By Kyle Smith
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Were you harboring any doubts about whether Mikhail
Gorbachev was a democrat who sought freedom for his people? Let Mikhail
Sergeyevich himself correct your impression. Asked about his successor Boris
Yeltsin, the first-ever elected leader of Russia, Gorbachev today says
spitefully, “I should have sent him off somewhere. He was playing up.”
Gorbachev, 88, would like history to remember him with
adulation, but that would mean pulling off an “I meant to do that” performance
he can’t quite manage. His own words betray him via a clever gambit by the
great filmmaker and interviewer Werner Herzog, who co-directs with André Singer
the documentary Meeting Gorbachev.
Herzog elicits the above remark on Yeltsin by deploying the interviewing trick
of remaining totally silent. People, even very famous people, even famously
self-disciplined people, will say the most amazing things if you just stare at
them and wait.
Gorbachev has not really changed: He was a Party man. He
was trying to preserve the Soviet Union, not end it. Though he says today,
“More democracy, that was our first and foremost goal,” he adds, “I also wanted
more socialism.” In the 1980s he is seen reassuring his citizens that he has no
intention of implementing one of those ghastly market economies with all of
their nasty “revenues and profits.” “I don’t think that’s the way forward,” he
said then. “That’s just not right.”
Gorbachev was steeped in Communist dogma as a young
lawyer from the sticks. When he implemented glasnost and perestroika in a
desperation move, wise observers to his west saw the opportunity to supply him
with rope and watch him fit the noose around his own neck. “He really believed
that he could reform Communism,” marvels the great Polish anti-Communist labor
leader Lech Walesa today. “Of course I and many others knew that Communism
couldn’t be reformed. So we applauded and encouraged him, knowing that once one
element was removed the whole system would collapse.” Reforming Communism was a
game of Jenga.
Herzog, in his narration, says Walesa’s take is “sinister
reasoning,” crying foul on those who abetted the suicide of the Evil Empire,
but the director’s sympathetic attitude toward his subject makes the film that
much more damning. Herzog was not seeking to nail Gorbachev. He merely sought
to understand, and like other Herzog subjects, the former Soviet leader
loosened up enough to reveal more than he intended.
Interviews with former Secretaries of State George Shultz
and James Baker and other officials fill out the picture along with
still-amazing footage of the fall of Gorbachev and the atrocious system he
headed. With his typical deadpan, Herzog revisits the days when Soviet
sweethearts Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko died in quick succession,
yielding three highly amusing funerals in two and a half years, and the heady
days of June 1989, when a Hungarian state newscast led with a lengthy segment
on how to repel slugs. In a wrap-up of brief items at the end, the news reader
casually revealed that the barbed-wire fence on the border with Austria had
just been shredded by the foreign ministers of both countries. A Hungarian
official recalls waiting to hear from Moscow, but no call came, and no troops.
Eyes turned to the Berlin Wall.
Gorbachev bristles at suggestions that there were any
winners or losers here. “Americans thought they won the Cold War and this went
to their heads,” he says. “What victory? It was our joint victory. We all won.”
Well, I don’t recall the Republican party of the United States dissolving, I
don’t recall the American economy reversing direction, and I certainly don’t
remember watching Maine, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Idaho, and Minnesota break
off from the United States. But, sure, both sides won. You say tomato, I say
tomahto.
Herzog tells the former leader, “The end of the Soviet
Union was a tragedy for so many people” — not really, Werner, no — “but it must
have been a tragedy for you personally.” Gorbachev agrees: “I regret it to this
day. Yes, it is hard. It is my own internal problem.” On August 24, 1991,
Gorbachev went off-script to hastily and unceremoniously sign his resignation
before the official camera was turned on (Herzog shows how a secondary one
captured the moment anyway). Days earlier, hardline elements within the Party
had sent tanks into the street to wrest power away from both Gorbachev and the
democrats, but finally lacked the nerve to murder Russians en masse. The game
was over.
Today, hinting that Vladimir Putin reversed course on freedom
without saying the words, Gorbachev would have us believe that his mission to
fully democratize fell sadly short. “We wanted to have democracy in our country
and we made progress in that,” he says, “But we didn’t get to finish the job as
certain forces took control of state power and property.” In contemplating an
epitaph, he suggests “We tried.” But what he actually tried was to save the
USSR. When elections started, he says today, “It’s like lighting a bonfire
instead of a match to have a smoke. They started a fire and everything burned
down.” So which is it — “We made progress” or “everything burned down”? Pride,
or bitterness? Gorbachev started something that got away from him, and we
should all be glad he did. But much of the good that happened in post-Soviet
Russia happened against his wishes. He didn’t want there to be a post-Soviet
era in the first place.
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