The Guardian Profile: Mikhail Gorbachev

The Russian revolutionary

He went from peasant village to the Kremlin and began the process that would end the cold war. Then, 10 years ago today, a coup attempt led to his departure. Jonathan Steele, who covered that upheaval, on the former Soviet president now enjoying a modest revival

By Jonathan Steele
 

His 70th birthday had just passed and the 10th anniversary of his enforced resignation was approaching, but Mikhail Gorbachev, against all the odds, was enjoying the sweet taste of power again. Sitting in the Oval Office with George W Bush, he had explained how Moscow saw the future of Russian-American relations, and now he was purring into the Kremlin in a black limousine to brief Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, on the American response.

Those 10 days last May as an officially encouraged go-between, several weeks before Bush and Putin were to hold their first meeting, were the high point of the former Soviet president's first decade of retirement. His boorish successor, Boris Yeltsin, never once invited him to any official function, not even a state dinner for a visiting dignitary, let alone a policy discussion. Bill Clinton, ever anxious to curry favour with Yeltsin, president of the "new" Russia, was happy to entertain Margaret Thatcher and other retired leaders, but always kept Gorbachev at arm's length. Now, the man who had done more than anyone else to end the cold war was back in the limelight, dispensing advice to presidential newcomers.

The brief revival of the Gorbachev glamour seems especially poignant. Before he came to power in 1985 the Kremlin was in the hands of one bumbling patriarch after another. Suddenly their place was taken by an exuberant figure who, wonder of wonders, knew how to smile, and had an elegant wife. That purple birthmark on his forehead was strange enough, but not as odd as the fact that a man with charm, energy and intelligence had managed to pop out on top of the world's most ossified bureaucracy.

For six and a half years "Gorby" dominated the news bulletins, first as an intriguing mystery - was it all an elaborate ploy? - then as his glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) took hold, he was lauded as a successful reformer. At home, he persuaded Soviet communists to give up their monopoly of power and accept a multi-party system. Abroad, he convinced the United States to withdraw its nuclear missiles from Europe. One arms control treaty followed another. Gorby-mania gripped the media.

Then everything began to spin out of control, and the world's favourite politician became a tragic figure, a combination of the boy with his finger in the dyke and the emperor who has no clothes. The Warsaw Pact, the Soviet alliance system in eastern Europe, collapsed. The Soviet Union was shot out from under him, to the delight of western leaders who switched their affection to Boris Yeltsin. The one-time enemy was on the road to capitalism. "Gorby" disappeared.

But Gorbachev is resilient, a man who accepts fate's blows with dignity and finds his solace in hard work. Other former statesmen write their memoirs; Gorbachev has not only done that but is constantly on the move, inside Russia and abroad. The death of his beloved wife, Raisa, from cancer two years ago was a terrible blow, but he picked himself up within weeks and now maintains a schedule as energetic as ever. He visits the cemetery beside the Novodevichi monastery in Moscow once a week. Before each foreign trip he drives there to say good-bye.

On a hot Moscow afternoon last month he was co-chairing a meeting aimed at setting up a United Social-Democratic Party. Russian politics have become as fractious as they were once monolithic, and there are already about 20 different social-democratic parties, associations and unions, each the creation of a dominant ego. The room was punishingly muggy and the meeting's focus was nothing more vital than how to merge just two of the parties. But Gorbachev, a ball of verbal energy, and with his legendary concentration on detail in full display, was arguing passionately over the procedure for electing the united party's committee.

Earlier this year he chaired the advisory committee set up by the media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky to protect Russia's only independent TV company from Putin's wrath. The battle was widely seen as a crucial struggle for press freedom. "Gorbachev was extraordinary. He was polishing the statements I drew up. He was the best editor I've ever had," says Lilia Shevtsova, a senior Russian journalist who was on the committee with him. "He was courageous, and all for putting tough questions to Putin. We only criticised him when he suddenly decided to negotiate."

Since leaving office, Gorbachev has set up a foundation in his name. It is meant to be the Russian equivalent of an American ex-president's library, with an archive and a visitors centre. So far it has concentrated on research, running conferences and round-tables on Russian politics and economics, international relations, the future of Europe, globalisation and the environment, as well as preparing the speeches Gorbachev makes on his frequent foreign trips. His latest project is a television series called The Secrets Of Power, in which he converses with other world leaders such as George Bush senior, the Pope, Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro.

His office in the foundation is conservatively furnished with wooden panelling and brown leather arm chairs. He still likes dark suits, though now, in a small concession to informality and the summer heat, he dispenses with a tie. He addressed me as "ty", the affectionate "thou", a lifelong habit from his Communist party days which most of his colleagues found patronising and uncomfortable. You reply, of course, with the formal "vy" (you).

Even now, a decade and a half after he burst on to the world scene, the central riddle about Gorbachev remains the same. How did a man with his views become Soviet leader? Was he a long-time subversive, a kind of democratic mole tunneling up to the top, or was it a conversion based on some special incident or flash of revelation? The ex- president sees the issue in less dramatic terms. His rise to the leadership was the culmination, he says, of a long process of experience and education, going back to his wartime childhood as the grandson of a collective farm chairman in southern Russia, an area which the Germans occupied.

"Remember, I'm from a very simple, poor family", he says. "I know what war is, what occupation is. I saw a country that was being ruined and destroyed. We saw prisoners of war being executed in the street. I was 11. They interrogated my grandmother and rumours were going round that they were going to shoot her." Earlier, the family had suffered under Stalin, though Gorbachev only understood this later. His mother's father, the collective farm chairman and loyal communist, was arrested in the 1937 purges (Gorbachev was six) and charged with being a member of a "rightwing Trotskyist organisation". He was lucky to be released after a year.

Gorbachev's father's father was a peasant farmer who at first rejected collectivisation. He was sent to a labour camp in Siberia, but got out after two years. Meanwhile, three of his sons (Gorbachev's uncles) starved to death in the famine that was precipitated by the massive rural disruption which followed collectivisation and peasant resistance. (It was not until August 1991, just after the coup, that Gorbachev, in his own words, "managed to cross the invisible mental barrier" and asked the new man he had appointed KGB chief to dig out the files.) Gorbachev's own father, an ordinary collective farm worker, spent almost four years at the front in the second world war and survived.

This turbulent and disrupted background was typical of thousands of Russian families, and Gorbachev did well to come through it, star at school, and be accepted into Moscow university's faculty of law, which became the second big formative influence in his life. For five years he was in the capital city. He met Russians of numerous nationalities, and foreigners - for the first time - and made friends with students from working-class and intellectual backgrounds. "Without Moscow I would never have had this culture", he says. "I came from a village with no electricity, no phones, no paved roads, and cut off by snow for two or three months a year. No one forced me to study at university. My father kept asking when I was going to come back and start working."

Raisa Maksimovna Titorenko, the bright sociology student he fell in love with, helped to open his eyes to theatre and the arts. On graduation he got a job in the prosecutor's office in Stavropol, the big town near his home village. He did not like the atmosphere, and embarked on a party career, first in the Young Communist League (the Komsomol), and then in the Communist apparatus. In a one-party system the career is more managerial than political: there was no cut and thrust of debate.

Being a reformer or a conservative was not relevant at the lower levels of the party. Gorbachev was competent and hard-working, and he rose quickly. But he was not alone in seeing that the system was not working well, so that by the time he came to the top he was part of a generation of party insiders who wanted change. While his intellect and experience turned him gradually into a reformer, he used the party's authoritarian traditions to his advantage. As general secretary, the party's top job, he sacked opponents ruthlessly. He used voting by a show of hands to ram through policies which a majority of central committee members opposed.

Outwardly warm, he was surprisingly closed as a person. Gennadi Gerasimov, Gorbachev's first spokesman, says: "It was not until some years after he left power and I met him at a book-signing that he actually thanked me. It was the first time he had ever done it. Other colleagues said it was the same with them." Only a handful of friends are ever invited to his home.

On his departure from power the political obituarists were quick to go to work, and their dominant view is negative. In Russia he is despised by right and left. The new anti-Communists (many of them former party members) see him as a pathetic figure who thought he could reform the unreformable and refused to give up his belief in socialism. The old Soviet patriots call him a traitor. The silent majority, that mass of non-political
Russians who expect their leaders to wield a strong hand, ridicules him as a fool who set the country on the road to chaos, a weakling who failed to re-exert control, and an endless talker who always avoided decisive action.

Gorbachev admits his mind frequently returns to the afternoon 10 years ago when the commander of the security guard at his luxury holiday compound on the Black Sea told him a group of top-level officials had arrived from Moscow, unannounced. "I picked up the phone and found it was cut off. I picked up every other phone, even the red 'strategic' one for nuclear weapons. Everything was dead," he recalls. The visitors' message was stark: sign a decree imposing a state of emergency to curtail civil liberties and impose order on the rebellious Soviet republics - or resign. Gorbachev refused, the visitors left, and 10 hours later the world was stunned by a series of announcements on state radio and TV that the president was seriously ill and his place was being taken by the Soviet vice-president at the head of an emergency committee. In Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, by then president of Russia, climbed on a tank and led the resistance. The coup collapsed within three days.

"If I hadn't gone away on holiday, this wouldn't have happened," Gorbachev concedes now. "But I was convinced we had overcome all the obstacles." He also admits the crucial factor in tipping the plotters' hand was the fact they had been bugging the room where he and Yeltsin were discussing a cabinet reshuffle. Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, and Dmitri Yazov, the defence minister, heard they would be sacked. "They listened to my conversation with Yeltsin. The KGB was above everybody," Gorbachev says.

Some critics have cast doubt on whether he really resisted the coup, claiming he deliberately isolated himself in the villa, waiting to join whichever side won. The charge always infuriated the ex-president and it still makes him angry. He brought the subject up himself: "People sometimes ask why I didn't break out and escape. I still had my armed bodyguards. But the place was surrounded by rings of troops and there were helicopters overhead. I kept walking around the compound so I could be seen and they'd realise I was not ill. Was I supposed to climb over the fence in secret, like a partisan? It's nonsense."

The theory also breaks down on the fact that Gorbachev, once released, did not join the winning side as soon as he got back to Moscow. Instead of racing to the Russian White House to greet Yeltsin on the balcony and thank him in front of the jubilant crowds who had camped outside for three days, Gorbachev went to the Kremlin. Many saw this as a sign that the Soviet leader did not understand how the balance of power had changed in his absence. "No, that wasn't important," Gorbachev insists when asked if he made a mistake. "I had to get things back under control." The coup failed, he argues, not because of Yeltsin's resistance, but for much deeper reasons - glasnost and perestroika had changed Soviet society, and all attempts to turn back the clock were doomed.

Gorbachev is right and wrong. With hindsight, his career can be seen as a brilliant mixture of tactical improvisations coupled with vision but no strategy. In the aftermath of the August coup it could be said his tactical skills let him down. His greater failure is not to have done enough long-term planning or advance analysis on any of his projects for strategic reform, whether it was economic change, reform of the Communist party, Soviet relations with eastern Europe, or the future of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev the man still commands great affection from those who worked with him as advisers, though their criticism of his policy can be severe. "Gorbachev had no economic programme, nor did any of the people around him," says Nodari Simonia, director of the Institute for World Economy and International Relations, Moscow's premier think-tank. "Even South Korea had one, when it started to open its economy. Gorbachev just told people you must show initiative and start a revolution from below. It was a kind of Maoist cultural revolution, but our people aren't used to showing initiative."

Simonia believes Gorbachev should have started his economic reforms by privatising agriculture and small businesses. Even when he did allow private cooperatives to emerge, alongside the state-owned factories, Simonia says he failed to give them enough support in the face of resistance from party conservatives. "It was important to change the system but not to break it. We needed a 10-year programme," says Andranik Migranyan, a political scientist who served on the presidential council. Like Simonia, he looks with envy at the Chinese model, believing that Beijing's gradualism could have worked in the Soviet Union: "Our intelligentsia was in a rush. They wanted everything quickly, and now they have turned out to be the losers. They used to be a kind of middle class."

Dmitri Furman, another former Gorbachev colleague, is more forgiving. "The fall of Soviet power and the fall of the Communist party were inevitable. But they could have happened in various ways and times, like a death. If a different person had become general secretary, the Soviet system could have lasted another 20 years," he says. He describes Gorbachev's emergence as "a piece of good luck", adding "for a tsar to dismantle the system was more likely than for a Communist party general secretary to do it."

Furman believes Gorbachev's expectation, when he started to reform the political system and allow other parties to be founded, was that the Communist party would continue to dominate for a long period, like the Congress party in India or the Institutional Revolutionary party in Mexico. "This would not have been very democratic, but it would have been better than what happened. The party was an instrument of government and a force for stability," he says. For the outside world, Gorbachev's changes in foreign policy were what caught the imagination. Here too the evidence is that he had no plan, only what he called "new thinking". Its central features were that the superpower nuclear confrontation was unacceptable, and that "universal human values" were more important than class interests.

The interesting question is which came first. Did Gorbachev decide for political and economic reasons that the arms race was too costly and then produce the thesis about the primacy of universal human values (for which he found justificatory quotes from Lenin)? Or did he start with the shift in values and then realise it allowed an end to the arms race?

Yuri Senokosov, of the Moscow School of Political Studies, is the son of parents who suffered under Stalin's repressions. He became a liberal in the 70s. "We were internally liberated long ago and couldn't feel we were part of Gorbachev's changes," he says. All the same, he finds Gorbachev remarkable. "He didn't understand democracy, human rights, private property. But in a strange way he wasn't a Soviet person. He had common sense. He developed this idea of universal human values out of a metaphysical fear of nuclear war. He felt that a clash with the Americans could lead to catastrophe."

For Anatoly Chernyayev, one of Gorbachev's closest foreign policy advisers throughout perestroika , Gorbachev's conversion to nuclear disarmament was a mixture of morality and pragmatism. "He thought it was crazy to run the risk of nuclear war because of ideological differences," he recalls. "He also realised our policy was a lie. Khrushchev started peaceful coexistence, but for him it was just another form of class struggle - 'my system is better than yours, so I'm going to destroy you'."

Chernyayev worked in the central committee's international department, and was in charge of Soviet relations with capitalist countries. He contrasts his group's approach with that of his colleagues who looked after eastern Europe. "We had no policy towards eastern Europe. Gorbachev recognises now that it was a mistake. There was no analysis of policy options. The department was concerned with day-to-day links between the ruling parties," he says. The policy slogan for eastern Europe under perestroika was "freedom of choice". The Soviet party would no longer prescribe how its allies should behave. Moscow would not bully them into following the Soviet model, nor would it ever again intervene to prevent reforms by force.

"Of course Gorbachev never thought they would turn their backs on us. We didn't know what was going on in those countries, nor what potential had built up for breaking away from us. We were better informed about the United Kingdom than about eastern Europe," Chernyayev says. The same could be said about Gorbachev's awareness of what was happening in the Soviet Union in the 14 republics beyond Russia. Gennadi Gerasimov remembers travelling with the president in Lithuania shortly before it declared independence: "He kept telling people it's better to stay together, because we have a common economy. He didn't understand the answer: we want freedom, even if it means poverty," he says.

Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev's last spokesman, believes his boss made a major mistake after the August coup in still trying to patch together a reformed Soviet Union rather than accepting its only chance of survival was as a loose confederation. But Gorbachev's virtue was also a vice - "a propagandist and teacher by nature, he sincerely believed he could convince every one he spoke to," Grachev says.

Gorbachev rejects these criticisms. His extraordinary ability to surmount disaster psychologically must stem from his abiding self-confidence and faith in his value judgments. He will only accept that his judgments about colleagues were often misplaced. Almost all betrayed him. "He forgives any disgusting behaviour. He has no sense of grievance, or resentment," says Dmitri Furman.

The weakest part of Gorbachev's legacy was his handling of eastern Europe and the unification of Germany. Many critics say he should have traded the Soviet withdrawal for concessions from the west, particularly the phasing out of Nato in line with the end of the Warsaw Pact. Both were relics of the cold war. "This talk about universal values was ideological capitulation," Andranik Migranyan argues. "It de-legitimised the party. It
de-legitimised Marxism. Gorbachev should have been more nuanced, and explained that on some issues you need universal values, but on others you need socialist ones."

In Germany the Soviet Union had treaty rights to keep troops, accepted by the wartime allies - the United States, Britain and France. When Gorbachev agreed to give them up, George Bush senior and James Baker, his secretary of state, made oral promises not to expand Nato eastwards. Asked why he did not get them in writing, Gorbachev shows a rare flash of anger: "The Warsaw Pact still existed. How could you get anything in writing on that? Expansion of Nato at that stage would have meant the third world war." He also points out that he got a written commitment that Nato troops and nuclear weapons would not move into eastern Germany as Soviet troops withdrew.

Although Chernyayev claims Gorbachev realises his policy on eastern Europe was a mistake, the ex-president will not admit that publicly. He prefers to take the credit he gets abroad for permitting democracy and de-colonisation. What matters is outcome, not process - as today's clichй has it. "He's re-writing history, and falsely claiming motives and ideas which he did not have at the time," says Furman.

Gorbachev is in an awkward position: he continues to travel the world as an elder statesman; he spent his holiday this summer on Bush senior's estate in Maine; he considers Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, a friend. He has chosen not to criticise people like this too sharply. Does he feel they tricked him? "Well, they used the chance which opened up," he replies with deliberate, though rather wistful, vagueness. "The expansion of Nato is linked to domestic American politics, such as Polish voters. We used to talk about a new world order and strengthening the United Nations. They've stopped talking about that." Then he blames his Soviet colleagues who undermined the Soviet Union. "If the Soviet Union had continued to exist, things would be different."

By the same token, Gorbachev takes a low-key attitude to Putin, who treats him with respect. Gorbachev has criticised the new president's pressure on the media, but otherwise gives him the benefit of the doubt. He has not condemned Putin's war in Chechnya. Bitterness only surfaces when the talk turns to Yeltsin. Gorbachev dismisses him as an "adventurist". Asked if he regrets giving Yeltsin (who was, like Gorbachev, just another provincial party manager) a good job in Moscow, he replies: "The major thing was giving this adventurist the chance to rise by exploiting the contradictions and difficulties of perestroika . If we hadn't made primary errors, such as allowing gaps to develop between purchasing power and supplies in the shops which created those massive shortages, then these adventurists, including Yeltsin, wouldn't have appeared. Yeltsin is basically a result, a tendency."

Where Gorbachev has not changed is in his belief in socialism, at least of the social-democratic kind. He has not swung, as so many Soviet and eastern European ex-communists have done, towards a Thatcherite neo-liberalism. He uses the word "totalitarian" to describe the old Soviet system, but there is no self-flagellating "god that failed" about him. His foundation criticises neo-liberal globalisation and is examining ways to reform the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In the west, traditional ignorance about Russia plus wishful thinking made a hero out of Yeltsin as the "father of democracy", forgetting that it was Gorbachev who ended censorship, freed the press, created the multi-party system, and gave extensive power to a parliament chosen in genuinely contested elections.

The slow and painful death of his lifelong companion, Raisa, in the summer of 1999 produced an unexpected wave of sympathy and nostalgia for Gorbachev. Many Russians reacted as though the couple's manifest devotion to each other was an icon of stability and purity in a competitive new world. The two-day farewell when her body lay in an open coffin in a hall in central Moscow attracted queues stretching for more than a mile. Naina, Yeltsin's wife, came twice to pay her respects, though her husband stayed away.

Gorbachev still has a government dacha, or country house, outside Moscow. But he spends most of his time in his city flat overlooking the Moscow river. Since Raisa's death, his only child, Irina (who divorced a few years ago), has moved in with her two children, Xenia, 20, a student at the prestigious Institute of International Relations, and Anastasia, 13, still at school. Irina trained as a doctor but recently became vice-president of the Gorbachev Foundation and its day-to-day manager.

The ex-president has few hobbies. He is still a man driven by work and hyperactivity. A rare pleasure is drama, and particularly visits to the Moscow Arts Theatre, created by Stanislavsky, and the home of imaginative productions of 19th-century Russian classics. Arkady Ostrovsky, a theatre buff, recalls hearing about an incident when Gorbachev attended a back-stage party at the theatre. Much the worse for wear, an actor suddenly called out to the ex-president, "Go on, sing something." Everyone froze with embarrassment, except Gorbachev. "It was a few months after Raisa died," Ostrovsky says. "The crowd gave him space, and he sang Lermontov's poem 'Out on the road I go alone. The flinty track shines through the mist.' The quality of his voice amazed everyone. There wasn't a dry eye in the house."

Life at a glance Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

Born: March 2 1931, Privolnoye, southern Russia.

Education: Krasnogvardeiskoye high school; Moscow state university.

Married: 1953 Raisa Maksimovna Titorenko (one daughter, Irina, born 1957).

Career: Lawyer, state prosecutor's office Stavropol 1955; first secretary Stavropol city party committee '66-70; first secretary Stavropol regional committee '70-78; secretary central committee in charge of agriculture, Moscow '78; full member of Politburo '80; general secretary central committee CPSU '85-91; elected Soviet President by Congress of People's Deputies 1990-91.

Some books: Perestroika: New Thinking For Our Country And The World (1987);

The August Coup: The Truth And The Lessons ('91); The Search for a New

Beginning: Developing A New Civilisation ('95); Memoirs ('96).