Gorbachev meant narrowly to advance the Helsinki process (1975) under the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, but he expanded it to mean general reduction of tensions to permit pan-European integration and co-existence of liberal and socialist systems. He writes in his memoirs:
The idea of Europe as our common home had been a spontaneous thought, but the symbolic image eventually acquired an existence of its own. People in Europe tended to be particularly aware of the instability of the international situation and of the threat of war. It was here that the two antagonistic military blocs stood face to face, accumulating mountains of weapons and deploying sophisticated nuclear missiles. On the other hand, Europe possessed the most valuable experience of co-existence between countries belonging to different political systems.[i]
In time, his conciliatory negotiating posture toward disarmament led to the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF, 1987), Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE, 1990), and the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START, 1992). These disarmament treaties marked the end of the Cold War. At the climax of his power – his speech to the United Nations in 1988 – Gorbachev expanded his vision to a “New World Order.”[ii]
Gorbachev, to a Westerner, was an almost unimaginable sincere Communist. He believed in socialism – “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work” – as fundamentally just for the Soviet peoples, but he had abandoned Lenin’s program for a Communist world state. He grew up believing in the “leading role” of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, then 19,000,000 strong, which he joined at Moscow University in 1952, but he came to think it could be reduced to a “normal political party,” responsible for ideology in a multi-party, democratic political system. It would seek popular votes to form legislative majorities, while management of the socialist economy would be left to competition in a free market system. He favored reform (glasnost, perestroika, demokratizatsiya).
He was not an apparatchik of “Breznevism,” which he particularly hated for suppression of initiative and stagnation in the country. He was appointed General Secretary in 1985 in the usual Communist party way, and at first exercised absolute dictatorial power over the Soviet Union and its allies. At the end, he was trying to negotiate a new Union Treaty to preserve the old federal union of the U.S.S.R. on the basis of the independence of the republics. He believed in the co-existence of the two systems in Europe and the world. He imagined that capitalism and socialism could abide together. He was a “pluralist.”
Of course, it all came to naught. The U.S.S.R. was dissolved on 25 December 1991. Gorbachev blames Boris Yeltsin and “obsolete and reactionary forces.”[iii] What emerged, after Yeltsin’s mismanagement of the transition from socialist property to capitalist ownership of the means of production, was an economic depression worse than the American Great Depression, which led to the rise of oligarchs or captains of industry like those in America’s Gilded Age. That was followed by the rise after 2000 of Vladimir Putin, who brought back Russia’s traditional, imperialist, authoritarian state. Its principal interest was security of the country from expansionist neighbors on a great Eurasian geographic plane. The multiparty electoral system was taken over by Putin’s party, United Russia.
By the third decade of the 21st century, when nationalism seems to be taking over the European Union, and cult of the leader the United States, it may be useful for the friends of democracy to ask: How could an enlightened leader like Mikhail Gorbachev have ever arisen in so tyrannical a state as the Soviet Union? Could his vision of a “common European home” yet become the future of the European Union? To ask this question is to ask a broader one: How do great leaders arise even in dark times? Could new democratic leaders yet arise in Europe, Russia, or America?
Gorbachev was born in 1931 to an old family of peasants on the steppes of southern Russia in Stavropol. Memories of the 1917 Revolution were vivid. His paternal grandfather had fought on the western front in World War I. In 1933, during mass collectivism and famine, his grandfather lost three of his children to starvation, then was accused of not fulfilling the sowing plan. He was sent to a camp in the Irkutsk region but was so good a worker that he was sent back in 1935. One of his surviving sons, Sergei, was the father of Mikhail. Hence Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Something worse happened to the father of Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa Maksimovna. He was suspected and executed in 1937. She did not receive a certificate of his rehabilitation until 1988. In 1941 the Germans invaded. Mikhail’s father fought in the Second World War, was once reported dead, returned alive, and continued to fight in the Red army until liberation of the country. Everyone endured terrible deprivations and sufferings. Gorbachev comments: “Our way of life had changed completely. And we, the wartime children, skipped from childhood directly into adulthood.”
What is impressive to me about this story is how resigned and accepting of fate was the character of the Russian peasant. Even though the common people were harshly treated during the early years of the Communist revolution, they did not protest the new regime. Everyone got back to hard work. They had virtues of courage and resourcefulness and family solidarity in the face of great suffering. I know that to a lesser degree only in farms and ranches in the American west.
Gorbachev studied law at Moscow University from 1950 to 1955. This was an elite school at the height of the Stalin period, after the deprivations of the Great Patriotic War. A graduate could expect entry into a professional career and a good life within the system. Even though we in the West have been taught that “revolutionary socialist law” was not based on bourgeois civil and political rights and an independent judiciary, Gorbachev got a good education there. He writes:
To me, the university was a temple of learning, the focal point of minds that were our national pride, a centre of youthful energy, passion, and quest.
Yet he knew that everyone was under surveillance. He once dared in an exam to make a slightly critical comment about one of his books, perhaps Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism, which cost him a low grade (a 4 in place of his usual 5s). He tells a story about one of his professors, S.V. Yuzhkov, an old-fashioned historian of Kievan Russia. Yuzhkov was once accused of “rootless cosmopolitanism” (a post-war movement of friendliness to the recent Western allies). He knew that defense was useless. Yuzhkov simply stood up in his Russian shirt bound with a cord around the waist at the academic council meeting where he was accused and said helplessly, “Look at me.” Everyone burst out laughing. Common sense prevailed. People asked themselves, “Are we completely crazy to suspect this man of being a cosmopolite?”
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Gorbachev, while at Moscow University, wrote his graduation paper on the advantages of socialist democracy over bourgeois democracy. He comments in his memoirs, “Obviously we were very far from understanding the principles of democracy.”[iv] His hopes to be assigned to the U.S.S.R. State Procurator’s office, where he expected to be part of the rehabilitation of victims of Stalin’s purges, were disappointed. So he returned to Stavropol to guide agriculture in the local party apparatus. Over the years, he was disappointed by Khrushchev’s “thaw”, then by his foreign policy. It was not just the “personality cult” that was wrong, it seemed to Gorbachev; the “command economy and the centralized state bureaucracy … sapped the vital energies of society.” The Soviet treatment of Hungary (1956), Cuba (1962), and China (after 1961) was disillusioning. Gorbachev was deeply moved by reports from friends (despite the party line) of the Prague spring of 1968. Basically, what he aimed at in the Soviet Union was modeled on “Communism with a human face”, as attempted in Prague.[v]
From this short sketch of Gorbachev’s origins, we can see how leadership emerges. Gorbachev grew up with decent moral values, truthfulness, sympathy, and hard work within the system. He got the finest education available, particularly in law. In his career, he became disillusioned with the command economy and the rigid single party. When great power was offered to him, as in his selection by high authority to be Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee in 1978 and then to the high command of the General Secretary in 1985, he knew what reforms he wished to make.
We can imagine what leadership will be required in today’s international situation to realize the dream of a common European home. Obscure public servants or politicians will come to power in the usual ways and then undertake to reform the rotten system. Where will they find their authority? There will be no post of general secretary of the CPSU to step into. They will get it from the people. Some event of supreme crisis – like the long feared nuclear war or the melting of the Greenland ice cap or world economic depression — will produce the popular will to take necessary action. I venture to think the leaders adequate to the challenges will not come from today’s nationalists, looking backwards, like Salvini or Trump. They will have to fail first, or be defeated in the crisis, opening the historic opportunity for real leaders in international integration.
Assuming a crisis to motivate action, a historic opportunity, and leaders ready to proceed to a European common home, including Russia, what can we venture to imagine would be next steps? I think everyone must make greater efforts to understand the conduct of Russia under Putin. We in the West bear some responsibility for him because of our expansion of NATO in 2004.
When Putin took over Crimea in 2014, the United States and its European allies immediately charged aggression. But Putin’s defense of his conduct deserves hearing. The attacks in eastern Ukraine, largely populated by Russians (not too far from Stavropol), were defensive, since Ukraine had been unstable on Russia’s western border since independence in 1991 and was notoriously corrupt. Putin in his 18 March 2014 speech claimed that Crimea declared independence as Ukraine broke down. He explained that Russia's part was to defend the residents and the naval port at Sevastopol, if Ukraine joined NATO. He conducted a fair plebiscite in which 82 percent of the electorate (1.5 million Russians, 350,000 Ukrainians, plus Tatars) took part. The vote was 96 percent in favor of returning Crimea to Russia. (It had been donated to Ukraine by Khrushchev after 1954). He claimed that the soldiers who fought to defend independent Crimea were drawn from the Russians living there. What he did was within his rights as leader of a sovereign state with no recourse for settlement available at a higher international level. It was no worse than the seizure of Kosovo from Serbia by the U.S. and NATO in 1999 in defiance of the U.N. Charter.
Putin turned the tables on the United States and its European allies who have charged Russia with aggression and applied sanctions:
Like a mirror, the situation in Ukraine reflects what is going on and what has been happening in the world over the past several decades. After the dissolution of bipolarity on the planet, we no longer have stability. Key international institutions are not getting any stronger; on the contrary, in many cases, they are sadly degrading. Our western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. They have come to believe in their exclusivity and exceptionalism, that they can decide the destinies of the world, that only they can ever be right. They act as they please: here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle “If you are not with us, you are against us.” … Today, it is imperative to end this hysteria, to refute the rhetoric of the cold war and to accept the obvious fact: Russia is an independent, active participant in international affairs; like other countries, it has its own national interests that need to be taken into account and respected.
Gorbachev, too, accepted Russia’s takeover of Crimea, since it was in accord with the “will of the people” and in response to NATO expansion. The event came well after Gorbachev’s memoirs, but it is fully covered in the new, sympathetic yet critical biography by William Taubman, “Gorbachev and His Times”:
Gorbachev’s attacks on Western post–cold war behavior tracked closely with Putin’s. Gorbachev, too, condemned Western attempts to ‘turn us into some kind of backwater’ after the cold war, with ‘America calling the shots in everything'. He too continued to censure NATO’s expansion up to Russia’s borders, along with NATO bombing of Yugoslavia without United Nations authorization, and the American invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush. Gorbachev welcomed Russia’s takeover of Crimea, calling it a ‘happy moment’ in accord with the ‘will of the people.’[vi]
Nevertheless, financial sanctions were immediately imposed by the U.S. Congress, most members of the European Union, and other states ranging from Norway to Japan. Russia was charged with invasion and seizure of territory like that of Iraq against Kuwait in 1990. Vice-President Biden said, “These asymmetrical advances on another country cannot be tolerated. The international system will collapse if they are". Sanctions by 2016 have cost Russia $170 billion, which contributed to another fall in the value of the ruble, and financial crisis. The E.U. reciprocally lost €100 billion. But the effect has not been to reverse the fate of Crimea.
Some E.U. states have called for review of the sanctions: Italy, Hungary, Greece, Slovakia, Crete, and most notably, France. President Macron of France is typical of new leaders in Europe in the current period without Britain and a trustworthy United States. He looks forward to long-term security, freedom, and prosperity in the Union. In his speech to the Group of Seven at Biarritz on 27 August 2019, he called for return of Russia to the G8, if not immediately to a lifting of sanctions. But he laid out a stratégie européenne based on a militarily strong France as the puissance d’équilibre (balancing power). He proposed a “frank and exacting dialogue” with Russia, on the grounds that “the European continent will never be secure if we do not pacify and clarify our relations with Russia”.
Gorbachev has written a book about Putin after Yeltsin, “The New Russia”. The return to authoritarianism in Russia, Gorbachev thinks, is contrary to globalization and the current forces of history tending toward coexistence and peace. America, too, needs “its own perestroika,” even a “new American Revolution.”[vii] He wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 10 June 2009, early in the Obama administration:
Our perestroika signaled the need for change in the Soviet Union, but it was not meant to suggest a capitulation to the US model. Today the need for a more far-reaching perestroika – one for America and the world – has become clearer than ever.
The West’s proper conduct toward Russia, I think, is not to prepare for a new cold war. The next step, if we can abandon labeling Russia an aggressor and cease the punitive sanctions, is to invite Russia into NATO – transformed into a Eurasian collective security system stretching to China. An opening has already begun by Russia’s participation in NATO’s Partnership for Peace, officially designed to deflect fears of secret NATO machinations. The Partnership consists of all twelve republics in the Commonwealth of Independent States, three in former Yugoslavia, and five in the E.U. When it was established in 1994, President Clinton said it was a "track that will lead to NATO membership", without drawing “another line dividing Europe a few hundred miles to the east”. That, of course, was before the expansion of 2004 (in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq), when all the seven former Warsaw-pact states, plus Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were brought into NATO, moving the line 800 miles to the east!
The transformation of NATO into an inclusive, working collective security system in Eurasia is where new leadership is needed. Probably the name should be changed. Call it “Europe Free from Sea to Sea”. Such a change presumes New Thinking in American foreign policy, abandoning hegemony for a decent respect to the opinions of mankind. Prospects are not good. After all, it was the U.S.A. under the Trump administration that abandoned the INF treaty. And also the Iran deal and the Paris accords on climate change. One way this revolution might happen is for some daring and wise European leader to make the same unilateral efforts to bring back Russia into the comity of nations within NATO, as Gorbachev did to cut forces and wind down the Cold War. Putin’s part would be to permit free elections in Russia, which is Gorbachev’s standard for democracy. Such an effort, by experienced leaders, could begin to establish a European common home.
[i] Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs, English trans. Wolf Jobst Siedler (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 427-28.
[ii] Ibid., 439–63.
[iii] Ibid., xxv.
[iv] Ibid., 52.
[v] Ibid., 481.
[vi] William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (London: Simon & Schuster UK, 2017), 685.
[vii] Mikhail Gorbachev, The New Russia (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 327-38.