The Last Bolshevik (Part II)

It is uncontroversial to say Gorbachev was tragically fated to have drunken Boris Yeltsin as the main Russian political figure emerging from his domestic reforms and the United States' National Security State as his greatest clueless foreign adversary. Gorbachev's revolutionary reforms were unmet constructively by the domestic forces unleashed, while possibilities offered for a new, vibrant international order were quashed by American intractability deriving from an unquenchable and destructive lust for unconstrained power.

Domestically, the greatest problem Gorbachev invoked was the loosening of central control at the top failed to unleash a corresponding vibrant democratic force below. Rather than building a constructive democratic order, formerly suppressed political energy, most especially that of the intelligentsia unleashed by Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, exclusively sought to dismantle the top.

The action that proved most fatal to the Union was in seeking to get around party control by building independent governing structures, Gorbachev created the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union. Members were elected in the nation's first truly competitive elections. Kotz and Weir report Gorbachev's intentions,

“We believe that [the party ’s] vanguard role cannot be imposed on society; this role can only be earned through an active struggle for the interests of workers . . . The CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) will carry out its policies and will fight to preserve its mandate as a governing party within the frame-work of the democratic process, and via elections to the legislative bodies in the center and on the periphery.”

With these elections, Boris Yeltsin's, who Gorbachev had brought to Moscow as a reformer, ascendancy began. It's not without great historical irony future dictator Putin's rise to power began with these Gorbachev mandated elections, to date the freest and fairest in Russian history. Once in power, Yeltsin himself would completely disregard future election integrity. In his role as an independent, newly elected Deputy, Yeltsin quickly became the main opposition voice to Gorbachev and the leading force for dismantling the Union itself, a dissolution Gorbachev never favored.

The elections revealed for all to see the incredible unpopularity of the Communist Party. Kotz and Weir write,

“Communist Party officials were defeated, including some who faced no opponent but suffered the indignity of having a majority of voters vote 'no.' This fate befell Yuri Solovyev, leader of the Leningrad regional party organization and a candidate member of the politburo. Local party leaders fared particularly badly in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev.”

Phew! When you lose an uncontested election, that's unpopular!

The new Deputies' Congress immediately gave rise to forces for the dissolution of the Union. From the beginning, the Soviet Union was comprised of numerous non-Russian national groups, some older than the Soviet Union, some like Ukraine, established by the Bolsheviks. Russia was by far the largest national entity with Moscow the seat of the Union's power. The Deputies generated massive centrifugal forces away from this center.

Yeltsin rode these waves, quickly becoming the leading force for the Soviet Union's dismantlement by calling for the independence of the Russian state, and thus the independence of all the other smaller “republics.” At the end of 1991, the Union was dissolved, notably once again, peacefully. Against all Gorbachev's intentions, the Soviet Union was no more.

Just as Gorbachev's reforms were not constructively met domestically, in either spirit or action, the foreign response followed suit. The Soviet Bloc of Eastern Europe formed after World War II consisted of the nations Soviet troops had liberated by pushing back Hitler's Germany invasion of Europe – a war costing over 20 million Soviet lives.

While the Soviets freed these countries from Nazi tyranny, they installed a new Soviet yoke that never sat well upon their necks. Violence was continually necessary to instill order. In four decades, Soviet troops actively suppressed the populations of East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. By the late 1960s, just as inside the Soviet Union, the communist parties of the Soviet Bloc saw their national economies and politics stagnate.

Gorbachev removed the Soviet yoke, unilaterally pulling out Soviet troops, allowing these nations self-government and uncoerced interdependence. Just as with Soviet domestic reforms, the Bloc's reforms unloosed massive centrifugal forces. In less than two years, from 1989 to 1990, every country in Eastern Europe saw the fall of communist rule.

Many of Gorbachev's detractors ignore the unpopularity of established communist rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. That these regimes fell literally overnight, like the recent fall of the two decades American installed Afghanistan government, attests to their lack of wide popular support. Uncritically blaming Gorbachev for their fall is simplistic, deliberately misleading, or both. These regimes' weaknesses could only be shored-up with violence, which Gorbachev adamantly and consistently refused.

For Americans, those who remember Gorbachev give him a certain respect, though completely ignorant, as all good Americans, of America's National Security State unhelpful actions in response to his reforms. Gorbachev's unilateral ending of the Cold War was constructively met neither half-way or almost in anyway. US focus, just as much of the focus inside the Soviet Union, became solely the dismantlement of the Union. To say Gorbachev caught his American counterparts by surprise is an understatement, it completely dumbfounded them.

Forty years previously, in the name of countering a misperceived existential Soviet threat, the US National Security State was created. Over time, massive bureaucracies were instituted in Washington, while trillions of dollars were allocated across the American economy for weaponry, all focused on a hysterically generated fear. Gorbachev removed the threat. The American National Security, just as desperately in need of reform as its Soviet counterpart, failed to take advantage or even understand.

Zubok sums up the American position four years into Gorbachev's reforms,

“The Bush administration, on whose cooperation Gorbachev and other Soviet reformers had counted so much, watched with growing amazement the revolutionary developments inside the Soviet Union, and then in Eastern Europe. A junior member of the administration, Philip Zelikow, recalls that the White House was closely following how Gorbachev would react to the Polish elections. ‘That was the key test, and boy has he been passing it.’ And yet Bush and Scowcroft just could not believe that Gorbachev was letting Eastern Europe go. Scowcroft’s deputy, Robert Gates, was convinced that Gorbachev’s reforms would fail, and the Soviet Union would return to its belligerent ways. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney thought that ‘the Soviets were as dangerous as ever, and despite its friendlier tone, communism remained just as evil as Reagan had once preached.’”

Zubok adds,

“On the second day of the summit he unveiled his surprise for the Americans―but it was not the one that Bush and Scowcroft feared. ‘I want to say to you and the United States,’ Gorbachev said solemnly, ‘that the Soviet Union will under no circumstances start a war. The Soviet Union is no longer prepared to regard the United States as an adversary.’ For the Soviet leader, this was a fundamental statement, a foundation for all future negotiations, but Shevardnadze and Chernyaev noted that Bush did not react.”

The pathetic hubris of Bush's Treasury Secretary Nickolas Brady quite horribly reveals the inability of America's Cold War elite to in anyway change forty years of entrenched thinking. Brady bellicosely declares, “What is involved is changing Soviet society so that it can’t afford a defense system. If the Soviets go to a market system, then they can’t afford a large defense establishment. A real reform program would turn them into a third-rate power, which is what we want.”

To get the third-rate power armed with nuclear weaponry they wanted (and eventually got), the US continually refused Gorbachev's requests to help fund essential economic reform. In the end, the US National Security establishment abandoned Gorbachev for Yeltsin. In the words of Richard Nixon, one of darkest and most depraved political figures the Cold War produced, their policy is explained,

“‘Yeltsin could be a revolutionary leader . . . He has the animal magnetism, he has the ruthlessness.’ The US government, Nixon concluded, should shift its support from Gorbachev to Yeltsin and his able advisors. This change could cause Gorbachev’s displeasure, Nixon admitted. ‘But we must remember that he needs us far more than we need him,’ and it was both morally right and in America’s national interest. Nixon also learned something else from Yeltsin. ‘He knows that there’s no future for the Soviet Union. None . . . If Russia has any future, Yeltsin is it.’”

Russia's future turned bleak indeed. Most ironic, Yeltsin provided the American National Security State the Union's dissolution they craved and immediately flipped against Gorbachev's democratic reforms. Upon reaching power, Russian President Yeltsin turned tanks on the Russian parliament and with the American funding always denied Gorbachev, initiated a radical economic restructuring, resulting in a new oligarch Russian ruling class.

It was Yeltsin's last move to bring handpicked, future dictator Vladimir Putin to power. Yeltsin's completely destructive decade rule is ignored outside Russia. It inflicted massive economic tribulation, desperation, and despair on the majority of Russians. Kotz and Weir's book is especially good on this period. In the minds of most Russians today, Yeltsin's Russia is Gorbachev's legacy.

Most Gorbachev's detractors fault him for not reasserting central control by using violence. Zubok opines, “A much more logical path for the Soviet system would have been the continuation of Andropov-like authoritarianism, which enjoyed mass support, combined with radical market liberalization.” Leaving aside the disproved notion the Soviet dictatorship “enjoyed mass support,” this is basically what Yeltsin practiced, resulting in horrific consequences.

Many claim Gorbachev should have followed the Chinese path, but this was not a path opened to the Soviets. Zubok very astutely concludes,

“Gorbachev could not release the energy of the peasantry in the way Deng did: Soviet agriculture, no more than 20 percent of the total workforce, had long been a state-subsidized business. China could leave its old industries, 15 percent of the total economy, alone, while creating a new market industrial sector. The Soviet economy was industrialized to an absurd extent, and its mono-industrial cities had no chance of surviving under market conditions.”

“Industrialized to an absurd extent” is a wonderful description. Unlike the Soviets, the Chinese for two and half decades under Mao underwent ceaseless political turmoil, but not a period of rapid industrialization. Upon Deng's ascension to power, China remained an overwhelming subsistence agrarian economy. Gorbachev inherited a very different economic situation dominated by entrenched, inefficient to the point of absurd industrial power structures resistant to change. China faces a similar situation today. Their recently established industrial infrastructure, while maybe not quite as absurd, is incapable of meeting the changing needs of China and its people.

This point is essential, though little understood, for any examination of the paths Gorbachev chose. For example, Gorbachev's policies of glasnost were designed to create a politics that could change a stagnant, misguided industrialism that had become both productively nonviable and ever more environmentally destructive. Today, the Chinese seek not glasnost, but a centrally controlled clampdown that will inevitably fail to gain the results they seek, including the Communist Party's continued monopoly on power.

The challenges Gorbachev faced three decades ago of stagnant and environmentally destructive industrialism entrenched in a dysfunctional political system, are similar challenges much of the world, including the US, face today. Gorbachev quickly ran into the limits of industrial Marxist-Leninist thought for providing answers, while also encountering the just as constraining limits of established industrial capitalism. Both undemocratic systems, Gorbachev correctly believed democracy could open needed new paths to the future.

In the end, the greatest problem Gorbachev encountered was the complete lack of political alternatives to industrial society developed over the last two-centuries. As an example, Zubok writes,

“Gorbachev remained uncomfortable with the concept of private property: he kept asking whether there was some way to achieve the same level of economic efficiency through collective ownership. He was concerned that “the mafia would buy up all the enterprises that went on sale” and disenfranchise workers’ collectives.”

Yeltsin's Russia proved him completely prescient, while the fall of the Soviet Union had proved its ruling doctrine already untenable.

From its inception, Bolshevism was radical and violent. The last Bolshevik, Mikhail Sergeyevich, demands a rethinking of this legacy. Gorbachev was radical in the true Latin meaning, “getting to the root.” His fundamental understanding that democracy was decentralized goes back to Ancient Athens. He encountered head-on the greatest problem all democratic reformers face today, the inability of the archaic agrarian structures of modern republicanism to effect change upon industrial oligarchy.

Gorbachev's most radical legacy is his continual refusal to use violence to keep power. He acted with a deep historical understanding of human community combined with a new understanding of the technological and environmental necessity of transcending the violence at the foundation of so many established human institutions. For a political figure not just of the 20th century, but across recorded history, he was was unique, though not peculiar. The end of Gorbachev's story has yet to be written. If it concludes in failure, it will not be his alone, but all of ours.

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