The Penguin History of Modern Russia

were those remaining aspects of official educational policy which provided sons and daughters of workers with preferential access to university education. The Politburo abolished all such discrimination. In the same spirit, measures were introduced to move away from Khrushchev’s highly vocational orientation in the schools. The economic ministries and even many factory directors came to feel that the pendulum was swinging too far in the opposite direction; but, after a spirited debate, only a halfway return towards vocational training in schools was sanctioned in 1977.¹⁸

Yet the Politburo was failing to maintain active support in society even at previous levels. It therefore sought to intensify the recruitment of communist party members. In 1966 there had been 12.4 million rank-and-filers; by 1981 this had risen to 17.4 million.¹⁹ Thus nearly one in ten Soviet adults were party members. Their assigned duty was to inspire and mobilize the rest of society. The idea was that the more members, the better the chance to secure universal acquiescence in the status quo. As ever, the result was not a compact political vanguard but a party which reflected the diverse problems of broad social groups. Politburo leaders contrived to overlook the problem. For them, the dangers of further change outweighed the risks of keeping things as they were. Indeed the contemplation of change would have required a concentration of intellectual faculties that hardly any of them any longer possessed. And those few, such as Andropov, who had even mildly unorthodox ideas kept quiet about them.

Despite being inclined towards caution in domestic affairs, they were still tempted to undertake risky operations abroad. In 1978–9 they had been disconcerted by the course of a civil war in Afghanistan across the USSR’s southern frontier. Afghan communists repeatedly asked the Soviet leadership to intervene militarily; but Brezhnev and his associates, sobered by the knowledge of the mauling meted out to the USA in Vietnam, rejected their pleas;²⁰ and Jimmy Carter, who had assumed office as American President in 1977, saw this as evidence that detente was a force for good throughout the world.

In December 1979, however, the Politburo’s inner core decided that failure to support Afghan communist forces would leave the way open for the USA to strengthen the military position of their Islamist adversaries. Soviet Army contingents were sent from Tajikistan to support the communist-led Afghan regime. President Carter felt deceived by the USSR, and ordered a substantial rise in the USA’s military expenditure. The policy of detente collapsed. In 1980, Moscow’s troubles increased when the Polish independent trade union Solidarity led strikes against the government in Warsaw. Poland was becoming virtually ungovernable, and in December 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who was already the Party First Secretary and Prime Minister, obtained the USSR’s sanction to mount a coup d’etat to restore order. The eventual alternative, as Jaruzelski understood, would be that Warsaw Pact forces would invade Poland. But Solidarity, though damaged, did not crumble. Deep fissures were beginning to open in the communist order of Eastern Europe.

The Soviet Union’s international position was shaken further when Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party’s right-wing candidate, defeated Carter in the American presidential elections in 1980. The Politburo was put on notice to expect a more challenging attitude on the part of the USA. Domestic and foreign policies which had seemed adequate in the 1970s were about to be put to their stiffest test.

21 Privilege and Alienation

The Soviet political leaders did not feel insecure in power. There were occasional acts of subversion, such as the detonation of a bomb in the Moscow Metro by Armenian nationalists in 1977. But such terrorism was not only rare; it was also usually carried out by nationalists on the territory of their own republics. Russians, however hostile they were to the Politburo, had an abiding horror of political upheaval. Civil war, inter-ethnic struggles and terror were the stuff not of medieval folklore but of stories told by grandparents and even fathers and mothers.

The KGB’s repressive skills remained at the ready. In 1970 the biologist and dissenter Zhores Medvedev was locked up in a lunatic asylum. Only the timely intervention of his twin brother Roy and others, including Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, secured his release.¹ Human-rights activist Viktor Krasin and the Georgian nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia were arrested, and they cracked under the KGB’s pressure on them to renounce their dissenting opinions. Another method was employed against the young poet Iosif Brodski. Since his works were banned from publication and he had no paid occupation, the KGB took him into custody and in 1964 he was tried on a charge of ‘parasitism’. In 1972, after being vilified in the press, he was deported. Solzhenitsyn, too, was subjected to involuntary emigration in 1974. Vladimir Bukovski suffered the same fate a year later in exchange for imprisoned Chilean communist leader Luis Corvalan. In 1980 Sakharov was subjected to an order confining him to residence in Gorki, a city which it was illegal for foreigners to visit.

Yet the members of the various clandestine groups appreciated the uses of publicity. Within a year of the signature of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, informal ‘Helsinki groups’ in the USSR were drawing the world’s attention to the Soviet government’s infringements of its undertakings. Western politicians and diplomats picked up the cause of the dissenters at summit meetings; Western journalists interviewed leading critics of the Politburo — and, to the KGB’s annoyance, several writers let their works appear abroad. The Soviet government did not dare to stop either Solzhenitsyn in 1970 or Sakharov in 1975 from accepting their Nobel Prizes.

Three figures stood out among the dissenters in Russia: Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and Roy Medvedev. Each had achieved prominence after Stalin’s death and had tried to persuade Khrushchev that basic reforms were essential. Initially they were not recalcitrant rebels; on the contrary, they were persons promoted by the political establishment: they did not seek confrontation. But all eventually concluded that compromise with the Politburo would not work. They were unique and outstanding individuals who could not be broken by the weight of material and psychological pressures that were brought to bear upon them. But they were also typical dissenters of the 1970s. In particular, they shared the characteristic of deriving a spiritual forcefulness from their acceptance of their precarious living and working conditions; they had the advantage of truly believing what they said or wrote, and were willing to endure the punishments inflicted by the state.

They gained also from the country’s traditions of respect for relatives, friends and colleagues. Before 1917, peasants, workers and intellectuals kept a wall of confidentiality between a group’s members and the ‘powers’, as they referred to anyone in official authority over them. Russians were not unique in this. All the peoples of the Russian Empire had coped with oppressive administrators in this way. The informal ties of the group were reinforced in the Soviet period as a defence against the state’s intrusiveness, and the dissenters latched on to the traditions.

What Sakharov, Medvedev and Solzhenitsyn had in common was that they detested Stalin’s legacy and knew that Brezhnev’s Politburo had not entirely abandoned it. But on other matters their ideas diverged. Sakharov had contended in the late 1960s that the world’s communist and capitalist systems were converging into a hybrid of both. But steadily he moved towards a sterner assessment of the USSR and, being committed to the rights of the individual, he saw democracy as the first means to this end.² This attitude was uncongenial to Medvedev, a radical communist reformer who argued that there was nothing inherently wrong with the Leninism enunciated by Lenin himself.³ By contrast, Solzhenitsyn put his faith in specifically Christian values and Russian national customs. Solzhenitsyn’s nuanced anti-Leninism gave way to strident attacks not only on communism but also on virtually every variety of socialism and liberalism. He even rehabilitated the record of the last tsars.⁴ Thus he infuriated Sakharov and Medvedev in equal measure.

By 1973 these disputes were ruining their fellowship, and the situation was not improved by the differential treatment of dissenters by the authorities. Sakharov had once received privileges as a nuclear scientist. The fact that he and his wife had an austere life-style did not save them from Solzhenitsyn’s carping comments, at least until Sakharov and his wife were dispatched into exile to the city of Gorki. Of the three leading dissenters, it was Medvedev who received the lightest persecution. His detractors claimed that although the security police pilfered his manuscripts, he had defenders in the central party leadership who felt that the time might come when his brand of reformist communism would serve the state’s interests.

Yet the efforts of the dissenters at co-ordination were insubstantial. The Moscow-based groups had some contact with the Jewish refuseniks in the capital; but they had little connection with the clandestine national organizations in Ukraine, the Transcaucasus or the Baltic region. And when in 1977 Vladimir Klebanov founded a Free Trade Union Association, he and his fellow unionists conducted their activities almost entirely in isolation from