Before the coup, some Soviet spokesmen tried to sell the line that the West should help Gorbachev hold his country together. Just as Lincoln waged the Civil War to preserve the United States, they argued, Gorbachev needed to take whatever steps were necessary, including the use of force, to preserve the Soviet Union. Their analogy—which, tragically, even some leading Western statesmen parroted—was fundamentally flawed. While the United States is a multinational society composed of free individuals, the Soviet Union was a multinational state composed of captive nations annexed against their will. Legislatures in each of the thirteen colonies ratified the U.S. Constitution before it came into force, while Lenin and Stalin ratified the incorporation of fourteen republics into the Soviet Union through the use of force. In addition, while the union in the American Civil War fought for the higher moral cause of abolishing slavery, the secessionists in the Soviet crisis struggled for the higher principle of abolishing communism, another form of slavery.
The new sick man of Europe was doomed to die. The centrifugal nationalist forces within the Soviet Union did not stem from trivial origins. The Soviet nations opposed the center not out of a desire to fly their own flags or sing their own folk songs. They did so as a result of their profound traditions as sovereign nations—six of which had been either independent countries or part of another free country—and of the deep and abiding historical grievances of each against the brutality of the center’s Communist rule:
—In Ukraine, Stalin killed 5 million peasants during the collectivization of agriculture, 10 million through forced famines, and 3 million in suppressing the postwar guerrilla resistance, while more recently the Chernobyl disaster doomed an estimated 2 million people to premature deaths from cancer and other ailments.
—In Byelorussia, Stalin not only killed 100,000 people in purges and repression in the 1930s but also doomed 1.5 million people and 75 percent of the republic’s cities and towns to death and destruction through his half-witted military strategies in World War II.
—In the Baltic republics, more than 150,000 Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian guerrilla fighters died resisting Soviet rule after World War II, while another 540,000 were killed in purges or exiled to Siberia.
—In Moldavia, a young Leonid Brezhnev orchestrated the postwar subjugation of the newly annexed Romanian territory, ordering thousands of executions and shipping off 30,000 people to Siberian labor camps.
—In the Caucasian republics, 100,000 Azerbaijanis, 30,000 Georgians, and tens of thousands of Armenians were imprisoned, tortured, or killed under Stalin, with Armenia’s prisons so full at some points that basements of government buildings were converted into makeshift jails.
—In the Central Asian republics, Stalin crushed the anti-communist guerrilla forces that fought Moscow into the 1930s, while Khrushchev’s “virgin lands” campaign triggered a massive influx of Russian colonists and Brezhnev’s harebrained agricultural and development schemes wreaked ecological disaster throughout the region.
In light of the scope of these human tragedies—which have no parallels in American history—it was totally unreasonable to expect these nations to use their growing political freedom under Gorbachev to seek a new union with Moscow as its dominant political center.
Reform leaders in the non-Russian Soviet republics have more in common with Walesa and Havel, who opposed communism from the outside, than with Yeltsin and Shevardnadze, who at first tried to reform the system from within. Lithuania’s Vytautus Landsbergis, Latvia’s Anatolijs Gorbunovs, Estonia’s Arnold Ruutel, the leaders of the Ukrainian Rukh movement, and other democratic leaders at the republic level sought not only freedom but also independence for their nations. In the republics, strategies based on working within the system were discredited because to be part of the system was to betray the nation. As a result, the new republic leaders were not reform-minded Communists like Gorbachev but nationalists who led democratic popular fronts and who sought to free their nations through elections.
I must admit to a measure of skepticism when I was introduced to Lithuanian president Landsbergis, who had been a professor of musicology before entering the political arena. I tend to agree with the observation of an eighteenth-century European king who said, “The cruelest way to punish a province is to have it governed by professors.” With notable exceptions, such as Woodrow Wilson, great professors are seldom good executives. I have found that they tend to become mired in irrelevant trivia, to flit from one intellectual fad to another, and to lack the decisiveness needed in politics. But I soon discovered in the course of our exchanges that this musician was a very strong leader who talked pianissimo but acted forte.
In our conversation, Landsbergis mentioned that his favorite literary quotation was a line from Ibsen’s Enemy of the People: “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.” The Lithuanian president personifies the concept better than almost any leader I have met. Like Charles de Gaulle in World War II, Landsbergis knew that his only source of power was his absolute inflexibility on matters of principle. His insight and personal will enabled him not just to navigate the perilous course that ultimately led to the restoration of his country’s independence after fifty-one years of Soviet occupation. In concert with Yeltsin’s Russia, he and the other democratic nationalists in the non-Russian republics served as the indispensable backstop in the victory of the August 1991 revolution.
It was ironic that many Americans, particularly within the foreign policy elite, viewed the new nationalists in the Soviet Union with disdain or contempt. That has not been our traditional—and historically vindicated—approach to nationalism. Few other forces inspire loyalties as strong as patriotism. International stability requires the great powers to accommodate legitimate nationalist aspirations while reproaching the excesses of extremists. With the death of communism as an ideology, the force of nationalism inevitably—and rightly—has become the decisive element in defining the future of the Soviet Union.
Since Woodrow Wilson, American presidents have recognized the legitimacy of nationalist movements around the world. At Versailles, Wilson helped oversee the birth of the new nations of Eastern Europe. Roosevelt and his immediate successors pressed Britain and France to grant their colonies independence. During the French war in Indochina, Truman and Eisenhower kept their distance in order to avoid tainting America with European imperialism. During the Suez crisis, Eisenhower forced the British, French, and Israelis to abandon their attempt to retake the canal by force. It makes no sense for the United States to have pressed for the dismantling of the British and French empires, which were based on the values of European civilization, and yet to have attempted to prop up the Soviet empire, which was based on the ideology of communism.
• • •
These fundamental policy errors were rooted in a misunderstanding of the Gorbachev era. Gorbachev has profoundly changed the world and the Soviet Union. But to understand him—and to comprehend why he failed—we must look not just at his actions but at why he took them.
Many in Western media and diplomatic circles uncritically embraced Gorbachev as the champion of world peace and democracy. In 1990, Time magazine named him “man of the decade,” remarking, “He is the force behind the most momentous events of the 1980s and what he has already done will almost certainly shape the future.” One newspaper commented, “No single individual alive today has more impacted the course of modern history and directly contributed to a climate for world peace than has this Soviet President. Future historians will divide the post—World War II era in terms of ‘before Gorbachev’ and ‘after Gorbachev.’ ” Another editorialized, “Gorbachev has solidified his place as one of the world’s greatest peacemakers,” adding, “perhaps the United States could use a leader such as Mikhail Gorbachev.” Still another opined, “Gorbachev is a prophet.” He was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his “decisive” contributions toward easing East-West tension and advancing disarmament. Former president Reagan called the Nobel c
ommittee’s choice “wonderful,” while former prime minister Thatcher called it “terrific” and Chancellor Kohl remarked that he was “delighted.”
For six years, Gorbachev stood at the center of the deepening crisis. A complex man who rose to power under Brezhnev and Andropov but who ultimately rejected much of their political and economic legacies, he impressed the world with his personal grace, powerful intellect, and acute political sense. He had supreme self-confidence, iron self-control, and a healthy degree of self-esteem. Not as quick as Khrushchev, Gorbachev carefully thought through a proposition before he spoke. He was an homme sérieux, in both the literal and broader senses. Khrushchev tried to cover up Soviet weaknesses by bragging outrageously about Soviet superiority. Brezhnev had without question achieved nuclear parity, but still never missed an opportunity to insist defensively that the Soviet Union and the United States were equals as world powers. Gorbachev was so confident of the Soviet Union’s strengths that he was not afraid to talk about its weaknesses.
But Gorbachev was not, and is not, a closet democrat, secret capitalist, or furtive pacifist. Those who portrayed him as such missed the point. Gorbachev was not a one-dimensional personality. He was a troika: a loyal Communist, a patriotic Russian nationalist, and a brilliant pragmatic politician who liked power, knew how to use it, and did whatever he believed necessary to keep it.
In overhauling Soviet foreign policy and launching domestic reforms, he acted not out of choice but necessity. In 1985, shortly after Gorbachev took power, I asked Hu Yaobang, then the general secretary of the Chinese Communist party, whether the new Soviet leader would adopt economic reforms similar to China’s. “If he does not,” he answered, “the Soviet Union will disappear as a great power by the middle of the twenty-first century.” Hu was right: Gorbachev had no other option. To preserve the Soviet Union’s status as a great power, he had to retrench abroad and reform at home.
For over seventy years, Soviet economic policy served Soviet foreign policy. Under Gorbachev, foreign policy served economic policy. But it was a change of the head, not the heart. He knew that without access to Western technology, capital, and markets the Soviet economy would remain dead in the water. In each reversal of policy, he knew that he had to make whatever sacrifices were necessary to create an economic lifeline to the West:
—In third world regional conflicts such as Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, Moscow was wasting tens of billions of dollars and thousands of lives—plus alienating all of the world’s major powers—in order to advance at best peripheral interests. Gorbachev chose to scale back Moscow’s direct engagement in those conflicts, even at the risk of losing his clients.
—When anticommunist revolutions erupted in Eastern Europe, Moscow faced the choice between preserving its Communist regimes through force but losing the goodwill of Western Europe or permitting the collapse of empire but winning new and wealthy allies in Western Europe. Gorbachev chose to lose his satellites in the East in order to win support and aid from the West.
—With a resurgent United States under President Reagan embarking on its high-tech Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—which threatened to neutralize the Soviet advantage in first-strike land-based missiles—Moscow confronted the need to ante up hundreds of billions of rubles to stay in the game. After doggedly trying and failing to stop SDI through arms control, Gorbachev recognized after checking with his banker that the Soviet Union had to fold its hand.
—In the Persian Gulf War, Moscow had to choose between supporting its traditional ally, Iraq, and retaining its newly won respectability in the West. Though the Soviet Union helped Saddam Hussein covertly with military advisers and spare parts and sought to save him from decisive defeat through last-minute diplomacy, Gorbachev ultimately endorsed the U.S.-led coalition’s use of force to liberate Kuwait and to cut Iraq down to size. Gorbachev is not a stupid man. Faced with a choice of Iraq or the West, he chose the West.
As a pragmatic politician, Gorbachev sought to combat the apathy of the Soviet people by denouncing the Stalinist past, allowing criticism of the current system, and decentralizing some power to the republics. He also chose to shake up the Soviet establishment through glasnost, to seek leverage over the nomenklatura through the threat of further democratization; and to try to solve Soviet economic failings through perestroika. As a loyal Communist, however, he could not bring himself to cut his umbilical cord to the Communist party. He refused to institute genuine democracy—the Soviet people were still denied the power to change their central government through the ballot box—or to run in a competitive election himself. He rejected proposals to legitimize private property and to free prices. As a Russian nationalist, he refused to allow the non-Russian nations to exercise their constitutional right to secede, instead contriving a secession law harder to work than Rubik’s Cube.
To ask whether Gorbachev was sincere begs the question. Unlike his predecessors, he recognized the fundamental inhumanity of the system founded under Stalin. But like his predecessors, he sincerely believed that the ideology of communism remained the solution, not the problem. “I am a Communist, a convinced Communist,” he said in 1990. “For some that might be a fantasy. But for me, it is my main goal.” He reaffirmed this view in early 1991, saying, “I am a Communist and adhere to the communist idea. And with this I will leave for the other world.”
In November 1990, Gorbachev gave a candid speech to Soviet intellectuals that provided great insight into his heartfelt views. He described a conversation he had had with Shevardnadze in March 1985, shortly after taking power. Reflecting on the course of Soviet history, Shevardnadze had said that since the 1917 revolution “everything had gone rotten.” Gorbachev had stated that he concurred, that “we could not live as we had lived previously.” But in the rest of the speech he indicated that on two principles—retaining socialism and keeping the Soviet Union intact—he would not budge. He said, “There are the founders of Moscow News, and they will say, ‘President, stop assuring us and swearing that you are a follower of socialism.’ But why should I stop if it is a profound conviction of mine? I will not stop; I will not stop as long as I have the opportunity of doing things precisely in such a way.” On retaining the union, he insisted, “We must not split up. I came and said honestly at a Supreme Soviet session: ‘We cannot split up, comrades. Whether we like it or not, this is how things have turned out for us. If we begin to split up, there will be a war, a terrible war.’ ”
Gorbachev’s adamant refusal to abandon the discredited doctrine of socialism and to move away from the center’s imperial domination of the republics soon isolated him from the growing Soviet pro-reform movement. Outpaced by his own reforms, he resorted to rhetorical inflation, praising “democracy” and “free markets” and eventually even calling communism “an outdated ideological dogma.” But his actions did not measure up to his words. Increasingly, he appeared to become yesterday’s man. His Communist beliefs and his Russian nationalism were blinders constraining his vision of the Soviet future. Like a circus performer on a high wire, he swayed from side to side, never too far one way or the other. He knew that if he fell, there would be no safety net to catch him.
A key turning point came in September 1990, when he rejected the Shatalin five-hundred-day plan to transform the Soviet system into a market economy. He then swung decisively to side with the reactionary forces of the Communist old guard—the nomenklatura, the economic central planners, the KGB, and the military top brass. Real reformers turned against him and called for accelerated change, not retrenchment, insisting only full democracy and free-market economics could save the country. The brightest and the best left him and joined Yeltsin. He was left with yes-men, second-raters, and hard-liners who used him rather than serving him. The problem was not just that Communist hard-liners occupied the seats in the cabinet room but that their ideas formed part of Gorbachev’s mind-set. The hard-liners were not an incidental part of his administration but an integral part of his vision.
In making common cause with the reactionaries, Gorbachev rolled back some of his own reforms. He curtailed glasnost, sharply limiting the permissible criticism and opposition views presented in the media, particularly on television. Though he denied giving the orders, he endorsed after the fact the actions of security forces that led to the killing of twenty-one people by the brutal OMON internal security forces in Latvia and Lithuania. He denounced cooperatives even though they accounted for only 1 percent of GNP in 1990. He recentralized economic controls to strangle budding private enterprise. And in January 1991, he launched a much-heralded economic reform plan worthy of a Brazilian junta: its centerpiece was a confiscation of high-denomination currency that only served to further undercut confidence in the ruble.
In April 1991, Gorbachev appeared to recognize that he had turned down a dead end. Hard-line allies could guarantee his grip on power, but they provided no program to rebuild the country. Meanwhile, the reformers were gaining strength, with Yeltsin only weeks away from a massive mandate in the presidential election in the Russian republic. Gorbachev backpedaled toward the reformers. He initialed an agreement on the future of reform and a new union treaty with Yeltsin and the leaders of eight other republics, moving in some ways toward a more reformist line.
Seize the Moment Page 5