Boris Yurchenko/AP Photo
President Ronald Reagan, right, talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the White House in Washington, December 8, 1987.
This week’s issue of The New Yorker went to press and into the mails several days before the death on Tuesday of Mikhail Gorbachev. In an odd and unplanned way, however, the issue contains an essay about the 19th-century Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev that sounds some of the same notes we’ve heard in the assessments of Gorbachev’s world-redefining career.
The occasion for the Turgenev essay, by Russian-born, Brooklyn-dwelling critic Keith Gessen, is the appearance of a new translation of Turgenev’s landmark novel Fathers and Sons. The novel’s lead characters come from Turgenev’s own milieu—as Gessen puts it, “the circle of so-called Westernizers” who dominated the St. Petersburg literary scene in the 1850s and ’60s. Turgenev traces the conflicts between those characters’ liberal and ineffectual fathers and their own, more radical and activist generation (to the extent that activism was even possible in Tsarist Russia). One thing Turgenev does not do is suggest a resolution to that conflict. His sympathies extend to both sides of the generational divide; he is a liberal who both understands the need for, and fears the consequences of, a radical reordering of Russian society.
As such, Turgenev was scorned by both Russia’s governing reactionaries and its radical critics. His reputation in the more liberal West, however, was towering. “He was always welcomed and admired in Europe,” Gessen writes. “But in Russia itself, for nearly two decades, he was out of favor.”
That same reputational disjuncture appears to extend to Gorbachev. In Europe and America, he’s the man who ended the Cold War and its inherent threat of nuclear holocaust, the man who let the Iron Curtain be torn down, the man who understood that Actually Existing Communism didn’t work (and later, the man who appeared in a Pizza Hut ad being lauded by the Russian stand-ins for bringing freedom and pepperoni to Moscow). In Russia, he was and is despised by those who resisted democratization, currently personified, alas, by neo-tsarist Vladimir Putin. But he was also heavily criticized before his presidency came to an end by the more radical critics of the old Soviet order, who viewed his moves toward multi-candidate democracy and a less bureaucracy-controlled economy as halting.
This is not to say that Gorbachev was a latter-day Turgenev. He was an activist par excellence, and certainly more of a socialist than any Soviet leader in decades. But his socialism was more Bukharin’s than Stalin’s, and since he came to power when the material and political successes of social democracies like Sweden’s were plain to see, I think he would have moved Russia closer to that kind of socialism had he been given more time and backing. Unlike any of his predecessors, he was open to a Russia that felt more like a social democracy. Given the limitations that Soviet history imposed on him, and on his own beliefs, though, he tried to balance that evolution with a non-cynical appreciation of what we might term the best of Leninism, which is one helluva balancing act for anyone to attempt.
Once the price of freedom was perceived by many to be deep economic insecurity, that didn’t augur well for fledgling democracies.
But while the West largely loved him, it really didn’t help him. In Russia, the fall of communism was experienced by some as a spiritual crisis, creating a void eventually to be filled by an aggressive nationalism. But it was experienced by many more Russians as a material crisis. The dismantling of the state machine meant many necessities, like jobs and food, were in alarmingly short supply.
Had the West’s economic priorities been Gorbachev’s—the conversion of a creaky Communist economy to a more vibrant one that also provided for the public’s social needs—Gorbachev’s tenure would not be equated by so many Russians with years of privation. That was something, though, that the West failed to understand.
In the fall of 1991, on the eve of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and the Democratic presidential primaries, I went to Manchester, New Hampshire, where I interviewed a Democratic candidate from Arkansas named Bill Clinton for my employer at the time, the LA Weekly. With so many newly post-Communist Eastern European nations and Russia itself on the verge of reinventing their economies, I asked Clinton whether, if elected president, he’d counsel those nations to build more purely market-driven economies or more social democratic market economies. His answer was the former: the market-driven economies. Given what has transpired since in Russia and some other once Eastern-bloc nations, that was a fateful answer. Once the price of freedom was perceived by many to be deep economic insecurity, that didn’t augur well for fledgling democracies, as it already hadn’t augured well for Gorbachev, whom the then-incumbent Bush administration certainly appreciated but failed to appreciate what he needed to succeed domestically.
It’s nice, but no great achievement, when the West appreciates Russian genius. There are times, though—as Turgenev noted when describing the shortcomings of do-nothing liberal fathers—when appreciation isn’t enough.
