Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (63 page)

The Politburo had become the ruling caste, as influential and as ritualized as any council of boyars. But its members did not live in the Kremlin and they left as soon as their business was done. Watching the sleek black limousines as they filed out through the Kremlin’s Saviour Gate on Thursday afternoons, a time-traveller from any of Russia’s pasts would have recognized power. The cars left through a gate that was closed to all other traffic, and on the public streets a path was cleared for their exclusive use. But not all headed right, towards the Party building on Old Square. Some, including the hard-line Ustinov himself, were going to the Defence Ministry, whose appetite for weapons and technology was draining the entire continent of wealth. Others headed confidently left, bound for the Lubyanka.
⁶⁶
By the 1960s, Soviet power relied upon the KGB, successor to Stalin’s secret police, and this huge organization had its own headquarters and its own power-base. It spied on Soviet citizens, it harassed and eavesdropped on foreigners, but it also watched the Soviet Union’s leaders.
⁶⁷
Any embarrassing detail (the Russian word is
kompromat
) was a form of currency, and the police had plenty of customers. When Vyacheslav Kostikov, who served as Boris Yeltsin’s press advisor in 1991, started to explore the office he had inherited in the Kremlin, he found that his bookcase had a false back. Behind it was a secret door leading to a room with a washbasin and a bed. Dominating the scene, however, was a massive safe, so heavy that it threatened to fall through the antique floor on to the rooms below. Double-walled, and lined with sand, the monster had once contained Brezhnev’s stock of
kompromat
on colleagues in the high elite.
⁶⁸

But these divisive personal games were secret; even some of the elite did not know the extent of the spying. In public, and above all to the world, the Soviet Kremlin was united, and it was still the regime’s favourite weapon for inspiring awe in outsiders. At formal receptions (the one time when he always used it), Brezhnev appeared to be serene, at home, emerging in a blaze of chandeliers to make a little speech and shake a hand. In Washington and in London, high-level delegations – and certainly those that involved a head of state – were greeted on the White House steps, or at the entrance to 10 Downing Street, but the Soviets broke all the rules. Their foreign guests were made to walk – it seemed like miles – up staircases and endless corridors around the Grand Palace. The place was confusing, ‘like a series of Chinese boxes’ in one victim’s words, and the fierceness of the central heating felt like an assault. At last, disgruntled and hot, the visitors would be motioned to wait, standing in the belly of a cavernous, glittering hall, until a pair of double doors at the far end was flung open. The Soviet hosts then made their entrance, fresh and relaxed. All these illusions were deliberately contrived, but there was nothing fake, unfortunately, about Brezhnev’s impatience with some of the guests. When the newly appointed British foreign secretary, David Owen, paid his first call, his interpreter overheard the Soviet leader asking his own foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, whether it was really necessary to invite such an unpromising character to share a glass of tea.
⁶⁹

*   *   *

Brezhnev’s glory was growing by the year, at least in the artificial world he had created for himself. In 1971, he decided to revert to his predecessor’s ruling style by adding the title and trappings of head of state to his existing role as General Secretary. A Kremlin office went with the new position, and though Brezhnev still preferred his eyrie in Old Square, he also took over a Senate suite. This was jocularly called ‘the Heights’, in part because Brezhnev avoided the lower floor where Stalin had once worked.
⁷⁰
The rooms were adapted to include a large office and a luxurious reception room, a smaller study for Brezhnev’s own use, and, later, medical facilities and a small private canteen.
⁷¹
Further millions were devoted, at the end of Brezhnev’s life, to building a marble hall in the Senate yard, designed to be invisible from Red Square and from other points inside the Kremlin grounds. Completed at the end of 1983, it was intended to host plenary meetings of the Party’s Central Committee.
⁷²

The Kremlin, then, was still the only place where the whole Soviet leadership converged. In recognition of its importance (and because few outsiders could follow the complex structures of this government), political scientists in the capitalist world coined a new term – ‘Kremlinology’ – for a pursuit that soon became both urgent diplomatic task and arcane academic specialism. The Soviet leadership mattered – this was the other atomic superpower – but understanding it was no easy task. On the most desperate occasions, Kremlin-watchers were reduced to noting which stiff, unappetizing-looking man had been positioned closest to the leader at a state parade. Distinctions like this may appear absurd today, but at the time there was no other way to calibrate the hierarchy. Minute gradations said it all; the political elite of the world’s first communist superpower really did spend hours deciding which of them should mount a rostrum in third place. There were the medals and bouquets, of course, but from the location of an office to the speed of its telephone connection, every Moscow-based official knew where to look for the real signs of rank and influence.
⁷³

The lists of Russian names and institutions were confusing – commentary had been much simpler back in Stalin’s day – but the careful, usually tedious, study of who was up and who was down on Soviet state occasions had a point. Those faces, after all, belonged to people with real organizations to manage and interests to guard. There were genuine struggles for resources, a bureaucratic politics, and there were also meaningful disputes over policy. ‘Brezhnev’, as Gorbachev, who must have known, would later write, ‘was forced to manoeuvre skilfully between different Politburo factions.’
⁷⁴
By the end of his reign, the groups included a ‘military-ideological’ bloc of conservatives (to whom, in truth, Brezhnev inclined) and a faction, more open to reform, whose members thought the time had come to tackle the country’s backwardness and economic woes. That group, ironically, was headed by the KGB’s own master, Yury Andropov. ‘Reform’, however, had a Soviet meaning all its own. No-one was thinking of free markets. As even Gorbachev would later say, ‘Our goal is to realize the full potential of socialism. Those in the West who expect us to renounce socialism will be disappointed.’
⁷⁵

There is plenty of evidence that Russians of the time approved. Not knowing any other life, many believed their political system to be more progressive, more scientific, and certainly fairer than any other.
⁷⁶
When it came to the details of that fairness, however, Karl Marx himself might have been shocked. Lenin probably did work tirelessly, at least until his first disabling stroke, but in 1966 Brezhnev made it a rule that Politburo members should take ten weeks’ holiday a year, and also ordered that their office hours should be restricted to nine to five each day with a compulsory break for lunch.
⁷⁷
The point was to avoid excessive strain – the team was already ageing – and also to leave the general secretary with free time for Zavidovo, the hunting-lodge, just over ninety miles from Moscow, where he could hope to bag wild boar and deer. It was an open secret that the deer were caught and tethered in advance so that he could not miss.
⁷⁸

The inequalities of Soviet life were not as glaring as detractors claim. Many other economies – and certainly the United States – were scarred by greater differences between the wealthy and the very poor.
⁷⁹
What made the Soviet case unusual was its hypocrisy, and with that, its obsessive, almost priest-like, secrecy. As in the past, each benefit was weighed and parcelled out; a boss lost everything if his career collapsed. In part, that was the reason why so many politicians chose to serve until they died. But graded privilege also made for a rigid structure of us and them, ‘a hierarchy complex’, in Dmitry Volkogonov’s phrase.
⁸⁰
Raisa Gorbachev, arriving in the capital from Stavropol, claimed to be shocked by the irrationality and waste. She likened the privilege system that she and her husband encountered to Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks, observing that new arrivals in Moscow would get a dacha and apartment ‘according to their place in the ladder of hierarchy’ and not ‘according to your own resources or your needs’.
⁸¹
Accommodation was only the start of it.

The system had its origins in Lenin’s ‘Kremlin ration’, and it carried echoes of much older systems of payment in kind. But now the ranks of the privileged included a whole range of new officials and administrators, many of whom worked in the precincts of the Kremlin and Old Square. The facilities inside the fortress were inadequate to serve the swelling numbers at this modern court. The bulk of the employees’ food was prepared in kitchens on Old Square, where there was also a canteen for 1,000 people. The Kremlin itself could cater for only a quarter of that, although there was a separate mess for the garrison in the arsenal. But the elite did not waste a moment in queues. Since Stalin’s time, Politburo members had enjoyed the services of dedicated personal chefs (these people, always scrutinized by the police, were not allowed to tell anyone where they worked). With a precise sense of hierarchy, full members of the Politburo were serviced by three cooks and candidate members by two. Each meal was tasted by a doctor and then placed in a secure refrigerator for twenty-four hours lest any poison had been introduced.
⁸²
If the doctor survived, presumably, the delicacies could safely be served, though Brezhnev’s hunting trophies at Zavidovo bypassed the quarantine and went straight to his plate. He was sometimes known, after a really splendid meal, to waddle out to the kitchen and plant a kiss on the hot cheeks of his favourite chef.
⁸³

There was also a special depot near the Kremlin – Gorbachev once called it the ‘feeding trough’ – for the packages of gourmet food that the elite could take away.
⁸⁴
The steamy canteens of the past were put to shame. By the 1970s, the Kremlin’s food service employed its own meat supplier (and its own herds), as well as direct access to the foremost chefs in Moscow. Seven tons of prepared meat – roasts and joints, sausages and hams – were wrapped and sent to the collection point on Granovsky street (now known as Romanov lane) every day.
⁸⁵
Elsewhere, the beautifully appointed Gastronom No. 1 (still often known affectionately by its old name: Yeliseyev’s) reserved a special section in its Gorky street store for elite clients, as did the glass palace of GUM, across Red Square from the Kremlin. There was a Kremlin tailor, where Soviet leaders were fitted with the dull and scratchy suits that they were all required to wear (the fabric, after all, had to be visibly of Soviet make), a Kremlin hairdresser and dentist, and a garage for the Kremlin fleet of limousines.
⁸⁶
At its most basic, all this meant that no Kremlin official’s wife needed to queue, or even to make cabbage taste exciting yet again. In more creative hands, however, the system was a paradise for the corrupt. Enterprising hangers-on, most famously Brezhnev’s daughter Galina, traded scarce goods on the black market, in her case feeding a passion for young men, circuses, and diamonds.
⁸⁷

The Kremlin also retained its reputation for medical care. Not far from the food depot on Granovsky street was a private clinic, staffed by the leaders’ personal physicians and equipped with a room for the general secretary’s exclusive use.
⁸⁸
Those Kremlin doctors, famously, grew busier towards the end. By the early 1980s, the country was in the hands of very old and often very sick men. Brezhnev himself was alleged to have a dangerous addiction to sleeping pills, and in later life he also suffered from a weak heart (he had a major stroke some months before his death) as well as emphysema and several types of cancer. But he refused to step down, despite the many rumours and the jokes. ‘All stand so that the leader can be carried in,’ they quipped, and many talked as if he were long dead and stuffed. The head of the KGB, Andropov, seems to have encouraged the vain, weak old man to appear in public, and especially on television, to feed the general public contempt.
⁸⁹
But others just colluded in the game. ‘The Politburo, the Health Minister Petrovsky and his successor Chazov, and the chiefs in the Kremlin medical service were in effect carrying out an experiment to see how long a fatally sick old man could give the impression of working,’ wrote Volkogonov, who had witnessed the charade.
⁹⁰
By the end, people had become so used to thinking of Brezhnev as a walking corpse that his final, clinically irreversible death came as a real surprise.
⁹¹

But die he did, at last, on 10 November 1982. The potential successors were the men who had worked with him in the highest ranks, and none was in the flower of youth. For three more years, the best way to predict the political succession at the top was to wait to see who would be put in charge of the most recent leader’s funeral arrangements.
⁹²
In Brezhnev’s case that honour fell to Yury Andropov. But he was already sick – his kidneys were failing – and his infirmity prompted the new chief of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, to suggest a discreet modification to the Kremlin’s Senate Tower. It was an escalator, designed to carry invalids the eleven feet up to the platform on the Lenin Mausoleum, and it was installed in July 1983.
⁹³
The ‘Lenin escalator’ proved a boon, if not a life-saver, to almost every other member of the Politburo, and it was an essential aid to Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko. This man, another victim of emphysema, in turn awarded a state prize to the designer of a pneumatic tube that blasted government papers from Old Square into the Kremlin and back in two minutes, sparing the men and women with the little carts and adding an element of farce to that old Kremlin-watchers’ conundrum, ‘Party–State relations’.
⁹⁴