安德罗波夫为何没有意识到戈尔巴乔夫的无能？
“How come Andropov did not realize Gorbachev’s ineptitude?”
TLDR:
Under Andropov, Gorbachev worked in the second echelon of Soviet rulers. By the start of the 1980s, he had a stellar track record as an educated, effective, and politically dependent Party functionary.
In terms of the Peter Principle, by the time of Andropov’s death, Gorbachev hadn’t yet achieved his “level of incompetence.”
LONGER ANSWER
I know at least one area where the USSR was ahead of everyone else in the world. It was vetting the personnel. I grew up with the conviction that the State knew everything about me, maybe apart from my thoughts.
Everything was known
Hundreds of thousands of diligent men and women worked tirelessly in the USSR on surveying everything and everyone, 24/7/365. Ambitious people who rose up in the ranks were especially under scrutiny.
Not least because when they reached above a certain level, the KGB lost the right to monitor them. This was the rule introduced after Stalin. For members of the Nomenklatura, the KGB needed special permission on a case-to-case basis. Yet, even up there, on the upper levels, you could always be sure that your comrades’ eyes and ears were trained on you day and night.
Probably the best
This is why we can say with certainty that when the top brass in the Party in 1985 picked Mikhail Gorbachev to be the Soviet ruler, they perfectly knew who he was. The KGB czar of several years vouched for him. Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the most capable—probably the most capable—among the possible General Secretary candidates.
It’s up to you to chalk his ultimate failure up to the general mediocrity of Soviet leadership, or maybe the fact that he was the right man for the wrong job. Namely, while the USSR as a country was possibly salvageable, the Communist project was not.
Strengths
Back in 1985, Gorbachev indeed looked head and shoulders above everyone else we knew in the Politburo.
- He was young, good-looking and high-energy.
- He projected confidence and spoke easily in complete sentences.
- Talking about Communism and politics, he was able to say more than just regurgitate cut-and-dried formulas imprinted in our brains by agitprop.
- Had a stellar record as a reliable, effective Party functionary.
- Wasn’t observed drinking, whoring, or gambling. Lived in love and harmony with his wife. Nothing in his private life would drain his energies from the main task of ruling the country.
- Was taken under their wings by the top men in the KGB. These men represented one of the best secret organizations in the world, had unlimited funding, and picked the most perceptive, creative, diligent people to work for them. And knew everything about everyone.
- Gorbachev survived being placed in charge of our Socialist agriculture at the top of the Party. At the time, this was effectively a death sentence for anyone’s career because of the hopelessness of the task.
The task
Looking back, we know that some influential people in the KGB started to mull rolling back the Communist project and considered something like the Chinese “SOE Capitalism” probably as early as the late 1950s. In the 1960s, they even commissioned theoretical discussions about the matter, low-key but not secret. Gaidar, Chubais, and other whizkids of our State-oligarchical Capitalism from the 1990s cut their theoretical baby teeth in the late 1960s and 1970s. They all grew up professionally under the parental supervision of the KGB and the Party.
It’s hardly a coincidence that the longstanding KGB boss Yuri Andropov, who yanked Gorbachev up to the Politburo, is now a hero of President Putin and his pals, some of the richest men in the world.
The right man for the wrong task
However, it looks like Gorbachev was not an optimal choice for the job. Instead of saving the USSR and transforming it into a State-oligarchical one-party Capitalist system like modern-day China, Gorbachev went about saving Communism.
This was a dead man’s journey (here’s why). What Gorbachev should have done instead, was try to roll back the Communist project, introduce a market economy, and steer away from nationalist unrest and the resistance from Stalinists in the Party. This was a totally different task that required a set of skills that Gorbachev turned out not to have.
Weaknesses
- As a Communist who didn’t experience first-hand the meat grinder of Stalinist purges, Gorbachev didn’t develop the level of ruthless paranoia needed for the task.
- Gorbachev didn’t possess the kind of hard-nosed cynicism for a societal transformation on the Chinese scale. He turned out to be a believer in Communism after all.
- He lacked the kind of contacts inside the military, the police, the party bureaucracy in the provinces, and the military-industrial complex that could assure him their support at critical turns. By 1989, they all lined up against him and went on openly sabotaging his policy. Gorbachev was finished when he lost the Outer Party.
- He lacked the ruthlessness needed to throw under the bus his most influential enemies in the Kremlin.
- Along with everyone else in Moscow, he underestimated the forces of ethnic nationalism.
- He obviously lacked the dark side in his personality needed for a Tiananmen-type massacre in Moscow. A high-profile slaughter of a mass of people before the TV cameras would show to the entire nation that he didn’t intend to stop at anything before he had his will imposed. After the fatalities during the riots in Tbilisi and Vilnius, he played dumb and started pointing fingers at the military. You won’t get much respect from your men in uniform for acting this way.
Below, an American cartoon, correctly catching the essence of the power succession in the Kremlin during the last 35 years. President Putin has successfully implemented what Gorbachev failed to do.
He had to turn around the USSR, ditch Communism, and introduce a one-party Capitalist system, adorned with Soviet symbols of state power and protected by the strong police state. Gorbachev’s errors wasted three decades of our history and caused a lot of misery, which is why he’s assured universal hate from the next few generations of Russians.
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