Down with Big Brother (40 page)

He finally got to sleep around 4:00 a.m. An hour later he was awakened by the noise of engines being revved up and soldiers joking about the end of the war. He dressed carefully, asking an adjutant to inspect his uniform from all sides, to ensure that he would be picture-perfect as he crossed the “Friendship Bridge.” He ordered guards to be withdrawn from the last remaining Soviet outposts around Khairaton. Outside on the parade ground five hundred soldiers of the 201st Reconnaissance Division were lined up next to their armored personnel carriers, waiting for the command to move off. Gromov gave the troops a pep talk, telling them they would go down in history as the last battalion of Soviet troops to leave Afghanistan. As they paraded past his reviewing stand, he noticed that many of the men had tears in their eyes.

A few minutes later Gromov climbed into his own APC to drive the final mile into Soviet territory. The “Friendship Bridge” was deserted. In the distance, on the Soviet side of the wrought-iron bridge, he could see a crowd of journalists and well-wishers, including fourteen-year-old Maksim. He jumped down from the vehicle and proceeded on foot. At the center of the bridge, on the state boundary line, he turned back in the direction of the country he had just left and said “what needed to be said.”

Speaking in a soft voice, so that no one could hear him, the last commander of the Fortieth Army roundly cursed the leaders who had dispatched a million Soviet boys to defend the “cause of socialism” in a backward, mountainous land, with a long tradition of fighting foreign invaders. And he asked for forgiveness from the mothers of the fifteen thousand soldiers who had never returned from Afghanistan.
¹⁰

MOSCOW
March 26, 1989

A
CCORDING TO STANDARD
M
ARXIST-
L
ENINIST THEORY
, a metropolis is meant to exploit its colonies for its own benefit, using them as a source of cheap raw materials and a dumping ground for shoddy industrial goods. In the Soviet case, precisely the opposite had happened. Russia exported oil at heavily discounted prices to places like Estonia, Poland, and Cuba. Sometimes it received overpriced consumer items in return for this oil; at other times, nothing at all. Third World trouble spots like Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua were a constant drain on the Soviet treasury. Under communism it was impossible to draw a line between exploiting and exploited nations. The rapacious system of central planning exploited everyone, Russians most of all.

Geopolitical setbacks overseas and economic devastation at home caused Russians to turn away from foreign adventure and examine their own problems. Thanks to glasnost, they were able to compare their standard of living with that of other people. They were dismayed to find that they were at the bottom of the pile. Vast territories and unprecedented military might had brought ordinary Russians nothing but pain and further economic suffering. The social compact of the Brezhnev era—pride in the Soviet Union’s superpower status combined with a low but gradually increasing standard of living—was disintegrating.

The revolt of ordinary Russians was the essential precondition for the successful rebellions in Eastern Europe. The subject nations wanted their freedom. Russians wanted an end to their economic misery. Eventually these two elements gelled into a grand political bargain that was to transform the Communist world.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to show any real concern for the opinions of his countrymen. In the spring of 1988, in the wake of the Nina Andreyeva affair, he had made a strategic decision. He would make use of public opinion in his battle against the nomenklatura. Frustrated by the opposition of Communist Party bureaucrats to his reforms, he came up with a device for circumventing them altogether. Citing the Bolshevik slogan “All Power to the Soviets,” he proposed creating a powerful legislature. The old Supreme Soviet, a rubber-stamp body packed with party hacks and a few token milkmaids, would be replaced by a real parliament.

The announcement that the Soviet Union would hold its first-ever contested election on March 26, 1989, provoked a wave of political excitement. Soon the entire country was caught up in a gigantic debate, which unfolded in television studios, city squares, meeting halls, classrooms, army barracks, and the columns of newspapers. The hubbub of voices was both bewildering and exhilarating. Fear melted away like the packed ice on Russian rivers after the long winter, cracking open with a mighty cacophony of sound. Suddenly everybody seemed to have an opinion. Walls were plastered with political slogans; housewives standing in line for groceries vented their spleen at the government; anti-Communist tracts were distributed on street corners.

As the elections approached, the apparatchiks began to panic. Voting procedures had been designed to give official candidates a built-in advantage, but in many cases this was not sufficient to ensure their election. The prospect of hundreds of Communist Goliaths being slain by populist Davids made for a riveting spectacle. This was a struggle for personal—as much as political—survival. In the Soviet Union political connections were the key to a privileged lifestyle: a larger apartment; improved food rations; opportunities for foreign travel; access to a government dacha; better medical services; a car perhaps. Losing one’s place in the nomenklatura was devastating, psychologically, professionally, and even economically.

In many people’s eyes, the struggle for democracy in the Soviet Union was symbolized by high-profile opposition candidates, like Boris Yeltsin and Andrei Sakharov. Both men overcame enormous bureaucratic resistance to get their names on the ballot. Yeltsin, the turncoat Politburo member, had decided to run for a city-wide seat in Moscow, representing six
million voters. Frantic attempts by the Communist authorities to discredit him only increased his popularity among ordinary Muscovites. Sakharov was nominated to fill one of the deputy slots reserved for the prestigious Academy of Sciences, a body that had joined in the Kremlin’s campaign to revile him for his human rights activities and opposition to the war in Afghanistan. The bureaucrats who ran the academy had initially attempted to block his candidacy but were forced to climb down following a series of angry protest meetings by rank-and-file scientists.

By Western standards, the election campaign was extraordinarily low-tech. There were no slickly made television advertisements, no image makers or spin doctors, no fund-raising drives, no campaign staffs. There weren’t even many political posters in evidence, just the occasional scruffy sheet of typewritten paper tacked to a wall, describing the “program” of one or another of the candidates. The most important platform for propagating a candidate’s ideas was the political meeting.

The Communist Party dug deep into its bag of dirty tricks in order to rig the election in its favor. Party officials packed nomination meetings with their own activists, preventing opposition candidates from getting their names on the ballot. Many apparatchiks ran unopposed in rural districts, where people were still afraid to express their opinions.

When the election returns came in, the apparatchiks received a hugh shock. In most places where there was a clear choice, the party-approved candidate was defeated. The list of the vanquished read like a who’s who of Soviet public life: Politburo members, generals, cosmonauts, government ministers, and the mayors or party bosses of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, and many other big cities. In Moscow Yeltsin crushed his official Communist rival by a stunning margin of thirteen to one. In the Baltic states popular front movements that were already beginning to toy with the words “national sovereignty” and “independence” crushed Communist Party candidates. In Ukraine, which had previously been regarded as a bastion of reaction, five regional Communist Party bosses were defeated by nationalist candidates.

The election results surprised and delighted Moscow intellectuals, who had previously regarded the Soviet people as a dark, inchoate mass unreceptive to democratic ideas. “After this, my country will never be the same again,” enthused the poet Andrei Voznesensky, a spokesman for the
shestidesyatniki
generation. “We intellectuals always saw ourselves as the symbol of democracy, but we thought the people weren’t ready for it. The joyful thing about all this is that in many ways we have been proved wrong.”
¹¹

Despite the powerful showing of the reformers, the conservatives were
still assured a built-in majority in the new legislature. One-third of the 2,250 seats in the Congress of People’s Deputies had been reserved for Communist-dominated “social organizations,” including the party itself. Communist Party candidates also did well in the countryside and traditionally conservative areas of the country, such as Central Asia and Belarus.

The apparatchiks had suffered a serious reverse, but they were hardly out of the game. Within days of their setback at the polls, they were galvanized into action by nationalist disturbances in the turbulent Transcaucasian republic of Georgia, birthplace of Josef Stalin. The counterattack would not be long in coming.

TBILISI
April 9, 1989

H
IS LEFT HAND RESTING ON A SILVER STAFF
, the patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church waited patiently for silence. The broad tree-lined avenue in front of him was packed with people. Illuminated by hundreds of flickering candles, their predominantly young faces bore expressions of expectancy and determination. One of the most ancient peoples of the Caucasus, inhabiting the mythical land of the Golden Fleece, Georgians were imbued with a sense of unique national identity. His Holiness Ilya II knew that it would be difficult to persuade his compatriots to back down now. But he felt a duty to try.

“In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. God is with us.”
¹²

A hush descended over the crowd as Georgia’s eighty-two-year-old patriarch pronounced his blessing. It was 3:15 a.m., and some ten thousand people were now crammed into the plaza in front of the Georgian parliament, on Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi’s principal thoroughfare. Some of the demonstrators held placards with slogans, handwritten in Georgian and in English, like “We Demand an Independent Georgia,” “Down with Soviet Power,” and “Russian Occupiers, Go Home.” Others waved the banned black, red, and white flag of the pre-Communist Georgian republic, which
had enjoyed a brief independence between 1918 and 1921, before its conquest by the Red Army. The color black was intended to symbolize the Georgian nation’s tormented past, red its bloodstained present, and white its glorious future.

On his way to the parliament building from his residence in the old town, the patriarch had seen Soviet troops and armored cars massing in Lenin Square, a few hundred yards away. Georgian officials had told him that the army planned to use force to disperse the demonstrators. He spoke slowly, with long pauses, hoping that reason would prevail over emotion.

“All of Georgia appreciates you. The nation understands what you are doing. It knows how important it is. But we cannot ignore the real danger that is facing us, right now. That is why I came to bless you and ask you to leave.”

Now in its fifth day, the protest outside the parliament building had begun as a hunger strike by several hundred students to denounce attempts by the Abhazian minority to secede from Georgia. As they listened to speeches by opposition activists, the protesters became increasingly radical and nationalistic. There had been demands for the formation of a provisional government to kick out the Communists and restore Georgian independence. Frightened of losing control, the authorities had called in the army. The previous day a column of tanks and armored cars had driven through the streets of the capital, while helicopters flew overhead. Far from intimidating the people of Tbilisi, this military display had only fueled their ardor. As rumors spread of an imminent crackdown, the size of the crowd grew steadily. The unarmed protesters blocked the approaches to the building with barricades, made out of city buses with deflated tires and abandoned concrete trucks.

Flanking the patriarch, on the stone steps of the floodlit parliament building, were the most prominent leaders of the opposition. Alongside them, squatting in makeshift plastic tents that had been pitched on a little stretch of grass next to the steps and facing their supporters in the square, were the original hunger strikers. A few minutes earlier the demonstrators had been dancing and singing Georgian folk songs. As they listened to Ilya, pleading with them to disperse, their mood became somber and defiant.

The patriarch tried again. “It is possible that there are only a few minutes left. We have a chance to go to the cathedral and pray there.”

“We’re not going,” one of the demonstrators shouted.

“We won’t take a step back,” others cried. “We have taken an oath not to leave.”

Suddenly the whole crowd began to chant: “Long live Georgia,” “Long live Georgian independence.”

The patriarch knew what was about to happen but felt powerless to do anything more. “Do you want to die?” he murmured to one of the protesters, standing beside him. As he left the plaza, the passionate voice of one of the nationalist firebrands, twenty-eight-year-old Irakli Tsereteli, boomed over the loudspeakers.

“Tonight we will be reborn. We will remain on the path of democracy, the path of independence, the path of God. God is with us.”

“Amen,” the crowd roared back.

“God is with us.”

“Amen.”

“We have taken an oath never to retreat. The best sons of Georgia will keep that oath, against the will of our enemies.”