Added 28 February 2011.

BOOKS: RUSSIAN HISTORY


Mikhail S Gorbachev: On My Country And The World (2000)

Mikhail Gorbachev probably needs no introduction to anyone older than thirty, yet today his name is scarcely mentioned in news items other than a note of his attendance at various memorials or funerals. Once the General Chairman of the Communist Party of the USSR and effectively the last leader of a superpower, even at the end of the 90s he was cruelly described by one writer as "yesterday's man". Nevertheless it is to Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as Ronald Reagan and his successor George Bush Senior, plus to a lesser degree Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, that the human race owes thanks for the end of the Cold War. Certainly from the UK point of view three of these leaders - Reagan, Gorbachev and Thatcher - in the 80s formed a troika that powerfully shaped the currents of political and economic thinking, both in the industrialised world and elsewhere. Today (2011) Reagan has been dead for over five years, while Gorbachev and Thatcher are names scarcely mentioned in their own countries except with reference to the past. Such is the fate of most politicians, even those who achieved on balance a positive influence on their nations and the world at large.

Perhaps the biggest weakness in Gorbachev's outlining of post-October history is his reluctance to consider Lenin's own failures. Certainly Lenin was not the monster that Stalin became, although if one is to believe Volkogonov's biography then the first Soviet leader was not averse to harsh measures himself, but this is the only part of the book where the informed reader feels an echo of the Soviet past, namely that Lenin is above criticism. Most of the calumny for the subsequent totalitarianism and hidebound bureaucracy is instead lumped (admittedly not unfairly) on Stalin, a man Gorbachev describes as cruel and morbidly suspicious. The breakup of the USSR is likewise ascribed to the coup plotters of August 1991 and Boris Yeltsin, who one feels from reading this book was certainly not on Gorbachev's Christmas card list. In fact Yeltsin bears a greater brunt of the blame than the Communist hardliners for his "intrigues" with the other leaders of the states who wanted to be independent, culminating in the Belovezh accord in autumn 1991 that effectively caused the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The second part of the book goes on to describe what Gorbachev calls the "new thinking" and how it was applied to the USSR's foreign (in particular) and domestic policy. This may sound like a platitudinous term for what was basically an ethical course of considering the needs of both sides in a discussion, but for the USSR it was a huge step forward from the dogmas that had existed since 1917, and one suspects that some of George W Bush's advisers might have done well to consider it. At times it is rather vague and seems more of a wish list than a concrete platform, but reading between the lines one notes that Gorbachev rejects the old Soviet-style communism but at the same time is critical of some aspects of the free market, in particular where the chasing after developing markets or natural resources causes friction, competition rather than collaboration and in particular ecological disruption. He is also critical of the NATO actions in the former Yugoslavia, and one suspects an updated version of this book would be even harsher towards the events in Iraq.

In sum this is an interesting book written by a wise man who one may perhaps say suffered much disappointment as well as triumph in his own political career as a world statesman. His prescriptions for the future may be vague and at times utopian, but the world would do well to at least give him a hearing.

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