The Penguin History of Modern Russia

shot.² He counted himself lucky to survive; and in 1954 he was appointed as Soviet ambassador to Hungary. He was in Budapest during the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and stayed there until 1957, when Khrushchev recalled him to work in the central party apparatus in Moscow. A decade later he was picked by Brezhnev to take over the KGB.

An associate described him as having ‘an enormous forehead, which looked as if it had been specially shaven clean on both sides of his temples, a large, impressive nose, thick lips and a cleft chin’.³ He took little pleasure in food and sport and was a teetotaller. His taste for well-tailored suits was his only sign of self- indulgence, and occasionally he let himself go by penning stanzas of doggerel to his advisers — and his humour could be lavatorial.⁴ But generally he refrained from such ribaldry. Not even fellow Politburo members saw much of his lighter side. He would not even accept an invitation to a supper party unnecessarily.⁵ His ideological severity was emphatic. Andropov believed in Marxism-Leninism and was offended by the laxities permitted by Brezhnev: he could not abide the incompetent gerontocrats in the Kremlin. The problem was that he, too, was old and was troubled by ill-health. A chronic kidney complaint was becoming acute. If he was going to have an impact, action had to be swift.

And so Andropov announced the reimposition of discipline and order as his immediate priority. He instituted judicial proceedings against leading ne’er-do-wells in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He also punished the more mundane misdemeanours of ordinary citizens: the police cleared the streets of drunks; lack of punctuality at work was also penalized and random inspections were made so that people might not leave their place of work in working hours. Conscientious fulfilment of professional duties was demanded of everybody in society, right from the central party leaders down to ordinary citizens. Such measures were stern in general, but they inflicted special hardship on Soviet wives and mothers. Most women in the USSR went out to work and yet had to undertake all the domestic chores; it was difficult for them to cope with the queuing in the shops unless they could take time off in working hours.

Not that Andropov was a complete killjoy. He did not mind if people had a tipple; on the contrary, he permitted the introduction of a cheap new vodka, which was known as ‘Andropovka’.⁶ He also genuinely aimed to improve living conditions. He gave the following summary of his purposes to his physician: ‘First we’ll make enough sausages and then we won’t have any dissidents.’⁷

Such a remark was not made by someone who was bent upon a fundamental revision of Marxism-Leninism. Accordingly, then, the slogan of ‘developed socialism’ was retained. But differences in style quickly appeared. For example, Andropov admitted that the party leadership needed ‘to acquire an understanding of the society in which we live’.⁸ This was a cognitive humility uncharacteristic of previous leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Andropov stressed that he had not come to office with ready-made, easy solutions and that he intended to learn from as many people as he could. Thus in February 1983 he visited a Moscow lathe-making factory and held brief conversations with workers.⁹ It was a mundane event in itself. (It was also highly contrived: the workers knew that they had to say things that would not irritate the General Secretary.) But the contrast with Brezhnev’s later years was unmistakable.

Replacements were being made in the Kremlin’s personnel. Andropov surrounded himself with personal advisers who, by contemporary official standards, were free thinkers. Typically they were academics or journalists. They were loyal communist party members; all for a long time had argued that official policies needed to be altered. Andropov also showed his impatience in his changes of political personnel at the centre. Mikhail Gorbachev and Yegor Ligachev were lively party officials from a younger generation for whom he secured further advancement; he also plucked Nikolai Ryzhkov from the State Planning Commission and transferred him to party duties. Gorbachev, Ligachev and Ryzhkov were appointed as Central Committee Secretaries so that Andropov could ensure compliance with his wishes throughout the central party apparatus. Gorbachev retained oversight over agriculture and gained it over the entire economy. Ryzhkov, who headed a new Economic Department, was made responsible specifically for industry. Ligachev led the Organizational Department.¹⁰

Andropov was aiming — in his secretive way — to explore possible ways to modify the Politburo’s measures; he knew that the economy cried out for regeneration. But he was far from sure about which measures to adopt. He therefore asked Gorbachev and Ryzhkov to conduct confidential, detailed research on his behalf and to make suitable recommendations.¹¹

Probably Andropov did not wish to venture far along the route of reforms. A decree was passed in July 1983 to provide industrial associations with somewhat greater autonomy from the central planning authorities.¹² Yet the clauses were still not as radical as the proposals of Kosygin in 1965; and the enduring closeness of his friendship with Minister of Defence Ustinov indicated that Andropov hardly wanted to transform the entire system of power.¹³ He kept his more independently-minded advisers well under control. Indeed several scholars outside his entourage felt that he was entirely failing to appreciate the critical nature of the country’s problems. In particular, a group of Novosibirsk sociologists and economists under Tatyana Zaslavskaya produced its own treatise on the need for reform. The authors argued that administrative arbitrariness lay at the centre of the difficulties in Soviet society and its economy. Zaslavskaya’s mild ideas were so audacious in the USSR of the early 1980s that she was in jeopardy of being arrested when the treatise fell into the KGB’s hands.¹⁴

At any rate, Andropov was a naturally cautious man. Certainly he gave no licence to Gorbachev and Ryzhkov, his adjutants in the quest for economic regeneration, to take up the analysis provided by the Novosibirsk group. In short, he wanted change, but insisted that it should be undertaken at no risk to the existing state order. Domestic policy was to be revised with gradualness and with due appreciation of all possible difficulties.

Andropov showed greater enterprise in foreign policy. On becoming General Secretary, he issued proposals thick and fast. He especially strove to reanimate the international understandings of detente which had been ruined by the Soviet military intervention in the Afghan Civil War in 1979. Andropov called for a summit with American President Reagan, for an arms reduction agreement between the USSR and the USA and for a ban on nuclear tests. At a Warsaw Pact meeting in Prague in January 1983 Andropov made a still more startling suggestion. This was that the USSR and the USA should sign an accord that each should formally undertake not to attack any country belonging to the other’s alliance or even any country within its own alliance.¹⁵ No doubt Andropov deliberately chose to make his suggestion in Prague, capital of the Warsaw Pact country invaded by the USSR in 1968.

But Reagan was as yet of no mind to see anything positive in Soviet overtures. He regarded the USSR as an ‘evil empire’ and former KGB chief Andropov as an emperor as demonic as any of his predecessors in the Kremlin. Far from improving, relations between the superpowers deteriorated after Brezhnev’s death. On 23 March 1983, President Reagan announced he was going to finance research on a Strategic Defence Initiative (or ‘Star Wars’ Initiative, as it quickly became known). According to Reagan, this would serve no offensive purpose whatever but would be an exclusively defensive system for the detection and destruction of nuclear missiles aimed at the USA. Reagan promised that the technological developments would be shared with the USSR. Unsurprisingly Andropov felt unable to accept him at his word: there was no guarantee that the system would indeed be confided to the Soviet Union. The Politburo resolved to subsidize a parallel research programme, and competition in military technology was set to grow fiercer.

Tension between the USSR and the USA increased on 1 September when a South Korean airliner, KAL-007, strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down by the forces of Air-Defense Command. Furious recriminations occurred between Moscow and Washington; the diplomatic strains were intensifying to the point of rupture. Andropov was advised by Sovet intelligence organs abroad that Reagan might be about to order a nuclear strike on the USSR. The suspicion was that the imminent NATO exercise of 2 November might be used as a cover to attack Moscow. Andropov felt he had no alternative but to order his nuclear forces to assume a condition of heightened alert.¹⁶ This emergency, unlike the Cuban missiles crisis, was kept secret from the Soviet and American publics. But the politicians in the two capitals knew how near the world had come to the brink of a Third World War; and it was clear that robust, clear-sighted leadership was required if such incidents were not to recur.

Robustness could no longer be provided by Andropov. The decay of his kidneys could not be slowed and the frequency of his attendance at official meetings was already decreasing in spring and summer 1983: colleagues had to communicate with him by letter as he convalesced at his dacha. Greater authority therefore passed into the hands of the second secretary of the Central Committee, Chernenko, who chaired the Politburo in Andropov’s absence. This job was also sometimes carried out by Gorbachev. In the discreet struggle for the succession,