A Stubborn Meditation
KRAMER, DAVID J.
A Stubborn Meditation Gorbachev: On My Country and the World By Mikhail Gorbachev Columbia. 300 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by David J. Kramer Associate director, Russian and Eurasian Program....
...Now head of a foundation named after him, Gorbachev has sought to become a post-Soviet voice of reason in his own country and internationally...
...Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Perhaps more than any other living public figure, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is far more popular outside than within his own country...
...If it were possible, he would support restoration of the Soviet Empire: "I am convinced that the world today would be living more peacefully if the Soviet Union —of course in a renewed and reformed version—had continued to exist...
...Readers seeking a serious self-re-evaluation, however, will be disappointed...
...they were a "profound basis for the transformation of our country...
...Yet perestroika and Gorbachev's other staple, glasnost, spun out of control...
...More recently, he has been ridiculed for appearing in Pizza Hut commercials and accused of selling out for his own personal interests...
...He strongly opposes NATO expansion for "ostracizing" Russia...
...Most bitterly, Yeltsin's "irresponsible" declaration of Russian sovereignty in 1990 is said to have caused the dissolution of the USSR...
...The August coup attempt was not unexpected...
...He also contends that the Revolution was "historically inevitable," and hastens to add that it did not have to take "such a destructive and veritably apocalyptic form...
...They contain some interesting insights into the author's views, particularly about Boris N. Yeltsin...
...To this day, he is hailed by Westerners for bringing about an end to the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact...
...sooner or later this approach will lead to catastrophe...
...So it is not surprising when Gorbachev praises Nikita S. Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign, noting that the former Party boss "gave the first impetus to a reform process that could develop further and only succeed as a democratic process...
...It was Lenin, after all, who laid the groundwork for Stalin...
...Nonetheless, one can't help being struck by how sharply this contrasts with his feelings about the man who forced him from office...
...He is very critical of NATO measures in Yugoslavia, too, insisting that UN approval should have been required—and ignoring the fact that Russia would have vetoed any action...
...in the West, particularly the United States, no such willingness existed...
...To his critics who charge that the Soviet Union surrendered the Eastern European states without compensation, he replies: "But to whom did we surrender them...
...The section is filled with generalities and fuzziness not uncommon to many considerations of globalization...
...This latest effort to play a role on the world stage is divided into three unrelated—some might say disconnected—sections...
...The author of three previous books about his years as Soviet leader, he has now written a fourth, Gorbachev: On My Countiy and the World...
...In a stinging criticism of Stalin, whom he holds responsible for turning the Soviet experiment into a dictatorship, he declares: "To me, Stalin was a cunning, crafty, cruel, and merciless individual, and a morbid suspiciousness was an innate part of his character...
...Gorbachev's stubbornness precludes his acknowledging the mistakes he made when he was in power...
...His thoughts on Socialism, Lenin, the October Revolution of 1917, and Stalin, which make up the first third of the book, are of the old school...
...In a long exposition designed tojustify his handling of the growing ethnic unrest that started in Kazakhstan in 1986, he provides extensive extracts from Politburo transcripts...
...Preservation, renewal and reform of the Union was my main political and, if you will, moral task," Gorbachev admits...
...Gorbachev's defense of Socialism is hardly shocking, of course, since he thought in the 1980s that he could reform its practice in his country...
...Revealing either great naïveté or wishful thinking, Gorbachev claims the October Revolution was victorious under the banner of "ultrademocratic slogans" that were "not merely demagogic, notjust a means for winning power...
...Gorbachev also presents perestroika, as having been "born out of the realization that problems of internal development in our country were ripe, even overripe, for a solution...
...The title of chapter 13, "The Coup: A Stab in the Back—and the Intrigues of Yeltsin, neatly sums up Gorbachev's perspective...
...His discussion, for instance, of the Soviet decision to rule out the use of force in 1989 amid the fall of the Berlin Wall may strike some readers as retrospectively self-serving...
...In his desire to reconstitute the USSR, Gorbachev calls for an amalgamation of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan...
...Only the recent death of his wife, Raisa, with whom he was very close, won him wide sympathy...
...While the USSR was "willing to find a way to arrive at genuinely democratic and peaceful international relations...
...The U.S., he continues, saw the end of the Cold War as "the removal of many substantial obstacles on the road to achieving longstanding goals of American policy...
...No one can reasonably argue with that Gorbachev does not hesitate to criticize the West for failing to recognize the "new thinking" he brought to the table...
...Here the answer is obvious: Every country, all the peoples of the world, benefited...
...There certainly were people who believed that at the time, but it is strange to hear someone like him espouse such a view now...
...Responding to charges that he "lost" the Cold War for Russia, he suggests: "We should ask, Who gained by the termination of that war...
...Yet his own policies prior to those events greatly contributed to that collapse...
...He deserves credit for removing the Communist Party's sacred monopoly on power and implementing other changes, but in doing so he stirred up the political forces wanting to protect the status quo...
...Interspersed with the banalities are a number of interesting discussions of policy-making during Gorbachev's last years in power, and of subsequent developments in Russia and the world...
...But Gorbachev is entitled to much credit—in Russia, some might say blame —for allowing the peaceful breakup of the Warsaw Pact...
...The defense here of Lenin and the original goals of the October Revolution, though, is dismaying...
...For the first time in millennia, he writes, "it is possible that the human race will perish because of progress...
...The August 1991 coup attempt "interrupted" it he says, but not before it succeeded in laying the foundations for "normal, democratic, and peaceful development of our country and its transformation into a normal member of the world community...
...In the final third of the book, Gorbachev turns to the need for resolving a growing array of global problems...
...That it failed owes less to Gorbachev— who never recovered from the blow— than to Yeltsin, whose bravery was exemplified by the pictures of him standing defiantly on a tank...
...My own opinion is quite definite: The Socialist idea has not lost its significance or its historical relevance," he writes...
...Gorbachev attacks Francis Fukuyama's notion of the end of history, arguing that "humanity cannot be simply a community constantly seeking to survive...
...Again, Stalin receives the blame for the oppression...
...His musings about the world's problems are new, but he offers only vague solutions—essentially that we need "new thinking...
...Because the confrontation has been overcome, we have all been delivered from a terrible danger, the threat of nuclear catastrophe...
...The Soviet government of the 1930s "cannot be an argument against the Socialist idea," he insists, because it actually was totalitarian...
...Gorbachev points to the Russian declaration of sovereignty in the summer of 1990 and the coup attempt the following year as the "fuse" which "ignited aprocess that eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union...
...Listing the problems that emerged as a result of Yeltsin's "shock therapy," the author warns that "there is no government responsibility for the future of the country...
...he has once again slipped back into the shadows of the Russian scene...
...But in certain periods it becomes particularly obvious and is often the cause of sharp contradictions...
...Yet his run for the Russian presidency in June 1996, more than four years after stepping down as President of the USSR, ended with a humiliating showing of less than 1 per cent of the vote...
...Yeltsin, he argues, "sacrificed the Union to his passionate desire to accede [to] the throne in the Kremlin...
...He even accuses Yeltsin of working with the Communists to destroy "the process of renewal and reform of the Union government...
...This 'double-layered' quality is to some extent inseparable from world history...
...Sounds like Mikhail Gorbachev would like one more chance to lead the world through a challenging phase...
...Indeed, the book is laced with shots at Yeltsin, indicating the depth of the resentment he harbors toward his successor has not dissipated...
...Throughout the book, he defends his policies of the 1980s...
...This unenlightened view may be shared by many in Russia who yearn for the old days, and even among some in Belarus, but the majority of those living in the now independent, non-Slavic states would undoubtedly strongly disagree...
...He does not seem to recognize that his clumsy handling of the unrest in Alma-Ata (then the name of the Kazakh capital) and later in Tbilisi (April 1989), Baku (January 1990), and Vilnius (January 1991) revealed a failure to appreciate ethnicity as a potentially explosive issue...
...He charges Yeltsin's "authoritarian regime" with "putting the brakes on Russia's development toward democracy...
...Most Russians, meanwhile, blame him for the demise of the Soviet Union and the decline of Russia as a superpower...
...Preventing such an outcome depends on people themselves...
...A new Union can be created...
...For example: "The development of the entire world organism has a complex structure, which is minimally two-fold...
...To their own people...
...That chance, however, will never again come in Russia...
...Not so immodestly, he claims to have started the search for new approaches in 1985, beginning with his trying to find a way to end the Cold War...
...The sentiment did not last long, though...
...Even if Gorbachev is right in pointing out that Lenin did not want Stalin to be his successor, Lenin himself was responsible for untold brutalities during the Civil War and the terror of the late teens and early '20s...
...The Union could have been preserved," he moans...
...Either way, he will go down in history as having been one of this century's most important leaders...
Vol. 82 • December 1999 • No. 15
