Down with Big Brother (45 page)

Attempting to defend himself, Sakharov went to the rostrum to say that he had the greatest respect for the ordinary Soviet soldier. His bony head cocked slightly to one side, his words almost whistling through the gaps in his teeth, he ignored the growing uproar as best he could. “The war in Afghanistan was a criminal one, a criminal adventure.…” (Here he raised
his voice above the shrieks of derision that poured down on him from all sides.) “A criminal adventure undertaken by unknown persons. We do not know who bears responsibility for this enormous crime against the motherland. This crime cost the lives of almost a million Afghans, a war of destruction was waged against an entire people.”

The conservatives were shouting so loudly now that Sakharov could hardly be heard. Few deputies were listening to what he had to say anyway. He seemed a beaten, dejected figure, as isolated as he had ever been. Still he pressed ahead. “I came out against sending Soviet troops into Afghanistan, and for this I was exiled to Gorky.” Noise in the hall, shouts of “Apologize,” “Shame on you.” “Precisely this was the main reason, I am proud of this.…” The words were almost drowned out by jeers and whistles. “I am proud of this exile to Gorky, as a decoration that I received.… I do not apologize to the entire Soviet army, as I have not insulted it. I was insulting neither the Soviet army nor the Soviet soldier.” Noise in the hall. “I was accusing those who gave this criminal order to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan.” General pandemonium, jeers, chants of “Away with Sakharov,” scattered applause.

After Sakharov had finished, the “aggressive-obedient majority” set about him with a vengeance. One by one deputies who had remained silent during the invasion of Afghanistan climbed to the rostrum to accuse Sakharov of slander and dishonor. It was as if they were justifying their own subservience by venomously attacking the one man in the Soviet Union who had had the courage to speak out. The verbal lynching was reminiscent of the way Yeltsin had been treated after daring to criticize Gorbachev and Ligachev at the Politburo meeting eighteen months earlier. Nobody came to Sakharov’s aid; the radicals were stunned into silence. Although Gorbachev seemed embarrassed by what was happening, covering his face with his hands, he did nothing to stop the attacks.

The onslaught reached a climax with a vituperative speech by a teacher from Uzbekistan. Her voice choked with tears, Tursun Kazakova said Sakharov had canceled out all his previous services to the nation “by this one action.” “You have insulted the entire army, the entire people, all our fallen who have given up their lives,” she screamed. “I have nothing but contempt. You should be ashamed!”

This hysterical performance brought those in the hall to their feet for yet another standing ovation. This time, however, Gorbachev remained in his seat.

As long as the Soviet Union remained a semifree country, with a semidemocratic
parliament, Sakharov continued to obey the dictates of his own conscience. He trusted the good sense of the millions of ordinary Soviet citizens who were following the proceedings on television. He was right about that. As a result of the congress, Sakharov achieved an almost heroic stature. Letters and telegrams of support poured into his apartment on the Moscow ring road and the Academy of Sciences, which had attempted to block his nomination.

A few weeks after the congress the country’s most popular newspaper,
Argumenty i Fakty
, ran a poll among its twenty million readers to nominate the “best deputy.” Sakharov topped the list, Yeltsin was second, and Gorbachev was a distant seventeenth. The general secretary was so annoyed by this result that he attempted to fire the editor, who refused to resign. Whether Gorbachev liked it or not, glasnost had come of age.

T
WO DAYS AFTER THE
C
OMMUNIST WORLD
had been shaken by the earthquakes in China and Poland, Mikhail Gorbachev sought inspiration at the shrine of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. When the congress broke for lunch, deputies were invited to join the Soviet leadership in making a ritual pilgrimage to the mausoleum, in Red Square, where Lenin’s body had lain in state for six decades. In the company of the international press corps, Gorbachev led the Politburo on the half mile hike through the Kremlin grounds.

Surrounded by a moving wall of bodyguards and television cameras, his wife, Raisa, by his side, Gorbachev was his usual ebullient self as he headed for the Kremlin’s ancient Spassky Gate. He seemed to relish all the attention. For all its rowdiness and unpredictability, the first Congress of People’s Deputies had represented an unquestioned political triumph for the father of glasnost. He had dominated the proceedings from the very beginning, alternately charming and cajoling the deputies, making up the rules as he went along, doing everything he could to steer the unruly congress in the direction he wanted. For someone who had risen through the ranks of a totalitarian state and had no experience of democratic debate, it was an amazing performance. Gorbachev took to parliamentary democracy instinctively. He knew how to twist arms, make deals, bend rules, win votes, exploit the media. He could outtalk, outmaneuver, and outargue everyone else in the room. Thanks to his ability to think fast on his feet, he was usually two or three steps ahead of his political opponents. He was also incredibly persistent. He understood that nothing is ever final in politics and that
the political struggle continues even when it appears to be over. He was the great improviser, the Houdini of Soviet politics, the statesman with nine lives.

The rest of the Politburo fell in line behind Gorbachev as he strode past the palaces and cathedrals of the Kremlin, waving cheerfully at astonished tourists. The contrast between the charismatic Soviet leader and these bureaucratic drones was stunning. They walked clustered together in a grim silence, fending off attempts by reporters to ask questions about events in China and Poland. It was enough to look at their somber, melancholy faces to guess what was running through their minds. Gorbachev may have come into his element, but their world was falling apart. The powers and privileges that they had worked all their lives to achieve were being stripped away from them, as rival centers of authority appeared in the country. During the past few days they had been forced to observe the debates in the congress from the wing of the vast hall, rather than the traditional place of honor on the presidium. It was a bewildering, humiliating experience.

For several months now, as Gorbachev acquired the status of an international superstar, other Soviet leaders had felt themselves increasingly left out in the cold. “We felt some kind of zone, or curtain, separating him from other members of the Politburo,” Vitaly Vorotnikov wrote in his memoirs. “We believed in Gorbachev for a very, very long time. We pinned our hopes on him, and were unable to imagine what kind of paths he would lead us down. Alas, we realized what was happening far too late. [By that time], the pseudodemocratic train had gained such speed that it had become impossible to stop.” Half in admiration, half in disgust, Vorotnikov cited Gorbachev’s unique ability to create a rhetorical mist “so that each of the opposite sides began to think that the
gensek
supported its position.”
⁴¹

The congress may not have been democratic enough for Sakharov and his supporters. For oligarchs like Vorotnikov, it was far too democratic. They were losing their ability to control events. During the breaks they gathered backstage, in the old Presidium Room, to grumble about the antics of the radicals and express alarm about the direction in which the country was headed. Gorbachev’s chief of staff later wrote that he had never seen Politburo members look so alarmed. “Most of them realized that a door had just been opened, and a motley crowd had burst through it. They were frightened by the kind of sentiments the crowd was voicing in front of the entire nation.”
⁴²

It was a decisive moment. Everyone understood that the genie of freedom had escaped from the bottle and that only massive repression would
succeed in stuffing it back in. The bloodshed in Tiananmen Square and the revolution by ballot box that was under way in Poland had crystallized the options facing Gorbachev. In the phrase of one of his Communist Party aides, he now stood at “a political and moral crossroads.”
⁴³
His revolution from above had become a revolution from below. He could permit the revolution to continue, in the knowledge that reformers like himself would ultimately be swept away, or he could use force to stop the revolution in its tracks. That would mean abandoning the hope of radical economic reform for another generation and risking an all-out confrontation with the West.

L
ED BY
G
ORBACHEV
, the Politburo members passed through the fortified Spassky Gate, with its four-sided clock and crenellated green spire, topped by a red star, onto the cobblestoned vastness of Red Square. Still fending off reporters’ questions, they marched into the boxlike red marble mausoleum in the center of the square. The KGB honor guards snapped to attention as Lenin’s modern-day heirs disappeared inside the black marble doors and descended into a dimly lit basement, where the temperature was kept at fifty-nine degrees Fahrenheit.

The body of the dead Bolshevik lay on a bed, beneath a bulletproof glass shield that had withstood several physical assaults, including a visitor who blew himself up with homemade explosives in 1973. Only Lenin’s waxlike hands and head—which housed a brain purportedly 25 percent larger than that of the average human—were visible above the blanket. Hidden wires connected the body to an underground control room, where teams of scientists monitored its condition twenty-four hours a day. (The Russian press later claimed that most of the corpse was moldy, following a bungled restoration job during World War II, when it was evacuated to Siberia to prevent it from falling into the hands of the advancing Nazis.) The subterranean complex also included a secret workout room, where KGB officers were encouraged to get into shape, after a hard day guarding Vladimir Ilyich’s physical remains.

The Soviet leaders filed past the body in an atmosphere of hushed reverence. As they emerged into the sunlight, they ran into the mob of journalists and cameramen, yelling questions about the events in Beijing. Gorbachev hemmed and hawed, saying that he was watching developments in China with “concern” but that every government was responsible for its own actions.

“At the press conference in China, I said we are in favor of a dialogue between
the state and Party organs, working people, and students. The answer to these questions can only be decided through dialogue. This is also my position now.”
⁴⁴

The equivocal position adopted by Gorbachev provoked much grumbling from the radicals. Anxious to forestall similar tragedies at home, they demanded a forthright condemnation of Beijing and a clear definition of the circumstances in which it was permissible to use force to break up demonstrations. Yeltsin described the actions of the Chinese army as “a crime against humanity.” Sakharov called for the withdrawal of the Soviet ambassador from Beijing. The
gensek
, however, refused to make things any clearer. He was determined to preserve his freedom of maneuver.

It was Gorbachev’s fate to operate in the shadowy world between politics and morality, where right and wrong are always relative and everything depends on the final result. In the cutthroat world of Kremlin politics, morality was a luxury that a statesman could ill afford. The primary goal was political survival. Had Gorbachev taken the kind of absolutist moral position favored by Sakharov, he would almost certainly have been stabbed in the back by his own colleagues.

At the same time, he did remain true to certain basic principles. Although he dabbled with violence himself and closed his eyes to its use by other Soviet leaders, he never permitted a forcible reversal of the political processes that he had set in motion. In 1989 he still had the power to stop the Second Russian Revolution in its tracks, before it accelerated out of control and the Soviet empire disintegrated. But he deliberately failed to use this power because he feared it would only lead to massive bloodshed and smother all hope of reform for another generation. He rejected the Tiananmen option. He permitted the revolution to proceed, behind a fog of rhetoric that confused supporters and opponents alike. The creation of this verbal smoke screen was arguably his greatest achievement.

Gorbachev’s resolve and political skill were soon to be put to the test by a series of dramatic events in Eastern Europe.

WARSAW
June 4, 1989

W
HILE THE
C
HINESE
P
EOPLE’S
A
RMY
was suppressing the last vestiges of popular resistance around Tiananmen Square, another Communist regime on the other side of the world was submitting its record to the judgment of the electorate. For the first time in more than forty years, the citizens of Poland had been granted the right to express their opinions through the ballot box. They were using their newfound freedom to deliver a massive rebuff to their self-appointed rulers.

The stark choice confronting Communist leaders, in the face of mounting popular discontent, was summed up by two evocative sounds. There was the rat-tat-tat of machine guns in China, as security forces splattered unarmed protesters with bullets. And there was the scrrratch-scrratch-scratch of voters’ pens in Poland crossing out the names of Communist parliamentary candidates. It was the choice between suppression of the people and submission to the people, dictatorship and democracy, violence and nonviolence. It had its clearest expression on June 4, 1989.