Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin

...Now retired at age 72, Ligachev has released a memoir clearly intended to correct his image as enemy of democracy and economic progress...

...L igachev was born to a Siberian peasant family in 1920...

...He is an enthusiastic advocate of central planning, which he compares to "the creativity of an architect who designs a building...

...Ligachev exaggerates when he suggests that radical democrats dominated the press...

...they controlled only a portion of it—which was enough to bring about a free-wheeling media atmosphere that could not help but discredit the old system...

...When he unexpectedly found himself thrust into a position of influence, Yakovlev seized the opportunity to press for reforms much more far-reaching than those envisioned by Andropov, Ligachev, or, for that matter, Gorbachev...

...Like Andropov, Ligachev wanted change, but not at the expense of socialism, the Union, or the Empire...

...This is how it is done the world over...

...He labels proposals to adopt a capitalist system as "letting the moneychangers and Pharisees back into the temple...

...In some respects, Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin is a typical Communist autobiography, full of generalization and evasion and short on intimate detail...

...Both Ligachev and Gorbachev were the kind of no-nonsense administrators Andropov, panicked at looming economic crisis, was looking to as successors to the Brezhnev crowd...

...Whether due to personal integrity or intellectual rigidity, Ligachev remains unabashedly committed to the language and structures of Leninism, and he nurtures a special grudge against those ex-party men who, having built careers within the system, abandoned Communism for Western ways...

...Western readers will come away rather impressed by Yakovlev's formidable talents as a political infighter...

...Nevertheless, Ligachev is a rare bird: a defeated Communist who enjoys the freedom to openly attack his opponents—in a book published aboveground and not smuggled out like Khrushchev's memoirs...

...In the late forties, his political fortunes suffered another setback after his dismissal from a Komsomol position on spurious charges of Trotskyism...

...He dismisses the demands of the non-Russian peoples for independence as the work of hysteria-mongering chauvinists and demagogues...

...Yet something else may have been at work: the sheer impossibility of reform Communism...

...Even as he churned out dreary anti-American propaganda tracts, Yakovlev obviously learned something about the way the real world Works during his banishment...

...Ligachev survived these difficulties to become an ideal party functionary...

...He neither smoked nor drank, he was incorruptible and intolerant of corruption in others, he worked hard and lived modestly...

...He was open to abolishing restrictions on writers and journalists, but was deeply unhappy when these freedoms were used to attack the values he held dear...

...He was usually depicted as the High Priest of conservatism and party orthodoxy, a backroom manipulator conniving to displace Gorbachev as party chief and erase the changes ushered in under the banner of perestroika...

...His favored change agenda, however, amounts to not much beyond the changes that Yuri Andropov envisioned: making the system more responsive to market forces, improved management techniques, an emphasis on technological advancement, the tightening of labor discipline...

...T he failure of the Communist Party to defend itself is usually explained as a consequence of the Soviet (and, for that matter, Russian) emphasis on obedience to the leader...

...Like Yuri Andropov, who elevated him to the central party leadership, Ligachev wanted to reform the system, not destroy it...

...Indeed, one is struck by the passivity of the traditionalists within the party leadership as things began to fall apart...

...I'd say the man has failed to make his case that Russia and the rest of the world would be better off had he and his ideas prevailed...

...He would tolerate more political liberty, but not if it threatened one-party rule...

...Their most important step was gaining some control over the media...

...He applies old Bolshevik labels to these scoundrels, dismissing today's nomenklatura capitalists as right-wingers or rightist extremists while calling himself a socialist—not, mind you, a leftist, since in the Leninist scheme of things leftism is a disease almost as virulent as conservatism...

...Having spent years scheming and disguising their opinions, they proved masters of Kremlin political techniques: obfuscation, the deployment of personnel, and what Samuel Gompers called "masterly inactivity...

...He even judges journalists as "sound" on the basis of how fervently they attack the United States...

...He hated capitalism and betrayed an abject ignorance of the workings of modern economies...

...As for thoroughgoing change, Ligachev reacted as one would expect a Communist to react...

...Yakovlev clearly benefited from his decade in exileas ambassador to Canada, punishment for writings deemed heretical by the Brezhnevites...

...His accomplishments in Tomsk caught the eye of Andropov after he became party secretary...

...Ideally, he says, planning is "not a narrowly technical matter but one closely linked to political decisions made by the leadership on the instructions of congresses of soviets or the ruling party...

...A lthough much of Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin is devoted to settling scores, Ligachev treats Gorbachev gingerly, describing him as naive, manipulable, and aspiring to the role of constitutional monarch...

...His parents were loyal Communists, and, after service in World War II, Ligachev began his career as a party official in Siberia...

...By Ligachev's expert testimony, the more ambitious members of Gorbachev's reform team were no dreamy romantics...

...Ligachev is bewildered, and not a little incensed, that a perspective shared by a minority within the ruling political class of the day actually prevailed over the more orthodox stance he and the majority represented...

...Ligachev continues to speak about "class interests of the workers," "international Communist and workers' movements," "bourgeois nationalists," and "Socialist Motherland...

...As a result, Ligachev writes, he and his family were for a time regarded as politically suspect...

...It infuriates him that he and other party traditionalists who retain a belief in socialism have been dubbed reactionaries and right-wingers while those who wrecked the system have successfully claimed the reform mantle...

...Men whose careers had risen with the party and presumably would decline as Communism collapsed,who had gloried in the triumphs of Soviet socialism and taken comfort as Communism conquered country after country throughout the world, behaved with a remarkable supineness when every cherished value was brazenly attacked by people they despised...

...The danger supposedly posed by Ligachev was compounded by his not being cut from the Brezhnevite mold of venality and sloth...

...Well, not exactly...

...Ligachev remains an unreconstructed foe of private ownership: "If we betray our essence, our country will inevitably be thrown back a century, will once again have to traverse the arduous path that the current developed capitalist countries traveled for a long time...

...He believed strongly in the socialist system, and threw all his energies into bringing Siberia a modern industrial economy through massive, typically Soviet projects: factories, collective farms, scientific research centers...

...For Ligachev, the real villain is Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev's chief adviser who is portrayed here as the man most responsible for the abandonment of socialism and the breakup of the Union...

...Stalin's terror saw his father-in-law, a Red Army general, executed as a foreign spy...

...Ligachev, it should be remembered, bristled at charges that he was anti-reform...

...In retrospect, Ligachev, not Gorbachev, remained most faithful to the Andropov legacy...