THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is an object lesson in the dangers inherent in moving a corrupt, highly-centralised autocratic government in which the individual is a servant of the party and state to a fairer and more open society in which the state is the servant of the people.
That is not to detract from Gorbachev’s greatness. His policies of perestroika and glasnost helped to bring an end to the Cold War. But they also opened the door to the rise of dangerous Russian nationalism and Vladimir Putin.
Gorbachev did not set out to topple the Soviet empire. He was a true believer who was convinced that communism was the path to political nirvana. His mentor was Mikhail Suslov whose primary role was to keep the Politburo on the ideological straight and narrow.
The problem was that the Soviet Union of the 1980s was not communist. It was a planned economy with the financial levers in the hands of the Party. But even more so, it was a corrupt, oppressive, geriatric oligarchy with a rapidly failing economy that was unable to support its military establishment and political control of Eastern Europe.
The “Era of Stagnation” - as Gorbachev dubbed it - started in the mid-1970s under Leonid Brezhnev with a clampdown on human rights and an emphasis on heavy industry and the military establishment. Soviet consumers were ignored. Between 1975 and 1985 the Soviet economy grew at a miserly average rate of 1.8 percent a year. The income of Soviet man dropped. Bribery, long queues and shortages were endemic. The state-controlled media and statistical bureau reported the exact opposite. Everyone knew they lied.
The exception to this economic plunge was the Party faithful. They were allowed to buy Western consumer goods in special hard currency shops and the Politburo were chauffeured from office to luxurious dacha in Zil limousines.
When Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982 there was a power struggle between the reformist wing led by Yuri Andropov and the old guard led by Konstantin Chernenko. Andropov won and then died 15 months later. Chernenko succeeded him only to die after just 13 months in the top job. The hierarchy swung back to the reformist wing and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachev immediately announced that he wanted to improve living standards and political freedoms and was prepared to cut non-productive military expenditure to achieve those aims. His policies were summed up by the terms perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (political and social openness). The economy was decentralised, incentive schemes were introduced for workers and managers, and state subsidies reduced along with Soviet aid to satellite countries. Nuclear arsenals were reduced and Soviet troops were pulled out of Afghanistan.
Reduced subsidies in Eastern Europe were accompanied by increased freedoms - political and economic - in the hope that increased productivity would replace the need for handouts. But it only created a taste for more. Gorbachev was easing the lid off the pressure cooker which his predecessors had kept tightly bolted in place. The boiling discontent it had contained very quickly blew it off.
In April 1989 the border between Hungary and Austria was opened and 50,000 East Germans drove across it on the way to West Germany. The iconic Berlin Wall had become redundant and on 9 November 1989 it came toppling down. Over the next two years the Wall was followed by one communist government after another, culminating in the formal end of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991.
As well as being an object lesson on how not to democratise a dictatorship, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an instruction in the law of unintended consequences. For decades the West beavered away at undermining the Soviet Union. Understandably so: Moscow made it clear that the Cold War was a them or us, win or lose, situation. The West won. The former Soviet satellites secured their independence and most of them moved into the Western camp.
The Russian rump (which is still the biggest country in the world by area) crumpled into chaos. In an attempt to rescue the economy, Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin, sold off Russia’s vast natural resources at bargain basement prices to an unholy coalition of ex-KGB men and organised crime. What emerged from the political vacuum was a Western nightmare of a kleptocracy fuelled by anti-Western ultra-nationalism which mirrors the rise of Nazi Germany from the ashes of World War I.
Mikhail Gorbachev, meanwhile, is revered in the West for his part in ending the Cold War and reviled in the East for losing it. The poster boy of a resurgent Russia, Vladimir Putin, has refused to attend his funeral.
Tom Arms is the foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and is currently working on a rewrite of his Encyclopedia of the Cold War.
