The Atlantic and Its Enemies

26. Chichikov

What was Moscow to make of 1983? Three things were clear enough. The economic crisis in the West had not proved deadly, for a start: quite to the contrary, the eighties boom was under way, and the most interesting Russian comment was a question, why, with an education system five times better, do we have an economy five times worse (a question still not answered: perhaps the answer is that real mathematicians are not interested in arithmetic). Then again, there was China, which, having made an enormous and murderous mess of her version of War Communism, was now flourishing mightily with her version of the New Economic Policy. Finally there was the Middle East and its oil. Blundering into a quagmire in Afghanistan, the USSR had lost all around, and her out-stations in the Third World were liabilities.

But so too were the satellites in eastern Europe. None of these countries was an asset, and the exports of Comecon, put together, amounted to about two thirds of Mexico’s. They took Soviet oil on cheap terms, and in public relations terms were headaches. The worst case was Poland’s. Historically, the relationship had been a poisonous one, of bullying and self-pity, a sort of permanent vierge folle and époux infernal. Rousseau had told the Poles: you cannot stop them from swallowing you; make sure they cannot digest you. Balzac had offered different advice: get on with practical life and make yourselves indispensable to the Russians. The Poles in a sense did both, because they did develop a first-rate intelligentsia, but instead of being loyal Communists, or even, like Czechs or Slovenes, just progressives of the sort that Communists could use, they marched off in a different direction altogether and produced the most vibrant political Catholicism in the world. Frenchmen, trained from earliest infancy in anti-clericalism, could not believe the crowds they saw in Poland welcoming the Pope. ‘Like the Ayatollah,’ sniffed one of those Frenchmen.

There were great differences between Poland and the other ‘bloc’ countries. In the first place she had a ‘mass of manoeuvre’, a population coming on for 40 million, and still, in the 1960s, expanding, and that because of a second considerable difference: a large peasant population, still set in the old days, with hay-carts trundling along on the roads. That in turn reflected another great difference, that the Western Allies had had some sort of formal rights as regards Poland, and even Stalin shrank from applying the full-scale Soviet formula there. Some version of due process had to be gone through, and collectivization of agriculture, the expropriation of private peasant plots, would have excited resistance. A consequence of all this was that the Catholic Church remained powerful — much more so than in Hungary, where there was a strong Protestant tradition, or Czechoslovakia, where anti-clericalism was also strong. Poland was different.

The Communists after the war had attempted ‘modernization’, the development of big industry, and, in the areas taken from Germany, that was not unpromising. There already was substantial enough mining, and a steel industry was built up. The old Kattowitz — Katowice — was a grim nineteenth-century barracks of a town, and it now acquired a Communist overlay. An enormous stadium was put up in the centre, as an open challenge to the Church that would otherwise have dominated the area. In Cracow, which was very Catholic and proper, a gigantic steelworks, Nowa Huta, went up, and the general idea was that with sport, women’s emancipation and a healthy proletarian work-day rather than mindless peasant agriculture, a new Polish version of ‘Soviet man’ would emerge. But the early, Stalinist, programme was carried through by a small group of mainly Jewish Communists, and they were broken when Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956.

A ‘native Communism’ took their place, under Władysław Gomułka, himself to a limited extent their victim, and he was prepared to co-operate with the Church and the peasants, and the intelligentsia as well, on the understanding that, with ‘modernization’, matters would go his way. This did not happen: on the contrary, the intelligentsia resented the censorship, and encouraged student revolts. The regime fought back, identifying the Jewish origins of many of the people involved, and drove some of them out. A characteristic victim of that moment (1968) was Leszek Kołakowski. Interwar Poland had crashed, especially with the failure of the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in 1944, and a good part of the intelligentsia, seeing the Red Army coming in, became, if not Communist, then at least sympathizers. It was a version of a fairly old Warsaw problem: Russia, whatever her appalling features, worked, and Poland, whatever her admirable ones, did not. Kołakowski, philosopher and historian of ideas, went along, and even helped falsify electoral returns in 1946: why bother accurately recording the votes of the Polish peasantry, obstinate clowns (the original of ‘clown’ is a Dutch word meaning ‘peasant’) and boors (ditto). A sojourn in Moscow caused some shock; but he was an enthusiastic supporter of Gomułka and the promise of a new Poland. Then the 1960s brought disillusion. He wanted to answer the central question of why reform Communism was not working. This was not a subject that he could openly address. He therefore addressed it in ingenious disguise: in Religious Inspiration and Church Link he wrote what purported to be a work of history, about the Dutch Calvinist Church of the early seventeenth century, when the (Arminian) effort to humanize it had failed, against the Counter-Remonstrants, who were enthusiastic about damning people. He had learned Dutch more or less on the train in order to write this book, a long one, hardly penetrable by the censors or for that matter anyone else. But it was enough to predestine him to exile, the more so as his wife was Jewish, and there followed the sort of distinguished career that put Poland back on the world’s intellectual map for the first time, in effect, since Copernicus in the sixteenth century. The three-volume Main Currents in Marxism is a classic. But in his disillusionment Kołakowski was in good company. Student revolts saw Gomułka off.

In the seventies the opposition gradually built up. As elsewhere in the ‘bloc’, intellectuals were a main element, and in ordinary circumstances this could be a ticket to nowhere: ‘daring arguments, tame conclusions’, as A. J. P. Taylor had said of Vienna in 1900. Beards talked ‘civil society’, and Thomas Aquinas was much brandished in the wind. Among the intelligentsia of western Europe, and especially in Italy, there was a desperate desire for some connection with the real proletariat. This was generally a hopeless cause, and so it also proved in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Marx had said that ‘the conjunction of the proletariat and the intelligentsia’ would bring Communism; he had gone on, to the effect that ‘philosophy cannot become reality without the abolition of the proletariat and the proletariat cannot abolish itself unless philosophy becomes reality’. In Poland these words came to mean something; and of all revenges on Marx, through the medium of the Catholic Church. The French observer who dismissed the masses’ religious enthusiasms as Ayatollah-like had it entirely wrong: the Church, historically, had been adept at raising the cause of the poor, and besides, in Poland, it was the national institution. Workers could be mobilized by priests, and this was to happen again and again as the seventies went ahead. The intellectuals went along, and found themselves having to talk common language with priests in a way that had no counterpart elsewhere. But it mattered also that the workers were galvanized by other factors: an industrialization that worked out very badly. In that decade the Communist Party (it had a different name in Poland) had also embarked on a supposedly unifying and national strategy, economic growth.

Gomułka’s successor, Edward Gierek, was a miner (he had quite good French, having worked in Belgium) and he wanted to profit from German Ostpolitik. He would make Poland ‘a new Japan’. His relations with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt were good; there was money to be had from the banks, stuffed with Arab dollars; Poland could export, as did the Far Eastern miracle-countries. Investment came in, and the skies above Upper Silesia — the Katowice region — turned a vague green, as factories pumped out their chemical smoke. For a time, this succeeded. Output rose by 11 per cent per annum and real wages by 7 per cent (1971-5). But consumption also shot up, as food to the value of $3bn was imported every year (in a country that, before the war, had exported it). However, Polish goods suffered for lack of quality, and when the second oil shock occurred, in 1978-9, the market for them went down. The external debt, at $20bn, could not be easily serviced, and investments, often pointless, were already taking 40 per cent of the national income. The ‘new Japan’ was looking instead at North Korea. Prices, preached the regime’s own economists (there had been quite a vogue for the sending of bright and orthodox Poles to business schools such as INSEAD), would have to go up, to take account of production costs. However, most workers could only see in that the privileges of the Party, and strikes began. The private butchers were permitted to sell the best cuts of meat, and could charge almost twice for them. Now they were permitted to sell cheap cuts as well, which affected ordinary consumers. The Lublin railwaymen got it into their heads that the lack of meat was caused by exports to the USSR, and they welded a train to the railway line heading east. At that, Gierek was summoned to explain himself to the General Secretary, Brezhnev, and a frigid communiqué resulted (in July 1980): ‘an exchange of information as to the situation in their respective countries’. In the docks of Gdańsk there was a stubborn woman, one Anna Walentynowicz, who worked a crane. There is always something of an imponderable about these working-class troubles in northern Poland: in that region, a great number of the people forcibly moved from the Ukraine had settled, including Polish Ukrainians (‘Ruthenes’) from the mountains of the south. Their children had inherited resentments to work out; and Anna Walentynowicz was herself from Rovno, in what had been a mainly Ukrainian area of old Poland. At any rate, she was refractory. She had been a good Communist and worker to start with — had even been decorated — but now she protested, and was dismissed, even though she only had a month or two before she would have reached the age of retirement. The workforce took up her cause, and there emerged another remarkable figure, Lech Wałęsa. Here was a good Catholic — eight children by the same wife — with a career as a fitter. He was also an organizer, and 13,000 people struck on 14 August 1980, in protest at the dismissal of Anna Walentynowicz. They occupied the workplace, the Lenin Shipyard. Priests were well to the fore. A trade union, Solidarność (‘Solidarity’), emerged from this, and the very name had Catholic overtones, solidarietà in Italian, involving charity and co-operative movements, under clerical patronage.

A central matter, here, was that the Pope was a Pole. Karol Wojtyła was elected on 16 October 1978, having been Archbishop of Cracow, the most religious city in Poland. He had risen from the pious lower-middle class, and brought enthusiasm to everything (he was even in his youth a good amateur actor). He knew his Communists, and told people, even in 1946 when he was just a parish priest, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll finish themselves off.’ But he was also a good tactician: the formidable Cardinal Prince Sapieha promoted him, and when he went to Rome, though he did not like the changes in the Church that came with Vatican II, he was careful not to make a personal issue of things. He was also a considerable intellectual, very well-read in Catholic philosophy and able, when he invited the world’s philosophers to the Vatican, to hold his own. Other Popes before him had either been deeply troubled about the modern world, not really knowing what to do, or perhaps too keen to go along with it. John Paul II — the name he took — had no doubts. He really came from the triumphalist world of the later nineteenth century, when Leo XIII, with Rerum Novarum in 1891, had made an effort to reconcile Catholicism with socialism. Here, Leo had quoted Aquinas from the thirteenth century — when ‘capitalism’ had started — and tried to identify a Christian answer. The Conservative Party in England belonged in this context, and the Christian Democrats in Italy and Germany were exemplars; perhaps, even, the most interesting question in France is why there never was an equivalent. Pope John Paul certainly had the measure of the modern world, and had a good idea as to how it might be managed. For instance, he did not bother very much with the media, and had his chauffeur read out a fortnightly summary of the press in the back of the car. He did not bother very much about the secular pieties, such as democracy, which he probably associated with ugly women and uneatable food. However, he had a wonderful sense of timing, of stage presence (much admired by Sir John Gielgud), and a papal appearance was a memorable occasion. In Poland the audiences were in hundreds of thousands. It was the man and the hour. On 13 May 1981 Mehmet Ali Ağca tried to kill the Pope. There was a Bulgarian connection; Ağca himself was a Turkish Fascist who had already murdered the editor of a Turkish left-wing newspaper and had mysteriously escaped from his prison. The circumstances have never been explained, even by Ağca himself after long years of incarceration: he seems to have lost his mind. But it would not have been stupid on the KGB’s part to want rid of this Pope: for he did destroy them.

Communist Poland now disintegrated, at any rate down to its most basic parts. Gierek had a heart attack, was even imprisoned for a year and in the event he died in 2001 aged not far off a hundred. He was succeeded by a nonentity, Stanisław Kania. Communist Poland was now down to its essence, the army, in the shape of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. On 9 December 1981 Marshal Viktor Kulikov, as head of the Warsaw Pact forces, moved on Warsaw. On the 12th, at night, roadblocks were set up, borders were sealed, and special troops moved on the telephone exchanges with long axes to cut the wires abroad. At 6 a.m. on came the general, national anthem to the fore, sternness of gaze, while tanks patrolled the streets outside. It was a military coup. In military form, Jaruzelski was almost a fossil of the Kołakowski generation. It was not that he believed in Communism, but he did believe that the Poles must find a method of living with Russia, that the great mistake of the country’s history was to fail to do so. A good part of the aristocracy had thought the same, sometimes with a corrupt side, in the Convention of Targowice in the age of Catherine the Great (1792). Some priests at that time had behaved in a suicidally nationalist manner. Pope John Paul was determined not to let this happen again: the Church would this time have a strategic sense. He managed matters in Poland. He had gone there in May 1979, to an audience of 400,000 in Plac Zwyciestwa, and through Cardinal John Krol in the USA he had a good contact with Reagan. This Pope was not at all popular with the media, but the morning Mass in the Vatican was crowded as never before. In June 1983 he returned to Poland. This time round, a million people turned up for the Black Virgin at Częstochowa, and some pilgrims betook themselves there from Warsaw on their knees. The Politburo in Moscow were apoplectic. They had Afghanistan on their hands, and no-one wanted to repeat the experience of Prague in 1968 let alone Budapest in 1956. The only hope was that the Poles would themselves do something.

In September-October 1980 there were agreements of the government with Solidarność, in the context of a strike threat, and coal output going down by 90,000 tons and inflation at 12 per cent. In mid-January 1981 Jaruzelski took over the government — a weird figure, be-corseted because of lumbago, and wearing dark spectacles because of eye problems that went back to the privations of resettlement in 1940. He did ask Brezhnev for troops but the entire Politburo voted against this: he would have to do it on his own. Nine million Poles were now in Solidarność. On 3 April 1981 he and Kania, the Party chief, by now, as was solemnly recorded in Politburo minutes, a very serious drunk, went to Brest-Litovsk. Solidarność held a conference in the autumn and there were Soviet descents on Warsaw — the head of ideology, Mikhail Suslov, and even the minister of foreign affairs, Andrey Gromyko. The Communist Party sacked all but eighteen of the Central Committee and Gierek was the scapegoat as the economy now crashed: there was not even tea to be had at hotel bars in Lublin. By November 1981 matters were in place for a declaration of martial law. A colonel, Ryszard Kuklinski, told the Americans. Jaruzelski took over the Party and tried to have Solidarność in a subordinate role, which Wałęsa refused; on 13 December 1981 WRON, the national security council, of fifteen generals and a cosmonaut took over. Wałęsa was put in a comfortable villa with his wife (seventh time pregnant) and apologetic generals. It had been Gomułka’s and he was there for seven months. There was no European reaction — quite the contrary, as Claude Cheysson even said, ‘socialist renewal’ was at stake. There were problems as soldiers took over the mines and the Seym produced a huge reform package that meant decentralization, etc., but it led nowhere. There were over 10,000 internments, and over 150,000 ‘prophylactic discussions’ but the overtones were farcical. If you lifted the hotel telephone you were told ‘Rozmowa kontrolowana’, meaning that someone was listening. That the tape was old and wheezing did not inspire fear, and conversations with the Polish intelligentsia anyway consisted of funny stories.

At any rate, Moscow was having considerable difficulty in digesting Poland, but there was worse. Could Poland digest the Soviet Union? There was an imponderable, television. Telecommunications were now such that in the furthest reaches of the Soviet Union truth could be told: people would know that they lived ‘like dogs’, as Richard Pipes’s fellow traveller had known in fifties Leningrad. Maybe in Brezhnev’s time the blockage of information meant that most Soviet citizens imagined that the West still lived in the world of Dickens’s novels, that the imperialized Third World was only waiting for shining tomorrows courtesy of Moscow. But cameras could now be dropped in the remotest places, from there to beam instant images to a waiting world (Robert Harris’s Archangel has a good description of the process). In East Germany Western television had generally been available, such that the inhabitants were under no illusions as to the relative poverty of their living conditions — as Enzensberger said, Communism was the highest stage of underdevelopment, and East Germany was a state that sich selber mitmacht, an imitation of itself, as Musil had called Austria-Hungary. This line was now true of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. What was to be done? A sign that matters were going out of control was that the secret police took charge.

This situation was not at all new for the bosses in the Kremlin. In 1921 the West had not followed the Bolsheviks’ pattern. There had been no revolution, or at any rate not a 1917, in Germany. By rights, the Germans should have produced one, and for a few weeks there had been workers’ and soldiers’ councils on the Soviet model. But then there had been deals — the Social Democrats with the generals, the trade unions with the bosses — and the final revolution was not Lenin’s but Hitler’s. Moscow had responded by finding common ground with Berlin. Now there was a wooden replay of this, an effort to separate the Europeans from the USA. ‘Our common European home’, an old tune of Molotov’s in 1954, came up again under Brezhnev.

In 1921 Lenin had responded quite creatively. In the short term the Revolution had failed. There was famine, and there were revolts. In 1920 the peasants were given a New Economic Policy, by which private buying and selling had again been allowed. Then there had been an approach to the Germans, and German industrialists and even military officers had co-operated with the new Soviet Union. Bolshevik diplomats put on white ties, appeared in the West, talking good French, and money came their way. On the whole, the West did not really understand 1917. Why could the Bolsheviks not be bought, like everybody else? Now in the 1980s, as Moscow saw the failure of everything, everywhere, that calculation came back in great force. Lenin is said to have said, around 1921, that there were Western ‘useful idiots’ who would talk about feminism or ecology or town planning or humanism and who could be put on the same platform as Bolsheviks whose intentions were to take over the planet. Now Moscow came up with the last useful idiot, Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev, in himself an obviously decent man, whose task was to soft-soap the West. Seeing him in action, Yuri Lyubimov, a theatrical producer of genius, scratched his head and wondered as to whom Gorbachev reminded him of. He said, at last, ‘Chichikov’, the anti-hero of Gogol’s Dead Souls, who worked out a scheme for buying serfs whose deaths had not been recorded — a scheme which in the short term makes Chichikov appear to be a great landowner, but which ends in farcial collapse. In the Soviet Union, there were many equivalents.

The statistics of the seventies could not conceal a slowing down and even a reversal of the economy. Labour was no longer migrant, and construction — its forte — slowed down. In the sixties labour began to run short, then in the seventies arable land, then in the eighties fuel, energy, petrol, and, as Vladimir Bukovsky puts it, ‘the system turned out not even able to pillage itself efficiently’. More and more of the GNP — one third in 1980 — went on investment, and a rough fifth went on defence, but the investment led nowhere. The statistics were in any case fictional, and in 1987 the economists Vasily Selyunin and G. I. Khanin challenged the whole set, claiming that the national income had grown far less since 1928 than had been suggested; growth rates had declined from the 4 per cent of the later sixties to 1 per cent; any growth was a statistical illusion, ascribable to inflation. It is an extraordinary fact that the most vociferous anti-Communists, starting with Reader’s Digest, understood such things much better than all the institutes set up for sympathetic study of the Soviet economy (for which ‘production’ would be an apter description). Time was to come when, at St Antony’s, Oxford, a Polish or Hungarian professor, didactically bearded, in a shiny brown suit, would lecture on such subjects as the possibility of market reforms under Socialism, and be discovered, a little later, buying Marks and Spencer female underwear from his expenses. Outdated technology and the exhaustion of plant caused shortfalls, and the quality of consumer goods was dismal; and, besides, the printing of money was causing a great overhang of deposits in savings banks, of 20 billion roubles in 1965 and 91 billion in 1975 (in 1985 more than twice that).

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.

Weinberger’s intention had been to find ways to render Soviet technologies obsolete. There was an especially vulnerable point, the Siberian pipeline. Here was the great legacy of Ostpolitik and détente, a huge project, financed by a foreign and mainly German consortium, that guaranteed the energy supply of central and western Europe; it would give Moscow a vast income and of course leverage in West German affairs. Moscow naturally knew that work on the pipeline could be interrupted through technical or legal obstruction. The Soviets had tried to offset the foreseeable pressure by pinning down work on the Siberian gas pipeline by contract, even to intermediate levels, but had neglected one aspect — the rotor shafts and blades driving the gas turbines for the forty-one compressor stations along the 3,600-mile Urengoy pipeline. General Electric made these, and was now prohibited from providing them. A Soviet team based in Cologne found that a French machinery maker, Alsthom-Atlantique, could make them, even then under a General Electric licence. The government allowed it to act in Moscow.

Meanwhile evidence built up that the Soviets were indeed in economic trouble — the trade surplus of $200m in 1980 had turned into a deficit of $3bn in 1981, and the USSR was having to pick up Polish bills, which weakened its capacity for credits in the West. Gold sales rose from 90 tonnes in 1980 to 240 in 1981, at that with falling prices: a clear sign of trouble. Early in 1982 American agents were sent to Poland through the Israelis, with the Church turning a blind eye: the idea was to co-operate with Solidarność people in hiding. An Israeli contact, manager of a shipyard in Gdańsk, took delivery of equipment for Solidarność, to maintain the pressure from underground, which was smuggled in from Sweden, apparently as tractor parts. Jacek Kuroń sent Reagan a letter from prison to the effect that a mass insurrection could come about: a letter that Reagan kept in his desk. The Warsaw embassy now had a four-man electronics team that could pick up most Polish traffic, and there was, by April, an underground co-ordinating committee which could communicate; there were flurries of activity. There were forays with American diplomats, but it was not the embassy that really mattered: the decoy work was useful.

A continuing point was with the Saudis. Weinberger had Arab friends, particularly Prince Fahd, the apparent heir, whose sons had been educated in England and the USA — a flamboyant spender and gambler, who had apparently opposed the oil price increase in 1973. He saw Saddam Hussein as a help against Iran, the more so as an underground Shiite organization was now active in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Weinberger went to Saudi Arabia to work out details, especially for a rapid deployment force that Carter himself had started — with provision for 300,000 US troops. In May 1982 Casey was in Saudi Arabia. The administration had done its best to prevent Congress from revealing the extent of Saudi investment in the USA, at the expense of some bullying by the CIA in Congress. Now, the point was to co-operate against the USSR in oil production — delaying the gas pipeline would contribute — the more so as Soviet oil would displace Saudi in such markets as Belgium. In 1982 Soviet sales to western Europe did increase by about a third and Saudi markets were pressed. Casey and the Saudis did a deal — the US would make things difficult for the USSR (and of course Iran) and the Saudis would do their best to push down prices (in itself this naturally helped the then depressed American economy). Casey also encouraged the Saudis not to use Palestinians, judged unreliable and possibly pro-Soviet; and Fahd wanted to support Islamic movements in Central Asia. Something was done in that direction.

Meanwhile vulnerability assessments of the Soviet economy were prophetic, convincing Casey (and Reagan) that the economy, dependent on the West for machinery to exploit the raw materials, was indeed about to implode and besides, as the terms of trade worsened, the OPEC countries would have less money with which to buy Soviet weaponry. In the 1970s Soviet earnings had risen 272 per cent, whereas oil exports had risen only by a fifth. Herbert E. Meyer, Casey’s chief banking and energy adviser, reckoned that each dollar in the price of oil meant a thousand million for Moscow. It was clear that both a British company, John Brown Engineering, and the French firm wanted to take over the supply of turbines for the Siberian gas pipeline project, and Casey could point to the $15-20bn per annum that would accrue. There was an important Chinese dimension to all of this. The Chinese took over from the Iranians as watchers of Soviet missiles; they supplied Soviet equipment to the resistance in Afghanistan; they maintained a Radio Urumchi for Central Asia. The Americans relaxed CoCom for them, the multilateral agreement to limit the export of the most advanced technology. On 23 March 1983 Reagan made his Star Wars speech — he would exploit Soviet weakness in the new generation of electronics. CoCom was tightened up, and 1,400 illegal shipments of high-tech equipment were seized (to 1987). Another wheeze was for dummy companies to sell fake technology such as flawed blueprints for gas turbines. Meanwhile the US was doing twice as much defence procurement as in the 1970s — 10,000 tanks and 3,700 strategic missiles. In 1984 Weinberger was aggressive at NATO in Brussels, as there always was a US component in the advanced technological items: that was one basis of the American recovery. The Pentagon budget for research and development had doubled and the Soviet defence budget was supposed to have risen by 45 per cent as well, to take account of proton beams. Gromyko accused Reagan to his face of using Poland as a lever and of trying to ‘exhaust’ the USSR into ‘surrender’.

Meanwhile oil prices went down. Twenty dollars per barrel was regarded as the right price for the USA, whereas in 1983 $34 prevailed. US energy imports would drop from $183bn to $70bn, or 1 per cent of GNP, as these imports (5.5 million barrels) accounted for a quarter of all. The Saudis took only $1.50 to produce a barrel, and Fahd visited Reagan early in 1985. The basic calculation was that a drop in the price of $5 would raise the American GNP by 1.4 per cent, bring down the deficit and reduce inflation. In effect the Saudis financed the Contras in Nicaragua. They then had to double output and agreed to do so; Nigel Lawson also wanted this, and the USA, by running down her own stock (held in salt caves in Texas), could drastically cut prices at will. The British did cut prices to $30, and OPEC went below that in 1983. The Soviets responded by sending Haydar Aliev in his English suits and Italian shoes to see Hafiz Assad, who had cut the Iraq-Syria pipeline in order to help Iran; the Saudis feared Iran and wanted Stingers and AWACS. The Saudis also worried that natural gas was replacing oil (1984). There were by now 1,700 US troops in Saudi Arabia, and the AWACS arrived; it was the same deal as with the Germans in the 1970s — support for the dollar in return for defence. Casey told the Saudis in advance that there would be a 25 per cent devaluation of the dollar in 1985 (the Plaza Agreement) and they acquired non-dollar assets to offset the fall in the oil price. Through Edgar Bronfman of Seagram (cover for the CIA) Casey had another channel towards Israel, which required reassurance as to the help for the Saudis. In August 1985 the Saudis started raising their output from 2 million to 6 million barrels and then 9 million such that prices fell to $12 by June 1986, a loss to Moscow of $1.4bn. Bush — a Texas oilman — did not like all of this and there were rows with Reagan. But by 1986 it took five times as much Soviet oil for a given piece of German machinery.

Meanwhile the Afghan crisis mounted. The CIA shipped its weapons and tried to keep President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq clean, but the Soviets responded with bazaar bombs and drove refugees into Pakistan with a view to destabilization. William Casey expressly said that this was America’s revenge for Vietnam. Bagram airbase was attacked by the mujaheddin, and twenty aircraft were destroyed by Chinese-supplied rocket-launchers; several senior Soviet officials and military were killed in Kabul. In January 1985 Soviet plans were known in advance (use of Spetsnaz night attacks with a van to interrupt mujaheddin communications). NSDD-166 of March 1985 was intended to end the stalemate and was to allow serious weaponry and not just the Carter harassment idea. There were 120,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan in 1985 but the mujaheddin had night-vision and precision-guided weapons as well as satellite intelligence, and even a device to identify a pilot’s voice as belonging to a particular unit. The oil pipelines were sabotaged; Kandahar airport attacked; Najibullah nearly murdered; 450 prisoners taken by Ahmad Shah Massoud (‘Lion of the Panshir’). By 1985, from Oleg Gordievsky (who defected in 1986) and other sources the encouraging news came back that the Siberian pipeline had been cut in half and was two years behind schedule in construction; the turbines were inadequate. Then the Stingers arrived, in July 1986: a ‘fire and forget’ weapon, meaning that the aimer could fire and then not remain exposed to counterfire. The missile could go up to 15,000 feet at 1,200 miles per hour. The mujaheddin first used it on 25 September 1986 and there were two strikes near Jalalabad airfield, and further ones over Tadzhikistan. In December 1986 Gorbachev told Najibullah in Moscow that there would have to be a withdrawal. His own Central Asian territories began to rumble, as in Alma Ata a rampage followed the fall of Dinmukhamed Kunayev and his replacement as boss of the Party by a Russian.

Gorbachev, in the first two years, talked. He talked and talked. Generally, what he said was long-winded and even impossible to unravel; the book that he subsequently produced launched a word, perestroyka or ‘reconstruction’, which entered the world’s vocabulary along with Sputnik and gulag as the Soviet contribution. So did another, glasnost, meaning ‘openness to criticism’. This was supposed to be revolutionary but in practice it was quite old. Ever since the early days, under Lenin, Bolsheviks had been well and truly aware that all was not well, that bureaucracy was somehow getting in the way of the original spirit, and calls for perestroyka had been made in the 1920s, sometimes by someone ambitious for the leadership. That criticism was suppressed — the intelligentsia muzzled, imprisoned or worse — made the problem worse, and glasnost was again quite an old cry. In effect all that was being done, in the first two years, was consolidation of Gorbachev’s position and the establishment of his coterie of ambitious advisers. The principal change was in foreign affairs, where a new approach was made to the Western Right, with a view to some dramatic arrangement as to arms control and a diminution of Western support for the Afghan rebels. There were other obstacles, such as CoCom, which did not stop the export, but made it expensive. And in any case the Western Left, especially the German, had proved to be of very limited utility; it was even being dropped by Moscow before Gorbachev himself emerged. At any rate there was a new era in relations, because, quite suddenly, Soviet representatives turned out to be agreeable drinking companions, quite willing to talk freely. This made, already, a huge change with the past and a great number of journalists, used to the restrictions of earlier years, allowed a natural Russophilia to emerge. It was a tribute at least to the public relations machinery in Moscow, which had been very wooden for a generation and was now learning fast. But in the first two years, and for that matter throughout Gorbachev’s six years in office, perestroyka remained a matter of words. The powers that be ranted on about the virtues of central planning, and amalgamated five huge ministries dealing with agriculture into one very huge ministry, which spewed out regulations to the collective farms even more frenetically than in Khrushchev’s time, and was not heard of within a year or so. Investment in heavy industries went up, the economist arguing for this, one Abel Aganbegyan, himself rollingly mountainous, being sent abroad to explain that there was new thinking in matters economic. Though gushed over by naïve Russian-speaking females at Oxford, he did not take in Margaret Thatcher, who knew her economics.

There was a strange moment in the summer of 1985 which was characteristic of underlying realities. Since 1918 Moscow had refused to pay a very large sum owed to the British, partly because of war debts and partly because oil companies had been expropriated without compensation. At each Anglo-Soviet meeting, the British side would propose a discussion of this, and the Soviet would refuse. But in that summer the new foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, greatly astonished his interlocutors by saying that the matter might indeed be discussed. There was some Tsarist Russian money still held in London, at Barings Bank, and that sum — a fraction, but £40m — was now handed over, in final settlement. It all had to do with the son of Duncan Sandys and grandson of Churchill; he had connections with oil, and when the deal was done, it turned out that everybody had been cheating everybody; they all sued. But the Moscow PR machine was in action. It had always been easy for Moscow to rope together writers and actors, traditionally the most absurd commentators on public matters, no doubt because subject in a higher degree than other professionals to a combination of vanity, boredom and resentment of the capricious free market. Now a clever attempt was made at the television audiences, by people who had watched American television and the mass media. They had appreciated the importance of the visual, now that devices could convey images almost ‘live’, to masses of people who would take in a very simple message. ‘Gorby’ became a star, especially in Germany, where his book was on the bestseller list for mysterious months and months.

Back home was another matter, and there Gorbachev was far more of an Andropov than his admirers in the West thought. One thing the regime did do, and it greatly damaged its own finances. Russians drank, and governments, proclaiming a monopoly of drink production, made money out of it. This weird episode was studied by Stephen White (Russia Goes Dry). Russians famously had a weakness for drink, and there was public understanding for drunkenness. A good part of the State’s income, in Soviet as in Tsarist times, came from the spirits monopoly. There was a puritanical side to the early Communists, who staged ‘battles on the alcohol front’, but drink was quite an easy way of keeping the people quiescent, and the battles became bottles. By the seventies there was an evident problem, and the census revealed less and less of life in the USSR — sixteen volumes for 1959, seven for 1970, but only one, summary, for 1979. Figures for life expectancy were suppressed, and after 1963 the figures for alcohol consumption were ‘managed’, almost ignoring moonshine, which represented nearly half of the consumption. The ten litres per head of 1965 turned into fifteen in 1979, but from the railways alone 7 million litres were stolen, and nearly a tenth of families spent 40 per cent of their income on spirits (which were relatively expensive). Under Gorbachev the statistics re-emerged, revealing that life expectancy had fallen to sixty-two for a man and that pure alcohol consumption per capita had risen four times since 1940, and consumption of all drink as much as eight times. The KGB stated that university students drank all day; 15 per cent of the population was alcoholic; and Pravda was complaining that building workers started only on Tuesdays or that collective farmers were useless after midday. The police under Andropov even went round the bathhouses arresting absentees, but they could hardly interfere with the third of the workforce that was absent in order to consult a doctor.

Not long after Gorbachev acceded, in May 1985, a campaign against drink began. He himself did not touch it, and had inveighed against it long before. He had allies as well — a reformed alcoholic named Mikhail Solomentsev in the Central Committee, and Yegor Ligachev, chief secretary in Tomsk, which he made ‘dry’. Others protested, even Aliev in Baku, and Nikolay Ryzhkov, the later prime minister, who simply said that Prohibition had never worked. Boris Yeltsin in Moscow protested, but did none the less close nine tenths of the wine shops. State output went down; vines were uprooted in the Crimea, in Georgia and — most disastrously — in Nagorny Karabakh. That area, formally part of Azerbaidjan, was largely Armenian in population, but had been handed to Azerbaidjan early on, as a way of softening the blow of Soviet conquest. Wine was a principal product, and its suppression (and a subsequent calamitous earthquake) meant general impoverishment, and a considerable worsening of relations between the two peoples. But the campaign against alcohol was, generally, farcical. In Moscow there were only seventy-nine places to drink, and hotels would not serve alcohol until 2 p.m. Some towns declared themselves ‘dry’, and drunks were sacked or fined. Diplomatic gatherings were widely deserted, but of course the counterpart was a rise in the output of moonshine, as had happened in twenties America. A Temperance Society by 1988 had 428,000 branches and over 14 million members, three quarters of them over thirty. Fifty films were suppressed because they showed drunken scenes; on the radio La Traviata was shortened to cut out the drinking; an ‘agitational steamer’ went down the Volga, and medical research teams jumped onto the bandwagon, working from the Serbsky Institute of Criminal Psychiatry, with an enormous research centre for the causes and consequences of drink (one head of department was sacked for suggesting moderation). In 1986 there were victories — output of vodka down by a third. Men were denounced by their mothers-in-law and packed off to ‘cure-labour prophylactorias’ without any judicial process. However, it was all more than somewhat ridiculous. Very little could be done to stop people making samogon, and of course they did this with ingenuity. The rural background of so many told them how. There was even a computer-programmed process, and it was often superior to the state product (and sold for more). Sugar sales from 1985 to 1987 reflected this, increasing more than they had done between 1970 and 1980, and yeast also boomed, for instance in Kamchatka. Fruit was stolen in large quantities, and criminal gangs went around with tankers full of neat spirits. In Tatarstan there was an underground distillery in the very Party headquarters; a fishing trawler was found to contain 576 bottles of vodka to celebrate the navigator’s wedding; soldiers used to shave the top of their heads and then place upon them a piece of bread, soaked in boot polish that had been left to melt into it under the sun for a day or two. One workman in Vladikavkaz complained on behalf of his hundred-odd fellows that ‘ordinary people have no holidays and everyone walks around in a foul mood, like jackals’. In 1988 the whole campaign was relaxed, and soon collapsed. By 1993 Russians were ahead of Frenchmen as drinkers, but over sixty drink factories had been destroyed and there were thousands of hectares of uprooted vineyards, whether in Yalta or in the Caucasus; Georgian wines had been famous. Now, even Armenia suffered, because she had produced the corks. It all added to the great tension and the disruption of supplies in general that went ahead in 1987-8.