Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Premier of what was then the Soviet Union, died August 30, 2022, at age ninety-one. He was a Promethean yet tragic figure, brought down by the very dragons of “glasnost” (transparency) and “perestroika” (restructuring) he’d unleashed—ironically, to save the Soviet system, not collapse it. But things had just gone too far when Gorbachev came to power in 1985: the repressive regime that had been in power since 1917, ruled for sixty-eight years, was too far gone, too rigid and unyielding, for his reforms to take hold. The Russians and other nationalities that made up the Soviet public, for nearly three generations, had never known freedom or democracy, nor had the generations before it, under the Czars; fragile, newborn democracy in Russia and the other Czarist-held territories was definitely a fragile, newborn thing, existing substantively only from February 1917 to October 1917, by the old Russian calendar—only from the overthrow of the last Czar until the coming of the Bolshevik Revolution; and during this time the Russian government was weak, inept, and saddled with participation in the unsustainable World War it had inherited from the very Czar it overthrew. Freedom and democracy in such a Russia took on the dimensions of a Greek tragedy: where the very Fate the protagonists do not understand, and had no role in deliberately creating, are yet undermined by, and driven to destruction, by it. Such was the fate of Gorbachev’s “glasnost” and “perestroika”—the newly-found freedom and democracy they created became a centrifugal, dividing, force, not a unifying, constructive one.
Gorbachev was born March 2, 1931, in a small village in southern Russia, which of course, was later collectivized under Stalin. Gorbachev’s father, a Communist Party member, became manager of the collective farm. His two grandfathers, however, became victims of the Gulag, but, unusually, survived and returned home to their villages. Gorbachev entered Moscow State University, the Soviet Union’s most prestigious, and joined the Communist Party in 1952. Much an orthodox Soviet Communist, his eyes began opening under his experience at the University, and later, by Khrushchev’s famous speech on Stalin, which Gorbachev called “courageous.” While at Moscow State, he befriended a young Czech student, who became both his lifelong friend and a leader in the Prague Spring of 1968. As a rising Communist, Gorbachev visited France, Italy, Canada, and West Germany, and was struck by how much higher the standard of living was in those countries as compared to the Soviet Union, even though the Soviet Union was also a developed country. He also visited Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring, and became a supporter of it. A member of the Central Committee, and later the Politburo, Gorbachev acceded to power in 1985 at the youngish age of fifty-four, after not only the death of septuagenarian Brezhnev, but also the death of near-septuagenarian (69) Yuri Andropov, who succeeded Brezhnev only to die a short while later; and then octogenarian Chernenko, who also died shortly thereafter. Now Premier and head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev embarked on his course of reform, in which he met heavy opposition from both Party hard-liners and from vested interests, notably the collective farm and military-industrial complex lobbies. Gorbachev also had the misfortune to accede to power during the tenure of Ronald Reagan as President of the U.S., an inveterate (invertebrate??) Cold Warrior and far-rightist who spurned Gorbachev’s peace and arms reduction proposals with harsh “evil empire” rhetoric directed as the Soviet Union and the regimes of Eastern Europe. So, despite high initial promises and expectations, Gorbachev’s ambitious agenda of “glasnost” and “perestroika” sputtered, and he found himself isolated until, finally, his former ally, now nemesis, Yeltsin, walked into Gorbachev’s office on Christmas Day, 1991, and bluntly told Gorbachev the Soviet Union was over, and that he was out of a job.
When in power, Gorbachev realized just how much the military defense was draining the Soviet economy, now that he had access to statistics denied even to high-ranking Central Committee and Politburo members—and was shocked to find out that the Soviet military-industrial complex absorbed 40% of state spending, an unsustainable reality for his plans for a better society, in which ordinary citizens would also gain to benefit. He did succeed in arms reduction deals with his U.S. counterpart, Reagan, despite the latter’s Cold Warrior intransigence. But his dreams or “glasnost” and “perestroika” never really took off: what Gorbachev planned as a unifying course of action turned out to be a disintegrating one, as long pent-up individual, societal, and ethnic people’s animosity, now unleashed, became centrifugal forces that tore apart, rather than rebuilt, the Soviet Union. (The whole of this struggle on the part of Gorbachev is told very well, and in much more detail, by a young scholar, Chris Miller, in his 2016 book, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press].) Thus did Gorbachev see his visions of “glasnost” and “perestroika” not galvanize Soviet society and public opinion, but instead, pent-up demands by non-Russian peoples for independence dismantled the Soviet state; U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs’s notion of economic “shock therapy,” i.e., overnight transformation of the economy from a state-owned collectivist one to a neoliberal capitalist one, carried out under Yeltsin, who succeeded Gorbachev in power in the Russian state, completed the death sentence of Soviet-style “socialism.”
Gorbachev was also a critic of strongman Putin’s dictatorial ways. Today, Russia has reverted to what it was in Soviet times, a one-party dictatorship under one “maximum leader,” Putin, who carries out only sham elections and imprisons, and even kills, his opponents—same as was done under Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev! (Only a capitalist one, of course.) Further, while the Soviet Union had been a superpower, second only to the United States in many areas, now it is a much-diminished economy and society, with a GDP today only about the size of Texas.
Gorbachev, the last “Leninist” in power in the Soviet Union due to his heading the Communist Party, was as innovative as had been Lenin—in ways antithetical to Lenin, of course, and in an attempt to further, not truncate, socialist democracy. His was a failure, but to this author, a glorious failure. We of a socialist bent would be better to hope for more Gorbachevs, and fewer Lenins. More socialist democracy, and less authoritarian collectivism dominated by the state, and the one-party clique that controls the state: which made Soviet-style “socialism” more akin to a company town, where the controllers of the state are both monopolists, selling “their” workers the goods and services they need and want, and monopsonists, the sole purchaser of labor power. The only exceptions are those specifically carved out by the state: exceptions to the rule that are officially allowed; with the only other course being the black market. Such is hardly an inspiring “socialism” that would attract millions of toiling masses in capitalist societies—and indeed, such a “socialism” has failed to do so. Let us of a socialist bent be honest about this, and admit it.
After
removal from power, Gorbachev became a has-been in the new Russia, ignored when
not despised for allegedly “destroying” the Soviet Union. His “communism” was more social democracy
than Leninism, and he himself admitted admiration for the German Social
Democratic Party, and chaired the small Social Democratic Party in Russia until
2004. If he was a nearly forgotten
has-been in his native Russia, he won accolades and awards in the West. And yes, his vision of socialism through
“glasnost” and “perestroika” is compelling, and a far cry from what we and
generations of leftists before us have come to regard as “socialist.” But imagine:
a socialism without Gulags, or the dreaded 3:00 A.M. knock on the
door. A socialism where everyone has the
right of free speech and speaking their minds, reading a free press, writing
what they wish to write, without fear of censorship, or feeling the “necessity”
of self-censorship. A socialism that is
governed by a free and fair democratic electoral system, with multiple
candidates vying for office, and multiple parties running candidates. As socialism that enshrines the “bourgeois
freedoms” as enshrined in, say, the Bill of Rights, where “life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness” can be taken for granted. And, of course, a socialism where not
everything is controlled by the state, and is allowed only under state aegis,
but where the “free development of each is the condition for the free development
of all,” to quote from the Communist Manifesto. In short, a socialism where the individual,
as well as the collective, matter, and where the individual finds his and her
self-determination naturally, “with liberty and justice for all.” Such is the socialism that might have been,
had Gorbachev succeeded, and for the lack of which we as socialists will
continue to pay for—through the nose, if history is any guide.
