The General's President Read online

  "At any rate, by appointing other top KGB men to the Politburo, Andropov put the KGB in a position to continue its rule after his death, at least during Konstantin Chernenko's brief tenure as Party Chairman.

  "For Chernenko was never more than a figurehead. He was appointed because there were two strong contenders for the position, Grigori Romanov as well as Mikhail Gorbachev. And someone was needed to occupy the throne without controlling power, until one of the two vanquished the other. The world is fortunate that Romanov did not win."

  Bulavin looked intently at the president. "There is a key relationship that is important to know, for anyone who wants to understand Soviet politics. During the sixty years of Soviet rule prior to Andropov's chairmanship, the power structure had been three-cornered, the corners being the Party, the army, and under one name or another the KGB. The army had much the greatest sheer power, enough to destroy either of the others. To prevent this, the Party had early installed a system of political officers within the army, to indoctrinate the troops. There was a political officer in every unit, down to company level.

  "Meanwhile the Party had also created the KGB, and one of its major functions was to help keep the army from taking over the government. The KGB did this by having literally thousands of spies within the army, monitoring personal associations and political conformity; by openly investigating and passing on the political attitudes of all army candidates for promotion; and by assuring the removal of any senior officers, or anyone else the Party decided might be dangerous in some way to the Politburo.

  "For the Politburo was the Party's ruling organ. And it was also the top level of the vast bureaucracy which controls the Soviet Union to a far greater degree than your government controls here. The bureaucracy that the Politburo controlled was very much larger than the army, although unarmed and far less disciplined.

  "The Politburo's main source of control in this three-cornered power structure has been the power of patronage, of appointment—that and its position as the source of political ideology. Its main tools of control were the army and the KGB. It used the KGB to control the army, and at times it used the army to control the KGB. And of course, the cadre section of the Party secretariat researched and appointed KGB officers.

  "At times the Politburo had been controlled by a single man—its chairman; most notably for almost thirty years by Joseph Stalin. At other times its leader had often been constrained to some extent, sometimes to a rather large extent, by other members of the Politburo. But with the sole exception of Chernenko, the chairman was the most powerful Politburo member. Chernenko had too little force, personally, to use the reins when they were handed to him."

  Bulavin paused to evaluate his listener. Haugen seemed to be absorbing the information without difficulty; he nodded to the Russian to continue.

  "The Politburo had created the KGB to curb the people and the army, and so this serpent, the KGB, also had to be powerful. Nothing less than powerful, ruthlessly powerful, could have controlled the army and the ethnic/national mix of the empire with its many languages and affinities. So in the tradition of Russian security police, it had been brutal as well as powerful, more brutal than any Czarist predecessor.

  "Now this brutal creation of the Party was quite willing to eat bureaucrats. The Politburo had used it repeatedly to purge the government, the army, and the Party itself. By Stalin in particular, but later also by Andropov, it was used even to purge the Politburo. Thus the government cadres had a fear and horror of the KGB."

  Haugen listened engrossed. I wonder, he thought, if Bulavin realizes that, as he talks about this, he begins to sound Russian? It wasn't a matter of accent but of diction—of word selection and sentence structure.

  "When Gorbachev took power," Bulavin went on, "Gromyko was more than foreign minister; he wielded important political power within the Party apparatus, which is to say, the bureaucracy. As did several other Politburo geriatrics to lesser degrees.

  "But time had weakened their ranks, and the KGB had decided they must go. Thus less than five months after Gorbachev became chairman, he 'promoted' his sponsor, Gromyko, into the vacant presidency. Which in fact meant he retired him. And replaced him as foreign minister with KGB General Eduard Shevardnadze. This, in fact, had been one of the conditions the KGB had exacted before agreeing to Gorbachev as Party Chairman.

  "The KGB also began, bit by bit, to replace the GRU—Soviet military intelligence—in all of its peacetime foreign roles except that of espionage. Which of course was its major peacetime role anyway, outside the Soviet Union."

  "Just a minute," Haugen interrupted. "Isn't the KGB the Soviet espionage organization?"

  "Not primarily. The GRU, military intelligence, has always held the foreign espionage role. But it maintains a very low profile. Some experts have even assumed that the GRU is a branch of the KGB, but nothing could be further from the truth. Each has been used to purge the other, and they have a long tradition of mutual hatred, a tradition carefully nurtured by the Politburo."

  "Well then," Haugen said, "if foreign espionage is the function of the GRU, what's the KGB's function outside the Soviet Union?"

  "The KGB spies upon, and otherwise monitors, Soviet citizens not only inside but outside the USSR. And frequently also non-Soviet Communists. It is especially active in monitoring the views, loyalty, and activities of embassy and consular officials and employees. And it is the KGB which is primarily interested in locating defectors, in some cases to get them to renounce the West and return home. Or in cases like my own, to arrange disappearances or fatal accidents.

  "It is also responsible for the encouragement and subversion of indigenous revolutionary movements in foreign countries, and since Andropov, the major development of international terrorism.

  "And with its new predominance, the KGB carried out the arrest and imprisonment of several key GRU officers on political charges or charges of corruption. A number of others were demoted from positions of power and influence to routine positions, for example in information processing. In a few cases, GRU officers with unusually influential connections were transferred to consular positions outside the USSR. Such positions have always been considered highly attractive, but they are outside the circles of power."

  Again Bulavin smiled his wry smile. "GRU officers become quite sophisticated. You might not believe how much they value assignments outside the Soviet Union.

  "Meanwhile, Gorbachev replaced the remaining Politburo geriatrics with people of his own, people whom the KGB would find acceptable. Including Nikolai Ryzhkov, another of Andropov's people, who replaced the confused and useless Tikhonov as premier.

  "Gorbachev made no attempt to preempt the position for himself. Which strengthened the KGB's attitude that he was controllable. For after all, Gorbachev had not risen to high position by force of character or single-minded ambition, nor on the basis of executive or technical competency. Not that he lacked intelligence and strength, but he had risen to the Central Committee and then to the Politburo by being in the right places at the right times. And by being a loyal and competent lieutenant to two men who would later sponsor him—Fyodor Kulakov and especially Yuri Andropov. And finally to Andrei Gromyko, turned power broker in his old age, who sponsored him because Gromyko feared and detested Grigori Romanov, Gorbachev's rival for the post.

  "In feet, it seems that, of the three, Kulakov had been the most influential of them all on Gorbachev, though that was not at once apparent. Kulakov was unquestionably the most able man in the Brezhnev Politburo, and he combined pragmatism with principles. In fact, he reputedly said that in the infinitely improbable event that one actually gained the chairmanship, one should, when he had entrenched his position, do all he could to 'turn things around'—make the Soviet Union an effective nation. Otherwise one's life would have been meaningless.

  "But Kulakov had died under extremely suspicious circumstances during Andropov's ascension to power, and Andropov's principles were quite different from Kulakov's.
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  "At any rate, to have the KGB in the primary position was a worrisome thing for the Party, including Mikhail Gorbachev; it could gobble up any one of them in a moment and spit out his bones. While the army had always hated the KGB, and deeply resented the reduction of its own covert action arm, the GRU.

  "So Gorbachev quietly built his own personal mafia. As had every Party Chairman before him except the decrepit, emphysemic Konstantin Chernenko. And in building up his own mafia, Gorbachev took a lesson from the book of Yuri Andropov: Although at the start he chose several men from his home district, a tradition among Party chairmen, mostly he selected men with some special qualification, regardless of their origin. Except, of course, they were all ethnically Russian. In fact, most of them had been Andropov's own people, as Gorbachev himself had been. Men whose loyalty he then proceeded to cultivate by giving them favorable positions, the power of which depended on Gorbachev and his continued dominance."

  As Bulavin talked, Haugen had noticed the man's muscles begin to twitch, to flutter, although his face remained stoic. Now the Russian picked up on Haugen's awareness. "Excuse me, Mr. President," he said. "It is a nervous automaticity that sometimes turns on when I speak of these matters.

  "I was describing how Mikhail Sergeyvich—Gorbachev—built up his power. As Party Chairman, he also continued quietly to cultivate the loyalty of key members of the Party apparatus. Especially some who had shown willingness to propose, and even to install, different ways of doing things which it might be hoped would prove more effective.

  "And even before his first appointment to the Central Committee, Gorbachev's success had been due in no small part to his personality, which in America we might describe as laid back and courteous. Genuine courtesy is very unusual in the Kremlin. More common are obsequiousness, coldness, and arrogance. When ruthlessness seemed called for, Mikhail Gorbachev was ruthless, but he was not gratuitously unpleasant."

  Along with his twitching, Bulavin's voice was becoming noticeably monotone now. Haugen interrupted, at the same time turning off his recorder. "Let's take a break, Colonel. Walk around the office if you'd like. Would you like tea, or have you developed a preference for coffee? I can also offer you hot chocolate if you'd like, or bouillon."

  The Russian emerged from his recollections and stood up, rotating his shoulders to loosen them. "Thank you, Mr. President. I've become quite a coffee drinker in America." A smile played at the corners of his mouth. "Even Mikhail Sergeyvich could have taken lessons in courtesy from American presidents."

  Haugen didn't respond to the comment. "This is decaffeinated, by the way," he said. "Cream and sugar?"

  "If you please."

  The president poured. His own coffee he took black; for decades he'd carried on a low intensity campaign to control his weight. After a few minutes of small talk, Bulavin seemed relaxed again. Haugen turned the recorder back on and picked up the line of the briefing. "You were telling me about Gorbachev building his power relative to the KGB."

  "Yes. It later became apparent that he also cultivated key army personnel, without being obvious about it. Including Colonel General Serafim Petrovich Gurenko, commander of the GRU. Previously, a commander of the GRU would ordinarily hold the rank of full army general. That Gurenko did not was a symptom of the GRU's reduced status and power, for by the Soviet system, he was eligible not only for the position but for the rank as well.

  "And while building his power, Gorbachev remained always very cooperative with the KGB. As a matter of fact, at that time his major problem with them was not their activities but their power, which was dangerous to him. And the KGB, in their turn, was less interested in his orthodoxy than his cooperation."

  Bulavin's voice was normal now. Pausing, he sipped his coffee, seeming to savor its sweetness. "As you perhaps know," he went on, "Gorbachev's economic and social reforms caused much more unhappiness within the bureaucracy than within the KGB. This was partly because some of his reforms failed, and partly because some of them succeeded, but mostly because they required that the apparatchiks be accountable. Then two successive years of very poor crops, of continuing industrial shortages and unfulfilled expectations, brought about sporadic outbreaks of strikes and even riots.

  "Which made Gorbachev susceptible to being ousted, and perhaps caused him to move more drastically than he otherwise would have.

  "At any rate, more than three years ago, after KGB troops had brutally put down unusually severe disorders in the Uzbek SSR, Gorbachev shifted production allocations further toward relieving the more drastic civilian shortages. He then began new negotiations with the USA, Canada, Australia, and Argentina for wheat, and with India, Iran, and Iraq to sell them more export-level weapons as a means of getting foreign currency for wheat purchases.

  "But for negotiations to be productive, it was necessary that the KGB curtail its program of terrorism. Which it was not willing to do.

  "The commander of the KGB was General Kir Nikolaevich Turolenko, and Gorbachev had asked him to discuss certain matters with the Politburo. He had also arranged for six spetsnaz officers to be present in a small chamber off the conference room. When he'd begun the meeting, the six officers came into the room. Then Gorbachev read a list of crimes of which he accused Turolenko. In several of these, a member of the Politburo, Alexis Semyonovich Pokrovsky, was also accused as an accomplice. Both were arrested on the spot, and taken from the chamber.

  "But they were not handcuffed, as one might have expected them to be.

  "Then, in the corridor outside, there was a burst of gunfire. Both Turolenko and Pokrovsky were shot dead, supposedly in a scuffle for one of the officer's guns.

  "The arrest was a signal for GRU commander Gurenko to purge the KGB of roughly fifty key officers—a purge carried out by teams of spetsnaz, which are, you understand, a branch of the GRU.

  "And the way the spetsnaz carried out this assignment foreshadowed things to come. Because they murdered a considerably greater number than the fifty or so whom rumor said Gorbachev wanted removed. This was followed by a large-scale purge of KGB agents within the army, a purge carried out entirely on the army's initiative. Of these, while many were shot, most, presumably thousands, were put into army penal battalions in the Transbaykal and Far East Military Districts. They could not safely be put into Siberian prison camps because the camps are run by MVD battalions, and the MVD, which you might think of as the non-secret police, are in fact dominated by the KGB.

  "This purge of the KGB involved more murders than had been seen in upper echelons since Stalin died—far more even than when Andropov was taking power, and more blatant. And while they might be ascribed to the long enmity between KGB and GRU, they certainly had the effect of increasing the army's power, relative not only to the KGB but to the Party. It could correctly be said that the army crocodile was shaking off its leashes."

  Bulavin stopped talking to sip coffee, and for a long minute, neither man said anything. Some twitching had begun again, but Bulavin's voice remained normal.

  "While these events were transpiring," he went on, "Gorbachev removed the KGB's Shevardnadze as foreign minister, accusing him of incompetence and replacing him with one of his own mafia.

  "Now it was necessary that Gorbachev move quickly to rehabilitate the KGB at a safe level and rebalance the power triangle as it had been before Andropov's time. Before the army could take broad advantage of its new predominance, yet without gaining its serious enmity. So he appointed one of his own mafia, Semyon Grigorovich Dolin, as head of the now demoralized and fearful KGB. Dolin, who was from Stavropol, Gorbachev's home district, had been a KGB colonel on Andropov's staff, but he had no particular reputation to attract the army's ire. Dolin then set about rebuilding the KGB command structure with people of his own selection who were approved by Gorbachev.

  "Meanwhile Gorbachev also retired Gromyko, who suffered from heart failure and was on continuous medication, and quickly appointed Marshal Fedor Petrovich Durukan as president. No army man had been
made president before, so some western experts interpreted this to mean that the army's position was being still further strengthened. That was not so, and everyone in the Kremlin and the army understood that. Durukan had been a very strong, very bold Minister of Defense, very active and strong-willed—very adamant about getting the army the weapons and research it wanted, despite the severe economic problems of the state. Now, for all practical purposes, he was retired.

  "In Durukan's place, Gorbachev quickly appointed Marshal Oleg Stepanovich Pavlenko as the new Minister of Defense. This placated the generals somewhat, as Pavlenko would probably have been their own choice if they could not have Durukan. But meanwhile Gorbachev had demonstrated that he controlled.

  "Not long afterward, during a Politburo meeting, Premier Ryzhkov suffered a severe stroke. This allowed Gorbachev to remove him gracefully from office and have himself elected to the premiership by the Politburo. He seemed not to have coveted it, but holding it made it clear to all that he ruled virtually beyond argument.

  "And so far as I know, there is no evidence that Gorbachev's subsequent death in a plane crash was anything more than an accident. Though naturally there were suspicions and accusations. Some probably remembered the fate of Chief of the General Staff S. S. Biriuzov in the 1960s. The KGB pointed out that the aircraft was operated by the GRU, but that is true of all Aeroflot aircraft, including those that fly regular commercial schedules to this country. While the army suggested that the KGB had arranged the crash to get rid of the man who had had it purged.

  "The best evidence that Gorbachev's death was truly accidental was that a power vacuum resulted. No plotters moved to take command. The Politburo consisted mainly of Gorbachev appointees not experienced in power changes at the Politburo level. And he—Gorbachev—had been healthy and vigorous. Thus there had been no 'crown prince,' or even any candidates with an eye on the throne and their own machinery of supporters prepared to lever them into office. Nor was there any longer a Suslov or Gromyko at hand as an experienced power broker. No one was prepared, and loyalties were uncertain.