The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

For over a generation before Gorbachev came to power, Politburo membership had generally been a lifetime appointment. When a member died, he was mechanically replaced by a candidate long held in reserve, often scarcely younger than the departed. Gorbachev started reshuffling the Central Committee's leadership several times a year, in an uphill battle to bring in fresh blood and shore up his own position at the same time. In his memoirs he notes, for example, that he chose to replace one Politburo member after he started nodding off during meetings—and the tone of the description makes clear this was a familiar symptom.⁶ When Alexander Nikolaevich first joined the Politburo as a full member in June 1987, Gorbachev put him in charge of ideology. In September of the following year, Gorbachev undertook one of his largest shake-ups of the bureaucracy. He brought in Vladimir Kryuchkov, a top state security officer who came highly recommended by Alexander Nikolaevich. Kryuchkov would now run the KGB. Gorbachev also freed up the post of the Politburo member in charge of foreign affairs—and he decided to move Alexander Nikolaevich into that role.⁷ Now he had his own handpicked people in the most sensitive posts.

Over the next year and a bit, Alexander Nikolaevich oversaw the rapid disintegration of the Eastern Bloc. Historian Stephen Kotkin

has called the Bloc the Soviet Union's "outer empire," like the "outer party" in Orwell's 1984.⁸ If the Soviet Union, with its fifteen constituent republics, was the inner empire, then the other countries of the Warsaw Pact—Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania—formed the outer empire. The Soviet Union gained dominion over these six countries in the post-Second World War negotiations with the Allied Powers. Initially, the arrangement also included Yugoslavia and Albania, but they wrestled free of Soviet influence in the 1940s and the 1960s, respectively. Each pursued its own leaders' version of socialism—a freer version of Soviet society in the case of Yugoslavia, and hard-line Stalinism in the case of Albania. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and, to some extent, Poland attempted to break ranks over the years, but the Soviet Union brutally repressed these efforts—with military action in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and a sort of preemptive imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981. Now Alexander Nikolaevich's mandate was inaction. He received an unending stream of visitors, representatives of those he called "friends" in his reports— the Communist parties of each of the satellites, who by turn tested the waters, asked for support, guidance, and permission. They were able to secure more permission than anything else.

One after another, the Eastern European states allowed protests, which quickly grew massive, and opened borders and attempted some measure of free elections with the participation of rapidly forming parties that were not Communist. Most places, the ruling party sat down with the opposition in what were called "round tables" and then exited the scene peacefully if not gracefully, leaving the ad hoc groups of former dissidents, academics, student activists, and trade union organizers to sort out the mess of turning a Soviet-style state with a command economy and a one-party system into a functioning democracy. In Romania, where the Party would not budge, a rebellious army seized and executed the Communist dictator and his wife. But the revolutions elsewhere were described by both local and Western press as "velvet."

The soft luxurious texture of these transformations was guaranteed by the passivity overseen by Alexander Nikolaevich. After regime change in its satellites, the USSR began pulling its military, secret police, and political personnel out of these countries. This was a complicated, expensive, and ill-prepared operation that often added homegrown insult to the moral injury of the personnel being decommissioned in a turnaround no one had bothered to warn them about. A KGB agent who was stationed in the East German city of Dresden would later describe the experience as frightful and humiliating.⁹ The agent's name was Vladimir Putin.

In the logic of perestroika, the pullout from Eastern Europe was inevitable: the "outer empire" was costing the Soviet Union too much, and the continued occupation of these countries could not be justified in the new ideology of openness. But Gorbachev, and Alexander Nikolaevich, imagined that the chain reaction would somehow stop at the Soviet border and the "inner empire" would remain intact.