War.”
29. All of these difficulties in measuring Gorbachev’s sincere thinking are present when reading Perestroika. He produced it just two years after coming to power, at the height of the global excitement over perestroika. The book provides a clear delineation of the disparities between Gorbachev and Reagan. At the same time, it must also be read carefully with an understanding of the above caveats. I suggest reading it in tandem with Archie Brown’s The Gorbachev Factor, or perhaps reading Brown first.
30. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 24, 58, 62, 64, 161, 252– 54.
31. Ibid., 128–30.
32. Ibid., 220.
33. Ibid., 66, 220.
34. Also see, among others: Ellman and Kontorovich, eds., The Disintegration of the Soviet Economic System, 20–27.
35. Gorbachev, Perestroika, 41, 106, 146.
36. In January 1987, the Party Plenum made official this thinking by formally defining perestroika. “The main idea of our strategy,” declared the Party Plenum, “is to unite the achievements of the scientific-technical revolution with a planned economy and to bring into action the entire potential of socialism.”
37. The “potential of socialism” (note: Gorbachev used the word “socialism” interchangeably with “communism”), wrote Gorbachev, “had been underutilized. We realize this particularly clearly now in the days of the seventieth anniversary of our Revolution. We have a sound material foundation, a wealth of experience and a broad world outlook with which to perfect our society.”
38. Gorbachev added: “The classics of Marxism-Leninism left us with a definition of the essential characteristics of socialism. They did not give us a detailed picture of socialism. They spoke of its theoretically predictable stages. It is our job to show what the present stage should be like.” That next stage, perestroika, “revives” the “living spirit of Leninism,” wrote Gorbachev.
39. Gorbachev, Perestroika, 10, 11, 17, 35, 45, 50, 66, 151, 253.
40. Ibid., 50.
41. Archie Brown also says, and this would at least partly explain Gorbachev’s Leninist language in Perestroika in 1987, that “Until the [Soviet] system had been radically altered by the late 1980s,…most ideas for changing that system fundamentally had, indeed, to be presented as a return to Leninist first principles if they were to get off the ground in the real world of Soviet politics.” Brown says that a “failure to appreciate” this has “led a number of Western authors wildly astray in their analysis of Gorbachev’s speeches and public statements” and “public utterances.”
In other words, Gorbachev had to cloak his actions in Leninist language. At the same time, as Brown himself notes, Gorbachev was a Leninist and long retained an “idealized” view of Lenin. Ultimately, he moved away from that idealized view, but certainly not totally. In short, the answer is much more complicated. The full picture is complex and requires nuance. Brown adds that Gorbachev, being CPSU chief, was thus also “official guardian of Marxist-Leninist holy writ,” and, further then, “as leader of a reform movement ready to question much of that doctrine, was in the uncomfortable position of being simultaneously both Pope and Luther.”
Furthermore, Brown concedes that Gorbachev, like the vast majority of Soviet citizens, had an “idealized” view of Lenin, a consequence of seventy years of distortion and brainwashing. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 93.
42. Gorbachev, Perestroika, 25.
43. Gorbachev, Perestroika, 25, 45, 145.
44. Ibid., 145. Obviously, it is arrant nonsense to say that Vladimir Lenin rejected violence. No government in history, with the possible exception of Red China, which had many more victims at its disposal, killed as many innocents as the Soviet state that Lenin created. The killing spree began not under Joseph Stalin but by direct orders from Lenin, the man who instituted the gulag labor-camp system where tens of millions perished. Lenin established the secret police, first called the Cheka. Right after the October 1917 revolution, by 1918–19, the Cheka was averaging 1,000 executions per month for political offenses alone, without trial. See Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Solzhenitsyn Speaks to the West (London: The Bodley Head, 1978), 17. This number was proudly self-reported by the Cheka in its documents. The Cheka actually apologized that its data was incomplete, and boasted that the number was likely much higher.
W. H. Chamberlain, probably the first historian of the revolution, said that by 1920 the Cheka had carried out 50,000 executions. See Douglas Brown, Doomsday 1917: The Destruction of Russia’s Ruling Class (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1975), 174; and George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 463–68. Robert Conquest, drawing exclusively on Soviet sources, tallies 200,000 executions at the hands of the Bolsheviks under Lenin from 1917–23, and 500,000 when combining deaths from execution, imprisonment, and insurrection. See Robert Conquest’s Congressional testimony, “The Human Cost of Soviet Communism” in Document No. 92–36, 92nd Congress, 1st session, U.S. Senate, Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, July 16, 1971, 5–33. The essence of this early Red Terror was described by the ferocious Latvian, M. Y. Latsis, who Lenin appointed as chief of his killing machine: “We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.” Among other sources that cite this quote, see Brown, Doomsday 1917, 173. For a comparison of numbers, see Courtois, Black Book, 13; and Leggett, The Cheka, 463–68. Page after page of this book could be filled with bloodcurdling directives written in longhand by Lenin, order after order whereby this political gangster requested that various groups and peoples, from kulaks to priests, be hanged or shot. For transcripts of Lenin directives, see Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 1, 3, 8–11, 13–16, 46, 50, 55–56, 61, 63, 69, 71, 116–21, 127–29, and 150–55.
45. What Lenin actually said, in a famous 1920 remark before the All-Russian Congress, known universally and oft-repeated by Ronald Reagan, was the following: “We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas that are outside class conceptions. Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.” V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31: April-December 1920 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 291. See “On Soviet Morality,” Time, February 16, 1981, 17.
46. Here is one example from pages 32 and 48–49: “In the West, Lenin is often portrayed as an advocate of authoritarian methods of administration. This is a sign of total ignorance of Lenin’s ideas and of their deliberate distortion. In effect, according to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible.” It was Gorbachev who was totally ignorant of this repugnant, very violent man who created the gulag and gave the Communist Party a monopoly on all political power.
47. Ibid., 50–51.
48. Ibid., 10, 37, 42.
49. Ibid., 42.
50. Ibid., 31.
51. Gorbachev, Perestroika, 161–63.
52. Ibid., 165.
53. Ibid., 163–64.
54. Properly evaluating Mikhail Gorbachev is a daunting problem, for at least three reasons: first, the real man must be separated from the mythological figure canonized by Western hagiographers in academe, especially those eager to shift any credit for the Cold War’s end away from Reagan, whose politics they despised. Yet, that record presents a second, sticky challenge: It is very difficult to assess what Gorbachev believed, especially regarding Communism, because as the reform-minded leader of the Soviet Marxist system he could not be forthcoming regarding his true goals and beliefs. His position depended on the support of hard-line Communists on the Central Committee and elsewhere. Prior to when Gorbachev at last firmly held complete control of the General Secretaryship of the Central Committee in 1990, he likely would have been removed at a moment’s notice if he had openly criticized Communism or spoke of abolishing the Soviet Communist system. Still, there is a third problem in gauging Gorbachev: He was on a lifelong journey from being a Marxist-Leninist who, as a young man, did not perceive Lenin’s or even Stalin’s culpability in Soviet crimes, to, at the end, a democratic socialist who favored a more Western European kind of socialism. He became, and remains, a staunch political pluralist. More
