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A few kind words for Gorbachev
Dan Rottenberg
The unthreatened political leader:
A few kind words for Gorbachev
DAN ROTTENBERG
To the National Constitution Center, Mikhail Gorbachev is one of history’s great leaders: the man who in six whirlwind years courageously liberated Eastern Europe, dismantled Soviet Communism and terminated the Cold War, all without the firing of a single shot. But to our own critic Robert Zaller, Gorbachev was one of history’s great losers: “He lost his country,” Zaller wrote recently in Broad Street Review. “He lost a superpower. He lost the greatest land empire ever seen. And he did it all on his own.”
When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Zaller reminds us, “his nation was one of the world’s two superpowers, the largest contiguous state empire in human history, and the co-victor of the greatest war ever fought…. No one doubted its viability, or even dreamed of its imminent demise.” But of course these perceptions, widespread though they may have been, were mistaken. In fact the Soviet Union was a gigantic Potemkin Village where, as the Russian joke went, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” The image of an effective and benevolent system was perpetuated largely by repressive regimes that dispatched dissidents to gulags and armies into the regime’s rebellious colonies.
Zaller faults Gorbachev for ignoring Machiavelli’s dictum: “The science of politics boils down to two things: getting power, and keeping it.” This is the rule followed not only by Gorbachev’s famous predecessors— Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Stalin and Lenin— but also by his successor Vladimir Putin, by Deng Xiaoping (who fired on student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989), by Hitler, by Mussolini, by Ivan the Terrible, by Attila the Hun and indeed by virtually every insecure ruler throughout history.
An Italian lesson
Gorbachev was the remarkable exception: a man uncorrupted by power and seemingly unthreatened by truth or by the prospect of change. As a young Soviet diplomat in Italy in the 1960s, Gorbachev noticed, while driving through the countryside, that the poorest Italian peasants seemed to live better than most Russians. Unlike most ambitious politicians, he was unable thereafter to banish this observation from his mind. When, incredibly, he nevertheless rose to the top of the Soviet system two decades later, Gorbachev sought to salvage a bankrupt system by opening it up. When the system proved beyond salvage, he acquiesced in the peaceful liberation of the system’s satellite countries. When the Russian Federation itself demanded liberation from the Soviet Union, Gorbachev acquiesced to that, too.
Machiavelli’s aptest students— Hitler, say, or Napoleon—were dislodged from their empires only by military force and at a cost of millions of lives. Gorbachev dismantled his empire peacefully and voluntarily. Instead of asking what was best for him or his empire, he asked what was best for the people he ostensibly served. He was that rarest of government role models: a public servant who actually ponders how he can best serve the public.
Bush’s failure, and Clinton’s
Certainly it’s true, as Zaller contends, that Russia’s greatest problem is not so much 70 years of Communism as 500 years of authoritarianism. It’s equally true that the greatest credit for Communism’s demise belongs to its subjects who first courageously spoke truth to power. It’s also true that in the wake of Communism’s collapse in 1991, many Russians found themselves worse off than they’d been beforehand. And it’s indisputably true that, in the ‘90s, the Bush I and Clinton administrations erred egregiously by treating the Russians as defeated enemies instead of potential allies.
But we haven’t yet reached the end of history. To me, the critical point concerning Gorbachev is this: When Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and other critics spoke up, he did not shut them up. He listened, he encouraged them, and ultimately he followed their advice. We Americans should be so lucky with our leaders.
It’s true, of course, that in a sense Gorbachev was one of history’s great losers, as Zaller contends. But that depends on how you evaluate defeat. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were great losers too, and so was Jesus Christ. These guys played not by Machiavelli's rules but by St. Mark's, specifically: What doth it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul?
A few kind words for Gorbachev
DAN ROTTENBERG
To the National Constitution Center, Mikhail Gorbachev is one of history’s great leaders: the man who in six whirlwind years courageously liberated Eastern Europe, dismantled Soviet Communism and terminated the Cold War, all without the firing of a single shot. But to our own critic Robert Zaller, Gorbachev was one of history’s great losers: “He lost his country,” Zaller wrote recently in Broad Street Review. “He lost a superpower. He lost the greatest land empire ever seen. And he did it all on his own.”
When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Zaller reminds us, “his nation was one of the world’s two superpowers, the largest contiguous state empire in human history, and the co-victor of the greatest war ever fought…. No one doubted its viability, or even dreamed of its imminent demise.” But of course these perceptions, widespread though they may have been, were mistaken. In fact the Soviet Union was a gigantic Potemkin Village where, as the Russian joke went, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” The image of an effective and benevolent system was perpetuated largely by repressive regimes that dispatched dissidents to gulags and armies into the regime’s rebellious colonies.
Zaller faults Gorbachev for ignoring Machiavelli’s dictum: “The science of politics boils down to two things: getting power, and keeping it.” This is the rule followed not only by Gorbachev’s famous predecessors— Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Stalin and Lenin— but also by his successor Vladimir Putin, by Deng Xiaoping (who fired on student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989), by Hitler, by Mussolini, by Ivan the Terrible, by Attila the Hun and indeed by virtually every insecure ruler throughout history.
An Italian lesson
Gorbachev was the remarkable exception: a man uncorrupted by power and seemingly unthreatened by truth or by the prospect of change. As a young Soviet diplomat in Italy in the 1960s, Gorbachev noticed, while driving through the countryside, that the poorest Italian peasants seemed to live better than most Russians. Unlike most ambitious politicians, he was unable thereafter to banish this observation from his mind. When, incredibly, he nevertheless rose to the top of the Soviet system two decades later, Gorbachev sought to salvage a bankrupt system by opening it up. When the system proved beyond salvage, he acquiesced in the peaceful liberation of the system’s satellite countries. When the Russian Federation itself demanded liberation from the Soviet Union, Gorbachev acquiesced to that, too.
Machiavelli’s aptest students— Hitler, say, or Napoleon—were dislodged from their empires only by military force and at a cost of millions of lives. Gorbachev dismantled his empire peacefully and voluntarily. Instead of asking what was best for him or his empire, he asked what was best for the people he ostensibly served. He was that rarest of government role models: a public servant who actually ponders how he can best serve the public.
Bush’s failure, and Clinton’s
Certainly it’s true, as Zaller contends, that Russia’s greatest problem is not so much 70 years of Communism as 500 years of authoritarianism. It’s equally true that the greatest credit for Communism’s demise belongs to its subjects who first courageously spoke truth to power. It’s also true that in the wake of Communism’s collapse in 1991, many Russians found themselves worse off than they’d been beforehand. And it’s indisputably true that, in the ‘90s, the Bush I and Clinton administrations erred egregiously by treating the Russians as defeated enemies instead of potential allies.
But we haven’t yet reached the end of history. To me, the critical point concerning Gorbachev is this: When Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and other critics spoke up, he did not shut them up. He listened, he encouraged them, and ultimately he followed their advice. We Americans should be so lucky with our leaders.
It’s true, of course, that in a sense Gorbachev was one of history’s great losers, as Zaller contends. But that depends on how you evaluate defeat. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were great losers too, and so was Jesus Christ. These guys played not by Machiavelli's rules but by St. Mark's, specifically: What doth it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul?
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