Without Gorbachev, the Soviet Union would still exist-decrepit and dangerous, heading for some cataclysm, but perhaps not on his watch. Sooner or later, any Soviet leader would have had to do some of the things Gorbachev did. But few would have been done so quickly. Without Gorbachev, Eastern Europe might still be squirming under Moscow’s thumb. Germany would still be divided. There would still be a cold war. Most of the hopeful upheavals that so astounded the world in recent years would not have happened yet if Gorbachev had not been so uniquely Gorbachev. His career refutes the mechanistic view of history beloved by Marxists: he is one man who made an epochal difference.
Gorbachev was a committed communist, one of the last and one of the best-uncorrupted, sincere, pedantic. To him, communism meant “political and spiritual freedom, respect for culture, humanization and democracy,” he said. He knew that Soviet reality did not square with his communist ideals, But free enterprise, private property and multiparty democracy were all cutthroat concepts to him. Gorbachev wanted to save the Soviet system, not destroy it. He failed. But his attempt at reform was what made wholesale change possible. Gorbachev’s failure was also his greatest accomplishment; he freed his country to reinvent itself. The fact that he did not intend, or even understand, many of the consequences of his own reforms does not diminish the magnitude of his achievement. “None of the great reformers in history Czar Peter the Great, Franklin Roosevelt-none of them could foresee the results of all their actions,” says Georgi Shakhnazarov, one of Gorbachev’s closest aides. “They began a process because they knew it was right.”
“I first became a dissident in 1953, more or less when I had the first doubts that things were right in our country,” Gorbachev told a recent visitor. That was the year Stalin died; Gorbachev, then 22, was a law student at Moscow University, preparing for a model career as a Communist Party apparatchik. If, as he now claims, Gorbachev was a dissident that long ago, he had to remain carefully closeted for more than 30 years as he worked his way to the top of the communist bureaucracy. But until he got there, Gorbachev didn’t know how bad things really were; full figures on the plight of the Soviet economy were a tightly held secret in Leonid Brezhnev’s inner circle.
Only when he became the party’s general secretary in 1985 did Gorbachev get the full picture. Far from burying the West, as Nikita Khrushchev had promised, the Soviet Union was in danger of burying itself. Papering over the problems would merely postpone an inevitable disaster. By his own account, Gorbachev went home and told his wife, Raisa: “Our country cannot go on living like this. I have to make the changes. That is my destiny.” Gorbachev kept most of his intentions to himself; no Soviet leader could announce an attack on the entrenched interests of the bureaucracy and expect to keep his job. He would concentrate instead on denouncing the safely distant past: the evils of Stalinism and the “stagnation” of the Brezhnev era. A masterful political manipulator, he would use the party to enact gradual reforms, under the vague headings of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Later, when the conservatives balked, he would use those reforms to create a new power base for himself, separate from the party.
He intended to command the moral high ground in the middle of a new Soviet political spectrum. With party mossbacks on one side and radical reformers on the other, he would be the indispensable centrist. It apparently did not occur to him that the middle might be a gulch, not a peak. Gorbachev was caught in a constant cross-fire between party conservatives and reformers like Boris Yeltsin. In October 1990, hard-liners threatened to fire Gorbachev from his party post, NEWSWEEK has learned, forcing him to back down on economic reform. And last August some of them tried to depose him in a clumsy coup that undermined both the hard-liners and Gorbachev’s own presidency.
For all his earnestness and political skill, Gorbachev was not intellectually equipped for the delicate task of reforming the Soviet system without destroying it. His higher education was limited to two fields-law and agriculture-in which the Soviet Union did not exactly shine. His job experience was restricted to the art bureaucracy and the Russian Republic. As a product of the Soviet system, he could not bring himself to repudiate it. “Should I denounce whole generations as if they had lived in vain?” he once asked. “No, I think we will never agree to trample underfoot that which we, our fathers and our grandfathers have been doing for decades.”
Gorbachev was given to lecturing and often made a poor listener, even with people who could tell him something useful. “Whenever I’ve had an audience with Gorbachev, he’s done all the talking,” says historian Roy Medvedev, a former dissident who is still loyal to Marx’s vision. “I can’t get a sentence in edgewise.” The most recent of their five meetings occurred last July, when Gorbachev wanted some advice from Medvedev on the proper procedure for signing a treaty that was to create a new, looser union. It turned out to be another of his monologues. “I could only drink tea and say da, nyet, da, nyet, " complains Medvedev. “It was so ridiculous, wasting the time of the president to give a lecture to one person.”
Throughout his years in power, Gorbachev surrounded himself with advisers of uneven quality. Some served him well, including strategist Alexander Yakovlev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. But both of them eventually quit in despair, with Shevardnadze returning to office only for what appears to be the union’s end game. Many other aides were incompetent or worse. Gavriil Popov, the reformist mayor of Moscow, used to say that out of every five people who got into Gorbachev’s office, four brought him disinformation. When many of his top-ranking appointees, including even his chief of staff, Valery Boldin, ganged up on him in the August coup, Gorbachev seemed to learn nothing from it. “Even after the putsch, he has not created a brain trust for himself,” complains Konstantin Lubenchenko, a prominent Soviet legislator. “In one of my last conversations with him, I said, ‘Mikhail Sergeyevich, what kind of people are you surrounding yourself with? They prostitute themselves and betray you.’ And he answered: ‘Da, da, da.’ But it’s too late.”
At first Gorbachev thought he could save the Soviet system by tightening discipline, an idea he inherited from his patron Yuri Andropov, the late party and KGB chief. The result was a series of crackdowns on alcohol, absenteeism and crime and a call for uskoreniye, or accelerated production–all of which failed miserably. Gorbachev thought the economy should be decentralized, but beyond that he had few fixed ideas about how to make farms and factories work better. “Gorbachev didn’t have a clear picture of what to do then, nor does he now,” says Medvedev. “He had no patience. He would try something for a year and then move on to something else.”
He also failed to understand the nationalistic forces that were to tear the union apart. “Gorbachev’s first serious misperception was about the basic nature of the Soviet Union,” Dimitri Simes, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, writes in a recent issue of Foreign Policy quarterly. “He failed to see that his country was not a voluntary federation based on common laws, culture, tradition, values, and interests, but rather a multi-ethnic empire built by force and sustained largely by repression.” Gorbachev did not grasp the depth of ethnic feeling that existed in the non-Russian republics, perhaps because he had never lived or worked in any of them. But what really undid him was his failure to comprehend the antiKremlin rebelliousness in his own Russian Republic-the force that propelled his archrival, Yeltsin, to power.
Gorbachev could have crushed separatist tendencies the old-fashioned way. Instead, says Princeton’s Stephen Cohen, “he became the first leader in Russian history ever to put the Russian Empire up for renegotiation with its component parts.” That process may have been unavoidable; the alternative was to risk a civil war in which parts of the Soviet Army might prove unreliable. But Gorbachev’s willingness to bargain contributed to instability and made him look wimpish. Even the tiny Baltic republics managed to stare him down. “It all got out of control because people began to construe sovereignty as independence,” says Cohen. “But this is not over yet.”
To his credit, Gorbachev realized that reform at home required peace overseas, along with political and economic support from the West. Brezhnev’s immense military buildup and his adventurism in the Third World had nearly bankrupted the state, without improving its strategic position. Gorbachev applied “new thinking” to foreign policy. The result was a long series of enlightened actions: Soviet withdrawals from hot spots overseas, arms-control agreements with Ronald Reagan and George Bush and unprecedented cooperation between Washington and Moscow on the crisis in the Persian Gulf. His diplomacy made Gorbachev a hero in many other countries; there he won the adulation denied him at home. “The greatest achievements of Gorbachev’s strategy were the radical changes he instituted in Soviet foreign policy,” Columbia’s Seweryn Bialer argues in the current issue of Foreign Affairs quarterly. “But in real terms these achievements were nothing less than progressive capitulation to the West.”
No capitulation did Gorbachev more harm at home than the one in Eastern Europe. He knew that he could not have reform in the Soviet Union without allowing it among his communist neighbors. In fact, he encouraged the hidebound leaders of Eastern Europe to move toward the “communism with a human face” that prompted Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Visiting East Germany not long before the fall of the Berlin wall, Gorbachev admonished Erich Honecker: “If you move too late, you will be punished by life.” (Honecker soon fled to Moscow, where last week he sought asylum at the Chilean Embassy, trying to avoid extradition back to Germany.) Once again Gorbachev meant to save the system, not destroy it. “I don’t think he intended to let go of Eastern Europe,” says Harvard’s Richard Pipes. “But once the explosion occurred, he decided he didn’t have the power to suppress it by force. So he let it go. That was a very major achievement, but I don’t think it was planned at all.”
The hardliners bitterly attacked him for the loss of Eastern Europe, among other things, forcing him into a fatal series of political flip-flops. For years, Gorbachev’s great strength had been his tactical agility, but in 1990 he ran out of room for maneuver. Under pressure from the hard-liners, he veered to the conservative side in a debate over economist Stanislav Shatalin’s radical plan for a 500day transition to a market economy. Gorbachev had endorsed the plan at first, but at a stormy meeting of the party’s ruling Politburo, he was forced to back down. According to one Central Committee source, Gorbachev was told that if he insisted on the Shatalin Ian, “you will be stripped of your party post ahead of schedule.” Other sources say the threat was less explicit, but Gorbachev quickly eaved. He wanted to stay on as general secretary; he still hoped to use the party’s power for his own ends. He rejected the Shatalin plan and appointed several hard-liners to his government. Last January he allowed Soviet forces to crack down in Lithuania, killing 13 people.
Then, in April, Gorbachev tilted back toward the reformers, signing a powersharing agreement with nine of the 15 republics. It was too little and, as usual, too late. “Gorbachev was always lagging behind events,” complains Igor Belyayev, a reform-minded Moscow city councilman. By now, both political camps distrusted him, as did most of the Soviet people, whose support for their president dropped to single digits in some opinion polls. Yeltsin and the other reformers who rallied against the August coup did not do so for Gorbachev’s sake. In fact, the decision to create a commonwealth, instead of continuing with a loose union, seems intended partly to strip Gorbachev of his remaining real powers.
In the end, Gorbachev delivered the coup de grace to the system he wanted to save. Whether or not that is a good thing remains to be seen. If the transition to a new system is peaceful and democratic, Gorbachev will be the man who made it all possible. If the former union plunges into civil war, or back into dictatorship, he will be viewed as a courageous reformer who tragically overreached himself. Either way, Gorbachev was guilty of inadvertence. He set in motion forces that he did not understand or control, whose consequences he could not predict. He changed the world more than any other member of his generation, but if he had known six years ago how it would all turn out, he certainly would have done something else-and probably something less hopeful.
PHOTO:THE END OF THE DREAM In Moscow, Gorbachev denounced the new commonwealth as a few protesters rallied in support. It was too late: in Minsk, Boris Yeltsin had struck a deal with other republic leaders that dashed Gorbachev’s dream of reforming communism while maintaining the old union. (DOKIN)
THE CLIMB TO POWER As a rising party leader, Gorbachev showed little passion for reform. He bided his time as Brezhnev was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, then Konstantin Chernenko. Then after burying Chernenko, Gorbachev rose to power and started shaking up the system that produced him.
A HERO OVERSEAS Gorbachev always got his best reviews abroad, as he struck historic arms deals with Reagan and Bush and got credit for allowing Eastern Europe to break free and the Berlin wall to fall
THE FINAL MONTHS By last May demonstrators were jeering Gorbachev in Red Square, and in August hard-liners attempted to overthrow him in a military coup. The president survived but was fatally weakened.
