What I should have remembered about Gorbachev.
A Russian made me optimistic. That should have been my first clue.
When Mikhail Gorbachev passed the other day, I did what most writers do when a notable person dies, and that is dig in my archives for something I wrote about him. The clip I found was from March 1993, and it took some restraint not to post a picture of my column with a hey-look-at-me observance that would have served no other purpose than to plant a flag on history’s timeline to say, “I was here.” But the truth is, Gorbachev was precisely the reason I was in Moscow to begin with.
I grew up during the Cold War. My mother’s second husband, a recovering alcoholic, kept a can of Coors in the fridge in case the Soviets ever launched nuclear missiles at our tiny town. We had a Coast Guard station and took it on faith that we would be hit. Mom threw the can away as much to keep him from relapsing as for how bad Coors was. If we’re gonna go, she told him, there’s always wine.
In what will surprise none of you, I was a ginormous nerd in high school and did a year abroad in then-West Germany as much to escape my lack of social success at home as to discover the world. This was the year Reagan went to Berlin and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
“Do you think the Berlin Wall will ever come down?” I asked my host mother.
“Not in our lifetimes,” she answered confidently.
Foreign languages and living abroad became my thing, so when Gorbachev began doing things that I thought qualified him as a good guy — nuclear arms treaties! ending state censorship! telling the truth about history! — things seemed to be on an upward trajectory.
Things seemed to be on an upward trajectory.
After a period of time I was no longer a ginormous nerd in high school and became a ginormous idiot in college. Caught up in the wave of optimistic assumptions that Things Were Getting Better in the Soviet Union, I majored in Russian and dabbled in International Relations. On November 10, 1989, the professor of my East-West Relations class walked in and held up the front page of The Oregonian, which showed the Berlin Wall being hammered to rubble.
“Congratulations,” he said. “This is now a history class.”
We were living through history, and for once this seemed like a good thing. Gorbachev’s perestroika policy of kinda-sorta changing the Soviet Union wasn’t nearly as interesting to me as the adrenalized revelations of glasnost. The 1991 coup attempt forced the cancellation of my junior year semester in Moscow. That was the time Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank and statues of Vladimir Lenin came down. All of a sudden, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and Russians were free.
I was sure everything was going to turn out great.
I wrote my thesis on the new freedoms given to editors in the Soviet press before doing my spring semester in Moscow. I landed in January 1992 and wasn’t coming back for graduation, if ever. An internship copy editing for the English-language translation for a Russian business magazine led to a staff job at an expat magazine called the Moscow Guardian. I had already worked some in journalism, but nothing that qualified me for what happened when my boss returned home to Texas. At 22 years of age, I became editor-in-chief. I was sure everything was going to work out great.
I was sure everything was going to turn out great.
As editor, I was excited to see Gorbachev speak to the Moscow Press Club, but the event was a dud. Gorbachev had star quality until he opened his mouth. Sentences got lost on the way to predicates, often dodging off into tangents to avoid being comprehended. But we didn’t think it was his fault; we were listening to the translation through headphones. When the event ended, most made for the exits, but I made for the translator, who lit a cigarette and wearily explained to me what a chore translating Gorbachev was.
Maybe it was his law degree. Maybe it was having to navigate a career through the ranks of the Communist Party where clarity of communication could get you killed. The translator contrasted Gorbachev to Yeltsin, who “would say, ‘The window is clear,’ but Gorbachev would say, ‘Well, looking at the window, it appears that…”
And then the translator gave me one of the greatest quotes I could ever ask for, and the first kicker of my fledgling career as a writer.
“The way he thinks doesn’t suggest he was trained as a lawyer,” said the translator. “The way he speaks, it doesn’t convey that he’s a Russian intellectual. He could be an American intellectual.”
By this time, the heady days of glasnost had given way to Yeltsin’s austerity measures and distinctly boring fights with the Communist-nationalist parliamentary coalition over what powers Yeltsin actually had. Meanwhile, Russians suffered. I got paid in dollars, shopped at hard currency grocery stores and hung out in nightclubs and restaurants owned by westerners. An engineer cleaned my apartment once a week. The little bit I paid him was more than he made in a month at his day job.
By this time I was working in the bureau of the Los Angeles Times as a researcher. I hung out with American businessmen, bankers, and journalists, all of whom shared the assumption that Russia was on the glide path to becoming a western-style democracy. We were sure that everything was going to work out great. We still thought of perestroika and glasnost as good things.
We were sure that everything was going to work out great.
Russians did not think things were working out great. When asked, only 33% of Russians said that they saw Gorbachev as having a positive effect on history. Josef Stalin had 25%. Only barely more than half (53%) thought that freedom of speech was a good thing, and 75% thought the breakup of the Soviet Union did more harm than good.
To make things fit into our fever dreams of Russian democratic evolution, we forgot that Gorbachev never wanted to get rid of the Communist Party or the Soviet Union. Perestroika and glasnost were his policies to save Communist rule of the Soviet Union. We erased the memories of him sending tanks into the Baltics and into the streets of Moscow to quell democratic protests. We created a version of Gorbachev where he did what we liked and everything was going to turn out great.
The power struggle between Yeltsin and parliament devolved in a depressing way, with Yeltsin trying to resolve a constitutional crisis by creating a bigger one. They were blocking his economic policies and refusing to adopt a constitution, so he dissolved the legislative branch and called for new elections. He did not have the powers to do so, but he did have a military, so the man who famously stood on a tank and brought down the Soviet Union called out the tanks to shell parliament. In the deadliest street fighting in Moscow since the October Revolution, 147 people were killed and 437 wounded.
The west quickly forgave Yeltsin, who after all was shooting at Communists and rightwing nationalists in the service of imposing economic austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund. And then we forgot. Even now, people remember Yeltsin for standing on the tank. We remember Gorbachev for opening up the Soviet Union. We don’t remember the ruin they left their country in.
And no one remembers what happened next. Yeltsin was immediately unpopular, and that was a problem which, unlike a constitutional crisis, he did have the power to fix.
No one remembers what happened next.
Gorbachev had relaxed the residency rules, meaning anyone in the Soviet Union could live in any city they wanted. Thousands of people from Central Asia had come to Moscow to get their hustle on either selling consumer goods in kiosk for prices that scandalized older Muscovites or fresh produce in the farmers markets for prices far higher than the state-backed grocery stores. You could either by old, sprouting potatoes for cheap or gorgeous, colorful, and varied produce from these “foreigners” for a lot more.
Most of these people had brown skin. Most Muscovites were white. It became an article of faith that the prices were higher because they were criminals. So under the pretext of enforcing the long-ignored residency laws, Yeltsin rounded them all up, put them on cattle cars, and sent them back home. I was in a casino one night when the police came through and removed a couple men. I saw the pictures in the paper of people standing in the cattle cars.
Yeltsin’s popularity increased despite the disappearance of all the good produce at the farmer’s market. Russians had not grown up learning the law of supply and demand, and the higher prices confused them. “Why are the prices still high?” asked one old lady. “Yeltsin got rid of all the criminals!”
I no longer believed that things were going to turn out great.
I no longer believed that things were going to turn out great. I packed my bags, flew home, and haven’t been back since. Nothing that has happened since then has surprised me, but my reaction to it has changed, or better said my reaction to my foolishness back then has. The young man who thought the world was going to keep getting better can now only be blamed for not doing more of his reading in history classes. As a friend remarked recently, “We don’t always recognize good times for what they are, or how thin the ice is under us when they are good.”
Next week I am thinking about digging into a big reason things did not work out in Russia and what that has to do with what we’re going through now.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
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