Yuri Andropov: A man who could have become another Deng Xiaoping...or not

A review of Zhores Medvedev’s “Andropov”

People who follow me know that I am a great admirer of Soviet historians Roy and Zhores Medvedev and have read most of their books. (I have explained before why I find their books particularly enlightening although they had to work, until the late 1980s, in isolation, exile and with very limited access to archival documents.) In the last two years I have read two books by Roy Medvedev dealing with what he calls the “unknown Stalin”, and another that describes famous dissidents (ideologically and as persons), among whom of course the most prominent are Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, both of whom Roy personally knew from the dissident circles that they shared.

Recently I read his brother’s (Zhores) book on Andropov. I vaguely remembered that I have read the book when it was published, and indeed checked my notes: I read it in 1983. While many of the points made by Zhores were known to me I was not sure whether I knew them from his book or from other sources. Reading the book today, more than forty years after it was published and taking into account what has happened in the meantime in the Soviet Union and then in Russia and Ukraine, brings different sentiments and thoughts than what I must have had at the time of the first reading.

The book can be read as a standard biography of Yuri Andropov but also as a discussion of the late Communist regime in its Brezhnevian variety, and also implicitly as a reverie of what could have happened had Andropov lived to rule the Soviet Union longer than a year and half. In Medvedev’s telling Andropov emerges as a very sharp and able technocrat. His first important job (after having worked in a CPSU party position in Karelia) was in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and quite fatefully as the ambassador of the Soviet Union in Hungary during the 1956 revolution. and its later suppression by the Soviet tanks. At that time Andropov got to know Nikita Khrushchev who secretly flew to Hungary a couple of times to coordinate the political and ultimately the military solution to the Hungarian crisis. Afterwards Andropov became a secretary of the Central Committee in charge of relations with the “brotherly” parties which meant East European ruling parties but not, to the extent that it can be read in the book, with the Chinese CPC. He was transferred to become the head of the KGB in 1967.

Medvedev shows that the position of the head of the KGB at the time had several important drawbacks. Seven out of eleven predecessors of Andropov were executed. That was particularly the case during Stalin’s rule when one after another KGB bosses were shot (Yagoda and Yezhev are the best known) either because they were too assiduous in the repression and Stalin wanted to distance himself from them or simply because of Stalin’s caprice, or desire to instill fear even in those whose job was to terrorize the population. That continued under Khrushchev when Beria and then Merkulov, his successor, were liquidated. Thus it was a job that even in the much calmer times of Khrushchev and Brezhnev still carried some risk. “Andropov was the only man who not only survived the job but also made himself more influential politically in the process. He also succeeded in making security work an acceptable background for the leader of CPSU. Moreover he became a leader through a normal process of party succession rather than through a long power struggle that many observers had predicted.” (p. 59).

Secondly, it was not seen as a particularly prestigious job in terms of party hierarchy. It was surely an important job but without much independent power and below the level of the Politburo member. In fact, it was lower than Andropov’s previous job as a secretary in the Central Committee, and Medvedev speculates that in order to compensate for it, Andropov was made the candidate member of the Politburo. When Andropov was appointed, the power of KGB derived from the Party and the Politburo. KGB was the executor of the policy that was decided by the party organs. It did not have an autonomous role. This is important to mention because many people, influenced perhaps by what is happening in Russia today, tend to mechanically assume that KGB (or its predecessors, GPU and NKVD) had an independent role in repressions. Nothing is further from the truth. They were simply executors of a policy that was decided on the political level, whether it be by the Politburo or one person (Stalin).

Medvedev also makes an important point that even the English short-hand translation of KGB as a “secret service” is wrong. It is a militarized security organization. It is interesting that just before Andropov’s appointment the decision was taken to have KGB staff wear uniforms. Before they wore civilian clothes and the uniforms which technically existed were worn only at various celebratory occasions but never during normal workdays. The goal of the new decision was to showcase the KGB as a disciplined military organization whose role was somewhat different from that of the military, since it was a time of peace, but whose purpose ultimately coincided with that of the Army.

Medvedev concedes that it is difficult for him as a dissident, having been listened to, followed, imprisoned and persecuted by KGB to write objectively about the head of the organization. He however manages to do it. In 1982 Andropov succeeded an old and ailing Brezhnev. Most of the book is understandably about Brezhnev’s period. It was a time of stagnation and elite decrepitude not only in the sense that people who were in power tended to stay there “forever” and Brezhnev made sure that even when they were demoted because of corruption or gross incompetence they would be given other nomenklatura jobs to keep them equally well off. This ensured bureaucratic survival and provided Brezhnev with strong support among the top bureaucracy but at the cost of increasingly inefficient economic and political management, lower growth rates, and—a point which is very interesting in hindsight—lack of political experience of the middle level cadres. The reason for that was the following: since the top people tended to stay in their jobs until they died, these positions as well as others just below were occupied by the same people for twenty or thirty years. People at mid-level positions simply had nowhere (higher) to go. They would get stuck at their jobs for years, and not only get discouraged and unhappy, but lacking in opportunity to acquire management skills or to show whether they are competent administrators of not.

As Peter Turchin argues in a similar context there was an elite overproduction and thus elite dissatisfaction. There were relatively few slots for so many aspiring bureaucrats and no occasion to tell them apart: who is competent and who is not. The lack of experience would strangely go together with frustration and unhappiness.

I cannot not think of Gorbachev here who in 1985 became General Secretary with relatively little experience in the management of the country and the economy. Had the system under Brezhnev allowed for upward mobility and retirement at some “normal” age it is quite possible that Gorbachev’s lack of management skills and inexperience and naivete would have been revealed. I remember a Chinese academic telling me that a person such as Gorbachev could never come close to power in China because his lack of skills would have been revealed at the county or provincial level and he would have never advanced past it. (In fact, Gorbachev was a Party head in the Stavropol region in Southern Russia but his success with Moscow leaders came not from his stellar economic management of Stavropol but from a very good location of the city, close to the famed mineral waters, where many Party stalwarts came for holidays and got to know Mikhail and Raisa—both much more charming and educated than the average party boss.) Whether that advantage of the Chinese system will continue with a more gerontocratic government of Xi Jinping is, of course, an open question.

The stability of the Brezhnevian political system was based on the very soft treatment of incompetent people at the top and all the way down the pyramid. Such mediocrities often belonged to the so-called Dnipropetrovsk (the city in the Ukraine where Brezhnev made his career) mafia. Brezhnev himself had relatively limited power. All important decisions were decided by the Politburo where different surreptitious factions, proper to any bureaucracy, existed and fought each other. Brezhnev’s skill was in maintaining the equilibrium and the semblance of unity but at the cost of lack of decisiveness. The best policy was to do nothing. There is no doubt that Brezhnev’s power in foreign policy was much less than that of an American president. I do not have in mind here Trump who has obviously taken many powers that might not properly belong to the President but presidents who stayed within the conventional limits of their power. They went to wars or ordered military actions practically on their own whim whereas this was impossible in the case of Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership after Stalin. It was an authoritarian group government with a very constrained power of the top person. It was in effect an oligarchy.

Andropov came to power in 1982 largely thanks to the fact that the existing leadership was already so old and discredited in the eyes of the Politburo and Central Committee members (as well as people although that mattered less) that they craved somebody younger and more technocratic. The need for economic reform was obvious to all, but nobody could tell what exactly should be done. Andropov understood that quite well and tried to improve things. Highlighting Soviet inefficiencies Medvedev makes a point that is often ignored in the literature on Soviet economics: incredible waste of goods and particularly food and energy (the latter is obvious even today to every tourist who travels to Russia). The waste was due to the very inefficient system of transport, and in the case of food, bad or non-existent refrigeration. If food products take days to make it from the producer to the customer, lots of it would obviously spoil. Some would be stollen too, again because no-one had much of an incentive to protect goods during transportation. Improvement in infrastructure (railways and roads) was thus one of Andropov’s priorities and he replaced the entire direction of the Ministry of Transport.

Waste also explains the discrepancy between the official production figures and reality. It is not (only) that the official numbers were inflated or purely invented out of the thin air but they were recorded at the point of production whereas significant part of that production never made it to the consumer.

Andropov also put the emphasis on work discipline and fight against corruption. The anti-corruption campaign made lots of sense because Brezhnev cronies (and even more so different republican mafias) were thoroughly corrupt. While some egregious cases of corruption were prosecuted (and that happened only rarely) most were simply ignored. Andropov changed that. But his emphasis on discipline and increased work effort could not yield results because of the lack of incentives and very little differentiation in salaries: whether one worked harder or not mattered little since salaries were more or less the same. This contrasts with the situation under Stalin when Stakhanovites and people who worked harder were paid much more than the others and wage differences were significant. Mancur Olson has even claimed that under Stalinism wage taxation was regressive because while the base salary was low the bonuses that came from extra work were taxed at much lower rates. There is no doubt that in the 1930s wage inequality in the Soviet Union was probably at its peak. (See my review of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed who writes about that.) But wage inequality went down significantly under Khrushchev and even further down under Brezhnev. Thus by the 1980’s the uravnilovka or the egalitarianism was pervasive and impeded any attempts to increase productivity.

Medvedev criticizes Andropov’s disciplinarian preferences. Andropov tried to severely limit “moonlighting” and informal jobs in the belief that if people worked harder in their formal jobs they would have less time to work in the informal economy. But as Medvedev points out this is a ludicrous idea so long as the work in the formal economy yields so little, and wages are not differentiated. In other words, Soviet income equality was one of the reasons for low labor productivity. The effect of Andropov’s disciplinarianism was perversely to lower availability of essential services provided by the informal sector and which the state sector was notoriously bad in supplying.

The main outlines of Andropov’s reform were thus the streamlining of relations between the enterprises and planners, strong emphasis on improvements in infrastructure and on increasing the work discipline among SOEs employees. The reforms did not have any of the so-called Hungarian elements whereby private sector enterprises were allowed in services under the condition of employing a limited number of workers. Andropov during his (short) tenure did not have in mind a New Economic Policy along Lenin’s lines but rather a technocratic streamlining and tightening of work discipline.

It is remarkable that when Medvedev discusses different policy options envisaged by Andropov and the people around him, he does not mention China at all. It is strange because by 1983 China was already growing at high rates and had introduced the responsibility system which significantly increased agricultural productivity (a perennial weak spot of the Soviet economy). It had also allowed private enterprises in a number of areas. These reforms were apparently not noticed by the Soviet reformers, including by Medvedev himself, the person who directly or indirectly had significant knowledge about the thinking of the post-Brezhnev elite.

Thus to answer the question with which I began and which is in the title of this Substack: it does not seem that Andropov could have become the Soviet Deng. The answer must be in the negative based on the facts that we know. Given that his reign was very short and that he was a smart and pragmatic person, it is not impossible that he would have realized that the systemic reforms had to be much deeper. However, it is interesting and intriguing that among Soviet reformists, even later under Gorbachev, interest for the Chinese approach was minimal. Why was this the case? Because of the perception that the Soviet economy was an industrialized economy that might learn from industrialized capitalist countries, but not from the then still poor and agricultural China? The complex of superiority because it was the Soviets who were advising China in the 1950s: could they now turn around and learn from their erstwhile pupils? They never thought of that, probably to their own detriment.