Free Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 by Stephen Kotkin Page B

less senior men—notably the 70-year-old Grishin—had made no secret of their aspirations.
    But Grishin was dogged by charges of corruption. 23 His nomination of the 54-year-old Gorbachev to chair the funeral commission demonstrated that the latter held all the cards: the mantle of Andropov, the de facto director-ship of the crucial party Secretariat, the weighty logistical support of the KGB, and relative youth. Why, then, would Gorbachev not have leapt at Grishin’s motion the first night to become funeral commission chairman, settling the question immediately? It seems his ego was waiting on the purely formal blessing of the old guard, above all Gromyko.
    In his memoirs Gorbachev does not even mention the supposedly decisive next morning phone call of support from Gromyko. What he does disclose is that the previous evening, twenty minutes prior to the politburo’s first meeting, he had arranged a secret tête-à-tête with Gromyko, but the senior figure remained noncommittal. 24 Gromyko’s ‘waffling’ was the entire ‘succession struggle’ . In the two years following Andropov’s death, Gromyko had schemed to sustain his own impossible chances by joining forces with Tikhonov, who engaged in all manner of nasty tricks, such as blocking a confirmation vote of Gorbachev’s status as second secretary under Chernenko, and instigating a covert search for compromising material on Gorbachev’s days in Stavropol. But these desperate manœuvrings could have little effect, other than ruining Gorbachev’s nerves.
    He was the lone representative of a younger generation in 56
    reviving the dream
    the politburo, and ultimately a generational change could not be avoided.
    Unlike the septugenarians and octogenarians of the ever-narrowing inner circle, the former country bumpkin from Stavropol—the youngest Soviet leader since Stalin— would prove to be a tactical virtuoso. Even more unlike the men he replaced, Gorbachev would show himself to be resolutely committed to renewing socialist ideals. All this may make him appear highly unusual. But belief in a better socialism marked most ‘children’ of the party’s 1956
    Twentieth Congress. Gorbachev’s beliefs, as well as his supreme self-confidence, were only deepened by first-hand experience of the men who had consolidated their power around the infirm Brezhnev (and then, one by one, filled urns in the Kremlin wall cemetery). Far from an aberration, Gorbachev was a quintessential product of the Soviet system, and a faithful representative of the system’s trajectory as it entered the second half of the 1980s. His cohort hailed him as the long-awaited ‘reformer’, a second Khrushchev. They were right. Belief in a humane socialism had re-emerged from within the system, and this time, in even more politically skilful hands, it would prove fatal.
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    3
    The drama of reform
    I don’t understand how we can fight the Communist Party under the leadership of the Communist Party . . . I don’t understand why perestroika is being carried out by the same people who brought the country to the point where it needs perestroika.
    (Mikhail Zadornov, Russian satirist, 1989) Liberalization and democratization are in essence counter-revolution.
    (Leonid Brezhnev, May 1968, confidential politburo discussion)
    ‘At first, the personality of Mikhail Gorbachev aroused delight,’ wrote KGB General Vladimir Medvedev, Gorbachev’s chief bodyguard, and before that, one of Brezhnev’s. The voluble new general secretary, the only full politburo member at Brezhnev’s death to have completed a full course of study at a major university, showed himself to be a ‘volcano of energy’, added the bodyguard.
    ‘He worked until 1.00, 2.00 a.m., and when various 58
    the drama of reform
    documents were being prepared—and they were limitless, for congresses, plenums, meetings, and summits—he would go to bed after 3.00, and he always rose at 7.00 or 8.00.’ 1 Just the fact that Gorbachev showed