“The West likes him. The people of Russia, not so much.” That has been a theme in tributes to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former head of the Soviet Union, who died yesterday, August 30.
You may know more about Gorbachev than I did a few years ago when I wrote a paper about him for a class about modern European history. But perhaps sharing some of the history I learned will reveal why the West is grateful to him, even if the people of Russia are not.
Gorbachev never intended to break up the Soviet Union. He simply didn’t know that perestroika (restructuring the USSR’s economy) and glasnost (openness of speech) would result in cataclysmic change.
If there were any hints that Gorbachev would become a reformer, they were that he was educated at Moscow State University (most leaders did not have a college education), and he was young and politically astute and worked his way up through the Kremlin. When Konstantin Chernenko, the last of the “old guard,” died in 1985, he was an obvious choice for general secretary of the party.
Gorbachev knew the Soviet Union was economically weak and believed it could be strengthened. Gorbachev considered the Soviet system basically stable, says historian Gail Lapidus, but suffering from poor economic performance and too much bureaucracy.[1]
He began perestroika as early as April 1985. He also realized that the Soviet Union could not move its economy forward if it continued to fight a costly Cold War. So he took aggressive steps to negotiate arms reduction, most notably with the INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] Treaty of 1987. According to historian Martin Malia, through this treaty he “bowed out of the Cold War essentially on the West’s terms.”[2]
To increase industrial productivity, Gorbachev first tried “acceleration” (a plan to speed up production and improve industrial equipment), plus an anti-alcohol drive and agricultural reorganization. But these initiatives pretty much failed.
So he proposed more economic changes. As Martin Malia describes them, Gorbachev allowed a small private sphere of production and trade under the name “cooperatives.” [3] Otherwise, the changes were similar to, but more forceful than, past attempted reforms—decentralization of decision-making, incentives for innovation, and more realistic prices.[4]
Next he introduced glasnost—allowing people to speak as they wanted about the Soviet Union and its past. This may have been even more important than the economic changes. “The effect was cathartic, and the catharsis had a profound, indeed a revolutionary impact on Soviet politics,” writes Michael Mandelbaum.”[5]
Gorbachev’s next step was to create a representative government separate from the Communist Party. That was a brilliant way to change the internal balance of power, but it led to Gorbachev’s downfall.
In 1991, responding to a coup by communist hard-liners against Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin became a hero by bravely climbing on a tank of the would-be ousters, facing their guns. The reorganization of the political framework that Gorbachev had created gave Yeltsin the opportunity to compete against Gorbachev and become president of Russia.
By that time. as Mandelbaum said, Gorbachev “belonged to history, not to the ongoing political life of what had been the Soviet Union.”[6]
Yet that place is history is a big one. He made possible the end of communism in Russia and its satellites. Yes, today’s authoritarian and oligarchical government of Vladimir Putin is regrettable on many levels. But millions of people have some freedom—freedom they would not have had otherwise. Communism had damaged them in so many ways. Now they have at least a chance to make good lives for themselves—even if they must leave Russia, as most could not during the Soviet era.
When I was a child, I was curious about the children in the Soviet Union. It was strange to me that we knew nothing about them; they were locked in their own country. What did they do? What were they like? Today, in spite of their autocratic ruler, the children have a chance to know the world, and the world has a chance to know them.
Notes
[1] Gail W. Lapidus, “Gorbachev and the Reform of the Soviet System,” Daedalus 116, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 1–30, at 10.
[2] Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 416.
[3] Malia, 425.
[4] Gorbachev was not the first Soviet reformer. Nikita Khrushchev preceded him, overtly criticizing the cult of Stalin.
[5] Michael Mandelbaum, “Coup de Grace,” in Leslie Derfler and Patricia Kollander, An Age of Conflict: Readings in Twentieth-Century European History (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2002), 317-354, at 341.
[6] Mandelbaum, 344.
Image by Andre Drechsel from Pixabay.
The Sept. 1 edition of Kyiv Post has an interesting commentary on Gorbachev. If you read it you’ll better understand my anti-Gorbachev perspective.
Gorby – Myth and Reality
Advertising — one of America’s most perfected products — often tells great truths in 30 seconds. Bad pizza but a great ad (features Gorbachev):
“Bad pizza but great ad.”
I believe the proper term is “propaganda.”
Speaking as a former political leader myself: Every leader has to work within the scope of his society, what is practical, and the knowledge available. And every leader must play with the cards given him or her.
The measure of a leader is what he or she does with those cards and within those constraints.
Gorbachev wanted his country to thrive, even at the cost of Communist orthodoxy. In that sense, he was a patriot. He had no reliable training in economics or democratic politics, but he brought a limited amount of economic and political freedom to a country that had never known either (except during the short Kerensky regime).
He also recognized the dictates of both necessity and humanity and worked with Ronald Reagan to end the Cold War.
It is true that things turned out differently than he expected, but with his skewed ideological education, he could not have predicted that. And that fact remains that the future turned out, if not for the best, then for the better: Despite the faults of the Putin regime, the fact is that Russians are much better off today than they were under Communism.
So although I wouldn’t use the word “hero,” yes, I would classify Gorbachev as a great statesman.
Yes, all leaders – all humans, in fact – must work within the limits of his society, his knowledge, and what is feasible. Gorbachev attempted to save the USSR and failed. The USSR unraveled as Gorbachev relaxed the iron grip of the Party, and the Russian people, the Ukrainian people, and the people of the Baltics broke free. I do not see the “great statesmanship” in that. Boris Yeltsin and some of the other national leaders might possibly qualify, but not Gorbachev. His “greatness” is a product of Western adulation. It is misplaced.
Gorbachev was a communist dictator. His sole contribution was that he was incompetent, tried to save the USSR and instead lost control and watched others take it apart. He tried to stop the process in Lithuania, sending the KGB and Soviet Army to put down their peaceful independence movement. The Lithuanians killed and wounded would be unlikely to be sympathetic to the claim this communist dictator was a hero.
Charles, you know a great deal about the Soviet Union that I don’t, but he held back militarily in some key places, if not in Lithuania. And Lithuania did, eventually, obtain its freedom. As Rob Natelson said in the above comment, “Every leader has to work within the scope of his society, what is practical, and the knowledge available.” Within that context, he tried to change the Soviet Union. He changed it, far more than he expected, and his country is better off.
Yes. He could have murdered many more and didn’t. He was no Stalin. But that doesn’t make him a hero or even a good leader. The unintended consequences of his failed attempt to save the USSR indeed made Russia better off, and certainly even more so the Baltics, Ukraine, Europe, and the rest of the world. But that does not speak well of him. He was trying to accomplish something else.
When I was teaching at Montana State a grad student from Ukraine told me how Gorbachev’s KGB kidnapped and killed a Ukrainian student at his college who insisted on wearing traditional Ukrainian clothing, speaking Ukrainian, and saying Ukraine should be an independent country. The student didn’t think much of Gorbachev or the much celebrated Glasnost.