The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s tragedy was that his strategies of statecraft lost equilibrium, which was most essential during a period of transition when values and institutions were losing their relevance and consensus was lacking on what constituted a worthy future, and society was unwilling or unprepared to tolerate sacrifices as a way station to a more fulfilling future.(Reuters, File)
While Gorbachev had a realistic assessment of Soviet society based on its history, mores and capacities, he failed to elicit in his people a wish to walk alongside him
Written by M K Bhadrakumar
August 31, 2022 8:14:03 pm
In his new book, Leadership, Henry Kissinger writes that “leaders think and act at the intersection of two axes: The first, between the past and the future; the second between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead.” Quintessentially, the leaders “must balance what they know, which is necessarily drawn from the past, with what they intuit about the future, which is inherently conjectural and uncertain. It is this intuitive grasp of direction that enables leaders to set objectives and lay down a strategy.”
The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s tragedy was that his strategies of statecraft lost that equilibrium, which was most essential during a period of transition when values and institutions were losing their relevance and consensus was lacking on what constituted a worthy future, and society was unwilling or unprepared to tolerate sacrifices as a way station to a more fulfilling future. While Gorbachev had a realistic assessment of the Soviet society based on its history, mores and capacities, he failed to elicit in his people a wish to walk alongside him. He was no doubt a courageous personality, fired up by a sense of destiny to transcend the “routine”. But the equilibrium was lost in his determination of which inheritances from the past should be preserved, and which adapted or discarded. Simply put, he failed to sculpt the future and give life to his vision using the materials available in the present.
To be kind, Gorbachev had to navigate within a narrow margin, furrowing his revolutionary pathway between the relative certainties of the past and the uncertainties of a future veiled in mist. Kissinger counsels that in such moments, leaders must take “step by step, must fit means to ends and purpose to circumstance if they are to reach their destinations”. Gorbachev utterly failed in that respect. He was not only a man in a hurry but relished the sheer headiness of it, goaded in no small measure by his acolytes in the West who were only too well aware of his susceptibility to flattery and were determined to breach the citadel that Joseph Stalin built. The country paid heavily for Gorbachev’s “hubris”.
Nonetheless, Gorbachev’s legacy in restructuring his country’s society and economy and reviving the spirit of Khrushchev’s short-lived attempt to deliver openness (glasnost) cannot be minimised. The consequent upheaval caused great sufferings to the people and an overall paralysis of power and will. But fundamentally, he was a Soviet apparatchik who rose in the party apparatus steadily and advanced his career in the usual way by making use of his position as Stavropol party chief to rub shoulders with the party elite from Moscow. Yuri Andropov, the KGB boss, Mikhail Suslov, the hardline ideologist, and Leonid Brezhnev, a man of great vanities, saw potential in Gorbachev, each for his own reasons.
Within six months of taking over as the party secretary in Moscow, Gorbachev overhauled the politburo, replaced 41 per cent of the voting members of the 27th party Congress and forced into retirement top military officers and thousands of bureaucrats. Perestroika and glasnost became his catch phrases. Gorbachev’s intention at the beginning would have been to work with the party, through the party, to reform the Soviet system. However, early enough, he possibly concluded that communism could no longer be the ruling force in Soviet life.
This meant taking on the mammoth bloc of over 18 million party and state officials who were stakeholders in the status quo. His zigzagging between the revival of Marxism and the ruthless dismantling of the political structure that provided the pillars for communist rule was all too apparent. He even toyed with the idea of a multi-party system. Similarly, he tried to pull a reluctant nation towards a market economy with shock therapy aimed at opening up the economy to private enterprise, removing subsidies, instituting market-driven pricing and even creating a currency of value.
The nation was unprepared to follow him, and, inevitably, a hiatus developed between his promise and performance, which coalesced with the seething disaffection already existing in society. The disconnect between the public and the ruling elite got further aggravated. By 1990, four years into power, perestroika was widely seen to have failed and things had spun out of Gorbachev’s hands.
To be sure, the West exploited Gorbachev’s plight. President Reagan’s strategy to increase American military spending was predicated on the logic that, eventually, the Soviet Union would be forced into bankruptcy and the communist system would collapse. With the help of Saudi Arabia, Reagan made the price of oil drop to $8 per barrel that drastically reduced the Soviet income, forcing Gorbachev to cut back on bankrolling allies that eventually led him to unilaterally disband the Warsaw Pact (much against the advice of Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterand).
One thing led to another and on the basis of a verbal assurance from the US, Gorbachev relented on the unification of Germany. It is absolutely staggering that such an intelligent and erudite mind weaned on history and dialectics would end up the way Gorbachev did. He passes into history as an epic tragic hero of Sophoclean proportion.
Of course, the West lionised him as a hero of our times. But in reality, Russia was never allowed to enter the “common European home” that he fantasised; his disarmament vision was abandoned by the US; the promise to him that NATO would never expand eastward “by an inch” was never kept.
Ironically, within two-three years of the collapse of the USSR, Washington began mooting an expansion of NATO in anticipation of the need to contain a vengeful Russia regaining great power status. And the first Chechen war over secession began by 1994, which, according to President Putin, was a US project with a long-term agenda to dismember Russia. Clearly, mixed feelings about Gorbachev in the Russian mind can be put in perspective. His legacy is seen as years of upheaval, national humiliation, loss of global stature and ultimately, hardly anything of enduring value on the positive side.
Gorbachev’s best obituaries are sure to originate from the West for whom his legacy is about the disbandment of the CPSU and the dismantling of the Soviet state. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth state assets were transferred to the West in the upheaval that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The writer is a former diplomat