348 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
foreign policy;^57 and when he later tried to insert traditional slogans
into official theses, Gorbachëv merely retorted that ‘it’s only when we
need to make the people go without food that we make mention of
class struggle’.^58 It was high time to remove the seventy-nine-year-old
veteran. When shunting Gromyko into retirement, Gorbachëv osten-
tatiously thanked him on behalf of party and country. Gromyko
responded by confirming his belief that perestroika was the only cor-
rect policy for the USSR.^59
Gorbachëv transformed the highest level of the party’s constitu-
tional structure. He abolished the Central Committee departments
and replaced them with a set of commissions. One of them would be
dedicated to international politics, and Yakovlev was to chair it.^60 It
was not entirely good news for the radical cause since Akhromeev and
Kryuchkov were nominated to Yakovlev’s commission.^61 Neither man
was genuinely enthusiastic about talk of the need for further conces-
sions in external policy, but Gorbachëv thought he could trust and
control them. He liked to give the impression that he sympathized
with communist traditionalists even while he was marching firmly
towards a destination of reform. Obfuscation was in his blood. He
hoped to drag the sceptics along with him until such time as it was too
late for them to reverse his policies. The Rust affair had enabled him to
get rid of doubters like Sokolov from the Defence Ministry. Now he
also replaced Chebrikov with Kryuchkov as KGB Chairman. Chebri-
kov was put in charge of the new Central Committee Rights Com-
mission. Although he was hardly a sympathizer with the human rights
goals that Gorbachëv espoused, the advantage was that he was no
longer running the KGB, and Gorbachëv felt that Kryuchkov would be
more malleable.^62
Chebrikov had given a disturbing report on the KGB’s work in the
year 1987. It claimed that America and its NATO allies were ‘exercis-
ing a definite influence over the formation of terrorist and extremist
objectives among persons of an anti-Soviet disposition and other
hostile elements’. Foreign Muslim organizations were sending secret
emissaries into the USSR. Ukrainian nationalists were active from
abroad. Afghan counter-revolutionaries had their agents on Soviet
soil. A serious nationalist plot had been uncovered in Georgia. Violent
activity was rare: there had been only five cases of criminal explosions
across the USSR as a whole. The KGB was more concerned to
highlight the increasingly overt nature of anti-Soviet militancy.
Demonstrations had even occurred on Red Square and outside the