Down with Big Brother (3 page)

His Politburo colleagues had consistently underestimated him. One of the main reasons why they had elected him general secretary to replace the disgraced Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 was that they were sick of strong, charismatic leaders. They wanted a malleable stopgap, and Brezhnev—nicknamed “the ballerina” because of his ability to change positions in line with prevailing opinion—seemed to fit the bill. They were correct in thinking that the new leader would be more easygoing than Khrushchev and would put an end to the upheavals that had shaken the party apparatus. But they seriously misjudged his staying power. Brezhnev had outlasted, and outmaneuvered, them all.

As he entered the sixteenth year of his reign, Brezhnev was a mixture of Communist demigod and national buffoon. The personality cult surrounding the general secretary, or
gensek
, had reached ludicrous proportions. Not content with depicting the doddering seventy-three-year-old leader as a wise and far-seeing statesman, the official media also presented him as a brilliant military strategist, a distinguished man of letters, and an outstanding contemporary thinker. Propagandists compared him with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state. He was the proud holder of Party Card No. 000002. (Card No. 000001 was reserved for the dead Lenin.)

The more infirm and senile Brezhnev became, the more honors and accolades he received. By the end of his life he had accumulated more awards than Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev combined. Soviet history books had been rewritten to transform his undistinguished wartime exploits into a decisive
contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany. His boastful ghostwritten reminiscences about World War II,
Malaya Zemlya
(Little Land), had been acclaimed a literary masterpiece by Soviet critics and printed in millions of copies. They were read out on radio and television, serialized in magazines, and “studied” in schools and party meetings.

All this was the cause of great ridicule among ordinary Soviet citizens. In public they joined in the officially orchestrated adulation of the general secretary, adopting resolutions to support his political initiatives and holding ceremonies to celebrate his birthday. In the privacy of their own homes they joked about his poor Russian and his narcissistic habits. After the publication of his memoirs in 1978, the villagers of Zareche began referring to the walled-in Brezhnev compound as Malaya Zemlya.
³

Although his sayings and doings filled the front pages of Soviet newspapers, Brezhnev usually worked for no more than one or two hours a day. By the late seventies he was barely able to look after himself, let alone the affairs of a mighty superpower. Politburo meetings had been reduced to fifteen or twenty minutes. The general secretary rarely visited his Moscow apartment or his Kremlin office. He spent weeks at a time cooped up in the Zareche dacha or his favorite hunting lodge at Zavidovo, at the confluence of the Moskva and Oka rivers. Family life had become a burden to him. His tearaway daughter, Galina, had scandalized Moscow by her luxurious lifestyle and affairs with shady circus performers. His son-in-law, Yuri Churbanov, had become a front man for the Uzbek cotton Mafia. Brezhnev would shut himself up for hours in his study with his personal bodyguard, an old wartime buddy named Aleksandr Ryabenko, playing checkers or dominoes.

Brezhnev’s true state of health was one of the Kremlin’s most closely guarded secrets. It was clear to anyone who observed his stumbling gait, slurred speech, and vacant expression that he was a chronic invalid. But the extent of his physical and mental ailments was known only to three or four senior Politburo members and a handful of doctors, bodyguards, and relatives. The truth was that the world’s largest country had been without an effective ruler since at least 1974, when the general secretary suffered a series of mild strokes caused by the medical condition known as arteriosclerosis of the brain.
⁴

As the arteries of Brezhnev’s brain hardened and became clogged, he lost control over many of his physical functions. Doctors observed a shocking, apparently irreversible change in their patient’s personality, caused by the devastation of the central nervous system. Once jocular and unassuming, he
had lost the ability to view his own actions with a critical eye. At times he experienced fits of deep depression and burst into tears for the most trivial reason. At others he would have delusions of grandeur, reading aloud the obsequious articles about himself in the state-controlled press. He insisted on driving fast cars long after he had slipped into his second childhood. There were several occasions when he nearly killed himself and his terrified security guards by steering his limousine too closely to a cliff on the winding mountainous roads of Crimea, where he had a summer residence.
⁵
His vanity was fed by a retinue of sycophants, always ready to assure him that he was a superb driver, in addition to being the beloved father of the Soviet people.

What would normally have been a serious but possibly treatable illness had been greatly complicated by an addiction to sleeping pills and prescription drugs. Brezhnev had long suffered from chronic insomnia. His aides and cronies slipped him powerful tranquilizers, which he often washed down with his favorite vodka, Zubrovka. During the mid-seventies he had formed a doting relationship with a KGB nurse, who supplied him with a steady stream of pills without the knowledge of his doctors. The depressants had the effect of further weakening his nervous system, making him listless and inert and contributing to his symptoms of dementia. This in turn further aggravated his insomnia. It was a vicious cycle. One crisis followed another.

In an attempt to save the general secretary from himself, his doctors and bodyguards frequently resorted to petty deceit. They diluted the Zubrovka with boiled water, causing Brezhnev to look suspiciously at his glass and complain, “There’s something about this vodka that’s not quite right.” On other occasions they gave him blank sleeping pills. The problem with this trick was that Brezhnev was unable to distinguish the real pills from the fake ones. Desperate to get to sleep, he would swallow increasingly large numbers of pills. The bodyguards worried that he might end up killing himself.
⁶

Enormous effort went into preparing his public appearances. Special escalators were invented to permit the
gensek
to climb the steps of the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square and his personal airplane. Politburo speechwriters were instructed to avoid the use of certain long words that he had difficulty pronouncing. Teams of resuscitation specialists accompanied him wherever he went. Special medical facilities were installed wherever he stayed. Doctors were under strict orders to do everything in their power to make sure that Brezhnev fulfilled his ceremonial obligations. The head of the Kremlin medical service, Yevgeny Chazov, later complained that the attempt
to camouflage the leader’s true state of health was not only “hypocritical” but also “sadistic.”
⁷

When Brezhnev gave a speech, his doctors never knew whether he would make it back from the podium. In October 1979, Chazov had accompanied his patient to ceremonies marking the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the German Democratic Republic. The trip almost ended in disaster after Brezhnev suffered an attack of chronic fatigue, losing sensation in his legs. An hour before a special session of the East German parliament bodyguards carried the general secretary out of his residence. When the time came for him to make his speech, he was unable to move from his chair. Chazov sat horrified in the corner of the hall as the Polish and East German leaders, Edward Gierek and Erich Honecker, gripped their Soviet comrade by the elbows and frog-marched him to the lectern. Miraculously Brezhnev managed to wheeze his way through his thirty-five-minute speech without alerting Western reporters to his true condition.
⁸

When it was all over, the Soviet Foreign Ministry lodged a formal protest with Poland over Gierek’s “unfriendly gesture” in assisting Brezhnev to the lectern of the East German parliament. According to the Soviet démarche, the gesture had created the erroneous impression that Comrade Brezhnev was “infirm.” Chazov later wrote that “gratitude” would have been more in order. “I am not convinced that Brezhnev would have been able to get up from his chair at all without outside help.”
⁹

B
ORN IN
1906, Brezhnev had watched Russia transform itself from a weak, practically defenseless country into a mighty superpower, feared and respected throughout the world. Soon after coming to power in 1917, the Bolsheviks had been forced to surrender territories containing one-third of Russia’s urban population to Germany under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. By 1945 not only had they reconquered all the land they had lost, they had gained control over a vast chunk of Central and Eastern Europe. Victory in World War II had brought a five-hundred-mile buffer zone around the western fringes of the Slavic heartland. For Brezhnev and his colleagues, the true western border of the Soviet Union was now represented by the Elbe River, where Russian and American soldiers had linked up following the victory over the Third Reich. It was an empire that exceeded the wildest dreams of the tsars.

The Soviet empire was shaped in the form of concentric circles, radiating outward from Mother Russia. The “inner empire” was made up of nations,
such as Ukrainians, Georgians, Balts, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Armenians, that had all been incorporated into the Soviet Union proper. The next circle consisted of the “People’s Democracies” of Eastern Europe, such as Poland, East Germany, and Hungary. The “outer empire” included Third World countries, like Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan, that had shaken themselves free from the shackles of imperialism but had not yet reached the stage of “real socialism.” In the last decade alone Marxist-Leninist parties had seized power in more than a dozen such countries, causing analysts in both Moscow and Washington to conclude that the worldwide “correlation of forces” was moving inexorably in favor of socialism.

Strategically, too, the global balance of power seemed to be shifting in favor of Moscow. During the past two decades the Soviet Union had embarked on a huge military buildup. From a position of clear inferiority when Brezhnev came to power, it had become the geostrategic equal of the United States. In some areas, such as tanks and heavy land-based missiles, it enjoyed a significant advantage. Six thousand long-range nuclear warheads were on permanent standby, ready to obliterate Washington and Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, at the touch of a button. Hundreds more medium-range missiles were targeted on West European cities, such as London, Frankfurt, and Paris.

Brezhnev regarded it as his duty to defend this legacy and pass it on intact to his successors. He based his actions on the tsarist principle that territory gained must never be surrendered. Translated into the wooden terminology of scientific socialism, the tsarist insistence on never taking a step back was known as the “irreversibility of history.” Once a country had progressed from one stage of history to another—from feudalism to capitalism or from capitalism to socialism—there was no turning back. To countenance the possibility of a regression from socialism to capitalism was to question the whole basis of Marxist dialectics.

In private Brezhnev could be brutally frank about Soviet foreign policy goals. When Alexander Dubĉek and the other Czechoslovak reformers were kidnapped and brought to Moscow in August 1968, following the Soviet invasion of their country, the Soviet leader gave them a harsh lesson in realpolitik. “The results of the Second World War,” he told Dubĉek, “are inviolable, and we will defend them even at the cost of risking a new war.”
¹⁰

A decade after the crushing of the Czechoslovak experiment in “socialism with a human face,” the Soviet regime appeared both unchanging and unchangeable. There was a similar immutable quality about international affairs. The world seemed permanently split into two, ideologically opposed
camps. Restrained by a balance of nuclear terror, neither side possessed the means to secure victory over the other.

In reality, the state of Soviet society and economy was more brittle than practically anyone imagined. With his vacant gaze and shuffling walk, Brezhnev was the public face of a vast multinational empire already sinking into irreversible decline. By the fall of 1979 the Soviet Union had become a sclerotic giant. Its bureaucratic arteries had shriveled and hardened. Years of ideological indoctrination, or, more simply, years of lies, had produced an atmosphere of total cynicism. Edicts were issued from the center and promptly forgotten; grandiose projects were announced and never completed; statistics had ceased to have any meaning. In the surrealistic atmosphere of the late Brezhnev era, the government allocated billions of rubles to building imaginary factories and nonexistent railway lines. Years later it was discovered that the leaders of the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan had been routinely reporting a fictitious cotton crop to Moscow and distributing the receipts among themselves.

Even the military-industrial complex—the leadership’s number one priority—was not immune from the ills afflicting the rest of the economy. The Soviet Union might be ahead of the United States in tanks and rockets and number of men under arms, but it was losing a much more important race. Soviet generals had begun to voice serious concern about the lack of “smart weapons” capable of matching the sophisticated weaponry under development in the West. Although some official U.S. studies claimed to show that the Soviet Union was “ahead” or “catching up” in key areas of military technology, such as cruise missiles or antisubmarine warfare, Soviet scientists knew very well that this was not an accurate picture.
¹¹
The Soviet Union was in danger of missing out altogether on the technological revolution that was transforming Western societies.