Back in Gorby’s USSR
A hefty political biography assesses the triumphs and failures of the Soviet Union’s final leader.
It’s getting hard to remember the years when the whole world knew what glasnost and perestroika meant and when Mikhail Gorbachev seemed capable of making a democratic, open society out of the USSR. GenSec of the old Communist Party from 1985 to 1991 and briefly president of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev
promised a more peaceful world and real material benefits for the Russian people. Instead, after a short burst of democracy, Russia reverted to its default setting of autocracy and extreme nationalism under the “postmodernist dictator” Vladimir Putin.
Gorbachev is now 86 and widowed (Raisa, his astute wife of 46 years, died of leukaemia in 1999). History has passed him by and moved on. So what is a fair judgment of his achievements?
A Pulitzer Prize winner for his hefty biography of Khrushchev, American Russophile William Taubman tries to answer that question in 700 closely printed pages. Only the first 200 deal with Gorbachev’s life before he took power – his peasant family origins, university study of law, dutiful rise through party ranks to become organiser of his region’s Komsomol (CP youth movement) and ascent to membership of the Politburo. As the average age of Politburo members was 72, Gorbachev, still in his fifties, promised some generational shift. Apart from a brief coda on Gorbachev’s retirement years, the remaining 500 pages are a blow-by-blow, almost day-by-day, analysis of Gorbachev’s
seven years of national leadership.
To put it politely, this is heavy reading – sometimes positively stodgy. Taubman is not the man for pithy aphorisms or
witty one-liners, but he is a man for facts. Truckloads of them. Still, many of them are revealing.
It is clear that, as part of glasnost, Gorbachev wanted a complete accounting of all Stalin’s crimes, including the extermination of much of the peasant class. But complete historical accounting was one thing that old hardliners resented in Gorbachev. They turned against him in part because – as Putin was later to do – they wanted to maintain the myth of continuous Soviet achievement. Like-minded military men were behind the failed coup against Gorbachev.
In Taubman’s view, Gorbachev erred in not reorganising the economy before he democratised politics. As well as allowing masses of banned books to be unbanned and free speech to flourish, glasnost also meant huge public protests at shortages and the malfunctioning economy. Just two years into his leadership, it was Gorbachev himself who was blamed for these things. This made an opening for the “authoritarian populist” Boris Yeltsin.
Taubman also implies that Gorbachev became addicted to adulation he received from Western leaders, “strikingly warmer” than his “frigid encounters” with East European Communist leaders who wanted to uphold the Soviet empire that was visibly crumbling.
In the end, this huge book confirms the common-sense view that in trying to reform Soviet communism, Gorbachev proved it couldn’t be reformed. He was patching up a rust-ridden engine that was falling apart. But Taubman gives him points for his vision, even if history has yet to make a definitive judgment on him.