Gorbachev And The Tragedy Of Russia

The death of Mikhail Gorbachev poignantly reminds us of the path Russia didn’t take after the fall of Soviet communism. Gorbachev’s vision was the utter antithesis of Vladimir Putin’s.

The Soviet Union emerged from the cataclysm of WWI, when Lenin and his band of Bolsheviks shrewdly and cold-bloodedly filled the vacuum created by the collapse of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty. Communism solidified its totalitarian grip after a horrific four-year civil war.

Lenin’s triumph was a catastrophe for Russia and the world. The death toll that communism inflicted there and elsewhere around the globe exceeds 100 million people.

Communism destroyed Russian civil society. It stunted creativity, culturally and economically. People learned that to survive and get ahead meant breaking the rules. Shortages were chronic. Economic life was best summed up by the adage, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” That stultifying, deeply cynical and initiative-suffocating environment over the course of 70 years made Gorbachev’s empire ill-prepared for exercising the kinds of freedom that we in the West take for granted.

The tragedy is that had it not been for WWI, Russia today would be economically robust, with freedoms that its citizens can now only dream about.

Before the war, the Czarist empire was experiencing the highest economic growth rate in Europe. It was rapidly industrializing. It was the world’s largest exporter of grain. As the absolute powers of the Czar were being chipped away, the country was haltingly but unmistakably morphing into something resembling a constitutional monarchy. An independent judiciary was emerging. But the war swept all this away.

Obviously, the prewar empire had ugly features, particularly an antisemitism that murderously manifested itself in pogroms. That’s why hundreds of thousands of Jews emigrated elsewhere, especially to the U.S.

Contrary to its propaganda, communism actually stunted Russia’s development. The Soviet Union became a grain importer, instead of exporter. Millions of farmers, who had resisted being forced into collectives, were deliberately starved to death. Independent institutions were obliterated.

Communist apologists used to say that the mass murders and the suppressions of freedom were necessary to make a backward nation into an industrial power.

Nonsense. Russia was impressively modernizing before WWI.

Soviet hardliners regarded Mikhail Gorbachev as one of their own when he took power in 1985. But he was too intelligent not to see that the Soviet Union was in desperate straits. Its industrial base was decrepit. High tech was almost nonexistent, an embarrassing contrast to Silicon Valley. The agricultural sector was a disaster. The U.S.S.R.’s big initiative to win the Cold War by driving a wedge between the U.S. and Germany in the early 1980s had failed.

During the 1970s, the Kremlin had gotten enormous monetary windfalls when inflation drove up the prices of oil and other commodities the Russian economy depended on by a 10-fold increase. Banks freely made loans to the Soviets and to Kremlin-controlled satellite countries in Eastern and Central Europe.

But Ronald Reagan ended that period of inflation. Oil prices collapsed, and because of this and the pressure Washington brought to bear, the loans stopped.

Gorbachev decided to institute what turned out to be seismic reforms that unintentionally ended the Kremlin’s control of Eastern Europe and brought down the Berlin Wall, which led to Germany’s reunification and, most astounding, to the breakup of the Soviet Union itself into 15 nations.

Independent media flourished. Freedom of speech became the new normal in Russia.

I had the chance to experience firsthand the astonishing changes Gorbachev wrought. During this tumultuous period, I headed the oversight agency of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe (RL and RFL), whose broadcasts broke the monopoly of information on which totalitarian regimes depended. RL and RFL were critical in helping to sustain dissident movements. The Kremlin hated the radios, and all of us associated with them were barred from entering the U.S.S.R. and the communist countries in Europe. The radios were constant targets of Russian disinformation campaigns in the U.S. and Europe.

But in 1988 a remarkable thing happened: Moscow invited leaders from the Voice of America (VOA), which was a government agency, to visit. The radios were a separate entity incorporated in Delaware but were funded by Congress. That invitation was something of a surprise. But the real eye-popping thing was that key people from the radios could also come, not as a separate organization, but as part of the VOA delegation.

The morning all of us met in Moscow with our Russian counterparts, I meant to test just how deep this opening was. Radio Liberty broadcasted to the Soviet Union itself; Radio Free Europe to satellite countries in Eastern Europe, such as Poland and Hungary. When it came time for my opening remarks, I went over the differences between the two services. The Russians obviously knew this, but I had a purpose. At the time the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were part of Soviet Union, having been forcibly seized in 1939. The U.S. had never recognized these conquests. So, when I described RFE, I said it broadcasted to non-Soviet countries, such as Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary—and then I added Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Normally, the inclusion of the Baltic states would have elicited a volcanic explosion. VOA never would have allowed us to come along if they’d known we were going to do this. But the Russians didn’t react at all; they just ignored it.

A small but telling sign of how fast and sweeping Gorbachev’s openings were.

In one of the most remarkable events in history, the Soviet Union peacefully collapsed at end of 1991, and Gorbachev was out of power. A few months later I met him when he, along with former President Ronald Reagan, were special guests at Forbes’ 75th anniversary celebration at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, which led to a remarkable incident.

A year later, I was privileged to see Gorbachev in Moscow with a small group from the radios. It was absolutely fascinating to see his dazzling mind in action. He seemed to envision a liberalizing of Russia that would take up where it had left off before WWI.

There are a variety of reasons why things haven’t unfolded that way.

But special mention must be made of the terrible mistakes the U.S. and the West made in the 1990s. The economic advice pushed on Moscow by Washington and the IMF was disastrous, such as inflation-inflaming devaluations and “more vigorously” collecting exorbitant taxes in an already impoverished nation. Making things truly intolerable, there were several different tax regimes within the country; it would be like the U.S. having four different IRSs picking our pockets. Those terrible times set the stage for the rise of Putin.