Volkogonov on Chernenko

Rightly or wrongly, Volkogonov is more contemptuous of Chernenko than any of the other six Soviet leaders. His Chernenko is a mumbling sycophant without political stature, real-world experience, or interest in the world outside of the Kremlin. According to Volkogonov, Chernenko, who reached the top post at age 72 by riding on Brezhnev’s coattails, was a Party bureaucrat to the core, and one without Andropov’s character, curiosity, practical experience, or intelligence. While presiding over a period of deepening malaise, Chernenko made no effort whatsoever to effect change.

Under Chernenko, the Soviet Union purchased ever greater quantities of foreign grain, lost more men in the maelstrom of Afghanistan, and became more deeply committed to propping up disreputable regimes like that of Angola, North Korea, Ethiopia, and Syria. As Rome burned, Chernenko busily crafted decrees about how governmental reports should be formatted, or spent time picking out presents for the North Korean dictator.



Chernenko had little genuine familiarity with the burdens of regional or national government. After all, he gained power by befriending Brezhnev early in his career and presiding over his personal office and even Brezhnev’s personal affairs. While Volkogonov has almost nothing positive to say about the man, Chernenko was obviously well organized, hard-working and extremely knowledgeable about political procedures and the individual men who made up the Party leadership. As such, he helped first Brezhnev, and later Andropov, to maintain important political relationships. He was a man who knew people’s birthdays, and knew all of the latest gossip before anybody else did.

Chernenko’s rise to power had little to do with either the Soviet people or indeed the Soviet Party. The patronage of a single man, Brezhnev, brought him into the heart of Soviet politics and kept him there for 18 years as the head of the “general department.” Following Berezhev’s death, Chernenko was out maneuvered by Andropov, but soon ended up chairing meetings in his absence. Apparently Andropov recognized Chernenko’s greatest virtue: loyalty.

Chernenko’s short reign is notable insofar as it served as a foil to the excitement of the Gorbachev era of reform that succeeded it. The contrast was stark. As the Soviet economy began to disintegrate, and the Soviet people became increasingly cynical about their experience with communism, Chernenko still agonized over which meaningless Marxist-Leninist slogan the government needed to employ to mobilize public opinion. Nothing—not the decline of agriculture, not increasing evidence of technological stagnation, not the rise of nationalism in the republics, not the inhumanity of his government toward human rights activists such as Sakharov —could convince him to try to change the course of the ship of state.

In his final days, Chernenko became increasingly ill but, like all previous Soviet leaders, he clung to power, flattered by everybody around him to remain in office right up until he died. The author relates one particularly embarrassing moment, when the old man was pulled from his hospital bed to vote, his hand visibly weak in front of the camera that projected the pathetic image to the nation at large.

Volkogonov

Dimitri Volkogonov deserves a special place in heaven. Although he was a very senior communist military leader for many decades and even produced a series of sterile treatises in support of Soviet military and ideological objectives, he developed a conscience and eventually wrote a series of brilliantly critical histories of modern Russian statemen. Two years ago, I read his biography of Stalin. Although one Stalin biography tends to blend in with the next, Volkogonov’s Stalin was bold, intelligent, original, and meticulously researched.

Western historians tend to be condescending about historians in other countries. With respect to historians who were forced to participate in Marxist-Leninist historiography, this condescension seems relatively well founded. However, Volkogonov’s scholarship is liberal, sophisticated, and grounded in the newly uncovered archives of the Soviet state, some of which have become inaccessible with the rise of Putin and his successor. If anything, Volkogov surpasses his Western peers by melding Western historical technique with a greater respect for special Russian sensitivities and particularities.

Volkogov’s books are predicated on exhaustive research and impeccable logic, but their power stems from his newly found antipathy to Bolshevism. As the Volkogonov’s longtime editor and translator, Harold Shukman, argues in the preface to Autopsy of an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime, reminds us, Volgognov’s family suffered a common fate in the 1930’s. His father, a communal farm manager, was shot, his wife exiled, et cetera and so on. In a sense, Volkogonov approaches history in a very traditional, top-down, way. His books do not deal directly with what Sheila Fitzpatrick would call “everyday Stalinism.” Even so, Volkogonov seems to understand that there is an important link between these leaders and the sad fate of ordinary Russians who lived in the last century, and this one.

I hope to post several times on Autopsy of an Empire since I haven’t discussed many of the Soviet leaders, aside from Lenin, Stalin, and to a lesser extent Khrushchev and Gorbachev. I do in fact accept the central premise of Volkogonov’s Autopsy of an Empire, and that is that the reign of Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko (or at least their rise to power), says a great deal about what the revolutionary experiment really became and really meant.

The other interesting thing about Volkogonov’s Autopsy of an Empire is that it is written from the point of view of a patriot. This historian is angry. Like other Western historians, he regrets the tragedy and death that accompanied the decisions of men like Lenin and Stalin. But Volkogonov is also angry about the Bolsheviks did to Mother Russia. As an active member of Yeltin’s government, and someone who interacted with many of the leaders he discusses in this book, Volkogonov is no passive adherent of Western emulation. He wants a strong, prosperous, independent Russia, capable of discovering its own truths whenever possible. Yet his patriotism makes him even more contemptuous of the Soviet leaders, Lenin included, than Western historians are likely to be. In Volkogonov’s overstated view, the Soviet experiment hurt only the Soviet people, and indeed helped the world by warning it what not to do.