Revolution 1989 (26 page)

Gorbachev had already decided that the war must be ended. The Zaitsev report simply furnished him with an additional argument against the few diehard militarists around the Kremlin who still believed in the mission. ‘The question was not whether to pull out, but
how
,’ one of Gorbachev’s closest aides, Andrei Grachev, said. ‘It had become obvious (to most of the leadership) that we could not go on paying such a heavy price - in casualties, expenditure and isolation on the international scene.’ Gorbachev frequently fumed to his associates in private ‘This can’t be delayed. We can’t let the Brezhnev /Andropov war become the Gorbachev war.’ Yet he continued to delay. Fearing resistance at home from his conservative critics, he could find no way to secure peace with honour - or without what he saw as humiliation.
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Andropov had realised the Afghan invasion had been a mistake soon after he had so forcefully recommended that it go ahead. During his short tenure at the top in the USSR, he tried to negotiate a deal with the Pakistani President, Zia-ul-Haq. The Soviets would withdraw, he offered, if the Pakistanis ended their support for the Islamic guerrillas - ‘the terrorists of the Mujahideen’ he called them. But as he approached death the talks came to nothing. Now Gorbachev was determined to seek a way out. In mid-October 1985 he summoned the Afghan Communist leader, Babrak Karmal, secretly to Moscow and gave him a stern warning: ‘By next summer, 1986, you will have to figure out how to defend your cause on your own,’ he said. ‘We will help you, but only with arms, no longer with troops.’

The Soviets had become disappointed with Karmal soon after they had installed him as head of the Afghan regime. Gorbachev had been sent numerous KG B reports saying he was weak, capricious and indecisive. Gorbachev often used to say ‘Karmal walks like a pretzel’ - a Russo/Yiddish phrase meaning someone is drunk. Inside Afghanistan, the Communists controlled the capital and the other cities, but even with Soviet armies helping them, large areas of the remote and mountainous land were in the hands of the rebels. Gorbachev now lectured Karmal on how to run a largely Muslim country: ‘If you want to survive you’ll have to broaden the base of the regime. Forget socialism. Make a deal with the truly influential forces in the country, including the Mujahideen commanders. You’ll have to revive Islam, respect traditions, and try to show the people some tangible benefits from the revolution.’
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Two days later Gorbachev met his fellow Kremlin magnates and came straight to the point: ‘It is time to take a decision on Afghanistan,’ he said. ‘With or without Karmal’s consent we take a firm line on the matter of our rapid withdrawal.’ He came well prepared. Gorbachev began reading from a series of emotional letters he had received from mothers of dead and wounded soldiers. ‘They ask: “International duty? in whose name?” Do the Afghan people want it? Is it worth the lives of our boys, who don’t even know why they were sent there. What are they defending?’ Gorbachev got his way. Not a single voice now seemed in favour of Soviet troops remaining in Afghanistan. Yet pulling out became an agonisingly slow process.
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A key ally and friend became Gorbachev’s creative partner in radical changes to the Soviet empire. In July 1985, Andrei Gromyko, for so long the stern face of Soviet diplomacy, was kicked upstairs to the powerless post of President. Gorbachev confounded the entire Soviet political class when he named a successor: Eduard Shevardnadze. It shocked the new Foreign Minister, too, who could scarcely believe what he was being told when Gorbachev ordered him to take the job. ‘But I am not Russian and have absolutely no experience in foreign affairs,’ he said hesitantly. Gorbachev waved all the doubts aside: ‘As to your nationality, it’s true you’re a Georgian, but above all you’re a Soviet man,’ he said. ‘No experience? Perhaps in this case it’s a good thing. Our foreign policy is in need of a fresh approach, it needs courage, dynamism and innovation.’ Gorbachev was not always a great picker of advisers, aides or colleagues to trust. But Shevardnadze was an inspired choice. They had known and liked each other for many years, but, more important, they agreed on the essentials. Neither had been a party to the decision to invade Afghanistan. They had been junior members of the Kremlin leadership at the time and were not informed about it until the day after the troops had arrived in Kabul. At their meeting when Shevardnadze accepted his new post both of them used the same word to describe the war almost simultaneously - ‘criminal’.
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Shevardnadze, like Gorbachev, often used to say war formed him. He was thirteen when the Germans invaded the USSR and one of his brothers was killed in the first days of fighting. One of his other two brothers was almost immediately sent to replace him and stayed on the front for the duration. His father, a teacher, survived Stalin’s Great Purge, but only just. He had been a Menshevik around the time of the 1917 revolution, and joined the Bolsheviks only during the Civil War. He was arrested in 1937, on the usual suspicion of ‘deviationism’, but by chance was recognised amidst the other prisoners by a NKVD officer who had been a pupil, and he was released. Shevardnadze, from Mamati, a remote village about 150 miles west of Tbilisi, used Georgian as his native tongue and always spoke Russian with a strong accent. He became a Party member in 1948 and was a zealot. ‘Communism was my religion,’ he said, and it brought him material rewards. He joined the apparat, and swiftly rose through the ranks in posts involving internal security. As, successively, police chief in Georgia and then Interior Minister, he had close links with the intelligence service - ‘the organs’ as the forces of repression were called. In 1951 he married a petite, beautiful and glamorous young woman, Nanuli Tsargareishvili. During the purges she had seen her father, a general noted for his bravery, arrested in the middle of the night. He was taken away and shot. She recalled how for a long period afterwards she cried herself to sleep. Later she remembered weeping genuine tears when Stalin died, for she too became a committed Communist.
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During the ‘stagnation’ years the Georgian Communist Party was one of the most corrupt in the Union. In 1972 the Party chief in the Republic, Vasily Mzhavanadze, was removed in a well-publicised bribes scandal and Shevardnadze replaced him, with orders to clean up the mess. He was highly respected as a man of integrity and stories abound of how he campaigned hard against the endemic Caucasian diseases of crime and graft. He once called for his colleagues in the Georgian leadership to vote at a Party gathering with their left hands. When they raised their hands he noted how many were wearing fancy and expensive Western watches, which at that time must have been dubiously acquired. Dressed in peasant clothes, he once took off north from Tbilisi and headed towards Moscow in a battered old car whose boot was stuffed full of tomatoes. Rules had recently been introduced in Georgia that no vegetables should be exported from there. As he drove, he counted the number of policemen he bribed when he was stopped, so the story went, and then purged the Georgian police.

He was relatively liberal, but could act in traditional Soviet ways. He had scores of dissidents arrested and jailed during the crackdown on human rights campaigners in the 1970s, including the distinguished scientist and writer Zviad Gamsakhurdia. When required, he could outdo Gorbachev as a crawler to those higher up the chain of command, once praising Brezhnev in a speech for his ‘breadth of vision, humanity, uncompromising class position, loyalty, principles and skill at penetrating into the soul of his interlocutor’. Georgia, he said, ‘would always be loyal to its Russian brother . . . They call Georgia a sunny land. But for us . . . the real sun rises not in the East, but in the North, in Russia, the sun of Leninist ideas.’
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He was promoted to a ministerial job in Moscow in 1976, a couple of years before Gorbachev, but continued in relatively obscure posts. He had met Gorbachev often when they were both regional Party bosses, but they became close family friends as they worked together in Moscow. They were discreet and careful Party men but it became clear as they talked that they both saw the flaws in the system which, Shevardnadze said, could ‘reduce a person to a cog who could be crushed with impunity’. They agreed on the kind of domestic reforms needed and the only way they could be introduced. ‘Gorbachev said to me there are two roads we can take’, according to Shevardnadze. ‘Either we tighten our belts very tightly and reduce consumption, which the people will no longer tolerate - or we can try to defuse international tension and overcome the disagreements between East and West - and . . . free up the gigantic sums we spend on arms.’ They met privately twice a week for long sessions and at several formal government and Party meetings. For many years it was an exceptionally close bond, unusual in Soviet politics.
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Shevardnadze was a fast learner with an extraordinary memory, his closest aide, Sergei Tarasenko, said. He had to be. Within three weeks of his appointment he had a scheduled meeting in Helsinki with the US Secretary of State, George Shultz - a highly experienced foreign affairs expert - when he made no bones about his ignorance of the details of arms limitations talks and other technicalities. Shultz was impressed by the Georgian’s honesty and candour. In a memo to President Reagan immediately afterwards he wrote: ‘The contrast between him and Gromyko was breathtaking. He could smile, engage, converse. He could persuade and be persuaded.’
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To the wider public, Shevardnadze presented a change almost immediately, with his handsome, warm face, his avuncular-looking white hair, cheerful demeanour and his fondness for a joke and a chat. He had first-rate public relations skills, said Tarasenko:

There were immediate changes in the way the Kremlin ran its empire. When previous Russian leaders told their underlings in the colonies that they would be given more independence and control of their affairs, they had not meant it. Shevardnadze and Gorbachev did. The practice since Stalin’s day was that when any of the satellites considered anything, however minor, with international implications, they would ask the advice of officials in Moscow before acting. ‘Our people would then prepare an answer - think about this further, say, or scrap the idea,’ Tarasenko said. ‘Soon after he became Foreign Minister Shevardnadze was asked for such advice and he replied he had none to give. Those were sovereign states and . . . they could do what they deemed necessary. He got quite emotional about it and said “this practice should stop”.’
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Ronald Reagan found the Soviet negotiating partner he was looking for. Gorbachev was anxious to meet him as soon as it could be arranged. He was confident that he could outsmart the American and Reagan was convinced he could outcharm the Russian. They fixed on a summit in Geneva in November 1985 - the first of four held over the next three years that transformed the postwar world. Nothing of major substance was concluded at that Swiss meeting - no agreements were signed or grand statements were made. But it forged a unique round of personal diplomacy that ultimately - and speedily - brought the Cold War to an end. It was a curious bond, as Reagan perceptively pointed out to Gorbachev at the last of their one-on-one sessions at the Chateau Fleur d’Eau summit on the shore of Lac Léman: ‘I bet the hardliners in both our countries are bleeding as we shake hands,’ he said. Reagan from that point speeded up the process he had already started of distancing himself from his erstwhile conservative supporters in the US. Gorbachev began a series of bruising battles with the reactionaries in the Kremlin, as he described them, who longed to take the Soviet Union backwards to isolation, and with his powerful military. Gorbachev initially thought little of Reagan’s intellect. ‘I felt I had encountered a caveman,’ he told aides. ‘He said things that can’t be called anything but trite. He was so loaded with stereotypes that it was difficult for him to accept reason. Whenever I brought up specifics, the President immediately let Shultz take over. And when we had our “fireside chats” as the President called them, Reagan had prepared texts.’ Later he grew to admire and respect him. From the first Reagan liked Gorbachev, who was so different from the leader he had expected to encounter from the ‘evil empire’, but he kept asking himself whether the Russian could be trusted and was sincere about changing the Soviet Union. He decided he had no choice but to do business with him.
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One major sticking point led to a shouting match in Geneva, despite the warm atmosphere during most of their five hours of private talks. Reagan was absolutely committed to the Star Wars project. The Soviets feared it would lead to a new arms race in space, which they would lose. Reagan maintained that SDI was a defensive system. Gorbachev repeatedly responded that from the Russian point of view it was seen as offensive: if the Americans had a shield that worked, what was to stop them launching an attack on the Soviet Union, knowing they were safe from retaliation? Star Wars ‘would destabilise everything’, he remarked. ‘We would have to build up in order to pierce your shield.’ Reagan said that would be entirely unnecessary: ‘You have to believe that this is so important for the world that we will give you the technology as we develop it.’ Gorbachev laughed and replied bluntly: ‘Surely you realise I can’t believe that, since you won’t even give us the technology for milking machines on our farms.’
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