From Washington to Moscow: US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR
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From Washington to Moscow: US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR
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| ISBN-13: | 9780822374008 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/04/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 784 KB |
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From Washington to Moscow
US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR
By Louis Sell
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7400-8
CHAPTER 1
First Visit to the USSR
Things Are Not as They Seem
"Vnimanije!" None of the American college students in the crowded train stopped at the Finnish border actually understood the Soviet guard's command to attention, but his burly presence demanded instant silence.
His next words sent a chill down my spine. Together with one of the female students in our group on its way to visit Moscow during spring break from a study-abroad program in Denmark, I was ordered off the train. As we climbed down from the green Soviet railroad car, I looked back toward the Finnish border. Only a couple of hundred yards away, it might as well have been the moon, which in that year of 1967 our two countries were still racing to reach.
Before we left Copenhagen, some of our Danish student friends had told us of a marvelous way to stretch our travel budget in the USSR. The Soviets, who basically viewed Western visitors as walking sources of hard currency, enforced an artificial exchange rate, making one ruble worth about one dollar. Outside the USSR, it was possible to buy rubles at a more realistic rate of four rubles for every dollar.
There was one problem with this scheme. Travelers were forbidden from bringing rubles into the USSR. I had cleverly conspired to fool the Soviet authorities by hiding the rubles in my sock, while my female friend had — so she told me — slipped them into her bra.
Walking to the station with the guard behind us, I wondered whether it was just a coincidence that two of us with illicit rubles had been summoned. Could I ask to go to the toilet and flush the rubles away? (This I learned later was presuming too much on Soviet bathroom technology.)
In the station an officer told us that we had improperly filled out our entry declarations. He slapped the forms onto the counter and pointed to where we had written our birthdates in the American fashion, with the month first, instead of in the European fashion with the day first, as the form clearly required, he sternly informed us. After we had filled out new forms, the officer said we were free to go.
When I awoke the next morning the train was moving slowly through a dense evergreen forest, the branches of the trees drooping under a heavy load of fresh snow. Occasional clearings revealed "Peter and the Wolf" villages with tumbledown wooden huts clustered around a hand-cranked well. In later years, I enjoyed cross-country skiing through the lovely woods that surround Moscow and I learned to treasure the ramshackle charm of Russian villages. But few cities show their best side to arriving rail lines and Moscow is no exception. In the late winter dawn, the villages seemed more squalid than picturesque.
As the train entered the Moscow outskirts, strings of identical high-rise apartment buildings reinforced the gloomy impression. Even at a distance, these unpainted concrete towers seemed shabby and unappealing, surrounded by mounds of debris and acres of mud and dirty snow. Our train rumbled slowly past long platforms packed with masses of people on their way to work. Dressed in shapeless, dark overcoats and jammed tightly one against the other, there was something unsettling about these crowds. Not many people appear at their best on the morning commute, but an aura of unhappiness and resignation, together with a dollop of menace, hung over these sallow-faced and unsmiling throngs.
The Hotel Tourist, flagship of Sputnik, the Soviet youth travel agency, provided our first exposure to the contrast between the image of the USSR as a nuclear-armed superpower and the grim reality of daily life. A dingy multistory building far from the center of town, the Hotel Tourist was barracks-living at its finest. Each room slept six students and every floor had one toilet. Bathing was also provided, of course — in the basement was a large, collective shower. Cleaning and luxuries such as toilet paper were apparently waiting for the next five-year plan.
Sputnik had allocated three guides to our group. Olga, the leader, was a heavy-set woman in her thirties, who moved us efficiently through Moscow's crowded tourist sites. She was pleasant enough but could be counted on to deliver the official line on any subject, with a smiling air of "I've heard all this before," if critical questions were asked. Olga's two younger female assistants supported her on any issue that might come up. One evening, talk turned to the well-publicized trial the previous year of two dissident Soviet authors, Andrei Sinyavskiy and Yuli Daniel. The discussion continued for some time along predictable lines until eventually Olga excused herself, saying she had to go home to her family.
As soon as the door closed behind Olga, the behavior of the two younger guides changed. One of them jumped to her feet and cried out in an animated voice, "Now, show us the latest dances." Discussion of politics was abandoned in favor of pop music, film, and life "over there." Our guides had a deep hunger for information about how young people lived in the West and did not bother to conceal their longing for some of the cultural and consumer advantages of the capitalist system whose flaws they had only recently joined Olga in exposing. It was my first — but far from last — exposure to one of the eternal aspects of Soviet life — the contrast between "official" and private behavior.
Visits to Moscow State University (MGU) provided another example. Sputnik had thoughtfully arranged for us to meet a carefully selected group for a discussion of everything the United States was doing wrong in the world, especially, of course, the war in Vietnam. More revealing insights came after we joined a group who invited us to their dorm rooms for a party.
I was struck by the difference between the Soviet and the American version of the late-night student "bull session," at least in its 1960s variety. For American students of that era, politics was the most important issue. We had discovered that the world, including our own country — perhaps especially our own country — was full of injustice, and we were the generation that was going to change that. Soviet students gave the impression of being bored with politics. The Soviet system was a reality. They didn't seem to expect or desire any serious changes, so why bother talking about it? The MGU students shared our guides' intense interest in ordinary life in the West. "What job does your father have, how much money does he make, how many rooms does your family have to live in, where do you go for vacation?" These were constant questions. For them, politics was simply part of the landscape.
Eventually one of the Soviet students took me to his dorm room. On the wall were three posters: Lenin, US president John Kennedy, assassinated four years previously, and the Beatles. Lenin, he said, was "not a bad guy," but he was essentially on the wall for "cover." JFK was there because he had been a world leader genuinely striving for peace. But it was the Beatles, he said, who were his true politics, and he showed me a collection of pirated Beatle recordings.
After a while we were left to our own devices, which turned out to be a big mistake from the point of view of our official handlers. We found our way into Moscow's youth subculture, aided by our Western appearance, the cachet of being American in Cold War Moscow, and, no doubt, the presence in our group of several attractive young women.
For me this experience centers around memories of Svetlana. Darkly beautiful and free-spirited, Sveta was an adventurer and a snob. She was determined to live her life independently and to the hilt, in the manner of her favorite poet Lermontov. Her father was a midlevel official in Moscow and, although she loved her parents and took advantage of his connections in such things as the purchase of Western clothes, she was indifferent to politics of any sort. The Soviet system she took as a given. She simply wanted to find her own personal space within its cracks.
For almost a week we were together every minute, falling deeply, passionately — and hopelessly — in love. On the night before my departure from Moscow, we considered various schemes of adolescent rebellion. I would not get on the train leaving Moscow and stay behind with her. We would go to the American embassy and declare that we wanted to remain together forever. But in the end we simply said good-bye, divided, as so often happened, by the immense differences of circumstances and systems.
Sveta and I wrote for a couple of years but eventually the correspondence trailed to an end. Every letter took months to arrive — no doubt delayed by detours through security authorities on both sides of the Iron Curtain — and we had our own lives to lead. At the time, I had no expectation of ever returning to the Soviet Union, and I do not believe she wanted to leave her home in Russia. I never saw Sveta again and I only hope that she ended up as happy in her choice of a spouse as I have in my own.
What stands out in my mind about that first youthful trip to Moscow was the way the underlying reality of Soviet life kept breaking through the highly embellished official version in which the Soviet authorities sought to enfold us. Things were not always the way they seemed — a lesson that was repeated on many occasions over the coming decades.
CHAPTER 2Leonid Brezhnev
Power and Stagnation
We remember Brezhnev as a doddering old man, clinging to power past his time. The shuffling gait, slurred speech, and gaffes such as reading the same page of a speech twice became the stuff of jokes and a source of embarrassment for many Soviets. Brezhnev's time became known as the "era of stagnation" and in historical perspective the term is well deserved.
But in his early years Brezhnev played the rough-and-tumble game of Kremlin politics with sufficient skill to defeat several challenges to his rule. Not an intellectual or an innovator, all his instincts were cautious and conservative. Nevertheless, he presided over an era of increasing professionalism and competence in the ruling elite and throughout Soviet society.
The first years of Brezhnev's rule saw relatively high rates of economic growth. The Soviet people experienced the beginnings of a modest consumer society. Individual apartments became more widely available and basic consumer appliances could be found to furnish them. Brezhnev brought a sense of stability to Soviet life, a feeling that things were improving and the expectation that they would continue to do so.
Brezhnev's international posture was active and aggressive. Under Brezhnev, the USSR invaded two countries, fought a border conflict with China, threatened the invasion of Poland, and together with its Cuban client used military might to install pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninist regimes in several African countries. In Southeast Asia, the Soviets provided Hanoi with massive quantities of weapons used to humiliate the United States. Brezhnev's military buildup turned Moscow for the first time in history into a truly global power. On the diplomatic front, a series of summit meetings in the 1970s symbolized the achievement of strategic parity with the United States.
This combination of domestic stability and international power is likely one reason why in the years after the Soviet collapse polls in Russia showed rising nostalgia for the Brezhnev era — memories which Vladimir Putin, who came of age under Brezhnev, skillfully exploited to buttress his own climb to power.
Brezhnev Consolidates Power
Brezhnev's appearance at the top of the Kremlin ladder came as a surprise to many, perhaps even him. On the evening in October 1964 when Khrushchev was ousted, P. K. Ponomarenko, a senior figure under Stalin, met Brezhnev by chance outside the elite apartment building where both lived. In retirement and having spent all day at his dacha outside Moscow, Ponomarenko had not heard the news about Khrushchev's overthrow. Brezhnev looked downcast and when Ponomarenko asked what was wrong, Brezhnev replied, "We removed Khrushchev today." A surprised Ponomarenko asked, "So who is the new 'First'?" Brezhnev answered, "Just imagine, it's me."
Brezhnev was widely expected to be a transitional figure. Many members of the new team had more impressive résumés and left no doubt about their own ambition for a higher role. Nevertheless, over the next several years Brezhnev moved skillfully to sideline potential challengers and cement his own place at the top of the Kremlin hierarchy.
Aleksandr Shelepin, former head of the KGB, presented the most serious challenge. Within the closed world of the Soviet elite, "Iron Shura" hardly bothered to conceal his ambition to achieve supreme power and his determination to return the USSR to a neo-Stalinist domestic course and a more confrontational posture with the West. Shelepin was the leading figure within the powerful Secretariat, in effect second secretary after Brezhnev. He also retained his position as head of the Party-State Control Commission and by virtue of this fact was deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. Shelepin's client Vladimir Semichastny headed the KGB, which had provided the security muscle for Khrushchev's ouster.
In the summer of 1965, rumors circulated within Central Committee circles that Shelepin would take over as party leader and Brezhnev would be relegated to his previous position as chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the powerless Soviet parliament. By the end of the year, it was clear that Shelepin had overplayed his hand. At the December 1965 party plenum, Shelepin lost control of the Party-State Control Commission. Mikhail Suslov, an acetic ideologue and former aide to Stalin, took control of the Secretariat and assumed the lead role in preparing for the upcoming 23rd Party Congress.
Shelepin further weakened his position in the run-up to the Congress when he proposed a radical party program that managed to offend almost everyone in the leadership. Shelepin called for a struggle against bureaucratism in the party apparat and the elimination of the system of "packets," by which members of the elite received special rations of food and other goods. Before the Congress, Minister of Defense Malinovsky pointedly stated that the army strongly supported the current leaders of the party and government and said rumors about dissatisfaction in the military were baseless, showing that the military stood solidly behind Brezhnev. Next year, while Shelepin was in the hospital having his appendix removed, Brezhnev used the defection of Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, as an excuse to remove Semichastny as KGB chief. Shortly thereafter, a Central Committee plenum installed Shelepin in the powerless job of trade union chief.
Kosygin and Economic Reform
Aleksei Kosygin played little role in the plot to oust Khrushchev but after its success he was the natural choice to be chairman of the Council of Ministers or prime minister. Personal relations between Brezhnev and Kosygin were strained from the beginning. Kosygin regarded Brezhnev as an intellectual lightweight and resented Brezhnev's interference with Kosygin's government turf. Brezhnev, for his part, was jealous of Kosygin's authority among the top elite and was angered by Kosygin's persistence in speaking his mind at Politburo sessions.
At a Central Committee plenum in September 1965, Kosygin announced a series of measures that amounted to the most sweeping change in the Soviet economy since the establishment of the Stalinist central-planning system in the 1930s. Kosygin reversed Khrushchev's despised structure of territorial economic management, which had sent bureaucrats out of their comfortable Moscow billets into remote regional postings. Kosygin reinstated the powerful industrial ministries but he also sought a new approach that would couple more efficient central planning with somewhat greater independence for individual enterprises. The number of plan indicators each enterprise was required to meet was reduced from thirty to nine and a modest move toward the notion of "profit" was made by allowing enterprises to keep a greater share of what they earned.
Kosygin intended for the 1965 program to be the first phase of a more sweeping reform to be introduced in the next Five Year Plan. According to Dzherman Gvishiani, Kosygin's son-in-law and senior official at the State Committee for Science and Technology, Kosygin sought "the gradual evolution of the system of 'state management' of the economy into state regulation of the activities of the enterprise." It turned out, however, that Kosygin's reforms collided with entrenched opposition at both the upper and lower levels of the Soviet system. Party leaders were unwilling to surrender supervision of the economy, which they feared could erode control over other areas of the system. Enterprise managers feared the limited autonomy the plan tried to give them. The Soviet central-planning system was so complex and basically so dysfunctional in practice that individual enterprise managers could not operate without the ability to turn to party officials for extrasystemic intervention — often quasicorrupt — to break through bottlenecks. Brezhnev, moreover, had no desire to see a potentially dangerous competitor gain credit for anything as important as rescuing the Soviet economy. The party apparat gradually whittled away at the reforms and by the time of the 24th Party Congress, in 1971, they had been quietly shelved.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From Washington to Moscow by Louis Sell. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Prologue. Two Treaties, Two Eras 11. First Visit to the USSR: Things Are Not as They Seem 5
2. Leonid Brezhnev: Power and Stagnation 9
3. Repression and Resistance 22
4. The Nixon Years 41
5. A Tale of Two Cities: Vladivostok and Helsinki 63
6. The Unhappy Presidency of Jimmy Carter 76
7. Two Crises and an Olympiad 96
8. Interregnum: Andropov in Power 114
9. Ronald Reagan's First Administration 128
10. Eagle vs. Bear: US and Soviet Approaches to Strategic Arms Control 145
11. Mikhail Gorbachev 165
12. Gorbachev Ascendant 184
13. New Kid on the Block: Gorbachev Emerges in US-Soviet Relations 196
14. "I Guess I Should Say Michael": The Turn in US-Soviet Relations 213
15. 1989: Year of Miracles or Time of Troubles? 242
16. Stumbling toward Collapse: Gorbachev's Final Eighteen Months 270
17. The August Coup 294
18. Red Star Falling 312
19. Why Did the USSR Collapse? 322
Postscript 339
Notes 351
Bibliography 383
Index 399
What People are Saying About This
"This memoir is a fascinating account of the final two decades of Soviet politics and a convincing analysis of the role of US-Soviet relations in the disintegration of the USSR in late 1991. Louis Sell’s book is a wonderful guide for readers who remember the Soviet Union and want a better understanding of why it collapsed, but it is at least as valuable for today’s undergraduates and graduate students, who have no direct memory of the USSR and need to learn about it from those who witnessed it firsthand."
"The breakup of the USSR in 1991 changed the political map of the world. Misunderstanding what happened then has exacerbated many of the problems facing the United States today. Louis Sell’s From Washington to Moscow takes us back to those turbulent days when Russia cast off most of its empire and gives us a corrective, insider’s view of worldchanging events. This is an important book, an exciting read that is also destined to be an important source for historians of the period."