The Promise and Failure of Gorbachev's Legacy

 

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.

The Origins of Cold War II

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The new Cold War, which now grips Europe and the United States, is not all Russia’s fault. A seed was sown in the American assurances broken by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who reversed verbal pledges to refrain from expanding the Atlantic military alliance toward Russia. The Russians didn’t get it in writing, and some analysts doubt that commitments were made, but official records of conversations suggest American bad faith.

That past doesn’t excuse Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive effort to reconstruct Russia’s sphere of influence. He has ignored one commitment that actually was put in writing, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which obligated Russia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” Negotiated in exchange for Ukraine’s relinquishing Soviet nuclear weapons stationed on its territory, it was brushed aside by Putin in 2014 when he annexed Crimea from Ukraine and began an ongoing proxy war against Ukrainian forces in the country’s east.

There are myriad reasons for Putin’s own expansionism, including Russia’s historic anxieties about the West’s political and military encroachment. Nevertheless, the past American behavior helps explain his distrust of the U.S., his sense of victimization, and his worries about national security. As exaggerated as those concerns might appear to the West, whose alliance has not threatened to attack Russia, they are amplified by Moscow’s experience with Washington after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has said that he was “swindled.”

Declassified documents tell the story of how American officials led the Russians to believe that no expansion would be undertaken by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), then later nearly doubled the size of the alliance. Russian and American transcripts and summaries of high-level meetings, posted in recent years by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, record multiple assurances in the early 1990s.

America Without Heroes

By David K. Shipler

Nobody believes in anything.

--Katya Polikanov, age 17

Moscow, 1978

                The trouble with statues is that they are carved in stone or cast in bronze, unyielding to the fluid shifts in surrounding sentiment. They cannot easily be revised. So they are erected in one time and toppled in another, and neither their creation nor their demise carries the nuances and contradictions of the real world. Statues that are celebratory and monumental represent myths, not true history.

                Some national myths are useful as long as they set high standards that the nation aspires to achieve. These include the founding myth of equality and liberty, the myth of racial acceptance, the myth of the American Dream’s promise that hard work brings prosperity, the myth of blind justice holding impartial scales. The distance between the myth and the reality is a gap we should seek to overcome.

Therefore, as Americans rally to tear down and deface the offensive symbols of a shameful past, it is worth considering what vacuums will be opened and how they will be filled. A country without heroes, which is what the United States is becoming, can be a land adrift, susceptible to demagoguery and absolutism. The challenge is to make the empty pedestals into foundations of conscience and self-correction. If destruction is the only result, trouble looms.

                Most historical figures are complicated, not one-dimensional. Statues, on the other hand, are rarely complicated. They honor and revere, nothing more. And they can perpetuate perverse notions of virtue. The Confederacy was not a noble enterprise, unbecoming as an expression of pride in Southern identity and culture. Surely there is more to the traditions of the South than treason, slavery, and a lost and bloody cause that left scars on America. Heroic sculptures of anti-heroes, and military bases named after them, have no place in an honest society.   

But they are part of history, it is argued. Yes indeed, and history should not be erased. Dictatorships do that with abandon to suit momentary political doctrine. But neither should history be sanitized and distorted. Let the Confederacy be taught by scholars who parse the competing impulses of its leaders. Let museums educate in context. If Confederate figures are retained in public squares, let them be accompanied by their opposites: abolitionists, slaves who joined the Union Army, memorials to all the useless deaths of that war. If Jefferson Davis must have a statue, stand Abraham Lincoln beside him.

The risk comes not from cleansing the countryside of abhorrent characters but by the spreading outrage of iconoclasts who want to obliterate too widely. President Teddy Roosevelt is coming down from before the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, despite his legacy of national parks—one of the country’s finest treasures. The problem is the demeaning portrayals of an African and a Native American by his side. You can’t edit bronze. As Bret Stephens suggests, a new statue would be appropriate for a president who “busted trusts, championed conservation, and caused a scandal by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine with his family in the White House.”

Francis Scott Key and Ulysses S. Grant were deposed in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Key owned slaves and defended slavery. Grant, however, had a foot on each side of the divide. He came from an abolitionist father and married a Southern woman whose slave-owning father gave him a man named William Jones. Grant, then a struggling farmer in Missouri, also employed freed blacks, and he freed Jones before the Civil War, then led the Union army in its defeat of the South. As President, he supported blacks’ rights during Reconstruction, ordered his newly formed Justice Department to go after the Ku Klux Klan, and endorsed the 15^th Amendment giving the vote to African Americans. But his policies on Native Americans were mixed. He wanted citizenship for them, and he tried to negotiate peace, but met fierce resistance from Congress and the Board of Indian Commissioners. Ultimately he sent the army into a series of bloody battles with tribes, enough to cost his monuments their justification.

Since real human beings are never perfect, it might be legitimate to regard certain statues as monuments to ideas rather than to people. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a womanizer, unfaithful to his wife but instrumental in raising the conscience of the nation. Should his name be scrubbed from streets and schools, his statues removed because of his philandering? Of course not. As of 2020, at least, King’s statues are safe, as they should be.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were walking contradictions, both slaveholders but central to the democratic values that ultimately made the country freer and more inclusive than they could have imagined. Protesters took down Washington’s statue in Portland, Oregon, then spray-painted it with “1619,” the year the first enslaved Africans landed on the continent. But what if Washington were cancelled out of our history? Would the American Revolution have succeeded? Would the disparate states have relinquished autonomy to form a union? Without Washington as the presumed president, would a consensus for the Constitution have been possible?

These were flawed leaders who transcended their limitations at a crucial juncture of history. Their ideas have proved larger than themselves. If we see them clearly—Jefferson in particular—we see ourselves vividly, in the ongoing clash between our faults and our principles.

Jefferson was a patriarch of the American idea. His declarations on individual liberty still serve as a moral and political compass, yet his belief in the racial inferiority of blacks also endures, embedded in the stereotypes that afflict African Americans today. He abhorred slavery as a “fatal stain” but never abolished it, not as governor, not as president, not as plantation owner. He owned enslaved people inherited from his father and his father-in-law, including Sally Hemings, with whom he had at least one child, DNA tests have shown, and probably five others.

His draft of the Declaration of Independence included an excoriation of slavery as a “cruel war against human nature, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty.” He called it “piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers” and accused England of engaging in “execrable commerce.” He was pained when the Continental Congress deleted this denunciation.

Yet in his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, he describes white skin as “preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers the emotions.” He asserts that blacks “secrete less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor.”

He sees less ability than whites to anticipate consequences. “They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome,” he writes. “But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present.”

He portrays blacks as primitive in sexuality, emotional capacity, and creative powers. “They are more ardent after their female; but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient.  . . . Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. . . . Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.” And so on.

Do we cancel Jefferson because of this? If we do, then we cancel ourselves, for alongside his prejudices, he nurtured momentous concepts of liberty. They remain alive, essential to the progress that the nation craves.

Countries without proud histories suffer. When Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, just seven years after the teenager quoted above assessed her society as lacking in belief, he tried to open the door to historical condemnation—only partway. It was suddenly permissible again to criticize Stalin, as Nikita Khrushchev had allowed in the 1950s. In the bold second chapter of de-Stalinization under Gorbachev, the press was mostly freed to spread the dictator’s crimes before the public, which heard from officials and ordinary citizens who had been witnesses, victims, or even perpetrators. Capricious arrest and exile, mass execution, famine, and even Stalin’s failures in World War II were under scrutiny. It was a heady time.

The delight was hardly unanimous. Many conservative, antidemocratic citizens were uneasy and resentful that their history was being trashed, especially when other Russians took the denunciations farther than Gorbachev intended. They expanded back in time, condemning all that had been revered from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution on. An ecstasy of revisionist truth-telling swept the country, bringing down statues of Lenin and his henchmen, revising the names of streets and other public places. Leningrad reverted to St. Petersburg, as under the czars, whose era of reign became a font of nostalgia.

Lenin’s mausoleum remains in Red Square, but the November 7 anniversary of his revolution is no longer observed. With the exception of the victory against Germany in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War, the reverence for modern Russian history has been practically extinguished.

No sensible argument can be made to preserve it, given the monstrous nature of the Communist Soviet Union. But the psychological effects were instructive. In the vacuum, a kind of chaos developed—economic and political primarily, but also spiritual. A weightlessness was felt, with nothing much to grab for steadiness. Where in this exhilarating change could you get a foothold to find solid ground again? I asked Russians at the time. There were no good answers. Who are your heroes? I asked them. There were no good answers. Instead, they have settled on a strong hand at the top, abandoning—at least for a while—their search for pluralistic democracy.

The United States is not at all like the Soviet Union, obviously. But we have no heroes, either. We are not divinely ordained to be a pluralistic democracy, either. And if we discard those whose ideas we rightfully revere as pedestals of that democracy, because they were not also saintly human beings, we lose more than the statues.

Foreign Policy: The Magnetism of the Center

By David K. Shipler

            The forces of international affairs usually drive US presidents toward the political center. Wherever they may begin, on the left or the right, presidents tend to feel pulled toward a middle ground, a place of more moderation and hesitation than they might prefer. Confronted by the complexity of crisis and the pragmatic limitations of power, most—not all—end up pursuing centrist policies. These bear marked resemblance to those of their predecessors and successors.

            A question now is whether this happens to President Trump. He has staffed his key foreign affairs positions with relatively level heads whose pronouncements are more sober than his own. They often contradict Trump’s dogmatic, threatening tweets and the absolutist, sweeping pledges from his campaign. Trump himself careens from the absurd, scary, and impractical to a more reasonable zone of compromise. Where he will end up on a given issue is highly unpredictable and therefore unsettling across the globe. But his inconsistency also raises intermittent hopes that realities are penetrating policymaking.

            A president has more authority in foreign policy than in domestic affairs, since he commands both military force and diplomacy, and can move more quickly than Congress ever does in picking over budget provisions on the tax code, health care, environmental issues, the social safety net, and other government programs to benefit Americans. In that domestic arena, the center has no apparent magnetism for Trump. Despite the difficulties he faces with the Republican-controlled Congress on health care, for example, he is getting win after win for corporations over individuals, and might do so on his tax proposals. Whatever happens in Congress, his regulatory agencies are in the hands of extreme radicals of the right, whom he has installed to dismantle decades of progress.

 So if Trump begins to look moderate, and beguiles the American public to see him as such, it will be in the international arena, not the domestic.