Gorbachev in hell
O'ROURKE, P. J.
Books Gorbachev in Hell By P.J. O'Rourke New Satan takes over in hell, wants to install air-conditioning. That is Memoirs by Mikhail Gorbachev in brief. And brevity is a thing of which you'll...
...And when Gorbachev took over as head of state he continued to believe in such nonsense as the USSR's having "military and strategic parity" with the United States and that President Reagan failed to respond to Soviet arms-control overtures because he was, perhaps, "overruled by the powerful American military-industrial complex...
...So Brezhnev dies, Chernenko dies, Andropov dies, and everybody else in the Kremlin is wearing Depends and getting lost on the way to the samovar...
...administrative agencies were to decide on the stationing of troops at flash points, but without imposing a curfew...
...The book is full of lies: Democracy can be developed under a one-party system...
...Three of his father's siblings died in the Soviet-induced famine of 1933...
...And he probably eliminated his enemies by boring them to death...
...He got the highest mark...
...Many people still suspect Gorbachev of trying to save the Party nomenklatura," appears on the page, and you think, "What witless, purblind pinko sap is writing this...
...A keen mind like Gorbachev's can't help but understand the significance of these events: To avoid dangerous excesses, the checkpoints to the West were opened...
...Of course, there is always a certain kind of person who identifies with and approves of the Gorbachev type...
...And our emphasis on public transport was better . . ." And as the Soviet Union comes apart around his ears he is shocked to find, "The people seemed almost to welcome the event...
...The content of Memoirs is, however, far more dreadful than the style...
...About the failure of the Communist party to hold on to power, Gorbachev says, "I do not think this is a subject for sarcastic comments or cynical laughter...
...committee as deputy head of the agitation and propaganda department...
...I note for clarity that these ideas were similar to Deng Xiaoping's reform methods," says Gorbachev on page 218...
...Those Western centers of psychological warfare are good— when Gorbachev ran for president of Russia this June he got about 1 percent of the vote...
...Or, as Gorbachev puts it, "The established pattern of disseminating information to the leadership of the country failed to provide objective data to manage the life of the society...
...There were," says Gorbachev, "endless plans, developments, plenums, memoranda to the Central Committee, 'wheedling' the big bosses, clashes with the 'retrogrades.'" Not one goes unde-scribed...
...He'll be on his knees, shining their shoes...
...Gorbachev was busy screwing the Soviet economy with the stroke of a pen: At the end of 1990 I signed several decrees proposed by the government on financial matters, which, it turned out, contained serious flaws...
...from planning by directive and decree, it was gradually to become planning by recommendation and forecasting...
...Gorbachev criticizes Khrushchev because "this 'leadership style' ...would often end up being vulgar...
...I agreed with the logic of [Deng Xiaoping's] arguments...
...And further sanctimony: Even when [Yeltsin] began to shower me with accusations and insults of the lowest kind . . . I never lowered myself to his level of kitchen squabbling...
...He goes to Bulgaria and says, "It seemed an Eden of orchards and flowers...
...His maternal grandfather, a loyal party hack, was accused of membership in a "counter-revolutionary right-wing Trotskyist organization" and was jailed and tortured in 1937...
...Gorbachev wiggles and oozes his way to the top...
...I remember a Politburo meeting where the chairman had a mental block and could not remember the subject of the discussion," says Gorbachev...
...We are running into the same general problems...
...Key actions to be taken: 1. Government analysis of situation to be published in the press 2. Gorbachev appears on TV 3. A debate in the Supreme Soviet 4. Various reports made public 5...
...Some of this idiocy was planned...
...And score-settling: Yeltsin, using office scissors, had simulated an attempt at suicide...
...Marx spoke of the ash heap of history and here it is...
...Gorbachev is well aware that Marxism is ignorant, useless, and vile...
...Memoirs puts to rest the old question, Are leftists crazy or are they charlatans...
...But it was hard work—although it was joyous—for we were inspired by high ideals...
...Brezhnev was bughouse...
...But nature had moulded us this way...
...His paternal grandfather was exiled to Siberia in 1934 after failing to meet a sowing quota for which no seeds were available...
...I had often met Brezhnev...
...Easy...
...But, "Camp David is a beautiful spot in the woods, designed for recreation, with many a shady nook and sports lawns and buildings," can be blamed on no translator...
...Whenever abuses and mismanagement were mentioned to [Brezhnev], tears would well up in his eyes and he would ask, bewilderment in his voice: 'Is it really that bad?'" Politburo meetings were incomprehensible: "It was a long table, and when [Brezhnev] consulted with someone on one side of the table...
...No amount of lousy verbiage and nonsensical purport can match the awful fact that Mikhail Gorbachev's personality shines forth from every leaf of his gross tome...
...The prose style is appalling: "The need for major changes was in the air, as the saying goes...
...Why was our system so unresponsive to renewal and innovation...
...He was busy establishing "a warm personal rapport with Rajiv Gandhi": I was deeply impressed by the way he organically combined the profound philosophic tradition of India and the East with a perfect knowledge and comprehension of European culture...
...We should, too...
...Meanwhile there's an uprising in Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall is falling...
...He knows something is amiss...
...The larger double-deals and back-stabs are left to the imagination, as are Gorbachev's techniques of intrigue...
...Himself being a good example...
...He thinks it needs to be tweaked, "keeping only social, economic and scientific-technological strategies under central direction and leaving everything else to the discretion of the industrial collectives...
...Plus, the psych-ops corps—or something—has Gorby locked in permanent manic jag...
...With liberty and justice for all...
...All statistics concerning the military-industrial complex were top secret, inaccessible even to the members of the Politburo...
...those of us sitting at the end of the table on the other side could not hear what was being said...
...Still, I can assure you that we were not bluffing...
...The answer is yes...
...An impressive sight, I can tell you...
...I absolutely reject the accusation that the Soviet leadership intentionally held back the truth about Chernobyl...
...The Politburo actually passed laws to keep itself moronic...
...During the 1991 attempted coup, Gorbachev was held hostage in a Black Sea resort by aging hard-line Communist Party Central Committee members and he makes the experience as dull as...
...For example, one of the decrees set up non-budget funds for the stabilization of the economy...
...The Communist party was Gorbachev's ticket out of Dogpatch, away from the rube village of Privolnoye in the hayseed (during the rare non-drought years when they could grow any) region of Stavropol...
...The third-person voice is used to such Bob Dolerous extent that consciousness of authorship begins to fog...
...His answer is to make the USSR live up to its ideals...
...The man is a first-class toad-eater and suck...
...As I write all this," he yaps, "it occurs to me that the reader may weary of the details of harvests, droughts, irrigation, road networks, and so on...
...Therefore I was not surprised when he suddenly asked . . . "Well, Mikhail Serge-yevich, how are things going in your sheep empire...
...Gorbachev, for instance...
...The only thing the Soviet Union ever had going for it was that it didn't work...
...Hear him on the subject of his marriage: Our life, our activities and even our appearance aroused jealousy and envy in some...
...The KGB would come around and recommend you kiss your ass goodbye because the forecast was they were going to shoot you...
...But the woods—and the steppes and the plains—are full of Mikhails...
...To us, arms negotiations were a method of consolidating the efforts of different states in order to achieve results that would benefit all parties involved...
...Gorbachev recounts with bland credulity how "Yevgeny Primakov, who headed a Soviet delegation there, reported a noticeable swing in American public opinion in favour of the Soviet Union, particularly at the grass-roots level...
...As he says about hearing the claptrap speeches from Politburo members when he was named general secretary, "I was stirred—never before did I have a chance to hear such words about myself and such great appreciation...
...Anyhow, things are going to be real, real different: "[T]here were significant changes occurring in the very understanding of socialism...
...Raisa's grandfather, arrested on nearly identical baseless charges, was executed the same year...
...In early summer, after lambing, thousands of flocks grazed in the steppes: a total of ten million sheep...
...And brevity is a thing of which you'll have a high, fine appreciation after 769 densely printed, generously sized pages containing, in total, more than 350,000 words...
...And Carter...
...being held hostage in a Black Sea resort by aging hard-line Communist Party Central Committee members...
...Our studies had proved that the potential answer to SDI could meet the requirements . . . When Gorbachev isn't making up things, he's being stupid in the bienpensant manner achievable only through upper-percentile IQ test scores and years of university study...
...It's the fellow capable of penning the sentence, "My speech started off like Hamlet's famous soliloquy: 'How to deepen and make irreversible revolutionary perestroika, which on the initiative and under the leadership of the Party has been launched in our country—this is the fundamental question . . .'" To which, if I remember my Shakespeare, Ophelia replies, "Sweet Prince, take your Prozac...
...And the USSR's timid piffling during Operation Desert Storm is glossed as anti-war diplomacy...
...Essentially, they were 'generating' money from nothing...
...It seemed to some that our life was almost a fairy tale, full of pleasure...
...How can these two mutually exclusive ideas of Marxism be contained in one head—in even the double-domed, global consciousness-sized noggin of Mikhail Gorbachev...
...Or rather, he gives nothing but details...
...Gorbachev does not give many details about how he rose from assistant combine operator helping screw up the local wheat harvest to general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union helping screw up the world...
...The super-centralized attempt to control every single detail of life in an immense state sapped the vital energies of society," to put it in the author's own lame words...
...When the General Secretary presented the failure of the Reykjavik meeting as a victory, Raisa Gorbachev was sitting in the conference-hall, looking with awe at her husband, with tears rolling down her face.'" Criticized for the un-Kremlinish act of dragging his missus around in public, Gorbachev responds, "the Western centers of psychological warfare pressed this point in order to discredit the Soviet leader...
...In fact, it became even worse...
...And yet Gorbachev hasn't a clue that Marxism is ignorant, useless, and vile...
...And whining: Right-wing circles in the West feared a renewed, dynamic and more democratic Soviet Union, offering peace and co-operation to other nations...
...But Gorbachev is building bridges to the future...
...The spontaneity and folksiness occasionally turned into open boorish-ness, not to mention the foul language and heavy drinking...
...The Russians hate him...
...No job is too disgusting for him...
...Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc...
...Then he gives more details...
...Which is probably just as well, since Mikhail Gorbachev has no discernible sense of humor and Politburo pronouncements were mostly of a hilarious type: "The Central Committee's resolution had designated the North Caucasus as an area where wheat was to be grown on irrigated lands...
...In a Soviet Union that worked, everybody would be dead...
...By chronological default, Gorbachev becomes boss...
...If Gorbachev sounds slightly insane there, it's nothing out of the ordinary...
...And in the next paragraph he says, "the grain yield increased by 26.6 million tonnes, meat by 2.5 million tonnes, and milk by over 10 million tonnes . . ." As befits a fully centralized socialist state...
...True evil at least has the virtue of being rare...
...PREVARICATION AND INTELLECTUAL IMPAIRMENT DO NOTAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY MAKE, NOT IF YOU'RE TIMFs MAN OF THE DECADE...
...Of course, mere prevarication and intellectual impairment don't make an autobiography, not if you're a Time Man of the Decade, international peace prize-winning world statesman, and—according to the August Vanity Fair—the fellow Jack Germond most admires on earth...
...I am not convinced by the opinions of some of our politicians that we should have followed the Chinese path," says Gorbachev on page 494...
...Although here and there certain hints are dropped: I studied eagerly and passionately...
...Whether it wanted to or not...
...Wait a minute, the USSR's ideals are materialism, atheism, class warfare, and the subjugation of individual freedom to the will of an all-powerful state...
...He invariably showed genuine interest in my concerns and lent me his support...
...I had been trying to get to the root of the food problem," says Gorbachev...
...And in the epilogue he quotes himself telling a journalist, "I do not know anyone against whom so many slings and arrows have been launched as against Gorbachev at present...
...And, he was busy formulating a numbskull five-point peace plan for Nagorno-Karabakh...
...We learn from Memoirs that Gorbachev went to law school, doesn't drink, and had an adolescent passion for amateur theatrics...
...He will restructure Soviet politics and economics along Chinese lines...
...Then you remember...
...I accepted his offer to transfer to the...
...He claims that, after the stalemated Icelandic summit with Reagan, "one journalist wrote...
...Even when he is embarked upon an interesting subject, interest flags...
...Gorbachev's essay subject for his final examination at college was "Stalin—our combat glory, Stalin—the elation of our youth...
...He visits Western Europe and notices almost nothing except "that public education and medical services were organized more fairly in our country...
...Or maybe not...
...And what a top it is...
...Perhaps the translator is an idiot...
...I might add that I donated both my Nobel Prize and the Fiuggi Prize—a total of more than a million dollars—to the same purposes...
...Gorbachev says, "The food situation was bad and it continued to be so...
...We have our hotheads too.' Communist defeats in Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and even Afghanistan are barely mentioned...
...But it gets worse...
...He's the person who makes evil possible with his myopia, his pieties, his perverse alternations between hot-air egotism and lickspittle humility...
...The Stavropol krai accounted for 27 per cent of all the fine wool produced in the Russian Federation...
...My work and Raisa Maksimov-na's profession compelled us to make a great effort at 'self-improvement.' We used every opportunity to do so...
...It is a small step from looking down on others to looking up to oneself, and Gorbachev takes it...
...A tee-totaling lawyer who wants to act...
...Although to be fair to the man, he was very busy at the time...
...And, Lord, he is a dull dog...
...If you can imagine...
...They are worse than evil...
...A man so well-stocked with self-seeking, self-consequence, self-righteousness, and self-approval can only be expected to be filled with self-pity, too...
...Gorbachev just doesn't notice that that gruesome thunder lizard, the Soviet empire, is everywhere in massive death throes...
...The Politburo members didn't know what they were talking about...
...Therefore, Gorbachev leaves plenty of typespace for sanctimony: My first book was a success . . . royalties were used for charitable purpose...
...Memoirs (Double-day, $35) is an impressive work—if you drop it on your foot...
...Gorbachev, however, is more than just a false witness, he is a big wind pudding and bull shoveler: Even today I cannot reveal certain facts to the reader...
...On judgment day, Gorbachev won't be standing up with Stalin and Mao...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 11
