As Mikhail Gorbachev tightens his grip on the Soviet Union following the 27th Communist Party Congress, it`s time to take another look at the man American journalists praised when he came to power one year ago.
When Gorbachev assumed office, American news magazines told us the new general secretary, while ”tough” and ”smart,” was also ”charming,”
”modest,” ”affable” and ”the Politburo`s answer to the Great Communicator.” His ”youth,” ”energy” and ”ideas,” we were assured, could ”profoundly change” the Soviet Union.
And even after a year, the Western press is full of enthusiastic references to Gorbachev`s ”vision of the past, the present and the future.” Some observers think he is bringing about a Soviet renaissance.
Is all this true? Is any of it true? Perhaps we can glean some clues from Gorbachev`s biography. Pravda informs us, for example, that Gorbachev was born to a peasant family near Stavropol in March, 1931, and that from 1946 to 1950 he worked as a machinery operator for a ”machine tractor station.”
Sparse as they are, these data are suggestive, for it was not every peasant who could contemplate having children in 1931, when the Communist Party was at the height of its merciless drive to collectivize farms and every farmer of the slightest prosperity was deported or killed. There was no place to hide from the party`s inquisition.
The number who died is lost to history, since the 1937 Soviet census was suppressed and its compilers liquidated. We can only approximate the casualties at 10 million, a figure Stalin mentioned casually to Churchill in August, 1942.
In the rabid hunt for ”kulaks” and ”counterrevolutionaries,” it is virtually certain that Gorbachev`s family members ran with Stalin`s hounds, and in return for their services obtained positions in the Stavropol Party apparat.
That the family flourished in the purges of the late 1930s, as well as the German invasion, is confirmed by Gorbachev`s relatively favored job with a machine tractor station after the war.
Although the labor shortage caused by the war would normally have required teenagers to work in 1946–particularly in Stavropol, a rich agricultural area overrun by the German advance to the Caucasus in 1942–the significant point is the place of Gorbachev`s employment. Machine tractor stations controlled indispensable farm equipment and their political personnel functioned as Stalin`s enforcers in the Soviet countryside.
In 1950, Gorbachev attended the ”juridical faculty” at Moscow State University, from which he graduated five years later. This unusual opportunity again confirms his family`s fidelity to Stalin, for without a spotless political background he would not have been admitted.
His admission also indicates that neither he nor his relatives spent time under German occupation, since Soviet authorities, in the twilight of the Stalin era, would view such an experience with extreme suspicion.
The approximate American equivalent to Gorbachev, therefore, is the scion of a Southern politician sent to an Ivy League college to acquire polish and personal connections. As an added benefit, Gorbachev`s studies exempted him from military service.
But the above-mentioned juridical faculty of Moscow State University did not in 1955, and does not now, produce anything like what Americans would call a lawyer. In the Soviet view, expressed with brutal clarity by purge-trial prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky in 1948, ”law is merely the will of the dominant class, elevated into statute.”
The dominant classes in the Soviet Union are proclaimed to be the workers and peasants, whose interests are exclusively represented by the Communist Party. Thus the courts, instead of being grounded in some conception of neutral justice, are simply designed to execute the policy of the Communist Party and the Soviet regime.
In light of these doctrines, it is not surprising that Gorbachev formally joined the Communist Party while an MSU student at the relatively early age of 21. It is also significant that during this period the party was engaged in purging ”rootless cosmopolitans” (Jews), and that Gorbachev–a top party activist at the university–is remembered as a dogmatic and arrogant bully.
Thus, Gorbachev`s introduction to ”internal party drama” came in the early 1950s, not during the anti-Stalin campaign of 1961.
The anti-Jewish campaign spawned the infamous ”Doctors` Plot” of early 1953, and there are sober and cautious individuals who are convinced that only Stalin`s death forestalled a slaughter that would have rivaled the Holocaust. After graduating from Moscow University, Gorbachev returned to Stavropol in 1955 to engage in Communist Party work. Voluntarily quitting Moscow is sufficiently unusual to suggest a fall into disfavor, but it is likely that he returned–or was assigned–to Stavropol because of his family connections.
Thus, the image that emerges has little to do with a bright peasant lad working his way to the top, in a Slavic rerun of an Horatio Alger novella. Instead, we find the spoiled heir of a Stalinist butcher capitalizing on his family connections and clout.
Gorbachev`s subsequent career as a rising Stavropol apparatchik confirms this impression. With the exception of a brief setback in 1958, when he apparently took the wrong side in Khrushchev`s quarrel with Malenkov`s ”anti- party group” and was temporarily demoted, Gorbachev`s entire career is attributable to a succession of powerful patrons. The most prominent of these were Stalinist ideologue Mikhail Suslov and KGB boss Yuri Andropov.
Nothing in Gorbochev`s biography or public utterances reflects the slightest familiarity with literature, science, art or culture. His only known specialty is agriculture, which during his tenure as Central Committee secretary (starting in 1978) fell to a level even more depressing than its usually abject state.
There is one thing, however, that Gorbachev certainly became familiar with during the Brezhnev era–rampant and universal corruption. A Soviet joke recounts how the police arrest a Moscow drunk who claims to be the manager of a meat-processing factory. When the police call his wife, however, she tells them her husband is not a meat-processing manager: ”He`s a member of the Academy of Sciences, but when he drinks he gets delusions of grandeur.”
In a permanently famished society, where the graft of a mere meathouse manager is a subject for envious jokes, the opportunities open to the party boss of a rich agricultural district such as Stavropol stagger the
imagination. Raisa Gorbacheva`s much-applauded taste for foreign luxuries bears witness that her husband`s opportunities were not entirely wasted.
Gorbachev`s public conduct since becoming general secretary has been fully consistent with his background–arrogant and aggressive. Although his criticisms have been sharper than those of his predecessors, he has said nothing inconsistent with the most orthodox Leninist dogma.
His message to the Soviet people is not the hope of a New Deal but exhortations to ”intensive labor” and appeals to ”scientific-technol ogical progress.” His utterances on foreign affairs range from dog-eared propaganda to belligerent threats, while his policies entail increased slaughter in Afghanistan and intervention in Central America.
Even as the Soviet economy staggers under the strains of socialist mismanagement, Gorbachev`s propaganda apparatus cranks out fawning plaudits to the general secretary.
For example, the talentless boss of the Soviet Writers Union, Georgy Markov, has produced a sycophantic novel describing a party secretary, Sobolev, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Gorbachev. It is more than a little ominous that Sobolev`s hero and model–explicitly named–is none other than Joseph Stalin.
”Charming” and ”affable” indeed.
