DETROIT – Today, it is easy to forget how incredibly important Mikhail Gorbachev really was. Millions of Americans too young to remember when he was in power have no idea.
Yet they do know in Europe, all right. Everyone knows about the Berlin Wall. But you really had to see it to know how terrifying it was. It was two walls, actually, with a no-man’s land in between.
Terrifying machine gun towers and barbed wire and guards staring coldly at you. I passed through it at “Checkpoint Charlie” a number of times in the 1970s and 1980s.
Had you asked me if I thought I would live to see it come down I would have said no. But it did, essentially without bloodshed, because of one man: Mikhail Sergeyvich Gorbachev.
Eastern Europe — Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania and the former Czechoslovkia — were ruled for four decades by Soviet puppet dictators; economically impoverished gray and repressive totalitarian states. I know, because I traveled in and reported from all but one of them.
Whenever their peoples tried to gain a little freedom or improve their lives, or governments tried to ease up, as Alexander Dubcek did in Czechoslovakia, they were harshly crushed, sometimes with great loss of life; think Hungary in 1956. Mikhail Gorbachev told them they had the right to determine their own destiny.
Within a few weeks in 1989, all those states had overthrown Communism, in most of them (except Romania) with virtually no loss of life. That happened because Gorbachev allowed it to happen.
Anyone who traveled in or tried to report from the Soviet Union before Gorbachev came to power in 1985 knows what a repressive, shabby world it was, filled with grim-faced and hopeless people.
Mikhail Gorbachev tried to change that too. He announced a new policy of glasnost – openness; in which people would be free to speak openly and even confront the government – which they did, once they realized, with a shock, that he meant it.
His real goal, however, was perestroika – restructuring, i.e., of the Soviet economy, and there he failed. He idealistically thought that if the workers had freedom, they would enthusiastically want to make socialism work much better. But freed from the command economy, many didn’t know what to do or how to do it.
There was no culture of entrepreneurship; almost nobody had any capital or much idea of how to build a business; the work ethic had atrophied or never existed, because for most people there was no point in working hard if getting ahead was impossible.
But those who sneer at his naiveté forget is that something had to be done. The Soviet economy was failing badly in 1985, when a young and energetic 54-year-old Gorbachev came to power. I saw him speak; he was powerfully charismatic.
Three old and sick Soviet leaders had died in quick succession in barely over two years, and the nation was in trouble and increasingly a laughing stock. The internet as we know it hadn’t been born, but the world’s economy was increasingly computerized.
Soviet stores still often used an abacus to calculate transactions. The USSR was desperate; it is possible that a tough hard-liner like Joseph Stalin could have kept it afloat on terror for a few more years.
But one day, it would have blown up, out of hunger and nationalistic revolts, and this was a land where there were nuclear weapons, many of them small and portable, in abundance.
Gorbachev became an international sensation in a way few of any other leaders have ever been, forging a close “odd couple” friendship with Ronald Reagan, wowing Margaret Thatcher, and seriously attempting to abolish all nuclear weapons.
But his popularity evaporated at home, as the economy sunk further and threatened to collapse.
Eventually, when it was clear things were spinning out of control in the summer of 1991, a small group of hardliners staged a coup; put Gorbachev under house arrest, and tried to restore control.
But Gorbachev had established freedom of the press. Russians could watch CNN, and could find out what was happening in the outside world. Soldiers refused orders, and the coup fell apart.
Gorbachev was freed and brought back to Moscow, only to be humiliated by Boris Yeltsin, and the discovery that the Communist Party which he revered was rotten to its core. The Soviet Union swiftly collapsed, and, a man without a country, Gorbachev resigned.
The years that followed weren’t kind. When he first came to power, Russians were shocked that he was happy to have his wife Raisa, an outspoken philosophy professor, share the spotlight with him; past Soviet leaders’ wives were seldom seen and never heard.
When Raisa died in 1999, Gorbachev said “now that she’s gone, I don’t want to live.” But his daughter and grandchildren buoyed him up. and he kept on fighting for a host of good causes, from the environment to curing cancer in children. Most of all, he never stopped trying to bring democracy to Russia.
He was, however, mostly despised at home. As crummy as most Russians’ lives were under communism, they had some level of security. That vanished when the Soviet Union fell.
When Gorbachev tried to run for president of Russia five years later, he got less than one percent of the vote. He never ran for office again, but he never gave up hope Russia would one day be a “normal” free democratic state, though late in life he acknowledged that would take far longer than people thought.
A few years ago, a retired high school history teacher who revered Gorbachev asked me to help her write a letter to the great man, thanking him for the example he had set.
I told her it was unlikely he would ever see it. But within weeks, he sent her a long personal reply that began by apologizing for the delay in writing her. “The most important of (our) goals is still relevant today – assuring people of a peaceful future,” he said.
“As you rightly wrote, we need to change our mindsets. I call it a shift to new thinking. This is a challenge to be addressed by young people who are not burdened with stereotypes of the past and do not have an us-versus-them mentality,” he said, and praised her for dedicating her life to teaching young people.
Today, it would be easy to look at the Russia of Vladimir Putin, an unreconstructed KGB man, and conclude that Gorbachev failed.
But I think that isn’t true. Change takes time. Ukraine is an independent nation for the first time in centuries because of what Mikhail Gorbachev did. So are Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
Years ago, when he was still in power, Gail Sheehy wrote a book about him called The Man Who Changed the World.
And he was really, as few others have ever been, exactly that.
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