By Neil Harris
ANATOLY Chernyaev, as deputy head of
the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)
and a candidate member of the Central Committee, was close to the centre of
power for over two decades. During the last two years of the Soviet Union he
became Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreign policy advisor. The diaries he kept, peppered
with an insider’s gossip, have been donated to the George Washington University
where they are slowly being translated and put on the web as part of their “National
Security Archive”.
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| John Gollan with Brezhnev in Moscow |
These diaries not
only paint a picture of the Soviet Union, as seen through the eyes of a
self-styled revisionist, they also shed new light on those from the “fraternal
parties” and their discussions with the International department in Moscow. Some of those it exposes destroyed the Communist
Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from within, one example being John Gollan, general
secretary of the British party from 1956 to 1976, who appears in an entry for 17th
May 1973:
“On
his way to Vietnam… in the evening I met him at the airport. At 5 in the
morning I saw him off on the rest of his trip. Evening on Plotnikov Street. As
they say, ‘besides harm, no good came of it’.t He was irritated at being met by
an official of my level, while ‘in Romania he was met by Ceausescu, in Hungary
by Kadar, in Yugoslavia by Tito’ and so on. (These are his own words! He is one
of those people!) He was irritated that there was no reaction to his offer to
meet with Brezhnev either on the way to Vietnam or on the way back. I felt
tense and self-conscious because of his attitude, especially after all my
attempts to start some kind of political conversation were met with
contemptuous silence: he was not going to discuss these things at my level.”
There are other
records of ill-tempered meetings with Gollan, who would only talk about
anti-communist dissidents and Jewish emigration. Ironically, Chernyaev was no
anti-semite and campaigned against prejudice until the end of the Soviet Union,
unlike many dissidents pretending to be democrats.
The international department didn’t
fare much better with Gollan’s successor Gordon McLennan. His first appearance
is as part of a divided and hostile CPGB delegation in March 1973: “It was a difficult week. The British
delegation returned to Moscow (Leningrad, Kiev, Vilnius, Lvov). They were a lot
of work, but in the end it was interesting.” Chernyaev records how critical
of the Soviet Union some on the delegation were, particularly after disruptive
comments were made at a car plant. As a result:
“….the
bearded guy, Ralph Pindor – a young, red-haired shop-steward from Scotland –
asked the head of the delegation to gather the members together. ‘What did you
come here for? To pick fights, like provincials? To spoil relations between the
parties? Are you at a bar around the corner, or are you carrying out a
political assignment?’ In the morning everyone was apologetic.”
There is no mention
of McLennan playing any role until the end of the visit and then it wasn’t a
positive one:
“Nevertheless,
I had a serious conversation with Gordon McLennan when we were working out the
communiqué. We discussed why we needed them to say that they ‘appreciate the
building of communism;’ we talked about the Common Market, about our foreign
policy, about why we needed the formula of ‘joint struggle for unity of the
International Communist Movement ( ICM)’.”
McLennan and some of
the others revealed their hand at the final reception:
On
1st March there was an official reception of the delegation by the
CC CPSU. The delegation (its head) no longer made any claims and praised
everything profusely. Gordon timidly noted that all questions have essentially
been answered and left it up to BN [Ponomarev] to decide whether to go over the
questions.”
Which would have been
fine, except that at the official Central Committee reception, McLennan asked
Ponomarev a hostile question about the harvest – in 1972 it had gone badly –
and this must have been calculated to embarrass. The attitude of some of the
group is also clear from this passage:
“Then
Kapitonov spoke ….he talked excitedly about how today Leonid Ilyich [Brezhnev]
signed Party Card Number 1 – to Lenin…..the Brits stared and could barely
restrain the smirks on their faces.”
If McLennan and his
group gave away hints of anti-sovietism in 1973, there was to be no doubt about
it in the 1980’s; this was the period of vicious internal struggle in the CPGB
which led to the creation of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and
ultimately the collapse of the CPGB. McLennan visited the International
Department on 14th March 1985 when he was in Moscow for the funeral
of CPSU general secretary Konstantin Chernenko, no doubt secretly hoping to
meet the newly elected general secretary and darling of the West – Gorbachev.
He was going to be unlucky:
“Out
of all the communist parties, Gorbachev met only with the Italians. And even
though BN [Ponomarev] did not object, he grumbled to us: saying how is that—so
many good (!) leaders have come, and we meet only with the Italians, the bad
ones!”
In fact what McLennan
got was a fairly lengthy telling off:
“I
was at BN’s talks with McLennan (general secretary of Great Britain’s CP). BN
agreed to berate him for Johnston’s article in Marxism Today.”
Monty Johnston, a
leading CPGB revisionist had published an article in that month’s Marxism Today entitled: Back in the USSR; the past catches up.
This was a piece of viciously anti-Soviet propaganda. It would have been more
appropriate from a Trotskyite or a Reaganite than from an article in a “communist”
magazine surviving on a Soviet subsidy. It’s clear that Chernyaev felt the same
way about it:
“As
a result, Gordon wanted to continue the talk with me. I stopped by his hotel in
the evening. Conducted an edifying conversation about this “anti-Soviet”
article: said that, since we are fraternal parties, we must observe some code
of propriety. We are not against criticism, but not one-sided: what if we had
written in the ‘Communist’ something similar about your party, what wouldyou
say?! There was nothing he could say to that. And in general, he is no expert
at debate, plus he has not completely parted (like the Italians have done) with
the ‘principles of the International Communist Movement’ in the traditional
interpretation.”
By now, the trip must have seemed less
of a good idea:
“16th March 1985, from early in the
morning yesterday I continued to ‘discipline’ McLennan, trying to get a clear
response from him, as to how he understands fraternal relations — does he
recognise at all, unlike the PCI [Communist Party of Italy], the specific
character of the relationship between parties? He got confused, said that he
thought about that all the time himself, and that I had now arranged all these
problems in a systematic way. But I continued to press on him: how can
fraternal relations be combined with an ideological war, which you are
virtually waging against us (the CPSU)?”
Chernyaev may have
been a revisionist, but he had a good grasp of the balance of forces in the British
party:
“I
am sure that this is all in vain: he is too weak a leader to make
internationalist sentiments prevail at the CPGB; even though the basic sense of
justice is on our side: the CPSU has, in fact, recognised most of its major
flaws and omissions, and has undertaken their correction, begun work towards
the ‘improvement of socialism’s image’. The new leader has clearly stated that
he came from the Andropov camp and that he would continue the work with greater
energy, and maybe even with the help of truly radical changes and reforms. And
you, the Eurocommunists and others like them, continue to say that this is an
impossible task unless we introduce a second party and altogether accept the
British system of parliamentary democracy, in other words you ‘criticise
constructively’ on the basis of dissidents’ gossip and the work of
Sovietologists, without a real understanding of the reality.”
Chernyaev was
realistic about prospects at the CPGB;
“With
that I saw the general secretary of Great Britain’s CP off; he has an
extraordinary congress in mid-May, where the minority of so-called ‘pro-Soviets’
will be dealt the final blow.”
That month, Chernyaev
also had the unhappy chore of dealing with the CPGB full-timer, Dave Priscott,
comparing him unfavourably with Labour’s Dennis Healey who had been in Moscow
to report on the 40th anniversary celebrations of victory over the
Nazis;
“17th
March 1985, at the airport, where I came to see him [Healey] and Priscott (from
the leadership of the Great Britain Communist Party) off, I found him writing
an article for The Observer about the 40th anniversary in Moscow. I
had to say goodbye to both of them at the same time and we sat in the guestroom
with some cognac.”
Time was plainly
dragging, at least until he got Healey going with the help of the entertainment
allowance:
“I
delivered all kinds of speeches, tried to joke, to egg them on. Healey spoke in
response and towards the end suddenly remembered and blurted out, addressing
Priscott, something like this: ‘I think, that comrade Priscott will not bear me
a grudge for speaking for both of us and taking up all the time before the
flight (the other nodded his head, with a pitiful and servile smile). Though, I
beg your pardon, after the events in your party, which will soon end with the
extraordinary Congress, perhaps I will not be able to call you comrade any
more, I will have to use “gospodin” (mister!)’. Everybody laughed. But this was
an excellent move against the CPGB’s descent into anti-sovietism.”
The result of the
Congress came through as expected;
“20th
May 1985, the CPGB Congress is over. The ’Eurocommunists’ won, ‘our guys’ were
driven out. Either they are fools, or the [intelligence] agents really made an
impact, or they are such vehement anti-Soviets that they have lost common
sense. Because under the English conditions there is no space for a
social-democratic (anti-Soviet) Communist Party, and especially now, when we’ve
begun embracing with Kinnock and Healey. Their Congress virtually means a
self-liquidation course. Formally, its substance is Eurocommunism, but the
reality in their situation is something completely different... Particularly
when Gorbachev is creating a different image of the Soviet Union as a world
power and the fears of the Soviet threat are beginning to dissipate.”
For Chernyaev this
was a source of despair, despite his revisionism. As a nationalist he was
attempting to keep alive the international movement – but only as a pro-Russian
force:
“22nd
May 1985. Lagutin has returned from the extraordinary Congress in Great
Britain. The Eurocommunists have absolutely defeated the faithful, i.e. the
people faithful to us….. They do not need us, the CPSU; do not need us at all.
They see in us neither a model, nor an example, ideal, brother, trusted friend,
not even someone who would save them from a nuclear catastrophe. Alas! Many
Communist Parties are on this path.”
The contradiction
that faced Chernyaev was that it was his official duty to oppose the
Eurocommunists because their position was anti-Soviet. At the same time he was
unable to support the “pro-Soviet” elements, because he was a revisionist. As a
result, he could not see beyond the appeal of transferring Soviet support to
western social democracy instead of seeking out revolutionaries and rebuilding
the communist parties around them.
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| Chernyaev and Gorbachov |
Although he was the
deputy head of the CPSU’s International Department responsible for relations
with Foreign Communist parties, politically Chernyaev had given up on Communism
years before. His plan for the International Communist Movement was to convert
it into a pro-Russian social democracy.
By August 1985 the
fallout from the British party’s extraordinary congress had reached Moscow and
was dealt with in the International Department’s report for the XXVII Congress
which included; “information for
Gorbachev about Rotschtein’s letter to him, about the situation in the
Communist Party of Great Britain and about our line”. This was a reference
to Andrew Rothstein, a leading British Communist, a delegate to the Communist
International in the 1930s, who was well known to Lenin and Stalin. He was the
son of Theodore Rothstein, pre-revolutionary Bolshevik party member, theorist
and Lenin’s representative in London after the revolution. Andrew Rothstein was
later to become a founder member of the Communist Party of Britain; at this
time he had written to Gorbachev for support against the eurocommunists – he
wasn’t going to get it. Chernyaev would meet him in person on a party visit to
Britain later that autumn, probably to explain why;
:
“1st
November — after lunch I went to visit Rotshtein (he is a veteran of veterans
of the Communist Party, a “Bolshevik,” the son of a Lenin’s friend, whom the
latter sometimes rocked on his knee). This is living history, but history,
another confirmation of the fact that there is, and cannot be, any place for
the Communists in the political life of England.”
The mood of
demoralisation was clearly the result of too many long meetings with the CPGB;
“On
28th October we spent five hours at the Communist Party CC. Pravda
correspondent Maslennikov was with us. The general conclusion from our
discussions is the following: they understand everything, but are also
absolutely incapable of acting; there is a complete absence of any kind of
perspective of being a political power in the country. Their attitude toward
me: trust, agitation, they perceive me almost like Gorbachev’s alter ego. We
had lunch in a nearby tavern. On 29thOctober, Tuesday, again at the
CC, but the talk was with the CPGB London organisation. [We spoke] about the
crisis in the party, about the minority opposition.”
As the group headed for
Wales, the problems and divisions in the party became clear: “On 30thOctober, Wednesday, with
Maslennikov behind the wheel we drove to Cardiff. We had a meeting in a cafe
with secretary of the Party organisation of Wales. It was surprising: the party
boss of an ultra-proletarian region is an artist who didn’t finish his studies,
yesterday’s student.”
It got worse when he
met miners’ representatives – the divisions were out in the open;
“In
the management of the miners’ trade union is a trade union boss, quite drunk,
who, looking directly at the party boss, met us with the words: “Who are you
for, McLennan (the generalsecretary), or for the Morning Star (a party organ in
opposition to the CPGB leadership)?
“Awkwardness.
I had to separate them and to set the conversation going.”
By this time, Chernyaev
who had written his 1949 university dissertation on the miners’ struggles in
the Rhondda, was fairly demoralised;
“Very
close to midnight, at the other end of Cardiff we met with veterans of the
anti-war movement. There were many women, young leaders. I spoke about Gorbachev’s
philosophy of international politics — for the present and the future. One
girl, very pretty, wore me out with questions. Everyone is very concerned. It
seems to be hopeless, but they continue to work, by the principle of ‘little
steps’.”
A complex character, in
public Chernyaev played the part of the loyal deputy to Ponomarev, his boss at
the international department, in secret he was contemptuous of both the man and
his politics.
As a Russian
nationalist and a war hero, he represented the first generation that had not
played a part in the Revolution, the Russian civil war against the Whites or
the Spanish Civil War – the ideological as opposed to “patriotic” wars. As a
generation it acted as a barrier between the Lenin and Stalin cohort and those,
like Gorbachev, that Chernyaev referred to as the “Children of the Twentieth Congress”.
He was in fact an
oppositionist all his life but only revealed this to his diary and close
friends. In 1991 after the collapse of socialism he records a discussion with
an old colleague from East Germany:
“Bruno Malov visited me. The one who was the deputy head, and then the head of
SED’s International Department [Socialist Unity Party, the ruling party in the
German Democratic Republic], who flashed across our TV screens as Honecker’s
interpreter……We discussed what we did, while we understood the absurdity of it
all, and that it would lead to a dead end. We remembered how Ponomarev would
gather officials at his level from five socialist countries and teach them how
to rebut the French and Italians with their eurocommunism, or the Romanians (I
remember in Poland, at night before Warsaw we were in some old castle from the
Mickiewicz era, we met secretly from the Romanian delegation to conspire!)…
Bruno understands everything and did not argue with me when I started to
“justify” the inevitability of what happened… That it was natural for
revisionism to be born in such units as the International Department… because
we knew the world and we knew that nobody was going to attack us, we knew what
the ICM (international communist movement0 was in reality, and that it was a
lost cause… It was not without reason that in the SED and especially in the
apparatus of the CC CPSU, the international affairs workers were considered revisionists
from Trapeznikov’s days, and they were endured only because ’technically’ it
was impossible without them to maintain relations with other Communist Parties,
and to keep them on our bandwagon.”
In 1989, on a more
personal level, Chernyaev was candid about his own political background;
“Probably,
it was always so… I am glad that back then, in the 1930s, I was not into politics,
and joined the Komsomol (Young Communist League) only right before the war…..
Consequently, I was never charmed by Stalin, never considered him great because
in my eyes he was not ’noble’ or an ‘aristocrat,’ not an intellectual, in other
words. a person of culture.”
His own background as a
snob is something he was unlikely to boast about except in his diary:
“My
mother’s hopeless attempts to hold on to the impossible – to raise me in the
traditions of Russian nobility, the canons of that pre-revolutionary era in
which she grew up herself (with piano, French and German lessons with the
governess Kseniya Petrovna), they did not pass in vain. Even though I cannot
truly play the piano or speak these languages, I have always been internally
free. The only period in my life when this freedom was called in question was
when I worked in the CC CPSU Scientific Department, in the late 1950s. At that
time I had to do some vile functions for work, even though I tried to resist
and to somehow neutralise this department’s blows to the ‘children of the XX
Congress’.”
Throughout the diaries,
Chernyaev attacks the “Stalinist” generation of Central Committee members like
Ponomarev, Suslov and Arvid Pelshe (who had also been a young Bolshevik in the
Revolution), characterising them as stupid, out of touch and senile even though
that generation’s private analysis of Brezhnev’s “Détente” and “real-politik”
was fairly near the mark as this 24th June 1973 entry shows:
“The
Brezhnev-Nixon agreement for the prevention of nuclear war has been signed……Here
are the symptoms, in conversation with our consultant Kozlov, Professor
Kovalyov, head of the Department of Scientific Communism at Moscow State
University and a moron, so to speak, ex officio, lamented: ‘How can this be?
Peace is good, of course. Lenin was also for peace. But we are concluding
economic agreements with capitalism for 30-50 years… We are creating an
economic structure for peaceful relations. At the same time we are tightly
binding ourselves with the capitalists. We are helping them to emerge from
crises, and so on. Hence, we believe that for another 30-50 years there will
not be any revolution? Then how are we to teach scientific communism and talk
about the death of capitalism?”
In the same 1973 entry
Chernyaev goes on to set out his own philosophy, his generation’s secret plans
to overturn the Soviet system. It is always expressed in Leninist terms –
partly because people like him were educated into the works of Lenin and Marx –
it was the language they were brought up
to use, just as for Marx and Engels the Greek myths and the Bible were their
common language.
Partly it was because
it was a code they used to protect themselves from exposure and potential
persecution. The “‘Leninism” that Chernyaev, Andropov, Gorbachev, their
sympathisers and advisors referred to was only the Lenin of the New Economic
Policy (NEP) of 1922. This was the brief policy reintroducing capitalism as
championed by Bukharin and accepted reluctantly by Lenin, who saw it as a
temporary, emergency measure. For the “Children of the twentieth congress” it was
their permanent solution as the 1973 entry goes on to say:
“…A
way out of this is to declare war on Trapeznikovism. The established peace
necessitates it. The enormous difficulty of such a war is that we are not talking
about just professors and a part of the apparatus; we are talking about a whole
layer of society that spans several generations. It cannot be reformed, and
most importantly – you cannot make it into smart and educated supporters of
something new. You have to start with a strong-willed restructuring
[perestroika] at the level of the general secretary of the main theoretical
concept itself; a genuine revival of Leninism on a modern basis; the liberation
of public life from ideological dogmas. In their day these dogmas had a real
meaning for social development, especially in our country, and this lasted for
a long time. But now they turned into ideological myths, into obstacles and
dangers for our society, and the source of its moral corruption.”
It may seem remarkable
that this was all set out in 1973, however this was not some master plan. There
never was a timetable to seize power in 1985 and then to destroy socialism in 1991.
What this (“Leninism on a modern basis”) represented was simply the common view
amongst the educated, privileged elite that the only solution to the Soviet
Union’s problems lay in the reintroduction of capitalism, a compromise with
imperialism to allow for rapid disarmament and the conversion of the CPSU into
a form of Scandinavian social democracy.
The revisionists never
intended this to be a “popular” uprising – involving working people - their
intention was to destroy the CPSU from within and from the top down. Such were
the dreams of fools and, as these diaries go on to record the Soviet Union’s
collapse from inside and from the top down, they go some way to expose the
consequences of such foolishness. In the end, there was to be no third way,
only gangster capitalism.
