Remembering Gorbachev

In early January 1997, I met my boyhood hero. It was in the grounds of his wintry dacha outside Moscow. A man in late middle age, though still sprightly, he wore a padded anorak against the cold and a dark patterned scarf. Snow lay fat on the bony branches, with more softly falling.

His boots creaked over the frost on the pathways as we wandered and chatted: me in my broken Russian, he in his easily recognisable, gentle southern accent.

It had been five years since he had signed away the Soviet Union at a pen stroke, and a little longer since he had been de facto discarded from genuine power. There were no bodyguards in evidence. This was yesterday’s man and nobody’s prize.

But Mikhail Gorbachev still sounded like a man with a bear in the political fight: and a still-burning grudge against his nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, the man who had engineered his downfall.

Yeltsin was at this point hospitalised. Once a figurehead of resistance to power, he was now bloated and sickly, and ordinarily very drunk. He had needlessly started and thoroughly fouled up a catastrophic war in Chechnya, in between flogging off Russia’s assets for a song. It is thanks to him that ‘democracy’ remains a four-letter word in the country.

‘There are many similarities between Leonid Brezhnev and Yeltsin: how they walk the same way, their same difficulty in speaking, the same pretence of working two or three hours a day, when actually no real work is done,’ Gorbachev told me, his brown eyes twinkling beneath the peak of a fur hat concealing that famous birthmark.

‘I took part in just this kind of sham when I was a Politburo member under Brezhnev. Such were the rules of the game,’ he added with a wry smile.

Astonishingly, Yeltsin had been re-elected the previous year, despite starting the campaign on single-digit ratings. This was in large part thanks to the wholesale rigging of broadcast media, lavishly funded by those now known as ‘oligarchs’. (It was a tactic Vladimir Putin, then sticky-fingered with bribes from his international trade job at the St Petersburg’s mayor’s office, may well have taken note of.)

By comparison with the bed-ridden Yeltsin, Gorbachev that snowy January afternoon remained a picture of unexhausted vigour.

Another Spectator writer suggested this week that it was thanks to Gorbachev’s reforms that her English father was able to travel to the USSR and meet her Soviet mother-to-be – and therefore, in a way, it’s because of Gorbachev that she came into this world.

In turn, I could also speculate that it’s thanks to Gorbachev that I exist – along with many others. Because one reason for his continuing rock-star popularity – for me, he was bigger than Lennon – is that with his calm and measured demeanour on the world stage our gut-felt dread of nuclear holocaust finally subsided. Perhaps we were not destined to be flamed in our worried beds in the hundreds of thousands?

As children, we were brought up with ‘Protect and Survive’ public service films. Take some of your doors off their hinges and create a kind of lean-to, was among the suggestions of the stern, headmasterly voiceover. It is very hard, looking back, to see how such an arrangement might have saved me and my younger brothers from either the blast, the heat, or the fall-out. But at the time, as a small child, I only remember wondering how my dad would ever manage this feat of eschatological do-it-yourself, given that his use for hand tools was limited to denting his thumb and swearing at volume. What on earth would become of us?

Gorbachev’s self-imposed mission had been, in fact, to preserve rather than abolish Soviet rule by adapting it to the modern world. And the abstruse Russian words for his efforts that became household terms in the west – glasnost, perestroika – were ultimately the catalysts of his unanticipated decline, and that of the country he led.

Back at his dacha, he wasn’t finished with Yeltsin. ‘Politically, the man has outlived himself,’ Gorbachev said, adding that he was sure Yeltsin would not resign. ‘He doesn’t have it in him.’

But on New Year’s Eve in 1999, Yeltsin did exactly that, handing over power to the then callow, grey man of St Petersburg’s smoke-filled city hall rooms, ex-middle-ranking secret policeman, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. It was another pivot in Russia’s history that Gorbachev had failed to foresee.

Mikhail Gorbachev is remembered with bitterness today in former colonial cities like Vilnius, Baku and Tbilisi for the vicious way in which Soviet troops put down uprisings as the empire fractured. But abroad he held to what became known as the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’ – allowing crumbling Warsaw Pact countries to ‘do it their way’.

In the end, Gorbachev’s greatest quality was not political acumen. Perhaps it was a fundamentally good nature. You don’t get to run the Politburo without very sharp elbows, of course. But he was worlds away from decrepit Brezhnev and ruthless Andropov.

And unlike them, he had the courage to entrust Russia’s future to the Russians themselves. It threw down a challenge to the nation. After the infatuation with Putin, maybe they will take it up again.

Meanwhile, the Russian leader has decided he will not attend Gorbachev’s funeral which takes place today. Even by Putin’s standards, to have done so would have been a gross hypocrisy – he has declared the dissolution of the USSR a ‘geopolitical catastrophe’, after all.

Also, ever mindful of the public mood, Putin will know well that ‘Gorby’ is still a despised person in his homeland. Why risk doing even the slightest honour?

Finally, this: how might one hold a state funeral for the president of a country that, at his own decision, ceased to exist a very long time ago? It would be a very Russian irony, and one I think Gorbachev would have been quick to appreciate.