IT IS unfortunate that the manifest failures of the 1990s have not prompted some reflection on the challenges of the 1980s and at least modest appreciation of what Gorbachev faced. It is an odd kind of “presentism”—exhibiting both the bias of hindsight yet a confused picture of the past—that can be traced in part to prejudices of the Soviet intelligentsia that had hardened by 1991. One of these prejudices was a haughty disdain of Gorbachev simply for who he was—a party official who spoke with a distinct southern accent, definitely not one of them. Another was broad ignorance of economics; beyond their own experience of a corrupt command system, the basics of agriculture and industry, or money and trade, were alien to most. (In one year, I visited more factories and farms than most intelligenty would see in a lifetime.) Hence the frequency with which one heard such bromides as “What we need is real self-management” and “You can’t cross an abyss in two leaps” or “Why are we trying the Yugoslav model? The Swedish one is clearly better” gravely intoned as if such keen insights were beyond the ken of dullards like Gorbachev. Perhaps most important was that, by 1991, most of the cultural intelligentsia—writers, filmmakers, historians—had abandoned the “indecisive” Gorbachev for the “bold” Yeltsin and have since found it difficult to say “Maybe we were wrong.”

Their paradigm of prejudice is so strong that, for some, it literally scrambles memory of basic facts and key events. As Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker in late August:

Andrei Sakharov, a dissident who was elected to the Supreme Soviet after Gorbachev released him from internal exile, argued against the monopoly of the Communist party. Galina Starovoitova, an academic ethnographer turned politician, argued that the empire must be dismantled, and proposed a union treaty to replace the Soviet colonial structure. Gorbachev rejected both notions.

Sakharov was actually elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, the largely democratic new legislature that Gorbachev created in 1989 (a fact that some might find salient in recalling how the USSR was democratized). As for the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, it was actually Gorbachev who in March of 1990 proposed to that same Congress—and overrode fierce Party opposition to pass—a constitutional amendment ending that monopoly. Four months later, in July of 1990, it was actually Gorbachev who declared in a nationwide address that the country must decentralize under a new Union Treaty, and devoted enormous effort to pushing the project through arduous negotiations until a draft was agreed by nine of the fifteen Soviet republics in 1991 (and it was precisely the formal signing of this decentralized new Union Treaty that the coup plotters of August 1991 sought to prevent).

If one really believes that “Gorbachev rejected both notions”—of ending the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, and of negotiating a new union treaty—then scorn for Gorbachev’s democratic, anti-imperialist reputation is understandable. The problem is that he didn’t, and it’s not the only such problem. Gessen continues:

In March 1991, after not only the Baltics but also Russia and Ukraine—the largest Soviet republics—voted to secede from the Union, Gorbachev staged a referendum on preserving the USSR.

But Russia never held a vote on secession from the USSR, ever. (Belief that it did, and that Russians voted to leave the USSR, represents a misunderstanding of Russian politics akin to the belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 U.S. presidential election; opinion polls conducted immediately after the breakup showed that, by a three-to-one margin, Russians regretted the end of the USSR.) By contrast, Ukrainians did vote overwhelmingly for secession in a 1991 referendum. But they only did so on the eve of the USSR’s collapse in December, not March, and only after several critical events intervened—most dramatically, the August coup attempt. Given this jumble of errors over what happened and when, it is difficult to understand the conclusion that follows: “Gorbachev used violence and rigged votes” in an effort to preserve the USSR.

WITH NO evidence offered for his “rigging” of votes (until Gorbachev there were no real votes!) what about his use of violence to save the USSR? As with the Soviet economy, so with the Soviet Union’s breakup, a short primer helps place events in context. The first major incident under Gorbachev was a mass protest—and its brutal suppression—in the republic of Kazakhstan in 1986. One version of events has Kazakh students angry that Gorbachev appointed a party secretary who was ethnically Russian. Another has those same students, inspired by Gorbachev’s call for perestroika, protesting against miserable living standards and official corruption. In either case, those responsible for violently suppressing the protests—taking dozens of lives—were local party and security officials.

Every subsequent outbreak of interethnic violence was different, yet similar in two respects. One was their origins in long-smoldering grievances rekindled by Gorbachev’s unleashing of glasnost and democratization; second is that local officials took key decisions, with no evidence that Gorbachev ever ordered the use of deadly force. Armenian political mobilization began in 1987 with environmental protests, followed by demands for unification with Karabakh (an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan), when people were permitted to rally, the press to report, and the Karabakh and Armenian parliaments to vote. In 1988, interethnic clashes escalated into vicious anti-Armenian pogroms. Gorbachev certainly fumbled the diplomacy of Karabakh, vacillating between pro-Armenian and pro-Azerbaijani policies and eventually infuriating both sides. But it’s also clear that he tried to avoid violence, and was afraid that granting historic justice for Karabakh would spark far more bloodshed by legitimizing demands to redraw many other disputed borders.

Interethnic disputes, aggravated by economic disparities, flared in the Ferghana Valley shared by Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in 1989–1990. In Georgia, free elections empowered extreme Georgian nationalists who in turn curtailed the rights of their Abkhazian and Ossetian minorities. The dissident and human-rights defender Sakharov, who championed the Armenian underdog, saw things differently in Georgia and faulted Georgian nationalists for dominating “a mini empire” of their own. Over 1988–1991 Georgia would be rocked by violent interethnic clashes and one brutal military crackdown in Tbilisi (taking twenty-one lives) that was ordered by local party bosses. 

Best remembered in the West—and frequently recalled in the denunciations of Gorbachev published since his death—were the January 1991 clashes between Soviet security forces and pro-independence protestors in the Baltic republics of Lithuania and Latvia. Twenty died when a Soviet army detachment (in Vilnius) and Interior Ministry troops (in Riga) deployed bullets and tanks in an effort to re-take government buildings under separatists’ control. Here too, Gorbachev himself first empowered the Baltic independence drives—by sanctioning the elections that created democratic parliaments, and by encouraging the glasnost that shed light on a bitter past, including the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 that sanctioned Soviet annexation of the Baltics. Here too there is no evidence that Gorbachev ordered use of deadly force—and much evidence that it was the decision of local commanders in concert with hardliners of the local Latvian and Lithuanian “Committees of National Salvation” and the national Soyuz (union) parliamentary faction. The latter, led by reactionary military officers, had called for Gorbachev’s ouster and, by provoking violence, hoped to prompt the imposition of martial law. Gorbachev can certainly be faulted for raising tensions with the Baltic republics as he sought to obstruct their drive for independence, and for not doing enough to prevent the attacks. But he must also be credited with moving quickly to halt the cascading violence, replacing officials and pulling back forces.

Some twenty lives lost in the Baltics, twenty-one in Georgia, and perhaps 2,000 overall in the disintegration of a vast empire—where many of the casualties were victims not of Moscow’s efforts to preserve imperial control, but of local interethnic hatreds. What are these numbers in perspective—do they justify calling Gorbachev a bloody imperialist? Perhaps 200,000 died in the final decades of British rule in India, and 500,000 in the Algerian war for independence from France—two hundred and fifty times more than in the USSR. And these were the mid-twentieth century decolonization struggles of two mature democracies, neither of which were simultaneously struggling to overhaul their entire political-economic system. Gorbachev eventually accepted that reforms meant to revive the multinational Soviet state had failed, that it could not be saved without major violence. The imperial sinews of the Soviet ideological and military-industrial complexes never accepted it at all, and in the chaos of surging nationalism and crumbling central authority—with hardliners’ defiance turbocharged by the loss of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe—it is certain that under any other Soviet leader the bloodshed would have been many times greater.

IT IS flatly wrong to assert as Applebaum does that Gorbachev “did not help design democratic institutions” when he proposed or promoted all of them—freedom of speech and the press, freedom of assembly, and multi-candidate elections from city councils up to a new national legislature—against fierce party opposition. To describe Gorbachev as a bloody “totalitarian,” as Peter Dickinson does, is positively Orwellian. And to claim as Gessen does that “he wasn’t able to imagine what his country would be if it wasn’t an empire” is a gross distortion. Early and often he warned Eastern European party leaders that they needed to reform, that Moscow would not intervene to save them, and they must win popular support. The winds of glasnost blew from east to west, and when free elections were held and the communists voted out, Gorbachev stood by. So much for the external empire, and as for the internal one—the Soviet Union itself—Gorbachev tried mightily to convert it from a repressive empire to a prosperous, consensual, democratic union. When economic reforms failed, nationalism flared, and separatist demands gained overwhelming popular support in the non-Russian republics, Gorbachev stepped aside.