For the leader of such a seemingly all-powerful organization, Andropov had a remarkably keen sense of the fragility of Soviet power. His younger associates talked about his “Hungarian complex.”
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As a rising apparatchik in his early forties he had been dispatched as ambassador to Budapest. There he had experienced the seminal event of his career, an armed uprising in 1956 against the Communist regime and its violent suppression by Soviet tanks. From the windows of his embassy he had seen Communists strung up from lampposts. He himself had come under fire, on his way out to the airport to greet a senior Soviet emissary. His wife, Tatyana, had suffered a breakdown, from which she never fully recovered.
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Andropov was stunned by the speed with which the apparently well-entrenched Stalinist regime in Hungary was swept away. It took just a few weeks for the dissatisfaction of a handful of intellectuals and military cadets to build up into a mighty protest movement. The secret police was disbanded in a matter of hours. Supposedly loyal Communist Party members transformed themselves overnight into fanatical anti-Communists.

There was another lesson that Andropov drew from the Hungarian uprising. Military power, ruthlessly applied, can stop a counterrevolution in its tracks. Furthermore, a successful demonstration of overwhelming force would deter future rebellions. As Soviet ambassador to Budapest Andropov had played a key role in crushing the uprising, persuading a former Hungarian prime minister to sign a letter “inviting” Soviet troops into the country.
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Nearly a quarter of a century later he proposed applying the Hungarian scenario to Afghanistan.

Andropov’s closest ally in the Politburo was Marshal Ustinov. Like the KGB chief, Ustinov spoke in the name of a tremendously powerful institution. With more than 180 divisions, and five million men under arms, the armed forces were an awe-inspiring colossus. Without the Red Army there
would have been no Soviet Union. No sacrifice was too great for the institution that had won the civil war for the Bolsheviks, driven out the German invader, and transformed a backward country into a global superpower. The army was both a source of national pride and an instrument for holding together a vast multinational empire. Every year more than a million eighteen-year-old Uzbeks and Russians, Lithuanians and Georgians were thrown into an ethnic melting pot for two years’ compulsory military service. The army had the task of transforming these raw recruits into both good soldiers and good Soviet citizens.

An engineer by profession, Ustinov personified the military-industrial complex. At the age of thirty-three he had been picked by Stalin for a crucial task, supplying the Red Army with the weapons it needed to defeat the Wehrmacht. As people’s commissar for armaments Ustinov had supervised the evacuation of the defense industry from European Russia to Siberia. Within six months of Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941, more than fifteen hundred defense factories had been physically transplanted one thousand miles to the east. The plant and equipment filled some one and a half million railway wagons.
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It was one of the most stupendous organizational feats of World War II and a vital precondition for the Soviet Union’s eventual victory. After the war Ustinov oversaw the construction of delivery systems for the Soviet atomic bomb. In short, he brought the Red Army from the age of cavalry to the age of nuclear weapons.

By the time Ustinov became Soviet defense minister in 1976, Soviet factories were churning out an average of five fighter planes, eight tanks, eight artillery pieces, and one intercontinental ballistic missile every day.
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In Politburo discussions Ustinov routinely demanded greater resources for the military—and usually won the argument. It was clear to everyone in the leadership that military spending was draining the Soviet Union’s economic resources, but no one had the courage to call a halt. Negotiations with the imperialists could be conducted only from a position of strength. As Brezhnev liked to say, “The people will understand us. For peace, it is necessary to pay a price.”
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The defense minister had the qualities of a strong-willed Russian muzhik, or peasant. He was big-hearted and gregarious. With the possible exception of Andropov, he was the hardest-working member of the Politburo, regularly putting in fifteen-hour days when he was well over seventy.
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Like many of the older generation of Soviet leaders, however, he was a Stalinist at heart. He never forgave Khrushchev for defiling the memory of the tyrant with his secret speech to the Twentieth Communist Party Congress
in 1956. By condemning Stalin’s crimes, Khrushchev had dragged Soviet history through the mud and undermined the faith of the people in Communist ideology. “No enemy brought us as many misfortunes as Khrushchev,” Ustinov told the other members of the leadership. “It’s no secret that the Westerners have never liked us. But Khrushchev gave them enough arguments and ammunition to keep them well supplied for many years.”
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The third member of the national security troika was Gromyko. For many people in the West, Gromyko was the physical embodiment of Soviet foreign policy. His dour demeanor—he was known on the diplomatic circuit as Grim Grom—seemed to sum up the Kremlin’s approach to international relations. A talented linguist, the foreign minister had been around for so long that he had practically become a one-man institution. He had run errands for Stalin at Potsdam and Yalta, while the fate of postwar Europe was being decided, and helped draft the founding charter of the United Nations in San Francisco. He had sat next to Khrushchev when he banged his shoe on his desk at the UN General Assembly. He had negotiated with Charles de Gaulle and Zhou Enlai, Henry Kissinger and Ho Chi Minh.

Western newspapers had christened Gromyko Mr. Nyet because of the series of twenty-six vetoes that he delivered in the UN Security Council between 1946 and 1948 as the first Soviet representative to the world body. In the Kremlin, however, he was known as Comrade Yes because of his servility to his superiors.
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A professional diplomat, Gromyko had climbed to the top of the Soviet bureaucracy by dint of loyalty and long service. He had achieved his ambition by becoming a full member of the Politburo in 1973 and would do nothing to jeopardize his privileged position. While Brezhnev’s illness had significantly increased his policy-making responsibilities, Gromyko was reluctant to cross swords with more powerful Politburo figures, such as Ustinov and Andropov. On crucial national security questions, the opinions of the minister of defense and the chairman of the KGB were usually decisive.
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