August 30, 2022
"When he came to power, Mr. Gorbachev was a loyal son of the Communist Party, but had come to see things with new eyes."
"'We cannot live this way any longer,' he once said. For this he was hounded from office by hard-line Communist plotters and disappointed liberals alike, the first group fearing that he would destroy the old system and the other worried that he would not. Within five years he had overturned much that the party held inviolable.
Mr. Gorbachev was caught between tremendous opposing forces: on one hand, the habits ingrained by 70 years of cradle-to-grave subsistence under Communism; on the other, the imperatives of moving quickly to change the old ways and to demonstrate that whatever dislocation resulted was temporary and worth the effort."
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31 comments:
I love your articles, but what about this? thank you
https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/08/gorbachev-finally-achieves-dream-living-under-daniel-greenfield/
I see the NYTimes is longing once again for the Communist past.
The best the Soviet Union could provide their people was a "comfortable" poverty. Even the Chinese Communist knew better. The best Gorbachov could have done is what the Chinese did in opening the economy while slowly reducing the military spending while keeping political control if the intention was to keep the Soviet Union going. Fortunately, he screwed up.
RIP Mr. Gorbachev. At the end you did acknowledge reality and ended the USSR without going out with a bang.
Too bad Biden cannot be run out of office like Gorbacev.
Gorbachev did not rob Russia of its capitalist potential. Yelsin did not help. The Econ Faculty of Harvard and Columbia acting as experts are the guilty.
The lesson of Gorbachev is that communists can never attempt liberal reforms. Liberal reforms are always the final symptom of late stage communism. Communism fails unless it crushes the will of the people.
Thanks to Ronald Magnus
He was trying to salvage Communism, and miscalculated. Let's be real about him
Gorbachev was the last Soviet idealist. He actually believed the system could function with the right people making the right tweaks. In truth he had no idea of the realities of Soviet life for the masses there and in the Red Empire, and to his credit when he realized how hopeless things were he took the out offered by Reagan.
The rise of Gorbachev and the end of the USSR disprove to me the easy linkage or equivalence others see between Nazism and Communism. Communism was a perversion and distortion of liberating and progressive (really) ideas and aims, while Nazism was from the start a warrior do-or-die cult-- a perversion and distortion of honorable traditions that could only end one way.
The very fact that Lenin had to improve Marx, and Stalin had to improve Lenin, and Mao had to improve Stalin u.s.w. indicates that Marx clearly didn't say what they (and some others) needed him to say so they made stuff up.
Try to imagine someone stepping up to 'improve' Hitler's ideas. Try to imagine a Hitler-successor giving the whole thing up with a discouraged shrug.
As for the blame often showered on Western experts, can anyone point to a serious study that 1) clarifies what advice they gave, 2) the amount to which Yeltsin was able and willing to follow their guidance, 3) the degree to which the remnant institutions and influencers in post-Sovetia cooperated, [a plethora of questions] and finally, can their hypnotic and mesmeric talents force Americans too to do their bidding?
I will never cry over a dead commie...
Well, tears of joy maybe.
Human agency in history. Contrast Castro and Kim families.
I think the Russian people are slowly moving toward a better life as Gorbachev wanted. After all, Putin hasn't dared to institute a draft for his mini-Patriotic War.
No more Gorbasms
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/11/10/it_s_a_25th_anniversary_gorbasm/amp/
Gorbachev tried to run a communist government successfully. Learned it can't be done.
Now, if only Biden's handlers could learn that lesson before they destroy the country.
Time to re-read WeTheLiving / watch movie
I've read that the crushing of the Prague Spring in '68 was a formative experience for Gorbechev's generation.
Infamous in the West, of course. But especially wrenching for the Gorbechev generation because it was going to be their chance to take over and do everything right. Instead, they got stuck defending the slowly disintegrating Brezhnev era.
Especially interesting because Gorbechev's crucial decision in 1989 was to hold back on sending the military to hold onto East Germany.
Somewhere in a drawer I still have a "National Lampoon" decal of Gorby's birthmark, which I was instructed to lightly dampen and apply to my forehead.
I'll have to find and apply it.
He was a decent man. I can see where the Russians might consider his legacy flawed, but they certainly had far, far worse rulers in the twentieth century. It wasn't a happy ending or soft landing for Russia, but he avoided pogroms, famines, and disastrous wars. It could have been worse....Putin will have a pretty large body count by the time he's done and may yet stumble into something catastrophic. Russians may look upon the Gorbachev era as the good times....Anyway, a sincere RIP to him.
"He is lionized by Leftists in the West and reviled by some in Russia."
There, fixed it for you.
He's lionized by the West because otherwise people would have to admit that Reagan's strategy and leadership actually won the Cold War.
The Soviets in the 1980s were dependent on grain imports. The USSR could not acquire grain without Western trade cooperation, which Reagan put stricter controls on. And the USSR could not dedicate the necessary resources to reform and recapitalization of its own agricultural sector while matching the Reagan military buildup.
There's some moral credit to Gorbachev that he didn't send in the tanks to crush the 1989 revolutions in the satellite states. But just some; he was constrained by that dependence on imported grain. Had Gorbachev resorted to force, the reaction in the West would have been to renew and strengthen the Reagan policies of tighter trade controls with the Eastern Bloc and higher defense spending, making the Soviet internal crisis even more acute.
The path of China was not available to the Soviets because Reagan denied it to them. Another American president might have followed conciliatory policies, fostering trade and avoiding a military buildup, giving the Soviets the time and resources to engage in internal economic reform while maintaining autocracy and empire. Reagan grabbed the Soviets where they were vulnerable and squeezed.
Putin is Russia’s answer to betrayal by the West after the fall of the USSR. His biggest blunder was not getting promises that NATO would not expand east in writing. Now NATO has metastasized into a war machine, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.
When I thought of Gorbie I then thought of Reagan and Thatcher. And then I literally sighed when I tried to think of anyone in our leadership over the last 40 years who had the combination of intelligence, insight and maturity of either of them. They had balls too.
Has there been anyone even close to them?
He would probably be the first to say that the USSR didn't do communism right.
Another old lawyer said...
"He would probably be the first to say that the USSR didn't do communism right."
If not our own comrade Bob could set him straight. He knows "real" communism.
Compared to other Soviet and Russian rulers of the twentieth century, the guy was beatific. You don't compare him to Thatcher or Reagan. Compare him to Czar Nicholas, Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, and now Putin. No pogroms, disastrous war, civil war, famine, more famine, mass terror, super disastrous war. His stewardship was a blessing. It was marred only by a nuclear plant meltdown and systemic government collapse. That's about the best you can hope for in Russia. Putin already has a pretty high body count, and, before it's over, he might yet stumble into another Russian grade catastrophe.....RIP Gorbachev. He was a decent man with humane instincts. Give him credit for that.
I will grant Gorbachev one thing: Yes, it's true, he tried to save Communism by reforming it, which is probably 99% of why western leftists love him. What he did, which was a great thing, is that he allowed the fall of the Soviet empire to happen without unleashing an atomic holocaust. A lesser leader could have let the hard-core Communists make it all go down in flames. Or maybe he was just the right mix of too weak to fight the west, but strong enough to keep his hard-liners in check. Either way, the world dodged a bullet.
The number of Communist revisionists on the Twitter trying to blame Gorby for destroying Communism a bit unsettling.
That the Soviet Union went from starving and needing to import grains before the fall of Communism to 4 of the world's leading wheat exporters today should tell you how terrible Communism was. Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Kazakhstan are in the top 10 wheat exporting countries today.
Gorbacev was the opponent of Reagan.
Gorbacev represented government control. Reagan represented freedom.
Of course the New York Times and it's shitty readers know how they support.
"He's lionized by the West because otherwise people would have to admit that Reagan's strategy and leadership actually won the Cold War."
We started the Cold War because it served (and serves) our own purposes, and we have never let it go, though we stopped using the term. It is the perfect (and necessary) rationale to continue ceaselessly and extravagantly expanding the budget of an already grotesquely over-budgeted War Department, for increasing the number, power, and reach of our multiple intelligence agencies, which include us in their full-spectrum surveillance), and for the maintenance of our global military bases.
The Forever Cold War is the reason Americans can't have nice things.
Unreconstructed Stalinist Cookie: "We started the Cold War because it served (and serves) our own purposes,..."
Shorter Cook: The Eastern Europeans had it coming.
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