Down with Big Brother (6 page)

A splinter from a grenade caught Dmitri Volkov in the throat after he had captured an Afghan tank on the approach road to the palace. Gennady Zudin was shot in the head as he squatted behind one of the Corinthian columns that adorned the front of the palace. Valery Yemishev, one of the first men into the palace, had his right hand blown off by an Afghan grenade. A friend took fifteen seconds out of the battle to reconnect the dangling hand with a rubber band. One of the Soviet doctors, Viktor Kusnechenkov, was killed in the crossfire.

Inside the palace there was total chaos. To disguise their identities, the Soviet commandos had put on ill-fitting Afghan army uniforms. Since both sides were also using Soviet weapons, it was difficult to tell them apart. In order to recognize each other, the Soviets screamed Russian swearwords as they raked the long corridors of the palace with machine-gun fire. They would kick a door down, throw in a grenade, and proceed to the next room. Shrieks and groans could be heard from all directions. When it was all over, Soviet cleanup squads carted away two truckloads of Afghan corpses.

As he ran into the palace, Boyarinov was hit by shrapnel. His face and hands were bleeding. His thirty-man team had been given the task of securing the ground floor, but most of them had disappeared. Rushing down a corridor, he spotted the shell-shocked and seriously wounded Sergei Kuvilin.

“We have to destroy the communications center,” Boyarinov shouted.

“There are none of us left. I’m alone.”

“Well, there’re two of us now.”
⁴⁶

Boyarinov threw a few grenades into the communications center and then raced up the staircase to Amin’s private apartment, leaving Kuvilin to cover the ground floor. At that moment a burst of automatic fire from somewhere up the staircase blew off Boyarinov’s face.

A
S
S
OVIET ARTILLERY SHELLS SLAMMED
into the presidential palace, Hafizullah Amin instructed the commander of the guard to find out where the fire was coming from. “The Soviets will come to our assistance,” he added confidently.
⁴⁷

The commander returned in panic a few minutes later. The telephones were not working. He had managed to reach army GHQ in Kabul by wireless. It too was under fire. No Afghan units had moved from their bases. There were no reports of mutiny or unrest. That left only one possibility: The palace was under attack by the “friendly army.”

“That’s impossible, you’re lying,” screamed Amin, throwing an ashtray at the unfortunate aide. “It’s our own mutinous troops.”
⁴⁸

Like Czechoslovakia’s Alexander Dubĉek before him, Amin could not believe that his Soviet allies had turned against him. For all his brutality, the Afghan leader had retained an innocent faith in the homeland of world socialism that went back to his days as a student at Kabul University. As a young Communist he had regaled his followers with tales about the valiant Red Army. For this army to attack him was not just betrayal. It was sacrilege.

As the sound of gunfire grew louder, Amin rushed out of his room. Two Soviet doctors cowered behind a bar in the corridor. They could see the Afghan leader dressed in white shorts, with drips still sticking out of his bandaged arms. One of the doctors pulled the needles out of Amin’s arms and dragged him to the bar. All of a sudden they heard a child crying somewhere in the darkness. It was Amin’s five-year-old son. Seeing his father, the boy hurled himself at him, grabbing his legs. Father and son slumped down together beside the wall.

Soviet soldiers discovered the two bodies in a pool of blood. Evidently, they were caught in the crossfire. As they lay dying, the tyrant hugged the boy’s head close to his chest.
⁴⁹
After the fighting died down, a member of a rival Afghan faction insisted on carrying out a formal death sentence on Amin “in the name of the Party and the people.”
⁵⁰
The fact that the dictator
was already dead did not deter him from pumping several more bullets into the corpse.

W
HILE THE
S
OVIET COMMANDOS
were mounting their assault on the Dār-ol-Amān Palace, the man who was shortly to succeed Amin as president of Afghanistan was cowering in a bunker on the other side of Kabul. Vain, garrulous, and a chronic alcoholic, Babrak Karmal had been one of the original leaders of the Afghan “revolution.” After quarreling with Taraki and Amin he was sent into exile as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia. The KGB had smuggled him back into Kabul on December 23, 1979, four days before the invasion.
⁵¹

Karmal later boasted that he had directed a “popular uprising” against the tyrannical Amin. In fact he had virtually nothing to do with the fighting. The first meeting of the new Afghan Politburo took place at the Soviet military base at Bagram Airport under the watchful eyes of Karmal’s KGB bodyguards. It was here that Karmal appointed himself general secretary of the Central Committee of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. It was here that he listened to his own prerecorded radio address to the Afghan people broadcast from a transmitter in the Soviet border town of Termez, in which he denounced Amin as an “agent of American imperialism.”

“The day of freedom and rebirth has arrived,” declared the new Afghan leader. “The tyrannical torture machine of Amin and his supporters—the savage butchers, hangmen, usurpers, and murderers of tens of thousands of our compatriots—has been smashed.”
⁵²

Late that night, after Amin was dead, Karmal climbed into a Soviet armored car. The armored car joined a Soviet convoy, guarded by three tanks, moving cautiously in the direction of the city. As dawn broke, the convoy drove into the center of Kabul. It was a clear, crisp morning. Armed men were everywhere. Tanks and armored vehicles roared down streets littered with burning vehicles and the debris of bombed-out buildings. Karmal and his bodyguards were deposited at the Interior Ministry building, now firmly in the hands of Soviet troops.

As Afghanistan’s new president was arriving in Kabul, another convoy was moving in the opposite direction. At the Kabul airport coffins containing the remains of the twelve Soviet commandos killed during the assault on Dār-ol-Amān were loaded onto transport planes.
⁵³
There were special honors for Boyarinov, who was given the posthumous award of Hero of the Soviet
Union. They were the first casualties of a war that was to last nearly ten years and take the lives of more than thirteen thousand Soviet servicemen, in addition to half a million Afghans.

As they watched the coffins of their dead comrades being stacked on transport planes at Bagram Airport that wintry morning, the survivors of the attack on Amin’s palace were convinced that the war was over. In fact it was just beginning.

The long-term results of the invasion were almost the exact opposite of the goals of Politburo leaders. Instead of crushing the Afghan opposition, they gave it new life. Instead of striking a blow against the imperialists, they provoked an unlikely coalition of the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia. And instead of defending the prestige of world socialism, they encouraged a generation of Soviet citizens to question where the world’s second superpower was heading.

When the coffins were eventually unloaded on Soviet soil, there were no salutes and no marching band. The Kremlin did not want anyone to know that Soviet citizens were being killed in combat operations in Afghanistan. The funerals took place in secret. A standard formula was adopted to explain the fatalities of a nonexistent war to the families of the victims. Boyarinov and the others had died “while fulfilling their internationalist duty.”

PITSUNDA
December 28, 1979

A
WOODED PENINSULA JUTTING OUT
into the Black Sea, the Georgian resort of Pitsunda has been known for its natural beauty since ancient Greece. Centuries-old pine trees stretch down to the water’s edge, providing shelter from the sudden winter storms and harsh summer sun. In the first century
A.D
. the Greeks established a fortified trading settlement on the narrow peninsula, with strong walls to scare away pirates. A thousand years later the rulers of Byzantium transformed the fortress into a kind of medieval health spa with magnificent baths.

After Georgia had been incorporated into the Soviet Union, Pitsunda became a holiday resort for the Communist nomenklatura. Nikita Khrushchev liked the place so much that he had a luxurious villa built by the seashore, surrounded by an ugly concrete wall. Recreation facilities included an Olympic-size swimming pool, a gymnasium, and tennis courts. Two other, slightly less grandiose villas were built on adjacent plots of land for more junior leaders.
⁵⁴
It was at Pitsunda, in October 1964, that Khrushchev learned of the Kremlin coup that forced him out of office.

As they walked down the winding paths of Khrushchev’s old dacha that wintry afternoon, the two youngest members of the Politburo recognized that the Soviet Union was headed in the wrong direction. Both Mikhail
Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze were convinced Communists, completely loyal to the system that had sponsored and promoted them. What distinguished them from the older members of the Politburo was a still-youthful energy and optimism, an almost naive belief in socialism’s further perfectibility. There was a word for their generation in Russian:
shestidesyatniki
, “men of the sixties.” Their formative years had been marked by Khrushchev’s thaw, the brief interlude between the terror of Stalinism and the stagnation of the Brezhnev period. The previous generation, as represented by Brezhnev, had been brought up in an atmosphere of all-pervasive fear. Conservative to the core, they were loath even to tinker with the system, for fear of bringing the whole structure crashing down. The
shestidesyatniki
, by contrast, were full of confidence in their own abilities and itching for the chance to put things right. They had little firsthand experience of war and terror.

The generational differences between Soviet leaders were summed up by a joke that became popular during Brezhnev’s twilight years. Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev are seated in a compartment of a train that breaks down in the middle of Siberia. After hours of waiting, an argument breaks out between the passengers over how to get the train moving again. “Let’s shoot one of the drivers,” suggests Stalin. “Then the other drivers will know that we mean business.” “No, that’s inhumane. We must abide by socialist norms,” says Khrushchev. “Let’s offer the drivers higher wages.” Unable to agree, the two older men ask Brezhnev to adjudicate. He ponders the question for a long time. “I know,” he replies finally. “Why don’t we just close the blinds and pretend the train is moving? No one will know the difference.”

The Soviet Union had been practically immobile now for fifteen years. Although Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had no clear idea how to get the train moving again, they understood that the first priority was acknowledging that it had stalled. That meant raising the blinds, letting in some fresh air, and ending the pretense about the country’s advancing from one socialist triumph to another.

As the Politburo member in charge of agriculture Gorbachev had an excellent vantage point for observing the ruinous effects of central planning. The world’s largest country—a country that possessed more acres of bountiful farmland than Canada and the United States combined—was unable to feed itself. A net exporter of grain before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Russia was now compelled to scrounge for grain every year from the capitalist West. Russian peasants, corralled into vast state-run farms during Stalin’s collectivization campaign, had forgotten how to farm. Instead of
producing goods for a market, they fulfilled the orders of bureaucrats. Prices were established by administrative fiat and bore little relation to real costs. The distorted price structure gave rise to many absurdities. Since the price of bread was heavily subsidized by the state and was lower than the equivalent price of grain, it made perfect economic sense for farmers to use loaves of bread as animal fodder.

Predictably enough, Gorbachev’s early attempts to boost agricultural production met with complete failure. In 1979 the grain harvest was a disastrous 179 million tons, 40 million tons below target. The shortfall would have to be met by imports. As usual, Soviet leaders blamed the weather. But Gorbachev knew perfectly well that the real problem was with the way Soviet agriculture—and, by extension, the entire Soviet economy—was organized. Labor discipline was so poor that hundreds of thousands of kolkhozniks failed to show up for work every day. One-third of the food harvest was lost because of inadequate storage facilities, an outdated transportation system, and general mechanical failures. Tractors and combine harvesters left factories in such poor condition that they invariably had to be repaired as soon as they arrived on the farm.
⁵⁵

In public Gorbachev maintained the pretense that all was well. But he talked frankly with Shevardnadze, whom he had known for more than two decades. The two men had much in common. As young men Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had climbed the greasy pole of Soviet politics together, making their early career in the Komsomol, the Communist youth league. Gorbachev became first secretary of the Communist Party in his home region of Stavropol in 1970. At the age of thirty-nine he had in effect become Kremlin plenipotentiary for a predominantly agricultural district roughly the size of Illinois. Two years later Shevardnadze was chosen as Communist Party chief in his native republic of Georgia, on the other side of the Caucasus mountain range.