Gorbachev, preoccupied with finding solutions to the multiple Soviet crises, put considerable thought and effort into his report to the congress. In the late fall of 1985, he summoned his two closest advisers—his chief assistant, Valerii Boldin, and Aleksandr Yakovlev, the former Soviet ambassador to Canada—to the state resort near Sochi on the Black Sea Coast. Perestroika—the radical restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system—still lay ahead; eventually, Yakovlev would become known as the grandfather of the movement. The key concept at the time was uskorenie, or acceleration. It was believed that the system was basically sound and simply needed a boost by means of “scientific and technical progress,” the Soviet term for technological innovation.
In the days leading up to the congress, Gorbachev shut himself up at home, reading his long speech aloud and timing it. Read without a break or interruptions, it would be more than six hours in length. As Gorbachev practiced his oratorical skills, the delegates to the congress kept themselves busy visiting the stores of Moscow rather than galleries and museums. “Having come from all over the country, they were preoccupied with their own affairs,” wrote Gorbachev’s aide, Boldin, who had coauthored the speech. “They had to buy many things for themselves, their family members, and acquaintances, who had ordered so much that it would be hard to transport even by train.”5
Most of the delegates came from the provinces, which were dogged by the shortages of agricultural products and consumer goods that had become a constant feature of Soviet life in the 1980s. The party leadership, unable to alleviate the shortages for the general population, did its best to supply the party elite. In hotels designated for congress delegates, party officials opened special branches of grocery and department stores, to which hard-to-get products were brought from all parts of the Soviet Union. There were stylish suits and dresses, shoes, caviar, cured meat, sausages, and, last but not least, bananas—all items desired by average Soviet citizens not only in the provinces but also in the much better supplied metropolitan centers such as Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyiv. The post office administration opened a special branch to handle all the merchandise that the delegates shipped back from Moscow.
For high-ranking party officials from the provinces and directors of large enterprises who had access to scarce goods at home because of their political power and connections, participation in the congress offered a different kind of opportunity. They used the time to lobby Moscow’s potentates and ministers, asking for money and resources for their regions and firms. They also worked hard to maintain old networks of friends and acquaintances and make useful new connections. Networking meant drinking, often to excess—a hallmark and curse of the Soviet managerial style. The previous year, Gorbachev, alarmed by the level of alcoholism among the general population, had launched an anti-alcohol campaign. Party and state officials, in particular, were liable to prosecution for drunkenness.
Vitalii Vrublevsky, a close aide to the all-powerful party boss of Ukraine, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, head of the Ukrainian delegation, recalled an episode in which KGB guards charged with checking passes to the congress smelled alcohol on one of the delegates and reported him to senior officials. The case, which involved a regional secretary in Ukraine’s mining area of Luhansk, was reported all the way to the top of the party apparatus. “The secretary was expelled from the party on the spot,” recalled Vrublevsky, who had barely avoided detection himself after spending a night drinking with some of the first cosmonauts—the Soviet equivalent of rock stars. “Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, sitting at the head table, kept glancing at his delegation,” recalled Vrublevsky. “And, as ill luck would have it, my head kept drooping.” He was saved by a friend who would squeeze his knee from time to time to wake him up in the middle of the speeches.6
Viktor Briukhanov, the fifty-year-old director of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine, was a member of the 1986 Ukrainian delegation. It was the first congress that Briukhanov was attending after many years as a loyal party member and high-ranking manager. Three-quarters of the other delegates were also there for the first time, but managers such as Briukhanov accounted for slightly more than 350 of the party delegates, roughly 7 percent of the total. Below average in height, slim and erect, with curly black hair that he combed back and a somewhat awkward smile, Briukhanov made the impression of a kind and fair man. His subordinates valued him as a good engineer and effective manager. He was hardly a drinker. If anything, Briukhanov was a workaholic. He put in long hours, spoke little, and was known as one of a rare breed: a Soviet manager who got things done while showing consideration to his subordinates.7
The privilege of becoming a delegate was recognition for the work Briukhanov had done at the helm of the third most powerful nuclear power station in the world. He had built it from scratch, and now it had four nuclear reactors running, each producing 1 million megawatts of electrical energy (MWe). Two more reactors were under construction, and the station had overfulfilled its plan targets for 1985, producing 29 billion MWe. Briukhanov had received two high Soviet awards for his work, and many believed that he was poised to receive an even higher distinction, the Order of Lenin, as well as the gold star of a Hero of Socialist Labor. In late November 1985, the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet in Kyiv had marked his fiftieth birthday with a commendation. His selection as a delegate, with the corresponding lapel pin, was a distinction in its own right, equal if not superior to most government awards.
When on the eve of Briukhanov’s birthday a reporter came from Kyiv to Prypiat, where the Chernobyl plant was located, to interview him about his accomplishments and plans for the future, Briukhanov, usually a man of few words, suddenly opened up to the visitor. He recalled a cold winter day in 1970 when he had come to Chernobyl and rented a room in the local hotel. Only thirty-five years old at the time, he had been appointed director of a power plant that was yet to be built. “To be frank, it was scary at first,” Briukhanov told the reporter. That was then. Now Briukhanov was running an enterprise with thousands of highly qualified managers, engineers, and workers. He also bore de facto responsibility for running the company town of Prypiat, which housed close to 50,000 construction workers and plant personnel. He even complained to the reporter about the need to divert people and resources from the nuclear station to ensure the smooth running of the city’s infrastructure. But there were also payoffs from the “father of the city” status that had been thrust upon him. Before and during the congress, photographs and profiles of Briukhanov were published in local and regional newspapers, including the one in Chernobyl.8
Photos of the Kyiv regional delegation taken in Red Square during the congress and then upon the group’s return to Ukraine show Briukhanov dressed in a fancy muskrat fur hat and short sheepskin coat with a mohair scarf around his neck—all expensive and hard to get in the Soviet Union at the time, tokens of the prestige and power of their owner. Briukhanov did not need the shops set up for rank-and-file congress delegates, but time in Moscow gave him the opportunity to meet with colleagues in the industry and lobby the party’s Central Committee and the Ministry of Energy and Electrification, which supervised his plant. The task was relatively easy, given that many officials in both places had once worked at the Chernobyl plant that Briukhanov ran.9