http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2007/09/07/105.html
Gorbachev's Coup
A new collection of essays by Archie Brown looks back to perestroika to explain
the Soviet Union's collapse.
By Rodric Braithwaite
Published: September 7, 2007
These days Mikhail Gorbachev is being airbrushed out of history. When Boris
Yeltsin died a few months ago, Western obituarists rushed to hail him as the
man who ended the Cold War, dismantled the Soviet Union and introduced
democracy into the New Russia. In fact, Yeltsin did none of these things. But
few of the commentators bothered to recall the Gorby- mania that swept the West
in the dying years of the Soviet Union: If they mentioned Gorbachev at all, it
was to deride him for trying to remain true to his communist past, for bungling
economic reform, for shoring up a Soviet Union that was clearly doomed.
Archie Brown is the dean of Gorbachev experts, and in his latest collection of
essays, "Seven Years That Changed the World," he points out that these
judgments are as crude as they are superficial. Many of the essays have
appeared before; they are now supplemented with the fruits of his mature
thinking and new archival material, and set out, systematically and
persuasively, the case for a more sober perspective.
The trouble is that sobriety is very difficult to achieve. The events are too
recent and still arouse too much emotion, above all inside Russia itself. The
debate will continue for a very long time to come: After all, we are still
arguing about the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. But the
questions are clear enough. Why did the Soviet Union collapse when it did?
Could it have been reformed? Could it have long survived in its unreformed
state? Its disappearance was a cataclysmic event, both for Russia and for the
rest of the world: Why did it happen with so little expenditure of blood?
The roots of the Soviet collapse go back well before Gorbachev was anywhere
near the top of the system. In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union was already in
serious trouble. The economy was faltering, growth rates were down and the
government was forced to turn for grain to its Cold War enemy. Nikita
Khrushchev tried a variety of ingenious expedients to jumpstart the system.
These harebrained schemes, as his enemies in the Politburo rightly called them,
were a failure, and he lost his job.
His successors were equally unable to devise effective remedies. At a loss as
to what to do next, they allowed the country to bumble along, spending vast
sums on a military machine which was itself losing its way despite a glittering
array of new weapons squeezed out of a national economy that could not afford
it. There was a small margin to spare for the ordinary Soviet consumer, enough
to give people the feeling that things were getting better. There was political
repression, too. But it was no longer on a mass scale, and so did not affect
most people, who rather liked the political stability that seemed to come with
it.
But the successive deaths of the Three Old Men -- Leonid Brezhnev, Yury
Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko -- forced the survivors to realize that things
could no longer go on that way. They elected as general secretary Gorbachev --
young, energetic, imaginative, from the right peasant background, with a wealth
of practical experience and a good Party member to boot. Gorbachev identified
three main problems: nuclear confrontation, imperial overstretch of the Soviet
Union and a stagnant economy. His remedies were unprecedented.
Itar-Tass
By December 1990, the reforms that Gorbachev introduced had taken on
their own momentum.
Little more than a year before Gorbachev became general secretary, a foolishly
ill-judged NATO exercise ("Able Archer") simulated a nuclear strike so
convincingly that the Soviets began to gear themselves up for retaliation.
Appalled at the prospect of nuclear war by accident, Gorbachev took his courage
in both hands, and sought a negotiation with Ronald Reagan, the archpriest of
anti-communism. Luckily for him, Reagan turned out to share his intense dislike
of the nuclear weapon -- to the dismay of both men's professional advisers.
But once the process of dismantling the Soviet Union's military and imperial
positions had begun -- under constant political and economic pressure from the
Americans -- it would have been hard to stop. Nuclear disarmament led to
conventional disarmament. Withdrawal from outposts in distant continents led to
withdrawal from Germany and Eastern Europe. The Army came home. There was
nowhere for it to live. Not surprisingly, the senior officers turned against
Gorbachev. Many were involved in the attempted coup against him in August 1991.
Gorbachev saw that the gray stagnation of the Soviet economy, its inability to
match the vitality and inventiveness of Western capitalism, was not only due to
the burden of empire and a bloated war machine. A stodgy political system
inhibited imagination and enterprise. Gorbachev believed that the inventiveness
of a talented nation could only be unleashed by letting ordinary people take
more control of their lives through some form of democracy. He freed the media
and then organized the first contested elections to be held anywhere in the
Warsaw Pact. In March 1989, Soviet voters threw out Party bosses all over the
country, and transformed the nation's politics.
Without the freedoms that Gorbachev introduced, Yeltsin might have remained an
unconventional but authoritarian provincial Party boss. Gorbachev's new
politics made it possible for Yeltsin to mount his tank and to defy the men who
made the putsch. But it was Yeltsin -- not Gorbachev -- who four months later
announced, without consulting the people, that the Soviet Union had ceased to
exist; and who reached naturally for the gun to resolve his political problems
with the unruly Russian parliament in 1993, and with the Chechens in 1994.
The Soviet Union may well have been doomed, even if Gorbachev had not tried to
reform it. But as Brown persuasively argues, its demise could have been much
more protracted. It could have been much more bloody, too, and spilled over
into an incalculable international confrontation. It was in significant measure
thanks to Gorbachev that a terrible threat was lifted from a world that had
skirted nuclear annihilation for four decades. That is something for which we
should be profoundly grateful.
So should Gorbachev's countrymen. But for very many of them he is the
incompetent, vacillating and pusillanimous traitor who fatally undermined a
great power, and who drove them into poverty and near-starvation in the winter
of 1991-92. The simultaneous collapse of the Soviet state, its political and
economic system, its military power and its international prestige, to the
undisguised satisfaction of its rivals and enemies, was a humiliation that few
Russians could forget or forgive. They made Gorbachev the obvious scapegoat and
turned to the more authoritarian Vladimir Putin to restore their self-respect.
But it is implausible to attribute the whole historical process to one man,
whether you like him or not. Gorbachev could not have single-handedly brought
down an otherwise healthy superpower. But he did, in Bismarck's words, "hear
God's footsteps marching through history, and ... catch on to His coattails as
He marches past." Although he made serious mistakes, his political courage and
ingenuity began the process of transforming the Soviet Union into a modern
country at ease with itself and the outside world. The transformation can only
come to fruition over many decades, and then only with luck and with many fits
and starts. But that is the historical perspective against which Gorbachev will
eventually be judged.
Rodric Braithwaite was British ambassador in Moscow from 1988 to 1992 and is
the author, most recently, of "Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War."
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