The Good Loser

E ven before he made it to the very top, Mikhail Gorbachev came across as a different type of Soviet leader (an impressed Mrs. Thatcher described him as someone with whom she could do “business”), but much of this was a matter of style over substance. He was energetic, approachable and, it seemed, open, here and there, to new ideas. After a period in which the USSR had been led by a senile drunk, an intelligent but ailing kidney patient, and an aged bag-carrier, it wasn’t much of a challenge for the energetic and outgoing Gorbachev, a stripling in his mid fifties, to make a good impression, both at home and abroad, when, in 1985, he took over in the Kremlin.

In his first speech as the Communist Party’s general secretary, Gorbachev included references to democratization and glasnost (openness), but these were words designed to signal only that he intended to mount a serious attempt to reverse the USSR’s all-too-visible decay. Drawing inspiration, even at this late date, from, dispiritingly, Lenin, he remained a true believer, not in what the increasingly moribund Soviet Union had become — for all its strategic power, no one with any brains could believe in that — but in what he still saw as the potential and the promise of the revolution that had set it on his way. This was a system, Gorbachev thought, that could be reformed from within, and on its own terms, with the planned economy revived and the party’s creativity unleashed by greater internal debate (that was what he meant by democracy).

But the Soviet economy, ruined by years of stagnation and decay, overburdened by military spending, and crippled by the built-in inadequacies of central planning, had even the slightest chance to deliver only one miracle: that somehow it might just manage to keep staggering along. Despite the additional pressures brought on by a low oil price, it probably could have done so, falling ever further behind the West, but rotting at a pace that would have been manageable by an authoritarian state prepared to suppress any manifestations of popular discontent. Something similar could be said of the broader Soviet system. It could have survived on its own terms, but only if those terms included, as they always had done, the party retaining a monopoly of power, and a willingness to enforce it.

We should not sentimentalize “Gorby.” While there is some evidence that he had some qualms about the way the Soviet Union was being run from early on in his career, he would not have risen so far and so fast within its totalitarian apparat without being considered both capable and ideologically trustworthy by those in charge of the party, many of whom had earned their spurs in the Stalin years and had track records to match. When Gorbachev, a tough Soviet politician, reached the Soviet pinnacle, he was set on reform as a practical necessity, not out of any particular sense of moral obligation.

Under the circumstances, when his initial “reforms,” many of them — a politically and fiscally catastrophic anti-alcohol campaign aside — little more than slogans, failed, and the economy’s problems grew more acute, it is to his enormous credit that he didn’t then revert to traditional Soviet-style repression. Instead, he went further and further along the route to democratization. But, despite acting at times at what seemed like (and, in many respects, was) remarkable speed, Gorbachev’s preference was almost always for the incremental, not the radical.

In part, this reflected the realities of Soviet politics. The party elite was infinitely less subservient to the leader than in Stalin’s day, and it was not, to say the least, a force for change. But incrementalism also reflected his own leanings. He wanted to fix the system, not tear it down. And this came at a human cost. The final prison camp for political prisoners was not closed until the end of 1987. The last Estonian dissidents were not released until 1988. It was another year before the emigration of Soviet Jews was fully liberalized. Gorbachev’s ingrained Soviet reflexes meant that he said almost nothing about what had happened at Chernobyl for two weeks. And all throughout this period, the war in Afghanistan raged on, ending only in 1989.

And in the end, this incrementalism was to doom him, He dragged his feet on the economic liberalization — those Soviet reflexes again — that might have ensured that the increasingly vocal peoples of the USSR — far freer now to speak out — were properly fed, clothed, and housed. Add to that fissile combination the resurfacing of long-suppressed nationalist discontent in Soviet “republics” that were, beneath insultingly unconvincing camouflage, the provinces of an empire, and it is difficult to imagine a better recipe for the disintegration of the old order. Within a tellingly short time, that’s what ensued. Gorbachev avoided, once again to his credit, resorting to violence to hold the Soviet Union together (probably: It’s unclear if he bears any direct responsibility for the blood shed by the authorities in Vilnius and Riga in 1991 or in Tbilisi in 1989). Whether he might have taken a harder line had his authority not been irrevocably broken by the attempted coup in August 1991 must remain one of history’s unknowns. He certainly did what he could during his last months in office, which was not much, to negotiate the survival of some part of a union that was rapidly falling apart.

We do know, however, that he had declined to intervene when, in 1989, the empire’s outer ring, the vassal states of Eastern Europe, states run by repressive regimes that he mainly left to their own devices, reclaimed their independence.

This was made easier for Gorbachev to accept by the relaxation of East–West tensions, an achievement that remains perhaps his greatest intentional legacy, albeit one that was neither his alone, nor, again, entirely voluntary. While he undoubtedly wanted better relations with the West, it was also in his interest to bring the Cold War to the end. Attempting to match the massive U.S. arms build-up under President Reagan not only added to the economic pressures he faced, but he also understood the ideological message being transmitted from the White House, 10 Downing Street, and elsewhere. The West’s useful idiots and neo-neutralists — so helpful to the USSR in the past — were, despite their best efforts, in eclipse. Mrs. Thatcher had thought the West could do business with Gorbachev, and Gorbachev realized that he had no reasonable alternative to doing just that, a process smoothed by the way his Western counterparts treated him, despite differences that could not be wished away, as a partner in the making rather than a foe in retreat.