Down with Big Brother (36 page)

After getting into a literary brawl with Russian nationalists in 1972,
Yakovlev was sent into gilded exile as ambassador in Canada. He remained there for ten years, observing the workings of a Western democracy from up close and the tragicomic goings-on of the late Brezhnev era from afar. The Canadian experience gave Yakovlev the ability to view the problems of his own country with a degree of intellectual detachment. It also provided a relaxed setting for a remarkable series of conversations with Gorbachev in May 1983, during which the two men explored many of the ideas that ultimately led to perestroika. Gorbachev, then the youngest member of the Politburo with responsibility for agricultural affairs, was making his international debut with a ten-day visit to Canada. Yakovlev had the job of showing him around.

Yakovlev had met Gorbachev on several occasions in the early seventies but did not know him well. However, they had a very close friend in common, a man called Mark Mikhailov, who was from Stavropol, Gorbachev’s hometown, and had worked for Yakovlev in the Central Committee. Thanks to this mutual friend, they knew that they could be frank with each other. The informal nature of Gorbachev’s trip also helped. Hopping around Canada in an old prop-driven Convair plane, they discovered that they had remarkably similar views. At one stop their Canadian host failed to show up, and they had a long two-hour walk through the cornfields until they were caught in the rain. “I took advantage of the circumstances and told him what I really thought. He did the same,” said Yakovlev.
¹⁸⁸
Far from KGB eavesdroppers and their doddering Kremlin colleagues, they talked about the “stupidities” of Soviet foreign policy and the need for a radical change of direction at home.

Gorbachev brought Yakovlev back from his Canadian exile and helped him become director of a prestigious Moscow think tank, the Institute for World Economy and International Relations. After he became general secretary, he promoted Yakovlev to the Politburo and made him his closest confidant. Yakovlev was Gorbachev’s ideas man, the intellectual powerhouse behind perestroika.

Although Yakovlev and Ligachev were political opposites, in one respect they were very similar. They both were skilled apparatchiks, accustomed to wielding power behind the scenes. On the basis of long experience, they had an intuitive feel for the backstage intrigues of the Central Committee bureaucracy. Although Yakovlev had a following among Moscow intellectuals, he lacked the populist instincts of a man like Yeltsin. Yakovlev believed that the real fight was in the Politburo, not on the streets, and that Yeltsin was harming the cause through his emotional, erratic behavior.

The supreme operating rule of big-time Kremlin politics was the principle of plausible deniability. Instructions were given verbally, often by telephone, in such a way that they could not be traced back to their source. Sometimes they consisted of little more than a wink and a nod. Like Ligachev, Yakovlev exerted his influence through a network of well-placed allies. He acted as the political patron of the self-proclaimed “kamikazes of glasnost,” the radical newspaper editors who were constantly probing the ideological limits. They took responsibility for what appeared in their newspapers, but it was understood that he would protect them in a crisis.

A typical example of Yakovlev’s methods came in October 1986 with the release of the anti-Stalinist film
Repentance
, one of the major breakthroughs of glasnost. A Felliniesque allegory set in Stalin’s native Georgia,
Repentance
dealt with some of the most explosive issues of Soviet history as well as contemporary politics. Yakovlev knew that it would be difficult to get such a work approved by Politburo conservatives. In order to skirt around this obstacle, he reached a confidential understanding with the director of the film, Tengiz Abuladze.
Repentance
would not be officially released. Instead it would be shown by private invitation to select audiences. The number of screenings grew and grew until virtually the whole country had seen the film.
Repentance
became a nationwide sensation.

Once censorship was relaxed, Soviet journalists and filmmakers needed little encouragement from above to expose the dark secrets of the past. Nevertheless, conservatives like Ligachev soon began to view Yakovlev as the evil puppeteer, pulling the strings of his glasnost puppets. They blamed him for all their setbacks. In his memoirs Ligachev denounces Yakovlev as the éminence grise who distorted the true course of perestroika through his manipulation of the media. Doing battle with such a man was like fighting shadows. “We had no idea what a powerful and dangerous weapon the media could be in [conditions of]
glasnost
and pluralism. Aleksandr Yakovlev, who had spent many years in the West, naturally had a much better understanding of this than other members of the Politburo. From the very beginning he established a personal control over the right radical press.”
¹⁸⁹

If socialism was to be saved, Ligachev knew that he had to fight back.

L
IKE
Y
AKOVLEV
, L
IGACHEV HAD
his network of like-minded editors, who regarded him as their political patron. In March 1987 one of these editors, Valentin Chikin, launched a journalistic broadside against glasnost in
his newspaper,
Sovietskaya Rossiya
. It came in the form of a full-page article, headlined
I CANNOT BETRAY MY PRINCIPLES
, signed by an obscure Leningrad chemistry teacher named Nina Andreyeva. The headline was borrowed from a recent Gorbachev speech, but the article itself was the antithesis of practically everything the general secretary stood for. Andreyeva defended Stalin, called for a “class struggle both at home and abroad,” and denounced the informal political groups that were springing up around the country. It was, Gorbachev said later, a direct assault “against perestroika.”
¹⁹⁰

Exactly who was behind Andreyeva’s tract later became a matter of great controversy. The radicals immediately suspected that Chikin was acting with Ligachev’s protection and encouragement. The two men were certainly in close contact during this period. Ligachev repeatedly denied that he had anything to do with the article
before
publication, and the case against him has never been proved. Given the way such matters were handled, it is unlikely that a “smoking gun” will ever be found. In a sense it is irrelevant because the real issue with the Nina Andreyeva article was what happened
after
publication.

Had “I Cannot Betray My Principles” been the musings of a lone chemistry teacher, no one would have raised an eyebrow. By 1988 glasnost was well advanced, and opinions similar to Andreyeva’s appeared in the press every day. What attracted attention, however, was their exceptionally prominent display in a leading party newspaper. The three-column photo spread of the author, wearing a Bolshevik-style leather jacket, surrounded by adoring students, was a signal to readers that her views had official approval. For the conservatives it was a call to arms.

The attempt to turn “I Cannot Betray My Principles” into the new party line began the day after publication, on the fifth floor of the Central Committee. Ligachev had deliberately avoided inviting the editors of the two most radical periodicals,
Ogonyok
and
Moscow News
, to the meeting, which took place in the Politburo conference room, around the corner from his office. After a few remarks about propaganda support for the spring sowing campaign and the development of livestock breeding, the ideology secretary turned to the subject that was uppermost in his mind.

“Have you read the article by Nina Andreyeva?” he asked the editors.

“Yes, we’ve read it,” replied Ivan Laptev, the editor in chief of
Izvestia
. The official organ of the Soviet Parliament,
Izvestia
had become a strong supporter of glasnost, which Laptev feared could be endangered if Ligachev got his way.

“It’s an excellent article, a wonderful example of party political writing. I would ask you, comrade editors, to be guided by the ideas of this article in your work,” enthused Ligachev in his stentorian voice. He then turned to the head of the Tass news agency, regarded by thousands of provincial newspapers as the official voice of the Kremlin.

“Tass should distribute this article at once.”
¹⁹¹

His instructions were immediately carried out. Dozens of provincial newspapers republished the article. Party organizations across the country held special meetings to study it. Telegrams from “honest workers,” supporting Andreyeva’s views, flooded into the Central Committee. One morning the Communist Party newspaper
Pravda
even printed Ligachev’s name ahead of his Politburo colleagues, elevating him to almost equal status with Gorbachev.
¹⁹²
The liberal intelligentsia was in despair. Without a signal from the top, no one dared respond to Andreyeva and
Sovietskaya Rossiya
. People remembered the Brezhnev period of stagnation, when Khrushchev’s thaw had turned back into a freeze, with little warning. The fate of perestroika seemed to lie in the balance.

Ligachev had timed his counteroffensive well. When he met the editors, Gorbachev had just left Moscow on an official visit to Yugoslavia. Yakovlev had flown off to Outer Mongolia, eight time zones away. It took three weeks for them to formulate a response.

THE KREMLIN
March 23, 1988

T
HE
P
OLITBURO DEBATE
over the Nina Andreyeva affair erupted unexpectedly. Gorbachev finally got around to reading the article on his return from Yugoslavia, on Saturday, March 19. He spent the weekend pondering its significance. The general secretary was uncertain how to react. On the one hand, he had no desire for a showdown with Ligachev, the party’s deputy leader. On the other, if this was a deliberate assault on perestroika, as his radical advisers insisted, there would have to be some kind of reply.

The Politburo was not due to meet until the following Thursday, for its regular weekly meeting. On Wednesday, however, fate intervened. Several thousand collective farmers from all over the Soviet Union had descended on the Kremlin for their first congress in more than twenty years. As was customary on such occasions, Gorbachev opened the meeting with a two-hour speech. Behind him, on the stage of the Palace of Congresses, a vast, plushly decorated auditorium built to house big propaganda events by day and performances of
Swan Lake
by night, were most of his Politburo colleagues. When the
gensek
finally got through exhorting the kolkhozniks to be more efficient and display more initiative, the Politburo members filed backstage to the Presidium Room for tea and sandwiches. Without warning the chitchat turned to Nina Andreyeva.

“Yes,” said Vitaly Vorotnikov, the prime minister of the Russian Federation, emphatically. “There was an article the other day in
Sovietskaya Rossiya
. A real, politically correct article. It was a model for our ideological work.”
¹⁹³

Ligachev jumped into the conversation, with more lavish praise of Andreyeva. “It’s good that the press is finally showing these …” He left the end of the sentence unspoken, realizing he was in polite company. “Otherwise everything would go to pieces.”

The Politburo patriarch, Andrei Gromyko, supported Ligachev. “I think it was a good article. It will put everything back in its proper place.” His fellow septuagenarian Mikhail Solomentsev, who had helped Ligachev organize the failed antialcohol campaign, added his two kopecks’ worth in favor of Nina Andreyeva.

Gorbachev suddenly realized that he could not let the conversation continue in this fashion. Four full Politburo members, out of a total of thirteen, had just endorsed a political platform that was fundamentally different from his own. Unless he took a clear stand, he could quickly find himself in a minority, supported only by the two hard-core liberals Yakovlev and Shevardnadze. He would then be forced to embrace the views expressed in “I Cannot Betray My Principles” or resign.

“If you consider this article to be a model, then we have to clarify a few things. I have a different view.”

“Well, well,” shot back Vorotnikov, an Andropov protégé and early supporter of Gorbachev, increasingly dismayed by the radical direction that perestroika had taken.

“What do you mean ‘well, well’?”

There was an awkward silence as Gorbachev and Vorotnikov glared at each other, and the other Politburo members glanced uneasily around the room.

“This smells of a schism,” said Gorbachev fiercely, using the Russian word
raskol
, a Bolshevik term of abuse. “The article was directed against perestroika. I have never objected if someone expresses his personal opinion. Whatever views you want—in the press, in letters. But I’ve been told that there have been attempts to turn this article into a party directive. In some party organizations they are already adopting it as a resolution, like in the old days. The press has been forbidden to utter a word against it.”

At this point Gorbachev decided to gamble everything on the strongest card in his hand, his immense political prestige, both at home and abroad. His Politburo critics may have tapped into a groundswell of Communist
Party dissatisfaction with the way perestroika was going, but they were disorganized and leaderless. Ligachev was a divisive, controversial figure. The rules of party discipline, plus ingrained habits of obedience, made it difficult for the conservatives to mount an open challenge to the general secretary. Their aim, at this stage, was not to replace the leader but to make him their spokesman. Gorbachev understood the contradiction in their position and exploited it brilliantly.