There Should Be A Better Thread for Gorbachev

I think he tried to do something that was difficult and deserves credit for that, so I am starting a new thread.

I hate to remove this from unanswered posts but forgot to add that I wonder what my co-workers who may have grown up in Eastern Europe or Russia think about Gorbachev. (I don't feel I know them well enough to ask.)

I've always liked him, or my idea of him.

Putin may think that the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and USSR was tragic, but the speed with which those nations evicted their governments and uncoupled themselves from the USSR would argue that the people most familiar with that domination loathed it. Every other leader of the USSR up until him did choose to violently crush any and all independence movements, killing or imprisoning millions of people over the decades. Gorbachev chose not to send in the tanks. Whatever other crimes he may have countenanced during his rise to power, that restraint is to his everlasting credit.

I learned for the first time from his obituary that he grew up in a peasant family and made his way up the party ranks.

Does anyone recommend Remnick's Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire or any others? Is it true that the West could have done more while Gorbachev was in power to ease economic adjustment in Russia? Could this have happened during Democratic Presidencies in the U.S., or with other sympathetic governments?

I recommend William Taubman's 2018 bio.

Thanks. Requested.

I think the clinton/yeltsin relationship answers the question about how democratic administrations handle things - a world where any kind of democratic social order not totally subordinated to the market is allowed to survive or develop is a world with a different 20th century

I find it hard to see the collapse of the soviet union into neoliberalism, oligarchy, nationalism and nihilism as anything other than a world historical tragedy compounding the world historical tragedy of the USSR

putin supports russian empire not the USSR and blames lenin for semi-successfully putting a damper on russian nationalism for a while

(Possibly Clinton/Gorbachev, or even Obama/Gorgachev if one dared to hope, could have resulted in different trajectories. Good point about Putin supporting a Russian empire, not the USSR.)

Youn: one interesting thing about him is apparently he's the only USSR leader who was born after it was formed. This makes his place in its history somewhat unique, as a 'young' guy in his 50s who still believed in the system beset on all sides by the crises of the late 80's.

If you feel up to it later, maybe ask what those co-workers think. He's a polarizing historical figure and even the people who hate him often do so for completely different reasons.

Aimless: on the whole I see your point - he was no dictator and didn't pull a '56 or '68. But in more than one instance he absolutely sent in the tanks. The warm memory that he "didn't send in the tanks" is because these things happened outside Russia proper, were on a smaller scale and did not succeed, and were quickly overshadowed by the drama of larger events.

implicit in most of the obits I've read and scanned seems to be the idea that the USSR could have held itself together, perhaps even to the present, if not for Gorbachev's ineptitude/naivete/other personal failing ... I don't find that plausible

I might try asking. Maybe his ambivalence on nationalism had to do with growing up in the old Soviet system and Communism. Beliefs about nationalism/imperialism could be the hardest to change.

I don't think Gorbachev's stance toward the West was ever like the stance of China's leaders during its economic transition. I believe but may be mistaken in thinking that Gorbachev in part initiated the change in relations with the West at that particular time.

Perhaps the West has also treated Russia with greater respect than it has China. Or perhaps suspicions on both sides in both situations would have been and are too great for the West to have done or do anything to improve economic conditions (and reduce environmental consequences).

Has any formerly Communist government privatized its assets without oligarchies or monopolies and widespread poverty as consequences? (Reunification is a special case. Particularly compelling would be transitions from difficult economic conditions.)

One thing of note (I just heard this on NPR) was that he didn't enrich himself by looting the state, unlike all the corrupt kleptocrats that followed him

implicit in most of the obits I've read and scanned seems to be the idea that the USSR could have held itself together, perhaps even to the present, if not for Gorbachev's ineptitude/naivete/other personal failing ... I don't find that plausible

― Brad C., Wednesday, 31 August 2022 19:00 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I found this TLS review of a book by Vladislav M. Zubok called 'Collapse: The fall of the Soviet Union' interesting, the book argues that the USSR could have survived if Gorbachev had done what the Chinese did and embraced free-market reforms while also maintaining the one-party state and ruthlessly cracking down on pluralism and separatism, but that this was basically the inverse of Gorbachev's whole project

(quotes from the relevant paragraphs of the review hidden so people don't have to scroll past them if they're not interested)

Zubok saves his most withering scorn for Mikhail Gorbachev, the West’s darling. “The Soviet Union fell victim to a perfect storm and a hapless captain”, Zubok notes, and proceeds to illuminate how the general secretary’s ill-conceived reforms unhinged a functioning economy. Even more culpably, for Zubok, Gorbachev mulishly pursued “a voluntary and unprecedented devolution of power”, which subverted the Soviet state. And when his self-inflicted destabilization became evident, Gorbachev – to Zubok’s fury – did nothing. Or, rather, the Soviet leader staged ever more talk-fests, dawdled over emergency economic transition plans, and jetted abroad to soak up the global limelight. Belatedly, the author concedes that Gorbachev was an ideologue, a believer in the “messianic idea of a humane socialist society”. The combination of “ideological reformist zeal with political timidity” makes for grim reading. “My father”, a son of Deng Xiaoping confided to an American journalist in 1990, “thinks that Gorbachev is an idiot.”

Zubok dismisses nearly the entire corpus of writings on the Soviet collapse, yet almost all his arguments ring a bell – although he omits the one about how Gorbachev’s temporizing averted Armageddon. Hardliners, Zubok argues redolently, proved too hapless to remove Gorbachev in time to halt his unwitting liquidation of the system. But Zubok further avers, as those hardliners did at the time, that the Soviet leader should have overthrown his own reformist self. The author perceives a grand opportunity in February–March 1990, when Gorbachev could have imposed “presidential rule”, rolled back the rights of the Soviet republics, and forced through the “radical” market reforms of his adviser, Nikolai Petrakov. “It would have been a huge gamble, but it was still feasible and could have changed the climate in the whole country”, the author asserts. How a committed anti-capitalist with democratizing tendencies could have become the opposite of himself remains unclear. Gorbachev did gesture in the hardline direction, but hesitantly, and, Zubok writes, “the window of opportunity closed: 1990 continued and ended as the year of wasted opportunities”.

Along with countless members of his generation, Zubok has migrated from champion of Gorbachev, then of Yeltsin, to contemptuous detractor of both. “A much more logical path for the Soviet system”, the apostate now asserts, “would have been a continuation of Andropov-like authoritarianism, which enjoyed mass support, combined with radical market liberalization.” He adds: “even the KGB officers would have supported state capitalism and privatization, just as they later did under Yeltsin and Putin”. But Gorbachev’s pie-in-the-sky “socialist democracy” was not personal whimsy. Fantasies of communist revival via political liberalization arose from deep within: in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and again in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Stirrings of communist ideology, so often given up for dead, kept resurfacing until they finally killed the communist monopoly. And because only the Party pyramid overrode the Soviet federal state, wrecking the Party broke the Union. Zubok seems uninterested in what the peoples of the Baltics, Caucasus or Ukraine might say about his Andropov nostalgia. His trajectory tracks that of the underappreciated Zinoviev, who excoriated communist lies, lived for decades in the West but found it pampered and hypocritical, and eventually returned to Russia, alternately praising and criticizing Putin, while defending the lost Soviet state.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/russia-soviet-union-putin-brezhnev-book-review-stephen-kotkin/

ok, it's only hidden the first of three paragraphs for some reason, nvm

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6b/19/21/6b19213510702193bd81c2034b1d8941.jpg
Once upon a time...

I think Zubok and others who believe that there was a viable path to economic reforms within the existing power structure are minimizing how broken the USSR's economy was by the 1980s and how sclerotic the leadership class had become ... the best evidence of the incapacity of the nomenklatura to pull off anything like that might be how they failed to maneuver Gorbachev out of office, waited until August 1991 to attempt a coup, and then couldn't pull it off

This review made for interesting reading and touches on some of the questions raised ITT:

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/democracy-and-discipline/

In The Triumph of Broken Promises, Fritz Bartel advances the ambitious proposal that “the economic forces unleashed by the 1973 oil crisis ultimately brought the Cold War to a peaceful end and gave rise to the neoliberal global economy of the late twentieth century.

First, East and West, rather than constituting separate worlds, faced remarkably similar contradictions in the 1970s and ’80s, and were thus faced with having to make strikingly similar decisions...

“Currency crises bedeviled Western societies, while debt crises came to haunt Eastern ones. But Western currency crises and Eastern debt crises were different manifestations of the same thing: international capital’s loss of confidence in the viability of a nation’s economy.” And so, “whether it was Thatcherism in Great Britain, monetarism and deregulation in the United States, perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union, or roundtable democratization in Poland and Hungary, governments in power adopted these forms of new think­ing because they appeared to provide the ideological and political means required to achieve the end of breaking promises.”

Bartel’s second big claim rests on the undeniable fact that Western democratic capitalism succeeded in breaking promises, thus ensuring regime continuity. Meanwhile, state socialism in the East failed, and the regimes crumbled—quickly. What is arresting here is the contention that democracies were better at imposing economic discipline than authoritarian states.

From the same review, re: the economic fate of former communist countries -

The trade-off is even more suspect in the successor regimes in the Eastern Bloc as a whole. Former World Bank economist Branko Milanović has written that most people’s expectations on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall were that capitalism would “result in economic convergence with the rest of Europe, a moderate increase in inequality, and consolidated democracy. They are fulfilled most likely in only one country (Poland), and at the very most in another, rather small, two (Estonia and Albania).” This balance sheet means that “1 out of 10 people living in ‘transition’ countries could be said to have ‘transitioned’ to the capitalism that was promised by the ideologues who waxed about the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets.”

I don't think I understand, or agree with, the view that Gorbachev was responsible for what happened after he left office - for the massive privatisations of the 1990s, and down to Putin's Russia.

As far as I ever understood it, Gorbachev was trying to steer the USSR on a different and better democratic and post-Stalinist path than that. The Russia of the 1990s was, at least, not what he had wanted to see.

Poster Brad C also seems correct in stating that the USSR would have broken up or ended anyway, so it's not Gorbachev's particular fault, or achievement, that it did.

I agree with poster Left that the history of the USSR was itself a world-historical tragedy.

There was a UK academic who grew up in the USSR on the radio yesterday talking about Gorbachev. She said many of her family admired him, but then added they were academic/nomenklatura folk who didn't suffer the privation that the average Soviet citizen did because of how badly wrong his liberalisation policies worked out for them.

collapse probably seemed inevitable as soon as other revolutions failed and was confidently predicted with every famine, change in leadership, (re)introduction and (re)abolition of capitalist elements, splintering of the international left (from individuals to parties to other "socialist" states) - the strangest thing is how it didn't happen until the century was nearly over - socialism probably collapsed (to the extent that it was ever established) long before the union did

any serious explanation for both the survival and collapse has to account for the varying forms and levels of state repression and popular support and resistance, deal with local and world capitalism (and anti-capitalism) in a way that's waaaaay more complex than the usual liberal or stalinist "socialist east vs capitalist west" or the anarchist/ultraleft "capitalist state like any other" narratives (not that those are always wrong but they are if they're totalising), as well as reckoning with the equally complex and contradictory and changeable relationships with fascism, imperialism, nationalism, the legacy of tsarism, a bunch of other stuff I haven't considered - I'm certainly not the person to do it and I'm not sure any one person can

one of the hardest things about trying to understand both soviet and post-soviet life is how uneven the effects seem to have been (contrary to the public lines of ideologues of either system) xp

I'm going to read that zubok book as soon as I've finished a few of the 30 others I'm in the middle of

basically everyone I've met from the region (almost all economically compelled to move west- before the war at least) has been v unhappy with the state of things back home even though most of them have also been anti-communist

"But there was one aspect of Gorbachev’s project that eventually made perestroika irrelevant. His generation was no longer young: the new Komsomol elites whose ascent had been stymied for so long were no longer invested in the survival of the socialist order, much less the building of communism. Even ordinary young people had never experienced the promise of communism as anything other than the rote pablum of bosses and hall monitors. Although it was foiled by a variety of material and structural obstacles, in a broader cultural sense Gorbachev’s bid for renewal was obsolete before it even began: having successfully forged a culture in which moderately affluent consumption was paid for by rote obeisance to political ritual, the Soviet Union could never return to the aspirations of earlier decades. Soon, Gorbachev would be shunted aside by a more cynical generation: full-throated free-marketeers like Boris Nemtsov and opportunistic entrepreneurs like the future media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky."

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/kids-those-days/