Former USSR Defence Minister, Soviet Union Marshall Dmitry Yazov
Photo: Pavel Smertin
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Nobody Assigned Me Anything
Vlast analytical weekly is continuing it series of interviews with the people who determined the foreign policy of the USSR in the years of perestroika. This time, correspondent Marina Kalashnikova talks with Dmitry Yazov, minister of defense under Mikhail Gorbachev.
What Friendship? I Was a Communist, He Was the General Secretary
You were considered Gorbachev's man. Did you share his ideas and approach to politics?
I was never his man. I saw Gorbachev close up for the first time at the plenum of the Central Committee when Andrey Gromyko nominated him to be secretary general. Gorbachev had already promised him the post of chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet. In 1985, when I was commander of the Far Eastern Military District, Gorbachev came there. He was in Khabarovsk with the 882 artillery regiment. The regiment was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Ushakov, who, like Gorbachev, came from Stavropol. He was shocked in the mess that slices of bread lay on a platter next to the table. “What, you don't hand the rations out?” he asked. I told him that every soldier took as much as he wanted and that that led to a savings of 9000 tons of bread per year. “It would take a big collective farm to produce that much grain,” Gorbachev exclaimed. I answered, “Besides saving state bread, we have seven collective farms.” That interested him. Then I gave a 30-minute report on the state of military discipline and said that the number of incidents had increased by 20 percent in the last year since we began to count all incidents, even the most insignificant. On that basis, they began to demand more of the commanders. He liked that too. Everyone in the regiment was glad that he was pleased.
Is that when your friendship began?
What friendship? I was a commander and a communist. He was the general secretary. That was all there was to it. That evening, I called a military council and invited all the commanders of armies, corps and chiefs of departments of the Far Eastern District. Gorbachev asked me to give a report. I hung up a map and gave a report on the enemy and the armies of neighboring states.
Did Gorbachev understand military problems?
Not likely. He was not a military man.
At the beginning of the 1980s, were they talking about preparations for war with NATO and the United States in the Central Committee and the Joint Staff?
What war?
Nuclear war.
Well, yes, but it was all in their imagination.
Gorbachev asked, “Where's the suitcase?” I said, “In the car.”
How did you get from the Far East to Moscow?
In 1987, Minister of Defense Sergey Sokolov called me and asked, “How would you feel about becoming chief of the Main Personnel Department of the Ministry of Defense?” I answered that I would respond positively. I had already worked for two years as chief of the First Department of the Main Department of Personnel. So the work was familiar to me. I had been in that position for three months when Rust landed on Red Square.
Was the military ordered not to down his plane?
We could have downed him a hundred times, but we didn't. After the incident with the Korean Boeing in 1983, it was decided not to take down civilian craft. So there went a little cropduster. No one knew that he was going to land on Red Square. He just landed, didn't harm a thing. That was not intelligence gathering. It was hooliganism. And suddenly they fired the minister, the chief commander and commander of the Moscow Military District, and several people were put on trial. All of that made me thing that the case was not as simple as it seemed.
Rust landed on Red Square and you in the minister's seat. How did that happen?
[Chief of the Joint Staff] Akhromeev called and summoned me to the Politburo. I think that session was arranged especially to get rid of Sokolov, recalled the chief commander of the air defenses and shake up the personnel. Sokolov ordered the documents brought that relate to the command of the 6th Army air defenses, because we expected the questions to concern the Moscow District. I brought several fact sheets. First Deputy Minister of Defense Petr Lushev began a report. In three or four minutes, Gorbachev began yelling at him. Then Chief Commander of Air Defense Forces Alexander Koldunov gave a report, and the same thing happened. Then Konstantinov began and they interrupted him too.
After everyone had had their hearing, the Politburo members retired to the “nut room” and asked Sokolov to go with them. We all waited in the lobby. In about 20 minutes, head of the administrative organs department of the Central Committee Savinkin comes out and takes me by the arm. Gorbachev said to me, “We talked it over and have decided to offer you the post of minister of defense. What do you think?” I answered that I had been in the central apparatus only for three months and there was a lot I didn't know. For example, the system for ordering weapons and hardware. “What else don't you know? We'll give you a day to prepare,” he said and everybody laughed. What could I do? I couldn't jump up and down like a little kid and say “I won't do it. I don't want to.”
That evening Gorbachev called me in the one-room apartment where I was living then. “Why are you at that number?” he asks. I explain that I don't have anything else yet. “And where's the suitcase?” “In the car.” I didn't bring it in the house with me. “And where's the car?” “In front of the entrance.” “We have to do you over right away.” Then they installed the connection in front of Sokolov's dacha, where a kindergarten had been at one time. It only took a few hours. And we moved there to live. There was room for the equipment there, and the three people with the suitcase. They had to go somewhere too.
What suitcase are you talking about?
The connection. No words, just dials and things. Permission to launch a nuclear attack. The secret suitcase.
And you left it in the car by your house?
Well, yes. And that is how I became a minister. But I was never Gorbachev's man.
But he must have trusted you. How else can you explain his choice?
I don't think he chose me alone. And it looks like a positive association remained from his visit to the Far East.
Everything Took a Dangerous Turn at the Beginning of Perestroika
What condition did you find things in when you began in your new post?
Our level of military preparedness was very high.
Where were our weak spots, in Europe, maybe?
I know the state of affairs in the military groups in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. They were all powerful enough. Even when the Americans wanted to place missiles where they had just minutes' flying time to Moscow. We responded by placing the Temp-S in Germany and Czechoslovakia. They could reach the American forces in Europe in three minutes.
So they were preparing for war in the early 1980s?
Well, what is war? Is Russia preparing for war now?
Of course.
That doesn't mean that tomorrow there will be war. There are no preparations going on now. What preparations? They order one missile and one plane from the military complex. Is that Preparation? Every district used to have its own air defenses with several hundred of the latest su-27, MiG-25 and MiG-27 aircraft. The air defenses could locate objects on the radar at a height of 50 m. to 20 km. Now, if it's lower than 10 km., nobody sees it.
What were the basic strategic and political tasks that Gorbachev and the Politburo assigned you?
Nobody assigned me anything.
When did you notice that the Kremlin's military policy was taking a bad turn?
Everything took a dangerous turn at the beginning of perestroika. But no one knew it then. When I told Gorbachev that it was necessary to build something up, he said “What are you taking about? Nose to nose, bayonet to bayonet. Those times have passed. We have to solve problems politically.” Another danger was private property, which Alexander Yakovlev called “a basic component of perestroika” and “democracy and glasnost as accessible information and a system of feedback.”
What was the threat to the armed forces in that?
A direct threat. What would become of industry with private ownership? What could the Ministry of Defense do?
In 1987, the new Soviet doctrine of “reasonable adequacy” was introduced. How did you take it?
It was fine. Otherwise, we wouldn't have agreed to reduce medium- and short-range missiles. You can't have so many missiles and nuclear warheads that you can eradicate the human race ten times over. We destroyed more missiles than the Americans. The Americans had missiles like that on ships even. When we reached a framework agreement in 1984, the Americans excluded their ships from the negotiations. The fleets were not discussed. Land aviation and missiles were reduced. But land-to-land missiles were our major stock. They had few Atlas missiles, about 50. Then they started developing the Minutemen. And when we started destroying short- and medium-range missiles, the Americans won, because their main forces were on ships.
36 Billion Marks to Leave. Are We Cheap Now?
Were You in Agreement with the Withdrawal of Troops from Europe?
Gradually, yes. But we did it in a hurry, that's just the way it was. When they decided to withdraw, I was not there. They started talking about the withdrawal in 1990. Genscher and Kohl came and talked to Gorbachev and Shevardnadze in Stavropol Territory and then visited Arkhyz two days later. Gorbachev called me and said, “The withdrawal costs 36 billion Marks. Have we come down in price?” I answered, of course, that we had.
Who named that price? Why did Gorbachev accept it?
I don't know. Everything wa done to break up the Soviet Union. That was the conspiracy of America.
Was Germany's participation a surprise for you?
Of course! We didn't discuss anything anywhere. And nobody listened to our criticisms.
Did you warn the Kremlin? Did you send Gorbachev papers?
Of course. Under the agreement on traditional weapons, we were obliged to disarm almost unilaterally. The Americans didn't reduce anything on their own territory, but only what they had in Europe. But we had everything up to the Urals. Just to save anything, I assigned every fleet an artillery division. That was 200 and some tanks each. When they found out, Thatcher came here and the Americans too. So did I hide anything? No. I carried out my policy openly. But Gorbachev made an agreement with them.
Why was the troop withdrawal so peaceful? Everybody was afraid that one spark would ignite and there would be God-only-knows what.
How do I know? I was already in prison.
They say that Dmitry Yakubovsky went to Germany on your plane to settle property deals there.
He is not an honest person. He flew on a Ministry of Defense plane that was used for the mail. They said that it was a special flight. He talked to me like the biggest shot of all, the secretary of the Moscow bar association. And ten he showed me a letter in which they said that we had too few lawyers in Germany and that the Germans could cheat us everywhere. I suggested that he come and talk to the prosecutor and the chief of the Western Group of Forces.
Who wrote that letter?
The chairman of the bar association.
Who knew what was happening in Lithuania and Latvia at the beginning of the 1990s?
I never went there. Gorbachev and Yakovlev were there.
So they were the ones who organized everything there?
No. They had enough anti-Soviets of their own.
Who was in command of our forces in Vilnius and Riga in January 1991? Gorbachev says that he doesn't know anything about it.
And he's lying.
Who gave the order to take the television center in Vilnius?
Not me. KGB agents.
But only Kryuchkov could speak for the KGB and Kryuchkov was Gorbachev.
Yes. And our forces entered only to maintain order. Maskhadov was the chief of artillery there. We didn't shoot anybody. We shot over their heads. Fourteen people were killed. And nobody was allowed to investigate. It was all a provocation thought up by the Lithuanians.
Why?
To secede from the Soviet Union.
Do you really believe that the KGB could do that without Gorbachev's knowledge?
He knew everything, of course. Do you think he's an idiot?
Did he know about the putsch in advance?
Of course. We went to see him in the Crimea beforehand.
Who was the main force behind the coup d'etat?
The main one was KGB General Grushko, Kryuchkov's first deputy. He and Pavel Grachev, commander of the air forces, started to make up emergency measures, but they didn't seize power. Yanaev didn't play in role at all.
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Dmitry Yazov was called “Gorbachev's marshal of detente” in the Western press. He became Minister of Defense in 1987 after German amateur pilot Mathias Rust ruined the career of the pervious minister, Marshal Sokolov, and 200 other military commanders. Yazov was active in the decommissioning of Soviet military forces and led the withdrawal from Europe. He had an extensive career for those times: he took part in World War Two in 1941, graduated from Frunze Military Academy in 1956 and the Joint Staff Military Academy in 1967, gradually commanding all of the biggest military units in the Soviet Union (including those in Cuba), and then in Czechoslovakia in 1979, the Central Asian forces from 1980 to 1984 and the Far East Military District from 1984 to 1987 in the Ministry of Defense of the USSR. From 1987 to 1991, he was the Minister of Defense of the USSR. He was a member of Gorbachev's Presidential Council (1990). He was imprisoned as a member of the State Committee for Emergency Situations from August 1991 to his amnesty in 1994. Now he is an adviser to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 21, 2005
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