With few exceptions, the democratic left in the west has
responded to Mikhail Gorbachev's departure from the Kremlin with praise for
his record in office.
Much of it is understandable. Gorbachev presided over a
period of extraordinary, and for the most part welcome, change, both
domestically and in Soviet relations with the rest of the world. When he
gained the upper hand in the political apparatus, tension between the
super-powers was at its height, east-central Europe was under Soviet
domination and war raged between Soviet occupying forces and Mujahedin guerrillas
in Afghanistan; at home, the regime was one of the most oppressive in the
world. Today, the cold war is over and the Soviet Union, having given up
east-central Europe, has ceased to exist. Most of the former satellite states
are now functioning democracies and several of the former republics of the
Soviet Union seem to be on the way to joining them. Despite the immense challenges
ahead for the post-communist world, all this is cause for the democratic left
to be pleased.
Yet, although much was Gorbachev's responsibility, almost
none of it was what he intended. The changes associated with his name were
mostly by-products of an attempt to modernise and revitalise the stagnant
Soviet system without fundamentally changing it. From any point of view, the
attempt failed.
When Gorbachev and his team of ambitious technocrats came
to power (he was never elected by popular vote), the only part of the Soviet
economy operating at anything like contemporary western levels of technology
and quality was the military sector; and the military sector was an unbearable
burden for the rest of the economy. Economic growth had slowed almost to a
standstill. The Soviet workforce was apathetic and unproductive, the ruling
bureaucracy corrupt and immobile.
Gorbachev's "modernising" reforms merely exacerbated
the crisis. The disengagement from the cold war and the arms race, culminating
in the withdrawal from east-central Europe, won Gorbachev many friends in the
west; but it happened too late (and latterly too fast) to benefit the domestic
economy, in the process losing Gorbachev the support of the military-industrial
complex.
Meanwhile, the succession of half-baked plans for
introducing market forces to the creaking mechanisms of production and
distribution foundered against bureaucratic antipathy and the growing
resistance of the working class. By the end of the eighties, the economy was in
tatters.
Cultural liberalisation and the policy of
"openness" – initially at least intended as little more than part of
an anti-corruption campaign - won the support of the intelligentsia for a
while but also unleashed demands for national self-determination and democracy
which inexorably undermined the very foundations of the Soviet political
system. Slowly but surely, Gorbachev's popularity ebbed away as the crisis
intensified. Last August's coup and its bizarre collapse left Gorbachev with
just one card to play: his status as world statesman. Boris Yeltsin and the
republican leaders soon found they could trump it (although it remains an open
question whether they will make it even more of a pig's ear).
Gorbachev's is a heroic record, perhaps, but it is a heroic
record of failure. Western left-wing politicians would be advised not to adopt
him as a role model.
