Where Angels Feared to Tread
SHUB, ANATOLE
Where Angels Feared to Tread Memoirs By Mikhail S. Gorbachev Doubleday. 760 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope," "The New Russian Tragedy" For decades after...
...Russian voters, who had to live with his almost daily presence for some 2,000 days, saw much more...
...For weeks before that vote, Gorbachev ignoring opinion polls to the contrary had been telling interviewers that he knew the Ukrainian people, and he could not believe that these good, sensible folk would vote to dissolve the bonds of union with Moscow...
...and also, how in early 1943 young Mikhail and other village children stumbled in a nearby forest on "an unspeakable horror," the remains of Red Army soldiers who had fought their last battle there in the summer of 1942...
...To their credit, and Gorbachev's, they did what they could to brake the cycle, not always successfully...
...Gorbachev claims that his maneuvers "gained time" for the cause of reform, but the claim is less than convincing...
...The majority of readers will make appropriate discounts for the consistently negative treatment of Yeltsin...
...Gorbachev was fortunate in having such intellectually liberated advisers as Aleksandr N. Yakovlev and Eduard A. Shevardnadze (to whom, unfortunately, these memoirs give scant credit...
...There he tells us, first, that the Wehrmacht sweeping through Privolnoye left behind a garrison whose troops "spoke Ukrainian...
...It has burned us, leaving its mark both on our characters and on our view of the world...
...The memoirs add that his maternal grandmother's family also came from Ukraineyet without indicating whether any of these forebears were, or considered themselves to be, Ukrainian...
...Khrushchev's de-Stalinization in February 1956 produced the Hungarian Revolution in October...
...Our generation," he concludes this moving passage, "is the generation of wartime children...
...and a military-industrial complex that could not match the West's yet doomed the nation to shortages, backwardness and diminished life expectancy...
...Most strikingly, amid scores of pages recounting his attempts in 1990 and 1991 to secure a new Union Treaty, he fails even to mention the Ukrainian independence referendum of December 1, 1991 that effectively sealed the fate of the USSR...
...the days before had seen his initial conflict with Boris N. Yeltsin...
...his solipsistic identification of reform with his personal power...
...He was also lucky in having such undogmatic American interlocutors as George P. Shultz and James A. Baker III...
...These included a losing war in Afghanistan...
...His "decisive step," Gorbachev says, was the October Revolution anniversary speech in 1987...
...Two unrelated examples, one of commission, the other of omission, are revealing of some of the author's other limitations...
...its sad fate proved, some said, that the system was incapable of reforming itself (as if systems, rather than persons, made history...
...hostile relations with all the other powers that had fought World War II...
...Nearly all politicians' memoirs are self-serving and these are no exception...
...Rather than piecemeal economic reforms, Gorbachev's priorities turned out to be diplomatic and political: halting the arms race, ending Russia's isolation from the West, and introducing freedom into a society paralyzed by fear...
...Much in these chapters was put together from public papers (speeches, interviews, transcripts, memoranda of conversations...
...Readers still puzzled by Gorbachev's reluctance to confront the realities of Ukrainian nationalism, even in the closing sections of this book, may find some clues by turning back to his early pages on World War II...
...five months later...
...He rightly remains proud that on June 2,1988, after their Moscow summit meeting, when someone in Red Square asked President Reagan whether he still thought it was an "evil empire," the President answered: "No...
...Gorbachev arrived with no grand design for reform, but with a lively intelligence, much intellectual curiosity and a pertinent set of youthful experiences that are recounted in the most illuminating pages of these memoirs...
...This was a simple measure of Gorbachev's achievement that no one can take away, not even the voters in last summer's Russian presidential elections, who rewarded him for his pains with a score of 0.5 per cent (equal to that of Ralph Nader in the U.S...
...On the domestic scene Gorbachev was by temperament an improviser, with a politician's feel for public opinion and the dynamics of power but little understanding of economics...
...Today, in the center of Privolnoye, "a simple obelisk has engraved on it the names of those who never returned from the War, with an entire column of Gorbachevs among them...
...Not until 1991 did he publicly confirm that his wife Ra-isa Maximovna was part Ukrainian, part Kalmyk, and that his maternal grandfather's family had come from Chernigov in Ukraine...
...Let us recall that most of them fought to defend their country: "Russia," or the Soviet Union, as it was then called...
...this, mutatis mutandis, was their equivalent of the flight to Varennes...
...Where might a would-be reformer start...
...Thus, although Gorbachev in 1985 may not have known exactly what to do, he had seen enough to grasp the necessity of radical change...
...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope," "The New Russian Tragedy" For decades after Stalin's death, observers of Soviet affairs wondered how his heirs, or their heirs, might go about transforming the misbegotten system he bequeathed...
...in the 1970s to Italy, France, Belgium, and West Germany...
...What Gorbachev offered in abundance were energy and willpower, and an understanding that the Gordian knots could not be cut in one blow but had to be carefully disentangled...
...in the early 1980s to Canada, Italy again and Britain...
...As a Communist official, first in Stavropol (1956-78), then in Moscow, he rose through the system and observed many of its failings...
...Certainly he did not intend either the reunification of Germany or the demise of the Communist Party...
...Gorbachev himself fully credits his political career to five stimulating years (1950-55) at Moscow State University...
...Western memoirists and journalists were quicker to the market as far as the diplomatic side of the story is concerned...
...Of course, the West saw Gorbachev at his best...
...In the Urals and beyond meanwhile, Yeltsin, Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, Yegor K. Ligachev and other Gorbachev contemporaries were spared such searing experiences...
...The issue then appeared to be radical economic reform (the "500 days" program), but Gorbachev argues, rather persuasively, that the underlying issue was already the political power of the Union authorities over the republicspower that the Union military and security bureaucracies were determined not to yield...
...The offspring of peasant families in the foothills of the north Caucasus, he was old enough to remember the arrests of both his grandfathers under Stalin, a four-month Nazi occupation of his native village, Privol-noye, and a false report of his father's death on the Carpathian front in 1944...
...Gorbachev presents an exhaustive account of his futile efforts to head off the Gulf War as a titanic attempt to save world peace, without reflecting that it might have had the opposite effect (i.e., encouraged Saddam to hang tough), or that his meddling may have made the Bush Administration less disposed to granting Moscow the economic aid he had long been seeking...
...Everything was tied up with everything else: Pull on one strand, and the entire fabric might unravel...
...The struggle continues...
...He also traveled abroad: in the late 1960s to East Germany, Bulgaria and postinvasion Czechoslovakia...
...Mikhail was 14 when the War ended...
...later, how his father, a much decorated war hero, fought in the liberation of Kharkov, Kiev, Lvov, and other Ukrainian towns before being disabled in Slovakia...
...Still, Gorbachev might have regained popular sympathy after the aborted coup of August 1991 had he not, on returning from Foros to Moscow, rushed to express his solicitude for the Communist Party...
...As for omissions, Gorbachev consistently tells us less than we know, rather than more, about the various troubles that arose in the non-Russian republics and his unsuccessful efforts to deal with them...
...his vagueness ("the Socialist choice"), inconsistencies, evasions of personal responsibility (Tbilisi, Baku, Vilnius) and tactical maneuvers too clever by half...
...By the time Mikhail S. Gorbachev took over in 1985, after a decade of rule by infirm old men, he faced new woes on top of those already apparent in 1956 and 1968...
...The Prague Spring of 1968 aroused similar fears...
...Cases can be made for other "decisive" steps and dates, among them the Reykjavik summit with President Ronald Reagan in October 1986, which began cracking the ice of Cold War suspicions...
...But his manner in delivering the speech was preoccupied...
...Such qualities make his detailed account of the revolutionary years 1988-91 exciting to read even though it offers hardly anything new in the way of recollection, reflection or analysis...
...Most observers believe Gorbachev lost the "mandate of heaven" with his ill-fated turn to the Right in October 1990...
...Bush passed the buck to an IMF study team...
...Yet, as all four of the above statesmen would readily concede, Gorbachev's was the driving force in ending the Cold War at home and abroad...
...They ultimately tired of his rustic south-Russian accent and grammatical errors...
...It was an old blind spot: On his first visit to Kiev as Party leader in 1985, he raised eyebrows at the airport with an offhand remark about "Russia, or the Soviet Union as we call it now...
...his log-orrheic monologues on primetime TV...
...But the somewhat older Yakovlev was wounded in combat as a fleet marine, while the Georgian Shevardnadze's older brother died in the defense of Brest-Litovsk...
...Perestroika at first had little specific content, and both early and later discussions of economic reform met with predictable resistance from entrenched bureaucracies (much of which continues in Russia and Ukraine to this day...
...In that speech, Gorbachev resumed the de-Stalinization that Nikita S. Khrushchev (on whom the author is very good) had been forced to abandon in 1964...
...It still seems miraculous that he succeeded so quickly, although in each case many others contributed and "success" ultimately went beyond the limits he had originally envisioned...
...These men understood that war was the ultimate horror, from which most of the other evils of this century had flowed, and that the fiercest wars were caused by aggressive nationalism...
...Before perestroi-ka and glasnost, he tried economic "acceleration" and an antialcohol campaign...
...A lot about the Gorbachev couple recalls Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette...
...At a G-7 meeting in London a few months later...
...The dilemma that he never did resolve was how to effect such change through the agency of the Soviet Communist Party...
Vol. 79 • December 1996 • No. 9
