Does Gorbachev Deserve All the Praise?
By Nicholas Baum
Mikhail Gorbachev’s passing at the end of August has revealed conflicting ideas about how the Soviet Union’s last leader should be remembered. On the one hand, President Joe Biden lauded Gorbachev as “a man of remarkable vision” who “embraced democratic reforms,” and French President Emmanuel Macron praised his “choices that opened up a path of liberty for Russians.”1 In contrast, however, top Lithuanian diplomat Gabrielius Landsbergis tweeted that “Lithuanians will not glorify Gorbachev,” and editor in chief of UkraineWorld Volodymyr Yermolenko explained that “we do not share the enthusiasm we’ve been seeing in obituaries all around the world.”2 Even in Russia, just 15 percent of citizens hold a positive opinion about the former president.3
Why the stark contrast in beliefs? Whereas many in the West view Gorbachev as a great reformer and visionary who recognized the importance of liberty and liberal democracy, many in the former Soviet Union recognize him as another ruthless dictator who attempted—but failed—to salvage the empire’s totalitarian structure and command economy. To many who survived his rule, Gorbachev will be remembered as a devout communist who fatefully tried to rescue the Soviet Union, not as a genius and closet capitalist who planned its demise.
“Beginning with the day he assumed power,” writes Dr. Yuri Maltsev, an economist and former Communist Party official who worked on Gorbachev’s reforms, “he positioned himself as an opponent of freedom and the market.”4 Specifically, Gorbachev held that “the socialist system was in good working order” but that citizens “had taken to laziness, drunkenness, and were accumulating ‘dishonest income’ in violation of socialist ethics.”5 Gorbachev’s view that the problem was not the murderous and inherently dysfunctional communist system, but unruly Soviet citizens, motivated him to impose reforms that further stripped citizens of their freedoms.
In May 1985, just six weeks after assuming power, Gorbachev launched “an all-out war on alcohol,” dictating the supply and hours of liquor stores across the country while prosecuting thousands of peasants and workers who were suspected of being drunk.6 Given that alcohol sales represented a quarter of all retail trade in the Soviet Union, however, the campaign caused the government budget deficit to skyrocket, bringing severe inflation that further crippled the Soviet economy.7
Also contributing to rampant budget deficits and hyperinflation at the time was Gorbachev’s second attempt at socialist revival: uskoreniye, Russian for “acceleration.” The Soviet leader resorted to Keynesian “logic,” thinking that increasing government investment in Soviet technology would accelerate the economy and lift it out of stagnation. Instead, deficit spending only furthered hyperinflation in the final years of the empire.8 What Gorbachev seemingly failed to understand was that the economy’s fundamental problem wasn’t a lack of investment, much less sobriety, but a lack of protections for individual rights. By maintaining the Soviet Union’s backward system of central planning while printing money and restricting a key consumer good, he trampled on what Russian-born novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand deemed the “indispensable foundation” of prosperity.9
Among the most destructive of Gorbachev’s rights violations was his campaign against “dishonest income,” which Maltsev says included “all sources of income other than official salary,” meaning, what one was paid via his state-provided job. Any other earnings were regarded as “an evil to be stamped out.”10 This assault on the vestiges of the free market proved to be catastrophic. In the wake of Gorbachev’s crackdown, Soviet society immediately experienced an “increase in bribes and a reshuffling of power in favor of the bureaucrat-led mafia,” Maltsev recalls. Suspecting that peasants were selling homegrown produce on the Soviet black market, “party bureaucrats bulldozed thousands of gardens in the backyards of peasant’s homes.” Maltsev estimates that around 150,000 citizens, most of whom were peasants or low-income workers, were imprisoned for “dishonest income” in the first year of the campaign alone.11
Further, Gorbachev’s reckless handling of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 endangered the lives of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens in the region. His administration waited three days to publicly admit to the accident, doing so only after the Swedish government threatened to inform the International Atomic Energy Agency that they had detected high radiation levels more than a thousand kilometers from the plant.12 In spite of this unprecedented leakage, Gorbachev insisted that Kiev hold its annual May Day Parade just ninety-three kilometers away, and even demanded that children be brought into the streets to show that it was safe.13 As a result, the World Health Organization estimates that the disaster caused upwards of nine thousand deaths among the 6.9 million “most-exposed” Soviet citizens; and the Belarus Foreign Ministry estimates the economic damage from the accident to be about $235 billion, with one-fifth of Belarus’s agricultural lands being contaminated.14
Mass arrests, major restrictions on trade, rampant deficit spending and inflation, the cover-up of a nuclear catastrophe, and an increase in bureaucratic corruption are hardly the visionary reforms that Western leaders claim Gorbachev authored. Even as the Soviet government and economy did begin to liberalize under his perestroika (“reconstruction”) and glasnost (“openness”) campaigns of the late 1980s, Gorbachev always intended to maintain communist rule in the country. Tom Nichols at The Atlantic observes:
Westerners now laud Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, but again, these were not initially meant to be democratic reforms. Yes, glasnost allowed Soviet citizens to blow off steam, but the main goal was to foster better communication in the Soviet economy. Perestroika was aimed at ditching Brezhnev-era cronyism and shortcuts, and to kick-start glaciated Soviet institutions.15
Even in the final months of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev continued to broadcast his true intentions, explaining to a reporter that “socialism is my deep conviction, and I will promote it as long as I can talk or work.”16 By that point, however, he knew his country’s fate. Not only that, he accepted it. Rather than continue to rule with an iron fist, Gorbachev understood that the Soviet Union was beyond saving, making the calculated decision to accept its inevitable demise and ultimately allowing most of the Soviet republics peacefully to declare their sovereignty from the empire.17
Gorbachev arrived at a similar conclusion regarding the Cold War. Although the Soviet leader received a Nobel Peace Prize for his policy of détente (French for “relaxation”), which saw improved U.S.-Soviet relations and the dismantling of the empire’s military and nuclear capabilities, Gorbachev did so only in order to salvage capital and political willpower for his domestic policies. As Thomas Graham with the Council on Foreign Relations writes, “Gorbachev understood that he had to reduce Cold War tensions with the United States so that his country could focus on internal reconstruction, including reforming an overblown military-industrial complex that weighed on the economy.”18
Although he foresaw and avoided the deadly consequences of both armed conflict in Soviet republics and the continuation of Cold War hostilities, Gorbachev’s legacy falls far short of the praise heaped on it. Instead, the final Soviet leader’s legacy should serve to illuminate the evils of communism and collectivism more broadly. As Ayn Rand said, “Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.” Gorbachev’s reign demonstrated the terror and destruction that follow from subordinating individual rights to the state, a lesson that the Western leaders who praised him would do well to learn.19