This was not completely new. “Gorbachev’s government has brutally repressed secessionist revolts before,” noted the New Republic, citing Kazakhstan in 1986, Georgia and Uzbekistan in 1989, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan in 1990. According to the human rights group Helsinki Watch, over 200 people were killed in these incidents. The methods included not just tanks and machine guns, but, in the brutal case of Tbilisi, Georgia, chemical weapons.12 To be fair, some of these were ethnic disputes and as such their violence was not Gorbachev’s fault. Nonetheless, others were questionable and clearly do not stand as a shining star on Gorbachev’s record.
Again, to the extent that Gorbachev backed these assaults, his purpose was to preserve the Soviet Union—his top priority.13 Thus, Gorbachev aide Alexander Yakovlev could later justifiably argue that it was “unjust” to blame Gorbachev for the Soviet breakup: “He did everything possible to keep the country united.”14 He indeed did all he could, including resorting to violence on occasion, and continued to employ or consider coercion until his final moments in office.15
GORBACHEV’S HISTORIC CHANGES
Although these cruelties blemished Gorbachev’s legacy, from 1990 to 1991, he implemented a series of crucial reforms that were fundamental to the burgeoning democratic movement in the USSR. The most critical of these changes began after the Moscow Summit in June 1988. Notably, Ronald Reagan’s actions at this summit were extremely important. Gorbachev had been under fire from hard-liners. As U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock recalls, Reagan’s comments in Moscow at the summit that week “did more than any other single event to build support for Gorbachev’s reforms.”16 When Reagan returned to Washington, an emboldened Gorbachev, who had struggled tirelessly for years, got back to work. The Communist Party Conference was scheduled. Soon, Gorbachev pushed the majority of his reform ideas through the Central Committee. Significantly, these ideas included granting real power to a legislature chosen by honestly contested elections, the establishment of an independent judiciary, due process for Soviet citizens, and an end to Party control of government institutions. Through these Gorbachev initiatives, the path to an ultimately pluralistic political system had begun.17
By 1990, the Soviet media was freer than ever, thus introducing a completely new concept in the USSR: a critical (though still cautious) press. Most significant, in February 1990, Gorbachev succeeded in banishing the Communist Party’s guarantee as the USSR’s sole, legitimate political party. Specifically, he backed a proposal by Alexander Yakovlev, a Politburo member and confidant, as well as other Soviet reformers, to repudiate Article 6 of the USSR Constitution, which had ensured the seventy-plus year Communist stranglehold on power. He also accepted a program that recommended the creation of a Western-style presidency and cabinet system. This historic shift toward political competition was greeted by a double-line top-of-the-fold headline that ran across the front page of the February 8 New York Times.18
At that moment, Mikhail Gorbachev formally ended the Communist monopoly in the USSR.19 Yes, Ronald Reagan applied crucial pressure that set certain forces in motion. Yes, Boris Yeltsin later won two significant presidential elections that kept the Communists from taking back the executive branch. However, it was Mikhail Gorbachev who technically ended the unilateral rule by the Communist Party—an idea suggested to him (and which he contemplated) as early as 1985.20
Yet, as Archie Brown notes, despite this monumental move by Gorbachev that ended the unilateral rule of the Communists, “it was no part of Gorbachev’s initial conception to introduce a fully-fledged political pluralism in which the Communist Party would become just one party competing with others.” The reality of the situation was that once Gorbachev began making qualified statements on democracy, the concept of pluralism took on a life and momentum of its own, and though he eventually came to embrace this newfound pluralism, it was a far cry from his original conception.21
Equally significant, while this viral brand of pluralism was not Gorbachev’s initial intent when he began the process of reform, it most certainly was Ronald Reagan’s intent in many of the NSDDs. Indeed, the pluralism that swept the former Soviet Union was an objective of NSDD-32, which set the goal of encouraging democratic change within both the Soviet bloc and the USSR itself. Recall that shortly after the signing of NSDD-32, NSC member Tom Reed had spoken to the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, where he shocked the audience by stating that it was the Reagan administration’s “fondest hope” to “one day convince” the Soviet leadership to “seek the legitimacy that comes only from the consent of the governed.” In addition, this goal was reiterated in the January 1983 directive NSDD-75, which advocated promoting “the process of change in the Soviet Union [and Eastern Europe] toward a more pluralistic political and economic system.” What makes these Reagan administration objectives particularly resonant is that they took place two to three years before Gorbachev had even entered office. Encouraging democracy in the USSR had been a plan of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan watched this plan come to fruition, intuitively understanding the deeper forces at work in the hearts and souls of all people, meaning that each person, in Reagan’s view, possesses a God-given yearning for freedom—including those living in the Evil Empire. As Gorbachev tried to get a grip on the situation, ex-president Reagan, speaking in Cambridge, England on December 5, 1990, demonstrated that he understood better than Gorbachev what Gorbachev’s taste of freedom would bring: “As is always the case,” said Reagan, “once people who have been deprived of basic freedom taste a little of it, they want all of it. It was as if Gorbachev had uncorked a magic bottle and a genie floated out, never to be put back in again. Glasnost was that genie.”22
Now, everything was collapsing around Gorbachev, spinning beyond his control.23 “Attempting to change society,” said Valery Boldin, CPSU official and Gorbachev’s chief of staff, he was “unintentionally” destroying “[our] statehood.”24
THE END OF THE END
By 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev’s star, and his beloved USSR, had been eclipsed by Boris Yeltsin’s Russian Federation. Yeltsin was voted president of Russia on June 12, 1991; its first ever democratically elected leader. Gorbachev, too, had changed the title of his unelected post from general secretary to president. There were now literally two presidents in Moscow sharing the Kremlin—who, or what, would prevail?
The subsequent weeks were a blur, filled with dramatic events all beyond Gorbachev’s ability to forestall, including a failed coup attempt in August. By September, nearly every remaining Soviet republic declared independence, a glorious event for just about everyone except Mikhail Gorbachev, who still hoped the USSR would persevere. Yet, there was no way Gorbachev could stop the flurry of freedom he had unleashed. Among the rebels, on September 6 a defiant Georgia severed all ties with its abusive parent. That same day, the USSR State Council recognized the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and fed up residents of Leningrad restored the city’s original name, St. Petersburg—a move that must have made Lenin howl from his tomb. On November 6, President Yeltsin—now the top dog after saving both Gorbachev and Russia from a coup—banned the Soviet and Russian Communist parties.
In a gesture of major symbolic importance, on December 18, 1991 the red Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag which had flown over the Kremlin for decades was replaced with the flag of the new Russian Federation. It then took Mikhail Gorbachev seven days to do the inevitable: to step down. He called President George H. W. Bush to say: “You can have a very quiet Christmas evening. I am saying good-bye and shaking your hand.”25