Gorbachev’s mother, Maria, could be cold and punitive: she had resisted being married to her husband, and she disciplined her son with a belt until he was thirteen. The family tensions took a toll on Mikhail; as he grew up, and even after he matured, he seemed to have a special need for the kind of attention and respect that he thought he deserved.
By 1950, when Gorbachev left Privolnoe to attend Moscow State University, he was strong, independent-minded and self-confident to the point of arrogance.
Sergei Gorbachev “was a wise man,” recalled a contemporary, “modest but extremely hardworking. . . . People loved him. He was always calm, a good man. People went to him for advice. He didn’t say much, but he weighed every word. He didn’t like speechifying.”26 According to a Komsomol colleague of Mikhail’s, the elder Gorbachev “never raised his voice, was levelheaded, orderly, and decent.”27 Raisa Gorbachev remembered, “Mikhail Sergeyevich and his father were very much alike. They were friends. Sergei Andreyevich never got a systematic education, but he had a natural cultivation, a sort of nobility, a certain breadth of interests.”
“She never could forgive me for the way I defended my father. ‘Your father is your favorite,’ she would say to me. I’d say, ‘You’re my favorite, too, but you haven’t noticed that I’ve grown up.’” -- Gorbachev, talking of his mother
He looked at me again and said something that I’ve remembered my whole life: ‘We fought until we ran out of fight,’ he said. ‘That’s how you must live.’” Sergei Gorbachev, Mikhail's father, giving him life advice after returning from World War II
Do such experiences [experiences of the war] help explain Gorbachev’s extraordinary reluctance, once he became supreme Soviet leader, to use force and violence to preserve the Soviet empire? Perhaps because that reluctance, so admired in the West, is as strongly condemned in Russia, he declined in an interview to answer the question.
Gorbachev began to identify success in life with reading and thinking, and also with leading his peers. [after returning from his first day at school]
From Belinsky, Gorbachev moved on to Pushkin, Gogol, and especially Lermontov. That early nineteenth-century poet of the Caucasus died young in a duel in Piatigorsk, approximately 120 miles from Privolnoe. Lermontov’s romanticism captivated him; “I knew not only his short poems but his long ones by heart.” Next, he was fascinated by Mayakovsky—more poetry full of romantic love, erotic longing, and rebelliousness. “What struck me then, and still strikes me now, was how these young writers managed to lift themselves to a level where they made philosophical generalizations. That was a gift of God!”
Gorbachev had extremely high standards for everyone. “I felt I was really not good enough for him,” Yulia [Mikhail's high school girlfriend] recalled, “or we really didn’t fit. He was too energetic, too serious, so organized. And he was smarter than I was. He was the center of attention.”
“I know for a fact,” says Zoya Bekova, “that he never stopped until two or three in the morning, after getting up at 5 or 6 a.m. He studied, he read, he did everything he could to bring himself up to the level of the Muscovites.
Gorbachev himself puts it this way, “I had made a firm decision—I would devote all five years at MGU to study. No love affairs.”
“He was not the most impressive student in our class by any means,” said Rudolf Kolchanov. “It’s not as if he were always a great reformer and world leader just waiting to happen.”43 Natalia Rimashevskaya, later a distinguished sociologist, remembered that Gorbachev “never tried to stand out, but rather stayed in the shadows. In class, he used to sit in the next to last row of seats. Those who wanted to be known as leaders made sure they occupied center seats in the first row.
It took him five years of living in Moscow to discover that “if you want to understand the inner world of the Soviet people, it is far more important to read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Gogol than all the literary productions of socialist realism put together.” “We understood,” he recounts, “that we could not and must not part.”96 “Our relationship and our feeling,” she carefully told an interviewer in 1990, “were . . . perceived by us as a natural, inseparable part of our fate.
Gorbachev got angry: “Mama, I’m going to tell you something you better remember: I love her. She’s my wife. And I never want to hear anything like that from you ever again.”
But over the next twelve years he rose steadily, first in the Komsomol and then in the Communist party apparatus itself: 1957—in charge of the Stavropol city Komsomol; 1958—number two man in the regional Komsomol and in 1961 its leader; 1962—party boss of a rural district; 1963—supervising appointments to all party posts in the Stavropol region; 1966—Stavropol city party chief; 1968—deputy party boss of the whole Stavropol region.
He had stood out in elementary and high school and at Moscow University, but his Stavropol experience further heightened his self-confidence. Comparing himself with the Komsomol propagandists he supervised in 1955, he could tell he was “so to speak, a head higher than they were.” His university education gave him “indisputable advantages.”
He had to learn “to use the [debating] power I had very carefully.”
Gorbachev admitted in his memoirs that the pressure of work, especially the bombardment of instructions from the Komsomol Central Committee in Moscow, was wearing. It was as if “those at the top were firmly convinced that without their bureaucratic directives no grass could grow and no cows could calve, as if the economy could function only under a regime of ‘permanent mobilization,’ completely deprived of any capacity for self-development.” But that didn’t prevent him from projecting during these years the image of a man fully in control of himself, his job, and his future.
His closest adviser, said Bazikova, was his wife. They were wonderfully “open and sincere” with each other. She was “very smart,” and he “knew that and listened to her. He didn’t trust many party workers, but he did trust her—in everything.” Even when the advice she gave him wasn’t good, at least it was “sincere.”
Kulakov would never forgive him. “The very best speech,” he continued, “is the one that goes ungiven.” Excellent advice! Gorbachev didn’t follow it often enough when he was Soviet leader.
tensions developed between the two men. It may be that Yefremov, with his cultural and intellectual pretensions, felt more challenged by Gorbachev than Kulakov had. Or that since his own career was declining, he resented a hotshot on the rise. Gorbachev probably also saw Yefremov as a loser who couldn’t help him advance his career.
“The supercentralized attempt to control every single detail of life in an immense state sapped the vital energies of society.”22 Much later, after he became Soviet leader, Gorbachev would dig deeper still, tracing the problems he saw in Stavropol to the very essence of Soviet state socialism, that is, to the Communist party’s monopoly of political and economic power.
Gorbachev had no hobbies, Mikhailenko added; his favorite leisure-time activity was taking long nature walks with his wife.
Andropov didn’t hold Gorbachev’s cheekiness against him. He countered that both older and younger leaders were needed, the elders guarding against the young men’s careerism, the young pushing their elders to work harder and better. Several years later, after Gorbachev had been promoted to Central Committee secretary in Moscow, Andropov greeted him with a smile: “Congratulations, Mr. Undergrowth. Now you’re part of the forest.”
Another liberal-minded Andropov adviser, economist Oleg Bogomolov, recalled seeing copies of books by Montaigne and Machiavelli on Andropov’s desk in the 1960s. “Why are you reading those books?” Bogomolov asked. “So as to be able to speak with you and your colleagues as equals,” Andropov replied.
[Andropov] didn’t smoke, and limited his alcohol intake. Both men knew how to make others feel comfortable in their presence. Both could carry a tune and each tried to write his own speeches, or at least rewrote draft after draft. (Andropov actually wrote poetry as well.) Neither knew enough about economics.71 It’s not surprising, then, that Andropov took a liking to Gorbachev, such a strong one that in the spring of 1977, he singled him out, in a conversation with Arbatov, as the kind of young leader who represented the hope of the nation.
Andropov developed what Arbatov and Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev called a “Hungarian complex,” namely, the fear that attempts to reform “from below” were fated to morph into mob rule (the same sort of complex, one might add, that seemed to animate Russian President Vladimir Putin half a century later).
In retrospect, it’s clear he [Gorbachev] was playing the game in order to change it. Ironically, though, he was better at old-style Kremlin infighting than at the new game of open, mass politics that he himself would later introduce.
Yakovlev mostly kept to himself, concentrating on his research on FDR and the New Deal, attending classes on American history and politics taught by distinguished scholars Richard Hofstadter and David B. Truman, even sitting in on Alexander Dallin’s course on Soviet foreign policy. The one American graduate student with whom he became friendly was Loren R. Graham, later to become a leading historian of Soviet science and technology. Once, when the two encountered each other in Butler Library stacks, Yakovlev exclaimed, “Loren, I’ve been reading FDR’s right-wing critics. They all said that Roosevelt was a traitor to his class, that he was destroying capitalism in America. But it’s obvious to me that Roosevelt was not destroying capitalism at all. He was saving capitalism when it was on its knees.” At the height of perestroika, Graham asked Yakovlev if he and Gorbachev were “trying to save communism the way Roosevelt saved capitalism.” Yakovlev smiled: “Yes, you are right.”
He stunned his hosts [the Thatchers] by quoting Victorian British statesman Lord Palmerston’s famous dictum, clearly at odds with official Soviet ideology, that, in Mrs. Thatcher’s words, Britain had “no eternal friends or eternal enemies, but only eternal interests.”
The obvious shortcomings of Gorbachev’s former colleagues reinforced his sense that the system needed change, but his lack of trusted associates was an obstacle to reforming it.
Gorbachev worked very hard, not just compared with his frail predecessors, but by any standard. According to his bodyguard Vladimir Medvedev, Gorbachev didn’t go to bed until one or two in the morning, as late as four when preparing for particularly important events. He arose at seven or eight and worked while being driven to his office in a huge ZIL limousine, reading papers, making notes, placing calls on two telephones.
Now the global price of oil plummeted, from $31.75 a barrel in November 1985 to $10 in the spring of 1986.118 Soviet oil production dropped, too, by as much as 12 million tons in 1985—just when Moscow needed to export more oil than ever in order to import grain.
Unlike so many of his generation, he never worshipped Stalin. It wasn’t the repressions, “about which we didn’t know much and which we thought might have been mistakes or even justified,” he recalled, or the “terrible losses early in World War II,” or inner revulsion against policies like the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact. It was the sense that “a crude, ignorant, completely alien force” was ruling over a culture that cherished Tolstoy and Chekhov and admired foreign writers like Shakespeare and Anatole France.
1986 came to an end. Gorbachev was revolutionizing Soviet thinking about the world, but not changing the world itself. He favored a new relationship with Eastern Europe, but had barely begun to construct one. He wanted to end the Afghan war, but it was still on. He couldn’t change his country unless he could drastically lower its defense burden, but the United States wouldn’t cooperate. He realized too well that domestic and foreign affairs depended on each other, but after twenty-one months in power he wasn’t getting anywhere fast enough in either realm.
Gorbachev shared some of the very failings he condemned in Yeltsin. Arrogance, vanity, pride—to the extent he was aware of these shortcomings in himself, Gorbachev tried to contain them. So when Yeltsin flaunted them all, in what Gorbachev regarded as a wild, erratic attempt to damage the great cause of perestroika, Gorbachev’s anger may have been aimed at least partly at himself.
told; “that was history, a tragic moment of history.” Afterward, recalled a MVD major, “we went off to smoke, and as usual, people said what they really thought.”18 At a Moscow high school, a young Moscow University graduate student who was interning as a teacher had been ignoring standard textbooks and assigning instead the latest revelations of glasnost.
Grachev thinks Gorbachev’s certainty that success was guaranteed served as “an alibi for inaction in Eastern Europe,” allowing him to “escape the necessity” of elaborating and applying a “concrete program” to promote reform in the area.28 But, if so, why did he want to escape that necessity? One reason was economic: the cost of sustaining East European regimes had become prohibitive. The Soviet Union couldn’t keep providing cheap oil to its allies (as much as 100 million tons in one five-year period, at prices four or five times less than on the world market), especially when world prices themselves had plummeted. “We must take care of our own people first of all,” Gorbachev told the Politburo on March 18, 1988.
Within the USSR, 1989 saw the peak of perestroika and, according to the most reliable public opinion polling, the peak of Gorbachev’s personal popularity.1 The Soviet regime was transformed when mostly free elections were held for the first time in more than seven decades, and a genuine, functioning parliament replaced the rubber-stamp Supreme Soviet. Yet the same year marked the beginning of the end of perestroika, since these same innovations crippled the institutions that had previously held Soviet society together, failed to replace them with effective new ones, and sharpened crises already undermining Gorbachev’s authority and the Soviet system itself: economic decline, ethnic separatism, political polarization both within and outside the Kremlin.
He was replacing the old political “game,” at which he excelled, with a new one that he never really mastered.
The intelligentsia, rather than the proletariat, was Gorbachev’s main constituency. But its members, too, were talking back. On the eve of 1989, several well-known intellectual and cultural figures published an open letter to Gorbachev in Moscow News. In Stalin’s time, they wrote, officials who didn’t implement his orders were removed or even shot, but Gorbachev not only tolerated them; he continued to trust them. Chernyaev shared the view that Gorbachev should be tougher, but instead of acting on the criticism, Gorbachev was “just irritated” by it. When he and the rest of the Politburo met with 150 leading intellectuals on January 6, Gorbachev spoke for two and a half hours and seemed on the defensive. It was not true, as conservatives charged, that perestroika was “leading to chaos,” that it had “no strategy and plan,” that what the country needed was a “strong hand,” as in the “good, old days.” But liberals were equally misguided in their calls for “political pluralism, multiple parties, even private property.” Adopting a centrist political line came naturally to someone temperamentally inclined to compromise.
Gorbachev regarded Sakharov as “an idealist not always in touch with real possibilities and consequences,” a description not so inapt for Gorbachev himself. But he, too, hoped to work with, not against, his sometime antagonist.
Sakharov’s death opened the way for Yeltsin to lead the no-longer loyal opposition, a result Gorbachev had expected for some time.
whereas Gorbachev concluded that economic reform was impossible without democratization and political pluralism, Deng was proceeding to introduce a market economy, while jealously guarding the party’s monopoly of political power.
Gorbachev hadn’t come to China to lead the demonstrations, of course, but to heal the Sino-Soviet breach that had waxed and waned since the 1960s. His talks with Deng succeeded in doing just that.
Deng [Xiaoping]’s view, his younger son, Deng Zhifang, expressed it to an American journalist in 1990: “My father thinks Gorbachev is an idiot.”56 What he meant was that Gorbachev was risking the survival of Soviet Communism by putting the cart (political transformation) before the horse (radical economic reform).
Grósz was tempted to use force to stop the system from unraveling, but, he recalled, “not only would we have been condemned by Western countries and subjected to sanctions, but, above all, such an action would have collided head-on with the whole thrust of Soviet foreign policy, and we would have been isolated in our own camp.”
If East Germany were to “crumble,” the issue of German reunification would “immediately arise,” and this would be dangerous, for a “united and powerful Germany would correspond neither to your interests nor to ours.”
The most severe troubles he faced, like economic collapse and nationalist uprisings, couldn’t be wished away, but others he could and did deny, repressing his qualms and soldiering on.
“Democratic Russia,” were better organized. This time Yeltsin, too, was better prepared: campaigning not just for himself (for a seat in his former base, Sverdlovsk) but for like-minded candidates in other provinces. He boasted a best-selling book, Confessions on an Assigned Theme, which advertised his brave battle against the dark forces of power and privilege; he stood for freeing Russia from stultifying centralist rule and offered to give regions within Russia more autonomy as well.
Gorbachev complained to Chernyaev and Brutents that he had “reached the breaking point” and his head was “bursting.”
Yakovlev considered it Gorbachev’s “worst, most dangerous mistake,” because that program was “the last chance for a civilized transition to a new order,” and what followed its rejection was “nothing less than a war.”
Americans could see “a man with an independent mind and common sense talking sincerely and naturally.” Whereas back home, he maneuvered this way and that, hiding his true feelings, issuing “appeals for compromise and unity that were already an object of ridicule.”
Why did Gorbachev hide the truth? For fear that disclosing it would destroy the new world he was building together with the West? To pay off the military for going along with his radical nuclear disarmament proposals? Whatever the reason, his behavior shows that, idealist though he was, he was also capable of realpolitik and of appeasing Soviet hard-liners—which in turn gave ammunition to American hard-liners who remained skeptical of Gorbachev’s intentions for so long.
British intelligence specialist turned cold war historian believes Gorbachev “could have squeezed far more from NATO had he played a tougher hand in the [German membership] negotiations, instead of expecting to be rewarded later for cards he gave away.”1
“He used to read articles and books . . . and thus develop himself.” Now “he has exhausted himself intellectually as a politician. He is tired. Time has passed him by—his own time, created by him.”
Still loyal to Gorbachev, and worried about the fratricide that was beginning to tear Yugoslavia apart, Bush warned against a bloody breakup of the USSR: “Freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred.”
local residents told Chernyaev that Zarya had gone up in a great hurry during the last year and a half. Until he saw Zarya, Chenyaev, who remained faithfully at Gorbachev’s side to the end of his reign and for more than twenty years afterward, had viewed his boss as the “selfless” hero of perestroika.
Gorbachev finally began to purge his opponents. Three of them did the job for him. One of the conspirators, Minister of Internal Affairs Boris Pugo, shot his wife and then himself. Former armed forces chief of staff Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who had broken with military hard-liners to become Gorbachev’s arms control adviser, but later grew disillusioned with his boss, had cut short his vacation and rushed to Moscow to support the coup. Now he confessed what he had done in a letter to Gorbachev, then wrote a note saying, “I can no longer live when my Fatherland is dying and everything I have worked for is being destroyed,” and hanged himself in his office. Nikolai Kruchina had been in charge of the Communist party’s secret stashes of funds as the Central Committee’s general manager. “I am not a conspirator,” he wrote, “but I am a coward. Please report that to the Soviet people.” Kruchina jumped to his death from his apartment window.5 Gorbachev
the code of the Bush dynasty: “You would be generous to a loser, you would not boast about your victory, you would be civil during an engagement, but you’d use every trick you had, every skill, to win.”35
“Mama,” asked ten-year-old Irina. “Why did the Khan have so many wives and Papa has only you?” “Ask Papa when we get home. Let him tell you whether I’m his only woman and why.” Irina asked, and her father answered, “You know, Khan Girei had many wives. But not one was a philosopher.”
Actually, he goes on in Alone with Myself, Raisa was “a beautiful woman, and not only in my eyes.” She was also “elegant, charming, wonderfully feminine,” and “innately aristocratic.
GORBACHEV WAS A VISIONARY who changed his country and the world—though neither as much as he wished. Few, if any, political leaders have not only a vision but also the will and ability to bring it fully to life. To fall short of that, as Gorbachev did, is not to fail.
Many in his demographic cohort, peasant boys rising in the post–World War II era of rapid urbanization and mass education, had not only an optimistic worldview but, as historian Vladislav Zubok has described it, “a naive belief” in the “cultured discourse and ideology, in comparison to sophisticated, cynical, double-thinking urbanites.”2
Gorbachev often told Aleksandr Yakovlev and Anatoly Chernyaev that he was prepared to “go far,” and in the end he abandoned Communism altogether. But because of his initial uncertainty, his sworn commitment to gradualism and his fear of alarming Politburo colleagues, he settled at first for mild economic reforms, plus a strong dose of glasnost. Only when the reforms stalled and the glasnost began to provoke conservative opposition did he determine to embark full bore on democratization. In doing so, he did indeed change signals on his initial Kremlin supporters, whom he then maneuvered, with more than a little help from Communist party discipline, into reluctantly tolerating his more radical program.
In this sense, Gorbachev helped bury the Soviet system by trying to make it worthy of praise, by seeking to make it live up to what he saw as its original ideals.
He trusted the people to embrace self-governance, and their elected representatives to shape democratic institutions—until it turned out that they didn’t know how and no longer trusted him.
The fact that he got the Communist party to vote away its monopoly on power was a tour de force accomplished without the use of force. His training and experience in the party apparatus prepared him to accomplish this feat—but Boris Yeltsin, whom Gorbachev regarded as inferior, as a loose cannon, turned out to be better at the new, populist political game. In a further irony, Yeltsin’s electoral success owed much not only to his populism (at which Gorbachev sneered) but also to his reminding Russian voters of a gruff, strong-minded, authoritarian tsar—in stark contrast to the much milder, more garrulous, consensus-seeking Gorbachev.
Gorbachev’s character helps to explain both his successes and his failures. His overconfidence in himself and his cause gave him the courage to reach so high that he overreached—and then warped his judgment when what he was trying to build started to shatter.
Gorbachev’s brave undertaking may have been doomed from the start. But what was the alternative? If the Soviet Union had tried to muddle through without change it might have survived another ten or twenty years. But what then? Would an all-out Yugoslav-type civil war between Russia and Ukraine (playing the bloody roles of Serbia and Croatia, respectively) have made the later, limited conflict between Moscow and Kiev look tame? Would Communists and anti-Communists have settled scores in a bloodbath?
The Soviet Union fell apart when Gorbachev weakened the state in an attempt to strengthen the individual. Putin strengthened the Russian state by curtailing individual freedoms.