فصل 12

CHAPTER 12

PARTY MEN

Geidar Aliyev was humiliated. After two decades as the Communist Party boss of Azerbaijan, he had been dumped in 1989 from Gorbachev’s Politburo, vilified for corruption in the news columns of Pravda, and reduced to sharing the backseat of a dismal Volga sedan with an American journalist. The upstarts in the Party—the Karpinskys, the Yakovlevs, even Gorbachev himself—had all betrayed him. “When we made Gorbachev general secretary we had no idea what it would lead to!” he said. The pressures of Aliyev’s decline wore on him. He had suffered mild heart attacks; his complexion had turned the shade of a votive candle. He complained of poverty to all who would listen. But Aliyev was still possessed of a certain unctuous charm, a parody of William Powell’s parody of a regal smoothie. “You should feel quite honored,” he told me as we drove to Moscow from his posh dacha in the village of Uspenskoye. “It’s not often that I give an audience.” When he was a young man, Aliyev’s ambitions were almost derailed when he was accused of sexual assault. He avoided expulsion from the Party by a single vote at his disciplinary hearing. There were, of course, no further “legal” proceedings. The Party’s judgment was all. In 1969, as the republic’s KGB chief, Aliyev launched a “crusade against corruption.” He intended only to purge his enemies and elevate himself and his clan, and he succeeded spectacularly. Once installed as republican Party chief, Aliyev ruled Azerbaijan as surely as the Gambino family ran the port of New York. The Caspian Sea caviar mafia, the Sumgait oil mafia, the fruits and vegetables mafia, the cotton mafia, the customs and transport mafias—they all reported to him, enriched him, worshiped him. Aliyev even practiced hegemony over the intellectual life of Azerbaijan. He appointed his relatives chairmen of various institutes and academic departments, enabling them, in turn, to charge tens of thousands of rubles to scholars in search of meaningful employment.

The structure of state in Azerbaijan—and everywhere else in the Soviet Union—was itself a mafia. The Communist Party’s dispensation of power and property was unchallenged by election or by law. Administrators of “socialist justice” were duplicitous props intended by the Party to give the appearance of civil society. These judges, police captains, and prosecutors were generally well fed and not meant to stand up for anything more than their share of the booty.

There had been, of course, some honest men in the Party structure. In one famous incident in Azerbaijan, a prosecutor named Gamboi Mamedov tried to investigate corruption in the Communist Party leadership. Aliyev had him fired and denounced. Later, at a session of the republican legislature, the inflamed Mamedov managed to grab the microphone, shouting, “The state plan is a swindle, likewise the budget—also, of course, those reports of economic success are a pack of lies, and …” Police hustled Mamedov off the speaker’s platform and into a back alley of obscurity. Seventeen loyal legislators quickly lined up to defend Aliyev. “Who are you fighting against, Gamboi?” Suleiman Ragimov, a hack writer and deputy, cried out. “God sent us his son in the form of Geidar Aliyev. Are you then opposing God?” The legislature rose as one in a standing ovation.

When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he became the boss of bosses, the leader of a Communist Party Politburo in which most of the leaders were unabashed mafia sultans, men like Aliyev of Azerbaijan, Viktor Grishin of Moscow, Grigori Romanov of Leningrad, Dinmukhamed Kunayev of Kazakhstan, Vladimir Shcherbitsky of Ukraine. In Russia, the principle of blood ties did not mean as much as it did in Azerbaijan or Central Asia, but the Party hierarchy, and the way it controlled all economic activity, was just as powerful. The Central Committee, too, was filled with “dead souls,” Party hacks whose sole mission was the protection of the Party as a privileged class. They had all long ago turned the poverty of Leninist ideology to their own advantage. In a state in which property belonged to all—in other words, to no one—the Communist Party owned everything, from the docks of Odessa to the orange trees of Georgia.

Aliyev, like the others, knew that the only real imperative of stability under Brezhnev had been to grease the don. Leonid Ilyich did not require the genuine prosperity or happiness of his people to please him. He needed only reports of same. As long as the official-looking documents that crossed his desk informed him of record successes and overfulfilled plans, he was well pleased.

Of course, the traditions of tribute pleased him even more. When Brezhnev came to the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, in 1978, Aliyev gave him a gold ring with a huge solitaire diamond, a hand-woven carpet so large it took up the train’s dining salon, and a portrait of the general secretary onto which rare gems had been pasted as “decoration.” For an official visit in 1982, Aliyev built a palace for Brezhnev’s use, an edifice with all the kitsch grandeur of the Kennedy Center in Washington. The great man slept there for a couple of nights and then the palace closed. To commemorate the same visit, Aliyev gave Brezhnev yet another ring that symbolized the worldview of the Kremlin better than any map. One huge jewel, representing Brezhnev the Sun King, was surrounded by fifteen smaller stones representing the fifteen union republics. “Like planets orbiting their sun,” as Aliyev explained. This masterpiece of the jeweler’s art was given the title “The Unbreakable Union of Republics of the Free.” When he received the ring and listened to Aliyev’s careful explication, Brezhnev, in full view of the television cameras, burst into tears of gratitude.

This system of shadows and gilt served the Party well while it lasted. But now Aliyev, who had grown accustomed to long Zil limousines while he was in power, found himself with his knees jammed into the seat ahead of him.

“Ach, I live badly,” he said as we sped along the highway linking Moscow to the villages where the Party elite kept their dachas. “My pension is tiny. Believe me, you would never work for such a sum. The driver? The car? Not mine. I just have the right to order them up once in a while.” In office, Aliyev had grown used to ordering suits from the Kremlin tailor, to regular deliveries of Japanese electronics, American cigarettes, and delicacies from the special farms and shops run by the KGB. Now his world was confused and threatening. “Gorbachev says he is for the renovation of socialism and against capitalism,” Aliyev said. “Fine. But what sort of renovation? What does it mean? Is it social democracy? That’s not socialism. What exactly is his socialism? No one knows. They don’t know what socialism is anymore, and they are all living in a fog. You Americans want everyone to follow your way, and the more things here are to the liking of George Bush, the better. But is Bush Jesus Christ or something?” We rode on a while in an agreeable silence toward Pushkin Square. Then, suddenly, through the evening fog, the gleaming apparition of the future: a pair of yellow arches, a winding line of hungry Russians. Aliyev sneered.

“McDonald’s!” he said. “There’s the perestroika you all love so much.” The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known. It guarded its monopoly on power with a sham consensus and constitution and backed it up with the force of the KGB and the Interior Ministry police. There were also handsome profits. The Party had so obviously socked away money abroad and sold off national resources—including the country’s vast gold reserves—that just after the collapse of the August coup, the Party’s leading financial officer took a look into the future and threw himself off a high balcony to his death.

The Party’s corruption under Brezhnev was not a matter of exceptions, of rotten apples fouling the Utopian barrel. No thorough prosecution could stop with a single indictment. “If it were a question of just one of the former leaders, the new government could easily give him up to be destroyed, presenting him as the black sheep—a sad exception to the general rule,” according to Arkady Vaksberg, the top legal writer for the weekly paper Literaturnaya Gazeta. “But since it is a question precisely of all (or nearly all) of the members of the previous administration of autocratic old men, their exposure would lead to only one possible and inescapable conclusion from a historical perspective, that is, of the criminal character of the Party and the whole political system which enables criminals to make their way into positions of power and fanatically protects them from exposure.” In many ways, Stalin’s Terror mirrored the tactics of the mafia. He used violence as an instrument of coercion and discipline; he fostered an atmosphere of secrecy and universal suspicion; there were “made” men (Party apparatchiks) and the outward appearance of legitimate business (embassies, diplomats, trade, etc.). As terror faded under Khrushchev and then Brezhnev, the Communist Party’s business became business. “Sometimes you gotta get rid of the bad blood,” Richard Castellano tells Al Pacino in The Godfather. But after an all-out war, the mafia always dreams of an Arcadian period of cooperation, of relations that are profitable, stable, and, always, “just business.” Ideology in the post-Stalin era was not so much a system of beliefs or behavior as a kind of language, a password among the “made” men; if you could speak the language without deviation, you might be trusted to share in the loot. “More than anything else,” the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas wrote a few years after Stalin’s death, “the essential aspect of contemporary Communism is the new class of owners and exploiters.” It was only in the post-Stalin era, after the violent period of collectivization and industrialization was over, that the Party-mafia structures took shape. Vladimir Oleinik, a famously honest investigator in the Russian prosecutor’s office, published excerpts from his diary in Literaturnaya Gazeta that described the rapid growth in the 1960s of the trade mafia, a pyramid of corruption that began in the Communist Party Central Committee and the top ministers and went all the way down to butchers, bakers, and gravediggers, with everyone getting a piece. Oleinik wrote of how one Central Committee member filled his bank account by selling midlevel positions in the ministries for 50,000 rubles a spot.

The trade mafia worked thousands of scams. Even the small-time jobs had a certain beauty to them. In Central Asia, I was told about the fruit juice scam. Workers paid enormous bribes to get jobs servicing carbonated juice machines throughout the warm, southern republics. When the workers serviced the machines, they skimped on the syrup and then sold it elsewhere. They also skimmed some of the money out of the cash boxes. The workers used part of their gains to pay the foremen; the foreman, in turn, paid off the assistant minister; the assistant minister paid the minister … and all the way up the line and to the top of the Party structure.

In the same region, even high Party positions and awards were for sale. The magazine Smena (“Change”) reported that the position of regional Party secretary in Central Asia cost a bribe of $150,000, and an Order of Lenin, the Soviet Union equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, cost anywhere from $165,000 to $750,000.

It wasn’t as if this swamp of corruption were a secret to the Soviet people any more than the existence of the mafia is a secret to the New York storekeeper forced to pay protection money. The mafia made itself known at every turn. You literally could not leave this earth without feeling its heavy hand on your shoulder. One afternoon, the nanny who took care of our son came to work exhausted and depressed. Her mother had died, but what had run her down most was the enormous effort and expense of getting the woman buried—a process that drained her as much as it enriched the “cemetery mafia” and its Party patrons.

“I knew immediately this was going to run into big money for us,” Irina said. “We were supposed to get a free funeral and burial. But that is a joke. The first stop was the bank. First, Mother’s body had to be taken to the morgue. We were told that the morgues were all filled up, and they wouldn’t take her. But when we paid two hundred rubles to the attendants, they took her. Then there was the fifty rubles for her shroud.

“Then the funeral agent said he had no coffins my mother’s size and that we could only buy something eight feet long. My mother was five feet tall. For eighty rubles he came up with the right size. Then the gravediggers said they could not dig the grave until two P.M., even though the funeral was set for ten A.M. So that took two bottles of vodka each and twenty-five rubles each. The driver of the funeral bus said he had another funeral that day and couldn’t take care of us. But for thirty rubles and a bottle of vodka we could solve the problem. We did. And so on with the gravesite and the flowers and all the rest. In the end, it took two thousand rubles to bury my mother. Three months’ income for the family. Is that what ordinary life is supposed to be? To me, it’s like living by the law of the jungle.” In the West, the mob historically moves in where there is no legal economy—in drugs, gambling, prostitution—and creates a shadow economy. Sometimes, when it can buy the affections of a politician or two, the mafia meddles in government contracts and runs protection schemes. But in the Soviet Union, no economic transaction was untainted. It was as if the entire Soviet Union were ruled by a gigantic mob family; virtually all economic relations were, in some form, mafia relations. Between a government minister’s order for, say, the production of ten tons of meat and Ivan Ivanov’s purchase of a kilo of veal for a family dinner, there were countless opportunities for mischief. No one could afford to avoid at least a certain degree of complicity. That was one of the most degrading facts of Soviet life: it was impossible to be honest. And all the baksheesh, eventually, ended up enriching the Communist Party.

“Look, it’s all very simple,” Andrei Fyodorov, who opened Moscow’s first cooperative restaurant in 1987, told me. “The mafia is the state itself.” Before opening his restaurant, 36 Kropotkinskaya, Fyodorov worked for twenty-five years in the state restaurant business. Over a cup of tea one morning in his empty dining room, Fydorov described how it all worked at his old place of business, the Solnechny Restaurant, a huge state banquet hall. “The game started at nine o’clock on Friday mornings when the inspectors came by. I soon realized they were not really interested in the state of things in the restaurant. Very soon we established good contacts in terms of giving them various foodstuffs, providing tables in the restaurant, arranging saunas. The director of the restaurant would just tell me which services I had to arrange for them. You see, every person working in services is always on a hook. The restaurant director’s salary is one hundred ninety rubles a month, say. You can’t live on that, and so he is forced to take bribes. But there is a system of bribing in the USSR. You can’t get too greedy. A restaurant director cannot take more than two thousand or three thousand rubles per month. If he starts taking more, the system grows worried, and in the next five or six months new people will come around to inspect your place, which means that you can be arrested for violating the unwritten code of bribery.

“It goes from the bottom on up. From waiters, the bribes go to the maître d’, and then on to the deputy director, to the director of the restaurant, and upward to various Party officials and auditing bodies. The same system applies to cafés, tailor shops, taxi depots, barbershops. A man who does not give bribes for more than six months is doomed.” Until his untimely arrest a few years ago, the most flamboyant mafia figure in the country was Akhmadzhan Adylov, a “Hero of Socialist Labor” who ran for twenty years the Party organization in the rich Fergana Valley region of Uzbekistan. Adylov was known as the Godfather and lived on a vast estate with peacocks, lions, thoroughbred horses, concubines, and a slave labor force of thousands of men. Anywhere Adylov went, he was accompanied by his personal cooks and a mobile kitchen. For lunch, he always ate a roasted baby lamb. He locked his foes in a secret underground prison and tortured them when necessary. His favorite technique was borrowed from the Nazis. In subzero temperatures, he would tie a man to a stake and spray him with cold water until he froze to death.

Adylov insisted he was a descendant of Tamerlane the Great. Considering his taste for ritual and cruelty, his blend of ancient and Bolshevik cruelty, it seems fitting. Adylov often sat in judgment, as if on a throne, under a portrait of the state deity, Lenin. When a Party hack named Inamzhon Usmankhodzhaev was nominated for high office in Uzbekistan, he had to appear before Adylov for approval. As a test of loyalty, Adylov ordered Usmankhodzhaev to execute an informer, but he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. Adylov could not excuse such a pathetic show of weakness and relented only when Usmankhodzhaev begged for forgiveness and, on his knees, licked clean the shoes of the Godfather.

From the Uzbeks, Brezhnev wanted only cotton and, more important, wonderful cotton statistics. The cotton scam was gigantic, yet elegant. Brezhnev would call on the “heroic peoples” of Uzbekistan to pick, say, 20 percent more cotton than the previous year. The workers, heroic as they were, could not possibly fulfill the order. (How could they when the previous year’s statistics were already wildly inflated?) But the local Party leaders understood the overriding issue. They assured Moscow that all had gone as planned. If not better! The central ministries in Moscow would, in turn, pay vast sums of rubles for the record crop. The republican leaders would pocket the extra cash. Brezhnev, for his part, smacked his lips anticipating the gifts that would come, air freight, from Bukhara, Samarkand, and the other centers of Uzbekistan.

Of all the most famous Party mafias in the Soviet Union—the Kazakhs, the Azeris, the Georgians, the Crimeans, the Muscovites—the Uzbeks showed a certain flair. Sharaf Rashidov, the republican Party chief, was a soft-spoken sybarite with literary pretensions. He fancied himself a novelist. To fulfill his ambition, he hired two Moscow hacks, Yuri Karasev and Boris Privalov, to do the writing. The resulting potboilers were published in editions that would cause Judith Krantz profound envy. Rashidov also knew how to satisfy his appetites. After hours of waving to the masses from the podium on May Day, he would descend into the basement beneath the podium, where, as Vaksberg reports, there were tables “piled with festive fare and delightful young ladies ready to put the spring back in his step.” Rashidov was awarded ten Orders of Lenin, and when he died in 1984 he was buried with pharaonic ceremony in the center of Tashkent near the Lenin Museum. For years, people brought mounds of roses and carnations to the tomb. Finally, the Uzbek leaders recognized the shift in political winds from Moscow and moved the grave to a remote village. But Rashidov’s legacy lived on. In 1988, regional Party officials summarily pardoned 675 people who had been sentenced for their roles in the corruption scandals of the Brezhnev era.

These were the go-go years under Brezhnev, and Uzbekistan did not, by any means, hold a monopoly on the grotesque. In the Krasnodar region of southern Russia, a mafia stronghold, ordinary membership in the Party cost anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 rubles. Vyacheslav Voronkov, mayor of the resort city of Sochi, hired an Armenian architect to construct a musical fountain in the foyer of his state mansion. Tourists were permitted to pay a few kopecks to hear their Party leader’s fountain in full aria. When Communist Party chiefs in Russia went fishing, scuba divers plunged underwater and put fish on the hooks. When they went hunting, specially bred elk, stag, and deer were made to saunter across the field in point-blank range. Everyone had a wonderful time. When the king of Afghanistan visited the Tajik resort of Tiger Gorge, he blew away the last Turan tiger in the country.

The mutual congratulations, the feasts and wedding parties, the piety and self-righteousness all smacked of mafia culture. At a conference of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1981, Yegor Ligachev, who would later serve as Gorbachev’s nominal number-two man and conservative nemesis, said, “You can’t imagine, comrades, what a joy it is for all of us to be able to get on with our work quietly and how well everything is going under the leadership of dear Leonid Ilyich. What a marvelous moral-political climate has been established in the Party and country with his coming to power! It is as if wings have sprouted on our backs, if you want to put it stylishly, as you writers do.” In Kazakhstan, a republic bigger than all of Western Europe, Dinmukhamed Kunayev showed a certain kindliness to his relatives and (a rare feature in mafia men) to his wife. Arkady Vaksberg confirmed a story about Kunayev’s connubial bliss that I had first heard when I was in Alma-Ata.

It seems that Kunayev’s wife became jealous after learning that the wife of the Magadan Party secretary had been given as a gift an extremely expensive Japanese tea service. Magadan, the former labor camp center in the far east, had unique access to Japanese goods, but Mrs. Kunayev would not be soothed. She had to have these cups and saucers. Party etiquette did not allow Kunayev simply to order the tea set from Japan or even Siberia. That was somehow too obvious. Even dispatching an aide to Tokyo was deemed unseemly.

“A way had to be found, of course,” Vaksberg writes. “And such was its originality and refinement that it deserves its own little page in the history of the Soviet mafia.” Kunayev could not merely send his private plane, a Tupolev 134, on the mission. Party rules dictated that a Politburo member’s plane always had to be on the ready for emergency sessions in Moscow. So Kunayev told his aides to draw up an official report saying the plane’s engine required repair. This would allow him to order another plane while the first was being “fixed.” Rules also dictated that after the repair, a Politburo member could not fly on the plane until it had been flown twenty thousand kilometers. “The point of this brilliant move is clear,” Vaksberg writes. “Some of Kunayev’s closest associates were happy to take on the ‘kamikaze’ role. They worked out a route which, there and back, would clock up the required distance of twenty thousand kilometers. There would be stopovers in Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Khabarovsk. They would return via Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, for it would have been unthinkable to visit the Soviet far east and not gawk at geysers and an active volcano. Everywhere they were received at the highest level—after all, they were emissaries from Kunayev himself. Those that have clawed their way to power have an astonishing passion for recording their pleasure on film. Thanks to this hobby we can today see with our own eyes how their trip went. Lavish picnics everywhere with the traditional shashlik and variety of vodkas, saunas, and royal hunting of boar, elk, and deer especially put up in front of them for easy shots.

“The first lady herself did not take the trip, needless to say. Like her husband, she was not allowed to take chances with her life. However, the jolly kamikazes came back with the passenger cabin and baggage hold crammed with gifts from the Soviet far east and Siberia. They brought not only dozens of Japanese tea sets but also Japanese sound and video equipment, furs, carvings on rare deer horn—the finest art of indigenous craftsmen—thousands of jars of Pacific crab and other fruits of the ocean. All these things were brought back to Alma-Ata like trophies.” After three decades as the Kazakh Party chief, Kunayev had been forced to retire for “reasons of health” in 1986. In retirement, he lived across the street from a park named in his honor. The focal point of the park was an enormous monument, a huge plinth with the great man’s granite head perched on top. The building at 119 Tulebayeva Street looked like a second-rate Miami Beach motel. In addition to Kunayev, the two top-ranking Party leaders also lived there.

The first time I went to meet Kunayev, I tried to “doorstep” him, to show up and hope for the best. This was not a wise maneuver. A KGB guard in the courtyard stopped me and made it clear, as his hand flashed lightly to his holster, that one further step toward the Kunayev residence would be inadvisable. So I tried a more conventional tactic. Through a Kazakh journalist, a particularly obedient one whom I knew from Moscow, I asked to see Kunayev and sent along a list of questions of the “What are the key achievements of Kazakhstan under Soviet power?” variety. While we waited for word back from Kunayev, we ate a multicourse dinner at the apartment of the journalist’s in-laws. It was a long evening. His father-in-law got badly hammered on the cognac I brought as a gift and spoke lovingly for some hours of Stalin’s “iron hand.” We all ate heartily of a dish that I was later informed was “delicious noodles” mixed with shredded horse heart. Tastes like chicken, my hosts assured me. They were wrong.

Finally, the call came from Kunayev. He was ready to see us the next morning at eleven.

We arrived, four of us, at the house five minutes early.

“Where are you going?” the guard asked us.

“We have an appointment with Kunayev.”

“Impossible,” the guard said.

“We do. An interview at eleven. He is expecting us.”

“Documents!”

We all showed our various papers, and the guard went to his special phone. He talked for a while and came back smiling in triumph.

“The American is forbidden,” he said. This seemed nonnegotiable.

Clearly, the ministers of Moscow had no interest in giving Kunayev a public platform, especially not in an American newspaper. They were prepared to let Kunayev live in relative splendor amid his beloved collections of cigarette lighters and foreign shotguns, but they did not want to be the agents of a resurrection. Gorbachev had already suffered once from Kunayev. When he fired Kunayev in 1986, Gorbachev made the mistake of appointing in his place an outsider and a Russian, Gennadi Kolbin. This was just what Kunayev needed. By all accounts, Kunayev’s clan encouraged anti-Russian, anti-colonial riots, using a latent nationalism to do his own work. Gorbachev soon corrected the mistake, replacing Kolbin with a Kazakh, Nursultan Nazarbayev. But it was that incident in Alma-Ata that should have demonstrated to the Kremlin that, contrary to myth, the Soviet Union had not solved its national problems; instead, the abuses of a half-century had created an empire of resentments. Alma-Ata was prelude to a series of national movements Moscow never expected.

I waited on the street. An hour later, the Kazakhs came out of Kunayev’s place, beaming. “Kunayev seemed sad that you couldn’t come,” one of them said. “He said, ‘It seems I’m powerless in my own house.’ ” It seemed I would never meet the fallen don. But later the same day, while I was with another Kazakh political official, one of the journalists walked into the room, tapped me on the shoulder, and told me to “wrap things up.” He had called Kunayev and we were all set to meet—on the street, outside the gates of the Communist Party’s House of Rest.

A half hour later, a Volga, not unlike Aliyev’s modest car, pulled up. Kunayev unfolded himself from the backseat. He was enormous, silver-haired, and dressed in a chalk-striped suit. He wore dark glasses and carried the sort of carved walking stick that gave Mobuto his authority. He had a fantastic smile, all bravado and condescension, the smile of a king. Without my asking a thing, he launched into a monologue about the such-and-such anniversary of Kazakhstan and wheat production and the need to preserve the monuments of the Bolshevik state. “I’ve never swayed,” he solemnly reminded us. “I am a man of the Leninist Party line. Never forget that.” We swore we would not.

When I finally asked my earnest questions—about Gorbachev, about politics—Kunayev laughed them off, fiddled with the mahogany knob of his stick, and set back on the course of his monologue.

There were, I said, interrupting, still many Kazakhs who wanted Kunayev to return to politics. “Are you ready to make a comeback?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t be against it,” he said. “Let the people decide. But tomorrow, I should tell you, I’m busy. I’m going hunting for ducks. I love hunting for ducks.” The decline of the Party mafia began with the death of Brezhnev and the brief reign of Yuri Andropov. Although Andropov was guilty of many things—most notably his brutally efficient campaign against the dissidents while he ran the KGB—he was a throwback to a tradition of Leninist asceticism. Andropov was profoundly corrupt, a beast. No man who ran the Budapest embassy during the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 can be declared an innocent. “In a way I always thought Andropov was the most dangerous of all of them, simply because he was smarter than the rest,” Aleksandr Yakovlev told me.

But Andropov’s main virtue was that he was appalled by the kind of corruption and rot that had become endemic under Brezhnev. While he was KGB chief, Andropov conducted a wide-scale, independent investigation into Party business and the general state of the country’s economic system. After Brezhnev’s death, in his few months as general secretary, Andropov ordered arrests of some of the most obvious Party and police mafiosi. He frightened the worst elements in the apparatus so badly that a series of high-ranking officials in Brezhnev’s old circle shot, gassed, or otherwise did away with themselves.

The remaining Brezhnevites at the top were not much grieved when Andropov became seriously ill. The Party mafia could not bear the thought of reforms that would endanger its comfort. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in 1991, “The corrupt ruling class—the many millions of men in the party-state nomenklatura—is not capable of voluntarily renouncing any of the privileges they have seized. They have lived shamelessly for decades at the people’s expense—and would like to continue doing so.” Had it not been for that primal urge to power and privilege, Gorbachev might well have taken over as general secretary more than a year earlier than he did. Arkady Volsky, a former aide to Andropov and a leading figure in the Central Committee, told me how the Brezhnevites in the Politburo steered power away from Gorbachev, an Andropov protégé, to “their man,” the moribund apparatchik Konstantin Chernenko. By December 1983, Andropov was in the hospital with kidney problems and blood poisoning. His aides would take turns visiting him in the hospital with important matters and paperwork. On a Saturday preceding a Tuesday plenum of the Central Committee, Volsky came to Andropov’s room at the Kremlin hospital on the outskirts of Moscow to help him draft a speech. Andropov was in no shape to attend the plenum, and he would have one of his men in the Politburo deliver the speech in his name.

“The last lines in the speech said that Central Committee staff members should be exemplary in their behavior, uncorrupted, responsible for the life of the country,” Volsky said. “We both liked that last phrase.… Then Andropov gave me a folder with the final draft and said, ‘The material looks good. Make sure you pay attention to the addenda I’ve written.’ I didn’t have time to look right away at what he had written. Later, I got a chance to read it and saw that at the bottom of the last page Andropov had added in ink, in a somewhat unsteady handwriting, a new paragraph. It went like this: ‘Members of the Central Committee know that due to certain reasons, I am unable to come to the plenum. I can neither attend the meetings of the Politburo nor the secretariat [of the Central Committee]. Therefore, I believe Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev should be assigned to preside over the meetings of the Politburo and the secretariat.’ ” Volsky knew well what this meant. The general secretary was recommending that Gorbachev be his inheritor. Volsky made a photocopy of the document and put the copy in his safe. He delivered the original to the Party leadership and assumed, naively, that it would be read out at the plenum. But at the meeting neither Chernenko, Grishin, Romanov, nor any of the other usual suspects in the Brezhnev circle made mention of Andropov’s stated wishes. Volsky thought there must have been some mistake. “I went up to Chernenko and said, ‘Sir, there was an addendum in the text.’ He said, ‘Think nothing of any addendum.’ Then I saw his aide Bogolyubov and said, ‘Klavdy Mikhailovich, there was a paragraph from Andropov’s speech …’ He led me off to the side and said, ‘Who do you think you are, a wise guy? Do you think your life ends with this?’ I said, ‘In that case, I’ll have to phone Andropov.’ And he replied, ‘Then that will be your last phone call.’ ” Andropov was furious when he heard what had happened at the plenum, but there was little he could do. Even Lenin did not have the power to name his successor, and the Brezhnevites in the Politburo were just too powerful. When Andropov died in February 1984, Chernenko became general secretary, the ventriloquist’s dummy of the Party mafia.

As a concession to the Andropov faction and over the objections of some of his own confidants, Chernenko made Gorbachev the nominal number-two man in the Politburo. This turned out to be a serious tactical mistake. Chernenko held office for only thirteen months, and much of the time he was sick and powerless. As Chernenko wasted away, Gorbachev was carefully consolidating power. He ran Politburo sessions and won the support of two critical figures—the foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, and the KGB chief, Viktor Chebrikov. He also took his famous trip to Britain, where he made a lasting impression on Margaret Thatcher and the world press. When Chernenko finally died in March 1985, Gorbachev had the backing of the younger Party secretaries and a few key members of the old guard, including Gromyko. He was in a position to head off any potential opposition from the mafia dinosaurs.

Gorbachev, for his part, took office without taint of blood or corruption, a first for a leader of the Soviet Union. But even this was relative. As the Party leader of a resort region in the Caucasus, a neighbor of the notorious Krasnodar region, he must have known about the Party way of doing business, both with Moscow and within the local structure. At best, it is unlikely that he could have avoided toadying to Brezhnev either as the Party chief of the Stavropol region in southern Russia or in Moscow as a member of the Central Committee. Roy Medvedev, a Gorbachev loyalist to the last, told a reporter for La Stampa, “I believe that presents for Brezhnev even arrived from Stavropol.” “Did Gorbachev give Brezhnev diamond rings the way Aliyev did? Of course not,” Arkady Vaksberg told me. “But on the other hand, no provincial Party secretary could survive, much less advance, by ignoring the birthdays and so on of those superior to him. Even an ‘honest’ Party secretary coming to Moscow would have to bring gifts for his superiors: a few cases of good wine. You couldn’t get away from that. Gorbachev included. That was life in the Communist Party.” On New Year’s Eve 1989, the censors canceled an installment of the popular television program Vzglyad (“View”) for “aesthetic reasons.” Vaksberg claims that the aesthetic reason in question was that Brezhnev’s daughter, Galina, had told an interviewer that Raisa Gorbachev had tried to curry favor with the Brezhnev family when Leonid Ilyich was in power and had given them a number of presents, including an expensive necklace. But Vaksberg is also quick to recount how after publishing a piece called “Spring Floods” in Literaturnaya Gazeta about the negligence of ministers while the harvest rotted in the fields, the paper got a dressing-down from the Ideology Department of the Central Committee. Just as the editor was instructing Vaksberg to print a retraction, Gorbachev called the paper to express his compliments for its crusade against corruption.

But Gorbachev knew that he could not conduct a genuine investigation into the Party’s corruption. First, the Party, of which he was the head, would sooner kill him than allow it. Second, even if he could carry out such an investigation, Gorbachev would be faced with the obvious embarrassment: the depths of the Party’s rot. Instead, taking a page from Andropov’s style manual, he made a grand symbolic gesture. Yuri Churbanov, Brezhnev’s son-in-law and a deputy chief of the Interior Ministry, was indicted and tried for accepting more than $1 million in bribes while working in Uzbekistan. At his trial, Churbanov admitted accepting a briefcase stuffed with around $200,000. “I wanted to return the money, but to whom?” he said. “It would have been awkward for me to raise the question with Rashidov,” the Party chief of the republic. Churbanov was sentenced to twelve years in prison at a camp near the city of Nizhny Tagil. Brezhnev’s personal secretary, Gennadi Brovin, was sentenced to nine years in prison, also for corruption.

Like Andropov before him, Gorbachev believed in his ability to master the Party and reform it. Over a five-year period, he fired and replaced the most obvious mafiosi in the Politburo: Kunayev, Aliyev, Shcherbitsky. But just as he could never distance himself enough from a discredited ideology, Gorbachev’s inability to jettison the Party nomenklatura and his political debts to the KGB spoiled his reputation over time in the eyes of a people who had grown more and more aware of the corruption and deceit in their midst.

In the meantime, a new wave of politicians saw Gorbachev’s equivocations as an opportunity. Telman Gdlyan and Nikolai Ivanov, investigators who helped convict Churbanov, became two of the most popular legislators in the parliament purely on the strength of their public attacks on the Party. In their investigations of corruption under Brezhnev, Gdlyan and Ivanov were known for mistreating witnesses, manufacturing evidence, and committing other illegalities. They dismissed such charges with a smirk. Gdlyan, especially, was a wild man. He told me one day that Yegor Ligachev, the number-two man in the Politburo, had “definitely” accepted at least 60,000 rubles in bribes from an Uzbek official. When I asked for proof, Gdlyan laughed, as if such things hardly mattered.

Boris Yeltsin was the master of the populist attack, using the issue of Party perks and corruption as a way to discredit everyone at the top, Gorbachev included. In his memoir, Against the Grain, which was terrifically popular in Russia, Yeltsin writes about the “marble-lined” houses of the Politburo members, their “porcelain, crystal, carpets, and chandeliers.” For an audience living in cramped communal apartments, he described his own house when he was in the Party leadership, with its private movie theater, its “kitchen big enough to feed an army,” and its many bathrooms, so many that “I lost count.” And, he wrote, “why has Gorbachev been unable to change this? I believe the fault lies in his basic cast of character. He likes to live well, in comfort and luxury. In this he is helped by his wife.” At times, Yeltsin seemed the Huey and Earl Long of Soviet politics, a theatrical populist. Relying on the politics of resentment, he won an angry public’s affection. After he’d been fired from the Politburo for daring to confront the leadership in October 1987, Yeltsin was still a member of the Central Committee, with all the privileges that entailed. But in an interview with me at his modest office at the Ministry of Construction, Yeltsin swore that he had voluntarily given up his dacha, his grocery shipments, and his car. “All finished!” he said with the pride of the converted. For a very short while Yeltsin made sure that Muscovites saw him tooling around the city in a dinky sedan. Later, when he returned to power, however, Yeltsin lived no worse than Gorbachev did. He commandeered a splendid dacha, organized a regal caravan of limousines, and made a public show of his love for that proletarian game—tennis. Yeltsin’s new double-breasted suits and silk ties were also, one supposed, not available for rubles.

Like Gorbachev, Yeltsin was an ambitious provincial who made good in the Communist Party. Like Gorbachev, he made absurd speeches at various meetings praising the wisdom of Leonid Brezhnev and the eternal goodness of the Party. But while Gorbachev spent all his working life in the Party, Yeltsin began late. He became a member of the Party to get ahead at the state construction agency in Sverdlovsk. In his autobiography, Yeltsin recounts with a brand of irony foreign to Gorbachev the preposterous oral exam at the local Party committee required for membership: “[The examiner] asked me on what page of which volume of Das Kapital Marx refers to commodity-money relationships. Assuming that he had never read Marx closely and had, of course, no idea of either the volume or page number in question, and that he didn’t even know what commodity-money relationships were, I immediately answered, half-jokingly, ‘Volume Two, page 387.’ What’s more I said it quickly, without pausing for thought. To which he replied, with a sage expression, ‘Well done, you know your Marx well.’ After it all, I was accepted as a Party member.” After his fall from the Politburo, no statement, no amount of bombast, was out of bounds. In interviews, Yeltsin would suggest with a burlesque arch of the brow that the KGB could yet kill him with a high-frequency ray gun that would stun his heart. “A few seconds,” he told me, “and it’s all over.” His paranoia was comic, but understandable. The Kremlin leaders despised him. They formed a commission within the Central Committee to investigate him and ordered wild stories in the state-run press to disgrace him.

As the man who would not go away, Yeltsin was, for the Communist Party, an intolerable dissident. Such was his vital importance, his first important contribution to the collapse of the regime. Despite the Kremlin’s best efforts, the history of Soviet politics will show it was Yeltsin—vain, comic, clever, crude—who accelerated the essential step in political reform: the shattering of the Communist Party monolith. From the moment Yeltsin attacked Yegor Ligachev at the Party plenum on October 21, 1987, and rumors of this assault became the talk of Moscow, the facade of unanimity and invincibility, the hermetic code of Party discipline and loyalty, began to crumble. Although the proceedings of the plenum remained secret for months, Yeltsin quickly became an underground martyr. An actress performing in a hit play about the cleaning of the Augean stables, The Seventh Feat of Hercules, stepped center stage, abandoned her script, and accused the audience of sitting idly by as a new Hercules, come to purify the city, had been disgraced and persecuted. There were demonstrations at Moscow State University. Small independent political groups such as the Club for Social Initiatives petitioned the government for more facts on the Yeltsin case. Club members reported they were followed around town by men in small cars.

After failing to win back his position or good name within the Party at the Nineteenth Party Conference, Yeltsin took his campaign for revenge and rehabilitation to the public. His barrel-chested fury, his awkward candor, had an almost narcotic appeal for a people who saw the Party that ruled them for seven decades—the Party of Aliyev and Kunayev—as an ominous secret. To any reporter or crowd who would listen, Yeltsin insulted Gorbachev’s “timidity and half-measures” and Ligachev’s “dark motives.” The Communist Party, for its part, well understood not only the meaning of Yeltsin’s attacks but also the much wider issue of what his political success would mean to its future. Yeltsin’s ascendance embodied the threat to the Party’s control of the economy and the Party mafia’s system of tribute.

From the first appearance of cooperative businesses in 1987, the Party did everything it could to destroy the new movement it had ostensibly endorsed. One leading conservative in the Central Committee, Ivan Polozkov, made his name fighting the rise of semiprivate cooperative businesses in the Krasnodar region. He closed down more than three hundred co-ops in the region, calling them “a social evil, a malignant tumor.” The KGB, under Vladimir Kryuchkov, waged a campaign against private business, all under the pretense of rooting out corruption. But Kryuchkov never got around to investigating the barons of the state military plants, men who would soon become his closest allies in the struggle against radical reform. The conservatives also knew they could play games with the psychology of a people grown accustomed to “equality in poverty.” They knew they could arouse bitter jealousy in millions of collective farmers and workers by advertising cases of abuse under the new “mixed” economy. They portrayed the new wave of businessmen as hustlers (invariably Jewish, Armenian or Georgian hustlers) who made millions by buying products at low state-subsidized prices and then reselling the same products for three or four times more.

Undeniably, the first wave of private businessmen in Russia were no angels—no more than the first Rockefellers or Carnegies were. Racketeering, theft and bribery soared. But to the Party and the KGB, what these entrepreneurs and hustlers represented was not so much evil or capitalism as competition. This was intolerable. Lev Timofeyev, the journalist and political activist who spent 1985 to 1987 in a labor camp for writing a book describing rural corruption, wryly demanded that the Party men “transform themselves into men of property, landowners or shareholders.

“Let them make profits and reinvest them, let them outrun competition and become rich. Let them be useful at last. They have a right to do that. The only requirement is that they do not prevent others from doing the same,” he wrote. “Unfortunately the party officials will hardly become successful owners of land or industries. They lack the qualities needed for becoming honest entrepreneurs and this is why they are so terrified of those who have them. They will stop at nothing trying to prolong the days of their rotten power and they are still strong enough to do it.”