At the same time, he’d started butting heads with Gorbachev. Just like Khrushchev, who only ever referred to the generals as ‘spongers’, Gorbachev didn’t like the army. We were a military nation, 70 or so per cent of the economy was, in one way or another, tied to the military. Our best minds worked for it… physicists, mathematicians… All of them helped develop tanks and bombs.
