Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin

The Memoirs Of Yegor Ligachev

Yegor Ligachev, Stephen Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429979422
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This memoir by the second most powerful Communist Party leader during the early Gorbachev years provides an important alternative view of the USSR's transformation?a view that is gaining ground in Russian politics today. In a substantial new piece for this edition, Mr. Ligachev outlines the political agenda of today's communist coalition?the establishment of a new Soviet Union, with strong economic and political integration of its member-states.Yegor Ligachev, a seasoned Party boss from Siberia, made a solid career for himself in the capital during the Khrushchev era, but, following Khrushchev's ouster, chose to retreat to the provinces. In 1985, his political patrons brought him back to Moscow to help them build a dynamic new leadership team under Mikhail Gorbachev. The two reform-minded communists launched an effort to inject life and energy into the Party, economy, and society through a series of liberalizing measures. But when Ligachev saw the reforms moving into a revolutionary phase that could result in the Party's loss of control over the helm of state, he found himself increasingly siding with the opposition.In this gripping book, Ligachev describes the evolving confrontation between opposing forces at high-level Party meetings and sessions of the Politburo as well as in less formal conversations. Along the way, he gives revealing glimpses not only of Gorbachev but also of Yuri Andropov, Andrei Gromyko, Alexander Yakovlev, Eduard Shevardnadze, Boris Yeltsin, and other top leaders. Notorious events such as the 1989 massacre in Tbilisi and the Gdlyan/Ivanov affair?in which, Ligachev argues, he was unjustly implicated?are also highlighted.

One
Inside the Kremlin and Old Square

For decades, the foreign press has written about the "secrets of the Kremlin," including under this rubric the process of decisionmaking at the highest level of the Soviet political leadership as well as the battle among advocates of different views of development and among top politicians aspiring to leadership. It is not at all surprising that such secrets exist. Political leaders in all countries must guard their activities from the excessive curiosity of die press and the assiduous attention of foreign political intelligence services. A natural effort to protect state interests dictates this. For example, we learned about the dramatic events that occurred in the White House during the Caribbean Crisis¹ only years later, from the memoirs of Kennedy family members.

But it is also quite natural that events occurring at the top level of every government have their own unique qualities rooted in that country's historic, political, and national traditions. These help us understand better how new courses of action are developed; why an apparently direct and clear path may be interrupted by zigzags; and why the danger of an impasse may loom.

My book is now more or less complete. I printed out several copies and gave them to my close friends to read, in order to recheck my analyses. Then I decided to publish the beginning of one of the chapters about events inside the Kremlin (the highest political body of the country, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [hereafter simply Central Committee], held its meetings right in the Kremlin and, of course, in the Central Committee building on Old Square).² But the reader should not expect any sensational exposés, startling details, or disparaging characterizations of political figures in the style of the "confessions on a theme" that have appeared not too long ago.³ This book is something else. It attempts a serious political analysis based on new facts, in addition to those already known to some extent to the reader.

A Late-Night Call

In April 1983, after seventeen years of work in the Siberian city of Tomsk, I was transferred to Moscow and appointed director of the Party Organization Department at the Central Committee, or to put it another way, the Department of Personnel and Party Committees. Under the system of Party-government rule that existed in those years, my position entailed dealing with the "cadres"⁴ in the broadest sense of that term, including those in the soviets⁵ and economic management.

During this period, the general secretary of the Central Committee⁶ was Yuri Andropov. I first became acquainted with him in February 1983. Our second meeting came in April of that year, when I was confirmed in my new post. Andropov categorically rejected his predecessors' practice of selecting the leading cadres on the basis of personal loyalty, choosing only people with whom they had previously worked.

A list of the people Andropov relied on is enough to prove this point. Gorbachev was from the North Caucasus; Nikolai Ryzhkov,⁷ from the Ural Mountains; Vitaly Vorotnikov, from Central Russia; Victor Chebrikov,⁸ from Ukraine; and Ligachev, from Siberia. Not that Andropov's selections were made randomly. Nor was it by chance that I came to his attention when it was time to find a director for one of the key departments in the Central Committee.

It was a member of the Politburo who proposed me as a candidate to Andropov and actively promoted my transfer to Moscow. Events in those memorable days of April 1983 unfolded unexpectedly and rapidly. I flew to the capital for a meeting on agriculture chaired personally by Andropov. In the Sverdlovsk Hall of the Kremlin, the members of the Politburo gathered along with the secretaries of the Central Committee and the provinces⁹ as well as many agricultural planners. These were the people involved with carrying out the food program adopted the previous year. Since Gorbachev occasionally dealt with agricultural problems during this period, he gave a report at the meeting. He was brusque and pointed, criticizing both local administrators and the center.

I recall that I sent a note up to the presidium¹⁰ of the meeting requesting the floor, although I didn't really expect to be allowed to speak. During the entire Brezhnev period, for the seventeen years that I had worked as first secretary of the Tomsk Province Party Committee, I had not managed to speak a single time at the Central Committee plenums. In die early years I regularly signed up on the speakers' list, but in time my hopes waned. I soon realized that only selected speakers were always allowed at the microphone, probably because they knew perfectly well what they ought to say, and how. I did not perceive any particular intrigues against me personally—many provincial Party secretaries were in the same position and had long and faithfully borne their heavy burden.

But with the advent of Andropov, the provincial Party secretaries immediately began to sense that changes had begun at the Central Committee. There were new hopes, and that was what moved me to send up that note.

Within the hour I was given the floor. As always, I had prepared some remarks beforehand—just in case. But I hardly glanced at the paper; I was speaking about everything I had lived through, how in seven or eight years Tomsk Province had gone from being a consumer of produce to a producer. I spoke of how the population of western Siberia was growing because oil and gas workers were coming into the region, and how they had to be fed primarily from local farming. And finally I recalled the harsh conditions of northwestern Siberia, and Narym Territory, once notorious for its slave labor, and the saying "God created heaven, but the devil made Narym." I mentioned Narym with a purpose: with Suslov,¹¹ I had long had in mind the idea of memorializing the victims of Stalinist persecution (more about this later).¹²

The Kremlin meeting finished at about 6:00 P.M., and I hurried to the Central Committee to settle some specific problems regarding Tomsk. As I recall, it wasn't until late in the evening that I finally made it back to my son's apartment to spend some time with him before flying back to Tomsk.

My flight was booked for the morning, and my ticket was already in my pocket. I intended to go to bed early. By Tomsk time, four hours ahead of Moscow, it was already early morning.

But at 10:00 P.M., the phone suddenly rang. The call was for me.

I took the receiver, not suspecting that this late-night phone call would change my whole life drastically and that the same kind of sudden late-night phone calls would sound, like the siren call of destiny, in February 1984, on the day Andropov died, and in March 1985, on the day Chernenko died. I took the receiver and heard:

"Yegor, this is Mikhail.... I need to see you in my office tomorrow."

Gorbachev and I had met in the early 1970s, when we happened to be in the same delegation traveling to Czechoslovakia. After that, at the Central Committee plenums and at Party congresses when all the provincial Party secretaries gathered in Moscow, we would always have a friendly conversation, exchanging opinions on both particular and general matters. When Gorbachev became a secretary of the Central Committee, and then a member of the Politburo, and then worked on agricultural problems, I began to visit him frequently. Moreover, given the habits of the top political leadership under Brezhnev, Gorbachev in those years was the only member of the Politburo who could be found in his office until late at night. This practice was of no little importance to a Siberian Party secretary who on his trips to Moscow spent from morning until night making the rounds of the ministries, trying to deal with matters of petrochemical development and the food industry, extracting permits for building modern construction depots, science and cultural centers, and working on a multitude of individual problems involving the life and work of the people of Tomsk.

It was not hard to guess that Gorbachev himself had seen to it that I was allowed to speak at the Kremlin agricultural meeting. And when that phone rang late at night, my first thought was that he wanted to tell me his reaction. In the opinion of those who had approached me after the meeting, my speech had been on target. Yet now he was telling me to be in his office tomorrow.

"But Mikhail Sergeyevich, I already have my ticket in my pocket; I'm flying out early tomorrow," I replied.

It had long been our practice for Gorbachev to call me Yegor, while I spoke to him more formally, using his first name and patronymic.¹³

"You'll have to delay your departure, Yegor," Gorbachev said calmly. His tone made it clear that this phone call had nothing to do with the meeting earlier in the day. "You'll have to turn in your ticket."

"I understand; I'll be in your office tomorrow morning," I conceded without further debate, although in fact I didn't understand a thing.

It was not uncommon for a provincial Party secretary on business in the capital to have to change his flight and return his airplane ticket. In those years, I had to return my ticket and delay my departure back to Tomsk at least a dozen times for various mundane reasons. A meeting with a minister or director at the State Planning Committee would have to be rescheduled; a previously unplanned meeting would suddenly come up—all kinds of unexpected affairs could detain a provincial secretary in the capital, especially if he had come from more than three thousand miles away. Better to stay an extra day than have to fly to the capital again.

I could have shown up early, before 9:00 A.M., but I was completely puzzled about the purpose of the meeting. I knew from my own experience that each director started his workday with a briefing, reading emergency reports, and revising the planned schedule if unforeseen circumstances had arisen. Moreover, it was Thursday, and I knew that a Politburo meeting was always held on Thursdays at precisely 11:00 A.M. This custom had been established back in Lenin's day, and was preserved almost up until the 28th Party Congress.

I decided that the most convenient time for Gorbachev would be at 10:00 A.M., and on the stroke of the hour, I opened the door to the waiting room outside his office.

From that moment on, I began to calculate time differently. My life proceeded at a new tempo that made even my stormy Tomsk period pale in comparison.

Gorbachev received me right away, and after exchanging greetings, I was in for an immediate surprise.

"Yegor, people are of the opinion that you should be transferred to work in the Central Committee and assigned to direct the Party Organization Department. That's all I can tell you now. No more. Everything depends on how events develop. Andropov will be inviting you in for a talk. He asked me to go over this with you first, which I'm doing. This is an assignment from him."

Frankly, this troubled me. The matter was not as simple as it seemed at first glance. The problem was that the director of the Party Organization Department at that time was Ivan Kapitonov, a Central Committee secretary, and only the Central Committee plenum was authorized to make such an appointment. Moreover, Chernenko, second secretary of the Central Committee, was on vacation at the time. If he had been there, Gorbachev would hardly have interfered so decisively in personnel matters, especially concerning the post of the director of the Party Organization Department. Among members of the Politburo, there was an unwritten but inviolable pecking order, and you were not to interfere in personnel assignments if they were not part of your duties. I myself later observed this rule strictly; it went a long way to preventing direct influence on the selection of cadres by any individual Politburo member, and left that right to the general secretary, the second secretary, and, of course, the Politburo as a whole, since the final decision was made collegially.

But since events were taking an unusual course, it was clear to me that Gorbachev had Andropov's trust. And there were other considerations. I was first asked to work on the Central Committee in 1961, in the postcult period,¹⁴ when Stalin-era accusations of Trotskyism¹⁵ were no longer a "blot on my record" barring me from working in the central government. To give my background briefly, in the 1950s I had been secretary of a district Party committee in the city of Novosibirsk, the same district where the famous Akademgorodok¹⁶ was built. During the whole start-up period of Akademgorodok, I worked side by side with Mikhail Lavrentyev, Khristianovich, Guri Marchuk, Gersh Budker, and other prominent Soviet scientists, from whom I learned a great deal. Subsequently, I was appointed ideology secretary of the Novosibirsk Province Party Committee. It was from that position that I was invited to work in the Central Committee as deputy director of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee Bureau for the RSFSR.¹⁷ Later, after the reorganization that shook up the Party apparat¹⁸ in those years, I was appointed deputy director of the bureau's Party Organization Department.

For the first two or three years, I found work in the Central Committee interesting. I was involved in many different matters, and I came to have a deeper understanding of many social issues. I went through a period of great intellectual growth. But gradually I came to yearn for real work with people. I began to lose interest in my job, became depressed and tense, would come home in the evenings in a foul mood. In 1965, after consulting with my wife, I wrote a letter to Brezhnev asking him to send me to do Party work somewhere far away from Moscow, preferably Siberia. (The phrase "somewhere far away from Moscow" wasn't actually in the letter, but I'd had a frank talk beforehand with my immediate supervisor, Kapitonov, the director of the Party Organization Department, and he supported me.)

In the post-Stalin period, the "rotation" of leading Party cadres—that is, their transfer from the center to the provinces and back—was done for a purpose: I would say it was like the movement of the tides. When Khrushchev was finally established in power, he sent his opponents, Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgy Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin, and Lazar Kaganovich into political oblivion. Then, in 1959, he began a new cycle of replacement of Moscow cadres. Many Party workers were sent away from Moscow under various pretexts. Kapitonov, first secretary of the Moscow Province Party Committee, was sent to work in Ivanovo; Marchenko, the second secretary of that committee, was moved to Tomsk; and so forth.

Under Brezhnev, the process moved in reverse. By 1964, Kapitonov was back in Moscow and had been made director of the Party Organization Department. Marchenko was recalled from Tomsk to the capital. In general, Brezhnev brought together the people who had been dispersed by Khrushchev, and, in turn, dispersed those whom Khrushchev had gathered.

This "tidal" tendency did not affect me. My connections with the Khrushchev team were limited to riding to work in the government car along with Burlatsky¹⁹ and Arbatov.²⁰ Burlatsky, as people joked then behind his back, was the baggage handler on that team—and he didn't even carry Khrushchev's suitcases, only those of his son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei. (With the passing of years, everything seems to look different. One gets the idea that Burlatsky was Khrushchev's chief adviser, while for some reason hardly anything is heard of Adzhubei.)

A brief digression: In June 1985, I was brought a letter from Adzhubei addressed to the Central Committee in which he expressed support for the new course and requested that ideology chief Suslov's restrictions on publishing under his own name be removed. I hadn't known that such untacit bans existed, and I was shocked: could people really be treated this way? Could a journalist really be prohibited from publishing under his own name? Of course, I showed this le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Ligachev and the Tragedy of Soviet Conservatism
• A Note to American Readers
• 1. Inside the Kremlin and Old Square
• 2. The Gorbachev Enigma: In the Trap of Radicalism
• 3. Harbinger of Disaster
• 4. The Tbilisi Affair
• 5. Gdlyan and Others
• 6. Ghosts of the Past
• 7. Witch Hunt
• 8. Our Own Path
• Afterword: Russia Before the Storm—Life Cannot Go On Like This
• About the Book and Author
• Index