Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (132 page)

His successor was far worse. Despite Watergate and all his disabilities, Ford nearly got himself, elected in 1976 and would certainly have done so if he had been allowed to pick his Vice-President, Nelson Rockefeller, as running-mate. By this date, as a result of media harassment, the presidency was regarded as an almost impossible assignment. The competition was meagre and the Democratic nomination went to a lacklustre Georgian, Jimmy Carter,
who was sold as a
TV
package by a clever Atlanta advertising executive, Gerald Rafshoon.
⁴⁶
He won the presidency by a tiny margin against the weakest incumbent in history and became a still weaker one. Carter carried on the Nixon-Kissinger policy of
détente
with Soviet Russia long after events had rendered obsolete whatever validity it once possessed and its authors had themselves lost faith in it.
⁴⁷
By the mid-Seventies, the first Strategic Arms Limitation agreement (known as
SALT I
), signed in May 1972, was having an unforeseen impact on American defence policy. It created an arms-control lobby within the Washington bureaucracy, especially in the State Department, which secured the right to examine new weapons programmes at their research and development stage, and seek to veto them if they posed special problems of control which would upset the
SALT ‘I
arrangements.
⁴⁸
Carter’s policies promoted this disturbing development.

Even more damaging was Carter’s ill-considered ‘human rights’ policy, based upon an agreement signed in Helsinki, under which the signatories undertook to seek to end violations of human rights throughout the world. The idea was to force Soviet Russia to liberalize its internal policy. The effect was quite different. Behind the Iron Curtain, the Helsinki Accords were ignored and voluntary groups set up to monitor observance were arrested. In the West, America found itself campaigning against some of its oldest allies. Again, a human rights lobby grew up within the Administration, including an entire bureau of the State Department, which worked actively against American interests. In September 1977 Brazil reacted to State Department criticisms by cancelling all its four remaining defence agreements with the US, two of which went back to 1942. Argentina was similarly estranged. The State Department played a significant role in the overthrow of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. An Assistant Secretary, Viron Vaky, announced on behalf of the US government: ‘No negotiation, mediation or compromise can be achieved any longer with a Somoza government. The solution can only begin with a sharp break from the past.’
⁴⁹
The ‘sharp break’ took the form, in 1979, of the replacement of Somoza, a faithful if distasteful ally of the West, by a Marxist regime whose attitude to human rights was equally contemptuous and which immediately campaigned against American allies in Guatemala, El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America. Again, in 1978, the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights actively undermined the Shah’s regime in Iran, playing a significant part in its destruction in 1979 and replacement by a violently anti-Western terrorist regime.
⁵⁰
American human rights policy, however worthwhile in theory, was naïve in practice.

Policy under Carter was so confused, however, as to lack salient characteristics, other than a propensity to damage friends and allies. The internal battles under Ford were as nothing to the triangular tug of war under Carter between his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, his Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and his Georgian assistant, Hamilton Jordan, much of which was conducted in public – leaving aside the freelance activities of Carter’s boozy brother, Billy, who acted as a paid lobbyist for the anti-American Libyan government. The only point on which Carter’s men seemed agreed was America’s inability to control events. Cyrus Vance thought that to ‘oppose Soviet or Cuban involvement in Africa would be futile’. ‘The fact is’, he added, ‘that we can no more stop change than Canute could still the waters.’ Brzezinski insisted ‘the world is changing under the influences of forces no government can control’. Carter himself said America’s power to influence events was ‘very limited’. Feeling itself impotent, the Administration took refuge in cloudy metaphor, for which Brzezinski had a talent. Vietnam had been ‘the Waterloo of the
WASP éLITE
‘: no such intervention could ever again be undertaken by America. ‘There are many different axes of conflict in the world,’ he noted; ‘the more they intersect, the more dangerous they become.’ West Asia was ‘the arc of crisis’. But: ‘the need is not for acrobatics but for architecture.’
⁵¹
No foreign policy architecture in fact appeared, however. When the Iranian terrorist government seized the American Embassy staff as hostages, acrobatics were eventually resorted to, ending in a charred heap of burnt-out American helicopters in the desert in May 1980, perhaps the lowest point of America’s fortunes in this century.

America’s decline in the Seventies seemed even more precipitous in contrast with the apparent solidity and self-confidence of the Soviet regime. In 1971 Soviet Russia passed America in numbers of strategic land-based and submarine-launched nuclear missiles. The same year Andrei Gromyko boasted that, all over the world, ‘No question of any significance …can now be decided without the Soviet Union or in opposition to it.’
⁵²
He himself was a symbol both of internal stability and the external consistency of Soviet policy, since he had been Deputy Foreign Minister as long ago as 1946 and, since 1957, Foreign Minister, a post he was to hold well into the Eighties.

Not that the internal history of post-Stalin Russia was uneventful. Beria, Stalin’s last secret police boss, did not long survive his master: he knew too much about everybody at the top. His colleagues drew up an indictment which, according to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, took three hours to read, and half of which was devoted to his sexual antics – epitomized by the poet Yevtushenko in his memoirs: ‘I saw
the vulture face of Beria, half hidden by a muffler, glued to the window of his limousine as he drove slowly by the kerb hunting down a woman for the night.’
⁵³
Beria was arrested on 26 June 1953 and officially shot in December, after trial. But Khrushchev, the Party Secretary, told an Italian Communist in 1956 that he was in fact murdered at the time of his arrest: while reaching for a gun, he was seized by Malenkov, Mikoyan, Marshal Konev and Marshal Moshkalenko and strangled (another Khrushchev version had him shot).
⁵⁴
In 1955 Khrushchev ousted Malenkov as leader of the post-Stalin oligarchy. Two years later he confirmed his power by driving from office the ‘Anti-Party Group’ of such old Stalinists as Molotov and Kaganovich, who had made common cause with Malenkov and his successor as premier, Bulganin. According to Khrushchev’s own account, they had a majority against him on the Presidium, but with the help of Marshal Zhukov he airlifted to Moscow his allies on the Central Committee and had the decision reversed. Four months later he turned on Zhukov, whom he accused of harbouring ‘Bonapartist aspirations’ and ‘violating Leninist norms’. Finally in 1958 he dismissed Bulganin and took over his job. Thereafter he was paramount for six years.

There was, however, no ‘de-Stalinization’. The term was never used inside Soviet Russia. All that the post-Stalin changes and Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Session’ speech at the twentieth Party Congress in 1956 involved was the end of mass-terrorism against party members, that is those inside the ruling system.
⁵⁵
The totalitarian structure of the Leninist state, giving an absolute monopoly of power to the party – meaning in practice the tiny élite which controlled it – remained in its entirety, sustained as before by the secret police and the army, itself controlled by an internal structure of party officers. The autocratic plinth endured; and at any moment a ruthless man could build a superstructure of mass terror on it. Khrushchev behaved in many ways like an autocrat, and had to be removed like one. His colleagues disliked his adventurism. They came to see him as a disturbing influence. He tried to introduce more democracy within the party, a non-Leninist notion. His idea of ‘the state of the whole people’, implying the end of party power-monopoly, was throughly anti-Leninist. In some ways Khrushchev, unlike Lenin, was a Marxist: that is, he believed Communism to be attainable. At the twenty-second Party Congress in 1961 he laid down as his programme the outstripping of American living-standards in the 1960s, the beginning of Communism (rent-free housing, free public transport, etc) in the 1970s, and its completion in the 1980s. He might be described as yet another optimist who succumbed to the illusions of the Sixties. His Presidium critics thought that such
promises, which could not conceivably be fulfilled, would merely produce disappointment and anger, as had his Cuban missile venture in 1962 and his ‘virgin lands’ scheme of 1954 to cultivate 100 million untilled acres in Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, which in June 1960 produced the biggest dust-storms in history. While he was on holiday in the Crimea in October 1964, the Presidium voted him out of office and had their decision confirmed by the Central Committee the next day. The plot was designed by the ultra-Leninist chief theoretician of the party, Michael Suslov, and executed by the head of the
KGB
,
Alexander Shelepin, who was waiting at the airport for Khrushchev when he was flown back to Moscow under heavy police guard.
⁵⁶
The object and manner of the
coup
confirmed the organic connection between ‘Leninist norms’ and secret policemanship.

Suslov, who preferred to remain behind the scenes, assisted the new First Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, in his ascent to paramountcy. Brezhnev was designated Secretary-General in 1966, Head of State and Chairman of the Presidium in 1977, and Chairman of the Council of Defence, as well as being made Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1976 and receiving the Lenin Prize for Peace (1972) and Literature (1979). This glittering concentration of offices and honours was the reward conferred by Brezhnev’s elderly peers in the leadership of the party for bringing to the direction of Soviet affairs a new stability, reliability and predictability, based upon an absolute determination to concentrate power in the Communist élite.
⁵⁷
Brezhnev summed up this philosophy of government in the code-phrase ‘trust in cadres’ – that is, a consolidation and perpetuation of a privileged ruling class, a division of the country into rulers and ruled. There must be no argument about where the line was drawn, no question of surrendering the smallest iota of power to a wider franchise than the party leadership. Positions of power, once acquired, were never to
be
relinquished, and the principle applied externally as well as internally. As he himself put it to the liberal Czech Communist Dubček in 1968, ‘Don’t talk to me about “Socialism”. What we have, we hold.’
⁵⁸

Brezhnev’s Russia was a fulfilled rather than an expectant society. It offered more of the same rather than qualitative change. He admitted at the twenty-sixth Party Congress in February 1981 that the 1961 targets were obsolete: there would be no more specific ‘Communist’ goals. He restored Stalinist priority to armaments, which remained the most favoured and by far the most flourishing sector of the economy; in the 1960s and 1970s military spending grew in real terms about 3 per cent a year, meaning that, between the fall of Khrushchev and the mid-1970s, Russia spent on arms, in relation to resources, about twice the rate of America.
⁵⁹
The Soviet economy as a whole grew more slowly. By 1978, according to one calculation,
GNP
was $1,253.6
billion, against $2,107.6 billion for the USA, giving a
per capita
income of $4,800 for Russia, $9,650 for the USA.
⁶⁰
The difficulty about such figures is that income per head means little in a society overwhelmingly dominated by the public sector; and in any case they are based on statistics compiled by the Soviet government for which no independent check is available. As Khrushchev characteristically observed of the officials who run the Soviet Bureau of Statistics, ‘They’re the sort who can melt shit into bullets.’
⁶¹
During the 1960s and 1970s Brezhnev made available for ordinary consumers considerable quantities of low-quality goods. One estimate was that, by the end of the 1970s, the living standard of the Soviet worker was approximately that of the American worker at the beginning of the 1920s.
⁶²
But this comparison was subject to three important qualifications. In Soviet Russia urban housing did not keep pace with the movement to the cities, which had only 19 per cent of the population in 1926 and about 62 per cent fifty years later. As a result, the Russians had the poorest living accommodation of any industrialized nation, with
per capita
floor-space only about 72 square feet (1,200 in America). Secondly, only one Russian in forty-six owned a car (though road deaths were higher than in the USA). Thirdly, the food situation deteriorated under Brezhnev, particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
⁶³

Yet Russia was prosperous enough for Brezhnev’s purposes. He wanted no ‘revolution of rising expectations’. The regime had no other purpose than to perpetuate itself. As Alexander Herzen said of the Tsarist regime: it wields power in order to wield power.’ But the comparison does not do justice to the Tsars, who were often motivated by a genuine desire to raise up their people. In exile in America, Alexander Solzhenitsyn repeatedly and angrily repudiated the notion that the Soviet regime was in any sense whatever a continuation of the Tsarist autocracy.
⁶⁴
Politically and morally the Soviet regime was a totalitarian society of an altogether different kind: more a self-perpetuating conspiracy than a legitimate form of government. Though the Chicago-style gangsterism of Stalin had been replaced by the low-key Mafia of Brezhnev and his associates, the essential criminality remained. The regime rested on a basis not of law but of force. In economic terms it was, perhaps, best defined by the pseudonymous Fedor Zniakov in his
samizdat ‘Memorandum’
circulated in May 1966, as ‘super-monopoly capitalism’, with all significant ownership concentrated in a single centre.
⁶⁵
Brezhnev’s political problem was to ensure that the profits of this super-monopoly were distributed among the ruling class. This could be considered as three-tiered. Of Russia’s 260 millions, about 15 million belonged to the party in 1976. These constituted not the
ruling class itself but potential members of it. By the exercise of industry and subservience a fraction of them graduated to actual membership of the class. Others were eliminated at the rate of 300,000 a year by the refusal of authority to renew their party cards. The true ruling class consisted of 500,000 full-time party and senior government officials (plus their families). They were rewarded by administrative power, made possible by the enormous size of the state machine and the existence of a vast Soviet empire with high-sounding jobs throughout the world – ‘enough pasture for all the sheep’, as Sir Robert Walpole used to put it – and by economic privileges based upon access to a closed distributive system, including food and other consumer goods shops, housing, foreign travel, health-care, resorts and higher education. The Soviet establishment thus became a true ruling class, in the old-fashioned feudal (and Marxist) sense, in that it was distinguished from the rest of society not by comparative wealth alone but by superior, clearly distinguished legal and administrative rights. Under Lenin and Stalin, and still more under Brezhnev, Soviet society became stratified throughout. At the science settlement at Norosibrisk in the 1970s, for instance, housing was allocated as follows. A full Academy member had a villa; a Corresponding member half a villa; a Senior Research Officer an apartment with a three-metre ceiling height; a Junior Research Officer an apartment with 2.25 metre ceiling height and only a communal bathroom.
⁶⁶
The real division, however, came between the top half-million and the rest: they were the true élite, the ‘them’ as opposed to the ‘us’ of the Russian masses. Of this ruling class, 426 exercised actual political power as members of the Central Committee. About 200 held ministerial rank. What they demanded of Brezhnev, and what he gave them, were extensive privileges, safety of life and property, and security of employment. In 1976, for instance, 83.4 per cent of the cc were re-elected, a typical proportion. By the end of the 1970s, most of the top 200 were over sixty-five, many in their mid-seventies. Because of its isolation from the rest of society, its special access to the highest quality of higher education, and its tendency to intermarriage, the new ruling class was already becoming hereditary, Brezhnev’s own family being a case in point.