Gorbachev's
Lost Legacy
By Stephen F.
Cohen
09 March, 2005
The
Nation
The most important event of the late twentieth
century began twenty years ago this month. On March 11, 1985, Mikhail
Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks
the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his
country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the
United States, began to unfold. Perestroika, as Gorbachev called his
reforms, officially ended with the Soviet Union and his leadership in
December 1991. The historic opportunities for a better future it offered
Russia and the world have been steadily undermined ever since.
The essential meaning
of perestroika for Gorbachev and his supporters was creating and acting
on alternatives to failed and dangerous policies at home and abroad.
Inside the Soviet Union, it meant replacing the Communist Party's repressive
political monopoly with multiparty politics based on democratic elections
and an end of censorship (glasnost) and replacing the state's crushing
economic monopoly with market relations based on different forms of
ownership, including private property. Both of those liberating reforms,
which were directed at czarist and Soviet authoritarian traditions,
were well under way by the end of the 1980s, when the Soviet Union had
already ceased to be a Communist or, as it was often characterized,
"totalitarian" system.
In Soviet-American
relations, Gorbachev's reforms meant ending the forty-year cold war
and its attendant arms race, which had imperiled both countries and
the world with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Here, too, having
found willing partners first in President Ronald Reagan and then President
George H.W. Bush, Gorbachev's initiatives were remarkably successful
well before he left the historical stage. By mid-1988, standing on Red
Square no less, Reagan had declared that the Soviet Union was no longer
an "evil empire," and in December 1989, at a summit meeting
in Malta, Bush and Gorbachev announced that the cold war was over. Treaties
providing for major arms reductions were signed, and even more far-reaching
ones were being negotiated. Both at home and abroad, therefore, Gorbachev's
policies bore historic fruit while the Soviet Union still existed, so
there was no reason for them to end with that state. But they did. In
Russia, Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev's successor, abruptly jettisoned his
predecessor's evolutionary approach for the old Russian tradition of
imposing unpopular changes on the nation from above--first the abolition
of the Soviet Union itself, then the economic measures known as "shock
therapy." Not surprisingly, those acts led to more undemocratic
ones in the 1990s, enthusiastically supported, it should be recalled,
by the Clinton Administration and most US media and academic Russia-watchers--Yeltsin's
armed dissolution of an elected parliament, oligarchical privatization,
the Chechen war, increasingly corrupted mass media and rigged elections.
Today's Russian president, Vladimir Putin, may be further undoing Gorbachev's
democratization achievements, but the process began when Yeltsin abandoned
perestroika.
The opportunities
that Gorbachev created for international relations have also been missed,
perhaps even lost--here, however, primarily because of the United States.
Instead of embracing post-Soviet Russia as an equal partner in ending
the cold war and the arms race, both the Clinton and the George W. Bush
administrations undertook a triumphalist winner-take-all policy of extracting
unilateral concessions first from Yeltsin and then from Putin. They
have included the eastward expansion of NATO (thereby breaking a promise
the first President Bush made to Gorbachev); the withdrawal from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had discouraged a new nuclear arms
race; the bogus nuclear weapons reduction treaty of 2002; and the ongoing
military encirclement of Russia with US and NATO bases in former Soviet
territories.
Those exceedingly
unwise US policies, which in Moscow are understandably viewed as another
attempt to isolate and "contain" Russia, are leading to a
new cold war. They have already badly eroded the political basis for
any pro-American orientation in Moscow and persuaded most Russian officials
that their country's salvation lies in reverting to pre-perestroika
governing traditions and finding strategic allies again in the East.
Weak militarily and unstable financially, the Kremlin has also reacted
by clinging to its uncertainly secure nuclear arsenal, even expanding
instead of reducing it. The current Bush Administration has apparently
decided, for other reasons, to do the same. A new nuclear arms race,
that is, already looms.
Twenty years later,
then, little, if anything, is left of the historic opportunities Gorbachev
opened up for his country and the world. Their loss may be the worst,
and most unnecessary, political tragedy of our time. (Those of us who
know Gorbachev have heard him speak of this with great sadness.) There
remains, however, the hope, at least in Russia, that, as sometimes happens
in history, the memory of lost alternatives will one day inspire efforts
to regain them. But that would require new perestroika-like leadership
in both countries.