Date: 12/08/2021
Author: Kent Moors, Ph.D.
As a brief update, “mother” and I are close to an agreement that will allow me to expand the Classified Intelligence Brief Spy Tale series into some less savory history. May be able to move by next week’s entry.
This time around, I return to one of the more interesting periods during my frequent stays in Moscow and elsewhere in the USSR/Russia. Set in 2000, it centers on one of the major figures in post-Soviet military leadership and politics.
This is Colonel General (four star) Boris Vsevolodovich Gromov, a 1991 Communist Party Vice Presidential candidate, later an elected member of the Duma (the more powerful lower house of the Russian Parliament), who would even later (from 2000 until 2012) be the governor of the Moscow oblast. (This is the region surrounding but not including Moscow itself. Moscow and St. Petersburg have the separate status of a Federal City under the Russian Constitution).
You have already been introduced to Gromov. In an earlier CIB (“The Murder of a Crusading Journalist in Moscow,” November 17, 2021), my wife Marina’s “Moscow Diary” column (from October 30, 1994) mentioned that General Gromov had formed a commercial enterprise to sell arms and technology to Armenia, (former Soviet) Georgia, and both sides of the civil war in Chechnya. At the time, I interjected Gromov would be the subject of a later Spy Tale.
This is it and he turned out to be a more complicated character.
In 1992, Gromov was appointed Deputy Defense Minister but was shifted over to the Foreign Ministry after joining with a group of other generals opposing Defense Minister Pavel Grachev (once again see “Murder of a Crusading Journalist” cited above) over the war in Chechnya. He resigned his commission and entered politics in 1994.
Throughout my latter period in and out of Russia, the general was the most watched Russian by US intelligence. More so even than Boris Yeltsin, then Russian President. Because, if there was to be another coup, odds were Gromov would be in the center of it. If ever there had been a (now) civilian who could call on an army that would march after him, this was the man.
There was certainly a reason, actually two. Gromov had been the last commander of Soviet ground troops in their ill-fated expedition into Afghanistan (the lesson remained unlearned later by the US). He was also the guy who led them back home across the Friendship Bridge.
Built by the Soviets in 1981 for both rail and road traffic, the bridge spans the Amu Darya River connecting the town of Hairatan in the northern Balkh province of Afghanistan with Termez in the Surxondaryo Region of Uzbekistan (then one of the 15 constituent republics of the USSR).
Years later, I would stand on this bridge and watch supplies move by in support of the Afghan Northern Alliance. In the early stages of our misadventure in Afghanistan, the Russian allowed us to use Uzbek bases to support Taliban opponents. That is another story which may someday show up as a Spy Tale.
He was idolized by his troops, especially after orchestrating a final campaign that extricated the main contingent of Soviet troops without significant casualties. But that was only where the adoration started. Because there was a second, more compelling, reason he could call on them and they would follow.
Gromov throughout his positions after Afghanistan had built a network among the soldiers. After the dissolution of the USSR, the economies in what were now 15 independent countries disintegrated. Very few in any line of work were receiving salaries, barter had replaced cash markets in many places, and times were hard. Nowhere more so than in the Red Army, dissolving along with everything else.
Soldiers were not paid, or for that matter received any replacement supplies or clothing. In my time spent in the new Russia emerging from January 1992, it was not unusual to see soldiers working on road crews, at lumber yards, or repairing just about anything to eat. They would still be wearing what was left of their last issued uniform but had little interest in returning to some home base. There was nothing there they could use. Some were turning to crime to survive.
It reminded me of the pictures I had seen of German soldiers after the end of World War II working to remove the rubble of bombed out buildings in return for food from American and British occupiers in the Western Zone.
The military diaspora quickly became one of the most troubling domestic problems in Russia that the bureaucrats did not want to talk about. By the time of this tale, we estimated there were as many as 1.5 million members of the army roaming the land with no source of income or a way to avoid starving.
Gromov cut orders to break into military stockpiles to distribute supplies to the vagabond army. The general fed them. He also clothed them, housed them were possible, provided public project jobs, and let them know there was somebody in authority who cared about their plight.
It resulted in the most extensive theft of public goods I ever witnessed but nobody in authority said anything or made any effort to stop it. After all, in addition to no regular market, payment of salaries, or distributed benefits, Russia at the time also had no welfare system to care for those simply set free on an exhausted country by its own military commanders.
If Gromov asked, these forgotten soldiers would march into hell and back at his order. He was genuinely the most powerful man in the country. If the former general turned to vindictive politics, he already had an army to do his bidding.
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It is for this reason that whatever I was working on during this period would come to a screeching stop when some higher pay grade would shout “Where is Gromov?” If he could not be located, for all we knew he was plotting a takeover leading his personal legions of disgruntled veterans.
Strangely enough, my personal barometer for all of this ended up being close to home.
His name was Sasha and he worked part time repairing things in the Moscow building where I lived. He would always make time for me because, unlike others who compensated for his services with whatever they could find in their apartment, I would pay him in cash. A veteran of the Afghan campaign, he had become one of the many bitter former soldiers whose pension had not arrived in months and who complained over the lack of national purpose.
But Sasha finally had something to celebrate. His hero had virtually returned from the dead. “I marched through fire and fury with this man,” he was telling anybody who would listen. “If anybody can clean up this mess, he can.”
Sasha and his comrades could only be referring to one person – Gromov. If there is one charismatic figure a disgruntled army could rally behind, that’s the fellow.
In 1991, he was Nikolai Ryzkhov’s vice presidential running mate, losing in what became Boris Yeltsin’s first election to the presidency of Russia (which was then still a constituent republic of the USSR). Even in a losing cause and still a general, he was impressive showing himself to be an intelligent and adroit campaigner, possessing strong rhetorical skills and deft timing.
Exactly the skills others had used to command popular uprisings.
But three years later, his career was apparently over. Then a deputy defense minister, he was soon to be axed because his boss Defense Minister Grachev was finally going to be fired for corruption (big time). On his own, Gromov would have been dismissed anyway given his criticism of the Chechen War and the bloodbath it produced.
In 1994, he retired and receded into private life and a run at politics. But his reputation did not. Some two years after he left (in 1996), Gromov was still being voted by line officers as their most popular general.
Then again, this is also Russian politics, where all one needs is time. Sooner or later those who wait seem to get another shot at the brass ring. Sasha was beaming because, only a few days earlier, Gromov had been elected for his first term as Moscow oblast governor.
He had engineered a revival by becoming an ally of the central city powerful major Yuri Luzhkov (who would later along with his equally powerful wife fall victim to their own scandals), had established a personal base in a short stint in the Duma, and managed to avoid becoming sucked into the machinations surrounding Yeltsin and the Kremlin’s own version of eating its own.
Gromov had overnight become the most respected and visible critic of any military policy the central government could put together. He also would be around for a while. Then at 56 (he is today still alive and approaching 80) he had the physique of somebody half his age.
Meanwhile in Washington, American policymakers were worried about whether the army would break with tradition and become political. Unlike some other countries, Russian generals sought concessions and deference for themselves and, every now and then, for their troops. But they did not like politics and tended to avoid involvement whenever possible.
Yeltsin had changed that by forcing army brass to choose sides in the August 1991 coup against then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and two years later during his own standoff against parliamentary leaders. The latter had ended up with army tanks shelling the Parliament Building.
While obeying the orders of their head of state, some of the military heads never forgave the president for forcing their hand in that altercation. For his part, Gromov had publicly opposed the 1991 coup (as did Grachev, resulting in much of the military heads not answering their phones when the coup plotters called for additional troops or air cover) and supported Yeltsin in 1993. That allowed him to protect his flank politically.
But soldiers, both veterans in civilian life like Sasha and those still in uniform, would respond should he call on them. And where Gromov was and what he had in mind were persistent concerns in the West. Hence, the recurrence of the “Where is Gromov?” refrain sounding through the halls of US intelligence.
So, I finally asked Sasha, my read on the pulse of Soviet/Russian veterans: “What if the general [Sasha never referred to him by his name, an old Soviet proclivity to protect a person they respected] asked you to march on the Kremlin, or the American Embassy, or the Moscow Stock Exchange?” I asked him.
“I would only need to know the time we were to muster,” he responded with a smile.
As it turns out, Gromov never has. And because he didn’t, neither would any lower class general. Seems even there he had more prescience than those actually filling offices.
Of course, that hardly changed what we had to do. For more than a decade before and after that morning I posed the question to Sasha, there was no choice but to figure out what the general was up to. It wasted time we could have spent doing something else. In that, Gromov managed to play us as well.
Dr. Kent Moors
This is an installment of Classified Intelligence Brief, your guide to what’s really happening behind the headlines… and how to profit from it. Dr. Kent Moors served the United States for 30 years as one of the most highly decorated intelligence operatives alive today (including THREE Presidential commendations).
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