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Mikhail Gorbachev, RIP
The first time I met Mikhail Gorbachev he ignored me for a couple of minutes, devoting himself instead to my wife.
This was in the early two thousands. Communism had collapsed so completely that even the last leader of the Soviet Union had become a capitalist, visiting the United States on a paid speaking tour. My wife and I met him backstage before one of these events. Chatting with Edita, Gorbachev asked where she was from, how she liked California, and if she had ever visited Russia. As they spoke, I realized he was good. Really good. He had the touch. Unlike Brezhnev, Andropov, Kosygin, and the other aging tyrants he had succeeded, Gorbachev proved human, even, heaven help me–he had lead a country officially pledged to the destruction of our own country, after all–likeable. He may have risen to power in a Communist system, but he’d have done just fine in a democracy, too. When at last Gorbachev turned from my wife to me, his translator explained that I had composed President Reagan’s Berlin Wall address. Gorbachev smiled. “Ah,” he said, “dramaturg!”
A couple of years later I met Gorbachev before another of his speaking gigs. When I asked him to sign a baseball—somehow I liked the idea of a Russian autograph on the symbol of our national pastime—he complied good-naturedly. Afterwards I listened from the front row as Michael Reagan, the fromer president’s son, interviewed the former general secretary.
Mike asked Gorbachev a question that I had suggested. In 1956, Mike explained, the Soviets had put down the Hungarian Revolution by force, and then in 1968 they had crushed the Prague Spring by force. Yet in 1989, as revolutions swept across all of Eastern Europe, Mikhail Gorbachev had kept the Red Army in its barracks, permitting one Communist regime after another to fall. “Why?” Mike asked. “Why didn’t you resort to force?”
“Because,” Gorbachev replied, speaking through his interpreter, “I shared your father’s values. We both believed in Christian ethics.”
In the town in the Urals which he had grown up, Corbachev explained, his grandfather had been the leading Communist–but his grandmother had always remained a Christian believer. When the town Communists held a meeting in their house, his grandfather would put up pictures of Lenin and Stalin. When they left, his grandmother would replace those pictures with icons of St. Andrew, the patron of Russia, and St. Michael, after whom Gorbachev himself had been named. Years later, when Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, lived in Moscow, his grandmother lived with them. She attended church every day. “She would always say, ‘I’m going to pray for you atheists.'”
Although a Communist himself, Gorbachev insisted, he had always respected basic Christian values. “I could never have permitted the Red Army to fire on civilians. Never.”
Gorbachev as some sort of humanitarian? The notion can be overdone. The KGB, the gulag, cities devoted to internal exile—he kept the whole brutal security apparat largely intact. When Lithuania made a bid for independence, Gorbachev sent in the tanks, refusing to permit rebellion in a country the Soviets still claimed as part of the USSR itself. He earned his place in history all the same. Thirty-three years ago, as risings coalesced from Poland to the Czech Republic, the world held its breath, waiting to see whether the leader of the Soviet Union resort to violence. Instead Mikhail Gorbachev behaved like a decent human being.
Published in Foreign Policy
Success doesn’t come from those things, though they help. Success comes from a dominant philosophy in a culture that values success and the individual. Russia has never had that, and perhaps never will. The US has had it, and it’s starting to lose it, but there is enough, I hope, to resurrect it.
Don’t leave out Bernie. Maybe we could get them to stay there.
Bernie needs another honeymoon and Bill Clinton needs a place to go now that Epstein’s fantasy island is no more.
Skyler, thanks for the response.
I don’t think that your last response is fair, when you call my statement “insulting.” My intent was not to shock.
My intent was to point out that the rule referenced in Peter’s post — something like “Christian ethics imply that you can never shoot civilians” — is a bad rule. Terrorists are civilians, and I think that it’s OK to shoot them. If you agree, then the rule that Peter stated is not correct.
I think that Christian ethics teaches that whether or not you can shoot civilians depends on what they are doing, and what they are opposing. If the civilians are opposing a tyrannical Communist regime, especially if they’re doing so peacefully, then it is wrong to shoot them. This is not the rule that Gorbachev followed, at least as reported in Peter’s post.
Terrorists are civilians but they are combatants.
I really like watching other people argue about this. People get really mad. lol
Supposedly, the dominant thing over there is that the citizens fear chaos. They will put up with a lot if they don’t have to worry about it.
They’re right to fear that though, aren’t they? If the government suddenly disappeared and we all spent the next ten years being ruled basically by organized crime I’m pretty sure that even America would elect someone like Putin.
Lincoln was committed to preserving the Union. The slave power was committed to their peculiar institution. Had Lincoln allowed the Union to dissolve there was no guarantee of subsequent peace. Kansas gave the prelude to the Civil War. War was the most likely outcome even if Lincoln had capitulated entirely to the demands of the Confederacy. The South fired the first shots and set the course for war anyway.
Thank you for this Peter. Accounts such as these are why I joined Ricochet