Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  Of all the Soviet Union’s leaders, according to the late historian Dmitry Volkogonov (who had unprecedented access to the vital files), ‘Brezhnev’s personality was the least complex. He was a man of one dimension, with the psychology of a middle-ranking Party functionary, vain, wary and conventional.’59 He was also a noted womanizer (like anyone who remembers his old age, I find this difficult to credit), devoted to fine food and endless cigarettes and utterly addicted to the hunt.60 His vanity was legendary, and in later years he enjoyed almost nothing more than giving and receiving medals and awards. In middle age, however, he was known as a political fixer, and though less flamboyant than Khrushchev, he had a reputation for shrewd management, vindictiveness, and sharp tactical skills. ‘His forte’, Mikhail Gorbachev believed, ‘was his ability to split rivals, fanning mutual suspicion and subsequently acting as chief arbiter and peacemaker.’61

  Talents like these were just the thing for Kremlin politics, but Brezhnev had another plan in mind. Unlike Khrushchev and Stalin, he decided to quit the fortress. Where others might have been content with a refurbishment and new name-plates, this general secretary (in a move that some have likened to Ivan the Terrible’s retreat to Alexandrovskaya sloboda62) chose to clear out altogether, taking a picked staff with him. As a Party man, he claimed to prefer the grey Central Committee building on Old Square, Stalin’s original stamping-ground. It lacked the Kremlin’s charisma, but it was also free of awkward memories and tourist crowds. The second entrance, fourth floor, was its nerve-centre. No-one could visit that without prior clearance at the highest level. The staff were deferential and the atmosphere refined. Admission was strictly by list. Tuesdays were the sacred day, for that was when Brezhnev’s small group decided on their week’s agenda, effectively determining the business of a whole empire.

  The Kremlin, then, as a contemporary later observed, became ‘the external symbol of state power rather than the living heart of the country’.63 Unexpectedly, it even developed a reputation for neutrality. With Brezhnev gone, no political body of any real significance now used it as a base. Six days a week, it was the home of the government, but that meant only relatively unimportant state officials in the Council of Ministers. Every year or so, huge congresses assembled in Khrushchev’s palace, but though these were officially the sovereign organs of the land, foreign journalists were quick to dub them ‘the world’s biggest rubber stamp’.64 While outsiders referred to Soviet rulers as ‘The Kremlin’ to save time, the magic scent of power had evaporated from the place itself, leaving a residue of museums, offices and reception-rooms under the regime of a military commandant.

  On Thursdays, however, the balance changed again, for this was still the day on which the Soviet Union’s supreme decision-making committee, the Politburo, convened inside the fort. The tradition – and the pompous rooms – remained unchanged till 1991. An inner circle gathered in the Senate’s Walnut Room, panelled and furnished like a London club, and then the whole meeting sat down in the much larger space next door. However grinding the debates, and however somnolent the ageing members of the group became, the Kremlin setting lent a sense of history. Soon, almost nothing anywhere got done without a nod from someone in this smoke-filled room. The sheer weight of detail was self-defeating. On 1 September 1983, under Brezhnev’s successor, Yury Andropov, the Politburo debated the production of chassis for self-propelled vehicles, colour television sets, methods of raising the productivity of labour, demographic research, aid to Afghanistan, and the choice of speaker for the sixty-sixth anniversary of the October revolution. Well into these toothsome discussions, a note was passed to the defence chief, Dmitry Ustinov, informing him that a Korean airliner with more than two hundred civilian passengers on board had just been shot down by Soviet planes.65 By then, however, everyone was almost numb.

  The Politburo had become the ruling caste, as influential and as ritualized as any council of boyars. But its members did not live in the Kremlin and they left as soon as their business was done. Watching the sleek black limousines as they filed out through the Kremlin’s Saviour Gate on Thursday afternoons, a time-traveller from any of Russia’s pasts would have recognized power. The cars left through a gate that was closed to all other traffic, and on the public streets a path was cleared for their exclusive use. But not all headed right, towards the Party building on Old Square. Some, including the hard-line Ustinov himself, were going to the Defence Ministry, whose appetite for weapons and technology was draining the entire continent of wealth. Others headed confidently left, bound for the Lubyanka.66 By the 1960s, Soviet power relied upon the KGB, successor to Stalin’s secret police, and this huge organization had its own headquarters and its own power-base. It spied on Soviet citizens, it harassed and eavesdropped on foreigners, but it also watched the Soviet Union’s leaders.67 Any embarrassing detail (the Russian word is kompromat) was a form of currency, and the police had plenty of customers. When Vyacheslav Kostikov, who served as Boris Yeltsin’s press advisor in 1991, started to explore the office he had inherited in the Kremlin, he found that his bookcase had a false back. Behind it was a secret door leading to a room with a washbasin and a bed. Dominating the scene, however, was a massive safe, so heavy that it threatened to fall through the antique floor on to the rooms below. Double-walled, and lined with sand, the monster had once contained Brezhnev’s stock of kompromat on colleagues in the high elite.68

  But these divisive personal games were secret; even some of the elite did not know the extent of the spying. In public, and above all to the world, the Soviet Kremlin was united, and it was still the regime’s favourite weapon for inspiring awe in outsiders. At formal receptions (the one time when he always used it), Brezhnev appeared to be serene, at home, emerging in a blaze of chandeliers to make a little speech and shake a hand. In Washington and in London, high-level delegations – and certainly those that involved a head of state – were greeted on the White House steps, or at the entrance to 10 Downing Street, but the Soviets broke all the rules. Their foreign guests were made to walk – it seemed like miles – up staircases and endless corridors around the Grand Palace. The place was confusing, ‘like a series of Chinese boxes’ in one victim’s words, and the fierceness of the central heating felt like an assault. At last, disgruntled and hot, the visitors would be motioned to wait, standing in the belly of a cavernous, glittering hall, until a pair of double doors at the far end was flung open. The Soviet hosts then made their entrance, fresh and relaxed. All these illusions were deliberately contrived, but there was nothing fake, unfortunately, about Brezhnev’s impatience with some of the guests. When the newly appointed British foreign secretary, David Owen, paid his first call, his interpreter overheard the Soviet leader asking his own foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, whether it was really necessary to invite such an unpromising character to share a glass of tea.69

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  Brezhnev’s glory was growing by the year, at least in the artificial world he had created for himself. In 1971, he decided to revert to his predecessor’s ruling style by adding the title and trappings of head of state to his existing role as General Secretary. A Kremlin office went with the new position, and though Brezhnev still preferred his eyrie in Old Square, he also took over a Senate suite. This was jocularly called ‘the Heights’, in part because Brezhnev avoided the lower floor where Stalin had once worked.70 The rooms were adapted to include a large office and a luxurious reception room, a smaller study for Brezhnev’s own use, and, later, medical facilities and a small private canteen.71 Further millions were devoted, at the end of Brezhnev’s life, to building a marble hall in the Senate yard, designed to be invisible from Red Square and from other points inside the Kremlin grounds. Completed at the end of 1983, it was intended to host plenary meetings of the Party’s Central Committee.72

  The Kremlin, then, was still the only place where the whole Soviet leadership converged. In recognition of its importance (and because few outsiders could follow the complex structures of this govern
ment), political scientists in the capitalist world coined a new term – ‘Kremlinology’ – for a pursuit that soon became both urgent diplomatic task and arcane academic specialism. The Soviet leadership mattered – this was the other atomic superpower – but understanding it was no easy task. On the most desperate occasions, Kremlin-watchers were reduced to noting which stiff, unappetizing-looking man had been positioned closest to the leader at a state parade. Distinctions like this may appear absurd today, but at the time there was no other way to calibrate the hierarchy. Minute gradations said it all; the political elite of the world’s first communist superpower really did spend hours deciding which of them should mount a rostrum in third place. There were the medals and bouquets, of course, but from the location of an office to the speed of its telephone connection, every Moscow-based official knew where to look for the real signs of rank and influence.73

  The lists of Russian names and institutions were confusing – commentary had been much simpler back in Stalin’s day – but the careful, usually tedious, study of who was up and who was down on Soviet state occasions had a point. Those faces, after all, belonged to people with real organizations to manage and interests to guard. There were genuine struggles for resources, a bureaucratic politics, and there were also meaningful disputes over policy. ‘Brezhnev’, as Gorbachev, who must have known, would later write, ‘was forced to manoeuvre skilfully between different Politburo factions.’74 By the end of his reign, the groups included a ‘military-ideological’ bloc of conservatives (to whom, in truth, Brezhnev inclined) and a faction, more open to reform, whose members thought the time had come to tackle the country’s backwardness and economic woes. That group, ironically, was headed by the KGB’s own master, Yury Andropov. ‘Reform’, however, had a Soviet meaning all its own. No-one was thinking of free markets. As even Gorbachev would later say, ‘Our goal is to realize the full potential of socialism. Those in the West who expect us to renounce socialism will be disappointed.’75

  There is plenty of evidence that Russians of the time approved. Not knowing any other life, many believed their political system to be more progressive, more scientific, and certainly fairer than any other.76 When it came to the details of that fairness, however, Karl Marx himself might have been shocked. Lenin probably did work tirelessly, at least until his first disabling stroke, but in 1966 Brezhnev made it a rule that Politburo members should take ten weeks’ holiday a year, and also ordered that their office hours should be restricted to nine to five each day with a compulsory break for lunch.77 The point was to avoid excessive strain – the team was already ageing – and also to leave the general secretary with free time for Zavidovo, the hunting-lodge, just over ninety miles from Moscow, where he could hope to bag wild boar and deer. It was an open secret that the deer were caught and tethered in advance so that he could not miss.78

  The inequalities of Soviet life were not as glaring as detractors claim. Many other economies – and certainly the United States – were scarred by greater differences between the wealthy and the very poor.79 What made the Soviet case unusual was its hypocrisy, and with that, its obsessive, almost priest-like, secrecy. As in the past, each benefit was weighed and parcelled out; a boss lost everything if his career collapsed. In part, that was the reason why so many politicians chose to serve until they died. But graded privilege also made for a rigid structure of us and them, ‘a hierarchy complex’, in Dmitry Volkogonov’s phrase.80 Raisa Gorbachev, arriving in the capital from Stavropol, claimed to be shocked by the irrationality and waste. She likened the privilege system that she and her husband encountered to Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks, observing that new arrivals in Moscow would get a dacha and apartment ‘according to their place in the ladder of hierarchy’ and not ‘according to your own resources or your needs’.81 Accommodation was only the start of it.

  The system had its origins in Lenin’s ‘Kremlin ration’, and it carried echoes of much older systems of payment in kind. But now the ranks of the privileged included a whole range of new officials and administrators, many of whom worked in the precincts of the Kremlin and Old Square. The facilities inside the fortress were inadequate to serve the swelling numbers at this modern court. The bulk of the employees’ food was prepared in kitchens on Old Square, where there was also a canteen for 1,000 people. The Kremlin itself could cater for only a quarter of that, although there was a separate mess for the garrison in the arsenal. But the elite did not waste a moment in queues. Since Stalin’s time, Politburo members had enjoyed the services of dedicated personal chefs (these people, always scrutinized by the police, were not allowed to tell anyone where they worked). With a precise sense of hierarchy, full members of the Politburo were serviced by three cooks and candidate members by two. Each meal was tasted by a doctor and then placed in a secure refrigerator for twenty-four hours lest any poison had been introduced.82 If the doctor survived, presumably, the delicacies could safely be served, though Brezhnev’s hunting trophies at Zavidovo bypassed the quarantine and went straight to his plate. He was sometimes known, after a really splendid meal, to waddle out to the kitchen and plant a kiss on the hot cheeks of his favourite chef.83

  There was also a special depot near the Kremlin – Gorbachev once called it the ‘feeding trough’ – for the packages of gourmet food that the elite could take away.84 The steamy canteens of the past were put to shame. By the 1970s, the Kremlin’s food service employed its own meat supplier (and its own herds), as well as direct access to the foremost chefs in Moscow. Seven tons of prepared meat – roasts and joints, sausages and hams – were wrapped and sent to the collection point on Granovsky street (now known as Romanov lane) every day.85 Elsewhere, the beautifully appointed Gastronom No. 1 (still often known affectionately by its old name: Yeliseyev’s) reserved a special section in its Gorky street store for elite clients, as did the glass palace of GUM, across Red Square from the Kremlin. There was a Kremlin tailor, where Soviet leaders were fitted with the dull and scratchy suits that they were all required to wear (the fabric, after all, had to be visibly of Soviet make), a Kremlin hairdresser and dentist, and a garage for the Kremlin fleet of limousines.86 At its most basic, all this meant that no Kremlin official’s wife needed to queue, or even to make cabbage taste exciting yet again. In more creative hands, however, the system was a paradise for the corrupt. Enterprising hangers-on, most famously Brezhnev’s daughter Galina, traded scarce goods on the black market, in her case feeding a passion for young men, circuses, and diamonds.87

  The Kremlin also retained its reputation for medical care. Not far from the food depot on Granovsky street was a private clinic, staffed by the leaders’ personal physicians and equipped with a room for the general secretary’s exclusive use.88 Those Kremlin doctors, famously, grew busier towards the end. By the early 1980s, the country was in the hands of very old and often very sick men. Brezhnev himself was alleged to have a dangerous addiction to sleeping pills, and in later life he also suffered from a weak heart (he had a major stroke some months before his death) as well as emphysema and several types of cancer. But he refused to step down, despite the many rumours and the jokes. ‘All stand so that the leader can be carried in,’ they quipped, and many talked as if he were long dead and stuffed. The head of the KGB, Andropov, seems to have encouraged the vain, weak old man to appear in public, and especially on television, to feed the general public contempt.89 But others just colluded in the game. ‘The Politburo, the Health Minister Petrovsky and his successor Chazov, and the chiefs in the Kremlin medical service were in effect carrying out an experiment to see how long a fatally sick old man could give the impression of working,’ wrote Volkogonov, who had witnessed the charade.90 By the end, people had become so used to thinking of Brezhnev as a walking corpse that his final, clinically irreversible death came as a real surprise.91

  But die he did, at last, on 10 November 1982. The potential successors were the men who had worked with him in the highest ranks, and none was in the flower of youth. For three mo
re years, the best way to predict the political succession at the top was to wait to see who would be put in charge of the most recent leader’s funeral arrangements.92 In Brezhnev’s case that honour fell to Yury Andropov. But he was already sick – his kidneys were failing – and his infirmity prompted the new chief of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, to suggest a discreet modification to the Kremlin’s Senate Tower. It was an escalator, designed to carry invalids the eleven feet up to the platform on the Lenin Mausoleum, and it was installed in July 1983.93 The ‘Lenin escalator’ proved a boon, if not a life-saver, to almost every other member of the Politburo, and it was an essential aid to Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko. This man, another victim of emphysema, in turn awarded a state prize to the designer of a pneumatic tube that blasted government papers from Old Square into the Kremlin and back in two minutes, sparing the men and women with the little carts and adding an element of farce to that old Kremlin-watchers’ conundrum, ‘Party–State relations’.94

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  The price of political stagnation was high. The Soviet economy became distorted and drained, haemorrhaging resources into the superpower arms race while citizens queued for basic food. From medicines and microchips to beer, the command-administrative system (as even its leaders called it) could not compete with rapid innovations in the west. A planned economy meant shortages, too, and someone who wanted a packet of nails or a pair of fashionable shoes might have to make a long pilgrimage – two or three days in a packed train – to find it. As for the major institutions of the state – the army and the KGB – these worked like mighty empires of their own, complete with food and raw material supplies, secret laboratories, and separate networks of hotels, housing blocks and hospitals. They could not win the war in Afghanistan, begun by Brezhnev and Ustinov in 1979, but their military failure did not prompt them to address deficiencies at home. As Gorbachev put it, ‘On taking office as General Secretary in 1985, I was immediately faced with an avalanche of problems.’95