talkpolitics | Gorbachev

~~Zdravstvuite, tovarischi~~ hello, comrades! Today is the 80th birthday of Mikhail Gorbachev, the father of Glasnost and Perestroika and the first and last "president" of USSR. It would be an understatement if I said he's not very popular today. There won't be any big events to commemorate his jubilee, and he'll probably celebrate it in a narrow family circle. There aren't many people who revere him as the bringer of freedom and democracy for Russia and Eastern Europe, and there are lots of people who plainly despise him and say he's responsible for the destruction of the Soviet empire. I took a brief scan through the Russian press and TVs today, and the headlines reflect the general moods about Gorbachev's anniversary in a very eloquent way.

The leading Channel 1 of the Russian state television (ORT) showed a 2-hour documentary entitled "Mikhail Gorbachev. The man who gave us our freedom". It showed a bio of "the architect of Perestroika and Glasnost in Russia". However it's evident that, while he's respected by some (although not many) Russians because he made the first steps toward democracy, many others hate him because he facilitated the end of the Soviet Union. Probably this controversial attitude to Gorbachev in Russia is one of the main reasons why most celebrations for his anniversary will be held later this month - not in Russia but in the West, where he's regarded as a symbol of the liberalization in USSR and the end of the Cold War.

Gorbachev himself appeared on an interview, and he used the opportunity to sling criticism at the present Russian leadership, particularly on the issue of human rights. Which is rather ironic in his case - but do bear with me, and you'll see why.

Specifically, in the interview he said that under the rule of president Medvedev and prime minister Putin there's been "an attack on the civil and human liberties of the people".

Some retrospect now. Gorbachev was the 7th and final leader of the USSR, and he'll remain in history with his timid attempts at reform. But his Perestroika was followed by the collapse of communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the coming of democracy throughout Eastern Europe, the dismantling of the USSR and the end of the decades-long nuclear and conventional arms race with the West. For some of these achievements, he got a Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. He has remained more attached to the Western values ever since, and has given numerous lectures across Western universities. Many within Russia regard him as "the first true liberal" in their country, at a time when everything was dominated by the communists.

Today, nationwide surveys display the attitudes to Gorbachev among his own people. More than half of the Russians feel indifferent to him - 47% of the polled, which is twice more than they used to be 10 years ago. I guess he's being fast forgotten. Some say he was way ahead of his time and history will pay due credit to him long after he's gone; others say he was just a mediocre figure who happened to appear at the right place in the right moment (or the wrong place, wrong moment - depends on your perspective). Compared to those 47%, the 10% who state a deep respect for him look like a tiny minority. The remaining 20%-plus are feeling outright hatred for him.

Under a headline "Precursor", the Moscow newspaper Novie Izvestia writes today that Gorbachev had climbed along all the steps up the party-state ladder, and he had seen with his own eyes that all of them were rotten. "He did not desire a revolution and he sincerely hoped that the system could be reorganized", the article says. It also points out that Gorbachev's era was associated with a number of catch-phrases: for instance the budding freedom of speech was called Glasnost (literally, "publicity"), the multi-party system was called Pluralism of Opinions, his attempt for economic reform with an emphasis on machine-building was dubbed Acceleration. The same way the restarting of the US-Russian relations is called today "Reset". (Although a hilariously embarrassing lost-in-translation style gaffe initially labeled it as "Overcharge").

Most of Gorbachev's comrades in the top echelons of the party did not share his enthusiasm for reform at the time. In turn, the intelligentsia initially supported him, until he spilled innocent blood on the protests in Vilnius and Tbilisi, then they turned their backs on him. He's been more respected in the West than in his own country ever since.

That he wanted more radical and faster reforms at home was not to the liking of many, because in Russia "the melancholy for the 'strong hand' is incurable, much like the desire to get everything here, and now", as the Novie Izvestia article says.

On the other hand, Gorbachev dragged his country out of the lethargic sleep which was threatening it with a clinical death, and then a real death. The country survived, albeit broken into its constituent pieces. Because he set the vector for further development, he showed the direction for the long-term future. Be it slowly or quickly, with occasional glitches and detours to the left and to the right, the country set off along that road, but the general direction was already clear to all, even to those who refuse to acknowledge Gorbachev's role for that.

He's being called "a person who changed the world". Indeed, it was Gorbachev's Perestroika (literally: reorganization) and his Glasnost that predetermined the further changes, including the change in Russia's relations with the West, especially the US. (Although some Hollywood movies even to this day continue to depict the Bad Ruskis as the primeval antagonist, for lack of a better imagination).

Even today Gorbachev is convinced that both America and Russia eventually turned out winners in the Cold War, and he's been repeating this mantra in all his lectures, which makes me think that he honestly believes this. "I wouldn't be mistaken if I said that the Perestroika won. It was successful", he says. When asked about America's hegemonic role in the modern world, he says, "America has the right to be a leader". But then he hurries to add a recommendation: "But it should be a leadership that is carried out through partnership, not domination. Or America would follow the Soviet's fate". A grim warning indeed.

Everyone has heard the symbolic song by The Scorpions, The Wind of Change. It became the number one symbol of the new era here in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev really brought unprecedented winds of change for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but still some people merely interpret this as mostly a pragmatic response to the immense Western pressure, above all. And they're right when they remind us that the "father of Perestroika" in fact never showed much interest in the human rights.

In contrast with the usual praise and applause for Gorbachev in the West, the political activists and historians who are his contemporaries remind that he personally gave orders to shoot on demonstrators in the Soviet republics who wanted independence. He himself was a staunch defender of the primacy of the KPSS (the Communist Party) as the only party who could rule the state, and most of all he had a rather ambiguous attitude to the political prisoners and dissidents.

His pragmatic, rather than principled motivation for occasionally offering the carrot rather than the stick to the democratic dissidents, is shown most eloquently in the following incident. In December 1986 Gorbachev allowed for the interned dissident and Nobel Literature Prize laureate, prof. Andrei Sakharov to return to Moscow with his wife Yelena Bonner - a gesture of huge symbolic value, which the West instantly welcomed. The return of Sakharov from exile was a clear sign to the West. The state finances were in a very bad condition and the Western credits were essential for the country's survival. The release of Sakharov was imperative, and it had to demonstrate that the process of democratization was carrying on at a moment when the West was beginning to ask inconvenient questions about the extent and the limits of the Perestroika.

The people who call Gorbachev "a human rights defender by compulsion" go on to point out that scores of political dissidents had been arrested and put in jail during his tenure. All those events, according to his critics, show a genuine lack of interest for human and civil rights in Gorbachev. This includes the deadly intervention of the Soviet military against the independence fighters across the Caucasian region and the Baltic republics in 1991, in a last attempt to prevent the complete disintegration of the USSR; as well as his refusal to change the Constitution of the USSR, whose very first paragraph stipulated that the Communist Party was the one and only party in the country.

Another curious editorial entitled "The revolt of the economy" in the Vedomosti newspaper summarizes that, in relation to the 80th anniversary, a number of commentators focused on Gorbachev's political decisions which allowed for the dismantling of the Soviet Union with relatively little bloodshed - or which brought about the biggest geopolitical catastrophe in modern history, depending on who you're asking.

The commentary goes on saying that the collapse of the USSR was caused not so much by the transformations in the social and political sphere which were initiated by Gorbachev and his associates, as much as the economic disorders and structural defects of the system. They were caused by the sluggish and inconsistent reform, during which Kremlin was trying to increase the efficiency of the Russian economy, while trying to preserve the intrinsically flawed socialist planned economy.