Gorbachev
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“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” —Matthew 5:9
Back in the days of the Soviet Union, when one of the old big men died, television broadcast would show a still picture of the Kremlin. From the audio came the enchanting strains of the second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony. Say what you will about the Bolsheviks, but it showed an elegantly beautiful musical taste and Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev remained a Bolshevik to his last breath.
It is hard to understand the magnitude of Gorbachev's historical impact. The Era of Gorbachev only lasted a half-dozen years, ending with the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev takes a lot of blame for things that happened once he was out of power, while not getting credit for his main accomplishment.
The single thing that makes Gorbachev a giant and unique historical figure is allowing the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Bloc. Never before had an empire peacefully dissolved. Gorbachev never intended for this dissolution, but catalyzed by the initiatives he launched, he refused to use violence to keep it together.
Today, it is difficult to understand the extent of centralized control in the Soviet Union. Over seventy-years, what many had once considered a new future politics, politically and economically stagnated, falling under the complete control of extremely concentrated power. Instead of a new order, the Soviet Union instituted a very old, a classically known political structure – the rule of the many by the few. Though even in 1985, there must have been some spark left of the old Russian Revolution, of “All power to the Soviets,” allowing Gorbachev's ascension.
Gorbachev understood the desperate need for reform. His two pillars of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reform) shook the Soviet Union and Europe. It would be a short, but decisive rule, ending, again not with what Gorbachev wanted, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
In Russia, Mikhail Sergeyevich remains, well, unpopular isn't nearly a strong enough word. “He was CIA,” rolls off many a Russian tongue when asked about Gorbachev. The 90s was a decade of incredible historical hardship for the Russians, a people long familiar with hardship, but Gorbachev had been banished from power at the end of 1991. It's a little like blaming Lenin for Stalin.
Gorbachev is ridiculed by many in regards to Eastern Europe. “He was naïve!” “He didn't get enough,” etc.. But this is a misunderstanding of power. Gorbachev unleashed events that were soon well out of his ability to control. The fall of Europe's Communist regimes followed rapidly, how rapidly said a lot about the state of that rule. The only possibility of keeping them together was violence and Gorbachev refused. That is his unique and sublime historical legacy.
As an American, the most tragic element of Gorbachev’s legacy was not just our complete inability to in anyway advantageously meet it, but just the opposite, with our actions, continuously trash it in every way possible. With the Soviet Union gone, we hubristically thought we could militarily rule the world, leading to one disastrous bloody misadventure after the next.
In 1989, Gorbachev visited East Germany for a celebration of the 40th anniversary of its founding. At that point, Erich Honecker, one of the useless tyrants Soviet imperialism had bestowed upon East Europe, had been in power for twenty years. He was an ardent opponent to all reform. In a meeting during the celebrations Gorbachev said to Honecker, “Life punishes those who come too late.”
When I first read this, my mind immediately went to Dr. Martin Luther King's speech against the Vietnam War twenty years before, which for all Americans should have even more profound resonance today. King said,
“Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, 'Too late.' There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: 'The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.'"
Almost forty years ago, six years into the desperate reactionary Reagan Revolution regime, how beautiful was that air suddenly wafting from Moscow. Gorbachev talked and acted on getting rid of nuclear weaponry, ceasing and reversing environmental destruction, and enacting democratic reform.
Twenty-five years ago in Los Angeles, I had the great honor of attending a small dinner, maybe fifteen people, couldn't have been more than twenty, with Gorbachev. As a Russian tradition, we did some shots and made toasts.
My experience giving toasts is short and not a good one. I sat in my seat trying to come up with something, but it all moved too quick. Gorbachev started, but everyone was sort of intimidated and only a couple toasts followed. For the only time in my life, I was simply awed to silence by a singular figure. Here is the toast I wanted to give,
“Mikhail Sergeyevich, if all of us gathered in this room are collectively able, across our entire lives, to move humanity one-thousandth of the way in the direction you started, posterity will say we lived well.”
God love Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev