Gorbachev's revolution

NOT ONE OF the grey men who assembled this week 25 years ago to pick a successor to Constantin Chernenko, the greyest of all leaders of the Soviet Union, had any idea what they would set in train. Within hours of his death the Politburo had earmarked the youngest among their number, Mikhail Gorbachev (54), to become the last secretary general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He would later become the first and last President of the Soviet Union and, despite himself, its gravedigger.

Although he would pass from power widely reviled at home – hated by ordinary people for the economic and social impoverishment that would follow him, and by communists for betraying their state and losing their empire – history and the world will judge him more kindly as one of the century’s outstanding figures.

A committed communist and party man, later not averse to using the old methods, Gorbachev was not picked as a reformer. If he believed in it he kept it largely to himself. But he found that to implement his top-down economic programme, “ perestroika ”, he needed to counterbalance the inertia of his own party’s conservatism with a bottom-up revolution, transparency, or “ glasnost ”. Relatively free elections followed. Necessity opened his eyes gradually to the revolutionary logic being ushered through the door he had opened.

Historian Orlando Figes has compared Gorbachev to Columbus, “setting out with high ideals to find one thing and achieving something better by discarding them”. In other respects he was straight out of Russian history: a second Alexander Kerensky, one of the architects of Russia’s first 1917 revolution who would be swept away in its second by the uncontrolable, pent-up forces he had unleashed.

The shaking loose of the party from its control of the state would shake Gorbachev’s own hands from the levers of power, just as the rise of nationalism would break up the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and would make his position as president redundant, and the world a different place.

On the sidelines now, Gorbachev recently returned to familiar ground, accusing Prime Minister Putin’s government of trying to initiate a modernisation programme for Russia from the top down, “practically without the people”. And he attacked the ruling United Russia party of seeking a monopoly on power “like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, only worse”. It seems that although much has changed in Russia, much has not.

The Irish Times. Saturday, March 13, 2010