Down with Big Brother (25 page)

Television cameras accompanied Gorbachev practically everywhere he went in western Siberia. Here he embraced the notion of the “human factor” as the decisive element in the revolution that he was attempting to unleash. Like many visitors to Siberia, he was struck by the contrast between the riches that were pouring out of the ground and the squalor in which people were forced to live. As he toured supermarkets, drilling rigs, and gas compressor stations, he was besieged by complaints about shoddy housing, poor food supplies, air pollution, outdated equipment, and the lack of consumer
goods. The ends had clearly
not
justified the means. The Stalinist system of economic management had created a monster that fed on itself, producing little benefit either for the country or for its inhabitants.

The new
gensek
was shaken to learn that for all the billions of rubles that it had contributed to the central treasury, Nizhnevartovsk did not possess a single public movie house. Movies were screened occasionally at a Communist Party youth club, but tickets were hard to acquire. All this troubled Gorbachev as he flew to the regional capital, Tyumen, for a meeting with local party officials. The next morning he got up early to revise the text of the speech that his aides had prepared for him.
⁶⁵
He agreed with the planners that urgent measures had to be taken to reverse the decline in oil production. But there was another message he wanted to convey: The entire economy had to be reoriented toward the individual.

“It is embarrassing for us to talk about the millions of tons of oil and cubic meters of gas when a drilling foreman says to us that the greatest incentive in Nizhnevartovsk is to be given a ticket to see a film,” he told party workers, gathered in front of him like dim-witted schoolchildren. “Why, at the end of the day, do we need to extract millions of tons of oil and gas? Not so that we can simply talk and brag about such quantities, but so that people’s lives can be improved, so that the economy becomes stronger, so that our defenses can be strengthened, so that the people’s living conditions can be improved. That is why all this is necessary.”
⁶⁶

During those early barnstorming trips around the country Gorbachev frequently discarded the speeches that had been prepared for him in advance. He modeled his speaking style on the early Bolsheviks, who could keep audiences spellbound through the sheer force of their oratory. Speaking extemporaneously provided a contrast with his immediate predecessors, who were barely able to read from prepared texts. On the other hand, it caused him to ramble, the occupational disease of an all-powerful leader who is rarely contradicted. The points he was trying to make could easily get lost in an avalanche of words. Sometimes he got carried away with his own rhetoric, forgetting the point that he intended to make.

While the new tsar had a very clear sense about what was wrong with the Russian economy, he had a much hazier idea of how to put it right. Stripped of their revolutionary rhetoric and good intentions, his early policies often boiled down to more of the same. He still proclaimed an undying faith in the socialist system of centralized distribution. His attitude to Lenin remained deeply reverential. On the subject of market economics, Western visitors found that he was practically illiterate. Given these ideological limitations
and the ingrained habits of Soviet bureaucrats, it was not surprising that the party bosses in western Siberia responded to the new leader’s criticisms and exhortations in the traditional way. They drilled hundreds more wells and increased the pressure on work crews to meet plan targets. Little attention was paid to the maintenance and repair of existing wells or the rational, long-term development of oil fields. Only token efforts were made to improve the living conditions of oil workers.
Uskorenie
(acceleration) became the slogan of the day.

Over the next two years oil production did increase slightly. But the frenetic drilling of new wells had the effect of making matters even more chaotic, exacerbating the problem of waterlogged fields. By 1988 Soviet production was in steep and irreversible decline. Even more alarming, at least in the short term, was a decision by Saudi Arabia in the summer of 1985 to increase its oil production dramatically. Shortly after Gorbachev’s visit to Siberia, world oil prices crashed. By the first quarter of 1986 the Soviet Union would be able to fetch no more than ten to twelve dollars a barrel for its oil, compared with a peak of nearly forty dollars in 1980. During Gorbachev’s first two years in office the country’s hard currency export earnings fell by almost a third.

Perestroika was doomed before it had even begun.

G
ORBACHEV’S TRIP TO
Western Siberia turned out to be important for another reason: It marked the high point of his ill-conceived antialcohol campaign, which did more to alienate the Russian people than any other single action. With hindsight, it was probably the most spectacular blunder committed by the new leadership during the early stage of perestroika.

Drink had been the scourge of Russian life for many centuries. “The greatest pleasure of the people is drunkenness, in other words forgetfulness,” noted the marquis de Custine during his visit to Russia in 1839.
⁶⁷
The Brezhnev regime tacitly encouraged vodka sales, which provided a valuable source of tax revenue and helped ensure the political acquiescence of the population. Consumption of hard liquor had almost quadrupled during the Brezhnev period. By the time Gorbachev came to power, alcoholism had reached epidemic proportions. Official studies showed that 70 percent of all crimes were related to alcohol. Drink was blamed for widespread absenteeism at work, a sharp increase in the divorce rate, and a dramatic drop in male life expectancy.

The driving forces behind the antialcohol campaign were two Politburo
members who had played an important role in helping Gorbachev become general secretary, Yegor Ligachev and Mikhail Solomentsev. Ligachev was a puritan, disgusted with the moral decay that he saw all around him. He had already tried to enforce a ban on alcohol in his hometown of Tomsk. Solomentsev was a reformed alcoholic who waged war on drink with the enthusiasm of the convert. Together they persuaded the Politburo to adopt draconian restrictions on the production and sale of alcohol. Tens of thousands of liquor stores across the country were closed down; centuries-old vineyards in the Caucasus were plowed up; alcoholic beverages were banned from official receptions. The sale of alcohol was prohibited altogether before 2:00 p.m. The few liquor stores that were permitted to remain open were constantly besieged by long lines of frustrated customers.

The effect of this campaign was to drive one of Russia’s largest and most profitable businesses underground. Sugar became a “deficit item” overnight, as the production of illegally brewed moonshine shot up. Unable to buy vodka from government stores, people switched to any available substitute. Thousands of desperate alcoholics died from imbibing noxious substances, such as eau de cologne, glue, window-cleaning liquid, and shoe polish. The government surrendered its jealously guarded monopoly over alcohol sales to criminal gangs. The loss of tax revenue from alcohol sales left a hole in the state budget that was never repaired. From 1985 onward there was a growing imbalance between the money income of the population and the supply of goods and services. Since the government continued to fix prices by administrative fiat, the result was widespread shortages. By the time the antialcohol campaign was quietly abandoned in 1988, the authorities had lost control over the monetary system.

Although Gorbachev was not the principal instigator of the antialcohol drive, he supported it wholeheartedly. In the public mind it was viewed as
his
campaign. Jokes soon circulated at the new leader’s expense. Russians started referring to him as
mineralny sekretar
(mineral water secretary), instead of
generalny sekretar
(general secretary). He was undaunted by the criticism. At Politburo meetings he made clear that he regarded the struggle against alcohol as part of the struggle for communism. What was at stake, he told his colleagues, was the “genetic future” of the nation. When the deputy head of the state planning agency, Gosplan, objected that the move toward prohibition would deprive the state of up to 12 percent of its revenues, Gorbachev cut him short. “Vodka is not going to bring us to communism,” he snarled.
⁶⁸

Gorbachev’s determination to impose sobriety on his countrymen, even
against their will, revealed an authoritarian streak in his personality that contrasted with his talk of democracy and openness. “Bear in mind, this is not for a day or two, or even for a year. It is forever,” Gorbachev told the oil workers of Nizhnevartovsk, wagging his index finger at them, like an angry patriarch.
⁶⁹
The workers applauded sullenly, without any intention of changing their ways.

GENEVA
November 19, 1985

T
HE DAY AFTER HIS APPOINTMENT
as general secretary, Gorbachev had written a private memorandum to himself, outlining his political priorities. Improving relations with the United States, the leading imperialist country, was at the top of the list.
⁷⁰
The time had come to put the memorandum into effect. He would have a face-to-face meeting with Ronald Reagan, a man Kremlin propagandists had compared with Hitler in his obsessive quest for world domination.

Close to one hundred photographers from all over the world were on hand to record the first handshake between a Soviet general secretary and an American president in more than five years. The practice of regular summit meetings had been suspended as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the political turmoil in Moscow. Reagan, who was already in the second term of his presidency, had geared himself up for a summit with first Andropov and then Chernenko. But, as he later complained, the Soviet leaders “kept dying on me.”
⁷¹
Now, in Gorbachev, he had finally found a young and vigorous leader with whom he could talk.

Reagan had a visceral dislike of Communists that went back to his days as a trade union activist in Hollywood after the Second World War and his suspicion that the Reds were attempting to take over the American movie industry. At his first presidential news conference he had spoken of Soviet
leaders as if they were soulless automatons, willing to “commit any crime, to lie, and to cheat” in order to promote the goal of worldwide revolution.
⁷²
Yet as he pumped Gorbachev’s hand in the courtyard of the Villa Fleur d’Eau on Lake Geneva, he found “something likable” about him. “There was warmth in his face and his style, not the coldness bordering on hatred I’d seen in most senior Soviet officials I’d met until then,” he recalled later.
⁷³

A small army of White House advance men had spent weeks discussing how Reagan could break the ice with Gorbachev. They had crawled over the grounds of the nineteenth-century château, with measuring tapes and telephoto lenses, looking for the best camera angles. It was important to establish the right atmosphere, an amalgam of intimacy, parity, informality, and security. Finally they settled on a cozy boathouse down by the lake, a hundred yards from the main house, with a picturesque fireplace. It was an image maker’s dream. After strolling down to the lake, the two most powerful men in the world would sit down opposite each other in overstuffed chairs, by a blazing fire, and address the great issues of war and peace. This would be the “Fireside Summit.” If that evoked memories of the reassuring fireside chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—one of Reagan’s great heroes—so much the better.
⁷⁴

The summit began on an inauspicious note, with arguments over ideology and human rights. “At the beginning it was more like a dispute between the number one Communist and the number one capitalist than a working dialogue between the world’s two most powerful leaders,” Gorbachev recalled later.
⁷⁵
To ease the tension, Reagan suggested a walk in the fresh air. The younger man accepted with alacrity. By the time they got to the summer house, a fire was already blazing in the hearth, attended by a bureaucrat with top-level security clearance.

As Gorbachev settled into his armchair, the president consulted his script, typed on a deck of four-by-six index cards, which he occasionally shuffled. He had given some thought to how to address his Soviet guest. In the end, he settled for “Mr. General Secretary,” having been persuaded that the use of “Mikhail” on the first occasion might be misconstrued. Having got the formalities out of the way, he staked out some common ground. Here we are, he said, the two of us, sitting opposite each other in this room. You, like me, were born in an obscure hamlet, in the middle of a huge country. From these poor and humble beginnings, we have risen to become the leaders of America and Russia.

“We’re probably the only people in the world who could start World War III. And we’re also the only two people, perhaps, in the world that could prevent World War III.”
⁷⁶

At first glance, it would be hard to think of any two men more different than the seventy-four-year-old president and the fifty-four-year-old
gensek
. One had made a career out on anticommunism; the other dreamed of giving communism a new lease on life. One was bored by the details of public policy and would happily abandon his briefing books for another viewing of
The Sound of Music;
the other was a workaholic who devoured position papers and intelligence assessments, underlining interesting passages with an iridescent marker. One held fast to certain immutable principles; the other was a compromiser born and bred. One was an amiable character, who liked telling jokes; the other didn’t much care for jokes and could be a bit of a bully.