From Palladium Magazine, January 30:
In July 1992, the Constitutional Court of the newly-minted Russian Federation convened to inquire into the activities of the Communist Party. A lawyer representing the now-disbanded organization that had ruled Russia for 80 years approached the stand for an examination of Alexander Yakovlev, the right-hand man of the Soviet Union’s last general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
Formerly an elusive chief of propaganda, this was one of the most public appearances of his career, and despite his secrecy, his reputation preceded him. The lawyer began with a pointed question: “Please explain what you did to destroy the Soviet Union.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, accusations of betrayal followed Yakovlev for the rest of his life. Ten years later he began his memoir with a barb at his endless critics: “Yes, I am that same Yakovlev,” he wrote, assuring the reader that it was “precisely me who is the main culprit for the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB, the army…and everything else. In short, a man of demonic possibilities.”
The first time Alexander Yakovlev came to doubt the Soviet Union was just after it had won its Great Patriotic War against Germany in 1945. Then a 23-year-old marine senior lieutenant, Yakovlev had been injured storming a machine gun nest in the swamps of Leningrad in 1942. His home village didn’t have much in the way of a hospital, so he spent the rest of the war recovering in its regional capital Yaroslavl. One day, a year after the war was over, he heard that a train car of returning soldiers was passing through.
He limped over to the train station to see if he could greet them. But when the train finally came to the station, it did not stop. As he soon learned, this is because these soldiers were not actually on their way home. Instead, the train contained a few of the nearly two million returning Soviet prisoners of war on their way to Siberian filtration camps—surrender had become a criminal offense during the desperate days of 1941 under Red Army Order 270. Prisoners liberated by the Western Allies were investigated for espionage. From there, many would be deported to the Far East, where they were to toil in the platinum mines of Magadan.
Yakovlev knew that he could have easily been one of them had he been captured by the enemy instead of rescued by his comrades. With an impeccable war record, an officer’s epaulets, and a recently-acquired Party card, he had great opportunities available to him instead. He studied history in Yaroslavl and was then recommended to the Communist Party’s Higher Party School in Moscow, where promising candidates were groomed for a role at the Central Committee, the Soviet Union’s executive administrative body.
He was promoted to work in the Central Committee shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953, and living in Moscow he would have observed that the deadly stampede at his funeral never made it into the news. Working at the Central Committee also gave him access to the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Union in 1956, where Nikita Khrushchev, the new general secretary, gave his unannounced Secret Speech denouncing Stalin. Like Yakovlev, many of the personnel there were new, including more than two-thirds of the Politburo, the senior leadership drawn from the Central Committee. Because of this, the Secret Speech would remain an event that framed the rest of Yakovlev and his colleagues’ lives. The general secretary began his speech before his thousands-strong audience impersonally enough:
Comrades! The cult of the individual caused the employment of faulty principles in Party work and in economic activity. It brought about rude violation of internal Party and Soviet democracy, sterile administration, deviations of all sorts, cover-ups of shortcomings, and varnishings of reality. Our nation bore forth many flatterers and specialists in false optimism and deceit.
But then Khrushchev, who had worked with Stalin in the party since the 1920s and, unlike Yakovlev’s generation, had watched the personality cult develop over time, began to rattle off countless episodes of Stalin’s arrogance and brutality. The speech turned into the toppling of an idol. He castigated the old general secretary’s behavior during the war:
…during the whole Patriotic War, he never visited any section of the front or any liberated city except for one short ride on the Mozhaisk highway during a stabilized situation at the front. To this incident were dedicated many literary works full of fantasies of all sorts and so many paintings.
He spoke of the “absurd, wild” purges of the late 1930s, where an astonishing 70 percent of the members of the Central Committee’s 1934 Congress were shot. Here, the speech’s transcript records that Khrushchev’s audience expressed “indignation in the hall” in response. Indeed, these revelations and criticisms were unthinkable—including for Khrushchev, who nervously rambled through the speech, stammering, coughing, and improvising as he went.
But whatever indignation there was in the hall, Yakovlev did not hear it. For the entirety of the speech, the entire Central Committee remained deathly quiet—either from shock or a sense of self-preservation, lest it be some strange test of loyalty—and so after the speech, Khrushchev’s assistants wrote in applause, indignation, and even laughter into the transcript. Yakovlev noted that while it was quiet enough to hear a chair creak, not one of them did:
Everything seemed unreal…the words crossed out everything I had lived. Everything flew apart into little bits and pieces, like fragmentation shells during the war. No one looked at each other—either from the unexpectedness of what just happened, or from the confusion and fear which seemed to have then settled on the Soviet people forever.
After Khrushchev finished he waited for the usual standing ovation, but the stone-faced apparatchiks remained silent. His scribes dutifully recorded it as “tumultuous, prolonged applause.” Yakovlev wrote that as the attendants shuffled out the hall, the moment felt like “a star of great faith falling down to a wicked earth.”
The Secret Speech sparked a crisis of faith among many of the younger cadres, including Yakovlev, and initiated a broader, gradual decay in party discipline that would continue for 40 years. Compared to its mass mobilization during the Stalin era, the party’s ability to embark on great projects and reforms would begin to slowly wither away. In the mind of every would-be hardliner, the question lingered: if even the Central Committee wasn’t safe, then what could happen to me?
Like many others, Yakovlev became sluggish at work. Feeling disillusioned, he decided to take a break from the Central Committee and began postgraduate education at the Academy of Social Sciences, where he reread Marx and Lenin in search of answers. It was then that he decided Marxism was fundamentally flawed and led to dictators like Stalin, but he still had hopes that Khrushchev’s reforms would transform the country for the better.
Despite flashpoints like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the tenure of the new premier brought some of the first American-Soviet joint initiatives since the war. In 1958, Yakovlev was one of the seventeen students selected to attend Columbia University in the first-ever Soviet-U.S. Fulbright exchange. There, he studied the reforms of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal. He also toured the Midwest, explaining to his curious farmhouse hosts that Soviets did not, in fact, practice polygamy. Back in New York, the recent publication of the Soviet dissident novel Dr. Zhivago saw American students asking him to point out the lines that would’ve gotten it banned. Despite his anti-Stalinist outlook, he was not impressed by the book, and observing America’s wealth inequality and segregation he could not say he was impressed by the country either.
When he returned to Moscow he published a series of anti-American books with names like The Call to Slaughter: American Falsifiers of the Problems of War and Peace. These books are curious outliers in his oeuvre, and it’s hard to imagine they were written for any other reason than to stave off possible associations with Western thinking. Thirty years later, one American journalist confronted him over passages from one of these books, On the Edge of the Abyss. In response, Yakovlev gave a start. “You’ve really read that book, haven’t you,” he said. When the journalist answered in the affirmative, Yakovlev supposedly smiled and replied “Maybe I should, too.”
When Yakovlev returned from his trip abroad, the Central Committee had a position waiting for him. By 1960 he was the head of the newspaper section of the propaganda wing of the Agitation and Propaganda (or Agitprop) department. But Khrushchev’s reforms had changed much in the time he had taken a break from party duties, and Yakovlev would be thrown into a new cultural world unfathomable just a few years before. As his involvement in this sphere grew, he made decisions that would lead to him leaving the Soviet Union once more—this time with no choice.
Inclusionary Politics
With the arrival of what would be called the “Khrushchev Thaw,” the ink began to flow. Intellectuals and political dissidents, many of whom had been released from the gulags just a couple of years before, began to poke their heads up at evening parties in crowded Moscow apartments. In private settings like those, debates on the reforms of the new era could take place mostly unmolested by the secret police. From there, conversations filtered into public discourse: between 1955 and 1957, 27 new “thick journals” were launched, reviving a pre-revolutionary media form wherein intellectuals submitted their takes on literature, political theory, and current events to long-form periodicals, each with its own political persuasion. But even though these writers were allowed to push the limits of contradicting Soviet authority, they actually served as useful tools for Khrushchev’s administration.After the death of Stalin and especially after the Secret Speech, Khrushchev inherited a hostile bureaucratic state. He now counted many enemies among various departmental heads and the Politburo’s old guard—former Stalin advisors Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov came close to orchestrating a coup against him in 1957. By allowing the publication of anti-Stalinist magazines, Khrushchev could let the Soviet Union’s cultural sphere strike against the Stalinists for him.
Among less ideologically-inclined communists, Stalinist cultural artifacts were still a regular problem. Yes-men and the fear of reporting mistakes made the Soviet information space very opaque, even for its senior leadership. On top of that, Khrushchev’s Politburo was conflict-averse, because no one wanted the kind of party discipline that led to denunciations, then purity spirals, then great purges—instead, the “party line” was upheld at all costs, and public debates or disagreements were basically unheard of. But having devolved from the absolutist governance model of Stalin toward a more involved collective leadership of the whole Politburo, Khrushchev and his deputies needed sources of dissent to test how his reforms in agriculture and foreign policy were being received. For this, his administration needed a controlled but insightful opposition.
Just as there was a detente within the Politburo, Stalinist-style terror as a means of controlling society was no longer an option. But political dissidents still presented a threat to the government, and they needed to be concentrated and monitored. And so it was easier to insert KGB informants into the editorial boards of state-controlled publications rather than unofficial, untraceable samizdat magazines....
....MUCH MORE
