The Legacy of Gorbachev
(David Satter, September 9, 2022)
Transcript available below
About the speaker
David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent, is a long time observer of Russia and the former Soviet Union. He was a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
Satter was born in Chicago in 1947 and graduated from the University of Chicago and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a B.Litt degree in political philosophy. He worked for four years as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune and, in 1976, he was named Moscow correspondent of the London Financial Times. He worked in Moscow for six years, from 1976 to 1982, during which time he sought out Soviet citizens with the intention of preserving their accounts of the Soviet totalitarian system for posterity.
After completing his term in Moscow, Satter became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs for The Wall Street Journal, contributing to the paper’s editorial page. In 1990, he was named a Thornton Hooper fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and then a senior fellow at the Institute. From 2003 to 2008, he was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2008, he was also a visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches a course on contemporary Russian history at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced Academic Programs.
Satter has written five books about Russia: Russia: It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (Yale, 2011); Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Knopf, 1996; paperback, Yale 2001); and Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale 2003). His books have been translated into Russian, Estonian, Latvian, Czech, Portuguese and Vietnamese. His first book, Age of Delirium, has been made into a documentary film in a U.S. – Latvian – Russian joint production.
Satter has testified frequently on Russian affairs before Congressional committees. He has written extensively for the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. His articles and op-ed pieces have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The National Interest, National Review, National Review Online, Forbes.com, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, The New York Sun, The New York Review of Books, Reader’s Digest and The Washington Times. He is frequently interviewed in both Russian and English by Radio Liberty, the Voice of America and the BBC Russian Service and has appeared on CNN, CNN International, BBC World, the Charlie Rose Show, Al Jazeera, France 24, Fox News, C-Span and ORT and RTR, the state run Russian television networks.
The views of the speaker are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Westminster Institute.
Transcript
Introduction
Robert R. Reilly:
Hello and welcome to the Westminster Institute. I am Robert Reilly, its director. Today, we are delighted to welcome back as a speaker, David Satter, who has been a guest several times before. David is a leading commentator on Russia and the former Soviet Union. He is the author of five books on the Soviet Union and/or Russia. He is also the creator of a documentary film on the fall of the USSR. His most recent book, Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union, is an anthology of his writings from 1976 to 2019.
David became the Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times in 1976 through 1982 during the height of Soviet power. In 1982, he became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs for The Wall Street Journal. In September 2013, he was accredited as a Radio Liberty correspondent in Moscow and has the distinction of being the first American correspondent to be barred from Russia after the end of the Cold War.
David’s first book was Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, which was published in 1996. It was later turned into a documentary film, Age of Delirium, which was awarded the 2013 Van Gogh Grand Jury Award at the Amsterdam Film Festival. He is also the author of Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, 2003, It was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past in 2011, and The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin from 2016. His books have been translated into eight languages.
David has been a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and has had similar positions in several other institutes. He also taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. Today, David is going to speak to us on the legacy of Gorbachev, and dispositively, the day after Gorbachev died, David had an Op-ed in The Wall Street Journal titled, “Mikhail Gorbachev’s undoing was his devotion to Soviet ideas. He was unable to preserve the Soviet ideological structure, but it was not for lack of trying.” David, welcome back.
David Satter:
Thank you, Bob, glad to be with you.
Historical Background
Robert R. Reilly:
Before we talk about Gorbachev’s legacy, let us talk about a little bit of his history, how he rose up in the Soviet Communist Party, how he got onto the Politburo and somehow in line to become Secretary General.
David Satter:
Well, it is important to bear in mind that in the last years of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union was very much a gerontocracy. The generation that was in power had been put in power, had been given their careers in effect by Stalin as a result of the purges during the 1930s, the late 1930s. Older cadres were arrested, in many cases shot. Under no circumstances were they able to resume their party careers, at the top of the pinnacle in any case, and they were replaced by a new generation of Soviet citizens who were absolutely loyal to Stalin and had no biographies of their own.
This is one of the things that Stalin wanted to eliminate. He wanted to eliminate those who had independent revolutionary achievements, as they understood them, and who at least potentially had the capacity to think for themselves. This generation was the Brezhnev generation, the Andropov generation, the Chernenko generation, and of course, after the death of Stalin and after the removal of, in particular, Khrushchev, who was also very quick to fire people and remove people, there was a period of career stagnation in effect in the Soviet hierarchy.
Those people who held positions kept them and they moved up step by step on the basis of seniority after the removal of Khrushchev, so the members of this rather conformist generation who were left once Khrushchev was removed, once Brezhnev was in charge, were pretty secure in their jobs, and they remained in those positions year after year.
They, of course, were very conservative in their outlooks in the sense that they did not challenge the Soviet ideology in any way, the way in which the system operated. They were not interested in reforms other than those that were forced upon them by circumstances, which were always very partial and not really very significant. For example, they were forced to tolerate a certain level of descent of dissent, again, really against their will, but in order to achieve the relationship with the West, which they thought would result in a flow of modern technology and expertise that would in turn help them modernize and improve the military potential and capabilities of the country.
So we had in the Soviet Union a situation in which younger people were pretty much blocked, systemic change was pretty much blocked, imagination was suppressed, and when nature took its toll and people began to die, there were very few alternatives as far as the choice of a new leader was concerned. Brezhnev died, there was a power struggle, a power struggle within the apparatus, and he was succeeded by Andropov, but Andropov was an old and very sick man. He was suffering from advanced kidney disease during almost all the period that he was in office.
He was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who had to conduct Politburo members in the Moscow central clinical hospital. And when it came to voting in one of the so-called Soviet elections in which, of course, there was only one candidate, and it was important to get a little bit of newsreel video of the head of state, and Chernenko was the head of state, voting in these elections in which all Soviet citizens were obliged to participate and vote for the only candidate, the candidate of the Communist Party, the hospital room was dressed up as a polling station so that they could film him casting a vote.
So it was a situation in which, really, the leadership had simply aged out, and it was in this situation that Gorbachev, who was a good 20 years younger at least, and was one of the few young people brought into the Politburo, in his case to handle agriculture, which he did not handle very well.
Andropov and Gorbachev
Robert R. Reilly:
And his sponsor was Andropov if I am [not mistaken]?
David Satter:
Well, this is what people say. The reports are that it was Andropov who liked him and promoted him, and it was the KGB that recognized, at least in their analytical department and in their analytical efforts, that some type of change was necessary in the Soviet Union. And Andropov may have felt that Gorbachev was the person who could carry that out.
Andropov himself relied – when he introduced reforms intended to make the economy more efficient – relied exclusively on repressive measures. All over the country people were being arrested for leaving work without permission, although under Soviet circumstances it is essential to leave work in order to do necessary shopping or run errands that cannot be postponed.
But this basically meaningless exercise resulted in a lot of arrests, and it showed Andropov’s kind of inclinations. And he may have felt that Gorbachev – it is not clear what he expected from Gorbachev, we do not know that, but by all reports he did support Gorbachev. It may have been one of the reasons why Gorbachev entered the Politburo in the first place, but the leadership did recognize that they needed a younger leader, someone who was stronger, more vigorous physically, and could be counted on to exercise the prerogatives of office for more than a matter of months, which was the situation with Andropov and Chernenko.
And it was Andrei Gromyko, the veteran foreign minister who had spent many decades in that post, [who propelled Gorbachev to power]. He was also an example of that generation, that post-purge generation, the young people promoted by Stalin to take the places of those who had been eliminated or killed, and he nominated Gorbachev. In any case, it was without great expectations that the world welcomed (if welcome is the word) the accession to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. He was someone who had moved up step by step in the party hierarchy.
The Soviet Union’s Perverse Ideological Environment
He was someone who could have only done that by repeating various ideological cliches, and demonstrating total loyalty, and being acceptable to all levels of the hierarchy, but what his colleagues could not know, and what no one else could know either, was what was really on his mind because in the Soviet Union, people hid their intentions.
One friend of mine, who later emigrated to the U.S. but at one point was an official of the Komsomal in Yermala, the resort city in Latvia near Riga, he said that the faces of his colleagues were masks. It was hard to understand what they were really thinking, but he said, you know, I cannot really blame them because when I was with them, my face was a mask, too. He said the only time he felt he could be honest with someone was when he was looking in the mirror.
It was in that perverse environment, perverse ideological environment, in which the opinion of the individual meant nothing, advancement was based on repeating obvious stupidity, that Gorbachev made his career. By all accounts he was also a rather congenial person, or he could be when the situation required it. And he became the new General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party at a time when the party and the country were beginning to experience very serious challenges.
The Beqaa Valley
Robert R. Reilly:
You mentioned something in your Op-ed, which is very striking, and that is what happened over the Beqaa Valley in 1982 when the Israeli Air Force, flying U.S. jet fighters, confronted Syrian pilots flying MiG-21s, and the Israelis shot down 81 MiGs and did not lose a single plane. You said that sent shock waves through the [Soviet Union]?
David Satter:
Yeah, MiG-21s, MiG-23s. Yeah, it did, that and Reagan’s announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative. It was widely ridiculed in the U.S. It was referred to as Star Wars initiative, but the Russians, the Soviets, did not ridicule it. They were very worried. They knew that they could not match that kind of technology, that they had not mastered the development of information technology and the tremendous changes that it was bringing about in the manner in which nations waged war.
I mean the Israelis in the battle over the Beqaa valley used the latest advances in electronic warfare among other things, and they blinded the anti-aircraft batteries of the Syrians, but they also, of course, were able to shoot them out of the sky. Now, of course, the Soviets suggested that the pilots were incompetent, which was what they would say if they were defending the quality of their technology, but it was quite a shock.
And the other thing was that the Russian economy was slowing down. They were not getting the growth did not increase, and in fact, in some respects it decreased, and this was on from a very low base and with an economic system that produced very low-quality products. So all of this pushed the Soviet leadership to consider what could be done to improve the capability of the Soviet Union, first of all, to develop economically, and intimately tied with that, to compete militarily with the West.
Gorbachev’s First Reforms
Gorbachev came to power, and what people do not realize is that the first reforms that he tried were purely administrative, they were coercive, they were in the Andropov tradition. For example, there was something – I think it was called in Russian хозрасчёт (khozraschyot). In any case, they were trying to penalize people for low quality production even though the low-quality production was not the fault of specific individuals but of an entire system. There was the anti-alcohol campaign in which they restricted the sale of vodka, and then this led to a huge boom in the bootleg production of vodka and the diversion of a lot of money that had been spent on vodka, and provided an important part of the state budget, to the black market.
But none of this worked very well in terms of increasing productivity and modernizing the country. Gorbachev also tinkered with the decentralization of the economy along the lines of the suggestions that had been made in the past by would-be Soviet reformers who thought that decentralization, greater freedom of decision-making would make it possible for the economy to perform better. The decentralization was resisted by the party apparatus.
It goes without saying that Gorbachev [by] himself could not really change anything. He could give orders, but those orders could disappear in a hostile bureaucracy that is not interested in carrying them out and feels itself to be invulnerable. And it was in that atmosphere that Gorbachev took the steps which eventually doomed the Soviet Union, which was he embarked on the policy of glasnost and perestroika. Perestroika was the restructuring of the economy and the political system. Glasnost was free information.
Did Gorbachev Understand the Risks of Reform?
Did he understand the risk he was taking? And this is something that I have often thought about because at the time in 1988, [in] an article I wrote at the time for The New Republic, I said that this is never going to work. He is going to have to either abandon ideological structures and completely democratize the country, or there will be massive repression and the reforms will be destroyed. Of course, the third alternative was that he would pursue this course of action further and the whole country would be destroyed, and that is what happened.
But I operated on the assumption that Gorbachev had to be aware that if he ignored the two alternatives that were obvious to a Western mind, and pursued a third alternative, i.e., trying to democratize the undemocratizable or whatever, a system that could not be democratized, let us put it that way, the system itself would fall apart, and that is what happened. There were certain dynamics in the Communist Party that made it very difficult for Gorbachev, having embarked on glasnost.
Glasnost was a tool. The party apparatus would not cooperate with his reforms, and so he mobilized, just as Khrushchev had done before him but on a much greater scale, mobilized the population against the party apparatus. Free speech, the ability to discuss problems openly, the ability to form independent organizations and organizations not dominated by the Communist Party, all of this greater pluralism in the society, the freedom to have political demonstrations, all of this was a way of putting pressure on the Communist Party apparatus. And as originally envisaged, it was a means of putting pressure on the apparatus in the interests of the reforms that Gorbachev had in mind, which were liberal by Soviet standards, but very far from being democratic, fully democratic.
Ideological Development Under Gorbachev
Robert R. Reilly:
What about some aspect of ideological development at the time that could justify what he was doing? He had on the Politburo with him as a supporter Alexander Yakovlev, who was supposed to be the sort of Pope of Marxist-Leninist ideology, and who clearly showed some flexibility of mind in some statements he made at the time. Others in the Politburo were old school and obviously resisted to the point they tried to overthrow him at a certain stage. How was the language and when did it become clear to you that the ideology could not withstand changes like this and itself would lose its legitimacy to the extent that it held any [legitimacy]?
David Satter:
That was obvious from the very, very, very beginning. I mean the ideology was a coherent whole. It was a false religion, and it really could not be challenged without calling into question its entire claim to infallibility. The ideology claimed to be a perfect science, claimed to be infallible, it claimed to be as inarguable as the axioms of geometry, to use the expression Lenin. And the way in which it preserved the credibility of this absurd claim was literally by creating reality.
For example, the ideology predicted that there would be total unanimity once the working class took power, as it supposedly did in the Soviet Union. Well, of course, there was no unanimity in the country. There were all kinds of [dissent], but anyone who dissented could end up in a prison camp or a mental hospital, particularly [a] mental hospital because they would say, well, yes, we are unanimous, but we have a few people who are mentally ill.
Robert R. Reilly:
Vladimir Bukovsky.
David Satter:
And a few traitors, but as soon as it became clear that it was not a matter of a few mentally ill people but huge swaths of the population that were unhappy with the situation, protesting against it, prepared to change it, well, under those circumstances, how could they talk about an infallible ideology which the party was guiding to a new utopia, with the help of which the party was creating a new utopia?
So from the very beginning [this was clear], and yet once they began allowing people – and particularly the press – to express free opinions and also to reveal information that for years had been hidden, the claim to total explanation and total perfection of the ideology, which had been the basis of the totalitarian system, was simply untenable.
And Gorbachev was in a difficult position, too, because once the momentum of glasnost was used by him and his allies as a weapon against the party apparatus to achieve their goals, they could not halt halfway. To do so would have been to give a grant of legitimacy to their political opponents, and also to call into question the validity of Gorbachev’s reform course such as it was.
Free Speech Unleashed in the Soviet Union
And the reality is that once Gorbachev made the decision to free the political prisoners in 1986 and removed the articles from the criminal code that penalized free speech and free assembly, the momentum of change [could not be halted]. He unleashed something that was really very profound. He said that Russians could suddenly get visas to leave the country, and come back, and go and see the rest of the world. They suddenly had access to Western publications. They could suddenly go to Xerox machines and make copies of their various statements and reports. They could speak in public without fear. All of this was absolutely revolutionary for the Soviet Union and profoundly destabilizing.
Robert R. Reilly:
As was the impact of further revelations about what happened in The Gulag Archipelago, where it happened, and to whom it happened?
David Satter:
Absolutely, because that information had been suppressed. In fact, many of the political prisoners were people who had been locked up because they circulated information about the Stalin era repressions. And suddenly, there was a joke. One friend called another and said, did you see what is published in the newspapers this morning? He said, please, you cannot discuss it over the telephone, and it was an amazing thing. Under Gorbachev, the newspapers began printing and people began discussing things that if it had been just a year or so earlier, would have landed the authors in jail, so the change was really dramatic, really dramatic.
And freedom of movement was granted to people, and the freedom to emigrate if they chose, the barriers to immigration were dropped, especially for Jews, who in many cases were emigrating either to Israel or to the West, to the U.S. in the first instance. So this is one thing we should not under any circumstances minimize, which is the profound impact of Gorbachev’s changes in dismantling the totalitarian system.
What was Gorbachev Trying to Do?
Where it becomes more complicated is what exactly was Gorbachev driving at and what was he seeking to do, and here the picture becomes less clear because Gorbachev himself was not clear. In fact, my guess is he did not even know. Hard as it is to believe, this massive, really revolutionary change in the world political situation was engineered by a man who probably did not have a clear idea of where he was going. He spoke about combining communism and the market, preserving the Soviet Union but doing so on the basis of democracy. He said that he wanted communism with a human face. He wanted to preserve [the Soviet Union], but he believed in the socialist choice of the Soviet people.
[He] wanted to preserve the Soviet Union. The problem was that the Soviet Union was based on repression and lies, and if you remove the lies and you remove the repression, the regime was untenable. Gorbachev even when he came back, he defended socialism and the socialist system, even after the 1991 coup, which Yeltsin helped to defeat when he returned to Moscow from being detained at his vacation home in Crimea in force. He repeated this.He also said that he was opposed to the restoration of private property.
Well, private property is the basis of a market economy, so how did he expect to combine communism and the market? How did he expect to transform a society without private property? That was not clear. I do not think it was clear to him, and he said, well, eventually we could have private property, but without any kind of exploitation of one class by another, so to the very end he was thinking in the framework of those communist ideas that had been drilled into him from an early age.
Did Gorbachev Ever Liberate His Own Consciousness?
Robert R. Reilly:
He made a statement about his mindset in 1985. I am quoting him here, “One could not naturally liberate one’s consciousness all at once from the previous blinkers and chains.” One question I would have about Gorbachev is: did he ever?
David Satter:
He was changing all through [his tenure]. He himself said that I changed. You know, one of the things that the Soviet leaders were very careful to do was to avoid informal uncontrolled contacts with Western leaders or with Western society. It all had to be controlled in advance because if it was not, it was not easy to punch a hole in that dike, which they had constructed to keep out reality.
About the evolution of Gorbachev: many people have suggested he was reckless. There is some truth to that if you are thinking in terms of preservation of the system, of the Soviet system, certainly, but what is I think really interesting is the recklessness with which he personally exposed himself to the reality of the outside world by traveling widely, by opening up himself and his country to foreign influences. And he himself said it various times.
Yakovlev who had served as the Ambassador to Canada was very critical in all this, and Gorbachev said that the country changed, and I changed during these years of perestroika as he began to come into contact with realities that the Soviet system was simply designed to conceal and to blot out. But at the end, of course, he also realized that this was a threat to his own power. First of all, the Soviet Union during perestroika was a very impoverished place even by Soviet standards Perestroika Moscow was a grim, grim spectacle, and with nothing in the stores except, you know, canned products many months old and frozen sprats that had been in that condition for God knows how long, and long lines.
There was no economic base for the kind of democratization that was taking place. Gorbachev would have needed really very significant popular support, which under conditions of general poverty, general and worsening poverty, he did not have. That is one of the reasons why he did not have the courage to run for office and face a free election, because he feared he would lose, but it meant that Yeltsin, who was the insurgent political leader, and who was freely elected, and who did risk taking part in elections, would have a huge strategic advantage over Gorbachev in the upcoming struggle for power.
So Gorbachev, in order to preserve his own power, had little alternative but to rely at least in part on existing Soviet structures, and that of course prevented the evolution, which was absolutely critical, which could have been critical for Russia’s future was the development of genuine, law-based democratic institutions, which would have meant, of course, allowing for the breakup of the Soviet Union on legal grounds and creating a condition in which those peoples that wanted to remain part of the Soviet structure had the opportunity to express that democratically and freely.
Truth and Reconciliation in Russia
Robert R. Reilly:
David, you have made quite a point in your writings and books that any progress in first the Soviet Union and now what has become Russia had to have as its basis an admission to what had been done to these people in the past under communism. Some of your books so powerfully addressed that subject. Our late great friend, Vladimir Bukovsky, talked about that, and I was going to mention his book, Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity, because even Yeltsin when it seemed there could be a trial, not to the extent that they would be hanging people from lampposts but at least a public accounting of these crimes, an admission of their commission and contrition before the playing field could be, let us say, refreshed or that this country would no longer be based upon the lies to which you referred so powerfully. Even though Gorbachev let out this information in glasnost, he was not capable of something at that level, was he?
David Satter:
The memorial society, which was dedicated to commemorating those who had been killed, was a very powerful force in mobilizing the population against the communists, and they contributed enormously to the overthrow of the communist regime, but the real memorialization could have taken place after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was in the heat of the political battle. What tended to happen in the last years of Gorbachev’s reign or the last years of the Soviet Union, and it was also a time in which there was a pretty severe shortage of money for various reasons, including massive corruption and the loss of state revenue due to bootlegging. And this was a legacy of the anti-alcohol campaign.
But in any case, what I wanted to say is that what tended to happen in the last years of perestroika was that people would put down a plinth or a pedestal and say this is the scene of a future monument to the victims. But once communists were driven from power and once there was a new so-called democratic Russia that embarked on the restoration of capitalism, those projects were all forgotten, largely forgotten, and certainly Yeltsin did not show any support for that once it was no longer useful. It was resurrected a little bit in 1996 when the communists presented a serious political challenge to Yeltsin personally, but the idea that there is an overall moral obligation here, so there is very little in the way of meaningful commemoration.
Now, in recent years, the Putin regime has created its own memorial to those who died in the Stalin era repressions, but needless to say it is organized and presented in a manner that does not conflict in any way with the legitimacy or undermine in any way the legitimacy of the regime.
Robert R. Reilly:
So the call at the time by people like Bukovsky that there has to be in Russia the equivalent of the Nuremberg trials after the fall of Nazi Germany, that never happened.
David Satter:
That never happened, no one was ever punished for those crimes, although it is hard to say who could have been at that point just for reasons of age. Most of the perpetrators, the main perpetrators, were no longer alive, but certainly, there should have been a thorough [campaign for truth and reconciliation], and that is still a task for the future. Russia needs a truth commission like the truth commission in South Africa, which was pretty imperfect, but the idea is a good one.
Robert R. Reilly:
Is one consequence of their not having had one the growing popularity of Joseph Stalin’s reputation even today?
David Satter:
Yes, plus the fact that the society itself has become more and more authoritarian, but here we get into something very sinister, which is that the Putin came into power with the help of terrorist acts against his own people, the 1999 apartment bombings, but that led to a kind of version of history according to which the logic of Russian history, the purpose of Russian history, is the defense and power of the Russian state. It is an absurd idea, but that is inculcated in people, so any crime is justified if it serves the state.
The commemoration of victims is a measure that says no, it is not the state, that is purpose of Russian society and Russian history. It is the welfare and happiness and security of the people who live here and who have the right themselves to determine how they are governed, so obviously with that atmosphere, with that theory, they may tolerate some references to the Stalin era repressions, but it will be very much within the context of the overall importance of preserving the power of the Russian state. And in fact, you know that combination is not conducive to helping people understand the real issues.
Robert R. Reilly:
When I asked you about [whether] Gorbachev’s mentality really changed, you indicated in what ways it did and ways it did not, and in ways that – this is my point. Alexander Yakovlev in the last couple of years of the Soviet Union was, in his position on the Politburo, kind of the pope of the ideology. [He] made a statement that appeared in the press that he had come to realize that Leninism is based upon class struggle, class hatred, and that this is evil.
Now, when I read that, I thought then this is over, at a certain level, it is over. And then we saw after the fall of the Soviet Union what happened to Yakovlev. He seemed to undergo a genuine Socratic turning of the soul, and as you know, he spent his time documenting and preserving the records of the religious persecution in the Soviet Union and the horrors committed, so there you see a man whose soul has completely turned and who dedicates his life exactly to accounting for these horrors. I do not know enough to be firm about this position, but I never saw that in Gorbachev.
David Satter:
Well, Gorbachev was in a somewhat different position than Yakovlev. Yakovlev was on one side of the political debate within the Politburo. Gorbachev was much less coherent than Yakovlev. Yakovlev once said to me – I knew him – he said that Gorbachev lies even when he is telling the truth.
Robert R. Reilly:
By which he meant?
David Satter:
He meant that Gorbachev was always a manipulator. He was always trying to [manipulate others]. Now, some people would argue that there was no other way he could have achieved what he did achieve in the Soviet system of that time. I will leave that to [others], that is a historical debate that we can have another time, but Yakovlev also said that he came to the conclusion, he finally realized at a certain age that Lenin was in reality a huge revisionist, that he had absolutely taken Marxist theory and adapted it for his purposes, which is another way of saying that Marxism-Leninism as a system of thought is absolute nonsense, as a system of thought, but as a prescription for mass oppression, it is absolutely great.
But I think that if we would look at Gorbachev, my impression of him, you know, he is very inarticulate when it comes to expressing his views. He had a book, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, but there was no new thinking in it. All he said was, well, we have to adapt to a new world where we have to make progress, we have to live in peace, you know, all worthy statements, but very general and very empty. But as a maneuverer, and as a bureaucratic politician, and someone who moved up in the bureaucracy and became the ruler of a vast country, Gorbachev was immensely talented in those arts.
But he was not a theorist. He never at any point in his career gave evidence of being a theoretician. He wanted the socialism to work better as he understood it, and he thought that the way to do that was to unleash the potential of socialism in the people by giving them the opportunity to express themselves more freely. Well, thank God he did do that, but it did not have the result that he had planned on.
Robert R. Reilly:
Now, you have seen, no doubt, many of the encomia that have been written and broadcast about Gorbachev as the great liberator, and even Grigory Yavlinsky, the former liberal opposition leader, had this to say, to quote, about Gorbachev, “He gave freedom to hundreds of millions of people in Russia and around it and also half of Europe. Few leaders in history have had such a decisive influence on their time.”
David Satter:
I think that is correct. Now, what they did with that freedom in many cases is another thing because Russia in particular degenerated int a state run by a criminal oligarchy and is now waging aggressive war against another state that was once part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, which before that invasion and before that attack also had problems of its own but is certainly now the victim of aggression.
Robert R. Reilly:
Before we get to the consequences of that part of the Gorbachev legacy, let us talk about what happened in that transition. Many people repeat ad nauseam that Gorbachev was great because the transition was bloodless, he did not kill people.
David Satter:
It was not quite bloodless.
Robert R. Reilly:
No, it was not, yeah. He sent troops to Tblisi, to Baku, to Vilnius in which a number of people are killed. So the opposing point of view said, well, no, he did use that violence, he did use Soviet military power, but then I think 14 people were killed in Vilnius. It is the scale of what he did, [which] is miniature compared to the past violence in the Soviet Union that leaders have undertaken to preserve power. Is that fair?
David Satter:
Sure, and I mean he could have made plans. For example, in the case of Lithuania or any of the other republics, he could have made plans to send in the army and just to impose total control. And I was in Lithuania after those shootings at the television tower, and the people had improvised weapons. [They] were getting ready to defend the parliament building. They would not have lasted long against a trained army.
But there were many things that Gorbachev [did], many situations in which Gorbachev, had he decided to use mass repression or military force, could have stamped out opposition. Of course, there would have been unpredictable consequences for him because he might have been blamed for creating the situation in which people rebelled, but in any case, he did not do it, and that is a big difference between him and not only previous Soviet leaders, but between him and Yeltsin and Putin.
Robert R. Reilly:
And most remarkably, when the Berlin Wall comes down, the Soviet troops do not move. The East German troops do not move.
David Satter:
No, there was no attempt. He was not he going to hold the Soviet [Union together]. He wanted the Soviet Union to be preserved. He was not ready to hold it together by force, and without force there was no way it could be preserved as a result of the reforms which he himself initiated.
Robert R. Reilly:
Or did he consider the East European part of the Soviet empire a kind of liability that the Soviet Union could no longer carry?
David Satter:
I think that, too. That, too, also, he understood that repression in Eastern Europe would have required repression in the inside the Soviet Union, and that repression inside of the Soviet Union would have empowered his opponents.
Robert R. Reilly:
So even though his ultimate goal was to preserve the Soviet Union and have communism with a human face, there must have been a basic decency about this man that he refrained from using the power he had, or was it [something else]?
David Satter:
He was more decent than other Soviet leaders, Soviet and Russian leaders, certainly more decent than [others]. In fact, in 1993, when Yeltsin organized the massacre at the Ostankino television tower of protesters in the wake of his abolition of the supreme Soviet, which was the parliament, the Russian Parliament, Gorbachev was highly critical of such bloodthirsty tactics. He in that respect was an exception.
And in fact, in the Soviet Union, there was always a kind of indulgent attitude toward violence even on the part of the population. It was considered to be [justified]. Violence was considered to be okay in a good cause, but what is a good cause? A good cause was anything that supported the state and that is one of the reasons why we see the passivity of Russian civil society today in the face of mass casualties, and widespread destruction, and obvious aggression against a neighboring country.
Robert R. Reilly:
So let us then address the Gorbachev legacy. As he loses power, Yeltsin takes over. To what extent is he responsible for what happened afterwards or there was no way in which he could [have acted]?
David Satter:
Well, once he was out of power, yeah, and you know it is also true that he did not try to mobilize the army or any forces that were available to himself to prevent a transfer of power. But once he was out of power, no, there was not much he could have done, but when he was in power, his lack of determination to take [action], and maybe it was too much to expect of him, but the only thing that could have prevented what we are seeing now was the forceful, decisive, directed transition of the Soviet Union into a democratic, law-based state. That would have meant, of course, leaving a large part of the country outside the borders of this new state because many of the republics would not have wanted to be part of it, but the very fact of having done that would itself be an important stimulus to the creation of a healthy democratic society in Russia.
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, you know, there were a lot of comments about the demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Egypt, these huge assemblies of people calling for democracy and etc., but some very wise analysts in the Middle East said that cannot result from this, the only beneficiaries of this are going to be the following institution, whether it is the secret police, operat, the religious bureaucracy, the tribal structure because there are no underlying institutions in Egypt that can lead in that direction. It is just the tradition is not there and the institutions are not there.
David Satter:
Yeah.
Robert R. Reilly:
Now, to what extent could we make those comments about Russia? I mean how could that have been done? Was it even possible?
David Satter:
Well, those institutions were not there, but Gorbachev was leading from the top, and those mechanisms could have been created. For one thing, Gorbachev could have announced that those republics that seek independence and want to leave are free to do so, and it could have been a negotiated, and democratic, and legal process instead of the Belaveski Agreement, in which three party bosses in effect got together without consulting anyone, and just dissolved the whole country. That is one thing.
The other thing [is] that there could have been an emphasis not on holding power but on creating the basic structures that are necessary for the rule of law, and of course, an articulate counter to the ideology’s insistence that there is such a thing as class values as opposed to universal values. Now, that would have taken someone truly great, so what we can say about Gorbachev is that he was not truly great. He was someone who had huge influence, he did do a great deal of good as well as a certain amount of harm, but he missed the greatest opportunity that history gave him, which was to methodically and in a directed manner to lead the country to a law-based state. Failing to do that or failing to try and losing out to someone like Yeltsin, a situation he helped [create], directly and indirectly created the conditions for what we have now.
Robert R. Reilly:
And in 1996, he tried to make a political comeback by running for president in Russia, and he received only a half a percent of the vote.
David Satter:
Oh, in ’96, yeah.
Robert R. Reilly:
Yeah, is that a judgment?
David Satter:
Yeah, it is, that he did not [perform well]. He was seen as a historical figure for one thing, and the other was that he had had his chance in power to really accomplish something for the country in terms of its politics, and he did not. He ended the Cold War, he freed people, but in terms of creating a system, [he failed]. And remember he had monopolistic power. If you are creating a system, embarking on a system that would be a reliable democracy, well, you did not do that.
Robert R. Reilly:
And to that extent you would hold him at least partially responsible for what followed, whether it was Yeltsin or now Putin?
David Satter:
Partially, yes, that is partially his legacy, also. Of course, it was the criminality of Yeltsin and Putin that was decisive in the developments after ’91 when Gorbachev lost power.
Robert R. Reilly:
So you would say, and you referred to this briefly before, that the conditions within Russia today are certainly not nostalgic for Gorbachev. They are not nostalgic for the very difficult period through which Russia went when its economy collapsed.
David Satter:
Yeah.
Robert R. Reilly:
And that this desire for stability, and a stable state, and a strong centralized state to what extent now could we say that is part of the Russian national character? Some people say it was always part of the Russian national character.
David Satter:
Well, I think the chaos of the 90s certainly reinforced that desire, but they have not lived under anything else by and large, and thoughtful Russians understand that that has to change if the country is going to ever be free. I think that the real problem was the absence of the rule of law and that should have been the first priority because the rule of law is that you are in a society it is a direct reflection of the domination and enthronement if you will of universal values.
Robert R. Reilly:
So to what extent do private property in the rule of law exists today?
David Satter:
Well, there is private property. There is rule of law to the extent in those situations in which it does not interfere with the regime. In other words, it does not exist at all. They can dictate the outcome of any case. In some situations, they choose not to in order to give the legal system a little bit of spurious legitimacy, but they want the outside world also to believe that Russia is a law-based state, that its courts are more than merely decorative, so in the interest of that image they are willing to allow it to operate normally in a limited number of cases. As soon as it affects in any way the interests of those who hold power, it becomes just a fiction.
Conclusion
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, I am afraid what we are out of time today and I would like to thank our speaker David Satter for joining us to discuss the Gorbachev legacy I want to thank our audience for joining us and also encourage you to go to the Westminster Institute website or to our YouTube channel and see our other offerings covering recent issues like the Ukraine-Russian war, China and Taiwan, the Middle East, and so forth, as well as the prior to Westminster presentations that David Satter has made for us. Thank you for joining us. I am Robert Reilly.