134 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
year he made a daring proposal to cut back the size of staff in the
industrial sector and prevent regular overpayment.^46 He continued to
call for a halving of ministerial personnel under Gorbachëv.^47 He
understood that the USSR was oversupplied with nuclear weaponry,
which was crippling the rest of its economy.^48 Soon after his promotion
he consulted specialists in the Party Defence Department and con-
cluded that the introduction of medium- and short-range missiles in
Europe was a greater danger for the USSR than for America. He fore-
saw difficulty in getting the General Staff to accept a change in policy.
But he was determined to achieve this.^49 He had formidable qualities.
Although he was resolute in pursuing his ends, he was known as
‘courteous and suave’:^50 he was adept at lightening the atmosphere in
moments of dispute. No one in the political elite had a bad word to
say about him. When on 19 May 1985 Gorbachëv endorsed a new
structure for military-political planning, he chose Zaikov to head a
Politburo Arms Limitation Commission – the Big Five – which incor-
porated leaders of the institutions responsible for defence, foreign
affairs, security and intelligence. People referred to it as the Zaikov
Commission. It met in Zaikov’s office, and Shevardnadze, Chebrikov,
Sokolov and Yakovlev joined from the inception.^51
The Big Five needed clear-cut advice rather that the complications
of technical disagreements. Officials at lower levels conferred regularly
about the details. Sometimes as many as fifty specialists attended.
Usually they met in the general staff building. From May 1987 they
were known as the Interdepartmental Working Group (or as the Little
Five).^52 An affable atmosphere was fostered, even when Akhromeev
attended and was in one of his grumpy moods, so that people could
speak without fear of what their superiors might think. (Kataev’s boss
in the Party Defence Department, Oleg Belyakov, resented his inability
to control him.) The aim was to produce recommendations that
enjoyed a consensus among the experts. Party, army, industry and
KGB cooperated with this in view – the Party Defence Department,
for instance, was in daily receipt of up to ten secret intelligence coded
messages. The system worked smoothly and the working group
annually supplied over eighty draft decrees for use by the Big Five; and
this environment nearly always enabled Zaikov to obtain agreement at
the Big Five itself before drafts were submitted for ratification at the
Politburo.^53
This was what Gorbachëv needed from Zaikov. Unlike Brezhnev,
he had no pretension to being regarded as a military expert and took