The following excerpts are from “Revolution 1989; The Fall of the Soviet Empire” by Victor Sebetyen. “A must-have accounting … Sebestyen’s brilliantly written narrative unfolds in brief, gripping episodes.” – Newsweek. “A digestible and colourful history of that miraculous year.” – The Economist
“While the world went on as normal, the Soviet leaders in the Kremlin became convinced that the US and Nato were about to mount a surprise nuclear attack against them and ordered the Soviet military to begin a countdown to retaliate. Only since the collapse of communism have documents surfaced which establish that, through a series of misunderstandings and miscalculations, Armageddon was averted more by luck than sound judgment towards the end of 1983. …
“Yuri Andropov finally achieved his lifelong ambition about a year earlier, on 10 November, 1982, when he succeeded Brezhnev as Soviet Communist Party Boss. But he was already a dying man, bitter, frightened and deeply pessimistic. His character and political convictions had been formed as a rising apparatchik in the years of Terror. ‘He was deeply traumatized by his years working under Stalin, like the majority of his generation,’ a long-time colleague said.
“Ailing and skeletal, he barely moved from the special Kremlin hospital room designed for him where he sat in a dentist’s chair with a high head-rest which enabled him to change positions – and make telephone calls – at the press of a button. Three months after he became General Secretary his kidneys failed completely. He needed dialysis treatment twice a week, which exhausted him for two days at a stretch.
“Andropov had been convinced before he succeeded to supreme office that America was planning a sudden first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union The election of a tough-sounding conservative, Ronald Reagan, as President of the US was part of the reason, but not the only factor. He was receiving intelligence about American military maneuvers throughout the globe, and, piecing all the clues together – wrongly – was persuaded that the Americans were preparing an attack. Nothing would dissuade him, certainly not the facts. Andropov believe Reagan meant his anti-Communist propaganda and viewed him with unrelenting suspicion. …
“In May 1981 Andropov invited Brezhnev to a closed session of top KGB and military officers where he told a surprised audience of his conviction about the imminent first-strike threat from Washington. He ordered his officers at the KGB to co-operate with the Russian army in the biggest intelligence-gathering operation the Soviets had ever conducted in peacetime…
“In Washington President Reagan and his advisers had no conception of the fear and paranoia sweeping through Moscow, largely at the instigation of the Soviets’ supreme leader. They did not realize Andropov was taking the presidential rhetoric so seriously. Reagan’s famous speech in Orlando, Florida, on 8 March 1983, where he branded the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’, ratcheted up the tension…
“Then came the Able Archer exercise, a nine-day-long test starting on this day of Nato’s command and communication readiness for nuclear war. Andropove and his top intelligencer advisers, hand-picked by him, were convinced that it was no exercise, but the real thing, a preparation for a strike against the “Soviet Union or its East European empire….
“Able Archer 83 was on a far larger scale than previous war-game exercises. It was a more realistic drill then ever before. Nato leaders took part, including British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
“Andropov concluded that all this information cold mean only one thing: that his fears and warnings about an American attack were coming true. He placed Soviet forces on the highest level of alert, and warned his Warsaw Pact allies that for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis the Soviets would deploy nuclear submarines along the US coastline.
“The Americans could not believe the Soviet reaction to a straight—forward drill. They assumed it was political posturing… A KGB officer working as a spy for the British, Oleg Gordievskky, urgently warned his controllers in London of the mood at the top in the Soviet Union. He recalled: ‘When I told the British, they simply could not believe that the Soviet leadership was so stupid and narrow-minded as to believe in something so impossible…I said to them OK I’ll get the documents.’ His information went direct to Thatcher, who insisted the Americans be told…
“The CIA, late in the day, accepted that the Soviet fears may have been paranoid and misplaced but were for real… When Reagan was finally told, the news had a pround effect. He saw how the superpowers could blunder into a war through a combination of overblown rhetoric, muscle-flexing, misunderstandings, naivety and accidents. Immediately he made overtures to Moscow to assure them that Able Archer really as an exercise, and he dispatched retired General Brent Scowcroft, a future National Security Advisor, for face-to-face diplomacy [ to assure that we have no intentions to attack].
“The episode radically changed Reagan, who confided in his diary: ‘Three years has taught me something surprising about the Russians. Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me but it did.’ The realization turned him from a harsh Cold Warrior into a far more emollient statesman.”
