So what exactly was Gorbachev's "legacy"?

 

The other day Mikhail Gorbachev passed away after 30 years of being out of the limelight, occasionally resurfacing to be an “elder statesman” to comment on the times. He was critical of Donald Trump’s total absence of statesmanship and common sense, and according to Reuters, he “was shocked and bewildered by the Ukraine conflict in the months before he died and psychologically crushed in recent years by Moscow's worsening ties with Kyiv.” Obviously such an attitude didn’t sit well with Vladimir Putin, since the latter has nothing (much) to say about his passing and is apparently refusing him a state funeral.

Of course, Putin (as others) blame Gorbachev for the breakup of the Soviet Union, which technically was a “union” of allegedly “autonomous” states that “consented” to the authority of Moscow. That all unraveled once Gorbachev began his “openness” campaign (“glasnost”) and unveiled his “perestroika”  reform policies, due to the constituent parts of the “union” being not as “loyal” as originally believed.

I guess this is another one of those “you had to be there” moments. I was in college, following my military service, during the majority of the time Gorbachev was either the last head of state of the Soviet Union and the first president of Russia before he was de facto forced from office following a three-day military coup attempt, during which Boris Yeltsin emerged as the “hero” defending the fledgling “democratic” movement in the country. In the West, Gorbachev was viewed in positive terms for ending the Cold War (which of course has restarted under Putin), releasing the former eastern European countries from the yoke of the Warsaw Pact, and “allowing” former Soviet “republics” to form independent nations.

In reality that was giving Gorbachev a little too much credit. In 1981, Ronald Reagan came into office really “big” on support for the military; I felt a little of that in my wallet, when service members were given a (relatively) large boost to low pay to start. Reagan took credit for new weapons systems like the Abrams tank that had already been in development during the Carter administration, but he did oversee a large expansion of the naval fleet.

The Soviet leadership realized that they simply could not keep up with all of this spending, especially with an ongoing war trying to prop-up the communist regime in Afghanistan. Gorbachev took over the Soviet leadership at a time when the economy was becoming increasingly stagnant, with fossil fuel production, industrial output and labor productivity decreasing. The lack of money to invest in new machinery required an increasingly unmotivated labor force to fill the gap, and the Soviet economy contracted from 1984 to 1985, the year he took power. 

The manufacture of consumer goods had decreased, which reminds one of the statement made by the Russian ambassador in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove when explaining why his country constructed a “doomsday device”:

There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. At the same time our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction what we had been spending on defense in a single year.

In fact, bare store shelves and Soviet technological know-how was largely the subject of parody; it was poked fun at in an SCTV sketch, where the Russian news commentators from CCCP1 “brag” about their “advanced” equipment over rival CCCP2’s…

 

…but which later blows-up:

 

Thus in 1986 Gorbachev announced to the 27^th Party Congress “The acceleration of the country’s social and economic developments is the key to all our problems…bold measures are needed to switch the economy to the intensive path and better labor discipline is needed…the success of any endeavor is determined, to a decisive extent, by how actively and consciously the masses participate in it.”

What this meant was a change in policy from a “command” economy in which the state was in complete control, to a “mixed” economy that allowed a certain amount of “capitalism”—or at least some production was passed into “private” hands—in order to create motivation from the public to improve the economy through an expectation of personal gain. Naturally that wasn’t easy to accomplish, and to this day the Russian economy is, according to this chart from the Peterson Institute For International Economics…

 

...still very much a state-run operation, with most of the private wealth in the hands of a few oligarchs dependent on the good will of Putin. The reality that Russia is essentially a one-party state means that there is no motivation to enact reforms for either political or economic purposes, as oil production and exports have largely propped-up the economy up to this point and has hidden its underlying weaknesses.

The simple fact is that the Russian mindset simply doesn’t question the authority of the state and its “trust” in in telling people what to do. In the mid-1990s, many outsiders assumed that a “new generation” of Russians would become accustomed to “freedom,” and the expectation would be that they would be inherently “democratic” in their view of politics.

But that did not happen, partly because Yeltsin and his successor were not committed to the democratization of the country. And as something that should give pause to we in this country, a correspondent in Russia at the time, Christian Caryl, noted in an article in The New Republic in 2017 that

During my years in Moscow, I did meet quite a few Russians who placed their faith in the principles of political and economic freedom, though they were clearly members of a small minority. Strikingly little evidence, however, supported the notion that young people were the self-evident constituency for a liberal future. Most of the 20-somethings I met—and especially those from outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg—expressed strongly nationalist views. Though they welcomed the freedom to travel and consume, they just as often mourned the collapse of the Soviet Union.

While Yeltsin talked “big” about political and economic reform, in practice there was more smoke than fire; he was clearly not committed to making the “painful” decisions needed to make it all work, particularly if it threatened his own power. Also a problem was that there was not what we might call the equivalent of a Democratic Party in Russia, only a mishmash of “liberal” parties that refused to coalesce together into a unified entity and a common governing theme. Instead—with the help of banning opposition parties, opposition press and thus causing voter apathy—Russia today is essentially a one-party state centered around the “cult” of Putin. In the past you occasionally saw pro-democracy street protests against sham elections, and isolated instances of anti-Putin demonstrations, but they were regarded as mostly crackpots and are now essentially criminalized and subject to immediate arrest and imprisonment.

Of course that was all happening internally and not a lot was being paid attention to that. What the West and the rest of the world was seeing when Gorbachev was in power was the ending of the Cold War (for reasons already discussed) and permitting “freedom” for the various former Soviet “republics,” many of whom had histories as independent nations, as well as eastern and central European countries that are ethnically Slavic. By the time Reagan made his “Tear down this wall” speech, it was already inevitable, because of the unintended consequences of what Gorbachev put in motion.

Gorbachev knew that in Russia, people would not be motivated to be more productive unless they saw some gain in it for themselves, and this would require some freedom of expression both in the media and in politics. But it was a tough sell to those in the Politburo still clinging to power, even opposing a secret ballot election of multiple candidates. Nevertheless, since glasnost allowed freedom of the press, perestroika was permitting a limited autonomy of action by state-run Communist Party entities, and Yeltsin was becoming a nuisance for his insistence on a faster pace of reform, nationalists in the Baltic States, the Caucasus and the Warsaw Pact members became more vociferous in their demands to break away from the Russia yoke.

Gorbachev realized too late that once the genie was out of the bottle, there was no getting it back in by merely “commanding” it to—it had to be “forced” back in by military repression. In fact Russian troops engaged in a major crackdown of the independence movement in Lithuania and killed so many people that it brought much bad publicity for Gorbachev, which made him look so much like an authoritarian hypocrite that he was forced to back down and watch a line-up of “republics” declare their independence.

Of course in the heady atmosphere of newfound “freedom” there was more an expectation of magical change than in doing the actual work required. That was easier for people of separate ethnic groups with their own sense of nationalism, but in Russia there was no real commitment to it—not even in the end by Yeltsin, who only felt the pull of “democracy” when he was out of power, and was somewhat less so inclined when he was in power. Putin was his hand-picked successor, although supposedly Yeltsin later felt remorse for this choice.

That unfortunately is the reality of Gorbachev’s “legacy.” What “good” he did do in the eyes of the West was largely a result of unintended consequences. He never intended the break-up of the Soviet Union; he simply lost control of a process he started, and Russia today is as dangerous to peace and tranquility as it’s ever been. That’s not to say that the U.S. is much better on the world stage, but at least it has a free press and a functioning democracy (that is admittedly under threat from Trumpism/fascism) that asks its leaders to at least explain what they are doing and voice their approval or disapproval at the ballot box.