By David K.
Shipler
On March
15, 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev swore himself in as president of the Soviet Union.
The country had no transcendent institution with constitutional authority, so
Gorbachev administered his own oath as he touched his right hand to a deep red
binder holding the constitution, newly amended to contain some of the checks
and balances that would be necessary, but not sufficient, to create democracy.
It was a culminating moment of his
rule, which he had begun five years earlier as General Secretary of the
Communist Party. He stood on the broad dais of the Kremlin’s Palace of
Congresses, facing more than two thousand delegates who had just completed
fractious days of argument over how much power an executive branch should
retain.
That he died early this week, at
this pivotal moment for both Russia and the United States, reminds us what the
landscape looks like at the intersection of authoritarianism and democracy. Russia
is descending. The United States is at risk of doing so.
When it came to executive
authority, Soviet conservatives faulted Gorbachev for wanting too little, and
for courting disorder in the land. Liberals attacked him for wanting too much,
and for his canny parliamentary evasions to frustrate their demands. Watching
from the gallery and hearing the fears from both sides, I wondered how he and
the country could navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of dictatorship and
anarchy.
Those were the twin specters of
Russian history. Lurching from one to the other, the society had endured unruly
transitions, leaving a residue of apprehension about pluralistic politics and a
fondness for the strong hand at the top. Gorbachev was trying to lift this
weight of the past, but with a restraint that proved untenable. In the end, the
center did not hold. Reactionaries kidnapped him but failed to unseat him, and
their abortive putsch accelerated the centrifugal force of ethnic identities
that broke the country apart merely nine months after Gorbachev had recited his
oath.
Left was a great vacuum of national
esteem, a ravaged sense of dignity that now helps drive policy in Moscow.
Gorbachev came out of a subculture within
Soviet Communism, a quiet, reformist impulse that ran parallel to the
self-glorifying propaganda of the party apparatus. He came of age as Nikita S.
Khrushchev, in his so-called secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in
1956, stunned officialdom by revealing and denouncing the demented abuses of
Stalin. Party members whose parents had disappeared into the labor camps knew
of the atrocities, but mainly on the limited territory of their own experience.
The larger scope, now disclosed, suddenly gave the lie to the reverence for
Stalin that had animated patriotism and nourished cohesion.
Khrushchev thus wrote the first
chapter of de-Stalinization. Thirty years later, Gorbachev wrote the second.
Free speech is risky in a system
long closed to introspection, and Gorbachev did not appreciate its uncontrollable
fluidity. At first he allowed the press to examine current ills: alcoholism,
corruption, drugs, prostitution, homelessness, teenage runaways, police
brutality, street crime—most discussion of which had been previously taboo.
Then came increasing candor about the Stalinist years: the 20 million dead in
the purges, the decimation of the officer corps, the cruelties of
collectivization, the atrocity of famine, the non-aggression pact with Nazi
Germany.
It was a dizzying time of
truth-telling that infected individual citizens as fear drained out of them.
Once guarded behind a glass shield of formulaic conversation, many relaxed into
honest discussion, flexing their minds and searching themselves for their own
thoughts. Their stories from the past poured into newspapers and magazines. The
journal Ogonyok published a letter from a prison camp guard who had lost
his health and his honor, prompting a confession in reply from a former secret
police investigator who begged forgiveness from those he had tortured, whose
faces still haunted him at night. His letter went unpublished because it was
anonymous—“My children and grandchildren do not know the whole truth about me,”
he wrote.
Gorbachev evidently meant to
liberate discourse and contain it at once, and specifically to insulate Lenin
and the Bolshevik Revolution from the onslaught of irreverence. To stop the
ruthless examination of history at the Stalinist era proved impossible, however,
and soon the flood of criticism and reexamination coursed backwards into the
past until it consumed Lenin and the revolution as well, hitherto sacred tenets
of the country’s pride.
A poster boy of professional emancipation
was Yuri Afanasyev, once a compliant historian, who began to denounce Lenin
until, at the congress that approved the constitution, he condemned the
Bolshevik leader as responsible for “the institutionalization of the state
policy of mass violence and terror.”
An echo of
this was heard in 1993 from an unlikely figure: Aleksandr Yakovlev, the former
Politburo member and chief architect of Gorbachev’s policy of openness. At a
conference, I asked if they’d known where they were going when they began. No
idea, Yakovlev replied. They had the mistaken notion that they could reform the
system. If it had been a socialist system, he said, it could have been
reformed. But it was a fascist, totalitarian system, he continued, and a
fascist, totalitarian system cannot be reformed, only destroyed.
When did
Gorbachev realize that? Yakovlev answered at the time: He still doesn’t. That’s
why we no longer speak.
Stripping
away the myths of a brutal history looked exhilarating from the West, and to
some Russians as well. The country was alive with nervous excitement. But the
truth-telling also eroded Russia’s pose of historical honor. It stole from
Russians their foothold in their past, as if Americans were to lose pride in the
founding fathers, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and
the Constitution.
Adrift, humiliated, and without a
sense of national purpose, Russians have since searched for points of dignity.
Some fix on the country’s heroism during World War II or reach back to the imagined
glory of the czars. Nostalgia for something that could be called Russianism—a
purity of culture, language, and religion—feeds a xenophobic ethnocentrism, a
yearning for a single truth and a firm autocracy, and a strong distaste for the
West. In making war on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin plays to some of these
reactionary impulses, while also trying to hold them in check.
So, Gorbachev leaves a
contradictory legacy. The history written in the West will cast him as a
pivotal figure whose bold liberalization led, inadvertently, to the collapse of
communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In Russia he is detested in
many quarters, precisely for the same thing. Without a basic reformation there,
he will not be treated kindly as Russians write their own history. Taking myths
from people is never popular.
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