Mikhail Gorbachev -Decent, but Doomed

I don't have anything original to say about Mikhail Gorbachev who has died in Russia at the age of 91.

Most accounts will confirm he was a man of great humour whose most important mission to reform the USSR failed, but who in the process signed the most significant arms control treaty with the USA , and whose refusal to either support the Communist governments of Eastern Europe, or intervene in their politics was instrumental in the transformation of Europe from dictatorship to democracy.

My first encounter as I recall was reading Archie Brown's 1985 paper on the transition of Gorbachev from Agriculture Secretary to the General Secretary of the Communist Party, published in the CIA-funded journal Problems of Communism. Then, and for some years after the focus was on Glasnost and Perestroika, and how a more open dialogue in Soviet politics, and a restructuring of its economy might or might not work. It was common at the time to believe the Autocracy would endure, that Gorbachev's reforms would achieve something, but probably not much, just as I assume undergraduates these days are asked to write essays and exam questions on whether or not the collapse of the USSR was inevitable, due to internal contradictions, external pressure, or a combination of the two. Even today the answer seems to be a combination of the two.

It is also inevitable that Gorbachev be compared to Putin, with one man determined to end the threat of war, the other too keen to use it, one being successful, the other currently a catastrophic failure, and, moreover, determined to re-create the USSR in some form. And bear in mind that while Gorbachev approved of the annexation by Russia or Crime, he was opposed to the current annexation of Ukraine,

The consequences of Gorbachev's failed reforms has been profound, not just in Eastern Europe, but also in the Middle East and the US. Almost overnight, the PLO lost a major source of finance and military assistance, and as a consequence, though Iraq's invasion of Kuwait also played a role, the PLO found itself at the weakest point since its split in the 1970s, and from this position of weakness Israel and the US were able to present Yasir Arafat with a peace treaty which in theory held the promise of a 'two state' solution, but which in practice led to the sub-division of the West Bank into unmanageable zones which have never deterred illegal settlement building, while making the emergence of an effective Palestinian government all but impossible. As the former minister in one of the front line states put it to me, 'Arafat has betrayed every Arab' -and Gorbachev in his own way played a role in that.

In the US Reagan's willingness to treat Gorbachev as an equal and then negotiate the intermediate range ballistic missile treaty was seen as another betrayal, and led to the emergence of the 'Neo-Cons' determined never to 'surrender' to another State, and to become the activists for American hegemony that led to the wars in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan, on which, one is tempted to say Gorbachev not Reagan was right -the former having abandoned Afghanistan as a lost cause, when a few years later, the Americans adopted it as their violent playground until they too went the way of every previous attempt by external powers to control it.

Lastly. what also went the way of history when the USSR collapsed, was the Centrally Planned Economy and the form of 'State Socialism' which discredited the only fair means of organising an economy, largely because the Russians were so bad at it, not because of the inherent goodness of Socialism. Indeed, so corrupt did Russia become that at its end, organized crime had meshed with the Party to control the production and distribution of goods, be they Russian or imported, and with it the succession to the old system -Russia swapped a Centrally Planned Economy for the gangster capitalism of the Yeltsin years, until Putin began the process of purging one set of crooked Oligarchs with a network of his own. Capitalism in Russia has never been of any benefit to the Russian people, yet the alleged failure of Socialism, which to most Trotskyists in the West was State Capitalism anyway, enabled the form of 'Neo-Liberalism' to dominate the global economy and most pertinently in China.

So we are left with age old questions -is Russia too big to be run efficiently as one country? Can it ever be ruled as a multi-party Democracy or will it always be subject to Dictatorship of one form or another? Is Russia a threat to its neighbours and the rest of the world? Did the end of the USSR, by reducing a global superpower to an impoverished empire of crime, lead Russia to the position today where it seeks to repair that humiliation, but is obsessed with the fear that 'we' outside it are its greatest threat?

History will show Gorbachev tried to reform Russia, and failed, but that the consequences demonstrate how hard it is for an Empire ruled as an Autocracy to undo the damage caused and offer citizens life in a liberal democracy where opportunities for all are more equalized and attainable. Like the post-colonial States of Sub-Saharan Africa, the legacy of Empire continues to obstruct progress. Russia in this case is little different, having lost an Empire for which it mourns over an ever larger mountain of corpses.