Pondering Gorbachev

The Last Soviet Leader's Legacy

Gorby smooches East German leader Erich Honecker, 1986

As you are no doubt aware, the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, died last week at age 91. There’s already been a good deal of debate about his legacy: Should he be mourned or mocked? Was he a tragic humanitarian? A naive fool? The betrayer of socialism or its potential savior, frustrated in his project by unfaithful allies support and the terrible state of the U.S.S.R.? Was a more democratic form of socialism actually possible or was the Soviet experiment doomed?

Interested in the roots of the war in Ukraine, earlier this year I read Vladislav Zubok’s Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. The picture of Gorbachev that emerges in the book is quite negative. The author, who is Russian, recognizes that the situation in the U.S.S.R. in the mid 1980s was untenable, that reform was necessary, but he contends that Gorbachev’s conception and management of those reforms was totally disastrous. What made Gorbachev embark on this foolhardy project? According to Zubok, the fact that the last leader and his wife Raisa were part of the idealistic Soviet intelligentsia and sincerely believed in the teachings of Lenin:

Any leader of the Soviet Union who inherited the old system in 1985 and ruled the people corrupted by it would have faced a Herculean task and opened a Pandora’s box of problems. But Mikhail Gorbachev was no ancient hero. He wanted to emancipate Soviet people from the legacy of oppression and conformism, yet did not learn enough from the great reformers of Russia’s past, such as Tsar Alexander II, Count Sergey Witte, or Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. Instead, his role model was Vladimir Lenin, the great destroyer of Russian statehood. Gorbachev felt his destiny was to embrace change on a revolutionary scale, just like the furious Bolshevik had done in 1917–22. Like Lenin, he wanted to unleash forces of chaos in order to create a society that had never existed—a dangerous exercise in ideological messianism. At the same time, in a major paradox of Soviet history, Gorbachev consistently rejected methods and features that were at the core of Lenin’s revolutionary success. He preferred speeches to action, parliamentary consensus to violence, and devolution of power to dictatorship. In a word, his messianic idea of a humane socialist society was increasingly detached from the realities of Soviet power and its economy.

The problem for Zubok was that Gorbachev took seriously all the original Bolshevik ideals that had been cynically cast aside by Stalin and his successors: the autonomy of the republics, respect for national self-determination rather than imperial expansion, that the Congress of the Soviets was actually supposed to be the sovereign governing institution and not the oligarchy of the Party, and that the economy would actually be decentralized and managed by the workers. He embarked on all these reforms at once, and believed that the politics of the society would benefit from a return to the lively and often fierce debates of the Old Bolsheviks. Instead he got total chaos: The old regime was like a complicated system of dams and dikes holding back a flood of discontent. Populist anger at corruption and nationalist agitation for independence quickly emerged as the primary political forces.

Gorbachev hoped that the Soviet intelligentsia, freed from censorship and surveillance, would form a new, responsible political elite. (This is quite unlike Lenin who thought the intelligentsia were “not brains, but the shit of a nation.”) But he found that they actually balked at the responsibility. There’s one humorous scene from the book, where the writers and intellectuals, frightened at the prospect of revolutionary upheaval demand the return of the status quo:

On 29 September, Gorbachev met with hundreds of representatives of the “creative” Soviet intelligentsia. The majority were from Moscow, members of the guilds of writers and artists with an elaborate system of privileges, paid out of the state budget and endowments. Gorbachev’s reforms emancipated them from the Party controls, censorship, and the KGB’s informers. At the meeting, however, nobody celebrated those new freedoms and praised Gorbachev. Everyone spoke of a new 1917, fearing anarchy and civil war. The composer Georgy Sviridov and the actor Kirill Lavrov spoke about the flight of scientific and cultural elites, many of Jewish origin, to Israel and the West. Mikhail Shatrov, a playwright with Jewish roots, feared pogroms. “The intelligentsia is capable of capsizing the ship,” he said. “Now the intelligentsia should ask itself if it can help to steady the ship, at a time of awful turbulence.” The editor of Novy Mir, Sergey Zalygin, bemoaned the excesses of glasnost: “In our country everyone has become a critic. And we set the example . . . We instigated the people to take this chattering path.” The theater director Mark Zakharov said: “I am for strong presidential power with unlimited functions for some time.” The Minister of Culture, Nikolai Gubenko, a well-known actor, grabbed the bull by the horns: “We are drunk with unfamiliar freedoms and destroy our cultural and historical tradition that brought many nations together [and formed the state that] is now named the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”84 The same people who wanted to bury Lenin and the Party dictatorship now called for a new dictatorship. It was up to Gorbachev to accept or reject this appeal.

These fears were somewhat justified. The republic of Azerbaijan witnessed terrible pogroms against its Armenian population that would intensify into a war—one that carries on to this day. Gorbachev failed to intervene forcefully as his advisors suggested. At points in Zubok’s account, he seems to come close to endorsing the view common among Gorbachev’s contemporaries that he lacked “the guts” to do a Tiananmen Square. While it’s hard to stomach the sanctioning of that kind of repression, in the case of the situation in Azerbaijan, use of force would’ve been less repression of dissent and more justified and responsible statecraft.

Zubok’s harsh judgment of Gorbachev hinges on the notion that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a bad thing, and that it unleashed more chaos and suffering than it prevented. This is an attitude you’re likely to hear from Russians more than, say, Ukrainians who aspired to national independence. Zubok is a very fine scholar, this book is expertly-researched and well-argued; this is in no way a tendentious piece of propaganda, but it should be pointed out that his view is not all that different from a certain conservative Russian constituency that Vladimir Putin often speaks for. Disdain for the dreams of the intelligentsia and preference for hard-nosed realism is a common attitude among older post-Soviet people. Putin’s speech justifying the invasion of Ukraine was partially directed at Lenin and his indulgence, at least on paper, of silly principles like national self-determination. But the hidden figure who Putin was directing his speech against was really Gorbachev, the “neo-Leninist” who let it all slip away with his harebrained schemes.

The Soviet Union was conceived in idealism but was sustained through cynicism: the lies and brutality of a narrow, self-interested oligarchy that helped-along the return of ancien regime features like autocracy under Stalin and the Great-Russian imperialism that Lenin hated above all else. If we are to believe Zubok’s account, as soon as someone came along who took the ideals seriously again, the entire system fell apart. Here is the contradiction at the heart of the Soviet Union: only those who actually believed in it would risk its death; the cynics who wanted to it continue it saw it just as a vehicle for stability or continued Russian ascendancy, not as a truly revolutionary society; they didn’t really believe in the experiment.

Could the U.S.S.R. have continued as a one-party state and embarked on some economic reforms, but left out the political upheaval and dissolution, like China? Zubok seems to think so. Would that have made for a better world? I’m not so sure. Was there a pragmatic middle course that could’ve answered legitimate desires for national self-determination without unleashing war and massacre? That’s a question that history itself apparently has not resolved. Ultimately I think the internal contradictions would’ve become manifest in one way or another. The idea that the Soviet collapse was just a stupid accident and not a historical necessity is one reason there is now a war, the ironic consequence of which will probably be the further diminution of Russia. According to Hegel, world-historical individuals are unaware what they are really doing: they appear to be following their own inclinations and desires, but are they are actually driven by the demands of the Spirit. In the long historical retrospect, it may turn out that Gorbachev was a kind of “dialectical hero” who rescued the future possibility of a truly democratic socialism by allowing the Soviet Union to die.