On the plane back from Kolkata, Rajiv was asked to become prime minister. ‘I have no interest,’ he replied. ‘Don’t bother me.’ But he was cooler by the time he joined Sonia at the Delhi hospital. She tried to persuade her husband not to accept the prime ministership. ‘They were hugging each other and he was kissing her forehead,’ telling her, ‘It’s my duty, I have to do it.’ Sonia said he would be killed. Rajiv replied that he ‘would be killed anyway’. Such is the grinding logic of hereditary power. Heir to a family whose leadership went back to his great-grandfather if not to the police chief of the last Mughal, Rajiv was the third generation of the Nehruvians to rule the world’s greatest democracy.
Thatcher flew to Delhi. As Hindu mobs chanted ‘Blood for blood’, Rajiv lit his mother’s pyre. On the night of the murder, Hindu mobs had poured into the streets of Delhi, searching for Sikhs: 8,000 were killed, a pogrom almost justified by Rajiv who, a few days later, reflected, ‘When a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.’ Thatcher attended the cremation: ‘She looked so small.’
At home, she and Reagan watched Moscow’s cadaverous succession. ‘How am I supposed to get any place with the Russians,’ quipped Reagan, ‘if they keep dying on me?’
On 9 February 1984, Andropov died of kidney failure, encouraging Gorbachev to succeed him. Gorbachev grieved. ‘We owed him everything,’ said Raisa. But the sclerotic cabal instead chose Brezhnev’s waxen sidekick Chernenko the Silent, who spent most of his reign in sepulchral silence in hospital while the Soviet Union itself was on life support. Its flaws – economic failure, global overreach, Afghan defeat, repression and inequality – were grave but not necessarily fatal. No one predicted what was about to happen.
As Chernenko declined, Gorbachev was invited to London by Thatcher, who was studying Russian history. The two admired each other. Thatcher challenged Gorbachev about the Soviet lack of enterprise and freedom and he debated with her. Thatcher was impressed with Gorbachev’s well-cut suit and Raisa’s fashion sense – ‘the sort of thing I might have worn myself’. Afterwards Thatcher flew to Washington to tell Reagan a new era was opening: ‘I like Mr Gorbachev.’
On 10 March 1985, Chernenko succumbed and Gorbachev became general secretary, promising glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). As he wrote in his notes, he also planned to ‘exit Afghanistan’ – slowly. ‘We’ll be out in two or three years,’ he said, ‘but the result mustn’t look like a shameful defeat as if after losing so many young men [13,000 Soviet troops] we just gave up.’ Everything about him was refreshing: charming, optimistic, indefatigable, Gorbachev smiled, his eyes sparkled and he listened to ordinary people. Even the birthmark on his forehead seemed a mark of honesty. But he was a devout Leninist, studying Lenin for lessons on how to reform a modern state in a global economy. The USSR was the world’s biggest oil producer, reaching its height in 1987 just as a glut sent prices falling and the Soviet economy into shock. Abroad, he knew he had to reduce Moscow’s global expenditure and at home attack ‘the dictatorship of the bureaucracy’. To challenge the supremacy of Lenin’s Party or the Soviet state was unthinkable. Yet his confidence was overwhelming: he felt he could do it all.
First he appointed an ally, the Georgian Party secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze, as his foreign minister. ‘But I’m a Georgian,’ replied Shevardnadze, ‘not a diplomat.’ Nonetheless, Gorbachev liked his fierce intelligence and ‘Oriental affability’.
Gorbachev also summoned a strapping, ebullient reformer from the Urals to be Moscow Party secretary: Boris Yeltsin. Both men were fifty-four, both the children of parents arrested by Stalin, both hard-driving, proud and vain, both craved the limelight, both had climbed the Communist Party and been appointed regional leaders by Brezhnev, yet they were opposites. Almost teetotal, Gorbachev was austere, sometimes verbose and pompous, Yeltsin was wild, obsessive, social, exuberant – and an alcoholic. Gorbachev was a literature student married to an outspoken student of philosophy, Yeltsin was an athletic engineer, a volleyball and tennis player, married to a self-effacing engineer. Yeltsin was moreover a born leader, but also impulsive, volatile, unstable and (often) inebriated, a man of appetites on a Russian scale. As a child, he had blown off some fingers playing with a grenade; now he did the same in Gorbachev’s Politburo.
Almost immediately, Gorbachev’s glasnost was challenged. On 26 April 1986, the core in No. 4 nuclear reactor at Chernobyl melted down and exploded. The catastrophe was a symbol of imminent Soviet decay – just as America reached its apogee as the unipower and its technology changed the way families everywhere lived and thought.
* They were aided by contingents from allies: Castro sent 4,000 Cubans to aid the Syrians; Bhutto sent a squadron of Pakistani fighter jets, one of which shot down an Israeli plane.
* Qaddafi proposed a pan-Arabist merger with Egypt. Rich on oil revenues, he backed Palestinian and anti-western radicals, buying arms from Moscow. ‘Qaddafi’s just a boy … they have no idea about Lenin or socialism,’ said Brezhnev to Castro. ‘What they do have is a lot of money. Simultaneously he’s a fanatical Muslim.’ ‘My impression,’ replied Castro, ‘is that he’s crazy.’ Inflating himself in a cult of personality, preaching his own Marxist–Muslim ruminations in his Green Book, living in a luxurious Bedouin tent pitched at his military headquarters, protected by female bodyguards, he sought to conquer an empire in Chad and lead a pan-African union, having himself crowned king of kings. He backed IRA and Palestinian terrorists but also funded Nelson Mandela’s ANC in South Africa. He degenerated into a radical Arab Nero, organizing terrorist atrocities such as the Lockerbie plane explosion, while murdering dissidents, ravishing young girls and grooming his son al-Saif for the succession.
* As for the Angel, Marwan served in Sadat’s office until 1976, when he retired to make a fortune, playing roles in the takeover battles for Harrods and Chelsea Football Club. His espionage was revealed much later by retired Israeli agents. On 27 June 2007, Marwan was killed, impaled on railings beneath his fifth-floor apartment in London. Egyptian potentates and intelligence chiefs attended his funeral. ‘Marwan carried out patriotic acts,’ claimed President Mubarak, implying Marwan was a double agent who had misinformed Israel. Naturally his death was blamed on Mossad, but it is likely he was liquidated by Egyptian intelligence, alarmed that he was planning an autobiography.
* But Mao allowed some of the purged to be rehabilitated: one of those was the Xi family. In 1972, the premier Zhou Enlai, who had himself survived Mao’s terror only by slavish submission, orchestrated a family union for the purged Xi Zhongxun, who had not seen his son Jinping for a decade. It was still hard for the young Xi Jinping: he was rejected seven times when he applied to join the Communist Youth League, ten times when he applied to join the Party. But finally he enrolled to study engineering in Beijing. The hell of the Cultural Revolution was almost over for the family of the future ruler of twenty-first-century China.
* When his brother and nephew demanded money to pay the presidential guard, Nguema had them killed. The nephew’s brother, Teodoro Obiang, decided to kill Nguema before he was killed: he arrested and executed him. Obiang has ruled ever since, promoting to vice-president and heir apparent his son Teodorín, who spent his Californian university days living at the Beverly Hills Hotel and running a $100 million yacht. The country has been ruled by one family since 1968.
* Indira’s husband, the editor and politician Feroze Gandhi (no relation), had died ten years earlier. It was not easy being married to Indira Nehru. For twenty years, the couple had lived with her father, Nehru. Feroze often found himself ignored, murmuring, ‘Look at me! I’m husband to Indira Nehru.’ But as a parliamentarian he was one of the first anti-corruption crusaders, a critic of corporate scandals engineered by business houses of Kolkata connected to Nehru.