Andropov’s preference was for Gorbachev over Chernenko. He appended a note to this effect on one of his last memoranda to the Central Committee. But Chernenko’s supporters excised the note from the version presented to the Central Committee, and Andropov died on 9 February 1984 before he could consolidate Gorbachev’s chances.17
For his proteges, Andropov’s passing was a tragic loss for the USSR. Even the dissenter Roy Medvedev felt that great changes had been in prospect under Andropov.18 This was excessive optimism. It is true that Andropov had succeeded in sacking one fifth of province-level party first secretaries — a vital process of replacement if ever the Brezhnevite complacency was to be dispelled.19 Furthermore, industrial output was five per cent higher in 1983 than in the previous year; and the value of agricultural production rose by seven per cent.20 Yet although the duration of Andropov’s tenure had not been enough for him to take a grip on economic policies, he was far too traditionalist to be able to do much more than he had already accomplished.
After kidney-patient Andropov it was Chernenko, already debilitated by emphysema, who became General Secretary. Gorbachev had to be content with being his informal deputy. Chernenko was not the most highly qualified of General Secretaries. Flimsily-educated and uninspiring, he had served in lowly party ranks until he met Brezhnev in Moldavia in the early 1950s. After years of service as Brezhnev’s personal aide, he was rewarded by being made a Central Committee Secretary in 1976 and a full Politburo member two years later. His talents had never stretched beyond those of a competent office manager and his General Secretaryship was notable for woeful conservatism. The sole change to the composition of the Politburo occurred with the death of Ustinov in December 1984 — and such was the disarray of the central party leadership that Ustinov was not replaced. Chernenko’s single innovation in policy was his approval of an ecologically pernicious scheme to turn several north-flowing Siberian rivers down south towards the Soviet republics of central Asia.
His Politburo colleagues had chosen Chernenko as their General Secretary because his frailty would enable them to keep their own posts and to end Andropov’s anti-corruption campaign. The Central Committee, being packed with persons promoted by Brezhnev, did not object to this objective. But the choice of Chernenko caused concern. Chernenko was left in no doubt about the contempt felt for him by members of the Central Committee when they refrained from giving him the conventional ovation after his promotion to General Secretary.21 But Chernenko was old, infirm and losing the will to live, much less to avenge himself for such humiliation.
It was Gorbachev who led the Politburo and the Secretariat during Chernenko’s incapacitation. Behind the scenes, moreover, Gorbachev and Ryzhkov continued to elaborate those measures for economic regeneration demanded of them by Andropov.22 Other Politburo members were disconcerted by Gorbachev’s status and influence. Tikhonov persistently tried to organize opposition to him; and Viktor Grishin decided to enhance his own chances of succeeding Chernenko by arranging for a TV film to be made of Chernenko and himself. Chernenko was so ill that he lacked the presence of mind to shoo Grishin away. Another of Gorbachev’s rivals was Politburo member and former Leningrad party first secretary Grigori Romanov; and, unlike the septuagenarian Grishin, Romanov was a fit politician in his late fifties. Both Grishin and Romanov were hostile to proposals of reform and wished to prevent Gorbachev from becoming General Secretary.
Chernenko died on 10 March 1985. If Brezhnev’s funeral had been distinguished by farce when the coffin slipped out of the bearers’ grasp at the last moment, Chernenko’s was not memorable even for this. Opinion in the party, in the country and around the world sighed for a Soviet leader who was not physically incapacitated.
Yet it was not the world nor even the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a whole but the Politburo that would be deciding the matter at 2 p.m. on 11 March.23 Behind the scenes Ligachev was organizing provincial party secretaries to speak in Gorbachev’s favour at the Central Committee. In the event Gorbachev was unopposed. Even Tikhonov and Grishin spoke in his favour. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was chairing the session and was unstinting in his praise of Gorbachev. There were the usual rumours of conspiracy. It was noted, for example, that Volodymyr Shcherbytskiy, who was not among Gorbachev’s admirers, had found it impossible to find an Aeroflot jet to fly him back from the USA for the Politburo meeting. But the reality was that no one in the Politburo was willing to stand against Gorbachev. The Politburo’s unanimous choice was to be announced to the Central Committee plenum in the early evening.
At the plenum, Gromyko paid tribute to Gorbachev’s talent and dependability: little did he know that Gorbachev would soon want rid of him.24 Whatever else he was, Gorbachev was a brilliant dissimulator: he had attended the court of Leonid Brezhnev and managed to avoid seeming to be an unsettling reformer. Only under Andropov and Chernenko had he allowed his mask to slip a little. In a speech in December 1984 he used several words soon to be associated with radicalism: ‘acceleration’, ‘the human factor’, ‘stagnation’ and even ‘
Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev had been born in 1931 and brought up in Privolnoe, a small village of Stavropol region in southern Russia. His family had been peasants for generations. Relatives of Gorbachev had been persecuted in the course of mass agricultural collectivization. One of his grandfathers, who was a rural official, was arrested; the other was exiled for a time. He had a straitened childhood on the new kolkhoz, especially under the Nazi occupation in 1942–3; his memory of his early life was far from sentimental: ‘Mud huts, earthen floor, no beds.’26 But he survived. During and after the war Gorbachev worked in the fields like the other village youths, and in 1949 his industriousness was rewarded with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. He was highly intelligent, receiving a silver medal for his academic achievements at the local school and gained a place in the Faculty of Jurisprudence at Moscow State University.
He graduated in 1955 with first-class marks, but recently-introduced rules prevented him from working for the USSR Procuracy in Moscow.27 He therefore dropped his plans for a career in the law and opted to enter politics. Returning to Stavropol, he joined the apparatus of the Komsomol and then the party. Two decades of solid organizational work followed for Gorbachev and his wife Raisa. He enjoyed rapid promotion. By 1966 he was heading the City Party Committee and four years later was entrusted with the leadership of the entire Stavropol Region. He was not yet forty years old and had joined an elite whose main characteristic was its advanced age. Both he and his wife were ambitious. A story is told that they had the same dream one night. Both had a vision of him clambering up out of a deep, dark well and striding out along a broad highway under a bright sky. Gorbachev was perplexed as to its significance. Raisa unhesitatingly affirmed that it meant that her husband was destined to be ‘a great man’.28
Khrushchev’s closed-session speech to the Twentieth Party Congress had given him hope that reform was possible in the USSR.29 But he kept quiet about these thoughts except amidst his family and with his most trusted friends. In any case, he was vague in his own mind about the country’s needs. Like many of his contemporaries, he wanted reform but had yet to identify its desirable ingredients for himself.30
In the meantime he set out to impress the central leaders who visited the holiday resorts adjacent to Stavropol; and he was making a name for himself by his attempts to introduce just a little novelty to the organization of the region’s kolkhozes. By virtue of his post in the regional party committee in 1971 he was awarded Central Committee membership. In 1978 he was summoned to the capital to lead the Agricultural Department in the Secretariat. Next year he became a Politburo candidate member and in 1980 a full member. Two years later he was confident enough to propose the establishment of a State Agro-Industrial Committee. This was a cumbersome scheme to facilitate the expansion of farm output mainly by means of institutional reorganization. It was hardly a radical reform. But it was criticized by Tikhonov, Kosygin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, as an attempt to form ‘a second government’, and the Politburo rejected it. Gorbachev was learning the hard way about the strength of vested interests at the summit of Soviet politics.31
His career anyway did not suffer: the preferment he enjoyed under Brezhnev was strengthened by Andropov. Word had got around that Gorbachev was a man of outstanding talent. He was not a theorist, but his openness to argument was attractive to the intellectual consultants who had advised Andropov. So, too, was Gorbachev’s reputation as a decisive boss. He had not in fact achieved much for agriculture either in Stavropol or in Moscow; but he was given the benefit of the doubt: he could not do what Brezhnev would not have allowed.
Gorbachev’s practical ideas in 1985 were as yet very limited in scope. He resumed the economic and disciplinary orientation set by Andropov; he also gave priority to changes of personnel.32 But already he had certain assumptions that went beyond Andropovism. In the 1970s he had visited Italy, Belgium and West
