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Mikhail Gorbachev: Man and Myth
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16298 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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3 / 1989 |
3,244 Words |
| Author
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Carl Linden
Carl Linden is professor of political science and
international affairs at the Institute for European, Russian
and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University. |
Mikhail Gorbachev's rapid rise in world politics over the past four years amazes most Western observers. Swift also was his preceding climb from provincial obscurity in Stavropol to the zenith of power in Moscow. It is easy to imagine that Leonid Brezhnev and his cronies of the Stalin generation who have passed from the scene bristle in their Kremlin Wall crypts. Gorbachev defames their collective reputation and shows contempt for past dogmas as he tries to reshape and salvage the faltering Soviet system and recast Soviet relations with the United States and the West.
Where did Gorbachev come from? How did this dominating personality and visionary of reform reach the top of a hidebound and entrenched Communist Party bureaucracy? What is the meaning of his presence at the Soviet pinnacle? Where did he get his ideas? What is he really trying to do, and can he do it?
George Kennan, dean of American Sovietology, says he cannot explain the Gorbachev phenomenon and concludes: "I think he's rather a miracle." There is some reason for such bemused elation. He comes as something of a relief after long years of East-West tensions. He has lent an aura of normalcy and reasonableness not before seen in the Soviet approach to the West. Nonetheless, Gorbachev is not a man from nowhere, despite our scant knowledge of his early career.
Gorbachev has made his meteoric appearance at a moment of truth--during an emerging crisis of communist rule. That crisis has been precipitated by the internal failure of communist centralized systems and command economies coming up against the success of democracies and aspiring democracies with their free markets. The former are lagging, and the latter are keeping abreast of the new scientific and technological revolution sweeping the world. The development alarms communist leaders and confounds the prognoses of their Marxist-Leninist ideology. The pressing reality of this turn in human affairs reverses the ideology's grand prediction of the inevitable victory of communism over capitalism.
The crisis that occasions Gorbachev's attempt at the verhaul of the Soviet system is chronic and fundamental. It is not simply Russian backwardness and authoritarian rigidity that hobble the Soviet rulers' efforts to modernize the country. The crisis afflicts not just Soviet Russia but also China and virtually all other communist states in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. It is not just a crisis of economics and politics but a failure of the utopian project conceived by Marx and put into action by Lenin. Marx's notion that
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