The clues that Gorbachev intended no real change after all, certainly none that might endanger his own absolute power, can be found in his discussion of communism as a system. The precariousness of the Soviet economy was caused by the personal greed of Leonid Brezhnev, his cronies and their families, and their antics, Gorbachev theorized. Corrupt individuals, not Marxism, had perverted the system, sullying a great nation. It was a crisis requiring his new leadership. It required major but not structural reform.
Stalin also used such reasoning in his public pronouncements at the very same time he was carrying out the most murderous purges in history. Remarkably, many believed the words while willfully ignoring the deeds. Mao, too, understood the use of the scapegoat. He periodically urged the Chinese to open up and criticize communism, a tactic that had the additional bonus of making it easier to later target anyone foolish enough to take him up on the invitation.
Gorbachev tactically applied criticism and the usual catchwords—bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, nepotism, and alcohol—to convert the explosion of public contempt and resentment against a scapegoat and make it redound to political support for himself. At the same time, however, he insisted that communism’s original, “positive” goals redeemed their abuse by some Russians.
Like Romania’s Ceausescu, Gorbachev permitted local elections that were limited to two candidates, but he kept his own seat and those of his top nomenklatura off limits from the vote. Gorbachev’s new “parliament” was just the old Supreme Soviet reshuffled to add a few hand-picked nonparty members and religious leaders. Russia’s new “supreme governing body” was still the leader’s docile servant. Gorbachev then installed himself into the newly renamed post of state president and gave himself broad governmental powers.
Russians followed along like sheep, as usual. Well-publicized meetings with the country’s religious leaders were held so as to make it appear as if he favored an open society that would be soft on Christianity. The whole sequence of fake democratization had been trailblazed by Romania’s Ceausescu. “Perfume your Communism with a dab of Western democracy, and the West will clothe you in gold,” Andropov had told the Romanian leader. Ceausescu called it the Andropov Principle. Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika were meant to instill hope and national pride as a necessary sop to the masses, to console them for getting little if any real democracy or food and consumer goods after the stirring reform moment had passed. Ceausescu’s New Economic Order amounted to much the same thing.
It is important to note that the Kremlin was, and still is, a creature of habit. In Russia, any formulas for action that have proven successful in the past will always be repeated. For instance, Gorbachev’s first visit to Washington in December 1987 was a near duplicate of Ceausescu’s successful last official visit to the United States in April 1978. The latter visit had been prepared by Gen. Pacepa, who accompanied the Romanian tyrant on the actual visit.
Both leaders brought their foreign intelligence chiefs along with them. Both boosted their national history and culture and recited poems by famous writers. Both pretended to be fans of American movies. In Washington, both reaffirmed their deep devotion to Marxism and let everyone know that they were determined to stay in power for the rest of their lives—an anti-democratic fact, to be sure, but one that Washington nevertheless appreciated. Unfortunately, a foreign leader’s determination to retain supreme power simplifies Washington’s job, insofar as the conduct of foreign policy is concerned.
Both Gorbachev and Ceausescu also sought photo opportunities in the United States. They understood celebrity media manipulation well, and both went out of their way to make friends among the American media. Gorbachev arranged an exclusive NBC interview; Ceausescu’s had been with the Hearst newspapers. After formal ceremonies, official document signing, and the requisite exchange of fancy dinners, Gorbachev again followed in Ceausescu’s footsteps by turning on the charm for high-level American businessmen and members of Congress, too often all too eager to make themselves useful to visiting despots.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, he praised communism to the skies for domestic consumption. On February 25, 1986, he told the XXVIIth Congress of the Communist Party: “We have built the whole country anew, have made tremendous headway in the economic, cultural and social fields and have raised generations of builders of the new society. We have blazed the trail into outer space for humanity.” Marshalling some alleged statistics: “In a quarter of a century, real per capita incomes have gone up 160 percent and the social consumption funds more than 400 percent; 54 million [apartments] have been built which enabled us to improve the living conditions of the majority of families…. The successes of our science, medicine and culture are universally recognized.”6 It was the classic Russian formula to boost national pride.
Gorbachev also set out to prove that he was a new breed of communist leader—just as Ceausescu had done. He called publicly for a decreased role for the party in running the country. It sounded terrific to Western ears. An evolution toward moderation! In fact, Gorbachev was seeking to outflank the competition. In the traditional exercise for any new Russian ruler, he was scapegoating the old regime. Everyone knew that the Communist Party was a dysfunctional and irrelevant bureaucracy. The secret police, not the party, had always been the source of political power in Russia—which is why nearly every Russian leader is so closely connected with the secret police.
In the spirit of Ceausescu, of Khrushchev after Stalin, and even of Deng Xiao Ping after Mao, Gorbachev declared a perestroika, an open season to criticize his own predecessors. Let a hundred flowers bloom! Let the whole nation rise up to blame certain others for the ills of the system.
Soon, however, Gorbachev’s role in transforming the Soviet Union out of existence (for which he was given the Nobel Prize and was named Man of the Decade by Time magazine) was dramatically reassessed by former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who had prominently endorsed Gorbachev’s glasnost in the 1980s. Now she conceded that “the role of Mikhail Gorbachev, who failed miserably in his declared objective of saving Communism and the Soviet Union, has been absurdly misunderstood.”7
Few looked back to speculate about how they had been so misled. Those details suddenly became nothing but an arcane footnote in the history of foreign policy.
“NEW” RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY
On the evening of Christmas Day 1991, the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time. The next day, the Soviet Union was dissolved, and Russia’s imperial tricolor banner was raised again over the Kremlin. The world watched in amazement as the Russians, armed with only a fierce desire for freedom, brought down one of the most repressive forms of government known in history. A few days later, Boris Yeltsin, president of the Soviet republic of Russia, along with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, signed a treaty creating the Russian Commonwealth of Independent States.
Millions of Russians began donating money to resuscitate another Russian symbol: the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, built in the nineteenth century in thanks to God for Russia’s victory over Napoleon. The NKVD had dynamited it in 1931 as part of Stalin’s war against religion that razed fifty thousand churches and killed over three times that number of clergy.
The Soviet Union’s spectacular collapse made the Kremlin a hit in the West, for a time. Public opinion in Russia was a horse of another color. Suddenly allowed to speak freely, Russians spent most of their time venting their pent-up anger and frustrations. Everybody began fighting everybody else and waiting for another miracle to occur.
The privileged Moscow nomenklatura decided that Russia’s president, Mikhail Gorbachev, was a loser. They appealed for help to the KGB—the traditional Russian way out of a Kremlin power struggle. On June 22, 1991, the chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, informed the Soviet parliament that Russia was on the brink of catastrophe. According to “reliable” KGB sources, he explained, the CIA was drawing up plans for the pacification and e
ven occupation of the Soviet Union.
Seemingly coincidentally, Kryuchkov ‘s speech was “clandestinely” videotaped and broadcast on Russia’s television that same evening. Two months later, Kryuchkov launched a coup d’état against Gorbachev in Moscow. On August 18, 1991, following a pattern similar to that which ousted Nikita Khrushchev, the KGB arrested Gorbachev at his summer residence in the Crimea and took over the Kremlin. Thousands of unarmed citizens defended the building. An insurgent tank switched sides. Boris Yeltsin, standing on its top, passionately appealed to the people of Moscow to preserve the “Soviet order.”
That speech, televised worldwide, was the birth certificate of a new Soviet star. Boris Yeltsin, who had been expelled from the Communist Party in July of 1990, asked in front of international TV cameras that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union be banned and its properties confiscated. People cheered.
Then and there the Communist Party expired, and no one missed it. Until Lenin came along, Russia had never had a significant political party anyway. Even after Lenin, the Communist Party had been merely the tool of the autocrat, not a forum for political competition, as the term “party” implies in the West.
EVOLUTION TOWARD INVOLUTION
The first freely elected president in Russia’s history, Boris Yeltsin, was not only as different from his predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev, as two human beings could be, he also had divergent political goals, tactics, and strategies. Gorbachev was convinced, and continues to be convinced to this day, that he could have saved the bankrupt Soviet Union by persuading the West to finance his “Marxist society of free people.” Therefore, he geared all his efforts toward cozying up to the United States and its Western allies.
Yeltsin, on the other hand, believed that making a name for himself in the West was a dangerous game with potentially fatal consequences. Therefore, he decided it would be wise for him to ignore the United States and its Western allies for a while and focus on his own image as a jolly tsar who was as Russian as vodka. His fondness for the bottle even turned out to be a plus.
Since the sixteenth century’s Ivan the Terrible, Russia had been a samoderzhavie, its own historical form of totalitarian autocracy in which a feudal lord rules the country with the help of a political police loyal only to him. That is what Russia’s new president also wanted to do.
Boris Yeltsin began the rise to his new power by distancing himself from communism, even though, as a Communist Party and Politburo member, he had served in its top ranks. His post-Soviet biographies stressed his engineering career and how he “mastered twelve construction worker skills (stonemason, carpenter, driver, glazier, plasterer, etc.), a unique achievement for a young college graduate.” He was stretching the truth in saying that he had joined the Communist Party late, more as an engineer than as a politician, at the advanced age of thirty-one and as “vice chairman of the Construction Department, then secretary on construction issues of the Central Committee of the CPSU.” He lied. But most Russian autocrats do that.
Yeltsin began to build his own samoderzhavie. First, he renamed the Soviet PGU (Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye, or First Chief Directorate of the KGB) with a more American-sounding name, Central Intelligence Service (Tsentralnaya Sluzhba Razvedki, or TsSR), so as to pretend that it was a new Westernized organization. TsSR’s new chief, Yevgeny Primakov, was a former KGB general whose first intelligence cover had been as a journalist in the West and, later, chief foreign intelligence advisor to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. During the first Iraq war, Primakov ferried messages between Gorbachev and Saddam Hussein, who had long been a Soviet client.
Next, Yeltsin began “rehabilitating” the KGB by appointing a new KGB chief, Vadim Bakatin, and pretending that the KGB had become a democratic organization. Bakatin was an undercover KGB officer and a former head of the Soviet Ministry of Interior in charge of the Soviet gulag system and internal repression. A new glasnost campaign for Western consumption portrayed Bakatin as an educated admirer of all things American; a fan, in his youth, of the Beatles and Elvis Presley; and—miracle of miracles—of American jazz. “My favorite album is Blue Pyramid,” Bakatin told the New York Times in November 1991.
David Wise, an American journalist who visited Bakatin at KGB headquarters, wryly noted that a statue of the KGB founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky, still stood guard over the new chairman’s reception area.8
That there was in fact no “new” KGB was suggested in an interview with Bakatin’s personal spokesman, KGB General Alexei Karbainov, by the New York Post on November 25, 1991. In a long conversation with American journalist Uri Dan in his office at the Lubyanka, General Karbainov promised that the “new” KGB would help American authorities learn the whole truth about the “old” KGB.
What about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? Dan asked. “I have no material about them,” Karbainov shot back, “no files. Nothing about the alleged nuclear spying.” Dan then recalled that Nikita Khrushchev had admitted in his memoirs that the Rosenbergs had “significantly” helped the Soviet Union build its first A-bomb and asked, “If you had material about the Rosenbergs, would you provide it?” Feigning incomprehension, Karbainov brusquely changed the subject.9
During Pacepa’s years at the top of the KGB community, General Sakharovsky used to discuss the Rosenbergs quite proudly. According to Sakharovsky, by going to the executioner without confessing that they had become KGB agents, the Rosenbergs had laid the groundwork for “our all-important anti-American movements.” Soon after that, left-wing peace demonstrations became big business for the KGB, worldwide.
On January 24, 1992, Yeltsin abolished the KGB and created a “new, democratic organisation” called the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation (Ministerstvo Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii, or MB) run by another former KGB general, Viktor Barannikov.10 In October 1993, when the Russian parliament rebelled against Yeltsin, the MB stormed the parliament building with artillery and arrested Yeltsin’s antagonists. After thus “resolving” the Russian parliamentary crisis, Yeltsin ordered the MB to attack the Chechen rebels. The towns of Grozny and Pervomayskoye, where the rebels had taken refuge, were razed in a war that cost over 30,000 lives.
In December 1993, Yeltsin abolished the MB by ukase, or Russian government edit. That was another lie. It was merely rebaptized as the Federal Counterintelligence Service (Federalnaya Sluzhba Kontrrazvedki, or FSK). Former KGB General Nikolai Golushko was appointed director of the “new” organization until March 1994, when he was replaced by another old KGB hand, Sergey Stepashin.11
A 1993 FSK report to Yeltsin claimed that foreign secret services were now busy trying to flood the Russian market with poisonous alcohol, bad cigarettes, fake money, drugs, and pornography, echoing the same lies Stalin and all his successors had used to drum up fear and nationalist paranoia against the Western enemy. “The objective of these foreign services,” added that report, was also “to infiltrate disguised leaders of criminal organizations in Russia’s power structures, and then to dictate conditions of trade relations.”12
On April 3, 1995, Yeltsin renamed the FSK as the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti v Rossiyskoy Federatsi) or FSB, and he appointed former KGB General Mikhail Barsukov to head the “new” organization.
Two days later, Yeltsin quietly gave the “new” FSB the same powers and duties the KGB had always had: the power to monitor political groups deemed a threat to the state, search homes and businesses, control all state secrets, carry out counterintelligence operations within the government and military, form businesses, infiltrate foreign organizations, conduct investigations, and run its own prison system.13
Most former Soviet states adopted identical patterns. Their “new” intelligence agencies made only superficial stabs at reorganization but never cut their ties to Russia’s new KGB, now FSB. Belarus’s political police didn’t even bother to change its KGB name.
The final result? Lenin’s secret police established in 1917 stayed solidly in
place under their new brass nameplates. Over the years it had changed its name many times, from Okhrana to Cheka, to GPU, to OGPU, to NKVD, to NKGB, to MGB, to MVD, to KGB. Now it was called the FSB.
Boris Yeltsin will go down in history as among the founders of the first intelligence dictatorship in history.
THE PERIL OF CATCHING COLD
In the summer of 1996, Boris Yeltsin was elected Russia’s president for a second time, but he was running the county through his political police, not a political party. Russia was never democratic, and that would not be its future. An ill-conceived privatization was underway to enable a small clique of predatory Russian insiders to plunder the country ‘s most valuable assets.
By 1999 the looting had become so outrageous that people attending auctions of state-owned businesses often carried banners with the slogan “privatizatsiya (privatization)=prikhvatizatsiya (grabbing).”14 “They are stealing absolutely everything and it is impossible to stop them,” explained Anatoly Chubais, the Yeltsin-appointed privatization tsar, who by that time was a billionaire who owned a good part of Russia’s energy industry himself.15
Corruption from the looting of state assets penetrated every corner of the country, eventually creating a Mafia-style economic system that threatened the stability of all of Russia. In July 1998, the ruble plummeted by 75 percent of its 1997 value, short-term interest rates rose from 21 percent to 60 percent, and the stock market slumped by 60 percent of its value in the previous year. Petropavlovsk, the capital of Kamchatka, and a few other smaller towns lost electricity due to unpaid bills.16 Yeltsin unsuccessfully tried to solve the crisis by sacking two prime ministers within six months: Viktor Chernomyrdin in March and Sergey Kiriyenko in August.
Facing economic chaos and civil disobedience, Yeltsin increasingly cut back on democratic experiments and governed through the traditional Russian reliance on the political police. According to Yevgenia Albats, a respected Russian intelligence expert and the author of a well-documented book about the KGB, “the Soviet Union, with a population of 300 million, had approximately 700,000 political police agents; Yeltsin’s new ‘democratic’ Russia, with a population of only 150 million, has 500,000 Chekists. Where we once had one Chekist for every 428 Soviet citizens, we now have one for every 297 citizens of Russia.”17
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