UNDERMINING MR GORBACHEV

The Daniloff affair was an unwelcome surprise the forces conspiring against Mikhail Gorbachev

'THE WORRY in my mind is that Mr Gorbachev's new broom risks being smashed by old Soviet-style reflexes.' Thus Sir Geoffrey Howe in Washington last week on the Daniloff case, and not for the first time the deceptively soporific Foreign Secretary had got it about right, albeit a little late in the day. It has been clear since the Central Committee plenum of March 1985 which elected Gorbachev General Secretary that there were going to be a lot of apparatchiks, generals, secret police- men, central planners and timeservers taking swipes at his new broom as it brushed tentatively across the obstacle- strewn courtyard of re- form.

The theory that Gorbachev himself en- gineered the Daniloff affair to torpedo a superpower summit for which he was not prepared seems to me absurd, and it in any case overestimates the extent to which a Soviet leader can simply give an order and hope to have it carried out. Gorbachev is out to change Russia and East-West rela- tions, but given the backlog of problems he inherited from his three aged predecessors he does not have time to play games with superpower relations. The gain for Mos- cow is a kind of 'moral equivalence' be- tween Daniloff and Zakharov, but the loss is that Gorbachev faces an angry and determined Reagan at a summit likely to be overshadowed by what should have been a minor incident.

There is a pitfall here, as Nick Daniloff — one of the most astute and fair-minded analysts of the Soviet scene, and one of the few who like myself witnessed the transi- tion from Brezhnev to Gorbachev — is no doubt well aware as he awaits the next move: Gorbachev is not a liberal in the Western sense, and to suggest that he intends to create an open society but is being frustrated by Kremlin conservatives is to paint a false picture. Many of the contradictions are within Gorbachev him- self. He is a man who made his early career under Khrushchev, but was critical of the dangerous path of liberalisation and de- Stalinisation embarked on by his remark- able predecessor but three. Gorbachev did not fight in the war against Nazism (he was only ten); but he is as much shaped by the myths of the war and the revolution as anyone else in a country where there is only one permissible world outlook. The Gorbachev generation is the Brezhnev generation in smarter suits and with better public relations.

As de Tocqueville observed, the most dangerous moment for an authoritarian government is when it begins to reform itself. The history of previous Soviet lead- erships — and Russia more than most is a country where the past governs the present — is a history of challenges to General Secretaries who, far from gaining total control once they have reached the top of the ladder, spend a great deal of time and energy eliminating rivals and neutralising or placating interest groups, much as they did during the ruthless climb to supreme power. From Lenin onwards, the struggle for power not only precedes the leadership

change, it also continues after it. It took Stalin six years to outmanoeuvre all rivals and impose a personal dictatorship after the death of Lenin in 1924, and it took Khrushchev four years to defeat Malenkov and the 'anti-party group' after the death of Stalin. Brezhnev had to rule as part of a collective troika after the fall of Khrush- chev in 1964 and did not wrest the pres- idency (a ceremonial post with a potential power base) from Podgorny until 1977. Yuri Andropov, despite his support from the KGB and the army, never did gain absolute authority during his brief time in office, for much of which he was on a kidney dialysis machine, and ruled in a kind of troika with Gromyko and Ustinov. Chernenko, seen as an interim and rather ineffective leader (though not always fair- ly), had so many detractors by the end that his leadership was undermined as much by disrespectful jokes as by his failing health.

There are no jokes about Gorbachev's authority, and no attempt to undermine him would have much of a chance. But he has inherited Brezhnev's adaptation of the system Stalin created, under which the general secretary is more like the chairman of the board than an autocrat. He has to accommodate powerful interest groups, and if he does not do so, not even Gorbachev's growing grip on the party structure and the Politburo — demon- strated by the February Party Congress and the Supreme Soviet in June — can save him from a rap across the knuckles.

In the Daniloff affair, the Gorbachev image has been inconveniently dented by the KGB chairman. Since it was cut down to size in Khrushchev's day, the KGB has again become a power in the land, and no general secretary can afford to ignore its views. The KGB supported Gorbachev's candidacy in the succession struggle after Chernenko's death, and General Chebrikov even made speeches praising Gorbachev's energy and (by implication) damning the dying Chernenko. Chebrikov is now in the Politburo. But he is his own man, was Andropov's deputy for many years, and before that was associated with Brezhnev in Dniepopetrovsk.

The arrest of Nick Daniloff took place while Gorbachev was on holiday, and was probably intended as a classic KGB exercise in intimidating Western journalists, designed to give Nick a fright and encourager les autres, while gaining leverage about Zakharov in New York. It is dangerous for Soviet leaders to go on holiday — as Andropov discovered during the KAL crisis of 1983 — since although the general secretary remains in ultimate control, it matters who is in charge of day to day decisions in the capital. If, as seems all too likely, the KGB miscalculated Western reaction to the Daniloff case but raised the stakes even when it became quite obvious what that reaction would be, the blame for not intervening to stop matters before they got out of hand belongs to Gorbachev. It was a failure of leadership, just as Andropov's inability to curb the military over KAL was a failure of leadership.

The generals, indeed, may well have supported any attempt to discomfit Gorbachev and clip his wings in the run up to the next summit. Gorbachev's 15-year programme for total nuclear disarmament, announced on 15 January — of which the current Soviet proposal at Geneva to cut strategic arsenals to 1,600 launchers and 8,000 warheads forms a part — is intended to impress the West with Gorbachev's peaceloving motives. But it also has an impact on those whose business it is to maintain Soviet defences and create new weapons to match the feared American arsenal, both on earth and in space.

In a little-noticed remark last month, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the chief of staff, referred to unnamed 'critics' of Gor- bachev's disarmament proposals who feared that his extension of the weapons- testing moratorium would be harmful to Russia's security interests. Gorbachev's own television address on this on 18 August was markedly defensive in tone. The army brass are also miffed that a year and half after the Gorbachev takeover there is no military man in the Politburo, as there had been from 1973 to the death of the formidable Ustinov in late 1984. They are probably also unhappy about promises of troop withdrawals from Afghanistan.

Gorbachev's dilemma is that — like his predecessors — he has to appease both the defence industries and Soviet consumers, whose expectations have been raised by Gorbachev's own rhetoric. The Five Year Plan discussed at the February congress and approved at the Supreme Soviet calls for a 25 per cent growth rate over five years, and puts the onus on factory mana- gers to invest in imported Western technol- ogy at a time when Russia's already scarce foreign currency reserves have fallen dis- astrously because of the decline in world oil prices.

As the consumers grow restless over empty shelves and the generals worry about possible arms concessions at Gene- va, the mass of middle rank apparatchiks who frustrated Andropov's reform plans are reverting to type — hence repeated and increasingly frantic Pravda editorials rail- ing aginst inertia and apathy, from the pen of Gorbachev's ally, Viktor Afanasyev. 'You know how it is,' the tirelessly peri- patetic Gorbachev remarked revealingly in Kuibyshev on 7 April: 'Everybody says, "We support the Party's resolutions," then they go back to their workplaces and carry on as before.'

Quite so, comes the reply from those of us who watched Gorbachev's rise, and regard Russian foibles with a mixture of affection and exasperation. We do know how it is. The one plausible solution to Russia's economic ills — a degree of privatisation, or the legalisation of existing underground enterprise — bit the dust at the Supreme Soviet. With a harsh new decree laying down labour camp sentences. for 'unearned income'.

The forces of conservatism, in other words, did not vanish overnight in Russia just because a man of 54 became General Secretary. A key figure in the Kremlin is Yegor Ligachov, who is over a decade older than Gorbachev, is a powerful second in command, does not owe his political rise to Gorbachev personally (he was another Andropov discovery), and is rapidly taking on the mantle of the late and unlamented Mikhail Suslov as the stern guardian of Marxist ideological orthodoxy. It was Ligachov who at the congress rebuked Pravda — Pravda! — for criticis- ing the privileges of the Communist elite.

Even Nikolai Ryzhkov, the Prime Minis- ter, who is of Gorbachev's generation and was promoted by Andropov in the hierar- chy because of his 'hands-on' technocratic background in the industrial Urals, ex- pressed doubts about economic reform at both the congress and the Supreme Soviet. Gorbachev's clear-out of the old guard has continued, with the uncultured figure of Piotr Demichev stepping down at last from the ministry of culture, to the relief of those who try to maintain the Russian traditions in the arts. But Dernichev is still in the picture as deputy to President Gromyko — who himself may be backing the conservatives, despite having played a crucial role in Gorbachev's election last year. Other old guard members too have been able to cling on.

Gorbachev achieved unquestioned ascerrdancy faster than any of his predeces- sors, and despite the setbacks he will meet Reagan as Russia's unchallenged leader. None of the interest groups can topple Gorbachev. But their conflicting demands and rearguard actions can slow him down. It will take extraordinary determination and energy for him to see the changes through and modernise Russia. Gorbachev does have powerful allies, such as Boris Yeltsin, the new Moscow Party boss and one of the most impressive figures in the present leadership. 'We must not be mesmerised by the apparent political sta- bility of the country,' Yeltsin warned in a remarkable speech to a largely uncompre- hending Party congress. 'How many times can one allow the same mistakes to be made and not take into account the lessons of history?' How many times indeed? The answer suggested by the record of the past 70 years, and six succession crises is: all too often.