The myth of Mikhail Gorbachev was in place even before the man stepped into obsolescence. If this were a docudrama, and it will be, it could be called ”Gorbachev: Greatness and Tragedy.” Here was the Man of the Age who
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”proceeded to dismantle the system that had nurtured him” (according to Fen Montaigne in the Knight-Ridder newspapers) but then was ”swept aside by the very forces that had nurtured him” (Serge Schmemann of the New York Times.)
The legend reached its apotheosis during Our Hero`s waning hours in power, or at least in office: In the short space of seven years, Mikhail Gorbachev established democracy in the Soviet Union, released the captive nations within and without a once-evil empire, and unleashed the flood of openness and reform-glasnost and perestroika-that swept him away in the last act.
Forgotten, or at least toned down, is the other Gorbachev, the leader of a totalitarian society who saw freedom only as another instrument, not the goal:
– The Gorbachev who was going to reform communism, not dismantle it.
– The Gorbachev who never freed the economy even as he opened the political process.
– The Gorbachev who continued to proclaim his faith in communism to the end, even if he used the euphemism socialism.
– The Gorbachev who allowed Soviet troops to crush the first stirrings of freedom in the Baltics.
– The Gorbachev who dismissed Boris Yeltsin, that populist upstart, only a few years ago.
– The Gorbachev who filled his inner circle with reactionaries and plotters, then disdained progressives like Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev when they tried to warn him that a coup was in the works.
– The Gorbachev who had been dragging his feet for years as freedom swept over his country, and at the last held on to the illusion of a Soviet Union long after it had become an empty shell.
How reconcile the two Gorbachevs, the man and the myth? Consider this explanation: There was always only one Gorbachev, a technocrat who saw the rot in the system and decided he was the leader who would cleanse and save it. Mikhail Gorbachev came not to destroy communism but to fulfill it. If he had succeeded, the world would be confronted today by a communism that worked, not a dissolving empire amid a new birth of freedom.
It should be clear by now that his grand dream was never realistic. This last commissar had about as much chance of reforming the Soviet Union as Satan would have of reforming hell. At the root of Mikhail Sergeyivich`s vast misperception was a refusal to acknowledge that communism was not a system that had gone bad-but one that was evil from the first, at the core, root as well as branch. It could not be reformed without being destroyed.
No closed system, which communism must be if it is to survive, can resist even a little light. Light spreads. Eventually it reveals all. Like truth, falsehood also is inseparable. To think of letting the light in just here and there is to risk exposing the whole, rotten edifice, which now has come tumbling down.
The Soviet Union might have survived a few more years or decades, perhaps even gone on indefinitely, if it had remained a hermetically sealed society.
(See Fidel Castro`s Cuba or Communist China.) But it could not survive half-slave and half-free. As Mr. Lincoln well understood, such a society must become all one thing or all the other. But Mikhail Gorbachev was trained in the dialectics of Marxism; he never understood the dynamics of freedom. If only he had read less Marx and more Lincoln.
The last czar of the Soviet dynasty didn`t just underestimate the attractions of democracy or the appeal of a score of nationalisms. His fatal error was to think he could introduce only as much freedom as he had use for. Boris Yeltsin knew better. He has ridden the waves of change, cobbling together new structures almost as fast as the old ones have collapsed. He has appreciated the need to stay just ahead of events-and has understood, as he once put it, that ”in Russia one can pass only on the left.”
Mikhail Gorbachev tried to straddle the middle. He thought he could channel and direct freedom as as he would any five-year plan. Nobody can. Once their chains are loosed, The People tend to become their own masters. Mikhail Gorbachev never understood that simple truth. It was his undoing. And the system`s.