Victory and failure of Mikhail Gorbachev

According to the great English historian Ian KershawThe collapse of the Soviet Union on December 31, 1991 marked the end of the most extraordinary political experiment of modern times. If we consider the French Revolution and its civilizational legacy, I am perhaps exaggerating as Kershaw himself admits, as Russia became a criminalized society after the revolutionary dawn (“Rise and crisis. Europe, 1950-2017: an uncertain path”, Ed, Critica, 2019). And of course, it goes on, albeit in another way.

Gorbachev insisted on reforming the rotten building of the Soviet Union, a structure that was structurally—and from the very beginning—unviable as a socioeconomic and political project. Was he, then, a Marxist-Leninist by birth and education, better than the October Bolshevik of the February revolution, equality and respect for human rights, born out of the two revolutions of 1917, the alliance of liberals and socialists who promised freedom, at its peak? The human cost of the latter was dire, and its legacy was a heavy burden of inhumanity and barbarism. However, I doubt that Gorbachev, an “apparatus” of the Party (CPSU), set out from such a premise in his reform purpose. What happened then?

With the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), the Soviet government established a socialist state and completely nationalized the economy. His intention was to promote, he writes. yuri slezkin (“The Eternal home: The epic of the Russian Revolution”, Cliff, 2021), the fulfillment of the original prophecy old script The economic prerequisites for the revolution, namely the industrialization of the country, which must be accompanied by the abolition of private property and the destruction of class enemies. The iron protection of the absolute and sole power of the supreme communist leader was utterly indispensable in the face of the resounding failure of collectivization and, ultimately, of the entire Soviet experiment. After the resounding military victory of 1945, the government system of the Soviet Union remained a totalitarian dictatorship and remained practically until the end.

Gorbachev entered this Jurassic world ruled by tough old men and started the process of opening up the communist regime through “perestroika” (reconstruction) and “glasnost” (transparency). write about it Serhii Plokhy (“The last empire. The last days of the Soviet Union”, Ed. Turner, 2015) made the recognition of the civil rights (and especially the right to vote) of the inhabitants of the Republics impossible. Protecting the empire: democratic elections turned out to be incompatible with the Soviet state. Or to put it another way: the democratization of the system undertaken by Gorbachev barely increased popular support from the Kremlin for the project to reform the USSR. The only thing that this opening policy achieved was to encourage the Soviet nations to claim their autonomy and thereby threaten the integrity of the Union to which they had forcibly joined. Thus, by the summer of 1990, most of the Soviet Republics had declared themselves sovereign, meaning that their own laws were superior to those of the USSR, whose Constitution, meanwhile, recognized the right to secede.

The million-dollar question is: why did the communist bureaucracy generally peacefully allow its enormous power to be liquidated? Because—Plokhy answers convincingly—the bulk of the Communist Party’s money went to banks and businesses created by the CPSU’s “instrumentalists” and their co-workers during the last two years of Gorbachev’s tenure. Dismissed Party officials sought to make a comfortable life outside the apparatus by transforming their political power into material wealth. Thus, the country avoided a protracted and possibly bloody conflict with a large and privileged ruling class that would otherwise have had nothing to gain from a political transition to a new regime.

This applies to both the Russian Federation and other self-declared Republics. They all became kleptocracies, including Ukraine. After eliminating Gorbachev politically, Boris Yeltsin he has firmly moved on this path of corruption and nepotism. His successor, Putin, overthrew the incipient democratic reforms and created a monocracy based on goodness and fear, including assassinations. Mijaíl Gorbachev, who already had no power, has since helplessly witnessed the long nightmare in which the dream of socialist renewal has turned. after reading San Augustin, could likewise confirm: “Remota itaque iustitia, quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?” (“De Civitate Dei”, IV, 4): If justice is not respected, what are States but big gangs of thieves?