His American style led to his society’s freedom and to his own political demise.
The great paradox of Mikhail Gorbachev — one of the great heroes of the 20th century — is that his life mirrored the democratic ideals that his socialism could not abide. If we take his name off of his biography and substitute a couple of general terms for his history, it reads like an American political rags to riches story:
Born to impoverished peasants, distinguishing himself on his own by his fine intellect, the first in his family to go to college, graduating from law school with honors, entering politics, demonstrating fine leadership skills, he rises to become head of state.
Of course, Gorbachev himself saw no parallel between his rise and the classic American story, but he acted the part, and not just by becoming wildly successful. His very style was an American style — utterly at odds with the dry, ponderous, faceless mask of the Soviet leaders who preceded him. Before his signature policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) in 1985, he broke the mold of fear-driven self-censorship in the Soviet Politboro, he mixed with people on the street, he looked to competence as the criterion of political promotions — he modeled the American-style openness as a kind of warmup to legitimating it in Soviet society as a whole.
He watched both of his grandfathers hauled off to the Gulag, and even though they were let out, their unwarranted and cruel but typical Soviet-style suffering left its mark on Gorbachev. There seems to be a line from his deep rejection of the cruelty in the Soviet system and his refusal to invade Warsaw Pact countries as they broke away from the USSR, unlike his predecessors who invaded and crushed democratic rebellions in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). Similarly, Gorbachev ended the Soviet entanglement in Afghanistan’s civil war of the 1980s.
The exception to Gorbachev’s policy of non-intervention seems to have been his dispatch of troops to Lithuania in 1991. They killed 14 people — and triggered a previously unimaginable protest in Moscow of 500,000 people. Glasnost worked.
Indeed it worked, not least in Gorbachev’s release of the records of the genocidal crimes of his precedessor Josef Stalin.
With these and similar moves, Gorbachev created a new Soviet Union, so new that its radically failed centralized economy could no longer be obscured and its totalitarian suppression of freedom could no longer last. The society he sought to reform fell on his watch. The head of the Soviet state presided over its dissolution in 1991 — but not before enabling the end of its twin evil satellite, East Germany, whose Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and which reunited as a democracy with West Germany. He did not intervene. His restraint was intentional.
And not before allowing millions of Soviet Jews the choice to emigrate.
The poverty and the political corruption in the USSR were so pervasive that when Gorbachev began to wedge open the door to freedom, it blew open without restraint. It blew away the USSR. He was left head of state of a state that no longer existed. Thus he ended the Cold War and the decades of fear over “Mad” — mutually assured destruction. His successful pursuit of peace derived from his open mind and open style.
It could have been otherwise. Until a few months before the USSR fell in 1991, he commanded the military.
He could have saved himself, but at what price? Civil war? Reversion to oppression? Instability on the continent? As the Wall Street Journal put it, “Instead, he bowed out with dignity.” He loved his country more than his personal power.
The current Russia-initiated war with Ukraine raises the question as to how successful Gorbachev’s pursuit of peace really was. Mark us down as laying the fault for this terrible turn of events strictly at the feet of Vladimir Putin. Power is not wielded by a world leader once he leaves office. The forces he puts in places when he is in office are subject to all manner of alteration — diminution, distortion and disfiguration — once he leaves office. Not to mention, the unpredictable factor in history — the individuality of the leader — can change everything.
Paradoxically enough, for Gorbachev to have better prepared Russian society for freedom, he would have had to have held the USSR together for longer. The state-provides-everything mentality of Soviet society was exponentially more debilitating than what some deride as an American tendency to becoming a “Nanny State.” One generation was not enough to absorb the vision and the policies of Gorbachev. The responsibility for making them work rested with Gorbachev’s successors. Their failure is their own, not Gorbachev’s. His achievements, utterly unimaginable under any single one of his predecessors, let alone under all of them, are heroic.
And please, context! However directly one might wish to attribute the reemergence of dictatorship in Russia, the USSR was much bigger than Russia. The forces for freedom that Gorbachev unleashed remain in force in Germany, Poland and the Baltics, as well as in many other former Soviet socialist republics. His legacy of freedom endures.
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