The death of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, eighth and last leader of the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, has been marked by an outpouring of the usual media pablum. CNN headlined the news of his passing in these words: “Mikhail Gorbachev, former Soviet president who took down the Iron Curtain, dies,” and hailed him as the man who, in partnership with President Ronald Reagan, ended the Cold War. But this is to misunderstand his record and his legacy. It would be far more accurate to say that the Cold War ended Mikhail Gorbachev.
He was the first Soviet leader who fairly could be described as post-Stalinist. Born in 1931, the son of a poor peasant family, he had no adult experience of the tumultuous, terroristic Stalin years. Gorbachev became a Party member in 1952, less than a year before Stalin’s death in March 1953. Thus his career began in the Khrushchev era (1953-64), and this may fairly be said to have influenced his later political outlook. Nikita Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinization” campaign and his reform program, tentative and partial though they were, prefigured Gorbachev’s policies as General Secretary and President of the USSR. The fact that the older man failed and was driven from power was an omen. For the same—indeed worse—was to happen to Gorbachev.
From the day of its founding to the day of its demise, the USSR oscillated between a militant policy of “building socialism” and one of “reform Communism.” In Lenin’s time the former, then called War Communism, practically destroyed the state and its economy. Then came reform: the New Economic Policy. NEP salvaged the Revolution, but the price was high. The economic concessions made to the peasants and to small private entrepreneurs were concessions to capitalism in the eyes of the Party, whose raison d'etre was, after all, the destruction of capitalism and the building of socialism. Stalin shrewdly exploited this discontent in the Party to acquire supreme power—and having done so he embarked on a fresh campaign to build socialism.
And socialism was built—but again the price was high. The collectivization of Soviet agriculture and the transformation of the USSR into an industrial state were carried through by the most brutal methods imaginable: famine, mass murder, mass repression. It has been claimed—and it may be so—that the horrors of the Stalin years were justified by the USSR’s great victory over National Socialist Germany in 1941-45. But Stalin left an indelible mark on the socialist state he built, a legacy of terrible crimes against humanity that his successors in power smothered under a conspiracy of silence involving the whole nation.
This was the cause of Khrushchev’s fall. Recognizing that reform depended on an acknowledgement of the truth, he attempted to do so in his “Secret Speech” to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (25 February 1956; Gorbachev was present as a delegate). In this address Khrushchev criticized the Stalinist “cult of personality” and denounced, if only partially, the crimes of the late leader. His reform program was marked by a similar, careful allowance of “openness”: for instance, by approving publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a searing expose of the prison camp system known as the Gulag. But his comrades in the leadership became increasingly fearful that Khrushchev’s reforms would undermine the stability of the state. They too had lived through the Stalin era, and some may even have agreed in part with Khrushchev’s 1956 speech. But they were Stalin’s heirs and they judged—correctly—that the truth threatened to undermine the foundations of the state. For the sake of stability, for the preservation of their own power, the conspiracy of silence had to be maintained. So Khrushchev and his reform program had to go.
There followed what was to become to become known as the “period of stagnation”: Stalinism transposed from its major to a minor key. Though mass terror was no longer necessary, mass repression continued and even intensified. Up to a point this policy was effective, since the party-state supervised and controlled everything: politics, culture and society, the economy—the lot. Inefficiency and corruption might run rampant behind the scenes, but outwardly the USSR appeared to be a global superpower whose only rival was the United States.
The leadership group that presided over the period of stagnation was exemplified by Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary from 1964 to 1982. This leadership’s outlook may be summarized in a remark, perhaps apocryphal, attributed to Brezhnev himself: “Don’t talk to me about socialism. What we have, we hold.” And this they did for some twenty years, as the USSR’s power crumbled around them. It was against this background that Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power.
He became the spokesman for a group of Party members, mostly younger men and women, who recognized that the USSR was indeed stagnating. It was clear to them that the centrally planned economy was backward, inefficient, incapable of competing with the market economies of the West. True, it provided the population with a basic standard of living. But in the long run, the Soviet economy was doomed to fall farther and farther behind—to the ultimate detriment of the country’s status as a superpower. In short, Gorbachev and his like-minded comrades recognized that the USSR was losing the Cold War. He came to power with the intention of negotiating a truce with the West before his country’s defeat became obvious. Only thus could time be bought to carry through the necessary reforms. These fell under two headings: glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).
But no more than Khrushchev could Gorbachev square the circle of Soviet history. The price of stability was stagnation; the wages of openness and reform was dissolution. To speak truthfully about the real history of the USSR was to admit that it was indeed, as Ronald Reagan called it, an evil empire, steeped in the blood of countless victims. As this truth was dragged out of the shadows and openly discussed, the foundations of the party-state were progressively undermined. The USSR’s hegemony over the “people’s republics” of Eastern Europe came to an ignominious end. The peoples of the union republics clamored for autonomy, then for independence. The Party itself was first deprived of its “leading role,” then finally abolished. When the red flag atop the Kremlin was lowered for the last time on 26 December 1991, that merely formalized the death of the state that Lenin established, Stalin built, and Mikhail Gorbachev strove unsuccessfully to salvage.
In the salad days of his tenure at the top of the party-state, Gorbachev said that his reform program aimed to preserve the “socialist choice” embodied in the October Revolution of 1917. This was his and his country’s tragedy. For he was attempting the impossible: Preservation of the “socialist choice” was fundamentally incompatible with the reforms he envisioned. Nor was it to be expected that a group of democratic states would emerge from the wreckage of the USSR. The Party had risen to power and maintained itself there by destroying all competing institutions, political, social, cultural, economic. There was no such thing as civil society in the Soviet party-state; its collapse left a vacuum behind.
Mikhail Gorbachev was not only the last Soviet leader but the first one who could be called a humane and decent man. But looking over his career, one is tempted to repeat the old truism that the path to hell is paved with good intentions. It would be unjust to saddle him with the blame for Russia’s descent into V. Putin’s shambling, zombie-like replica of Stalinism. But he does bear a certain responsibility for the USSR’s fall and the catastrophic consequences thus visited on its peoples. Perhaps—perhaps!—they’d have been better served by some cold-eyed realist like Bismarck or Diocletian.