New Satan takes over in hell, wants to install air-conditioning. That is Memoirs by Mikhail Gorbachev in brief. And brevity is a thing of which you will have a high, fine appreciation after 769 densely printed, generously sized pages containing, in total, more than 350,000 words. Memoirs is an impressive work-if you drop it on your foot.
Marx spoke of the ash heap of history and here it is. The prose style is appalling: "The need for major changes was in the air, as the saying goes." Perhaps the translator is an idiot. But "Camp David is a beautiful spot in the woods, designed for recreation, with many a shady nook and sports lawns and buildings," can be blamed on no translator. The third person voice is used to such Bob Dolerous extent that consciousness of authorship begins to fog. "Many people still suspect Gorbachev of trying to save the party nomenklatura," appears on the page, and you think, "What witless, purblind pinko sap is writing this?" Then you remember. It is the fellow capable of penning the sentence, "My speech started off like Hamlet's famous soliloquy: 'How to deepen and make irreversible revolutionary perestroika, which on the initiative and under the leadership of the party has been launched in our country-this is the fundamental question...' " To which, if I remember my Shakespeare, Ophelia replies, "Sweet Prince, take your Prozac."
But the content of Memoirs is far more dreadful than the style. The book is full of lies: "...democracy can be developed under a one party system."; "To us arms negotiations were a method of consolidating the efforts of different states in order to achieve results that would benefit all parties involved."; "I absolutely reject the accusation that the Soviet leadership intentionally held back the truth about Chernobyl."
Gorbachev, however, is more than just a false witness, he is a big wind pudding and bull shoveller: "Even today I cannot reveal certain facts to the reader. Still, I can assure you that we were not bluffing. Our studies had proven that the potential answer to SDI could meet the requirements..."
When Gorbachev is not making up things, he is being stupid in the bien pensant manner achievable only through upper percentile IQ test scores and years of university study. He goes to Bulgaria and says: "It seemed an Eden of orchards and flowers." He visits western Europe and notices almost nothing except "that public education and medical services are organised more fairly in our country. And our emphasis on public transport is better..." And as the Soviet Union comes apart around his ears he is shocked to find, "The people seemed almost to welcome the event!" If you can imagine.
Of course mere prevarication and intellectual impairment do not make an autobiography, not if you are a Time Man of the Decade, international peace prize-winning world statesman and, according to Vanity Fair, the fellow Jack Germonde most admires on earth. Therefore, Gorbachev leaves plenty of typespace for sanctimony:
"My first book was a success... royalties were used for charitable purposes... I might add that I donated both my Nobel prize and the Fiuggi prize-a total of more than $1m-to the same purposes."
And whining: "Rightwing circles in the west feared a renewed, dynamic and more democratic Soviet Union, offering peace and cooperation to other nations."
And further sanctimony: "Even when [Yeltsin] began to shower me with accusations and insults of the lowest kind... I never lowered myself to his level of kitchen squabbling."
But it gets worse. No amount of lousy verbiage and nonsensical purport can match the awful fact that Gorbachev's personality shines forth from every leaf of his gross tome. And, Lord, he is a dull dog. "As I write this," he yaps, "it occurs to me that the reader may weary of the details of harvests, droughts, irrigation, road networks, and so on." Then he gives more details. "There were endless plans, developments, plenums, memoranda to the central committee, 'wheedling' the big bosses, clashes with the 'retrogrades.' " Not one goes undescribed. Even when he is embarked upon an interesting subject, interest flags. During the 1991 attempted coup Gorbachev was held hostage in a Black Sea resort by ageing hardline Communist party central committee members and he makes the experience as dull as... being held hostage in a Black Sea resort by ageing hardline Communist party central committee members.
We learn from Memoirs that Gorbachev went to law school, does not drink and had an adolescent passion for amateur theatrics. A teetotalling lawyer who wants to act! Gorbachev's essay subject for his final examination at college was "Stalin-our combat glory, Stalin-the elation of our youth." He got the highest mark. Gorbachev criticises Khrushchev because, "this 'leadership style'... would often end up being vulgar. The spontaneity and folksiness occasionally turned into open boorishness, not to mention the foul language and heavy drinking."
It is a small step from looking down upon others to looking up to oneself and Gorbachev takes it. As he says about hearing the claptrap speeches from politburo members when he was named general secretary, "I was stirred-never before did I have a chance to hear... such great appreciation."
A man so well stocked with self-seeking, self-consequence, self-righteousness and self-approval can only be expected to be filled with self-pity, too. Talking about the failure of the Communist party to hold on to power, Gorbachev says: "I do not think this is a subject for sarcastic comments or cynical laughter." And in the epilogue he quotes himself telling a journalist: "I do not know anyone against whom so many slings and arrows have been launched as against Gorbachev at present."
If Gorbachev sounds slightly insane there, it is nothing out of the ordinary. He claims that, after the stalemated Icelandic summit with Reagan, "one journalist wrote... 'When the general secretary presented the failure of the Reykjavik meeting as a victory, Raisa Gorbachev was sitting in the conference hall, looking with awe at her husband, with tears rolling down her face.'" Hear him on his marriage: "Our life, our activities and even our appearance aroused jealousy and envy in some. But nature had moulded us this way. It seemed to some that our life was almost a fairy tale, full of pleasure. But it was hard work-although it was joyous-for we were inspired by high ideals."
Criticised for the un-Kremlinish act of dragging his missus around in public, Gorbachev responds, "the western centres of psychological warfare pressed this point in order to discredit the Soviet leader." Those western centres of psychological warfare are good. When Gorbachev ran for president of Russia this June he got about 1 per cent of the vote.
Memoirs puts to rest the old question: are leftists crazy or are they charlatans? The answer is yes. Gorbachev is well aware that Marxism is ignorant, useless and vile. Three of his father's siblings died in the Soviet-induced famine of 1933. His paternal grandfather was exiled to Siberia in 1934 after failing to meet a sowing quota for which no seeds were available. His maternal grandfather, a loyal party hack, was accused of membership in a "counter-revolutionary rightwing Trotskyist organisation," and was jailed and tortured in 1937. Raisa's grandfather, arrested on nearly identical charges, was executed the same year. "The super-centralised attempt to control every single detail of life in an immense state sapped the vital energies of society," to put it in the author's own lame words.
And yet Gorbachev has not a clue that Marxism is ignorant, useless and vile. He thinks it needs to be tweaked, "keeping only social, economic and scientific-technological strategies under central direction and leaving everything else to the discretion of the industrial collectives." With liberty and justice for all.
How can these two mutually exclusive ideas of Marxism be contained in one head-in even the double-domed, global consciousness-sized noggin of Gorbachev? Easy. The Communist party was Gorbachev's ticket out of dogpatch, away from the village of Privolnoe in the hayseed (during the rare non-drought years when they could grow any) region of Stavropol.
Gorbachev does not give many details about how he rose from assistant combine operator helping screw up the local wheat harvest to general secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union helping screw up the world. Or, rather, he gives nothing but details. The larger double deals and back stabs are left to the imagination as are Gorbachev's techniques of intrigue. Although, here and there certain hints are dropped: "I studied eagerly and passionately."; "My work and Raisa Maksimovna's profession compelled us to make a great effort at 'self-improvement.' "
"I had often met Brezhnev... He invariably showed genuine interest in my concerns... Therefore I was not surprised when he suddenly asked... 'Well, Mikhail Sergeyevich, how are things going in your sheep empire?' The Stavropol krai accounted for 27 per cent of all the fine wool produced in the Russian federation. In early summer, after lambing, thousands of flocks grazed in the steppes: a total of 10m sheep. An impressive sight, I can tell you..."
The man is a first class toad-eater and suck. And he probably eliminated his enemies by boring them to death. No job is too disgusting for him. "I accepted his offer to transfer to the... committee as deputy head of the agitation and propaganda department." Gorbachev wiggles and oozes his way to the top.
And what a top it is. Brezhnev was bughouse. "I remember a politburo meeting where the chairman had a mental block and could not remember the subject of the discussion," says Gorbachev. "Whenever abuses and mismanagement were mentioned to [Brezhnev], tears would well up in his eyes and he would ask, bewilderment in his voice: 'Is it really that bad?' "
Politburo meetings were incomprehensible: "It was a long table, and when Leonid Ilyich consulted with someone on one side of the table... those of us sitting at the end of the table on the other side could not hear what was being said." Which is probably just as well since Gorbachev has no discernible sense of humour and politburo pronoun-cements were mostly of a hilarious type: "The central committee's resolution had designated the north Caucasus as an area where wheat was to be grown on irrigated lands." Whether it wanted to or not.
The politburo members did not know what they were talking about. Or, as Gorbachev puts it, "The established pattern of disseminating information to the leadership of the country failed to provide objective data to manage the life of the society." Himself being a good example. Gorbachev says, "The food situation was bad and it continued to be so. In fact, it became even worse." And in the next paragraph he says, "the grain yield increased by 26.6m tonnes, meat by 2.5m tonnes, and milk by over 10m tonnes."
As befits a fully centralised socialist state, some of this idiocy was planned. The politburo actually passed laws to keep itself moronic. "All statistics concerning the military-industrial complex were top secret, inaccessible even to the members of the politburo." And when Gorbachev took over as head of state he continued to believe in such nonsense as the USSR having "military and strategic parity" with the US and that President Reagan failed to respond to Soviet arms-control overtures because he was, perhaps, "overruled by the powerful American military-industrial complex." Gorbachev recounts with bland credulity how "Yevgeny Primakov, who headed a Soviet delegation there, reported a noticeable swing in American public opinion in favour of the Soviet Union, particularly at the grassroots level."
So Brezhnev dies, Chernenko dies, Andropov dies and everybody else in the Kremlin is getting lost on the way to the samovar. By chronological default, Gorbachev becomes boss. He knows something is amiss. "Why was our system so unresponsive to innovation?" His answer is to make the USSR live up to its ideals. Wait a minute, the USSR's ideas are materialism, atheism, class warfare and the subjugation of individual freedom to an all-powerful state. The only thing the Soviet Union ever had going for it was that it did not work. In a Soviet Union that worked, everybody would be dead.
But Gorbachev is building bridges to the future. He will restructure Soviet politics and economics along Chinese lines. "I note for clarity that these ideas were similar to Deng Xiaoping's reform methods," says Gorbachev. Or maybe not. "I am not convinced by the opinions of some of our politicians that we should have followed the Chinese path." Anyhow, things are going to be real, real different: "There were significant changes occurring in the very understanding of socialism... from planning by directive and decree, it was gradually to become planning by recommendation and forecasting." The KGB would come around and recommend you kiss your ass goodbye because the forecast was they were going to shoot you.
Meanwhile there is an uprising in Tiananmen Square and the Berlin wall is falling. A keen mind like Gorbachev's cannot help but understand the significance of these events: "To avoid dangerous excesses, the checkpoints to the west were opened."
"I agreed with the logic of [Deng Xiaoping's] arguments. We are running into the same general problems. We have our hotheads too."
Communist defeats in Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and even Afghanistan are barely mentioned. And the USSR's timid piffling during Operation Desert Storm is glossed as anti-war diplomacy. Gorbachev just does not notice that that gruesome thunder lizard, the Soviet empire, is everywhere in massive death throes. Although to be fair to the man, he was very busy at the time. Gorbachev was busy screwing the Soviet economy with the stroke of a pen:
"At the end of 1990 I signed several decrees, proposed by the government, on financial matters, which, it turned out, contained serious flaws. For example, one of the decrees set up non-budget funds for the stabilisation of the economy. Essentially, they were 'generating' money from nothing."
He was busy establishing "a warm personal rapport" with Rajiv Gandhi: "I was deeply impressed by the way he organically combined the profound philosophic tradition of India and the east with a perfect knowledge and comprehension of European culture." And, he was busy formulating a numbskull five point peace plan for Nagorno-Karabakh. Key actions to be taken: first, government analysis of situation to be published in the press; second, Gorbachev appears on television; third, a debate in the Supreme Soviet; fourth, various reports made public; fifth, administrative agencies were to decide on the stationing of troops at flash points, but without imposing a curfew.
Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jim-my Carter of the communist bloc. The Russians hate him. We should, too. Of course, there is always a certain kind of person who identifies with and approves of the Gorbachev type. Gorbachev, for instance. And Carter. They are worse than evil. True evil at least has the virtue of being rare. But the woods-and the steppes and the plains-are full of Mikhails. He is the person who makes evil possible with his myopia, his pieties, his perverse alternations between hot air egotism and lickspittle humility. On judgement day Gorbachev will not be standing up with Stalin and Mao. He will be on his knees, shining their shoes.
Memoirs
Mikhail Gorbachev
London: Doubleday 1996, ?25
