The essence of a man cannot be derived from his profession or way of life (what difference did it make that Jesus was a carpenter?) but only from his consciousness. The same was true of nations. ‘Consciousness determines being to a much greater extent than the other way around,’ Yakovlev concluded. ‘From my point of view, the source of everything, including progress, is information… Information is primary, the matter and spirit are secondary… Without a human brain – this perfect synthesizer of information – neither an atomic nor a hydrogen bomb could go off…’4 The only way to change the Soviet way of life was through opening up the flow of information and altering people’s consciousness. The ‘means of mass information’ – as the media were and still are called in Russia – were far more important in altering the country than the means of production. Glasnost – the opening-up of the media – was in large part the practical result of that idea.
In December 1985, a few months after his appointment, Yakovlev drafted a memo that was more radical in its views than anything that was to follow over the next few years. ‘The dogmatic interpretation of Marxism and Leninism is so unhygienic that it kills any creative and even classical thoughts. Lucifer remains a Lucifer: his satanic hoof stamps out any fresh intellectual shoots… Marxism is nothing but a neo-religion, subjected to the interests and whims of the absolute power… Political conclusions of Marxism are unacceptable for civilization.’5 Thus wrote the man in charge of Soviet ideology.
Yakovlev also believed that the country needed a free market and private ownership to overcome its economic sclerosis. ‘Socialism without a market is a utopia and a bloody one at that…’ Society needed a normal exchange of information, which was possible only in a democracy. Yakovlev defined the ingredients of Perestroika as a market economy, private ownership, democracy and openness:
Civil life is poisoned by lies. Presumption of guilt is a guiding principle. Two hundred thousand different instructions tell a person that he is a potential villain. One has to prove integrity with references and certificates. Conformism is seen as a sign of trustworthiness. Socialism has cut itself off from a way forward and started moving backwards towards feudalism and in some places… descended into slavery… For thousands of years we have been ruled by people and not by laws… What we are talking about is not the dismantling of Stalinism, but a replacement of a thousand-year old model of statehood.6
Yakovlev did not show this memo to Gorbachev fearing that it would be too radical for his tastes. True to the principle of ‘divide and rule’, Gorbachev had split in two the job once held by Suslov, the Stalinist guardian of Soviet ideology, and Yakovlev’s position was complicated by the fact that he had only half of it and the other half was held by Yegor Ligachev, his ideological opponent. Although formally the two halves were equal, with Yakovlev controlling the workings of the media and propaganda, Ligachev was a secretary of the Central Committee and oversaw ideology. Moreover, Ligachev was a watchdog, one of the most senior people in the party, and he physically occupied Suslov’s office, which, in the Byzantine topography of the Kremlin, signalled superiority.
Wary of spooking Gorbachev and raising alarm within the party nomenclatura, Yakovlev had to tread carefully. As Yakovlev himself wrote, he often had to act like a ‘secret agent’, resorting to tricks and covert operations to advance his ideas. Here was a paradox: in pursuit of truth, people still had to resort to lies.
One of the ‘covert’ operations performed by Yakovlev was the release of the most powerful and honest film about the Stalinist legacy – Pokaianie (Repentance). It was a work by a Georgian director, Tengiz Abuladze, and was made a year before Perestroika, in 1984, under the patronage of Eduard Shevardnadze, one of Gorbachev’s closest allies, who headed Georgia at the time. Made like a philosophical fable and set in a small Georgian town, the film starts with a scene of a woman making cakes. A man in a rocking chair reads from a newspaper that the town’s mayor Varlam Aravidze has died.
The day after Aravidze’s funeral, his corpse turns up in the garden of his relatives’ house. The body is reburied, but next day springs up again in the same place, propped up in a garden chair. Aravidze’s grandson hounds and shoots ‘the corpse digger’, who turns out to be Keti, the cake-maker. Put on trial, she tells the court that Aravidze has no right to be buried and, through cinematic flashbacks, narrates the story of his repressions, including the murder of her parents. (One such flashback shows Keti, as a young girl, searching for her father’s name in a log pile of timber produced by Gulag prisoners. While she looks, the logs are being ground into sawdust which she sieves through her fingers.)
Aravidze’s son, Abel, defends his father and tries to get Keti declared insane. At the end, his own son commits suicide and Abel himself digs up Aravidze’s body and throws it off a cliff. The film ends as it begins – with Keti preparing a cake. An old woman, played by a legendary Georgian actress, the eighty-six-year-old Veriko Andzhaparidze, asks Keti at the window whether this is the road that leads to the temple. The woman replies that the road is Varlam Aravidze’s street and will not lead to the temple. The old woman replies: ‘What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to a temple?’
In the highly politicized atmosphere of the mid-1980s, with little time for reflection, Abuladze’s philosophical film was too often used for a quick political commentary; pulled into quotes and soundbites. It was like using a telescope as a sledgehammer. Pokaianie was not about a distortion of the system, but about the universal nature of evil which can take any shape. The name Aravidze in Georgian means ‘nobody’ and ‘everybody’ and the mayor, dressed in a Stalin-like military tunic, had Hitler’s moustache, Beria’s rimless glasses and Mussolini’s operatic manner.
Yakovlev, who watched the tape at home, felt overwhelmed by the film. ‘It was merciless and convincing. It smashed the system of lies, hypocrisy and violence like a sledgehammer… I had to do everything in my power to get the film out.’7 (He argued to the Central Committee that the film was too complex to be understood by a broad audience, so there would be no harm in showing it ‘once or twice’, while ordering the official Committee for Cinema to produce hundreds of copies to be shown throughout the country.) The release of the film was scheduled for April 1986, but had to be put off because of the disaster that struck the country.
In the early hours of 26 April 1986, nuclear reactor no. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear station suffered a massive power surge, resulting in a fire and the release of 400 times more radioactive material than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The reactor had been built in the 1970s with severe safety breaches. The only reason it passed an examination by foreign experts was that, prior to inspection, its engineers had temporarily replaced Soviet electronics with Swedish and American ones. As Filipp Bobkov, first deputy chief of the KGB, told members of the Politburo a couple of months later, it embodied the carelessness, arrogance and window-dressing that were the essence of the Soviet planned system which commanded people to fulfil a plan at all costs, including the safety of people. As often was the case with such disasters, the cover-up was even more deplorable than the initial errors that led to the explosion. Despite the Politburo’s call to ‘provide honest and measured information’, the officials acted on their inbred instincts.