Michael Strand. "Gutsy Gorbachev"

     MANHATTAN — Cynics have claimed that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. used nonviolent tactics because that was all they had available.
     Friday afternoon, taking questions after a speech at McCain Auditorium on the Kansas State University campus, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev deflected a similar question.
     “Some say you became a democrat only after trying everything else,” said the questioner, who asked Gorbachev if the reforms that introduced the world to the Russian words “perestroika” and “glasnost” would ever have occurred if his early attempts to “fix” Communism had succeeded.
     “I would not agree to this opinion of when I became a democrat,” said Gorbachev, speaking through his translator to more than 2,000 people as part of the university’s Landon Lecture series.
     “In 1985, the Soviet leadership faced a choice,” he said. 1985 was when the country’s Communist leadership elected him as general secretary of the party — the country’s de facto leader; it was in 1990 that he was named the U.S.S.R.’s first and only president.
     “From the start, we chose in favor of democracy and openness,” he said. “I would ask you not to doubt my democratic credentials.”

 Absence of freedom

      Gorbachev is on a speaking tour of the United States, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the beginnings of his reforms. Those reforms eventually led to the opening of the Iron Curtain, the dissolving of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and its expensive arms race, and the marginalizing of worldwide Communism — as well as bringing social and economic freedom to Russia.
     “In the history of Russia, there were three events that had a tremendous impact on my country and the world,” Gorbachev said, listing the country’s 1917 revolution, “the Great Patriotic War” that we call World War II, and perestroika.
     By the early 1980s, “desire for change was in the air,” he said, prompted by the realization that “our country, which was extremely rich in education and natural resources, couldn’t provide for its people ... our country had been stifled because of the absence of freedom.”
     Worker productivity was about one-third what it was in the West, and farm productivity was one-fifth that in the West, and the cost of producing goods was double what it was in Europe and the United States, he said. And with the exception of weapons, what was produced was of poor quality.
     “Attempts at change had been made before,” he said, citing several previous Soviet leaders. “But as soon as it was obvious the system needed changing — it stopped.”
     Gorbachev and other leaders had come to believe that was exactly what was needed: “radical change, systemic change.”

Bunch of old guys

 But not everyone agreed.

     “I was 54 years old and youngest member of the Politburo (the party’s inner circle) — all the rest were over 70 ... the system was rusty to say the least.”
     Though he said the reforms were supported by the people, “Perestroika meant overcoming totalitarianism, and this did not happen overnight. There was resistance from the bureaucracy, the party bureaucracy, the government bureaucracy and the military bureaucracy.”
     He acknowledged “We had some initial illusions — that we could improve the old system, give it a second win.”
     The reforms included writing a new “union treaty” giving individual republics new autonomy; Gorbachev had already allowed the countries of Eastern Europe to break away, and East and West Germany had reunited a year before. That new union treaty was to have been signed on Aug. 20, 1990.
On Aug. 19, hard-liners who wanted to turn back the clock arrested Gorbachev and surrounded the Russian Parliament with tanks and troops.
     Though returned to power three days later, the coup “weakened my position,” Gorbachev said, with the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and other republics working “behind my back” to dismantle the Soviet Union. On Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet Union was no more, and Gorbachev was out of office.

A lost empire

     Along the way, Russia lost its “empire” in eastern Europe — something Gorbachev is sometimes criticized for.
     Where previous Soviet leaders had used the Red Army to quash any attempts at independence from Moscow in eastern Europe, “We never interfered from my first day,” he said.
     “It is sometimes said that I gave away Poland, that I gave away Hungary,” he said. “I gave it to their people; I gave Hungary to the Hungarians, I gave Poland to the Poles.”
     “What happened afterwards was a different history,” he said. New Russian president Boris Yeltsin “had other plans,” which Gorbachev described as a “misadventure that ended badly. The wealth of a nation was plundered. Our economy was opened up when it was not yet ready to compete with the developed countries.”
     “It is true we were not able to achieve all the goals we had planned,” he said. “But we were able to wipe out a totalitarian system.
     “What we were able to do before August 1991 is what enabled our country to move forward — we will not go back,” he said. “And that is the achievement of perestroika.”
     Today, Russian president Vladimir Putin has brought stability to “the chaos he inherited from Boris Yeltsin.”

Can’t go it alone

     Though challenges clearly remain ahead for Russia, Gorbachev said the world as a whole also faces challenges.
     And meeting them will require global cooperation, not unilateral action, he said.
    “No country can achieve security alone,” he said. “The is something the United States needs to know ... this is an interdependent and interrelated world, where no country can solve it problems alone.”
     The move towards globalization has brought new wealth to millions around the globe, he said, “but we see that globalization does not include billions of people.”
     He also urged attempts to bring the Moslem world into the global community.
     Saying the Islamic world has been increasingly “marginalized” in recent years, he said continuing to do that “could result in a lot of trouble.”
     “The Islamic world required understanding and respect,” he said. “Let us not think of the Islamic world as just a supplier of terrorists ... every religion has its fundamentalists, so let’s not just accuse Islam of that.”
     And while he said “America has a right to a leadership role in the world,” he added that that should be a “partnership, not domination of other nations. History has shown the people of the world will not accept attempts by one country to be the world’s policeman.”

Salina Journal, October 29, 2005