Brezhnev, now seventy-two, had just suffered a stroke, but his fellow geriatrics in the Kremlin leadership felt no need to retire him in a system as sclerotic as his arteries. His decline was quick. Sickly and addicted to sleeping pills, drinking heavily, Brezhnev struggled to control his family, his daughter Galina smuggling Siberian diamonds and brazenly having affairs with gangsters and lion tamers. The horizon of this world potentate shrank. Often Brezhnev was alone all day: ‘16 May 1976. Went nowhere. No one called. I called no one. In the morning I had my hair cut, shaved and washed my hair. Walked a bit. Watched Central Army [football team] lose to Spartak. The lads played well.’ But the diaries reveal who was rising. ‘Yu. Andropov phoned. He came. We talked.’ Andropov supplied sedatives for him. More importantly, they discussed what to do with the murderous Afghans.
THE SPYMASTER: ANDROPOV AND HIS PROTéGé GORBACHEV
‘A committee’s been set up,’ Andropov wrote to Brezhnev, ‘to liquidate Amin.’ The KGB had a department – the Camera – dedicated to poisons. Andropov infiltrated into Amin’s kitchens an Azeri assassin, codenamed Patience, trained as a cook.
Andropov had a vision to reform the Soviet Union. As ambassador in Budapest he had orchestrated the crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and then, appointed KGB chairman in 1967, he had supervised the invasion of Czechoslovakia, as well as the new repressions against dissidents and Jewish refuseniks, devising the use of psychiatric hospitals to ‘destroy dissent in all its forms’. Implacable, teetotal and incorruptible, Andropov was a Dostoevskian inquisitor who knew everything about everyone. Interviewing a subordinate who said, ‘Let me tell you about myself,’ Andropov replied, ‘What makes you think you know more about yourself than I do?’ But Andropov had a family secret: he had been brought up by a stepfather and had worked on Volga barges, a perfect proletarian background, but he was actually the son of a Jewish jeweller, Karl Fainshtein, killed in an anti-German riot during the First World War and his wife Evgenia – a fact he concealed in order to join the Communist Party in 1937. His secret Jewishness did not discourage his persecution of Jewish dissidents.
Abroad, Andropov disdained the corruption and weakness of western democracies and pursued sophisticated programmes of disinformation that are the real origins of today’s ‘fake news’. This diehard Leninist, who loved detective novels and jazz, believed that harsh measures were required while the dictatorship reformed itself. He realized that the Soviet state, increasingly interlinked with the world economy, needed to change. Its military expenditure – 15 per cent of its GNP – was not outrageous for a superpower. In 1977, its new West Siberian oil field made it the world’s biggest producer. Yet it was overdependent on oil profits, which it spent on importing grain instead of western technology, and on subsidising Cuba and other vassals, which Andropov called ‘vulgar robbery’. ‘The task is to work out a system of logistical, economic and moral steps,’ he said, ‘that would encourage renovation of equipment and managers.’ He foresaw the peril presented by Lenin’s structure of fifteen ‘independent’ republics. ‘Let’s get rid of the national partition,’ he said. ‘Draw me a new map of the USSR.’
‘In twenty years,’ he said in 1975, ‘we’ll be able to allow ourselves what the west allows itself now, freedom of opinion and information, diversity in society and art.’ But he believed that political power must remain the monopoly of the Communist Party. Like Deng in China, he envisaged a rising economic freedom but steely political control. He was ‘the most dangerous’, noted a reformer, Alexander Yakovlev, ‘because he was the most smart’.
Andropov had recently befriended an energetic new Party leader in Stavropol whom he visited for holidays, hikes and singalongs of songs forbidden by his own KGB: Mikhail Gorbachev. The upcoming Gorbachev praised Brezhnev and did what was necessary to rise. But he and his auburn-haired wife Raisa, both children of families killed by Stalin, were appalled by the inertia of Brezhnev.
Andropov guided the rise of Gorbachev, who knew that the system was failing. Gorbachev found a kindred spirit in the tough but intelligent Georgian Party chief, Eduard Shevardnadze, blue-eyed with a plume of white hair, who walking along the Black Sea beach suddenly said to him, ‘You know, everything is rotten.’ In 1978, Brezhnev, prompted by Andropov, promoted Gorbachev to the Politburo in Moscow. ‘Do we really need this?’ asked Raisa.
‘We can’t go on,’ replied Gorbachev, ‘living like this.’
In the Kremlin, he was amazed to see the general secretary fall asleep in Politburo meetings. The leadership functioned like ‘a scene from Gogol’. Gorbachev complained to Andropov, who replied that ‘the stability of Party, country and even the world’ required they ‘support Leonid’.
Further down, in the lower ranks of the KGB, Andropov fostered an esprit of knightly loyalty. In 1969, he promoted a new cult of the secret policeman, the Chekist, backing a TV mini-series Seventeen Moments of Spring featuring a Soviet super-spy, Colonel Isayev, who penetrates Nazi headquarters using the name Stierlitz.* It worked. Stierlitz became a Soviet hero. Brezhnev so loved the series he changed the timing of Central Committee meetings to watch it, and it inspired many – including a Leningrad law student named Vladimir Putin – to join the KGB. Putin hero-worshiped Andropov and wanted to be Stierlitz. ‘My notion of the KGB,’ he remembered, ‘came from romantic spy stories.’
In 1975, Putin joined the KGB at the age of twenty-three, working in both counter-intelligence and internal surveillance. Later he was trained at the Yuri Andropov Institute. His background was conventional. He had grown up in the impoverished, leaky apartments of a decaying Leningrad block, running with street children, but his mother, Maria, forty-one at his birth, had lost a baby in the Siege and cossetted him with the special attention that can sometimes endow a child with great self-confidence. Vladimir – known as Vova – was rescued by the kindness of a Jewish neighbour who fed him while his parents worked, and by his sports training as a karate fighter. But he had a deeper secret-police connection: his grandfather Spiridon had worked in the NKVD service staff, cooking for both Lenin and Stalin; his father had served with NKVD units in the war.
Now the poisoning of the Afghan tyrant proved more difficult than Andropov had hoped: Brezhnev and the Politburo agonized over what to do. Andropov initially advised restraint. Let poison do its work. But if intervention became necessary, surely it would be quick and easy.
In August 1978 the shah of Iran was telephoned by his neighbouring potentate, Saddam Hussein, Iraqi vice-president, who asked if he would approve the killing of that troublesome Iranian exile in Iraq, Ayatollah Khomeini. Saddam explained that Khomeini was making trouble among Iraqi Shiites. Saddam could kill him or exile him. Which would the shah choose?
IMAM, SHAH AND SADDAM
By now even the shah’s courtiers were suggesting reform. In June 1974, Alam asked him, ‘How can we expect people to go without bread when we’re telling them we’re in the midst of a golden age?’ The shah ‘seemed thoroughly taken aback and ordered me to set up a committee’. Yet the shah’s gambit to make Iran the hegemon of the Gulf and break up Iraq was working. He had backed a bloody Kurdish insurgency, led by the latest warlord of the Barzani family, which forced the Iraqis to recognize their autonomy.* But the emergent leader of Iraq – Saddam Hussein – feared that the loss of Kurdistan would break the country up.