58 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
- What they had, they intended to keep. They did not want to
‘lose’ Afghanistan, Eastern Europe or even Vietnam.^23 In June 1983
Gromyko again told the Central Committee plenum that all was well
with the Soviet armed forces. By choreographed arrangement, Molda-
vian Communist Party First Secretary Ivan Bodyul stepped forward to
emphasize how enthusiastic the Cubans were about the USSR and its
political and economic system.^24 Alexander Chakovski, reporting on a
congress of writers in Bulgaria, assured the Central Committee that all
was well in Eastern Europe; he added that the American writers in
attendance, Erskine Caldwell and John Cheever, were angry about
their own country’s bellicosity. He quoted British novelist C. P. Snow
as having said: ‘We mustn’t allow atom bombs to fall into the hands of
criminals and lunatics.’^25
Soviet leaders were aware that economic reality was a different
matter from the official rhetoric. On 18 January 1983 Nikolai Ryzhkov
told a conference of Central Committee secretaries chaired by
Andropov:
We have now received the data from the Central Statistical
Administration about the results for 1982. What’s to be said
about these data? Of course it’s said there that the plan has been ful-
filled. But that won’t be the truth because it’s the corrected plan
that’s been fulfilled whereas the plan envisaged by the nation-
al-economic plan has not been fulfilled. This is how we get a
situation here where we ourselves create disinformation.^26He was saying something that was general knowledge in the leader-
ship. What was extraordinary was the fact that he brought it up for
discussion. He would not have done this if he had not thought he had
Andropov’s blessing. Andropov had plucked Ryzhkov from the State
Planning Commission and promoted him to the Party Secretariat as
soon as he became General Secretary. Ryzhkov joined Vladimir
Dolgikh and Mikhail Gorbachëv in a confidential research unit that
Andropov created to ascertain the roots of the USSR’s economic mal-
aise – Dolgikh and Gorbachëv were Central Committee secretaries.^27
Many Soviet officials saw that the USSR bore an excessive burden
as a result of its military expenditure. What was less widely appreci-
ated was the oddity of the arms industry within the economy. In the
US, advances in military technology had often facilitated innovations
in the production of mass consumer goods. The WD40 lubricant,
Teflon non-stick coating, scratch-resistant lenses and robust computer