Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  Only in the president’s milieu could the chairman of the KGB walk up and ask, “Gentlemen, I trust you won’t object if I join you? I will not inconvenience you?” (This was Vadim Bakatin.) It was only in such a setting that encounters with the most well-known persons in the country, those not belonging to the “royal party,” were of no great interest and speaking with them no big deal. Working in such places implied confidentiality. Certainly it was only there that, literally in the space of a few minutes, one could ask the head of state any question one liked or express one’s own opinion.

  Unfortunately, at work, one sometimes encountered dirt that had been brought into politics by the Central Committee and the KGB, but at least for me these instances were exceptional. I can think of only two such occasions, both connected with Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the right-wing nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. During the rather brief interval between the August coup and the breakup of the USSR, I had to deal with him twice, though fortunately not face-to-face. The first time was when an extremely distressed colleague dropped in on me in the Kremlin. Public opinion polls had revealed Zhirinovsky’s enormous popularity. Publishing his standing in the polls would have shown an already overwrought public just how much support he enjoyed. It would inevitably have further swelled the number of his supporters. Therefore, without hesitation I crossed out the real figure and substituted one that was much lower. Surprisingly, this ersatz figure survived without any significant changes many years after the collapse of the USSR.

  Was this unseemly? Of course. Undemocratic? Undoubtedly. Many other unflattering definitions of what I did are appropriate, and I would agree with them. But at least I had an absolutely clear justification in this crisis situation, soon after the coup. Why did Zhirinovsky, who must have noted the obvious forgery in the published public opinion poll, not protest this forgery? It is easy to imagine him, brows knit and lips pursed, shocked at his own standing in the polls. “And just where did this figure come from?” he asks. “From the Kremlin,” his colleague says guiltily, shrugging his shoulders. So why didn’t this self-proclaimed guardian of Russia’s national interests, who dreamed of washing his boots in the Indian Ocean, settle accounts with a petty Kremlin bureaucrat? He would have been right to do so. Yet he swallowed the lie as the scoundrel he was. Knowing the history of Zhirinovsky and his Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, I was all but certain the matter would end here. Under any regime, the devil created by the Central Committee of the KGB must know his place.

  The second involved an almost personal encounter. I was drinking coffee in the buffet of the Moscow Conference on Assessing Human Dimension of the CSCE when I heard strange noises and hysterical shouts in the foyer. Going out to take a look, I saw Zhirinovsky, shouting, “Germans to the buses, to Sheremetevo, to Germany! Jews to the buses, to Sheremetevo, to Israel! Catholics to the buses, to Sheremetevo, to the Vatican!” I glanced around. Although such public outbursts were not allowed according to the conference rules, the officials of the executive secretariat did not react to what was going on. When I ordered that the guard be summoned to throw Zhirinovsky out, several of the executive secretariat colleagues did not agree with what I felt was the only possible course of action.

  In the Kremlin the implications of Yeltsin’s seizure of power after the August 1991 coup were felt constantly and everywhere. For example, after yet another change in the agency that controlled the Kremlin guards—first it was the KGB, then it was the Presidential Guard Service of the USSR—under Yeltsin they came under the control of the Russian special services. Gorbachev’s guards only had authority over the presidential suite of offices. Once I stayed late at work, and upon leaving, I handed over the key to Chernyaev’s office. I lingered a bit, and when I was already out on the street, I heard through the still partly open door a guard speaking to someone on the telephone, “Comrade Kovalev has left.” Most likely someone was interested in the contents of the desks and the safes.

  The official telephones were tapped so blatantly and with such poor technology that it was often impossible to talk because of the interference and noises. Not infrequently it became necessary to redial and talk on the unsecured municipal line.

  Gorbachev’s loss of power was due in large measure to his own gross errors. Returning to Moscow after his confinement in Foros during the coup, instead of going to the Russian White House, the seat of Russia’s parliament, as soon as his plane landed or, at the least, the next morning, he spent the whole day consulting with his confidants. In the evening he held an uninspired press conference in which he affirmed his loyalty to “the socialist choice.” Almost no one grasped that he was speaking of social democracy and not of Soviet-style socialism. When he went to the Russian parliament the next day, this mistake played a fatal role, and Gorbachev was humiliated in the eyes of the entire country, including those who blamed him for the ban on the CPSU, an action that was forced upon him.

  By this time, Gorbachev had lost his political instincts, his feeling for the historical process. I think it was due in large measure to his circle of confidants, who deliberately misguided him and from whom he often received distorted information. In this regard, Valery Boldin is a prominent example. Boldin, who served as Gorbachev’s assistant starting in 1981, became the director of the General Office of the Central Committee and head of the president’s staff. He detested his boss and his reforms and wrote about this openly in his book Collapse of the Pedestal.8 Most of the information that Gorbachev, a reformer, received first passed through the sieve of his trusted and powerful confidant, whose reactionary character the president apparently never realized. Naturally, Gorbachev also received information from those who had direct access to him. But after Shevardnadze and Yakovlev were thrown off his team, the future plotters—KGB boss Vladimir Kriuchkov, Minister of Internal Affairs Boris Pugo, Minister of Defense Dmitry Yazov, and others of their ilk—had a virtual monopoly when it came to informing the president. This is probably why Gorbachev was so nonchalant regarding information about preparations for the coup d’état.

  Often, for some reason, those in daily contact with Gorbachev were afraid to give him critical information. I became firmly convinced of this when I learned from a reliable source that the communists planned to organize massive disturbances and explosions at one or more of the nuclear reactors located in the capital on the Lenin Days in January 1992. I immediately went to Chernyaev who, as it turned out, already knew about this plot and was afraid to tell Gorbachev. But he agreed to pass along this information in my name. Once informed, Gorbachev phoned Yeltsin, who several minutes later phoned him back to say that he had already issued all the necessary orders. Why Chernyaev was so timid remains a mystery to me. Even stranger was that the special services did not inform either Gorbachev or Yeltsin about this matter. They must have been cognizant of the source of my information, a person who was known as a successful, highly placed official in one of the totally harmless departments and was an officer in the KGB’s active reserve, as I was well aware.

  Moreover, Gorbachev’s personal bodyguard, who carried out orders from his immediate superior, KGB boss Kriuchkov, “pumped” Gorbachev full of antidemocratic information in the car on the way to work. Thus, Gorbachev arrived at work already ill disposed toward his own democratic reforms and toward the democratic leaders.

  Too often Gorbachev was a poor judge of people. For example, he befriended the behind-the-scenes plotter Anatoly Lukyanov and completely trusted the minister of defense Dmitry Yazov, who was also a plotter, to say nothing of the aforementioned Boldin. That the entire top leadership of the country came out against the president speaks for itself.

  Gorbachev spoke of Alexander Yakovlev as follows, “He is a good strategist but a rotten tactician.” (Gorbachev actually used a stronger word.) Experience revealed that Yakovlev, not Gorbachev, was right.

  I recall the following episode.

  The morning after the tragic events in Vilnius in January 1991, Gorbachev
telephoned my father, whose friendship with many Balts, as well as his sympathies toward Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the president knew very well. “Do you know what this National Salvation Committee is and who is in it?” he asked.

  Of course, like much else, Gorbachev’s bewildered, helpless question to his deputy foreign minister demonstrated not only that he had not given the criminal order to attack demonstrators but also that he was also not in control of the situation. In other words, the opponents of democratic reforms manipulated Gorbachev and played their dirty and criminal political games behind his back, while his supporters, for wholly understandable reasons given the Soviet mentality, were afraid to oppose them. Gorbachev became such an object of manipulation that, if one believes Ignatenko, when the president decided to go to Lithuania after the events of January 1991, he let himself be talked out of this undoubtedly correct step by his own bodyguards—namely, the KGB.

  In another example, in 1990 Gorbachev, after entrusting my father with receiving his Nobel Peace Prize on his behalf, met with him shortly before his departure for the awards ceremony. As he escorted him to the elevator, the president said in the corridor, “Bear in mind that I am now executing a necessary shift to the right. I will end this with the Nobel lecture.” Apparently, the president realized that his cabinet was listening in. This practice was confirmed when once, speaking on the telephone with my father, Gorbachev said that he heard some sort of noises in the receiver and would call back, which he did a few minutes later, saying that he had reprimanded Kriuchkov and had warned him not to allow this anymore.

  Still one more observation on how the highest level of power functioned: in some situations the secretary in Gorbachev’s reception room could actually decide the fate of the country, since it was up to him who could speak to the president and who could not. Sometimes the secretaries and trusted stenographers were better informed and more influential than the ministers. Let us not forget where the loyalties of many of them lay, as well as the loyalties of the waiters and many other service personnel from the KGB.

  Working in the secretariat of the head of state, one could learn and understand a lot. It held an abundance of the most delicate and sensitive information and not always only what you needed to know in order to discharge your direct responsibilities. You could understand even more if you were in the very thick of the “political soup,” closely associating with the reformers who were intimates of Gorbachev’s and working together with them on a daily basis. In the final analysis, grasping this truth leads me to conclude that in the dramatic break in Russia’s history that occurred in 1991, there is too much that cannot be explained simplistically by using obvious words and reasons. It would be just as premature to repeat the mistakes of the vain politicians of that era and jump to any conclusions.

  3

  Anatomy of a Lost Decade, 1992–2000

  Between 1986 and 1993, from the launch of Mikhail Gorbachev’s democratic reformation through the initial period of Boris Yeltsin’s tenure as the first president of post-Soviet Russia, Russia found itself at a fork in the road. One choice was the well-worn totalitarian and imperial path; the other was that of transforming Russia into a normal country, a home for people wanting to live normal lives. Unfortunately, Russia’s choice of one of the worst possible paths forward was partly conditioned by history and partly foisted upon it by the new Russian elite. Why did perestroika—Gorbachev’s democratic reformation—fail? Why did Russia slide toward a new type of reactionary politics accompanied by a totally unjustified foreign policy of revanchism?

  The fall of a colossus such as the USSR is always an impressive spectacle even if observed from a distance, a safe distance that provides a panoramic view. But may one really speak of safety when the clay feet of ideology and violence crumbled in a country bristling with nuclear weapons and potential ecological time bombs?

  For those buried under the wreckage, the spectacle was not something to be contemplated from any distance, safe or otherwise. They lacked both the time and the moral strength to ponder what until recently had been the reality of the USSR, what lessons to draw from its collapse, and what consequences might follow.

  Gorbachev’s perestroika and the Yeltsin period that followed evoked a strong reaction comparable to that of the Bolshevik coup after the overthrow of tsarism and the establishment of a weak provisional government. One of the main consequences of Yeltsin’s presidency was that he created the opportunity for a slow-motion coup d’état in which members of the special services seized key positions in the country—that is, to the revolution of the Chekists. Thus, in 2000 Russia was being run by the special services in the guise of Vladimir Putin.

  The entire Soviet period of Russian history, when punitive state institutions played an extraordinarily important role in politics, prepared the ground for this outcome. The influence of the special services receded after Josef Stalin’s death, but the KGB continued to exert an inordinate impact on Soviet politics and the lives of Soviet citizens. The special services also retained their covert influence on even the most highly placed Soviet officials. If the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the law, then the KGB was above the law. Not a single law could be adopted and implemented without its agreement. The CPSU, which, in the pre-perestroika era, lauded itself as “the mind, the honor, and the conscience of our epoch,” became dependent on its own instrument of repression and coercion. The tail began to wag the dog.

  The situation only began to change during perestroika. The dismantling of the totalitarian system implied the inevitable transformation of the KGB into a normal special service. Even the KGB’s notorious Fifth Department, concerned with ideology and political investigations, was supposedly abolished. In its stead a department to defend the constitutional order was established. But what transpired was merely a change of the signboard; in essence nothing really changed. Under attack, the totalitarian system desperately fought to survive even prior to the first attempt at revenge during the 1991 coup.

  A Trap for Democracy

  The Soviet totalitarian system established after the Bolshevik coup of 1917 was so all embracing that it functioned like an unknown law of public life. Moreover, just like the Phoenix bird, it was capable of arising from the ashes. It would be a simplification to conceive of the totalitarian system as a straightforward aggregation of punitive and other coercive institutions and the punishment of dissenters. The reality was much more complicated. For example, Alexander Yakovlev, the theoretician of perestroika, accurately wrote, “I apply the definition of ‘punitive’ to the entire system, for all of the organs of power were punitive—the special services, the army, the party, the Young Communist League (YCL), the trade unions, even the Junior YCL organizations.”1 I should add that KGB agents had penetrated the entire state apparatus as well as the so-called Soviet public organizations and cultural associations.

  Not only did Gorbachev’s change of political direction—the demolition of totalitarianism—fail to gain the support of the overwhelming majority of the population, but also most of the Russian political elite likewise gave it the cold shoulder. Despite their dissatisfaction with the period of so-called stagnation, during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82) and his fleeting successors Yury Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, most people were not ready for even half-hearted democratic reforms. Therefore, these reforms, although real, remained unimplemented.

  The only ones to support Gorbachev’s reforms were liberal Soviet intellectuals and other dissenters who were then able to say and write what they pleased. Because of their extremely small numbers and fragmentation, however, they enjoyed a degree of influence very briefly and only when Gorbachev gave them some support. Within the Soviet bureaucracy anti-reformist and reactionary moods prevailed. This was inevitable, given the traditions and mentality implanted in the nation from the time of Vladimir Lenin and Stalin—that is, if one can even refer to the multiethnic and multifaith conglomerate that inhabited the USSR as a nation. At the very least, e
veryone else was indifferent to the reforms or did not embrace them for a variety of objective reasons, including a decline in their standard of living. In sum, only a tiny portion of the population embraced the reforms as necessary.

  The overwhelming majority of the peoples of the USSR were committed communists of the Leninist-Stalinist school who either did not believe that abuses of power occurred or, worse, who actively supported such abuses by engaging in denunciations and other inhumane behavior. As a matter of reflexive self-preservation, after the repressions had ended, those who had discarded Stalinism expunged this terrible period of history from their minds, especially after Nikita Khrushchev’s superficial and half-hearted condemnation of Stalin in 1956. The USSR had fallen into the trap of selective and restricted truth. The abuses of Lenin and his henchmen continued either to be idealized or ignored. Stalin was viewed as a leading statesman who had merely “carried things too far.” The collectivization of agriculture that had destroyed Russia as a great agricultural power; industrialization, which had been accomplished by an unpaid prisoner labor force; and victory in the Second World War, achieved by the people despite their mediocre commander in chief—all were presented as the tyrant’s personal achievements. In the collective consciousness of the people, Stalin’s “individual shortcomings” and “occasional excesses” evidently took a backseat to these “magnificent accomplishments.” As happens so often in Russian history, lies triumphed over historical truth and common sense.