Seize the Moment (7 page)

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These fundamental policy errors were rooted in a misunderstanding of the Gorbachev era. Gorbachev has profoundly changed the world and the Soviet Union. But to understand him—and to comprehend why he failed—we must look not just at his actions but at why he took them.

Many in Western media and diplomatic circles uncritically embraced Gorbachev as the champion of world peace and democracy. In 1990,
Time
magazine named him “man of the decade,” remarking, “He is the force behind the most momentous events of the 1980s and what he has already done will almost certainly shape the future.” One newspaper commented, “No single individual alive today has more impacted the course of modern history and directly contributed to a climate for world peace than has this Soviet President. Future historians will divide the post—World War II era in terms of ‘before Gorbachev' and ‘after Gorbachev.' ” Another editorialized, “Gorbachev has solidified his place as one of the world's greatest peacemakers,” adding, “perhaps the United States could use a leader such as Mikhail Gorbachev.” Still another opined, “Gorbachev is a prophet.” He was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his “decisive” contributions toward easing East-West tension and advancing disarmament. Former president Reagan called the Nobel committee's choice “wonderful,” while former prime minister Thatcher called it “terrific” and Chancellor Kohl remarked that he was “delighted.”

For six years, Gorbachev stood at the center of the deepening crisis. A complex man who rose to power under Brezhnev and Andropov but who ultimately rejected much of their political and economic legacies, he impressed the world with his personal grace, powerful intellect, and acute political sense. He had supreme self-confidence, iron self-control, and a healthy degree of self-esteem. Not as quick as Khrushchev, Gorbachev carefully thought through a proposition before he spoke. He was an
homme sérieux,
in both the literal and broader senses. Khrushchev tried to cover up Soviet weaknesses by bragging outrageously about Soviet superiority. Brezhnev had without question achieved nuclear parity, but still never missed an opportunity to insist defensively that the Soviet Union and the United States were equals as world powers. Gorbachev was so confident of the Soviet Union's strengths that he was not afraid to talk about its weaknesses.

But Gorbachev was not, and is not, a closet democrat, secret capitalist, or furtive pacifist. Those who portrayed him as such missed the point. Gorbachev was not a one-dimensional personality. He was a troika: a loyal Communist, a patriotic Russian nationalist, and a brilliant pragmatic politician who liked power, knew how to use it, and did whatever he believed necessary to keep it.

In overhauling Soviet foreign policy and launching domestic reforms, he acted not out of choice but necessity. In 1985, shortly after Gorbachev took power, I asked Hu Yaobang, then the general secretary of the Chinese Communist party, whether the new Soviet leader would adopt economic reforms similar to China's. “If he does not,” he answered, “the Soviet Union will disappear as a great power by the middle of the twenty-first century.” Hu was right: Gorbachev had no other option. To preserve the Soviet Union's status as a great power, he had to retrench abroad and reform at home.

For over seventy years, Soviet economic policy served Soviet foreign policy. Under Gorbachev, foreign policy served economic policy. But it was a change of the head, not the heart. He knew that without access to Western technology, capital, and markets the Soviet economy would remain dead in the water. In each reversal of policy, he knew that he had to make whatever sacrifices were necessary to create an economic lifeline to the West:

—In third world regional conflicts such as Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, Moscow was wasting tens of billions of dollars and thousands of lives—plus alienating all of the world's major powers—in order to advance at best peripheral interests. Gorbachev chose to scale back Moscow's direct engagement in those conflicts, even at the risk of losing his clients.

—When anticommunist revolutions erupted in Eastern Europe, Moscow faced the choice between preserving its Communist regimes through force but losing the goodwill of Western Europe or permitting the collapse of empire but winning new and wealthy allies in Western Europe. Gorbachev chose to lose his satellites in the East in order to win support and aid from the West.

—With a resurgent United States under President Reagan embarking on its high-tech Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—which threatened to neutralize the Soviet advantage in first-strike land-based missiles—Moscow confronted the need to ante up hundreds of billions of rubles to stay in the game. After doggedly trying and failing to stop SDI through arms control, Gorbachev recognized after checking with his banker that the Soviet Union had to fold its hand.

—In the Persian Gulf War, Moscow had to choose between supporting its traditional ally, Iraq, and retaining its newly won respectability in the West. Though the Soviet Union helped Saddam Hussein covertly with military advisers
and spare parts and sought to save him from decisive defeat through last-minute diplomacy, Gorbachev ultimately endorsed the U.S.-led coalition's use of force to liberate Kuwait and to cut Iraq down to size. Gorbachev is not a stupid man. Faced with a choice of Iraq or the West, he chose the West.

As a pragmatic politician, Gorbachev sought to combat the apathy of the Soviet people by denouncing the Stalinist past, allowing criticism of the current system, and decentralizing some power to the republics. He also chose to shake up the Soviet establishment through
glasnost,
to seek leverage over the
nomenklatura
through the threat of further democratization; and to try to solve Soviet economic failings through
perestroika.
As a loyal Communist, however, he could not bring himself to cut his umbilical cord to the Communist party. He refused to institute genuine democracy—the Soviet people were still denied the power to change their central government through the ballot box—or to run in a competitive election himself. He rejected proposals to legitimize private property and to free prices. As a Russian nationalist, he refused to allow the non-Russian nations to exercise their constitutional right to secede, instead contriving a secession law harder to work than Rubik's Cube.

To ask whether Gorbachev was sincere begs the question. Unlike his predecessors, he recognized the fundamental inhumanity of the system founded under Stalin. But like his predecessors, he sincerely believed that the ideology of communism remained the solution, not the problem. “I am a Communist, a convinced Communist,” he said in 1990. “For some that might be a fantasy. But for me, it is my main goal.” He reaffirmed this view in early 1991, saying, “I am a Communist and adhere to the communist idea. And with this I will leave for the other world.”

In November 1990, Gorbachev gave a candid speech to
Soviet intellectuals that provided great insight into his heartfelt views. He described a conversation he had had with Shevardnadze in March 1985, shortly after taking power. Reflecting on the course of Soviet history, Shevardnadze had said that since the 1917 revolution “everything had gone rotten.” Gorbachev had stated that he concurred, that “we could not live as we had lived previously.” But in the rest of the speech he indicated that on two principles—retaining socialism and keeping the Soviet Union intact—he would not budge. He said, “There are the founders of
Moscow News,
and they will say, ‘President, stop assuring us and swearing that you are a follower of socialism.' But why should I stop if it is a profound conviction of mine? I will not stop; I will not stop as long as I have the opportunity of doing things precisely in such a way.” On retaining the union, he insisted, “We must not split up. I came and said honestly at a Supreme Soviet session: ‘We cannot split up, comrades. Whether we like it or not, this is how things have turned out for us. If we begin to split up, there will be a war, a terrible war.' ”

Gorbachev's adamant refusal to abandon the discredited doctrine of socialism and to move away from the center's imperial domination of the republics soon isolated him from the growing Soviet pro-reform movement. Outpaced by his own reforms, he resorted to rhetorical inflation, praising “democracy” and “free markets” and eventually even calling communism “an outdated ideological dogma.” But his actions did not measure up to his words. Increasingly, he appeared to become yesterday's man. His Communist beliefs and his Russian nationalism were blinders constraining his vision of the Soviet future. Like a circus performer on a high wire, he swayed from side to side, never too far one way or the other. He knew that if he fell, there would be no safety net to catch him.

A key turning point came in September 1990, when he rejected the Shatalin five-hundred-day plan to transform the Soviet system into a market economy. He then swung decisively to side with the reactionary forces of the Communist old guard—the
nomenklatura,
the economic central planners, the KGB, and the military top brass. Real reformers turned against him and called for accelerated change, not retrenchment, insisting only full democracy and free-market economics could save the country. The brightest and the best left him and joined Yeltsin. He was left with yes-men, second-raters, and hard-liners who used him rather than serving him. The problem was not just that Communist hard-liners occupied the seats in the cabinet room but that their ideas formed part of Gorbachev's mind-set. The hard-liners were not an incidental part of his administration but an integral part of his vision.

In making common cause with the reactionaries, Gorbachev rolled back some of his own reforms. He curtailed
glasnost,
sharply limiting the permissible criticism and opposition views presented in the media, particularly on television. Though he denied giving the orders, he endorsed after the fact the actions of security forces that led to the killing of twenty-one people by the brutal OMON internal security forces in Latvia and Lithuania. He denounced cooperatives even though they accounted for only 1 percent of GNP in 1990. He recentralized economic controls to strangle budding private enterprise. And in January 1991, he launched a much-heralded economic reform plan worthy of a Brazilian junta: its centerpiece was a confiscation of high-denomination currency that only served to further undercut confidence in the ruble.

In April 1991, Gorbachev appeared to recognize that he had turned down a dead end. Hard-line allies could guarantee
his grip on power, but they provided no program to rebuild the country. Meanwhile, the reformers were gaining strength, with Yeltsin only weeks away from a massive mandate in the presidential election in the Russian republic. Gorbachev backpedaled toward the reformers. He initialed an agreement on the future of reform and a new union treaty with Yeltsin and the leaders of eight other republics, moving in some ways toward a more reformist line.

While Gorbachev had temporized, however, the reform movement had taken on a momentum of its own. Independent democratic political parties took root. The press refused to be shackled again. The Communist party suffered a hemorrhage of resignations, with 25 percent of its 20 million members breaking ranks in a pell-mell struggle to escape a sinking ship. Despite their minority status, pro-reform factions in the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People's Deputies managed to hamstring some antidemocratic legislation. All fifteen republic governments declared their sovereignty and asserted the supremacy of their laws over those of the center. Six republic governments held free and fair elections, with their new leaders openly challenging the Kremlin in what Gorbachev called a “war of laws.” Among the people, fear of the once-mighty regime evaporated. Massive prodemocracy rallies—numbering in the hundreds of thousands—took place in Moscow and other cities, some even in defiance of explicit decrees from Gorbachev. This trend culminated in June 1991 with the resounding victory of Boris Yeltsin in a free presidential election in the Russian republic.

When the Communist hard-liners temporarily ousted Gorbachev two months later, they soon discovered that the smooth overthrow of Khrushchev in 1964 could not be reenacted. Before Gorbachev, Soviet leaders could intimidate the entire country by repressing a few dissidents. But Gorbachev's
reforms had corroded the system. While the coup leaders controlled the levers of power, those levers no longer flawlessly operated the machinery of repression. Kryuchkov, Yazov, and Pugo gave the orders to crack down, but their subordinates opted not to carry them out. Even if the coup had not collapsed within sixty hours, it would have soon degenerated into a replay of the downfall of the East German regime, with massive demonstrations and general strikes in Moscow and other major cities overwhelming the capacity of the state to suppress them with force.

Gorbachev failed at first to understand that he returned from captivity to a changed nation. Even before the coup, he had two political strikes against him. The first was his responsibility for the collapse of the Soviet economy. No Western democratic leader could possibly survive the fallout after a 15 percent drop in the economy over one year. The second strike was his position atop the Communist establishment. He won no friends by ruling the house that Stalin built and perpetuating the system of parasitical privileges for the Soviet elite. Yet while down in the count, he was not yet out. He could have gotten ahead of the pitcher if he had resigned from the party, accepted genuine democracy, accelerated market-oriented reform, and permitted self-determination for the republics immediately upon his return to Moscow. Instead, by proclaiming that he would “fight to the end for the renewal of the party,” he went down without swinging.

Just as history has bypassed communism, it has also bypassed Communists. Gorbachev faced a rapid erosion of his political position until he finally was forced to leave office. Before the coup, Gorbachev's only constituency was the Communist party. After the party betrayed him and the reformers scorned him, he was left with a constituency of one—himself. In viewing Gorbachev as indispensable, many in
the West assumed that any alternative to him would be worse. In fact, the alternative—Boris Yeltsin—may turn out to be better.