Poles’ gratitude to Reagan did not stop. They continue to look for ways to honor him. This includes a grassroots movement that looks to name things after Reagan. “I will not rest until there is a Ronald Reagan Square in Warsaw,” says Radek Sikorski, who in the 1990s became deputy minister of foreign affairs and deputy minister of defense for free Poland. “We want some major form of commemoration,” says Sikorski. “They [Poles] at least want a Reagan statue in a place of significance.”39 Precisely that was proposed by a committee of Poles called the Ronald Reagan Legacy Committee. Sikorski is chair of the committee, which includes Polish cabinet members, senators and members of Parliament, and major Solidarity figures.
Still, Poles did what they could. Reagan was made an honorary citizen of Gdansk and Krakow, the cities where the Solidarity tradition was strongest. Separately, a competition was held to choose a name for a square in front of a train station in Warsaw. No suggested names were listed. The public voted. Naturally, the winner was the architect who constructed the train station. Ronald Reagan, however, was runner up.
21. The Coroner Comes to the Kremlin: 1990–1991
IT DID NOT TAKE LONG FOR THE JOYOUS DEVELOPMENTS OF 1989 in Eastern Europe to have a ripple effect on the Soviet Union, one that Mikhail Gorbachev did not desire, that he in fact dreaded, and that careened out of his control. For Gorbachev, Eastern European freedom was a train wreck screeching down the tracks and headed smack for the middle of Red Square.
It was not supposed to happen like this: Gorbachev had not initially favored what blossomed in Eastern Europe. “Gorbachev never foresaw that the whole of Eastern Europe would fly out of the Soviet orbit,” said Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, stating the obvious. He became, said Dobrynin, a “helpless witness” to the inevitable.1 He also did not foresee that at the start of 1990 Eastern Europe’s next generation of leaders would move quickly toward free-market economies. Once given the freedom to chart their own course, they unwaveringly opted for the antithesis of the Leninism that Gorbachev publicly preached and even the milder socialism he privately pursued. With their first opportunity to choose their economic destiny, the former Soviet bloc nations looked toward the system championed not by Gorbachev but by Ronald Reagan, a man who in the 1980s was the face of free-market capitalism.2
Still, what was done was done, and to his immense credit, Gorbachev did not send in the tanks. He was unwilling to use force to try to hold onto Eastern Europe, to the Soviet “ally” he had seen as central to the grandiose twenty-first century he envisioned for a better, stronger, kinder USSR.
When it came to the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was not willing to let go so easily, and as such the general secretary had planned a very different response. Oxford professor Archie Brown confirms that “it was no part of Gorbachev’s intention to stimulate the breakup of the Soviet Union” and that “the last thing Gorbachev wanted was to lose any part of the Soviet Union following the loss… of Eastern Europe.” He “wished to reform the Soviet system, not to destroy it.”3 Going further, Brown agrees that by introducing the democratizing elements of glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev was unwittingly fostering the dissolution of the USSR.4 Gorbachev himself came to understand this, but only as he scrambled to prevent a complete collapse.
DYING FOR THE MOTHERLAND
Approaching the end of 1990, Gorbachev, terrified by the hurricane he had generated, shuffled his inner cabinet, adding hardline Communist thugs dedicated to the Soviet motherland—men that Gorbachev thought would be needed to help him keep the USSR together—and immediately instructed them to draw up plans for emergency and full dictatorial power if need be. In response, his most influential adviser, Edward Shevardnadze, resigned, direly warning the legislature that “dictatorship is coming.”5
A few weeks later, on January 12–13, 1991, Lithuania felt the brunt of this ugly turn, as Soviet special forces stormed the Baltic nation with orders to destroy the democratic opposition. Gorbachev, once again talking like a Marxist, spoke of the need for a “restoration of the bourgeois order” in Lithuania.6 At least fourteen were killed and hundreds were injured. In an attempt to absolve himself of the situation, Gorbachev denied that the military acted on his orders but instead under the direction of his newly appointed lieutenants—a claim adamantly denied by those lieutenants. One of them, KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, later stated: “Everything was done with the agreement of Gorbachev. Absolutely. And I don’t condemn Gorbachev for giving the command to intervene. I condemn him for his deception and his denial of this command. Can you imagine that in this country we would intervene without the president’s permission?”7
Despite condemning sentiments such as these, some authorities believe that Gorbachev had little personal culpability in the matter. Archie Brown conceded that Gorbachev “is open to criticism” for his tougher line and sharp rhetoric toward Lithuanians in the days preceding the attack, as well as for his tardiness in condemning the killings; however, claims Brown, there is evidence that Gorbachev was angry over the attacks.8 Anger that would lead some to conclude that Gorbachev did not have a direct role in the attacks themselves.
Regardless of Gorbachev’s personal involvement, Boris Yeltsin responded by calling the actions in Lithuania “a powerful attack on democracy” and predicted that more force would follow in other republics, as it did only a week later in Riga, Latvia on the night of January 20–21, where four people were killed by Soviet troops.9 Gorbachev countered by blasting Yeltsin for threatening the Soviet state and the socialist ideal it represented. He then again, as with Lithuania, publicly reaffirmed his devotion to Communism: “I am not ashamed to say anywhere in public that I am a Communist and believe in the socialist idea,” said Gorbachev. “I will die believing this and will pass into the next world believing this.”10
In the United States, two opposing ideological sources, the New Republic and National Review, the political bibles of the left and right, respectively, expressed outrage. In an editorial titled, “Gorbachev’s Tanks,” the New Republic stated: “It says something about the roots of glasnost that, in a twinkling of Gorbachev’s eye, it can revert to levels of distortion even Brezhnev might envy.” The editorial continued:
[Gorbachev’s] Western admirers are in acute discomfort, amazed that a man who has just amassed near-dictatorial powers in his revamped presidency should choose to use them… horrified that perestroika should seem now to mean the crushing of human beings with tanks. Yet no one who saw Gorbachev’s complete lack of remorse, or witnessed his energetic verbal attack on the Lithuanians two days after the Soviet army assaulted their country, can doubt that he is in control of this strategy.11