Tribune leader, 3 January 1992
With few exceptions, the democratic left in the west has responded to Mikhail Gorbachev’s departure from the Kremlin with praise for his record in office.
Much of it is understandable. Gorbachev presided over a period of extraordinary, and for the most part welcome, change, both domestically and in Soviet relations with the rest of the world. When he gained the upper hand in the political apparatus, tension between the super-powers was at its height, east-central Europe was under Soviet domination and war raged between Soviet occupying forces and Mujahedin guerrillas in Afghanistan; at home, the regime was one of the most oppressive in the world. Today, the cold war is over and the Soviet Union, having given up east-central Europe, has ceased to exist. Most of the former satellite states are now functioning democracies and several of the former republics of the Soviet Union seem to be on the way to joining them. Despite the immense challenges ahead for the post-communist world, all this is cause for the democratic left to be pleased.
Yet, although much was Gorbachev’s responsibility, almost none of it was what he intended. The changes associated with his name were mostly by-products of an attempt to modernise and revitalise the stagnant Soviet system without fundamentally changing it. From any point of view, the attempt failed.
When Gorbachev and his team of ambitious technocrats came to power (he was never elected by popular vote), the only part of the Soviet economy operating at anything like contemporary western levels of technology and quality was the military sector; and the military sector was an unbearable burden for the rest of the economy. Economic growth had slowed almost to a standstill. The Soviet workforce was apathetic and unproductive, the ruling bureaucracy corrupt and immobile.
Gorbachev’s “modernising” reforms merely exacerbated the crisis. The disengagement from the cold war and the arms race, culminating in the withdrawal from east-central Europe, won Gorbachev many friends in the west; but it happened too late (and latterly too fast) to benefit the domestic economy, in the process losing Gorbachev the support of the military-industrial complex.
Meanwhile, the succession of half-baked plans for introducing market forces to the creaking mechanisms of production and distribution foundered against bureaucratic antipathy and the growing resistance of the working class. By the end of the eighties, the economy was in tatters.
Cultural liberalisation and the policy of “openness” – initially at least intended as little more than part of an anti-corruption campaign – won the support of the intelligentsia for a while but also unleashed demands for national self-determination and democracy which inexorably undermined the very foundations of the Soviet political system. Slowly but surely, Gorbachev’s popularity ebbed away as the crisis intensified. Last August’s coup and its bizarre collapse left Gorbachev with just one card to play: his status as world statesman. Boris Yeltsin and the republican leaders soon found they could trump it (although it remains an open question whether they will make it even more of a pig’s ear).
Gorbachev’s is a heroic record, perhaps, but it is a heroic record of failure. Western left-wing politicians would be advised not to adopt him as a role model.