Down with Big Brother (37 page)

“I am not going to fight for my chair. But as long as I am here, as long as I occupy this position, I shall insist on the idea of perestroika,” he declared, hinting that he was prepared to resign. “No, this is not going to succeed. We will discuss this matter in the Politburo.”

T
HE
P
OLITBURO MEETING LASTED
for two days, an unprecedented length of time, even by glasnost standards. It began in the Kremlin on Thursday and continued all day Friday on the fifth floor of Old Square, in the same conference hall where Ligachev had heaped praise on the Andreyeva article, less than a fortnight previously. Much of the debate was taken up by the general secretary’s long monologues. A mixture of waffling visionary and determined politician, Gorbachev had a unique ability to envelop an audience in billowing clouds of rhetoric, exhausting and disorienting everybody with his tortuous logic. The confusion of a good argument seemed to clarify his thinking and serve as a platform for action. He liked to quote Lenin: “The most important thing in any endeavor is to get involved in the fight, and in that way learn what to do next.”
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He could talk himself out of almost any crisis.

On this occasion the role of attack dog was played by Yakovlev, who took the Andreyeva article apart line by line. “This is an antiperestroika manifesto,” he declared bluntly. He was supported by the prime minister, Nikolai Ryzkhov, who made an impassioned defense of perestroika and suggested that Ligachev be relieved of his position as ideology secretary. Ever the unctuous Georgian, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze described what was happening in the Soviet Union as the “major event of the twentieth century.” “The issue here is nothing less than the salvation of socialism,” he enthused. “A primitive approach could compromise our magnificent enterprise.”
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Now that the debate had been framed in terms of perestroika—for or against—the outcome was clear. No one wanted to be labeled a “splitter” or “destroyer of party unity.” The remaining Politburo members all hastened
to endorse the party line, as laid down by Gorbachev and Yakovlev. The conservatives soothed their consciences by grumbling about the “irresponsible” media. “Of course we are all for glasnost,” remarked Gromyko, eager to make up for his lapse earlier in the week. “But it is intolerable that the Soviet people are presented in the press as a people of slaves, a people of lackeys. The thesis developed by
Sovietskaya Rossiya
was a reaction to this slander.”

As the debate swirled around the question of who had issued the order to discuss Andreyeva’s article at party meetings, Ligachev maintained a sullen silence. He later said that he found the atmosphere at the Politburo session “oppressive.” It reminded him of a “witch-hunt.” Yakovlev was clearly intent on making him take political responsibility for the affair and ousting him from the leadership. He was ready to defend himself, if necessary.
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Gorbachev decided not to press the point. He had won an important victory. He had got the Politburo to agree to issue an authoritative reply to Andreyeva in the pages of
Pravda
, to be drafted by Yakovlev. By now it was clear that he had the support of the Politburo’s wobbly-kneed majority, who were willing to go along with practically anything their leader said. Wishing to avoid an open break with the conservatives, the general secretary helped Ligachev cover his traces. Like his opponents, he had an ingrained fear of
raskol
. He thought that little would be gained in having a Politburo composed of like-minded people if it was unable to push its decisions through the generally reactionary apparat, the vast bureaucratic machine that actually ran Russia.
¹⁹⁷

Pravda
published its counterblast to “I Cannot Betray My Principles” on April 5, ending three weeks of national uncertainty about the future of perestroika. The unsigned editorial insisted that there were no “taboo subjects” and “no going back” to the policies of the past. A few weeks later Ligachev was relieved of his ideological portfolio and given the thankless job of rescuing Soviet agriculture from its chronic state of crisis.

T
HE
N
INA
A
NDREYEVA AFFAIR
was a turning point for both the Soviet Union and Gorbachev. The floodgates of glasnost were opened once and for all. The trickle of revelations about the country’s Stalinist past now became a veritable deluge. There was something new every day: the television premiere of Mikhail Bulgakov’s “anti-Soviet” masterpiece
The Heart of a Dog;
the publication, by an Estonian newspaper, of the secret protocols
of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, demonstrating the collusion between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany; a theater production of
Hope Against Hope
, Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s epic description of the gulag; the decision by a Moscow court to release Vladimir Nabokov’s erotic novel
Lolita
. The rewriting of Soviet history became so extensive that Soviet secondary schools were obliged to cancel all history exams, pending the release of new textbooks.

The rebirth of history triggered a sense of political exhilaration that transcended class barriers. The homeland of world socialism became a gigantic “debating society,” in Gorbachev’s phrase.
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Highbrow intellectuals, frightened that they might miss something, spent hours glued to their television sets. Brawny workers thumbed through fat literary journals in search of a long-banned work by Akhmatova or Solzhenitsyn. Former prison camp inmates cast aside decades of caution and told their stories in public for the first time. Archivists for government agencies devoted their spare time to drawing up lists of the “repressed.” A group called Memorial succeeded in gathering tens of thousands of signatures in several weeks to support demands for a center to commemorate Stalin’s victims. Suddenly everybody seemed to have an opinion and was not afraid to voice it.

Gorbachev sensed this national mood and responded to it. By now he saw himself as a man of destiny, chosen by history to accomplish something very special. To a far greater extent than any of his colleagues, he had staked his reputation on the success of perestroika. He was the tsar-liberator, the farsighted ruler who had given the serfs their freedom. At Politburo meetings he occasionally compared himself to the great Lenin, who had launched a revolution through the sheer force of his political will. There was no going back now.

“You have certain goals in which you believe, and you are sure that you are right,” he told his fellow Politburo members. “If this is the case, you have to go on, right to the end. Otherwise what kind of man are you, and why do you occupy this position? You have the country, the whole world, behind you. If you panic at the slightest setback, like some weak fellow, if you cry ‘Help’ and behave like an opportunist who is concerned only with saving his own skin, then all is lost.”
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The Andreyeva affair made Gorbachev realize that he could no longer entrust his revolution solely to the party. He was taken aback by the strength of bureaucratic resistance to his ideas. “Now I realize the kind of people I’ve been working with,” he told his chief of staff.
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“You can forget about perestroika with people like that.” He complained that many of his
Politburo colleagues lacked the political imagination to grasp the significance of what was happening in the Soviet Union. “It’s as if there’s a ceiling, right here,” he said, waving a hand above his head.
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The political system would have to be opened up to outside forces.

At the end of the two-day Politburo meeting on the Andreyeva case, when everybody was too exhausted to pay much attention, Gorbachev exploded one of his rhetorical bombs. “The people” were demanding changes in the electoral system. Serious consideration would have to be given to how to implement the Leninist slogan “All power to the Soviets,” the representative organs that had, up until now, provided a constitutional fig leaf for Communist dictatorship. The entire relationship between the party and the Soviets would have to be “rethought.”

Stripped of the ideological trappings, what the general secretary was proposing was an end to seven decades of one-party rule.

LABOR CAMP PERM-35
July 8, 1988

M
ART
N
IKLUS FELT
like the man in the proverbial time machine. An unrepentant Estonian nationalist, he had been dispatched to a “strict regime” labor camp in the Urals in 1980, at a time when the Brezhnev regime was preoccupied with the crises in Poland and Afghanistan. His contact with the outside world had been minimal. He spent his days sewing cords onto electric irons. When he reached the required daily norm of 522 finished electric irons, he was allowed to take a forty-five-minute walk in a thirty-foot-long cage. If he protested, he was thrown into an unheated isolation cell, ten feet long, three feet wide, and six feet high. The nerve roots in his back had become chronically inflamed from sitting in the same position, day after day. Now he was going home.

Like many Estonians, Niklus was a man with a long memory. He remembered how the Red Army had marched into his hometown of Tartu in June 1940, when he was a nine-year-old boy. He remembered how his country had been incorporated into the Soviet Union against its will and how the cream of the Estonian nation had been deported to Siberia. He remembered the postwar purges and the campaign of terror against private farmers. Unlike most of his countrymen, however, he did not keep quiet about what he had seen. At Tartu University he organized groups of students to listen to
Western radio stations. He made copies of the text of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact—unearthed by Western historians in the former Nazi archives—and distributed them as widely as he could. He tried to stage street demonstrations on Estonia’s prewar independence day. The authorities considered him a “dangerous recidivist.” They sentenced him to long prison terms for “anti-Soviet agitation,” only to see him resume his seditious activities as soon as he was released. By 1988 the former zoologist had spent nearly twenty of his fifty-seven years in Soviet penal institutions.

Since his most recent incarceration three general secretaries had died in office, and nothing had changed at Perm-35. The new general secretary had come into office, angrily denying that the Soviet Union had a human rights problem.
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Vague rumors had reached the camp—the last remaining outpost in the once-sprawling “Gulag Archipelago”—of new political slogans, like glasnost and perestroika. But no one seemed to know what they meant. Initially Niklus was skeptical that they meant anything at all. As recently as 1986 a fellow political prisoner, Anatoly Marchenko, had died of the treatment he received at Perm-35. When Niklus asked a prison guard when they could expect to see some “restructuring” in the gulag, he was told: “We don’t know. We only follow the rules; we have received no instructions.”
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Niklus began to suspect that something might be changing when several nearby labor camps were closed. The population of Perm-35 began to decline. By mid-1988 there were only several dozen political prisoners left in the camp that had once housed such eminent anti-Soviet “hooligans” as Natan Shcharansky, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Yuri Orlov. On June 15 Niklus received a visit from two officials of the Estonian KGB. They brought him a food parcel from home, gave him some chocolates—an unimaginable luxury in Perm-35—and asked, very politely, if he would like to write a letter to his mother. He was permitted to receive Estonian newspapers, and soon he was reading about a demonstration in Tartu demanding his release. On June 30, still sitting in prison, he read an interview with a senior official announcing that he had already been freed and was on his way home. His reaction was to begin an immediate hunger strike.

It took another week for the release order to make its way down through the prison bureaucracy. On July 8 Niklus was escorted out of the barbed-wire enclosure, and taken to the Perm railway station. He sent a telegram to his mother, hoping that someone would show up at Tartu railway station to help him with his luggage. Then, still dressed in the striped black clothes reserved for specially dangerous prisoners, he boarded a train to a country of newspaper fable, the land of perestroika.

The “dangerous recidivist” was unprepared for the welcome he received in Tartu. Thousands of well-wishers showed up at the train station, offering him flowers and waving the long-banned flag of the prewar Estonian republic. There were banners with slogans like “We want perestroika without the KGB” and “We want to leave the Soviet Union.” “It was the most fantastic moment of my life,” Niklus recalled later. “They didn’t simply carry my bags; they carried me, on their shoulders. Everyone wanted to touch me.” He was paraded around the town, like a returning sports hero, and made a little speech about Estonian independence. Within two hours he heard his halting, emotional words being broadcast over the same state radio that had once denounced him as an “enemy of the Soviet people.” That evening there was a mass meeting in Tartu’s medieval town square to celebrate his return.

There were many times, during those first few weeks of freedom, when the former political prisoner could scarcely believe what was happening around him. Ordinary people now voiced opinions that had earned Niklus long terms in the gulag. A few weeks after his release, Estonia’s Communist-run television station broadcast a program to mark the forty-ninth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. There was a graphic picture of sinister black arrows, marked with swastikas, devouring most of Poland. Then large red arrows coming from the direction of the Soviet Union swallowed up the rest of Poland, plus the Baltic states. There were shots of the Soviet and German foreign ministers, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, congratulating each other in Berlin. The camera then panned to a rally, addressed by Yuri Afanasiev, a prominent Russian historian. Afanasiev not only admitted the existence of the secret protocols—a fact still denied by Soviet leaders—but described them as a “historical injustice that we have no right to keep silent about.”
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