Spymaster, page 41
I quickly grew weary of such affairs and tried to avoid them, for with every passing month it became more evident that our Communist bosses were busy pickling their brains while the country steadily fell to pieces. Once Romanov went to a small town to celebrate the anniversary of the lifting of the nine-hundred-day Siege of Leningrad. Like most Communist Party bosses, he shamelessly used the suffering of our people during the war to bolster the authority of the Party, saying that without the valiant Communist structures we would have never defeated the Nazis. I got tired of watching people like Romanov wrap themselves in the mantle of World War II, and after the ceremony I decided not to attend the usual banquet. My absence created quite a stir. The next day I got a call from one of Romanov’s assistants, saying that the first secretary had been asking after me.
“It was a big mistake not to stick around,” the assistant told me. “How could you leave such an important event? You should have stayed and had a drink with the rest of us. You’re supposed to stay with Comrade Romanov, to protect him. It’s your duty.”
Lev Zaikov, the mayor of Leningrad and later first secretary of the city Party organization, was as conceited as Romanov, though each man had his own peculiarities. A tall, husky man with bulging eyes, Zaikov had been manager of a large defense factory before being named head of the Leningrad Party organization. I was in Leningrad when Zaikov was promoted, and a KGB official called Nozyrev to inform him that the agency had a significant amount of information about Zaikov’s alleged corruption and malfeasance at the defense plant. Nozyrev took the call while I was in his office.
“Now that Lev Nikolayevich Zaikov has been elected Party secretary, gather everything you have about his activities at this plant and destroy it,” Nozyrev instructed his underling. “You have damaging information? ... Yes? Well, destroy the files at once. Don’t you know that we mustn’t have anything of this nature on file about Party officials?”
Zaikov was driven to distraction by people who dared pass his long black Chaika limousine on the highway. One of my acquaintances made the mistake of overtaking Zaikov on a road near Leningrad. The Communist Party boss ordered his driver to run the poor man off the highway. Then the driver got out and yanked the fellow’s license plates off his little Moskvich. Zaikov rolled down his window and, wagging his finger victoriously at the unfortunate driver, told him he would get his plates back from the police in a month or two.
One day, as I was riding from work to my dacha outside Leningrad, I saw a Chaika limousine in front of me, poking along at about 40 miles per hour. My driver casually passed it. A few seconds later, the Chaika roared by us, its siren wailing and someone in the backseat shaking his fist at us from the curtained window. I thought nothing more of the incident.
The next day, however, someone from the mayor’s office called our office to see if it was indeed my car that had passed Zaikov’s on the Seaside Highway. The following day my phone rang, and I picked up the receiver only to hear Zaikov’s angry, stentorian voice.
“Were you on assignment when you overtook my car the day before yesterday?” the mayor yelled. “No? Then why were you going so fast! Didn’t you see it was the mayor ahead of you? You didn’t know, huh? The license plates were unfamiliar, weren’t they? That’s right, I have another set of license plates. But you saw it was a Chaika, didn’t you? You have no respect for the mayor! None at all. Your boss would never do such a thing. And you think you can do anything you want because you’re from Moscow. You don’t respect me. No! Not at all!”
The next day, our chief—Nozyrev—called his top deputies together for an important announcement.
“I am sick and tired of listening to the Party committee’s complaints about our men overtaking their cars on the highway,” said Nozyrev. “I won’t name any names of the latest offenders. But from this day on, it is strictly forbidden for anyone to pass the cars of top officials of the regional Communist Party. You know their license numbers. Those who do it again will be severely punished.”
We left chuckling under our breath. So this is what our vaunted Communist Party had come to: worrying about people passing their leaders’ cars on the highway. And now we were being forbidden to undermine the Communist Party’s leading role in society by daring to pass them on the open road. From now on, we had to be good comrades and learn to tag behind our Party leaders, no matter how slowly they were going or how badly they were driving.
It’s easy to see how these Communist Party bosses came to feel that they were masters of all they surveyed, for in reality there was almost nothing they couldn’t do in their regions. One of my duties in Leningrad was to oversee the KGB troops along the Finnish frontier. I made numerous trips to the border, talking to the officers and men there and sometimes going hunting and fishing in the pristine wilderness (off-limits to other Soviets). I had heard of a terrific hunting spot along the frontier in a place called Kirovskaya Bukhta, and one day I asked my colleague, Rear Admiral Sokolov, if he would like to accompany me on a trip there. He declined, warning me that this was the exclusive reserve of Romanov, Zaikov, and other Party bigwigs. Since the border was my area of responsibility, I went anyway on a trip that mixed business and pleasure: after talking with the troops, I wanted to do some hunting.
When I arrived at Kirovskaya Bukhta, one of our officers again warned me that these were the hunting grounds of the Party bosses. I asked how large was the hunting estate, and he told me it was 7,500 acres.
“They’ve got a small river of their own with a bridge over it,” the officer said. “You can catch great pike in there. They had a small house built for them on an island in the Gulf of Finland, next to the border. We feed the moose here so that the guests are assured a good hunt. Rear Admiral Sokolov is here more often than anyone else; he comes and gets fish and moose meat for the bosses. Some of the fish he salts away in barrels, so there’s enough for the winter too.”
Romanov had a dacha about twenty miles from Leningrad in a lovely spot known as Osinovaya Roscha. But I learned from Rear Admiral Sokolov that Osinovaya Roscha was famous within the KGB for more than its fine country houses. It seemed that just a mile or two from Romanov’s dacha was a mass grave in which an estimated seventy thousand victims of Stalin’s terror were buried. The problem was that every spring, with the melting snow, dozens of skeletons would pop up from the thawing earth. Sokolov had a team of a half dozen workmen who went out to Osinovaya Roscha in the spring to rebury the uncovered remains. Few people knew then of the mass grave, and though Stalin had been denounced and his crimes vaguely discussed, we had not yet progressed far enough to let our people know how grisly the Stalin years had truly been.
The unchecked power of these Communist bosses wreaked untold damage on our society, as was vividly illustrated by the construction of a dam across the Gulf of Finland. One of the legacies of Stalinism was our leaders’ love of colossal public works projects. Brezhnev oversaw the building of the Baikal-Amur Railway, known as BAM, a gigantic undertaking that lay down a little-needed rail line in the wilds of Siberia. In Leningrad, in the late 1970s, Romanov and his underlings devised their own “construction project of the century,” a plan to dam off the Gulf of Finland in order to stop the frequent flooding of Leningrad. So in the 1980s, over the objections of some eminent scientists, a twelve-mile dam was built across the shallow gulf at phenomenal expense. There was, indeed, reduced flooding, but the dam so interfered with tidal flows and the local ecology that it turned much of the gulf near Leningrad into a dead sea. Leningrad’s water became virtually undrinkable, beaches were polluted, and migrating species of fish, such as the delicious koryushka, were virtually wiped out. The dam was a boondoggle, an example of the monumental irresponsibility of our Party leaders and the absence of control over their actions, from above or below. Zaikov too was a big booster of the dam, and he and Romanov had no trouble persuading the Politburo in Moscow that their dam was a glorious achievement for Soviet Communism.
In late 1984, Romanov moved on to the Politburo in Moscow, and he was replaced by Zaikov. I remember vividly how Zaikov returned from a meeting with the fossilized Soviet leader, Chernenko, and reported on his trip in glowing terms.
“Constantin Ustinovich [Chernenko] gave me a very warm reception,” Zaikov told a meeting of the regional Communist Party Committee. “He is so wise. He has so much understanding! He knows the problems of our city very well. I asked him about the construction of the dam, and he said he would like it to continue. We will soon get extra funds, and the blocking off of the Gulf of Finland will continue at full speed. It will be a great victory for us, comrades!”
Listening to Zaikov, it was clear that we were going back to the Brezhnev days, with their paper victories and mighty projects. As the roughly one hundred members of the regional Party Committee enthusiastically applauded Zaikov’s speech, I felt my heart sink. I wanted to howl with anguish.
A group of local scientists asked me to use the power of the KGB to stop construction of the dam. But when I approached my chief, Nozyrev, and began talking about the environmental problems, he waved me off.
“Mind your own business,” he snapped. “Grigory Vasilyevich [Romanov] has made a decision on this and it’s final. Why do you have to listen to all these bleeding hearts?”
I was given an inside glimpse of our Party and political life when I was “elected” in 1981 to the Leningrad regional Soviet, our local legislature. I was nominated from the outlying Gatchina district. One day, in a prearranged show, a local seamstress school invited me to a political meeting. A Party official stood up before the three hundred students and said, “This is General Kalugin. He has rendered tremendous service to his country, he has many decorations, so we suggest that you nominate him to the regional Soviet.”
All in the room raised their hands in assent. On election day, I received 99 percent of the votes in the district; after all, I was the only candidate. Once a month, I held office hours, but no one ever came to see me and I would wind up reading the newspaper or talking with friends. I did manage, through my connections, to find funds to build a new apartment building for the seamstress school, and that remains my only legacy from my seven years on the regional Soviet.
I also was chosen as a member of the regional Communist Party Committee, and I remember my first meeting, and how impressed I was as a seemingly simple worker stood up and delivered an eloquent speech on the region’s social problems. After the meeting, I told a local Party boss how intelligent this common man had seemed, and how our educational standards appeared to be improving. The boss enlightened me, however. The worker hadn’t just stood up and made an extemporaneous address. Party officials had chosen him a month in advance, had written his speech for him, and had drilled him repeatedly on how to deliver it. It was all scripted in advance, as was every meeting of the regional Soviet and Communist Party Committee. It was a charade, with leaders applauding one another for nonexistent achievements, issuing glowing reports about our bright future, and listening to the proletariat deliver canned speeches on the problems of the day.
In a KGB library, I got hold of the writings of the banned Yugoslav philosopher Milovan Djilas. His views on the corruption of Communism, and how he eventually made a break with Communist philosophy, mirrored mine exactly.
“In the sphere of intellectual life, the [Communist] oligarchs’ planning doesn’t lead to anything but stagnation, moral degradation and decadence,” Djilas wrote in his book The New Class. “These heralds of the rigid, eroded, outdated ideas—it’s they who freeze and hamper the people’s creative impulses. Free thought is for them like a weed which threatens to uproot people’s minds.”
He went on to describe the shadow game the deluded Communist leaders played with one another: “It’s like a theater without an audience: the actors applaud each other, admiring the way they play.”
Reading Djilas’s preface, I found a passage that exactly described my state of mind: “I departed from Communism gradually and consciously, as I came to get the picture and draw the conclusions described in this book . . . I am a product of this world. I took part in building it. Now, I’m one of its critics.”
In March 1985, just as my faith in my country and its government was at an all-time low, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev swept aside the octogenarians on the ruling Politburo in Moscow and took power. And with his ascension to the throne, I began to believe that my long-held dream of radically reforming our Communist state was about to come true.
I had first heard of Gorbachev the year before, while visiting my old friend Alexander Yakovlev, with whom I had attended Columbia University. Yakovlev had gone on to become Soviet ambassador to Canada, where in 1984 he met Gorbachev while the latter was on a trip to Ottawa. The two men forged a fast friendship, and they—along with Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze—went on to mastermind perestroika.
After his Canadian posting, Yakovlev returned to Moscow and was appointed head of the Institute of World Economy, where he became Gorbachev’s closest adviser. Clearly they were already planning how Gorbachev might take power once the ailing Chernenko passed away. I went to see Yakovlev in his office, and we greeted each other like old friends, catching up on all the news and gossip since our last meeting six years before. In the middle of our conversation the phone rang and Yakovlev, limping from a war wound, ambled over to his desk and picked up the receiver. His face lit up as he talked.
“Yes, Mikhail Sergeyevich,” Yakovlev said. “I’ll be done soon and I’ll drop by then. . . . We’ll work on it when I get there.”
Yakovlev returned to his chair, took a sip of coffee, and said, “That was Mikhail Gorbachev, a member of the Politburo and Central Committee secretary. He’s a great guy. If he becomes a general secretary there will be colossal changes in the country. He’s a reformer with a capital ‘R.’”
Now, two decades after Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union, it is difficult for outsiders, and even some Russians, to remember what an astonishing impression he made during his first year on the job. In hindsight, it’s clear that Gorbachev had no intention of doing away with the Communist system but simply wanted to overhaul it, to make it work more efficiently. At the time, however, what a joy it was to watch a robust man (he was then in his early fifties) talk about radically changing our society. What a breath of fresh air was glasnost, as our people and the press began debating long-taboo subjects, such as the stagnation of the Brezhnev years, the cruelty of Stalin, and the gross inefficiency of our Soviet system. One after another, the barriers came down, the sacred cows were slaughtered. It was an indescribably heady period, and I found myself almost instantly revived, like an old wineskin filled with young wine.
I was lucky enough to see Gorbachev just a few months after he took power. He came to Leningrad on an official visit, and I accompanied him to Petrodvorets, the site of Peter the Great’s old palace. We met briefly, and then I listened to him speak at a meeting of the regional Communist Party. He struck me as almost Kennedyesque, talking in impassioned tones about how we had to get our society moving again. He was lucid and vigorous and, unlike our previous leaders, could even speak extemporaneously. (Toward the end of his reign, Brezhnev seemed incapable of saying his name without reading it from a cue card. We all cringed in embarrassment once when Brezhnev read the same page of his speech twice without realizing it. When I was in intelligence, Kryuchkov announced that, since Brezhnev didn’t like to read, all our reports meant for the Soviet leader had to be triple-spaced and could not exceed three pages.) I came away from Gorbachev’s Leningrad trip feeling certain that this was the man who could finally set things right in our long-suffering land.
Spurred on by glasnost and the new spirit ushered in by Gorbachev, I began to speak more aggressively at our KGB meetings, pushing for reform both inside and outside our agency. I also began writing letters to our national newspapers, joining the flood of people who welcomed the increased openness in our society. During the previous thaw in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, no one dared speak out about Stalin until our leaders gave the okay. But by 1986, Soviet citizens weren’t waiting for approval from on high; they were diving right in, saying and writing what they believed. I joined the fray, writing at least a dozen letters to Pravda, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Literaturnaya Gazeta, and other publications. I wrote the letters (none of which was published) as a common citizen and signed them “O. Kalugin.” Now they look absurdly tame, but at the time the themes I was expounding seemed shockingly bold. I suggested it was all right for people to work side jobs as farmers or repairmen, pocketing the profits from their labor. I attacked the extensive system of traffic police posts that ringed our cities, calling them holdovers from an authoritarian past. I excoriated corrupt Communist Party bureaucrats, and said that the anti-alcohol campaign then sweeping the country was a foolish mistake. Seeking to prove that it was useless to try to stop people from drinking, I even quoted Karl Marx, who once wrote, “Being a native of a vine-growing land and a former owner of vineyards, I appreciate good wine. I even agree with old man Luther that a man who doesn’t like wine is incapable of anything worth mentioning.”
