The Crusader

leaders would move quickly toward free-market economies. Once given the freedom to chart their own course, they unwaveringly opted for the antithesis of the Leninism that Gorbachev publicly preached and even the milder socialism he privately pursued. With their first opportunity to choose their economic destiny, the former Soviet bloc nations looked toward the system championed not by Gorbachev but by Ronald Reagan, a man who in the 1980s was the face of free-market capitalism.²

Still, what was done was done, and to his immense credit, Gorbachev did not send in the tanks. He was unwilling to use force to try to hold onto Eastern Europe, to the Soviet “ally” he had seen as central to the grandiose twenty-first century he envisioned for a better, stronger, kinder USSR.

When it came to the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was not willing to let go so easily, and as such the general secretary had planned a very different response. Oxford professor Archie Brown confirms that “it was no part of Gorbachev’s intention to stimulate the breakup of the Soviet Union” and that “the last thing Gorbachev wanted was to lose any part of the Soviet Union following the loss… of Eastern Europe.” He “wished to reform the Soviet system, not to destroy it.”³ Going further, Brown agrees that by introducing the democratizing elements of glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev was unwittingly fostering the dissolution of the USSR.⁴ Gorbachev himself came to understand this, but only as he scrambled to prevent a complete collapse.

DYING FOR THE MOTHERLAND

Approaching the end of 1990, Gorbachev, terrified by the hurricane he had generated, shuffled his inner cabinet, adding hardline Communist thugs dedicated to the Soviet motherland—men that Gorbachev thought would be needed to help him keep the USSR together—and immediately instructed them to draw up plans for emergency and full dictatorial power if need be. In response, his most influential adviser, Edward Shevardnadze, resigned, direly warning the legislature that “dictatorship is coming.”⁵

A few weeks later, on January 12–13, 1991, Lithuania felt the brunt of this ugly turn, as Soviet special forces stormed the Baltic nation with orders to destroy the democratic opposition. Gorbachev, once again talking like a Marxist, spoke of the need for a “restoration of the bourgeois order” in Lithuania.⁶ At least fourteen were killed and hundreds were injured. In an attempt to absolve himself of the situation, Gorbachev denied that the military acted on his orders but instead under the direction of his newly appointed lieutenants—a claim adamantly denied by those lieutenants. One of them, KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, later stated: “Everything was done with the agreement of Gorbachev. Absolutely. And I don’t condemn Gorbachev for giving the command to intervene. I condemn him for his deception and his denial of this command. Can you imagine that in this country we would intervene without the president’s permission?”⁷

Despite condemning sentiments such as these, some authorities believe that Gorbachev had little personal culpability in the matter. Archie Brown conceded that Gorbachev “is open to criticism” for his tougher line and sharp rhetoric toward Lithuanians in the days preceding the attack, as well as for his tardiness in condemning the killings; however, claims Brown, there is evidence that Gorbachev was angry over the attacks.⁸ Anger that would lead some to conclude that Gorbachev did not have a direct role in the attacks themselves.

Regardless of Gorbachev’s personal involvement, Boris Yeltsin responded by calling the actions in Lithuania “a powerful attack on democracy” and predicted that more force would follow in other republics, as it did only a week later in Riga, Latvia on the night of January 20–21, where four people were killed by Soviet troops.⁹ Gorbachev countered by blasting Yeltsin for threatening the Soviet state and the socialist ideal it represented. He then again, as with Lithuania, publicly reaffirmed his devotion to Communism: “I am not ashamed to say anywhere in public that I am a Communist and believe in the socialist idea,” said Gorbachev. “I will die believing this and will pass into the next world believing this.”¹⁰

In the United States, two opposing ideological sources, the New Republic and National Review, the political bibles of the left and right, respectively, expressed outrage. In an editorial titled, “Gorbachev’s Tanks,” the New Republic stated: “It says something about the roots of glasnost that, in a twinkling of Gorbachev’s eye, it can revert to levels of distortion even Brezhnev might envy.” The editorial continued:

[Gorbachev’s] Western admirers are in acute discomfort, amazed that a man who has just amassed near-dictatorial powers in his revamped presidency should choose to use them… horrified that perestroika should seem now to mean the crushing of human beings with tanks. Yet no one who saw Gorbachev’s complete lack of remorse, or witnessed his energetic verbal attack on the Lithuanians two days after the Soviet army assaulted their country, can doubt that he is in control of this strategy.¹¹

This was not completely new. “Gorbachev’s government has brutally repressed secessionist revolts before,” noted the New Republic, citing Kazakhstan in 1986, Georgia and Uzbekistan in 1989, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan in 1990. According to the human rights group Helsinki Watch, over 200 people were killed in these incidents. The methods included not just tanks and machine guns, but, in the brutal case of Tbilisi, Georgia, chemical weapons.¹² To be fair, some of these were ethnic disputes and as such their violence was not Gorbachev’s fault. Nonetheless, others were questionable and clearly do not stand as a shining star on Gorbachev’s record.

Again, to the extent that Gorbachev backed these assaults, his purpose was to preserve the Soviet Union —his top priority.¹³ Thus, Gorbachev aide Alexander Yakovlev could later justifiably argue that it was “unjust” to blame Gorbachev for the Soviet breakup: “He did everything possible to keep the country united.”¹⁴ He indeed did all he could, including resorting to violence on occasion, and continued to employ or consider coercion until his final moments in office.¹⁵

GORBACHEV’S HISTORIC CHANGES

Although these cruelties blemished Gorbachev’s legacy, from 1990 to 1991, he implemented a series of crucial reforms that were fundamental to the burgeoning democratic movement in the USSR. The most critical of these changes began after the Moscow Summit in June 1988. Notably, Ronald Reagan’s actions at this summit were extremely important. Gorbachev had been under fire from hard-liners. As U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock recalls, Reagan’s comments in Moscow at the summit that week “did more than any other single event to build support for Gorbachev’s reforms.”¹⁶ When Reagan returned to Washington, an emboldened Gorbachev, who had struggled tirelessly for years, got back to work. The Communist Party Conference was scheduled. Soon, Gorbachev pushed the majority of his reform ideas through the Central Committee. Significantly, these ideas included granting real power to a legislature chosen by honestly contested elections, the establishment of an independent judiciary, due process for Soviet citizens, and an end to Party control of government institutions. Through these Gorbachev initiatives, the path to an ultimately pluralistic political system had begun.¹⁷

By 1990, the Soviet media was freer than ever, thus introducing a completely new concept in the USSR: a critical (though still cautious) press. Most significant, in February 1990, Gorbachev succeeded in banishing the Communist Party’s guarantee as the USSR’s sole, legitimate political party. Specifically, he backed a proposal by Alexander Yakovlev, a Politburo member and confidant, as well as other Soviet reformers, to repudiate Article 6 of the USSR Constitution, which had ensured the seventy-plus year Communist stranglehold on power. He also accepted a program that recommended the creation of a Western-style presidency and cabinet system. This historic shift toward political competition was greeted by a double-line top-of-the-fold headline that ran across the front page of the February 8 New York Times.¹⁸

At that moment, Mikhail Gorbachev formally ended the Communist monopoly in the USSR.¹⁹ Yes, Ronald Reagan applied crucial pressure that set certain forces in motion. Yes, Boris Yeltsin later won two significant presidential elections that kept the Communists from taking back the executive branch. However, it