To improve productivity and the quantity and quality of goods and services, Andropov proposed greater discipline and better incentives. In particular, Andropov launched a campaign against poor work, absenteeism, drunkenness, moonlighting, and irresponsibility. Those so guilty would have to pay in a “direct and inexorable way” by lost wages, reduced positions, and diminished “moral prestige.”124 In “Operation Trawl” in early 1983, the authorities “flushed out absentee workers in shops, bars, and steam baths.”125 The media joined the campaign for greater discipline, and Andropov personally took the campaign to a Moscow machine shop.126 Andropov proposed punishment for public drunkenness and for such offenses as leaving work to shop or go to the baths. According to Zhores Medvedev, Andropov’s efforts, particularly to reduce waste, brought “immediate and striking” results. Newspapers began openly criticizing inefficient farms and incompetence in the food industry.127
Andropov vigorously opposed wage leveling, such as had occurred under Khrushchev, as a violation of the fundamental socialist principle of “to each according to his work.” He believed that unless productivity increases accompanied wage increases, greater wages would stimulate a demand that could not be fully satisfied and thus would produce shortages and other “ugly consequences,” like the black-market. Properly conceived, incentives could do more than reward good work; they would stimulate quality work and an involvement in the activities and plans of the collective and of the entire people.128
In foreign affairs, Andropov had no taste for the kind of retreats and unilateral concessions that would mark Gorbachev’s foreign policy. Andropov upheld the policy of peaceful co-existence and the avoidance of war, but he insisted that the principle of class struggle still prevailed internationally.129 In the 1970s, he repeatedly warned that by raising issues of “dissidents” and “human rights” and by increasing the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the imperialists were actually intensifying their ideological and psychological warfare against the Soviet Union.130 In his first speech as General Secretary, Andropov said Soviet foreign policy would remain “exactly as it was.”131 At that moment, Afghanistan represented the fulcrum of international struggle, and on it Andropov did not waver. Months before becoming General Secretary, Andropov said that the CPSU remained faithful to its international duty and would do everything it could to strengthen “solidarity and cooperation with its class brothers abroad.”132 Within days of becoming General Secretary, Andropov told the President of Pakistan to stop pretending that it was not a partner with the U.S. in the war against Afghanistan and assured him that “the Soviet Union will stand by Afghanistan.”133
Andropov tried to improve the prospects for peace with the United States, but he did not have a lot of room for new initiatives. He took office at the nadir of Soviet-American relations, in the middle of what Soviet ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Dobrynin, called the “new Cold War” that began under Carter and worsened under Reagan.134 After Reagan called the Soviet Union the “evil empire” and announced plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative, Soviet-American relations reached a state of what Andropov called “unprecedented confrontation.”135 Andropov grounded his approach to the United States in the conviction “that peace cannot be obtained from the imperialists by begging for it. It can be upheld only by relying on the invincible might of the Soviet armed forces.”136 Consequently, Andropov rejected Reagan’s lopsided “zero option” proposal (later acceded to by Gorbachev), under which Western European medium range missiles would remain, but the U.S. would refrain from installing medium range missiles in Europe, if the Soviet Union would withdraw all its existing European-based medium range missiles. Andropov had no interest in what he viewed as unilateral concessions. The Soviet Union’s “entire experience,” Andropov said, showed that “one cannot go to the imperialists, hat in hand, and hope to win peace.”137 Instead, Andropov made a number of disarmament proposals based on strict parity, while making it clear the Soviet Union would settle for nothing less.
In his short time in office, Andropov showed flexibility and initiative in his dealings with the U.S. He managed to restart high level discussions with Washington after a complete absence of nearly two years. When Reagan met for the first time with Dobrynin and raised only one substantive issue, the granting of exit visas to Pentecostals who had taken refuge in the American embassy in Moscow, Andropov agreed to act and allowed the Pentecostals to leave. Even though Andropov believed Reagan hoped to achieve military superiority and even contemplated a first nuclear strike, the Soviet leader instructed his arms negotiators to stop threatening to withdraw from the talks, and he re-opened the confidential communications channel that had been shut down since Carter. Andropov also instructed Dobrynin to be alert to any signs of Reagan’s willingness to improve relations. In the end, Andropov’s efforts to open a dialogue with the U.S. came to little. In September 1983, when a Soviet aircraft mistakenly shot down a Korean passenger plane and Reagan spokesmen reacted with a rhetorical rampage, any chance of improving relations vanished.138
In his brief tenure, Andropov also addressed problems related to Party standards, personnel, democracy, ideology, and the national question. He made clear that the Party would not tolerate corruption, bribery, or embezzlement. He insisted on a restoration of “Leninist norms.” According to Ligachev, after Andropov became General Secretary “everyone went from an abbreviated workday to a longer one.”139 Andropov also abolished Brezhnev’s “stability of cadre” policy and forced out the old and incompetent and brought in new and effective Party and state officials. One of his first moves was to replace the head of the Transport Ministry, which had been a source of persistent bottlenecks in the economy.140 To improve democracy, Andropov attacked the excessive formalism of Party meetings and demanded an end to their scripted character.141 He demanded the removal of obstacles to initiatives in the workplace, and according to Ligachev, introduced “the practice of holding preliminary discussions of Party and government decisions in work collectives and factories.”142 In June 1983, Andropov devoted a plenary meeting of the Central Committee to a discussion of the improvement of ideological work.143
Unquestionably, Andropov understood the problems facing the Soviet Union and the CPSU and undertook serious reforms. Some writers in the West suggested that the Soviet leader was a closet liberal, but they were wishing to make it so.144 Nothing in Andropov’s words or deeds showed the slightest interest in the path that Gorbachev would follow after 1987. It was not simply that Andropov quoted Marx and Lenin and hewed to the Party line. The Party expected no less of any Party leader. Rather, Andropov distinguished himself, as his speeches between 1964 and 1983 show, by the creative application of Marxist-Leninist ideas to immediate problems, the bold defense of tough policies, and the ability to rebut Western criticism with strength and sophistication. In precisely those areas, where Gorbachev would exhibit the most vacillation, Andropov showed the greatest steadfastness.
Similarly, Andropov took a more tough-minded approach to socialist democracy, nationalism, and the second economy than Gorbachev would. Andropov scored Stalin’s breaches of socialist legality and Party democracy, but proclaimed the revolution’s right and need to defend itself with force.145 Andropov also had no sympathy whatsoever for manifestations of the second economy. No aspect of Soviet life drew more of Andropov’s censure than “money-grubbing,” “the plundering of the people’s property,” and the use of public posts for “personal enrichment.”146 Personal acquisitiveness could not be harnessed or encouraged for the benefit of socialism. It reflected a bourgeois value that socialism had to transcend. In what may have been his last article, Andropov said, “The turning of ‘mine’ into ‘ours’…is a long and multifaceted process which should not be oversimplified. Even when socialist production relations have been established once and for all, some people still preserve, and even reproduce, individualistic habits, a striving to enrich themselves at the expense of others, at the expense of society.”147