[H]ow can we agree that 1917 was a mistake and all the seventy years of our life, work, effort and battles were also a complete mistake, that we were going in the “wrong direction?”… We have no reason to speak about the October Revolution and socialism in a low voice, as though ashamed of them. Our successes are immense and indisputable.49
Far from being an evil empire, Gorbachev saw the USSR as a grand achievement to be extolled. This sentiment carried over into a definitive sentence from Perestroika, in which Gorbachev quoted Karl Marx’s best-known maxim, linking his own vision directly with Marx’s: “The policy of restructuring (perestroika) puts everything in place. We are fully restoring the principle of socialism: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work (or needs).’”50
Similarly, Perestroika revealed a host of Gorbachev’s beliefs regarding the status of Eastern Europe and how success in those vassal states would be achieved. These were beliefs that not only differed from Reagan’s but were the antithesis of what the president believed. For instance, Gorbachev blindly asserted that “it was not socialism that was to blame for the difficulties and complexities of the socialist countries’ development.” Worse, speaking of the tragedies of Hungary in 1956, Poland in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968, when thousands of freedom-seeking Eastern Europeans were murdered by Communist troops from the USSR or their own armies, Gorbachev wrote: “Through hard, and at times bitter, trials the socialist countries accumulated their experience in carrying out socialist transformations.”51 He portrayed these events not as cries for freedom crushed by Soviet tanks but, rather, heartwarming moments of perseverance in the glorious struggle for socialist victory. These socialist states, said Gorbachev, were engaged in “revolutionary creative work” to push Communism to that next dialectical stage on the heroic road to a classless society. They were all, together, proceeding to the next “crucial stage in world development.”52
While Gorbachev displayed a fatally flawed interpretation of the Eastern bloc’s past, his view of the region’s present and future was equally in error. According to Gorbachev, “Now we can safely state that the socialist system has firmly established itself in a large group of nations, that the socialist countries economic potential has been steadily increasing, and that its cultural and spiritual values are profoundly moral and that they ennoble people.”53 This was Gorbachev’s prognosis for a region that within just two years of the publication of his words would take to the streets to throw off the shackles of Communism, to smash the Berlin Wall, to jail and sometimes execute its Marxist leaders, and to toss every Communist out of office.
Importantly, it is difficult to say how much of this was illustrative of the real Gorbachev, the evolving Gorbachev, or the Gorbachev forced to frame the state of Soviet society in a positive light in order to mollify the hardliners that kept him in power.54 Most likely, at this point in his shifting political-ideological life, it was a combination of the three, a combination that led to a refined Soviet ideology and a new outlook for the Crusader’s enemy.
THE COMMUNIST AND THE CAPITALIST: COMING TOGETHER
With this set of Communist Party line views, many in the Reagan camp feared that there could be no overlap or shared goals between their president and Mikhail Gorbachev. No doubt, there was much on which Reagan and Gorbachev disagreed, and which the president learned right away. Gorbachev, who characterized the United States as brimming with racists, Indian rapers, imperialists, robber barons, and the homeless, dubbed Reagan’s image of America as a Shining City as “American propaganda—yes, propaganda.”55
But while their policies had very little in common there was one ideal that remained consistent for both: Like Reagan, Gorbachev adamantly rejected the thought of attacking the United States or Western Europe, and vetoed ever entertaining a nuclear strike: “only a madman would unleash nuclear war.” Between the two, there existed a mutual abhorrence for nuclear weapons, and Gorbachev made it a point to state this emphatically in Perestroika and elsewhere. Furthermore, he spurned the goal of global Communism—a fact Reagan noticed immediately and brought up repeatedly.56 The notion that he would seek a one-world Marxist state, said Gorbachev, was “nonsense.”57 Most significant, he was committed to reforming the Evil Empire, the full extent of which remained to be seen.
Also, Gorbachev emphasized dialogue. Often, pleas for dialogue are a trite, veiled way of saying that all will be fine if you agree with me; for the Soviets, this had been the spirit, or at least their understanding, of détente. To his credit, Gorbachev sincerely sensed that he and Reagan could negotiate the life-death issues related to nuclear Armageddon and believed that they should do everything within their means to eliminate as many missiles as possible.58 Gorbachev’s instincts were correct, and in time, the dialogue between the two superpower leaders would lead to great mutual respect and genuine peace. Before this could happen, however, the two leaders would pass through some rough and tumble, and Gorbachev would need to experience the failure of his central task: saving the Soviet Union.
16. Afghanistan, the Arms Race, and Gorbachev: April to November 1985
ALMOST FROM THE MOMENT THAT HE ASSUMED HIS NEW POSITION, Mikhail Gorbachev had two overriding and dramatic interests: he wanted to end the war in Afghanistan and he wanted to end the arms race. The war in Afghanistan, which the Soviets had been waging since 1979, had proven to be one of the costliest undertakings of any Soviet leader and was a conflict that had outlived all three of Gorbachev’s predecessors.
Gorbachev’s initial dedication to the Soviet effort was evident in a very disturbing section of his book Perestroika. Amazingly, he asserted that “progressive changes were charted” in Afghanistan under the brutal Marxist dictatorship that took over in the latter 1970s. These positive moves, Gorbachev maintained, were halted by “imperialist quarters [that] began to pressure Afghanistan from without. So, in keeping with the Soviet-Afghan treaty, its leaders asked the Soviet Union for help.” Speaking of Afghanistan’s tyrannical regime, Gorbachev insisted it be allowed “to decide which road to take, what government to have, and what development programs to implement.”
While Gorbachev justified the Soviet presence in Afghanistan with the notion that the Red Army was resisting the “imperialist quarters” who stood in the way of the happy Communist government, the truth was that the Afghan rebels who had been combating Soviet intentions in the country since the late 1970s were fighting a horrible Soviet-backed regime. Though Afghanistan had been a monarchy since 1953, the 1970s had seen the USSR support the concentrated buildup of a united Marxist party in the country. By April 1978, the party had gained sufficient strength to satistfy Moscow, which in turn sanctioned a Communist coup that overthrew the nation’s monarch, King Daud.
From the onset, Afghanistan’s experience with Communism was horrific, and human rights atrocities in the country were rampant. The Marxist trio that took over from 1978 to 1979 was vicious: Torture was a daily practice, prosecuted by appallingly innovative means. In March 1979 in the village of Kerala, 1,700 adults and children, including the entire male population, were machine-gunned in the village square. The dead and dying were bulldozed. Across the country there were thousands of horror stories like this, indelibly ingrained in the consciousness of millions of Afghans, all of which were deemed necessary for creating the Communist utopia. As Lenin and Trotsky had promised, Communism would not be ushered in with white gloves on a polished floor. Throughout Afghanistan, the floor was soaked red.