Volkogonov on Gorbachev

When Volkogonov arrives at a description of the Soviet Union’s last Party Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, he has become part of the storyline. Gorbachev’s political nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, appointed Volkogonov as the the civilian leader of the Russian armed forces when he assumed power. Volkogonov believes Yeltsin made the correct choice in jettisoning the Communist Party and Bolshevik ideology, and he faults Gorbachev for remaining wedding to Leninism when the Leninist system had already been discredited as both a political creed and an economic philosophy. However, Volkogonov is sympathetic to Gorbachev, who was, as one American journal put it, the best that the Soviet system had to offer. He admits that Gorbachev was a towering political figure, a humane reformer, and a change agent who hastened the end of the Bolshevism.



While Gorbachev had no particular road map for reform, and did not know where glasnost and perestroika and acceleration might lead, he unleashed forces that could not be turned back. Although committed to failed ideological premises associated with Lenin, he renounced most, but not all, of the tools of totalitarianism. He also avoided military force and ultimately pulled the country's forces out of Afghanistan.

The author notes that historians have written more books about Gorbachev than any other Russian politician, including Lenin. In the midst of this sea of information about the man, Volkogonov understandably appears reticent to render a final judgment on Gorbachev. Clearly, Volkogonov believes that Gorbachev had a genuine faith in socialist principles, which he reiterated even after the failed coup of 1991. He also believes that Gorbachev was unable to free himself from the Party’s traditions, which included secrecy, extreme political centralization, and the Party’s monopoly of power. But these were inherited sins, and Gorbachev’s relentless pursuit of perestroika and glasnost had tremendously useful ramifications.



The author particularly admires Gorbachev’s decision to move away from international rivalry, although he notes that the Russian people were more severe in their judgments about the real cause of Gorbachev’s popularity abroad. They thought he was betraying Russia at the expense of its traditional enemies.



Volkogonov’s analysis of Gorbachev is incomplete, but he emerges as an intelligent and complicated man who blended moral inclinations with the obsolete clichés of Marxist-Leninism. Perhaps Gorbachev could have taken a few pages from Yeltsin’s playbook and resigned from the Party at an earlier date. But it’s hard to see how exactly this would have helped either Gorbachev or Russia. Gorbachev’s ability to effect change was predicated on his role as Party Boss. To surrender this privilege, would have been to have surrendered his power base. In fact, when the USSR came apart, the Party hierarchy continued to control the destinies of the people. The former apparatchiks rapidly took control of the formal as well as informal economy, to say nothing of the various nationalist movements. Even Putin gained much of his authority as a direct result of his tied to the security organs who dominated the Communist State.

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 on Yuri Andropov

Yuri Andropov was sixty-eight years old when Brezhnev died and he ascended to the role of Party Leader. He lived only fifteen months after that, but his short reign as the Soviet boss reveals a great deal about the Soviet political experiment. Andropov’s rise to the top Party job reveals the close ties between the political hierarchy and the security apparatus. The Soviet Union was awash in security officials and paid informers, people who existed at every level of Russian society and regularly received small stipends for their services, so it was only natural for Brezhnev’s Politburo to place its faith in the head of the KGB.

Under Andropov, the KGB had become less brutal but no less efficient or even powerful. Andropov referred to his men as “Chekists” (a term that connoted a certain level of cold-bloodiness to those who had experienced the early years of the Bolshevik regime ) and was sometimes called a “Liberal Chekist,” insofar as he believed that the security organs could often fight heterodoxy at the level of ideas more often than it relied on the naked threat of physical coercion. Volkogonov points out that Andropov spent half his life as a Party apparatchik, and the other half as a KGB leader.

Andropov –calm, secretive, desk-bound, humble, and hard-working-- shared Brezhnev’s basic political outlook. The two men were conservatives who believed wholeheartedly in the basic tenants of the Soviet political system and command economy. Unlike Brezhnev, Andropov was well-read and extremely intelligent, if fairly orthodox in his approach to the growing problems that confronted the Soviet Union, including its troubles in Afghanistan, ailing economy, strained relations with China, and expensive arms race with the United States. According to Volkogonov, Andropov had a powerful intellect but failed to creatively address the basic flaws in the Soviet system. The answer to all pressing problems was greater Party discipline, more police surveillance, and more perfect control over the economy.

While Andropov made cosmetic proposals to alter the formal composition of the Supreme Soviet, took on a few regional bosses on issues related to corruption, and talked about new “brigade contracts” to incentivize work at least one some level, he entertained no thoughts that would have affected the Party’s monopoly of power. Indeed, under Andropov, the Politburo continued to make all decisions, no matter how big or small. In a single day, a few old men (and usually, only one old man, namely Andropov) would decide the future of Soviet foreign policy as well as which pig breeders deserved to be awarded prizes for their accomplishments.

Andropov’s rule was marked by debilitating illness. Volkogonov is impressed with Andropov’s capacity for work in the face of advancing physical infirmity, but notes with sadness that no Soviet leader even considered giving up power, no matter how incapacitated. The darkest moment of Andropov’s reign came in 1985, when the Soviets shot down a commercial Korean airliner, killing 269, and showed no remorse (and some deceit) over the incident.

Volkogonov on Khrushchev

In Stalin’s old age, he told his cronies that they were “Pygmies” who would be eaten alive after he was gone. He’s wasn’t too far wrong, but Khrushchev was at least interesting. He wasn’t an intellectual giant, to be sure, but he was folksy, quick-witted, comical, energetic, flamboyant, and mercurial. Deeply implicated in the horrendous crimes of Stalinism—but what Communist bureaucrat who survived the purges wasn’t?—Khrushchev outplayed and outlasted other Party insiders, especially the notorious Beria, and eventually emerged as the third Communist Leader.



Khrushchev probably owed his survival under Stalin to his working class origins and unassuming, comic persona; he probably owed his rise to power in the wake of Stalinism to his craftiness and reputation as a man who was unlikely to kill off too many rivals. In the event, Khrushchev had Beria killed (as the Thermidoreans had Robespierre killed) but soon emerged as a reformer who, somewhat courageously, overturned much of Stalin’s legacy. Self-serving or not, there is not a little sincerity in Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin and Stalinism.



Volkogonov’s assessment of Khrushchev is of course mixed. As Taubman’s biography also makes clear, there is much to both hate and admire in this complex man. In the “hate” column, Volkogonov stresses Khrushchev’s participation in collectivization, slave labor, and deportation during the 1930s and 1940s. He shows that Khrushchev was an unevenly educated, boorish, anti-Semitic ideologue, who accepted—despite his critique of the “cult of personality”—his own right to make decisions in every arena of Soviet endeavor, including politics, economics, agriculture, technology, defense, and even art.




The First Secretary was an energetic reformer, but his reforms, especially in the area of agriculture, were poorly thought out and frequently disastrous. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign was a truly earth-shattering event in the life of the Soviet State; even so, Volkogonov asserts that Khrushchev never really upset any of the principles of the Leninist regime. The security apparatus, the expensive military machine, the Gulag, the Communist ideology—everything was kept in working order.

The Communist hierarchy eventually brought Khrushchev down. They blamed him for his erratic behavior, which was perhaps most embarrassing in the arena of foreign policy. Volkogonov supports the criticism and blames Khrushchev almost exclusively for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as for the rupture with China. Even the most critical communications from Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis appear a bit disjointed and rambling, if not deluded. For instance, Khrushchev denied that nuclear weapons in Cuba could be considered as offensive weapons at all.



In his way, Khrushchev was interested in peace, and certainly he promoted detente, but he was a bully too, and threatened Poland with invasion, attacked Hungary, banged his shoe in the UN, and constantly provoked the West in unproductive ways. Khrushchev believed what he said, that socialism would “bury” capitalism, that socialism was inherently peaceful, et cetera.



Khrushchev’s final years gave his life a final dignity. Ousted from power and ostracized, Khrushchev braved Party pressure and wrote or rather dictated his memoirs (published in the West by his son) which Volkogonov assures us are one of the best descriptions of this epoch in world affairs. In the end, it’s a strange comment on world history that this strange “Pygmy” steered the ship of state of one of two superpowers in the age of the space race, detente, the U2 incident, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hungary, the Suez Canal Crisis, the Sino-Russian split, the Tito reconciliation, the Berlin Blockade, etc.

Volkogonov on Brezhnev

Dimitry Volkogonov comes into his own in the era of Brezhnev, in part because he was already a reasonably important Party apparatchik at the time. In fact, Volkogonov had access to Brezhnev's personel file at the time, and even participated in the early phases of the disastrous and immoral intervention in Afghanistan. Who was Brezhnev? Before the creeping senility and physical infirmity overtook him and turned him into a running punchline of untold political jokes, Brezhnev was an affable man, not well-read or worldly, but good-looking, charming, personally generous, apparently loyal, and well-liked by colleagues and supervisors.

Gradually Brezhnev worked his way up through the ranks of Stalin’s regional and then national political regime. Khrushchev (with Stalin's personal knowledge) tapped Brezhnev for multiple advancements, but was eventually undone by his own protegee. Volkogonov says that Brezhnev never evinced any particular courage other than leading the coup to overthrow Khrushchev, and even mentions that fact that one eyewitness reports that Brezhnev collapsed in fear when he believed that Khrushchev was about to act against him. But Brezhnev was the right man for the job of overthrowing Khrushchev, in that his own personal moderation and penchant for stability helped to galvanize party officials who were disgusted by Khrushchev’s theatrical antics, unending reforms, and enthusiasm for change of any sort.



Where Khrushchev never sat still even in his retirement, and never met an idea he didn’t like; Volkogonov says that Brezhnev craved consensus and the maintenance of the status quo, and never really came up with an original or profound idea. (And obviously, in his later years, Brezhnev could barely speak coherently, and was often physically guided, script in hand, from one appointment to the next, as--to paraphrase Volgonov--a sort of experiment to see how long a dying man could be made to maintain even the pretence of working in an official post.)



The author combed Brezhnev’s voluminous personal records and diaries, and rarely if ever found evidence of creativity, abstract thought, or theoretical sophistication. Brezhnev's diaries reveal nothing so much as the record of his hunting accomplishment, though in his advanced age he was sometimes hurt by the recoil of the rifles he could no longer control. (Near the end, Brezhnev merely supervised the hunting, doing no actual shooting.)



The Brezhnev era, as a whole, was a conservative and stable one, although certain intellectual and cultural trends that had emerged under Khrushchev showed continued vitality beneath the surface of official Soviet life. And Brezhnev's 18 year reign witnessed the "beginning of the end" or at least the "end of the beginning" of Russian communism. Under Brezhnev, who refused or could not reconstitute terror to move the economy forward, the Soviet economy stagnated, awash in corruption, cronyism, regulation, extreme centralization, and bureaucracy. The basic Soviet model of political economy was obviously flawed: the Soviets could not compete with America and the West, and maintaining military parity was helping to bankrupt the system. Indeed, probably only massive amounts of petroleum kept the state adrift. But the Brezhnev regime knew enough to understand that Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe depended on military coercion, so the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the whole Brezhnev doctrine made sense in the context of certain inherent Russian weakneses. Without the invasion, the Soviet system might well have collapsed much sooner than it did.

Volkogonov on Stalin

Volkogonov believed Stalin was brutal, dictatorial, and poisonous to Russia. Going through Stalin’s personal papers within the archives, Volkogonov found ample evidence of Stalin’s murderous actions throughout his long reign. Stalin’s famous blue pencil gives direct testimony to dozens if not hundreds of individual as well as mass crimes.



But Volkogonov is particularly intent on demonstrating the extent to which Stalin merely carried on the traditions of the Bolshevik Party established by Lenin. As noted in an earlier portrait of Lenin, Volgonov argues that Stalin’s many disastrous decisions had already been taken by V.I. Lenin., who indeed was often Stalin’s patron notwithstanding his famous “testament” against Stalin’s rudeness and inordinate power within the Party machinery. Lenin had, after all, already made countless decisions, including the murder of the tsar and his family, without consulting even his peers within the Central Committee. No doubt Stalin increased the scale of crimes against Russian citizens, but Lenin had already resorted to all of Stalin’s tools, including censorship, police brutality, execution, arbitrary imprisonment, exile, secrecy, class oppression, etc. Of course, Stalin’s decision to purge the Party and military was done on a scale that might have shocked even Lenin. Lenin was certainly less paranoid than Stalin, at least in the early stages of his career. But had Lenin lived, who knows what he might have been capable of?

Again, as a patriot, Volkogonov is particularly appalled by Stalin’s incompetence during World War II. Having maintained the extreme form of political centralization established by Lenin, Stalin ensured (even without the purges) that his military leaders would not be able to act independently. But of course Stalin’s passivity in the face of German preparation for war, as well as his famous decision to disallow any form of tactical Russian defeat, cost Russia a great deal in the early phases of the war.

In the end, Stalin’s poor leadership cost the Soviet Union millions of soldiers and citizens, although Volkogonov does admit that Stalin gradually got the hang of military leadership, if only insofar as he eventually began to trust his military leaders. Toward the end of Stalin’s reign, the criminality of his regime did not dissipate. Having won World War II, an increasingly senile Stalin imprisoned countless Russian prisoners-of-war, built numerous palaces, surrounded himself with sycophants, brought about the Korean War, and eventually died in the midst of the Doctor’s Plot, probably a prelude to one more round of ruthless purges.

Volkogonov on Lenin

Volkogonov’s Lenin has many similarities with the Lenin of Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, and others. Volkogonov’s Lenin is one-dimensional (he doesn't read Russian classics and thinks Chernechevsky makes for great literature), hypocritical, undemocratic, unpatriotic, ruthless, and interested in power for its own sake. While this Lenin was a true genius—especially in terms of his persuasiveness, willpower and dogged determination, and tactical flexibility—and accomplished more in his brief tenure in power than any other modern politician has accomplished in a lifetime, he was thoroughly amoral if not immoral.



Volkogonov isn’t exactly breaking new ground by listing the crimes and misdemeanors of V.I. Lenin. Yet it’s worth repeating some of the author’s chief complaints against the man. Volkogonov blames Lenin for attacking religion, instituting grain requisitions, ending press freedom, destroying the very notion of private property (and burning property-related papers to hinder counter-revolution), exiling opponents, normalizing executions (although his own brother had been executed under the Old Regime),creating a surveillance state, and implementing a philosophy of terror against political and so-called “class enemies.”

The author’s contempt for Lenin is limitless. According to Volkogonov, Lenin failed by any definition of good or ethical statecraft. He ended “bourgeois democracy” but also dealt a death blow to any meaningful definition of “worker democracy” insofar as he placed a very tiny minority of the Party above all trade union activity or worker control of factory life. Lenin also created the climate of inordinate secrecy that surrounded the Soviet Party elite. Everything became a state secret. Citizens weren’t permitted to know anything about the political or economic system, but even seemingly banal facts and figures were put off limit to the public or press, such as they were. Moreover, Lenin purposefully kept details about the emerging nomeklatura’s perks and privileges secret from the prying eyes of the Party at large.

Where Volkogonov’s critique of Lenin differs most from those of Westerners, is the outrage he reserves for Lenin’s commitment to international revolution. Ever the nationalist, Volkogonov blames Lenin for secretly sending large amounts of capital out of the country to support foreign communist parties. While this seems to be an inherent component of early (and late) Bolshevik ideology, Volkogonov reminds his readers that Lenin supported global revolution while ignoring the poverty and starvation that were gripping his country during War Communism.

Again and again, the author portrays a political leader who sacrifices ordinary people in order to create a distant utopia. Of course, Lenin had fairly limited contact with actual workers or peasants; no matter, he was prepared to authorize any moral outrage in the service of his personal conception of the workers’ needs. Volkogonov makes one other interesting critique of Lenin. He argues that Lenin arbitrarily ended the old tsarist administrative system that had been routed in provinces or oblasts rather than countries. The ultimate dissolution of the Soviet Union was the result of this extreme hubris. Under the Tsars, allegiance within the Russian Empire often transcended nationality. Under Leninism, the nationalities were only bound together by extreme forms of coercion and centralization. When the Party collapsed, the Soviet Union necessarily did so too.

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.