ALEXANDER YAKOVLEV

USSR: The Decisive Years

1991

A SUCCESSFUL POLITICAL CAREER in the Soviet Union depended on being with the winning side in any and every confrontation. This involved a process, largely invisible to outsiders, of allegiance and promises to the powerful, and betrayal of the friendship and principles of those without power. To the winners, rewards, to the losers punishment that ranged from dismissal and ostracism to twenty years of hard labor in the Gulag and judicial murder. Alexan der Yakovlev spotted early on that Mikhail Gorbachev was a winner, which committed him to unconditional support for glasnost and perestroika, though whether he really believed in the reforms he was promoting was a constant enigma. In return, Gorbachev appointed him to leading positions including membership of the Politburo. In the final months of the Soviet Union, the head of the KGB and other old-style Communists determined to get rid of Gorbachev, if necessary by force. Defending himself from becoming a loser, Gorbachev saw fit to dismiss Yakovlev. Had the so-called counter-revolutionaries succeeded in their aborted coup of 1991, Yakovlev might well have paid with his life.

Politicians and commentators in the West were mostly disposed to take Gorbachev at his word and give him credit for making the world a better place. Whenever he appeared in some Western city, huge crowds turned out to admire and chant “Gorbi.” As reform began to contradict the basic tenets of Communism, however, I expected him to accuse the United States of destabilizing the whole Soviet order and then to declare a nuclear alert, close all borders, impose military rule and have the KGB commit a massacre in some city as an exemplary warning. Repression did occur, notably in the Baltic Republics and Georgia, but on a limited scale and apparently without central organization.

My book, The War That Never Was (or The Strange Death of the Soviet Union in the American edition) addresses the question why Gorbachev had not tried to save Soviet Communism by resorting to maximum force as Karl Marx, Lenin and every previous General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party would have advocated without a qualm. Given such an outcome, Gorbachev’s successor as General Secretary might still be in the Kremlin.

One possible explanation is that Gorbachev was a man of principle who would not make himself responsible for loss of innocent life. That is the noble image of himself that Gorbachev in his retirement has been doing his best to establish, presumably with an eye on posterity. An alternative explanation is that he really believed his reforms would enable a perfected Communism to deliver on its promises. In which case, he was simply deluded. Having heard him give a lecture and having read his book, I was pretty sure that he would take a line moulded to present himself as a hero of democracy, but all the same I wrote to ask for an interview. On one of my trips to Moscow in the early 1990s, I had an appointment at the imposing offices of the Gorbachev Foundation with Anatoly Chernyayev, a Gorbachev loyalist. Gorbachev was quite willing to talk to me, he said, the fee would be twenty-five thousand dollars.

In the course of other trips in the republics that had comprised the Soviet Union or the satellites of the Soviet bloc, I had the impression from various former First Secretaries and Ideological Secretaries, all of them hardened Communists, that they were wondering why they had so tamely allowed themselves to become losers. Nobody had foreseen that reform would incite subjected people to mobilize on the streets. It was an irresistible matter of identity. Gorbachev did not give orders to open fire at Popular Front demonstrators because that would have been firing at his own program of reform. I was advised to talk to Alexander Yakovlev. Never before had a member of the Politburo come clean and admitted that Communism was a criminal enterprise from first to last, targeting the whole of humanity, not just Russia. He was known to have said that a single live bullet fired by a soldier at a mob was bound to be the end of Soviet power.

Yakovlev was always busy, in the provinces, away from his office, abroad. At one point, though, he had been invited to Israel and I flew there too. Early in the morning when we had arranged to meet, the telephone rang in the room of the hotel in Jerusalem. Announcing himself to be a professor acting for Yakovlev, a disembodied Russian voice said there would be no interview until I had settled the question of an honorarium (pronounced onn-or-rharium). One thousand dollars. I explained that it was not the custom in the West to pay for interviews. After lengthy discussion, we settled on a hundred dollars. Face to face with Yakovlev, I didn’t like to raise the subject and it struck me much too late that the professor was onto a scam and Yakovlev may have known nothing about what had been done in his name. Much later still, I came across the observation of Andrei Sakharov, dissident-in-chief, that he sensed in Yakovlev “an indelible residue of Leninist doctrine.” If so, it’s evidence that the success of nationalism and the failure of Communism were really and truly accidental.

Postscript. Anatoly Lukyanov, a Gorbachev colleague turned opponent and sentenced to prison for his part in the aborted 1991 coup, also asked for a fee when I interviewed him. Fifty dollars.