Mikhail Gorbachev Brought Democracy to Russia and Was Despised for It

 PETER BAKER SEPT. 6, 2017, New York Times [Original article contains links.]

Image from, with caption: "gorby by alexander kosolapov"

Review of:
GORBACHEV
His Life and Times
By William Taubman
Illustrated.
852 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $39.95.

When my wife and I arrived in Moscow as journalists early in the reign of
Vladimir V. Putin, the first person we interviewed was the last leader of the Soviet
Union, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. He told us he had recently visited Putin at the Kremlin
and asked the question many around the world were asking: Did Putin plan to return
Russia to authoritarianism? “His answer,” Gorbachev told us, “was a very definite
no.”

With the benefit of hindsight, Putin’s answer of course looks disingenuous. To
Putin, Gorbachev was an intermediary to the West, sending a reassuring if deceptive
message. Westerners like us flocked to see Gorbachev as an oracle of democracy. But
what Putin knew was that Gorbachev was no hero to his own people. Russians
despised Gorbachev as the destroyer of their empire and supported Putin as its
restorer. Gorbachev lived then, as now, in a dual reality — admired and feted in
Washington, London and Berlin, reviled and ostracized in Moscow, St. Petersburg
and Vladivostok.

William Taubman, a professor emeritus at Amherst College, grapples with this
dichotomy in his masterly new biography, “Gorbachev: His Life and Times,” which
will surely stand as the definitive English-language chronicle of this most intriguing
figure for many years to come. Taubman, whose brilliant 2003 biography of Nikita S.
Khrushchev won the Pulitzer Prize, delivers another richly layered portrait of a
Russian leader determined to reform a thoroughly corrupt and dysfunctional society,
only to be swept away by forces he could not control.

That this book should come out now is fortuitous as Americans debate Russia’s
role in the world — and in our own political system. To understand today’s Russia, it
is necessary to understand what happened during Gorbachev’s time, how he opened
up a hermetically sealed society after 70 years of stifling Communist rule but was
unable to solve its deeper problems and was ultimately pushed aside by the
ambitious and mercurial Boris Yeltsin. A populist democrat more interested in
breaking apart the sclerotic system than reforming it, Yeltsin introduced a raucous
version of democracy and a crony version of capitalism that ended up discrediting
both in the eyes of Russians who lost their savings while oligarchs snatched up
lucrative state assets.

By the time Putin, the cold-eyed former K.G.B. lieutenant colonel, came along, many
Russians were eager for a strong hand, willing to trade some of their newfound
freedom for a leader promising order and a return to national greatness. When Putin
lamented that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical
catastrophe of the century,” he was met with cheers, not jeers. Gorbachev begat
Yeltsin and Yeltsin begat Putin.

But Gorbachev, now 86 and still living in Moscow, remains celebrated in the
West and it is hard to think of many figures who shaped the last half-century of
world history more than he did. He put an end to the totalitarian system created by
Lenin and Stalin. He freed Russians to speak their minds without fear, ended the
Communist monopoly on power and held competitive elections. He paved the way
for Eastern Europe to leave Moscow’s orbit, largely without violence. And he made
peace with the West.

“Gorbachev was a visionary who changed his country and the world — though
neither as much as he wished,” Taubman writes. Gorbachev’s problem, he says, was
that Russia had no real experience with the freedom it was being offered. “It is more
the fault of the raw material he worked with than of his own real shortcomings and
mistakes that Russian democracy will take much longer to build than he thought.”
Surprisingly, this is the first serious, full-fledged biography of Gorbachev in
English with the magnitude he deserves. While there were some quick books written
about his life while he was still in office, like those by Gail Sheehy and the team of
Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, they were by definition incomplete.

Since then, most of what has appeared have been accounts of the fall of the
Soviet Union, in which Gorbachev is obviously a central player but not the sole focus
— notably David Remnick’s exemplary “Lenin’s Tomb” and Michael Dobbs’s
remarkable “Down With Big Brother.” There have also been academic looks at the
man who ended the Cold War, like Archie Brown’s worthy “The Gorbachev Factor.”

Gorbachev’s own memoirs were not especially satisfying and the series of other
books he has written over the years seem more aimed at staking his claim as world
statesman than revealing anything about the man and his moment.

So while a shelfful of books on Putin has appeared in recent years, Gorbachev
largely disappeared, until now. Taubman took on the project with characteristic care.
He benefited from archival research and the many memoirs written by people
around Gorbachev, as well as the essential diary of Anatoly Chernyayev, one of
Gorbachev’s closest advisers. He also conducted interviews with several key players,
including eight sessions with Gorbachev himself over the course of several years.
What emerges is the portrait of a leader who is vain, impatient and at times petulant,
but also wise and thoughtful, a complicated man for a complicated time.

Born in 1931 near Stavropol in the North Caucasus, Gorbachev was close to his
father, who fought in World War II, but had a more complex relationship with his
mother, who was severe and whipped him with a belt. He worked five summers
helping his father operate a combine harvester, earning the Order of the Red Banner
of Labor, signed by Stalin himself, and wore it proudly throughout his first year at
college. At Moscow State University, he was a country boy who did not even know
what the ballet was.

But he was a quick study and became a master of the system he would later
destroy, rising through the ranks as a provincial official in Stavropol. His real break
was getting to know Yuri Andropov, another son of Stavropol, who became K.G.B.
director and later general secretary of the Communist Party. The two were close
enough that they vacationed together. Andropov brought Gorbachev to Moscow and
into the Politburo, setting him up as an eventual successor in 1985. “We owe
everything to him,” said Raisa Gorbachev, his wife.

From the inside, Gorbachev understood the system was rotting away. A turning
point for him was the government’s knee-jerk cover-up of the Chernobyl nuclear
disaster. “Chernobyl really opened my eyes,” Gorbachev said later. His life, he said,
could be divided into two parts — before Chernobyl and after. His programs of
glasnost, or openness, and perestroika, economic restructuring, changed Russian
society. But his was a gradual, stutter-start revolution, a “revolution by evolutionary
means,” as he put it.

Through the fall of the Berlin Wall, the summit meetings with Ronald Reagan
and the changes in Soviet society, Gorbachev’s efforts to straddle between reformers
and hard-liners satisfied neither side. His personal feud with Yeltsin sowed the seeds
for his fall. Gorbachev, Taubman writes, may have recognized his own “arrogance,
vanity, pride” in Yeltsin. “Gorbachev’s anger may have been aimed at least partly at
himself.”

When the end came, as it inevitably would, the hard-liners turned against him
first, mounting an amateurish coup attempt in 1991 that quickly fell in the face of
popular resistance led by Yeltsin. But it was the reformers who finally did him in, as
Yeltsin then shoved Gorbachev aside. Gorbachev’s final attempt at a comeback, a
tragicomic run against Yeltsin, who was seeking re-election in 1996, yielded a
humiliating 0.5 percent of the vote. That was the Russians’ judgment on the man
who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by the West.

When Yeltsin gave way to Putin at the start of 2000, Russia had changed,
imperfectly, Gorbachev insisted, but still for the better. But it was turning again.
“The truth is that Russia under Vladimir Putin largely abandoned Gorbachev’s path
at home and abroad and returned to its traditional, authoritarian, anti-Western
norm,” Taubman writes. “But that only underlines how exceptional Gorbachev was
as a Russian ruler and world statesman.”

Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The Times and a former Moscow
bureau chief for The Washington Post, is the author with Susan Glasser of “Kremlin
Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution.”