A little sympathy for Gorbachev
His criticisms of the West in Berlin were probably the least he could say in the intolerant Putin era, writes Eric Morse.
In the wake of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, spare a thought for Mikhail Gorbachev.
The 83-year-old last Soviet leader has been harshly criticized for his recent remarks in Berlin. He decried a mood of “triumphalism” in the West following the breakup of the U.S.S.R., warned of “a new Cold War,” and called for dialogue and the lifting of sanctions. Given that the dialogue he is calling for would be with his distant successor Vladimir Putin, who respects no dialogue but that of force, that is specious on the face of it. But in his own time Gorbachev did engage in dialogue, and may truly believe it is possible. It’s worth remembering that as a result of his dialogue with the United States the Soviet Union ended, and Gorbachev is reviled by millions of Russians as a result.
Gorbachev was always brave — as a law student in 1948 he attacked Communist colleagues in a party meeting for supporting Stalin’s final purge — but what he said in Berlin was probably the least that he could say, considering he has to live with a regime that is now intolerant of any criticism. Opponents are harried abroad or jailed on trumped-up charges no less asinine than those of the great show trials of the 1930s. In Putin’s eyes, Gorbachev is a despised relic of defeat in another time and place, to be trotted out on the very rare occasions when the regime has a use for him.
We often forget that Gorbachev neither foresaw nor desired the end of the U.S.S.R. He
Putin is trying to rebuild something that never was, by means that can never succeed.
knew something was wrong with the system he had grown to power in, but it wasn’t until after 1983, when he became acquainted with Soviet ambassador to Canada Alexander Yakovlev, who was very much a humanist and freethinker, that he began to conceive glasnost and perestroika, which like many political platforms, were more ideas than considered policies.
Gorbachev understood that the moribund Soviet economy could no longer sustain strategic competition with the West and a war in Afghanistan, but could have had no idea what loosening the political strings would lead to. Soviet/Russian society had been so isolated for so long that there was no real ability among even the intelligentsia to view anything other than through a single lens, and the Stalinist ethnic policy slogan “national in form, socialist in substance” imposed as heavy a chain on the Russians as it did on the minorities.
In the end what the Russian people saw was capitulation, economic collapse and the end of empire. Gorbachev did not expect to be deposed in the putsch of August 1991. (Yakovlev had seen it coming, was the target for most of the hardline opposition of the day, and later assailed Putin’s brand of virulent nationalism before his own death in 2005.) Gorbachev also did not realize, when he was restored three days later, that it would be as a figurehead for Yeltsin’s “internal putsch” that in three months saw the end of the U.S.S.R.
Putin has called the breakup a “geopolitical tragedy,” but he sees it primarily in terms of power. Twenty-three years ago, watching families separated by arbitrary borders, careers smashed, life savings wiped out and ethnic conflicts kindled, I would have agreed with him at least on the “tragedy” part. The Soviet Union was never pretty and could be horrific, but it was what they had, and they lost it. Putin is trying to rebuild something that never was, by means that can never succeed.
Whatever he may be allowed to say now, Gorbachev probably understands that.