Blame Yeltsin, Not Gorbachev
Russia needs to rewrite its narrative of post-Soviet collapse
On the occasion of Mikhail Gorbachev’s death, I want to revisit some of what I said in my post on the occasion of the thirtieth the anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union, and in my post about the missed opportunities of the post-Soviet era and the deep roots of the war in Ukraine. Specifically, I want to lay out where I agree with Tom Nichols in his piece looking back on Gorbachev’s premiership, where he credits him primarily with happily failing to achieve any of his objectives, and where I disagree with him.
Where I agree with him is simple. Yes, the Soviet system was oppressive and deeply dysfunctional; yes Gorbachev aimed to save the Soviet system, not to bury it; and yes, he failed, utterly. But I don’t think he should be lauded solely for his failure, nor even (though this is extremely laudatory and important to remember) for how he responded to failure, refusing to resort to brutality and mass violence. Rather, I think he should also be remembered fondly—not only in the West but in Russia—for how he tried to succeed. I think that reframing is essential if he is ever to be viewed as a historically positive figure in Russia as well as in the West, and if the onus for the disasters of recent Russian history is ever to be placed where it properly belongs.
In his time as Soviet premier, Gorbachev instituted reforms under two broad rubrics: glasnost, or openness, and perestroika, or restructuring. The two ideas went hand in hand: somewhat looser control of information and somewhat greater autonomy for enterprises were both necessary to enable the restructuring of the Soviet economy by introducing elements of market pricing. Ditto for collaboration with Western companies—foreign investment was necessary to make Soviet enterprises more efficient, but it required some movement in the direction of the rule of law as opposed to rule by the party.
It didn’t work for a host of reasons. State-owned enterprises weren't so easy to reform, the Communist Party didn’t have sufficient popular support to sustain it through a period of liberalization—the Soviet system had long since been hollowed out, and reform largely exposed just how badly it had already failed. But the biggest reason that it failed was the nationalities problem. Popular support for Soviet domination in the non-Soviet countries of the Warsaw Pact was basically nonexistent; nothing short of a iron fist would keep them in the fold. And even within the Soviet Union, there were nationalities, especially the Baltic states that were only conquered under Stalin, that were ready to bolt at the first opportunity.
I’ve speculated before about whether someone more like Andropov might have held the Soviet Union together by force for a little while longer, or even for a long while. It’s hard to know; a lot depends on what might have happened with oil prices over the next several years and how badly the Soviet military might have deteriorated after Afghanistan in this counterfactual world. I think the world is much better off—and even Russians are better off—for that counterfactual not manifesting itself, and if that’s what it would have taken to succeed we should all be glad that Gorbachev failed. But I want to throw another counterfactual out there, one where Gorbachev succeeded just a little bit more than he did, because he was a little bit tougher and far-seeing than he was, or faced less opposition from conservatives within the Politburo and the armed forces who opposed all change.
Suppose that Gorbachev had understood the seriousness of the nationalities problem, and recognized that neither the Warsaw Pact nor the Soviet Union was going to survive in its then-current form, and got ahead of events rather than always responding to them. Might he have negotiated for German reunification on the basis of German neutrality? Might he have granted Ukraine greater actual autonomy within the Soviet Union in exchange for restoring Crimea to Russia? Might he, one way or another, have played the bad hand that he was holding better—and might that have, in the long run, meant for a more peaceful world? The precipitate collapse of Soviet Power was a psychological and social disaster for Russians, and turned the rump of Russia into a revanchist power almost immediately (the frozen conflicts of Transnistria and South Ossetia first broke out in the early Yeltsin years). There might have been no better way, but it’s not crazy to wonder whether it might not have been more desirable not only for Russia but for the nations seeking freedom from Russia if the Soviet decline and dissolution had been more gradually negotiated.
The point of the counterfactual isn’t to suggest that a better alternative was likely or even possible. Nor am I trying to be ungrateful for the gifts that we were given by the gods of history; the mere fact that the Soviet Union collapsed without either war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO or mass violence within the Soviet Union remains a modern miracle. What I want to highlight, rather, is that Gorbachev was trying—too late and too ineffectually—to forestall the collapse and preserve some kind of institutional continuity, some degree of power. If there was a major actor in Russian politics who was on the other side, hastening the collapse along, it wasn’t Gorbachev. It was Boris Yeltsin.
I remember the early days when Yeltsin was hailed as one of the heroes who slayed the Soviet dragon, the Russian leader who stood for liberalism and democracy and an end to tyranny. Yeltsin quickly proved a catastrophic leader for Russia, presiding over the hollowing out of the state, the corrupt looting of its assets, and its virtual prostration before the West. Nor were his liberal democratic credentials pristine; he sent tanks to attack his own parliament and thoroughly corrupted the electoral process in his reelection campaign. And, lest we forget, he chose Vladimir Putin as his successor. Before all that, though, his agreement with Ukraine and Belarus to dissolve the Soviet Union—which ended Gorbachev’s career, made Russia the successor state to the Soviet Union, and therefore catapulted Yeltsin himself to the heights of power—gave away so much that it inevitably set the stage for the revanchism that followed. But unlike with Yeltsin’s cronyism and corruption, that act is rarely seen in a self-interested light, because it felt like another wave of liberation.
Today, Gorbachev is almost universally despised in Russia, while Yeltsin is seen more as an embarrassment than an object of hatred: a corrupt drunkard easily outfoxed by Westerners, a very Russian character though not an admirable one. Gorbachev, by contrast, is seen as an outright traitor. It would be very helpful to the Russian political psyche to adjust this understanding. Gorbachev was someone with the foresight to see that radical change was necessary to save Russian power as well as the Soviet system, but who was too naive or lacked the wisdom to foresee the consequences of his own actions, and therefore became the victim of events. To see him that way is to see him as a failure, but a patriotic one. Yeltsin, by contrast, might be usefully seen as, in substantial part, an opportunist who tore the Soviet Union to pieces in part for personal gain, and who inaugurated the very era of state capture and collapse that Gorbachev aimed to forestall. By these lights, Putin is someone who—for all his claims to have revived the Russian state—instead captured it himself in a way that leaves it brittle, and invites the prospect of yet another collapse in the future after he passes from the scene.
There’s probably not much we in the West can do to help that adjustment along. But we could start by acknowledging that, at least from a Russian perspective, Putin is right that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical catastrophe, and that therefore the fact that Gorbachev failed is nothing for Russians to celebrate. If that is all we celebrate Gorbachev for, then, Russians will feel right to continue despising him.
The economic and geopolitical facts were what they were; had Gorbachev succeeded, and inaugurated a more liberal phase in Soviet history rather than presiding over its sudden collapse, Soviet power would still have declined dramatically, and for all we know the Soviet state would still ultimately have ceased to exist. But we can be deeply grateful that Gorbachev did not try to forestall collapse with brutal violence without also emphasizing our gratitude at the collapse itself.
And as we arm Ukraine for its latest counteroffensive, and relish the prospect of Russian aggression being punished as it deserves to be, it wouldn’t hurt to try to imagine a world where we actually coexist, peacefully, with Russian power, and not just with Russian weakness and defeat. We can’t will it into being by imagining; Russia must decide its own destiny. But if we can’t imagine it, then we’re unlikely to seize the opportunity if, one day, another, undoubtedly rather different reformer arises.