Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev 1931--2022
August 30, 2022 5:06 PM Subscribe
Branko Milanovic:
By the standards of statecraft, he must be judged harshly, like one of the most extraordinary failures in history. By the standards of humanity, he must be judged much more kindly: he allowed millions to regain freedom, not only proclaimed, but stuck to the principles of non-violence in domestic and foreign affairs, and left his office willingly, when he did not need to do, simply because he did not want to fight and risk lives in order to keep it. But being nice and, in fact, anti-political, he left the field open to much worse men...posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:08 PM on August 30, 2022 [50 favorites]
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posted by Silvery Fish at 5:11 PM on August 30, 2022
posted by Silvery Fish at 5:11 PM on August 30, 2022
I visited the USSR in 1988 with my high school Russian class. It was still very closed-up. We weren't allowed to interact with any unvetted citizens. BUT, the Intourist guides were very excited because they'd recently been given permission to talk about how bad the Stalin years were. Obviously the way the Soviet Union shambled to an end was less than ideal. I kind of feel like we're in a similar slow-motion-crash era in the USA these days. Gorbachev could have made the whole process a lot worse, but he was a true statesman.
posted by rikschell at 5:11 PM on August 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 5:11 PM on August 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
A giant among lesser men. I remember as a kid seeing him at some summit where he corrected a translator. It was immediately clear that he could speak English, but chose not to -- to buy himself time to think of a best answer, to refuse to meet his adversary on their terms. It struck me as such a power move, and impressed me as it was an *earned* one, made possible because he had done the work. He had abilities his opponents -- our side -- did not. He was intellectual and he was crafty, and not at all of the image the West portrayed Soviet leaders. There was more to the other side than I had been taught. That moment was a spark which lead to my own intellectual awakening, questioning the world as it had been presented to me -- and I have Gorby to thank. Do I agree with everything he did or stood for? Of course not. But he widened my world by showing that we didn't have all the answers, that we weren't right simply by virtue of being us. He brought down the Berlin Wall, and more immediately, he brought down walls inside myself.
posted by Capt. Renault at 5:26 PM on August 30, 2022 [51 favorites]
posted by Capt. Renault at 5:26 PM on August 30, 2022 [51 favorites]
It was such a heady rush to watch crowds rushed both East and West in Berlin when the Wall came down. .This was sad news to hear.
posted by y2karl at 5:45 PM on August 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by y2karl at 5:45 PM on August 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
It sounds improbable even to someone who was there, but we actually had a Russian-language class in my tiny rural high school in a deeply Republican area in the late 1980s. It was technically a “club” rather than a for-credit class.
Our French teacher had grown up in Soviet Lithuania and had spoken Russian as her second language, and enough of us were interested that she offered to teach an after-school class. It was the age of glasnost and perestroika, and we kids who had been raised with the certainty that the world would end in a mushroom cloud were really eager to grab onto any hope that it might not happen after all.
Most of that first semester was spent learning to read and write the Cyrillic alphabet (both print and cursive), make the different consonant and vowel sounds we weren’t used to, and understand things like patronymics and gendered surnames. And I remember that “Gorbachev,” along with “glasnost “ and ““perestroika” were on our first vocabulary list. It still annoys me when I hear an historian or a newscaster pronounce it badly!
(My university Russian class failed in our fundraising goal for a trip to Moscow, and used the money for a fancy dinner instead. And for some reason, it ended up not being at one of the several Russian restaurants in the nearest big city.)
End of an era. покойся с миром, Михаил Сергеевич
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:45 PM on August 30, 2022 [20 favorites]
Our French teacher had grown up in Soviet Lithuania and had spoken Russian as her second language, and enough of us were interested that she offered to teach an after-school class. It was the age of glasnost and perestroika, and we kids who had been raised with the certainty that the world would end in a mushroom cloud were really eager to grab onto any hope that it might not happen after all.
Most of that first semester was spent learning to read and write the Cyrillic alphabet (both print and cursive), make the different consonant and vowel sounds we weren’t used to, and understand things like patronymics and gendered surnames. And I remember that “Gorbachev,” along with “glasnost “ and ““perestroika” were on our first vocabulary list. It still annoys me when I hear an historian or a newscaster pronounce it badly!
(My university Russian class failed in our fundraising goal for a trip to Moscow, and used the money for a fancy dinner instead. And for some reason, it ended up not being at one of the several Russian restaurants in the nearest big city.)
End of an era. покойся с миром, Михаил Сергеевич
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:45 PM on August 30, 2022 [20 favorites]
'Gorbachev's Disputed Legacy' (Foreign Policy):
Gorbachev’s deep aversion to the use of raw power had prompted him to devolve authority to others, including the leaders of the 15 Soviet republics. Eventually he found himself a ruler without a Soviet state, yet he kept his dignity to the bitter day of Dec. 25, 1991, when he resigned and Yeltsin formally inherited the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Many of Gorbachev’s compatriots appreciated the new freedoms he had granted, yet many more blamed him for economic chaos and the collapse of the Soviet empire.posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:48 PM on August 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
I think I speak for many people when I say I was surprised to hear he wasn't long dead already.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:00 PM on August 30, 2022 [17 favorites]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:00 PM on August 30, 2022 [17 favorites]
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posted by lalochezia at 6:08 PM on August 30, 2022
posted by lalochezia at 6:08 PM on August 30, 2022
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posted by JoeXIII007 at 6:30 PM on August 30, 2022
posted by JoeXIII007 at 6:30 PM on August 30, 2022
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posted by May Kasahara at 6:45 PM on August 30, 2022
posted by May Kasahara at 6:45 PM on August 30, 2022
He was the right person in the right place at the right time. Sometimes fate is kind to the world.
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posted by Ickster at 6:54 PM on August 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
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posted by Ickster at 6:54 PM on August 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
On a visit to DC in 1990 he had his limo stopped on a random street and waded into the crowd to shake hands. чемпионский ход.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:00 PM on August 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by kirkaracha at 7:00 PM on August 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
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He ended the cold war, and we may owe our lives to that. History, the province of victors, does not often remember the peacemakers fondly.
posted by eustatic at 7:02 PM on August 30, 2022 [49 favorites]
He ended the cold war, and we may owe our lives to that. History, the province of victors, does not often remember the peacemakers fondly.
posted by eustatic at 7:02 PM on August 30, 2022 [49 favorites]
"If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum."
-Mikhail Gorbachev
posted by clavdivs at 7:06 PM on August 30, 2022 [28 favorites]
-Mikhail Gorbachev
posted by clavdivs at 7:06 PM on August 30, 2022 [28 favorites]
I hope history remembers him more kindly than Reagan.
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posted by TedW at 7:08 PM on August 30, 2022 [12 favorites]
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posted by TedW at 7:08 PM on August 30, 2022 [12 favorites]
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posted by vorpal bunny at 7:37 PM on August 30, 2022
posted by vorpal bunny at 7:37 PM on August 30, 2022
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By the standards of statecraft, he must be judged harshly [ . . . ] By the standards of humanity, he must be judged much more kindly
I think this assessment is spot on.
I don't believe anyone in history has been responsible for such a huge increase in freedom and self-determination for so many people, in such a short time, with so little violence. This is not hyperbole, and it could have gone very poorly for humanity indeed if almost anyone was running the USSR during its crises.
But on his own terms he failed totally. I saw him give a talk in '93 or '94 and was a bit nonplused that it was a hyper-legalistic defense of his legacy as opposed to an uplifting speech about, you know, how important peace and freedom are. In retrospect it was a bit like hearing a hardcore US centrist saying, sure, the radicals are in charge now, but at least we didn't compromise on the filibuster on my watch.
At heart I think he was a true believer in the USSR, the theory and legal fiction as opposed to the existing one. The Ned Stark of the Cold War, totally out of place, doomed to lose--except, again, unlike Ned, he avoided plunging our world into chaos and bloodshed.
I hope history remembers him more kindly than Reagan.
As a child of the Cold War I remain flabbergasted at how Gorbachev proved the right wing hawks totally wrong about how the USSR would act in a crisis, and yet in their mind the whole thing is going to be forever remembered as a triumphant vindication.
Sadly I don't think you'll get your wish.
posted by mark k at 7:38 PM on August 30, 2022 [35 favorites]
By the standards of statecraft, he must be judged harshly [ . . . ] By the standards of humanity, he must be judged much more kindly
I think this assessment is spot on.
I don't believe anyone in history has been responsible for such a huge increase in freedom and self-determination for so many people, in such a short time, with so little violence. This is not hyperbole, and it could have gone very poorly for humanity indeed if almost anyone was running the USSR during its crises.
But on his own terms he failed totally. I saw him give a talk in '93 or '94 and was a bit nonplused that it was a hyper-legalistic defense of his legacy as opposed to an uplifting speech about, you know, how important peace and freedom are. In retrospect it was a bit like hearing a hardcore US centrist saying, sure, the radicals are in charge now, but at least we didn't compromise on the filibuster on my watch.
At heart I think he was a true believer in the USSR, the theory and legal fiction as opposed to the existing one. The Ned Stark of the Cold War, totally out of place, doomed to lose--except, again, unlike Ned, he avoided plunging our world into chaos and bloodshed.
I hope history remembers him more kindly than Reagan.
As a child of the Cold War I remain flabbergasted at how Gorbachev proved the right wing hawks totally wrong about how the USSR would act in a crisis, and yet in their mind the whole thing is going to be forever remembered as a triumphant vindication.
Sadly I don't think you'll get your wish.
posted by mark k at 7:38 PM on August 30, 2022 [35 favorites]
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posted by fimbulvetr at 8:02 PM on August 30, 2022
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:02 PM on August 30, 2022
Back in 1989 I was in my second year at NYU, studying theater. NYU wants theater students to have a firm-ish foundation in liberal arts, despite a rather busy conservatory schedule, so we were given a VERY free hand with our non-theater course selection; prerequisite requirements were usually waived in our case. And that's how I ended up taking a poly-sci course called "Modern Soviet Foreign Policy", because I innocently thought it sounded interesting. However, most other students had taken some basic courses in political science, so they could follow along - while I was COMPLETELY at sea for the first couple weeks.
And then....that's when glasnost started happening. With each new change, yet another one of the things our professor was teaching was stripped away. I literally heard him in class once conclude a ten-minute explanation of some obscure point of Soviet theory by saying "of course, after Gorbachev's press conference yesterday, everything I've just told you is now completely moot." By the last couple weeks of the class, the professor finally had to admit that things had changed so much that now even he had no idea what the fuck was going on any more, so he turned the whole class into a pass/fail class and we did current events discussion for the remaining class sessions.
So in short - in addition to closing out the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev kept me from failing one of my college courses.
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posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:06 PM on August 30, 2022 [75 favorites]
And then....that's when glasnost started happening. With each new change, yet another one of the things our professor was teaching was stripped away. I literally heard him in class once conclude a ten-minute explanation of some obscure point of Soviet theory by saying "of course, after Gorbachev's press conference yesterday, everything I've just told you is now completely moot." By the last couple weeks of the class, the professor finally had to admit that things had changed so much that now even he had no idea what the fuck was going on any more, so he turned the whole class into a pass/fail class and we did current events discussion for the remaining class sessions.
So in short - in addition to closing out the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev kept me from failing one of my college courses.
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posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:06 PM on August 30, 2022 [75 favorites]
But being nice and, in fact, anti-political, he left the field open to much worse men...
This is a shocking rewrite of history. Gorbachev didn't like it that the Soviet Union was over but he saw that it was and managed it's decline better than any politician of the time (or since) could have done.
What happened after was imposed on Russia by the smart kids in the west. The looting of the state, the rise of crime both improvised and organized, the corresponding desire for some strong man to take control - all forced on a confused and vulnerable country by people who should now be locked up.
Make no mistake - for a large number of powerful people in the west the current form of the Russian state is the fulfillment of an ideal. One that they are working hard to bring to the rest of the world.
And yet all this is Gorbachev's fault? No.
It didn't have to be like this. It was a choice made by, primarily, people in the US who are now honored and still in positions of power.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:09 PM on August 30, 2022 [45 favorites]
This is a shocking rewrite of history. Gorbachev didn't like it that the Soviet Union was over but he saw that it was and managed it's decline better than any politician of the time (or since) could have done.
What happened after was imposed on Russia by the smart kids in the west. The looting of the state, the rise of crime both improvised and organized, the corresponding desire for some strong man to take control - all forced on a confused and vulnerable country by people who should now be locked up.
Make no mistake - for a large number of powerful people in the west the current form of the Russian state is the fulfillment of an ideal. One that they are working hard to bring to the rest of the world.
And yet all this is Gorbachev's fault? No.
It didn't have to be like this. It was a choice made by, primarily, people in the US who are now honored and still in positions of power.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:09 PM on August 30, 2022 [45 favorites]
So many memories. One for now: watching that desperate coup in realtime, glued to the tv (and taping every live minute, I still have the tapes). History suddenly teetered and yawed into dark possibilities.
During one press conference a videographer zoomed in on one of the coup plotters, then made a closeup on his hands. While the man's voice was serious and sober, the hands were *trembling* upon a table under glaring lights.
posted by doctornemo at 8:34 PM on August 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
During one press conference a videographer zoomed in on one of the coup plotters, then made a closeup on his hands. While the man's voice was serious and sober, the hands were *trembling* upon a table under glaring lights.
posted by doctornemo at 8:34 PM on August 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
Erik Loomis over at LGM has a very fitting write up on Gorbachev's life and legacy.
posted by Ickster at 9:30 PM on August 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Ickster at 9:30 PM on August 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
I was and am as staunchly anti-communist as one can be - and the USSR was a terrible, evil monstrosity - but what Gorbachev did was basically unthinkable, until it wasn't. He saw the future, and did what he could to make it better than what it had been.
Whether he truly "believed" in communism/marxism-leninism/etc all the way to his core isn't as relevant as (as others have noted above) what he did to end the Soviet state, thereby enabling truly tens and tens of millions of people (more?) from many countries to once again reclaim their freedom and heritage.
And watching it all in near real-time was utterly fascinating and joyful.
RIP, Gorby.
posted by davidmsc at 9:54 PM on August 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
Whether he truly "believed" in communism/marxism-leninism/etc all the way to his core isn't as relevant as (as others have noted above) what he did to end the Soviet state, thereby enabling truly tens and tens of millions of people (more?) from many countries to once again reclaim their freedom and heritage.
And watching it all in near real-time was utterly fascinating and joyful.
RIP, Gorby.
posted by davidmsc at 9:54 PM on August 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
"Because of him we have many things... Like Pizza Hut!"
posted by kaibutsu at 10:05 PM on August 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by kaibutsu at 10:05 PM on August 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
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posted by Token Meme at 10:25 PM on August 30, 2022
posted by Token Meme at 10:25 PM on August 30, 2022
Whether he truly "believed" in communism/marxism-leninism/etc all the way to his core isn't as relevant as (as others have noted above) what he did to end the Soviet state
But he never did anything "to end the Soviet state." He did things while the Soviet state was ending, or more accurately he declined to do some things while it was ending. His singular, critical, humanity-saving virtue was the refusal to use force. But it's pretty clear that he didn't understand that force was all there was to the eastern bloc and the USSR.
I read the Loomis piece linked above with interest. Loomis is unlike me both a professional historian and possesses of strong credentials as an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist commentator. But you'll find he has the same perspective on Gorbachev's role that I do.
posted by mark k at 10:26 PM on August 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
But he never did anything "to end the Soviet state." He did things while the Soviet state was ending, or more accurately he declined to do some things while it was ending. His singular, critical, humanity-saving virtue was the refusal to use force. But it's pretty clear that he didn't understand that force was all there was to the eastern bloc and the USSR.
I read the Loomis piece linked above with interest. Loomis is unlike me both a professional historian and possesses of strong credentials as an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist commentator. But you'll find he has the same perspective on Gorbachev's role that I do.
posted by mark k at 10:26 PM on August 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
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posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:36 PM on August 30, 2022
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:36 PM on August 30, 2022
☭
posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:55 PM on August 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:55 PM on August 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
What happened after was imposed on Russia by the smart kids in the west. The looting of the state, the rise of crime both improvised and organized, the corresponding desire for some strong man to take control - all forced on a confused and vulnerable country by people who should now be locked up.
Make no mistake - for a large number of powerful people in the west the current form of the Russian state is the fulfillment of an ideal. One that they are working hard to bring to the rest of the world.
Forced is something of an overstatement, but otherwise yes. The choice of Yeltsin to accept the recommendations of Chicago School shitheads has a direct line to the enormous economic upheavals and the rise of the oligarchs. I'd argue that the right wingers who subscribe to that economic bullshit would have preferred that Russia remain weak, though. That's not to say that they don't prefer strongmen like Putin, just that they want the US to be run that way, not Russia.
It was always going to suck for Russia once the economic path that China later took was foreclosed to them by circumstances imposed from within and without, but it didn't need to be anywhere near as bad as it was. Part of it was mistrust on the part of the US government, who refused to provide assistance to the state enterprises in making the transition to a market economy, which made the whole rapid privatization push look a whole lot more attractive.
They literally didn't have any experience in identifying market needs and estimating demand, which led to a whole lot of wasted effort and resources early on which made everyone lose any hope for a gradual transition away from state ownership. Anything had to be better than the status quo.
We often forget when looking back just how hard it was for people in power to grasp that it wasn't all some kind of dirty trick. It's incredibly disturbing how hard it was to get money out of Congress even to help secure the vast amount of nuclear material and expertise that was floating around the former USSR in the early 90s. Plutonium, weapons grade uranium, initiators, machines for fabricating bomb components, and the people with the knowledge to put it together were all up for grabs for years. And that's not even getting into the biological weapons that were pretty much ready to go. It's a goddamned miracle that Iran, Libya, and a bunch of other countries and terrorist organizations didn't get their hands on it.
The WMD situation is emblematic of the attitude governments of the west as a whole had towards the FSU in its early days. They didn't step up to the plate, which left room for the extreme right wing acolytes of Ayn Rand to do it instead. As shitty as neoliberal economics can be, going that route would have not been anything like the stupid as shit shock therapy that ended up happening. Would have been a whole lot less dangerous, too. And might have even forestalled the shift back to authoritarianism, though that is more speculative.
posted by wierdo at 11:37 PM on August 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
Make no mistake - for a large number of powerful people in the west the current form of the Russian state is the fulfillment of an ideal. One that they are working hard to bring to the rest of the world.
Forced is something of an overstatement, but otherwise yes. The choice of Yeltsin to accept the recommendations of Chicago School shitheads has a direct line to the enormous economic upheavals and the rise of the oligarchs. I'd argue that the right wingers who subscribe to that economic bullshit would have preferred that Russia remain weak, though. That's not to say that they don't prefer strongmen like Putin, just that they want the US to be run that way, not Russia.
It was always going to suck for Russia once the economic path that China later took was foreclosed to them by circumstances imposed from within and without, but it didn't need to be anywhere near as bad as it was. Part of it was mistrust on the part of the US government, who refused to provide assistance to the state enterprises in making the transition to a market economy, which made the whole rapid privatization push look a whole lot more attractive.
They literally didn't have any experience in identifying market needs and estimating demand, which led to a whole lot of wasted effort and resources early on which made everyone lose any hope for a gradual transition away from state ownership. Anything had to be better than the status quo.
We often forget when looking back just how hard it was for people in power to grasp that it wasn't all some kind of dirty trick. It's incredibly disturbing how hard it was to get money out of Congress even to help secure the vast amount of nuclear material and expertise that was floating around the former USSR in the early 90s. Plutonium, weapons grade uranium, initiators, machines for fabricating bomb components, and the people with the knowledge to put it together were all up for grabs for years. And that's not even getting into the biological weapons that were pretty much ready to go. It's a goddamned miracle that Iran, Libya, and a bunch of other countries and terrorist organizations didn't get their hands on it.
The WMD situation is emblematic of the attitude governments of the west as a whole had towards the FSU in its early days. They didn't step up to the plate, which left room for the extreme right wing acolytes of Ayn Rand to do it instead. As shitty as neoliberal economics can be, going that route would have not been anything like the stupid as shit shock therapy that ended up happening. Would have been a whole lot less dangerous, too. And might have even forestalled the shift back to authoritarianism, though that is more speculative.
posted by wierdo at 11:37 PM on August 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
Enormous potential wasted, to be sure, yes. It seems likely to me that they could likely have been at the level the Baltic states are today, not super-rich, but a lot better off overall and with a functioning democracy, had we managed to help them out.
posted by Harald74 at 11:55 PM on August 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Harald74 at 11:55 PM on August 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
When I, a Norwegian, first got together with my wife, a Latvian, I was a bit taken aback at how unpopular Gorbachev was in the Baltic states, especially Lithuania. There was bloodshed when the Soviet garrisons were told to occupy key sites to quell the independence movement in 1991, and they haven't forgotten who was commander in chief at the time. In Norway he was quite a popular figure, seen more as a liberator at the time, and I stupidly assumed that the Baltics would have a favourable view of him.
posted by Harald74 at 12:03 AM on August 31, 2022 [16 favorites]
posted by Harald74 at 12:03 AM on August 31, 2022 [16 favorites]
I'd like to take it as optimistic that Mikhail Sergey'ich's position in history is not for his being a mensch or a hero (do ask a Lithuanian). He just wasn't the right kind of asshole at the right time to really fuck things up thoroughly.
Sometimes we get lucky and the Berlin Wall falls. Nobody expected it.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:05 AM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
Sometimes we get lucky and the Berlin Wall falls. Nobody expected it.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:05 AM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
Mikhail Gorbachev visited China in 1989 and found a revolution looming. What he saw changed history
- an interesting take by Stan Grant - Gorbachev didn't have a Tiananmen square moment and this is maybe why the USSR and China took separate paths.
This has inspired me to look up Michael Palin's Pole to Pole (on YouTube, probably not officially) that was filmed in the summer of 1991. (Route chosen because of the most land- roughly the 30th meridian east) - it's an interesting snapshot of the time.
posted by freethefeet at 12:20 AM on August 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
- an interesting take by Stan Grant - Gorbachev didn't have a Tiananmen square moment and this is maybe why the USSR and China took separate paths.
This has inspired me to look up Michael Palin's Pole to Pole (on YouTube, probably not officially) that was filmed in the summer of 1991. (Route chosen because of the most land- roughly the 30th meridian east) - it's an interesting snapshot of the time.
posted by freethefeet at 12:20 AM on August 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
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The Australian newspaper cartoonist Matt Golding has a good take on Gorbachev vs. the current incumbent: Birth and death marks.
posted by acb at 3:55 AM on August 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
The Australian newspaper cartoonist Matt Golding has a good take on Gorbachev vs. the current incumbent: Birth and death marks.
posted by acb at 3:55 AM on August 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
Leonid Bershidsky, ‘Mikhail Gorbachev’s Failures Did Not Go Deep Enough’
Mikhail Gorbachev failed at everything he tried as the Soviet Union’s last leader. The state he led could only change the world for the better by failing — and it did. But, alas, not for long.posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:48 AM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Javier Grillo-Marxuach: sometime in the late 90s, i went to a friend's bachelor party in las vegas...
posted by 1970s Antihero at 4:59 AM on August 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by 1970s Antihero at 4:59 AM on August 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
And then....that's when glasnost started happening. With each new change, yet another one of the things our professor was teaching was stripped away. I literally heard him in class once conclude a ten-minute explanation of some obscure point of Soviet theory by saying "of course, after Gorbachev's press conference yesterday, everything I've just told you is now completely moot."
The love of my young life did her bachelor’s degree in political science. She graduated in 1989, and her particular focus was Sovietology.
I have told her she should petition our alma mater to retroactively make it a history degree.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:20 AM on August 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
The love of my young life did her bachelor’s degree in political science. She graduated in 1989, and her particular focus was Sovietology.
I have told her she should petition our alma mater to retroactively make it a history degree.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:20 AM on August 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
Reagan, Gorbachev, and Reykjavik (Part I, Oct 29 2014; Part II, Nov 4 2014), Michael Krepon, Arms Control Wonk:
posted by cenoxo at 5:35 AM on August 31, 2022 [9 favorites]
…Reykjavik was an extraordinary success story rather than a failure. A treaty eliminating intermediate- and shorter-range nuclear forces was signed in Washington, amidst much pomp and ceremony, fourteen months later. Before leaving office, Gorbachev welcomed Reagan to Moscow, ground central of the “evil empire” he railed against at the outset of his presidency. (When asked by a reporter during a stroll in Red Square whether the opprobrium still applied, he responded, “No. That was another time, another place.”) The strategic arms reductions that Reagan and Gorbachev envisioned at Reykjavik were finalized in 1991 and 1993, during George H.W. Bush’s term in office.More at Wikipedia > Reykjavík Summit (1986).
Reagan and Gorbachev broke the back of the superpower nuclear arms race. Reykjavik was the pivot point for this world-historic achievement. The ambition of these two men was breathtaking and contrasts painfully to President Barack Obama’s hesitancy and President Vladimir Putin’s revanchist tendencies. Both Reagan and Gorbachev deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts and their concrete achievements. One could not have accomplished deep cuts in nuclear forces without the other. But only Gorbachev got the Nobel Peace Prize….
posted by cenoxo at 5:35 AM on August 31, 2022 [9 favorites]
"A giant among lesser men" is a great way to put it.
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posted by Gelatin at 7:16 AM on August 31, 2022
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posted by Gelatin at 7:16 AM on August 31, 2022
From the Branko Milanovic essay linked near the top of the thread:
He was incapable of running a complicated, fraught by too much history, multinational, and vast empire like the Soviet Union. The country was additionally “saddled” by its reluctant satellites, the unwinnable war in Afghanistan, arms race with a much stronger opponent, and a quasi-stagnant economy. The situation that Gorbachev inherited was far from easy. But, it was manageable, and the fact that nobody predicted the precipitous economic, military, and political decline of the Soviet Union confirms it. Gorbachev, by trying to improve things, made them catastrophic.
Yeah, no. This is wrong. When Gorbachev rose to power in 1984, the Soviet Union was barely functional. The fact that "nobody predicted" the Soviet decline was mostly because most people in the West had no idea how badly run the USSR was, and people in the East weren't going to talk about it in public.
"Quasi-stagnant" doesn't really begin to explain how bad the Soviet economy was: it was dominated by its military sector to a degree that was both massively unproductive on a national scale and actively harmful to the economy because Soviet military tech was rapidly becoming outdated compared to Western tech, which meant that only client states would buy it. Every other element of the Soviet economy was in active decline - unproductive compared to their Western equivalents, working with technology even more outdated than their military tech was, and riddled with corruption from top to bottom because the Soviet Union was basically a giant kleptocracy by the end. And because the USSR could only trade with its client states, that meant trading, mostly, with other countries that had all the same problems of the USSR, because the Soviet model they all based their governments on was an extremely bad one, and I say that as someone who leans socialist more often than not.
And by the way: all those client states wanted and mostly got deals that were beneficial to them rather than the USSR, because of course they did, because with the possible exception of Cuba they didn't actually have any love for the Soviets; they were either Eastern Bloc states with populations that quietly loathed the USSR and governments who were repressing those populations, usually for their own gain, or they were technically-unaligned countries who could get a better deal by accepting Soviet aid because the Soviets would give you more stuff just so that you wouldn't go with the Americans.
At the same time, the Soviet Union was already coming apart, because the various SSRs had never actually wanted to be part of the Soviet Union and they all could see the center starting to come apart. Kazakhstan was more or less in open revolt from 1984 onwards and the only reason it wasn't news was because, well, Central Asia is where Western attention spans go to die. Armenia and Azerbaijan essentially went to war with one another in 1988 while still technically part of the USSR. And then the Baltics started revolting in 1989, and the West actually paid attention to them because they were mostly white and near Finland and Sweden, and that was really the beginning of the end because all the other SSRs realized that Gorbachev wasn't going to be able to hold it together unless he massacred a whole lot of people and that he would never do that.
And then you tack on the war in Afghanistan, which was a colossal clusterfuck the Soviet Union would have ill-afforded at any other point, let alone when it was struggling to stay afloat. But the hardliners wanted that war, just like they wanted the arms race they poured Soviet money into for the twenty years before that. And then you tack on Chernobyl, which was both a massive economic disaster and also a near-perfect example of how badly Soviet governance and management had failed literally everybody.
There was no survival path for the Soviet Union. None. There was only managed decline, even if Gorbachev never admitted it and hoped that, given the choice, people would freely choose to continue the Soviet project (which they of course absolutely did not do). Gorbachev managed that decline as well as could be hoped for, which is to say: we didn't get a major war.
posted by mightygodking at 8:06 AM on August 31, 2022 [17 favorites]
He was incapable of running a complicated, fraught by too much history, multinational, and vast empire like the Soviet Union. The country was additionally “saddled” by its reluctant satellites, the unwinnable war in Afghanistan, arms race with a much stronger opponent, and a quasi-stagnant economy. The situation that Gorbachev inherited was far from easy. But, it was manageable, and the fact that nobody predicted the precipitous economic, military, and political decline of the Soviet Union confirms it. Gorbachev, by trying to improve things, made them catastrophic.
Yeah, no. This is wrong. When Gorbachev rose to power in 1984, the Soviet Union was barely functional. The fact that "nobody predicted" the Soviet decline was mostly because most people in the West had no idea how badly run the USSR was, and people in the East weren't going to talk about it in public.
"Quasi-stagnant" doesn't really begin to explain how bad the Soviet economy was: it was dominated by its military sector to a degree that was both massively unproductive on a national scale and actively harmful to the economy because Soviet military tech was rapidly becoming outdated compared to Western tech, which meant that only client states would buy it. Every other element of the Soviet economy was in active decline - unproductive compared to their Western equivalents, working with technology even more outdated than their military tech was, and riddled with corruption from top to bottom because the Soviet Union was basically a giant kleptocracy by the end. And because the USSR could only trade with its client states, that meant trading, mostly, with other countries that had all the same problems of the USSR, because the Soviet model they all based their governments on was an extremely bad one, and I say that as someone who leans socialist more often than not.
And by the way: all those client states wanted and mostly got deals that were beneficial to them rather than the USSR, because of course they did, because with the possible exception of Cuba they didn't actually have any love for the Soviets; they were either Eastern Bloc states with populations that quietly loathed the USSR and governments who were repressing those populations, usually for their own gain, or they were technically-unaligned countries who could get a better deal by accepting Soviet aid because the Soviets would give you more stuff just so that you wouldn't go with the Americans.
At the same time, the Soviet Union was already coming apart, because the various SSRs had never actually wanted to be part of the Soviet Union and they all could see the center starting to come apart. Kazakhstan was more or less in open revolt from 1984 onwards and the only reason it wasn't news was because, well, Central Asia is where Western attention spans go to die. Armenia and Azerbaijan essentially went to war with one another in 1988 while still technically part of the USSR. And then the Baltics started revolting in 1989, and the West actually paid attention to them because they were mostly white and near Finland and Sweden, and that was really the beginning of the end because all the other SSRs realized that Gorbachev wasn't going to be able to hold it together unless he massacred a whole lot of people and that he would never do that.
And then you tack on the war in Afghanistan, which was a colossal clusterfuck the Soviet Union would have ill-afforded at any other point, let alone when it was struggling to stay afloat. But the hardliners wanted that war, just like they wanted the arms race they poured Soviet money into for the twenty years before that. And then you tack on Chernobyl, which was both a massive economic disaster and also a near-perfect example of how badly Soviet governance and management had failed literally everybody.
There was no survival path for the Soviet Union. None. There was only managed decline, even if Gorbachev never admitted it and hoped that, given the choice, people would freely choose to continue the Soviet project (which they of course absolutely did not do). Gorbachev managed that decline as well as could be hoped for, which is to say: we didn't get a major war.
posted by mightygodking at 8:06 AM on August 31, 2022 [17 favorites]
His motorcade closed the street I lived on, and the highway my few guests were taking, the day of my high school graduation party in 1990. (Not even a party, just a handful of friends and their parents.) What a PITA. He was visiting the governor of Minnesota.
I visited Berlin in 1988 and touched The Wall. Seeing it come down, and then the USSR basically dissolve, in my last two years of high school made me feel like history was fermenting every day -- so the claim that "history is dead" struck me as obviously false. Gorbachev was at the center of all of it for a while there, and then quietly just....retired, it seemed.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:54 AM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
I visited Berlin in 1988 and touched The Wall. Seeing it come down, and then the USSR basically dissolve, in my last two years of high school made me feel like history was fermenting every day -- so the claim that "history is dead" struck me as obviously false. Gorbachev was at the center of all of it for a while there, and then quietly just....retired, it seemed.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:54 AM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
Reading this thread, I realized that, as someone who went to Catholic school in the 80's, I was raised to distrust someone who seems like they were a lot better than the guy leading the US back then.
.
posted by luckynerd at 9:00 AM on August 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
.
posted by luckynerd at 9:00 AM on August 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
1970s Antihero's link above has tangentially reminded me of another post-Soviet story, something I heard about from our neighbor when I was a kid (a guy who later became First Selectman and then went onto the state legislature in later years).
So sometime in the early 90s, a guy in town who ran a scrap-metal business started buying up lots of scrap metal from former Soviet republics, paying about 50 cents a pound on average (even when he had to bid for the lots). Usually he bought things "as is", and usually didn't know what he was gonna get until the package got to him. So he was very surprised when he was unpacking one such crate, and discovered a twelve-foot tall statue of Vladimir Lenin.
Well, there was no way he was gonna melt that down. But - what should he do with it?
Well: that town is home to a somewhat unique grass-roots July 4th parade which is open to all. The scrap-metal guy reached out to the parade committee to offer putting the Lenin statue on the back of a pickup truck as a sort of float, just for the "it's weird" factor. They agreed, and everyone was going to keep it as a surprise for the town - but somehow the guys at the VFW found out and had a complete hissy fit, to the point that someone actually called one of the parade organizers and left a death threat message for them. So instead the scrap metal guy set Lenin up in his parking lot and charged people a buck each for a photo with the statue. It's still lurking somewhere in his scrapyard.
Our neighbor concluded his account of this story with two observations - firstly, that it was kind of silly for the VFW to get upset over the statue, because the scrap metal guy had bought it because he was willing to pay the highest bid for it - "and that's kind of evidence of the ultimate victory of capitalism over Communism." The other thing he said was that one of the things the parade committee was keeping secret was that they had been planning to dress the Lenin statue up in a fuzzy bathrobe.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:05 AM on August 31, 2022 [8 favorites]
So sometime in the early 90s, a guy in town who ran a scrap-metal business started buying up lots of scrap metal from former Soviet republics, paying about 50 cents a pound on average (even when he had to bid for the lots). Usually he bought things "as is", and usually didn't know what he was gonna get until the package got to him. So he was very surprised when he was unpacking one such crate, and discovered a twelve-foot tall statue of Vladimir Lenin.
Well, there was no way he was gonna melt that down. But - what should he do with it?
Well: that town is home to a somewhat unique grass-roots July 4th parade which is open to all. The scrap-metal guy reached out to the parade committee to offer putting the Lenin statue on the back of a pickup truck as a sort of float, just for the "it's weird" factor. They agreed, and everyone was going to keep it as a surprise for the town - but somehow the guys at the VFW found out and had a complete hissy fit, to the point that someone actually called one of the parade organizers and left a death threat message for them. So instead the scrap metal guy set Lenin up in his parking lot and charged people a buck each for a photo with the statue. It's still lurking somewhere in his scrapyard.
Our neighbor concluded his account of this story with two observations - firstly, that it was kind of silly for the VFW to get upset over the statue, because the scrap metal guy had bought it because he was willing to pay the highest bid for it - "and that's kind of evidence of the ultimate victory of capitalism over Communism." The other thing he said was that one of the things the parade committee was keeping secret was that they had been planning to dress the Lenin statue up in a fuzzy bathrobe.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:05 AM on August 31, 2022 [8 favorites]
As a child of the cold war, I fondly remember the Pravda headline "Gorbachev sings Tractors: Turnip! Buttocks!"
posted by autopilot at 9:15 AM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by autopilot at 9:15 AM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
"Because of him we have many things... Like Pizza Hut!"
In-depth article in Foreign Policy on his 1991 Pizza Hut commercial.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:24 AM on August 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
In-depth article in Foreign Policy on his 1991 Pizza Hut commercial.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:24 AM on August 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
That statue of Lenin belongs in a mini golf course!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:33 AM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:33 AM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
"Quasi-stagnant" doesn't really begin to explain how bad the Soviet economy was: it was dominated by its military sector to a degree that was both massively unproductive on a national scale and actively harmful to the economy because Soviet military tech was rapidly becoming outdated compared to Western tech, ...
And it's not a new problem. IIRC, one reason why the Soviets were so destructive when they invaded Germany at the end of WWII was that they were pissed off at how good the Germans had it, cars and nice bicycles and such.
posted by Melismata at 10:35 AM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
And it's not a new problem. IIRC, one reason why the Soviets were so destructive when they invaded Germany at the end of WWII was that they were pissed off at how good the Germans had it, cars and nice bicycles and such.
posted by Melismata at 10:35 AM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Years ago, I took a Great Courses Plus class on the history of Russia from Peter the Great to Gorbachev. The professor was not terribly charismatic, but he did have one choice quote that stuck with me :
"There is no worse time for a bad government than when it tries to reform itself."posted by panama joe at 11:15 AM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
Is there a list of Soviet-bloc statuary in the US? There's the Lenin in Seattle (which came from Czechoslovakia, IIRC), the one in the scrapyard, and surely that's not it.
posted by acb at 11:24 AM on August 31, 2022
posted by acb at 11:24 AM on August 31, 2022
I don't believe anyone in history has been responsible for such a huge increase in freedom and self-determination for so many people, in such a short time, with so little violence. This is not hyperbole, and it could have gone very poorly for humanity indeed if almost anyone was running the USSR during its crises.
This is the key fact about Gorbachev. People often have a very hard time understanding how much better a thing that happened was than what could have happened.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:50 AM on August 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
This is the key fact about Gorbachev. People often have a very hard time understanding how much better a thing that happened was than what could have happened.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:50 AM on August 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
Regarding that Lenin statue in Fremont, acb, here are a few interesting quotes from the June 12, 2017 Spokane Spokesman-Review's obituary of its sculptor Emil Venkov:
posted by y2karl at 12:45 PM on August 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
...It was commissioned by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and was installed in the city of Poprad in the former Czechoslovakia in 1988. Poprad is now in Slovakia.I wonder if that last part is still true.
The next year, when the Communist Party was overthrown, the statue was removed.
The statue was found in a Poprad scrap yard by Issaquah, Wash., native Lewis Carpenter in 1993, who mortgaged his home to finance its transport. The statue arrived in Seattle that year and was installed in Fremont by sculptor Peter Bevis two years later.
...The Carpenter family still owns the statue, which has been for sale since 1995. As of 2015, its asking price was $250,000 or best offer.
posted by y2karl at 12:45 PM on August 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
Lenin's on sale? Again?
posted by acb at 12:56 PM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by acb at 12:56 PM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
From a Russian: "We don't really care about him. He broke the Soviet Union but that's history. Putin is much worse right now."
posted by lock robster at 1:10 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by lock robster at 1:10 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
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