Waiting for Gorbachev: The Chernyaev Diary, 1984

Washington D.C., May 25, 2024 - The National Security Archive today marks what would have been Anatoly Sergeyevich Chernyaev’s 103rd birthday with the publication for the first time in English of his diary for 1984. A top aide to Mikhail Gorbachev who later became one of the most important scholars of the perestroika period, Chernyaev’s diary for 1984 documents his time as deputy director of the International Department of the Central Committee, responsible for the International Communist Movement (ICM). Within three years, he would become Gorbachev’s chief foreign policy adviser.

With the aim of preserving his diary as a historical document that should be available to scholars, Chernyaev donated the original copy to the National Security Archive. Every year, the Archive translates and posts another installment of this extraordinary chronicle. Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Hoffman has called the Chernyaev diary “irreplaceable” and “one of the great internal records of the Gorbachev years.”

After the Soviet collapse, Chernyaev followed his president to the Gorbachev Foundation, where he continued his scholarly work and also became one the most important voices for transparency and historical truth. In the 1990s, he was a prolific writer, a participant in numerous conferences, and a mentor to many Russian and Western scholars of the Cold War.

This is the final installment of the Chernyaev diary. With this publication, the staff of the Archive’s Russia Programs has finished translating all of the “public” portions of the diary, as selected by the author himself, covering the years 1972-1991. This year is also the longest and most varied of the diary in terms of the subjects it covers.

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For Chernyaev and many in-system dissidents and critical thinkers, 1984 was a year of great anticipation. The hopes connected with former General Secretary Yuri Andropov had not materialized, and as a result of the Soviet shootdown of a Korean airliner in September 1983, U.S.-Soviet relations had deteriorated sharply to levels not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. In December 1983, the Reagan administration started the deployment of Pershing missiles and cruise missiles to Europe, and the Soviets withdrew from arms control negotiations. Internal stagnation and a worsening international situation weighed heavily on the mind of Chernyaev, the Central Committee’s progressive thinker.

But when Andropov dies on February 9, Chernyaev is thinking about the future: “Awful. Our poor Russia. But did the Andropov era come to an end? […] Would they have enough responsibility before the country, enough of Lenin’s party sense to appoint Gorbachev! If Chernenko—then the era will end quickly and overall …” Chernyaev believes that the promise of the “Andropov era” could be still realized and that the country could start moving under a new, energetic General Secretary. But already by February 14, Chernyaev expresses deep disappointment in his diary: the “miracle did not happen.” He sees the new Soviet leader, Konstantin Chernenko, as “mediocre and squalid in his intellectual capacity, poorly educated and devoid of any cultural basis, a minor party bureaucrat in his habits and ‘work experience,’ [an] apparatchik in the worst sense of this word.” The party quickly forgets about Andropov, and his name is barely mentioned in the Soviet leadership discourse.

During Andropov’s funeral, many international leaders, including Margaret Thatcher, who led a large delegation, came to Moscow signaling a possible warming of relations. Sensing a chance for a new start, Chernyaev wonders if the leadership would grasp the opportunity and respond to the peace gestures appropriately, or “will our ‘class’ suspiciousness, our disparaging attitude to ‘their’ customs and rules of the game, and mainly the needs of the military-bureaucratic complex (meaning Gromyko-Ustinov personally) take the upper hand?” But the Soviet foreign policy remained frozen on Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko’s harsh positions.

During 1984, Chernyaev writes about Gromyko frequently, often sharply disagreeing with his views. On May 25, he notes that Gromyko “is a person dangerous for his country. […]  He was talking about how to present issues of nuclear arms control during negotiations. The essence of his numerous approaches and hints is—harsh confrontation, and not an iota away from the set formula: no negotiations until you remove the missiles from Europe.” In these notes on the fate of negotiations and on militarization, one sees a glimpse of Chernyaev the abolitionist, as he would later become as Gorbachev’s adviser. Chernyaev believes that the Soviet Union has to respond to Reagan’s “peace offensive,” especially since East European allies also want to improve relations with the West.

One unforgettable vignette in the diary describes a June 4 Central Committee session on “military education.” In Chernyaev’s description, Chief of General Staff Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev gives a presentation “About the Character of Modern War” and shows U.S. documentaries about NATO weapons and war scenarios. Chernyaev is impressed not only by the technological aspects of the new weaponry, but also by the expense of producing it and the burden that responding in kind would put on the Soviet economy. The Marshal argues for “turning the country into a military camp,” while Chernyaev thinks about a suicidal war: “I was watching it and thinking: but it means that we must spend just as much, and even more for similar things. And what is all this for? To prepare a suicide of the humankind? Some kind of insanity! Forgetting where I was, I wanted to jump up and ask the Marshal: And what if we just went ahead and destroyed all these weapons, which are not worse and not less smart on our side? And to say to the entire world: we had enough, that’s all, full stop! We regained normal vision and common sense! What will happen?... Americans will go and conquer us at once?” These words seen like an early version of what he would write later, in 1986, in reaction to Gorbachev’s nuclear abolition proposal of January 15, 1986: “nobody will attack us even if we disarmed totally.”

In another episode described in the diary, speechwriters and consultants gather at one of the “dachas” in Serebryanny Bor where they work on a draft of the new party program and relax after work: “atmosphere—loosened tongues, Alexandrov, in front of other people, calls Gromyko a dangerous senile, the term ‘duocracy’ is being used from time to time (Gromyko+Ustinov); the policy of being tough with the United States is discussed briskly: ‘we are working on Reagan’s reelection.’” Chernyaev, who was not present, heard about the scene from another International Department official and Chernyaev’s close friend, Karen Brutents. People around the table include Vadim Zagladin, Alexadr Bovin and Alexandr Yakovlev—all future new thinkers and architects of Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika. In Chernyaev’s own work, in the International Department, the crisis had become more and more obvious, as the International Communist Movement (ICM) was stagnating just like its patron, the USSR. In the diary, Chernyaev muses about the fate of ICM and the “helplessness” of his department. He sees that “there are some objective causes of our helplessness: the object of our work is either helpless itself or not ‘manageable’ from Moscow.” Communist parties in capitalist countries and even longstanding socialist allies like Hungary were trying to distance themselves from the USSR.

As in previous years, Chernyaev gives vivid critical assessments of his boss, Boris Ponomarev, who he sees as an ossified apparatchik whose main aspiration is to please his bosses and maybe become a Politburo member. Chernyaev sees himself as an  “asshole idealist” compared to Ponomarev, now almost 80 years old, who is obsessed about his own role in Soviet policy formulation, demanding that Chernyaev and other deputies produce endless drafts of speeches and programmatic articles. The work is almost unbearable for Chernyaev, who writes, after one conversation with Ponomarev: “Our poor party, which keeps this kind of vainglorious pigmy in its leadership (and for so many years!).”

In late May and into June, Chernyaev visits Hungary on the invitation of the Hungarian leadership, who see him as a “smart” old friend. He sees his old friend Gyula Horn, who will become one of the leading Hungarian reformers in the late 1980s, then Foreign Minister, and later Prime Minister of Hungary. The Hungarians speak quite openly with Chernyaev about self-sufficiency, independence, and openness to the West. At the same time, they assure him that Hungary will not leave the commonwealth and will stay on the socialist path. But even loyal Hungarians complain about the heavy-handed and disrespectful Soviet policy: “how disrespectfully and un-comradely we acted when we did not consult or inform or agree beforehand about refusing to participate in the Olympics. Could there have been any doubt—Gyula was saying—that we would show solidarity regardless of whether we liked it or not? But how could one show one’s disrespect to their friends so rudely, to confront them with a fait accompli? To leave them looking like fools in front of their own people and athletes?”

The Soviet international image had suffered considerably from the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The situation there continued to deteriorate, and the puppet regime of Babrak Karmal was relying more and more on Soviet advisers and combat troops. In the diary, Chernyaev describes an August 9 Politburo session in which Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov reports about his conversations with Karmal: “The bandits control 80% of the territory. There is no full normalcy and order even in Kabul. The trouble is that the liberated areas are not ‘reinforced,’ or the way we would put it, they do not implement ‘soviet regime’ there. The troops leave—and the bandits come back.” The Soviet army defends the border with Pakistan. The military draft is not working, and the Afghan draftees “run away and scatter.” Ustinov tells Karmal, “it will not work this way. You are in power, this your country, you should govern” and not shift responsibility to Soviet advisors.

As part of his work on a new edition of the History of the CPSU, Chernyaev comes face to face with memories of Stalin’s crimes and the way they were brushed under the rug even after the 20th party congress. He meets with a party historian who had full access to documents from Stalin’s purges. The historian, Zaitsev, tells him about his experience: “There are terrible things there. I held those documents in my own hands. For example, the list of 145 industrial leaders … signed: Molotov, below [his signature] Stalin. But in Stalin’s handwriting, there is a bracket across from all the names and it says: ‘All to be shot!’ Or the list of 46 secretaries of district committees.” According to Zaitsev, Khrushchev eventually decided that there were already too many revelations and that school textbooks should not say anything about the purges. The documents were reclassified, and since then nobody had access to them. Chernyaev, in indignation, writes in his diary about the cult of Stalin and the fact that it is still present among the population.

1984 is also the year of the cotton “affair” in Uzbekistan and when the Politburo took a closer look into what was happening in the Central Asian republics. Chernyaev describes a report to the Politburo by the first secretary of Turkmenistan, Gapurov, who reveals that there are “[t]housands of underground mullahs. In public view, people appear to live by the Soviet norms, but at home, in the village—follow the Sharia norms. Boys are circumcised, 100% of funerals are done by the rules of the Koran, and so on.” Women are forced to stay at home, the dowry system is widespread, and the situation looks quite medieval. Gorbachev and other Politburo members react with disbelief. Chernyaev’s reaction is quite radical: “maybe we should send all these Turkmen, with the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Estonians and others to go f*** themselves: let them do whatever they want to do to themselves independently!”

But the main theme of the year is anticipation. Chernyaev was hoping that Gorbachev would become Andropov’s successor, but “the miracle did not happen,” and so in 1984, he keeps comparing the lively and smart Gorbachev with the sluggish and asthmatic Chernenko. On April 10, he notes in the diary, “I am living in an almost unbearable anticipation of something, as if something is about to happen with me any time now, or something must happen at the Kremlin heights, or in the bowels of our blessed Ponomarev’s agency, or in my ‘social relations’ with people who surround me … I don’t know … Maybe it is a more global foreboding: maybe something will suddenly change in the world and it will all turn completely differently.”

Chernyaev observes Gorbachev chairing the CC Secretariat sessions on a regular basis, meeting with foreign dignitaries and engaging with Soviet regional leaders on the most challenging issues of the day. In June 1984, Gorbachev was sent (after some controversy, because Ponomarev wanted to go) as Soviet representative to the funeral of Italian Communist party leader Enrico Berlinguer, where he was greeted by adoring crowds. Chernyaev watches the young agriculture secretary with avid interest and is convinced that he would become the next Soviet leader: “I was admiring Gorbachev: he is lively, with quick reaction, and at the same time one can see that he had been preparing; competent, confident, precise, capable of grasping the very essence of an issue, distinguish chatter from business, find solutions, point to practical measures, straighten out and even threaten when things are hopeless. He is cheerful and with internal strength. In other words, we have our ‘succession.’”

Chernyaev seems to describe every Politburo session where he heard Gorbachev speak: his smart and substantive remarks, his displeasure with presenters who read their formal papers, his attention to new ideas, his hints that it is time to break the monopoly of the Foreign Ministry. The problem is that his boss, Ponomarev, “despises Gorbachev, he considers him a parvenu and a complete ignoramus in big politics, an ‘agrarian secretary,’ who went twice on foreign trips and believes that he learned everything. This hubris will cost Ponomarev dearly.  Especially so because it is directed toward a person who is superior to Ponomarev in all parameters many times over, including by his intellect, his education, and in his adherence to his principles, and in his decency.”

Gorbachev consults with Chernyaev and values his opinion, especially before his groundbreaking trip to Great Britain in December 1984, during which Gorbachev impressed Margaret Thatcher as a man “we can do business with.” In this year, the minds of the future General Secretary and his future adviser meet, and probably a spark flies between them, previewing a time, in less than two years, when they would work together closely and help change the world.