Dmitri Volkogonov - Autopsy For An Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime

By the same author

STALIN: TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY

LENIN: LIFE AND LEGEND

TROTSKY: THE ETERNAL REVOLUTIONARY

THE FREE PRESS
A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 1998 by Novosti Publishers

English language translation copyright 1998 by Harold Shukman

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

THE FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Volkognov, Dmitri Antonovich.

[Sem vozhdei. English]

Autopsy for an empire : the seven leaders who built the Soviet regime / Dmitri Volkogonov ; edited and translated by Harold Shukman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-684-83420-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-684-83420-7
eISBN: 978-1-439-10572-6

1. Heads of stateSoviet UnionBiography. 2. StatesmenSoviet UnionBiography. 3. Soviet UnionHistory. I. Shukman, Harold. II. Title.

DK268.A1V5813 1998

947.0840922dc21

[B] 98-10287

CIP

Contents

Illustrations

(Photographs courtesy of ITAR-TASS, Novosti News Agency and Publishers, L. Sherstennikov and the personal collections of I.Yu. Andropov, S.N. Khrushchev and M.S. Gorbachev.)

Lenin in Moscow, 1918.

Lenin at the Military-Revolutionary Committee, discussing the seizure of power, October 1917.

Lenin in conversation with H.G. Wells, 1920.

The funeral of Lenins brother-in-law, Mark Yelizarov, 1919.

StalinThe Lenin of today.

Mikoyan, Khrushchev, Stalin, Malenkov, Beria and Molotov on their way to a sports meeting in Moscow, 1945.

Khrushchev harangues a meeting in the countryside in the 1950s.

Khrushchev shows off the fruits of his maize campaign at the Enbekesh Pioneer Camp in Kazakhstan, 1961.

Fidel Castro enjoys the Georgian horn of plenty with Khrushchev in Abkhazia, 1963.

Brezhnev before decrepitude.

Brezhnev receiving the Order of Victory in 1976.

Flanked by his senescent comrades-in-arms, Brezhnev celebrates his birthday in 1978.

Yuri Andropov.

Andropov with his local host, Mikhail Gorbachev, in Pyatigorsk, Stavropol region, 1974.

Chernenko in his border guards uniform, 1930.

Chernenko returning from rest and recuperation, 1984.

Chernenkos first, and last, appearance on the Mausoleum as General Secretary, 1984.

Chernenko and Margaret Thatcher, 1984.

Stavropol Party Chief Gorbachev greets Prime Minister Kosygin, 1972.

Gorbachev relaxing with US President George Bush at Novo-Ogarevo, 1991.

The last General Secretary in reflective mood.

Editors Preface

The disintegration of the Soviet Union was preceded by a relatively brief period of some five or six years during which cautious economic reforms were quickly overtaken by an information revolution. Almost overnight the face of the regime changed from the familiar mask of concealment, mendacity and deception to an increasingly open expression of honesty, truth and self-exposure. Like Siamese twins, perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness) seemed to be inextricably linked, as the effort to raise living standards was mirrored by an outburst of free expression on a breathtaking scale. The first target was Stalinism, and the role Stalin had played in Soviet history.

Dmitri Volkogonov was an improbable candidate for launching the first fall-scale, documented Soviet assault on the Stalinist system. A three-star general, a former head of the Armys Political Administration and from 1985 Director of the Institute of Military History, he was, however, well placed to examine the Partys secret archives. He began writing his biography of Stalin in 1978, and it was almost complete by 1985 when Gorbachev came to power. By the time the book was published in the Soviet Union in 1990, virtually every hallowed principle of the previous seventy years had been challenged and rejected, and most taboos of Soviet history broken. Volkogonov followed his biography of Stalin with an even more iconoclastic study of Trotsky, published in Russia in 1992. But by the spring of 1990 he had begun research for a root and branch demolition of Lenin, as the founding father of a system that had brought the Soviet people to the crisis they found themselves in at the beginning of the 1990s. Lenin: Life and Legacy was published in 1994, and its completion left Volkogonov free to tackle the present book, which was his last. It is noteworthy that he wrote his studies of Trotsky and Lenin and his last book at a time when he was fighting the cancer from which he died in December 1995, and indeed this book frequently reflects his mental struggle to come to terms with his imminent death, when he felt he still had so much to contribute to public life and so much left to write. In the early 1990s he underwent a Christian baptism, from which, he told me, he derived much of the spiritual strength he displayed in his last years.

Each of the seven chronological chapters of this book is a self-contained political study, but they are all linked by a common thread of ideology, outlook and, in some sense, practice. Throughout the Soviet period, with one important exception, the leadership remained committed to Marxist orthodoxy, to a greater or lesser extent a militantly command economy, the unitary constitutional state of the USSR, the dream of world revolution, and the holiest of holies, namely the political monopoly of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Even in what might have seemed the slackest, most corrupt period, under Brezhnev, these commitments remained intact.

The great exception was, of course, Gorbachev. Yet even here, as Volkogonov shows, the leaders resistance to diluting, let alone jettisoning, Leninism, or to introducing a mixed economy or loosening the Partys hold on many social institutions, remained stubborn until relatively late. Gorbachevs greatest strides were in bringing about radical change in international relations, ending the Cold War and fundamentally altering the outside worlds view of his country. Glasnost meanwhile was eroding the foundations of belief in the system, undermining and disorienting the political establishment, and generally softening up the regime and making it amenable to the new conditions. As Volkogonov shows, the regime was not in fact amenable to such extreme change without inflicting terminal damage on itself. Like an absolute monarch, a Communist regime either is, or it is not. Both are brittle forms of government that cannot bend or adapt beyond a certain point without breaking. The monarch departs, one way or another, and the system is altered. In the Soviet case, the system and the leader both succumbed.