The Dead Hand

more of these desolate villages than he did. She trudged in boots and rode by motorcycle and cart through the bleak Russian countryside to carry out her research.²²

Gorbachev moved up in Stavropol, first through the city organization and then to become the highest-ranking party official in the region. In these years, in the 1960s and 1970s, he again felt the disparity between the way people lived and the empty party slogans and rhetoric. In farming and industry, the heavy hand of the state stifled individual initiative. Theft, toadying, incompetence and malaise were everywhere. Central planning was both intrusive and woefully inefficient. Once, he toured a collective farm in Stavropol. There were “magnificent crops of both grain and fodder.” Gorbachev was pleased, but asked the chairman of the collective farm, “Where did you get the pipe to do the irrigation?” The man just smiled. He had diverted the pipe from somewhere, on his own, and Gorbachev knew that his success had nothing to do with socialism.²³

It is important to recall that the most daring changes in the centrally controlled Soviet economic system at the time were extremely modest, such as demonstrations of self-financing, or khozraschyot, the idea that a factory or farm could retain its own profits. Sweeping challenges to the system were just not possible; even minor experiments in individual initiative were snuffed out. This is the world Gorbachev knew. The bureaucrats at central planning in Moscow arrogantly issued orders to do this and that, and on the ground in farms and cities, the orders often made no sense. The demands were ignored, statistics faked, budgets swallowed up with no result, and anyone who deviated was punished. From 1970 to 1978, Gorbachev was first secretary of the Communist Party in Stavropol, the highest-ranking official in the region, an expanse between the Black and Caspian Seas with the most fertile lands in all of Russia. Gorbachev was essentially the governor, but wielded much more power than an American governor. Regional party bosses were a key power bloc in the Soviet system and could affect how Moscow decisions were implemented. As first secretary, Gorbachev joined an elite group at the pinnacle of Soviet society. He was eligible for special privileges—good housing, food, transport—and was a full member of the Central Committee in Moscow. In the Brezhnev years, a party first secretary was “a prince in his own domain,” as Robert G. Kaiser of the Washington Post described it.²⁴But Gorbachev was something of a populist. By one account, he often walked to his office and informally listened to people on the streets. He was a regular at theater performances and encouraged the local press to be less driven by party ideology.²⁵ Gorbachev was “as pragmatic an innovator as the conservative temper of the times allowed.”²⁶ For example, he supported a farming plan to give autonomy to groups or teams of workers, including families, even though it was viewed with suspicion by the Moscow bureaucrats. In 1978 Gorbachev wrote a lengthy memo on the problems of agriculture that called for giving “more independence to enterprises and associations” in deciding key production and money issues. But there is no evidence that these ideas ever took root very widely, and Gorbachev was definitely not a radical. He joined other party bosses in lavishing obsequious praise on the 1978 volume of Brezhnev’s ghostwritten memoirs of war, Malaya Zemlya, a blatant effort at self-glorification. Words of the state and party lost their meaning, but it was mandatory for Gorbachev and others to keep repeating them.

Gorbachev realized as regional party boss that something much more serious was wrong with the Soviet system than just inefficiency, theft and poor planning. The deeper flaw was that no one could break out with new ideas. Gorbachev bridled at being “bound hand and foot by orders from the center.”²⁷ He concluded that a “hierarchy of vassals and chiefs of principalities was in fact the way the country was run.” In a reflection many years later, he said bluntly, “It was a caste system based on mutual protection.”

The outside world, too, offered Gorbachev fresh evidence of the contrast between reality and the party line. When his university friend MlynaaY visited Stavropol in 1967, he surprised Gorbachev with a warning that Czechoslovakia was “on the verge of a major upheaval.” In the year that followed, MlynaaY became a figure in the liberalizing movement in Czechoslovakia, headed by Alexander Dubcek, which led to the Prague Spring and the drive to create “socialism with a human face.” This fling with democracy was crushed by Soviet tanks and Warsaw Pact troops on the night of August 20–21, 1968. Gorbachev has acknowledged that in 1968 he supported the invasion as a party official in Stavropol. But Gorbachev saw a different reality a year later when he visited Prague. On this trip, he did not see MlynaaY, but he realized people sincerely believed in the liberalization and hated the Soviet leadership in Moscow. While the KGB line was that external factors were at work, Gorbachev saw that the impetus was internal. On a factory tour in Brno, workers refused to even talk to Gorbachev. “This was a shock to me,” Gorbachev said. “This visit overturned all my conceptions.” In Bratislava, he saw walls densely covered with anti- Soviet slogans. “From that time on, I began to think more and more about what was going on in our country, and I came to an unconsoling conclusion: there was something wrong…” But he kept these thoughts to himself, and Raisa.²⁸ Throughout the 1970s, Gorbachev traveled several times to the West, including Italy, France, Belgium and West Germany. What he saw in these relatively prosperous democracies was far different from what he had been shown in Soviet propaganda books, films and radio broadcasts. “People there lived in better conditions, and were better off than in our country. The question haunted me: why was the standard of living in our country lower than in other developed countries?”

The Stavropol town of Kislovodsk was favored by the Soviet elite for its soothing spas and mineral springs. The Soviet KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, who suffered kidney ailments, often retreated to a KGB lodge there. He and Gorbachev shared a holiday at the mineral springs in August 1978. Andropov had taken notice of Gorbachev as a potential future leader. They climbed in the nearby mountains, and spent many hours sitting around an open bonfire, cooking shashlik under the star-studded skies. Andropov, who had wide-ranging interests, often talked to Gorbachev about affairs of state, and they listened to tape recordings of Vladimir Vysotsky and Yuri Vizbor, who strummed a seven-string guitar and sang of people’s everyday problems. This must have been an amazing scene: two party bosses enjoying the music of bards whose works were largely distributed on bootleg tapes. Andropov, head of the secret police since 1967, became one of Gorbachev’s mentors and tutors.

In Moscow, Gorbachev was elected a secretary of the Central Committee and put in charge of agriculture.²⁹ Full of enthusiasm, he went to see Brezhnev about farm policy. But Gorbachev, forty- eight years old, found the Soviet leader, then seventy-one, almost lifeless in his Kremlin office. “Not only did he not take up the conversation, but he showed no response at all, neither to my words nor to myself,” Gorbachev recalled.

As a junior member of the Soviet ruling elite, Gorbachev soon discovered that the final years of Brezhnev’s rule were filled with such scenes. Some Politburo meetings lasted no longer than fifteen or twenty minutes, so as not to tire the chairman. “It was a sad sight,” recalled Gorbachev. The country was in serious trouble economically as the oil boost of the late 1970s began to give out. The war in Afghanistan, launched by a coterie around Brezhnev, turned into a quagmire. The hopes of detente in the 1970s evaporated, and the superpower tension escalated. Food shortages grew at home. During the first four years that Gorbachev was secretary for agriculture in Moscow, there were four successive bad harvests and massive Soviet grain purchases abroad.³⁰

From the time Gorbachev arrived in Moscow in November 1978, through the early 1980s, a simmering power struggle unfolded between an old guard, bastions of the party and military, and a handful of reformers, most of whom were academics with fresh ideas but no power base. When Brezhnev died, Andropov promoted a group of younger officials, including Gorbachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov, an experienced factory manager from Sverdlovsk. Andropov put Gorbachev in charge of economic policy for the whole country. Gorbachev solicited ideas from the academic reformers. Now, at least the reformers had an umbrella—Gorbachev would listen to them.³¹

True to his background in the KGB, Andropov tried to rejuvenate the country with police-state methods, such as arresting people seen as loafers on the street during working hours. Gorbachev told him this was a dubious practice, that people were making jokes about it, but Andropov wouldn’t listen. He brushed Gorbachev off, saying, “When you get to my age, you’ll understand.”

What brought these two men together was a shared understanding of the plight of the system. Gorbachev recalled that Andropov was determined to root out the ills of the Brezhnev era, including “protectionism, in-fighting and intrigues, corruption, moral turpitude, bureaucracy, disorganization and laxity.” But as historian Robert English pointed out, it was extraordinarily hard to make change “in an ossified, militarized Party-state system,” especially given the latent power of the hard-liners.³²In the end, Andropov ran out of time. Gorbachev wrote later that Andropov could not have really carried out drastic change; the years with the KGB left him unable to