(Dobbs) Gorbachev is Dead. Should We Mourn?
He was still a product of the system. But maybe he wanted the system to be better.
Mikhail Gorbachev was no saint. He put the world on a path to a more peaceful co-existence, and for that he deserves every plaudit history provides. But he was no saint.
I only met the man once, in Moscow— more a hale hello and a hearty handshake than a meeting. But for all his charm, I could never forget that he came up through the Communist system. Not just the Communist system, but the Soviet system. He didn’t reach the highest heights by fighting it. He got there by supporting it.
The Communist system, as we were taught if we grew up in the Cold War, was based on the principle, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” But the government owned everything, from every inch of land within the nation’s borders to the shoe shine kit of the guy outside the hotel where I usually stayed. So people’s needs and people’s abilities were whatever the government said they were. From the living conditions I saw whenever I covered news there, the needs of the shoe shine guy, I would guess, were assessed as very low.
But as unbearable as it was, the Communist system was not the most oppressive part of people’s lives. It was the Soviet system, a police state intolerant of any views but its own. As such, there was no freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no freedom of political affiliation, no freedom of the press, and for those who fought for freedom anyway, there were the gulags. These days they call them prison camps but if you don’t think they still are gulags, just ask Putin’s imprisoned rival Alexei Navalny.
A few stories might help illustrate life in Soviet times, and here’s why I tell them: they don’t date back to early autocrats like Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. They are from the epoch of Gorbachev. Despite his permissive policies of glasnost and perestroika which deservedly won Western acclaim, these anecdotes clarify the boundaries for people stuck within the Soviet system.
Like the sunny summer day when a Moscow-based ABC News colleague and I had a picnic on the banks of the Moscow River. We were chatting away in English about covering news there when a man started crawling toward us, on his hands and knees, at snail’s pace. Even slower, really, because with every few feet, he’d stop and surreptitiously look over both shoulders to ensure that no one was paying attention as he approached.
When he reached us, having heard us speaking English and figured out that we were journalists, he told us in his own broken English that he was a fireman at the firehouse that protects the Kremlin, and that their fire hoses were fraying, but his unit couldn’t get anyone’s attention to replace them. In the United States, a fireman with a grievance like that would get his union to call a news conference and hope for a headline on the front page but in the Soviet Union, complainers were disciplined. This Moscow firefighter hoped that as western journalists, maybe we could put pressure on the Kremlin to get the hoses fixed.
He risked his freedom to send us that message. In the epoch of Gorbachev.
On a different day, this time a stormy snowy day in the middle of December, someone sent us a clandestine message to be at Gorky Square, not a half mile from the Kremlin, at 3 o’clock. No name, no reason, just a covert tip-off to be there. It turned out that the same message had been delivered to my colleagues at the NBC, CBS, and the then-new CNN bureaus in Moscow, as well as the BBC’s. It was International Human Rights Day, so this was a notice that none dared ignore.
In the heart of Gorky Square is a statue atop a pedestal of the Russian novelist Maxim Gorky, and on the ground all around it, a small plot of dirt for flowers in the summertime, surrounded by a wrought-iron chain. But there were no flowers growing in Moscow in December, we were in a blizzard and it was rush hour and people were dashing left and right to catch their buses when suddenly one woman stepped from the crowd to the foot of the statue. Just one woman, with a bouquet of flowers in her hand. She walked up to the statue almost without notice. She raised her left boot above the level of the chain, which was about a foot-and-a-half above the ground, and stepped into the soil on the other side.
Before we knew it, three thugs grabbed her, one seizing each arm and a third lifting her legs, and carted her away. They were identically clothed, and identically outfitted with steel-toed shoes. The KGB. Then came a man with another bouquet, and more thugs to cart him away. Then a few more after that. (They also attacked us. One TV camera was thrown to the ground and destroyed. Another had its lens pulled off.)
That's what you called a protest those days in the Soviet Union. Laying flowers next to a public statue. The government did all the municipal landscaping, so anyone who stepped onto forbidden government property and put down their own flowers inside the chain was usurping the government, and risking imprisonment.
These dissidents risked their freedom to protest the dreadful state of human rights in the Soviet Union. Still in the epoch of Gorbachev.
It was not uncommon in those days for westerners like us to therefore assume that everyone in the Soviet Union wanted to have what we had, that everyone wanted to be like us. As I learned during a cloak-and-dagger middle-of-the-night interview with a dissident on the run, that would be wrong.
Before meeting with him, we had disassembled our camera gear and with help from the dissident’s comrades, gotten the pieces smuggled into the basement of an apartment house on the outer edge of Moscow. Then, while my camera crew was putting it all back together, I sat with this man and to avoid getting into the topics I wanted to cover in the interview, I made what might pass as small talk, beginning with something stupid like, “You must wish you could just do this out in the open the way we can in the United States.”
His reply was more illuminating than the interview itself. “You Americans think we all want to be just like you,” he said. “We don’t. You can be richer than we can even dream of being, but you can be poorer too. We don’t have fancy houses like you do, but we also know we can’t end up out on the street. Our hospitals are bad but at least everyone can use them. The one thing you have that we don’t have is freedom. The only way we want to be like you is to be free.”
This man wasn’t free. Because he had openly denounced his government, he was on the run. It was still the era of Gorbachev.
When the Soviet Union fell apart, there was a brief flowering of freedom. Political parties blossomed, open assembly was allowed, news media flourished, speech was unrestricted, and it must indisputably be said, Gorbachev had set that tone. Sadly, before many years passed, Vladimir Putin fortified his power and, by awarding loyalists with the spoils of the new Russia, his power base. He slowly but surely put rigid restrictions back into place.
That wasn’t Gorbachev’s fault. As analysts say, he might not have intended with his policies to let the Soviet empire dissolve, but he did intend for a better relationship with the West. And notwithstanding the experiences I personally had, that could only come by diminishing the draconian constraints on people’s rights.
In marking Gorbachev’s death, Italy’s prime minister said, “He ended the experience of the Soviet Union and sought to build a new season of transparency, rights, freedom.”
To be fair, from what I saw, that is at least half true. If not for Putin, that short-lived season might still be Russia’s.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Another interesting and intriguing essay. Thank you for sharing them with us.
Thoughtful column, and as always I enjoyed your personal stories. I think we should mourn Gorbachev. As you say, he wasn’t a saint, but to me the fact that he grew up and worked in the Soviet system makes his attempts at reforms even more impressive than if he had gained power as a dissident. As you point out, he had not (yet?) eliminated the police state repression of the Soviet government. It is difficult to completely reform an entrenched system, particularly when one has grown up as a part of it, and he only had six years in charge. Not everything he tried worked out as he (or we) would have liked. To me, the most important thing is that he was a man who achieved great power and then tried to use that power to improve the lives of his people and promote world peace. Can you think of any other autocrat who has tried to do that?