Riddle, Mystery, and Enigma by David Owen

Author:David Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913368395
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Russia on the Road to Reform

While the Brezhnev era was generally seen as the age of stagnation, one of the key figures to emerge from that period, Yuri Andropov, was to play a critical role in the momentous changes that followed. A hard-liner in many ways, Andropov was a man of extraordinary influence, brimming with ideas and involved in a broad range of decisions on ideological and other issues from the moment he became head of the KGB in 1967. Moreover, unlike his short tenure at the very pinnacle of the Soviet system as general secretary, his legacy was long-lasting; Gorbachev took a great deal of inspiration from him. His influence can also be seen today in the career of President Putin.

The longest-serving KGB chief, Andropov was not corrupt. He ran it largely unchecked for fifteen years and built it into the most influential organisation in the USSR, particularly in strengthening its activities against internal dissidents. Andropov was well positioned when the Communist Party’s second secretary, Mikhail Suslov, died in 1982. As mentioned in Chapter 6, he had worked with Suslov during the crushing of the Hungarian rising and gone on to serve under him as head of the Foreign (Socialist) Department of the Central Committee from 1959 to 1967. Andropov had ‘acquired the reputation within the Party of being a strong but just man, the guardian of the system. He, Suslov and [minister of defence, Marshal Dmitry] Ustinov were the only Politburo members known to be modest in their personal lifestyle.’1 Brezhnev’s choice for Suslov’s successor had been his former personal assistant Konstantin Chernenko, but he soon found there was no support for this move. Gromyko and Ustinov were against Chernenko, and Brezhnev was unable to prevent Andropov’s appointment as his number two in the party hierarchy. The background to this man is, therefore, of considerable interest.

Like his protégé Gorbachev, Andropov was a son of Stavropol. His father was a Cossack, his mother, Evgenia Fainshtein, Jewish.2 By the time he became general secretary of the CPSU, he was a widower with two children. His daughter was married to an actor at the avant garde Taganka Theatre, and she worked for the magazine Theatre. His son was a delegate to the follow-up conference of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Madrid. Andropov spoke English, had tried to teach himself German as a youngster, and was an avid reader; books by Montaigne and Machiavelli were seen on his desk. He did not go to university, but his higher education might have been at the special KGB academy. In later life, he liked the music of Yuri Vizbor and Vladimir Vysotsky, whose songs were often politically incorrect and suspect in the eyes of the ideological guardian but which circulated on tapes hand to hand. According to Gorbachev’s biographer, William Taubman, Gorbachev and his wife would sing these together with Andropov.3

Andropov had been acutely aware for years that old-fashioned Soviet propaganda was becoming counterproductive and that the nature of the Soviet economy was leading to its persistent economic decline.

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