The Death of Marshal Akhromeyev, and the Past 100 Years | Books About the Soviet Union

One hundred years since the October Revolution, and 25 years since the Soviet Union came apart.

"Even my suicide failed. The first attempt was at 9:40, but it didn't work — the rope broke. I had to gather all my strength and try hanging myself again."

Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev left three notes behind. The first explained why his suicide had failed. Just before that failure, the 68-year-old Soviet marshal had lived through a much larger one: while Gorbachev was on holiday in Crimea, his deputies and the military launched a coup. It was an attempt to save a Soviet Union already sliding toward collapse, and it became the last straw that broke it.

Marshal Akhromeyev was not one of the men who started the coup — the members of the State Committee on the State of Emergency — but once he heard the committee existed, he hurried back to Moscow from his holiday in Sochi. He supported their declaration and stood ready to give whatever help was needed.

The coup's failure broke him. On August 24, in his office in Building No. 1 of the Kremlin, Marshal Akhromeyev killed himself. As Gorbachev's military adviser and a central figure in US-Soviet nuclear disarmament, he used the note he left for Gorbachev to explain why he had rushed back from holiday to support the coup. At the end, he said he hoped to be forgiven.

In another note, to his family, he wrote: "When the motherland is dying and everything I have built in my life is about to be destroyed, I cannot go on living. My age, and what I have achieved along the way, give me the right to leave this world. At the end of my life, I was still struggling and fighting."

A man of dignity, he lived through the collapse of this vast system.

He lived inside the old order and would not bend. When the Soviet authorities published an official biography of Stalin, he called the "argument" of its author, Dmitri Volkogonov, tantamount to treason.

But he clearly understood that change had to come, which is why he turned up at the funeral of one of his "enemies," or adversaries — the famous Soviet dissident leader Andrei Sakharov.

Jack Matlock, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, wrote in his memoir that he was startled to catch sight of Marshal Akhromeyev standing some distance away. Sakharov and Akhromeyev had been enemies in life, adversaries who gave each other nothing. Yet Akhromeyev had come to say goodbye. Apart from him, no one came from the Kremlin, and no one came from the General Staff either...

He won the respect of another adversary too. The tribute that Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan, published in Time in September 1991 says it all:

"Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev was my friend, and his suicide is a disaster that reflects the convulsions shaking the whole Soviet Union. Sergei Akhromeyev was a communist, a patriot, and a real soldier. He was loyal to his country and to the Party, and at the same time a modern man. He had come to understand that much of what was happening in the Soviet Union was wrong, and that if the Soviet Union wanted to go on existing as a great power, much of it would have to change. Sergei Akhromeyev worked hard to lower the tension in the military standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States. In 1987 he visited the United States for the first time, accompanying Gorbachev to Washington to sign the treaty eliminating intermediate- and short-range missiles. I invited him to the Pentagon. Two days later Sergei Akhromeyev had breakfast with me, and I found that he had come alone. That the chief of the Soviet General Staff would walk into his adversary's camp with no guards and no entourage showed how confident he was."

"He did not fully gauge the depth of the discontent at home. He wanted change, but he could not foresee where reform would take the country. We met again in Moscow a year ago, and he said to me: 'It wasn't you who destroyed the Communist Party — it was us. As long as this process doesn't stop, my heart will explode a thousand times a day. How bitter it is when someone tells you that everything you fought for over 50 years was wrong!' Sergei Akhromeyev was deeply loyal to communist ideas, but his grasp of capitalism was very shallow..."

In 1991, 74 years after the October Revolution succeeded and 69 years after the Soviet Union was founded, Akhromeyev, like many others, had lived through a span of time that is not short by the measure of a single life. His life ran exactly alongside the history of the Soviet Union, and everything that gave his existence value rested on that country. In a sense, he was one more symbol of a nation on its deathbed.

Four months after Marshal Akhromeyev's suicide, the Soviet Union was formally declared at an end.

Then nearly 26 more years went by, and those two-and-a-half decades, together with everything before them, look more and more like history.

Svetlana Alexievich, the Nobel laureate, quotes one person's account:

On the bus, an old man sat down next to me. He could tell I wasn't a local and asked: "Who are you looking for?" I began: "There used to be a labor camp here..." "You mean that camp? Two years ago they pulled down the last of it. People used the bricks and tiles to build chicken coops and bathhouses. The land was divided up for dachas, and gardens were fenced in with wire. My son has a plot there too... You know, it's not pleasant here... Every spring, when it snows or rains, you can dig up human bones in the potato patch. But nobody is disgusted anymore, because everyone is used to it. This land is full of bones, everywhere, like stones. People throw them back in the ground and crush them under their boots. Crush them, and that's that. It's become ordinary. Just grab a handful of the black earth and turn it over, and there they are..."

Concentration camps and labor camps have become history.

The French writer Olivier Rolin writes in The Gulag Meteorologist: "How far away it all looks now — the 1990s, when the KGB and security-service archives could be read, when members of Memorial could still walk into the State Duma..."

The post-Soviet era has become history too.

John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale history professor and a leading authority on the Cold War, says: every fall semester, on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, I lecture several hundred undergraduates on the history of the Cold War. As I lecture, I have to remind myself that none of these students remember the events I am describing. To my students, the figures I mention — Stalin and Truman, even Reagan and Gorbachev — are as distant as Napoleon, Caesar, and Alexander the Great.

The Cold War is history, he says, just as the Peloponnesian War of ancient Greece is history.

It has already become history. Strictly speaking, though, that does not include China.

2017 marks 100 years since the October Revolution, 100 years since Leninism began to be put into practice. QDaily will pick out a number of books to introduce to readers. Most of them have been published openly in China, and we have chosen some important reviews — many written when the books first appeared — to share.

The first book is The Cold War, by Professor John Gaddis, mentioned above.

The historical accounts in this article are drawn from Secondhand Time, The Last Year of the Soviet Union, Lenin's Tomb, and The Gulag Meteorologist.

Looking Back, Breathing Out

• The Cold War (The cold war: a new history)
• John Lewis Gaddis (author), Zhai Qiang (translator), Zhang Jing (translator)
• Social Sciences Academic Press
• December 10, 2016
• 36 yuan

Review by Michael Beschloss

In 1991, as the Soviet Union was falling apart, a senior foreign policy official in the George H. W. Bush administration said to me: "You historians are going to be busy. How are you going to explain to later generations why we spent 45 years scared out of our wits?"

He was right. By 2006, young people who had never done "duck and cover" (America's nuclear civil-defense drills) needed a first-rate scholar to explain why nine American presidents had thrown the full weight of the country against an empire that, in the end, fell apart so clumsily.

John Lewis Gaddis is that scholar, and his The Cold War: A New History is that book. A history professor at Yale, Gaddis is known for a six-volume history of the Cold War that paid close attention to the strategies of both sides and appeared during the war or shortly after it ended.

While the truth about the conflicts of the Cold War was still coming to light bit by bit, no one untangled it better than Gaddis. It was like asking a historian to ride through a forest at midnight and describe the whole forest at the same time.

Writing this new book, Gaddis could finally look down on the entire forest in daylight, using information once kept secret and the hindsight a historian needs to write the real history.

He does not pretend that all his past judgments were right — his insistence in 1987, for instance, that the Cold War had settled into a stable "long peace" that would go on indefinitely. Gaddis now cheerfully admits that "visionaries" such as Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan saw more clearly than his own forecasts, which rested on "historical probability."

Gaddis's fresh view of this era's leaders and phases is likely to have a large effect. With some relief, he points out that the clashes between American and Soviet aircraft in the Korean War were the only conflict in the whole Cold War in which the two sides actually shot at each other.

He is convinced that Nikita Khrushchev smuggled missiles into Cuba "mainly to spread revolution in Latin America, unlikely as that may seem," letting his "idealistic romanticism outrun a strategic analytical ability of unknown size."

With a mix of fear and respect, Gaddis describes how Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to guarantee that nuclear weapons would never be used on a battlefield precisely by refusing to put limits on nuclear war. By the end of his presidency, Eisenhower's only war plan, if carried out, would have dropped more than 3,000 nuclear weapons on every communist country.

By the 1970s, Eisenhower's strategy had turned into the doctrine of "mutual assured destruction," along with a treaty limiting each side's defenses against the other's long-range warheads.

Now that we know how the Cold War ended, we can judge every act of the drama again. So Gaddis can now complain that the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente bought stability by dashing the hopes of billions of people under communist rule who had dreamed of one day electing their own leaders.

Yet he again praises the Helsinki Accords, signed by Gerald Ford in 1975. Reagan and other conservative politicians despised the accords for deepening the division of Europe, but Gaddis shows how they created a new and effective platform for dissidents and critics inside and outside the Soviet Union: "Even as the Kremlin tried to use it to legitimize Soviet rule... the Helsinki Accords instead became the basis for delegitimizing it."

Then there are the leaders Gaddis calls "wreckers of the status quo": Pope John Paul II, Reagan, Thatcher, and others. They believed the West had paid too high a moral and political price to keep a long peace with Moscow. They wanted better.

Pope John Paul II reminds Gaddis of Stalin's insulting question about an earlier pope: "How many divisions does he have?"

Gaddis's answer is that John Paul II needed no army. When he returned to Poland in 1979, he used spiritual force against communism and backed Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement.

Reagan was another wrecker. By "exploiting Soviet weaknesses and pressing Western advantages," he fought to break the East-West deadlock.

Few people, even among his supporters, grasped how sincerely Reagan wanted to abolish nuclear weapons, which he considered immoral. Many American scholars denounced him openly, saying that his 1983 proposal for the "Strategic Defense Initiative" (popularly called Star Wars) extended the Cold War into space and amounted to beating the drum for war.

But while Gaddis admits, reluctantly, that the plan carried risks — the Soviets always feared a surprise first strike — he also praises Reagan for using such a threat to build an anti-missile system the Soviets could not match, at least for a while. "If the Soviet Union was collapsing, why should Americans stay tied to mutual assured destruction? Why not speed the collapse up?"

Gaddis also weighs Mikhail Gorbachev, setting him against the Pope, Reagan, and Thatcher. He writes: "They all had goals in their heads, and a route to reaching them. Gorbachev wavered among contradictions and never resolved them. Because of that, in the end he gave up ideology, gave up an entire empire and his own homeland, and never chose to use force." Gaddis believes this was a strategy that made little sense in the traditional language of geopolitics, but one that made him the most deserving winner the Nobel Peace Prize has ever had.

Gaddis does not make the mistake of confining the history he describes to rulers. He shows instead how nameless crowds set off the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet republics — the Hungarians in 1989, for example, who "declared that the barbed wire dividing them was no longer needed" and demanded the Kremlin take it down. Faced with such unheard-of challenges, Gaddis says, Soviet leaders felt "shocked, afraid, exhilarated, brave, lost, at a loss, struggling to seize the initiative again, only to find that all they could do was admit that what had once looked impossible had become unavoidable."

Only after an era ends can historians see the whole of it and judge what made it unusual.

"For the first time in history, no one was confident of winning — no one was even confident of surviving this great confrontation," is how Gaddis sums up the era. By its end, "military force, the decisive factor that had defined 'power' for the past 500 years, lost its decisive role."

In the second half of the 20th century, Gaddis was surprised by the acceleration of the information revolution, by how much better free societies were at giving their people comfortable lives, and by the fivefold increase in the number of democracies. He writes that "the world came closer than ever before to a consensus... that only democracy is legitimate."

Yet the Cold War's smooth ending was not a foregone conclusion. Gaddis reminds us that the conflict could easily have destroyed far more of humanity: "A telescope looking back from the distant future would prove it — had the Cold War taken another path, there might have been no one left to look back at all."

Plenty of signs remind us the Cold War is over. Those terrifying missiles have become scrap metal. On screen, even James Bond has moved his crosshairs off KGB agents and onto other adversaries.

In that atmosphere, and now that Gaddis has produced this kind of last word on the Cold War, perhaps he can turn his attention to art history.

Review translated by Panda Translation Society, Harry

Cover image from Wikipedia