Politically speaking, Mikhail Gorbachev has suffered a defeat. The "democratic reforms" that he tried to carry out in the Soviet Union ended in its disintegration. But that's not the only result of his six and a half years of leadership, a period in which he made two unprecedented achievements. He brought Russia (the Soviet Union at the time) closer to real democracy than it's been at any other time in its centuries-long history. Together with his partners - US presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush - he came closer to the end of the Cold War than anyone else before him.
Of course, it would be ludicrous to assume that Gorbachev could have possibly completed everything that he started. Few reformers, even the most outstanding historic figures, have proven capable of seeing their mission through in full. This is particularly true of those who launched big changes, the character and duration of which generate more obstacles and problems than its authors (with the exception of Stalin) can possibly overcome in their lifetime. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, the reconstruction of American capitalism, went on, albeit with several digressions, for many years after the death of its author. The majority of such leaders merely open political doors and provide access to alternative roads that were completely unknown and unheard of before, hoping, as Gorbachev did, that what they've started will be irreversible.
The historic chance to modernise Russia gradually and put an end to the Cold War on the basis of consensus was Gorbachev's legacy. The elites and leaders who came to power after him, both in Moscow and Washington, completely wasted this legacy. As a result, this historic chance was misinterpreted and almost entirely forgotten. Despite all the Gorbachev-inspired democratic breakthroughs, the role of "the father of Russian democracy" was instead given to his successor, Boris Yeltsin. Now, America's leading journalists and representatives of Washington's political establishment are feeding the public the notion that Yeltsin was to thank for putting an end to totalitarianism in Russia putting the country on the road to democracy, and encouraging the first manifestations of democratic attitudes.
So, what is to blame for this historical amnesia? In post-Soviet Russia, the main motive stemmed from political expediency. Worried about the public's indignation over their role in the Soviet Union's collapse and Gorbachev's unfading popularity abroad, Yeltsin and his entourage announced that the first Russian president was "the father of Russian democracy", whereas Gorbachev was nothing but an awkward reformer who tried "to save communism".
In the West, particularly in the United States, the revision of history was determined by ideology. Gorbachev's historic reforms and Washington's earlier hopes to see them carried out were instantly erased from the public's memory after 1991, when the Soviet Union's disintegration and America's supposed victory in the Cold War laid the beginning of America's new ideology of triumphalism. The entire history of the "defeated" Soviet enemy was presented by the US media as "seven decades of a tough and merciless police state", a "wound inflicted on the people", which tortured the nation "for the larger part of the century", and an experience that proved to be "an even bigger evil than everyone had initially thought..."
American scholars, some of whom were also influenced by this new wave of triumphalism, reacted in the same way. With few exceptions, they returned to the old Sovietological axioms that the Soviet system had always been incorrigible and its fate predetermined. The Gorbachev-proposed evolutionary middle-of-the-road change was called a chimera, similar to the New Economic Policy, and an attempt to reform something that simply cannot be reformed. The Soviet Union's demise was attributed to a lack of alternatives.
The revision of Soviet history required a revision of the last Soviet leader's opinion. Gorbachev, at one time seen as "the number one radical of the Soviet Union", a man who was applauded for his courage, was now accused of lacking resolve, productivity and radicalism.
The idea that Gorbachev's pro-democratic reforms and other reforms were not radical enough makes it rather difficult to understand the fundamental difference between his and Yeltsin's approaches. From Peter the Great to Stalin, the main method of authoritative change in Russia was revolution from the top, which imposed painful changes on the public. The measures taken by Yeltsin in the early 1990s, which were dubbed "shock therapy", continued this vicious trend, albeit with a different goal.
In the meantime, Gorbachev categorically renounced this tradition. From the get go, he was prepared to lead the country through change without any bloodshed for the first time in its long history. As he saw it, the perestroika was a historic chance to modernise the country by way of reforms, a revolutionary process in content but evolutionary in form. And Gorbachev paid dearly for his "democratic reformation" (a kind of heresy for any ruler) as an alternative to the Russian tradition of forced transformation.
Amid the political and social upheavals of the post-Soviet 1990s, Russian historians and other intellectuals, in contrast to their American colleagues, started to rethink the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse. An increasing number of them came to the conclusion that Gorbachev's perestroika or "non-disastrous evolution", even after he stepped down, offered a less traumatic and costly way to carry out democratic and market-oriented reforms than under Yeltsin. Russian historians and politicians are sure to discuss this issue for many years to come, but the fate of the country's democratisation demonstrates why some of them are already sold on the idea that Gorbachev's approach was a "missed alternative".
Let's take a look at what experts call the "trajectory" of the four main components of any democracy, which Russia followed before and after the Soviet Union's collapse in December 1991.
The presence of a considerable number of independent media is indispensable for other elements of democracy, from honest elections and mechanisms for limiting power to the judicial system. Gorbachev introduced "glasnost", the gradual reduction of official censorship, as the first major reform in 1985-1986. As a result, a huge number of independent publications popped up in 1990-1991, and, more importantly at that time, the government's television and radio networks and the press were, for the most part, freed from censorship. The reversal only set in after Yeltsin's victory over the GKChP (the State Emergency Committee) in August and the Soviet Union's demise in December of 1991. In both cases, Yeltsin shut down several opposition newspapers and brought back the Kremlin's censorship of TV broadcasts. These were only temporary measures. Yeltsin established control over the post-Soviet Russian media for an even longer term after the military destruction of parliament in 1993 and "privatisation decrees", which handed over the bulk of he country's wealth, media included, to a small group of people known as oligarchs.
The 1996 presidential elections, which Yeltsin very nearly lost to a communist candidate, marked the end of the truly free and independent national media in post-Soviet Russia. Even though some pluralistic attitudes and independent journalism continued to exist, their degradation was relentless.
Russian elections followed the same trajectory. The first alternative national elections in Soviet history were held in March 1989. Half of the deputies to the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, the country's new legislature, were elected from organisations rather than by popular vote, but this was still a big democratic breakthrough in Gorbachev's democratisation campaign. More advancements took place soon after. To this day, the elections to the legislature of the Russian Federation in early 1990 remain the most free and honest parliamentary elections ever seen in Russia. The same can be said of the new presidential elections in Russia in 1991, where the rebellious Yeltsin won by a landslide over the Kremlin's candidate.
Prior to the Soviet Union's disintegration, there were no parliamentary or presidential elections held in Russia, and those held afterwards always kept competition at a "safe" level and became increasingly less free and honest. By 1996, the authorities had developed enough "political technology" for "controlled democracy", a term and idea later came to be associated with Vladimir Putin: using funds on the biggest scale possible, controlling the media, clipping the powers of independent nominees and carrying out election fraud. These were the methods used to guarantee effective power no matter who ruled Russia.
Significantly, Yeltsin's election as Russian president in 1991 was the first and the last case of the executive government freely passing from the Kremlin to the opposition candidate. In 2000, Yeltsin handed over power to Putin by means of "controlled elections", and Putin made Dmitry Medvedev his successor in 2008 in exactly the same way.
Yet, no other democratic achievement from Gorbachev's era was of such major importance and underwent such fatal degradation as the Soviet legislature elected by the whole nation in 1989-1990 at his suggestion. It may be possible for democracy to exist without independent executive power, but it's impossible without a sovereign parliament or its equivalent - the only irreplaceable institute of representative power. From tsars to general secretaries, Russian authoritarianism has always been distinguished by the unconditional dominance of executive power and the absence or weakness of a representative assembly, be it the tsarist Duma prior to the 1917 revolution, the Constituent Assembly of 1917-1918, or the Soviet leaders elected by the entire nation.
In this context, the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, held in 1989, and its Russian republican analogue in 1990, each of which elected its own Supreme Council as permanent parliament, went down in history as the most groundbreaking achievements of Gorbachev's democratic reforms. The first congress operated as an increasingly important constitutional convention, as it adopted laws to promote the Soviet Union's democratisation by dividing powers that had always previously been a privilege of tsars and commissars, establishing all kinds of investigative committees and acting in opposition to Gorbachev. The second congress acted in the same way in Russia. Its most important legislative move was the institution of the elective presidential office for Yeltsin.
Twenty years later, the post-Soviet Russian parliament, renamed the Duma, became almost an exact replica of its weak and obedient predecessors of the tsarist period, while presidential power, on the contrary, became nearly omnipotent.
Finally, viable democracy requires a ruling elite with access open, at least from time to time, to representatives of other parties, non-governmental agencies and civil society. By the beginning of the perestroika, the self-appointed Soviet nomenclature (the governing establishment) had concentrated all the political power in its own hands, thereby effectively preventing other forces from taking part in politics at all. This monopoly was broken up only when new political figures from different social and political circles appeared: when Gavriil Popov, a doctor of economics, and Anatoly Sobchak, a professor of law, were elected mayors of Moscow and St Petersburg, respectively. This was yet another democratic breakthrough in Gorbachev's era. In 1990, such figures were a meaningful minority in the Soviet parliament and the majority in its Russian counterpart.
After 1991, this achievement was also discarded and relegated to the trash bin of history. The post-Soviet ruling elite transformed into a narrow group made up mostly of the leader's personal entourage, financial tycoons and their representatives, government officials and siloviks (people from the armed forces and security agencies). Although the growth in the latter's number is usually associated with the advent of Putin, a former KGB lieutenant-colonel, this process had in fact already begun not long after the Soviet Union's collapse.
Civil society did not make much progress, either. Regardless of what the so-called "promoters" of civil society say, civil society always exists, even when authoritarian regimes are in power. But in post-Soviet Russia, the majority of civil society's representatives reverted back to pre-perestroika inactivity by the end of the 1990s and preferred to either act sporadically or do absolutely nothing at all. There are several factors to blame for this, from fatigue and disappointment , and the state's reoccupation of the political sphere, to the adverse effects of Yeltsin's "shock therapy" of the early 1990s, which had effectively quashed the once massive and professional Soviet middle class - the existence of which was generally seen as a prerequisite of a stable democracy.
Put simply, these four signs indicate that after the Soviet Union's collapse, Russia's democratisation followed a downward trajectory. Other political processes moved in the same direction. Constitutionalism and the supremacy of law were the leading principles of Gorbachev's reforms. Granted, they may not have always prevailed, but they were certainly much more pronounced than the methods Yeltsin used to destroy the entire constitutional order, from the parliament and the Constitutional Court, which had only just started to regain its strength, to the revived local Soviets. Up until the end of the 1990s, Yeltsin ruled mostly by decrees. In one year alone, he issued 2,300. There were plenty of ups and downs in the official attitude toward human rights, another sensitive indicator of the stage of democracy.
The conclusion is obvious: Soviet democratisation, no matter how dictatorial the system's history had been in the past, was a lost democratic opportunity for Russia, an evolutionary road that the country failed to pass.
Now, 20 years after the Soviet Union's demise, the majority of Western analysts agree that Russia is undergoing a profound "de-democratisation". Attempts to explain when and why the process started reveal more major differences in the reasoning of Western, particularly American, authors and their Russian counterparts.
After erasing Gorbachev's reforms from "evil Soviet history", and crediting Yeltsin with democratisation, the majority of American analysts have lashed out at Putin for leading Russia in the opposite direction. Very few American experts hold a different view and blame Yeltsin rather than Putin for the relapse of democratic reforms.
Even fewer analysts in the United States wonder (apparently for fear of expressing doubts about "one of the greatest moments in history") if this backslide didn't in fact start earlier, at the time of the Soviet Union's disintegration. It's not hard to understand why journalists and politicians wouldn't want to spend much time pondering this question, but even respectable scholars, who later regretted their optimism about Yeltsin's government, choose not to revise their position on the Soviet Union's dissolution. They should think better of this, because the way in which the Soviet Union disintegrated (in circumstances which Western experts are usually either completely silent about or turn into a myth) heralded only bad things for Russia's future.
By and large, there were many formidable parallels between the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the tsarist system in 1917. In both cases, the method used to put an end to the old order caused almost complete destruction of the Russian statehood, which in turn plunged the country into full-blown chaos, conflicts and disaster. (The term "havoc", which Russians use to describe the events that followed, denotes fear of the future emanating from previous historical experience, and the traditional English term "time of troubles" fails to convey the true meaning of the word. In this sense, the end of the Soviet Union was determined not so much by the specific features of the Soviet system as by the repeated destruction of the state in Russian history).
Despite some major differences, the consequences of 1991 and 1917 were actually quite similar. Hope for evolutionary progress towards democracy, prosperity and social justice was ruthlessly crushed; a small group of radicals imposed extreme measures on the nation; active attempts to seize property and territory tore the country and its multiethnic foundation apart (in the latter case, it was a nuclear state), while the winners destroyed the established economic institutions and other major agencies in order to create absolutely new ones, as if the past had never existed at all. The elites once again acted in the name of ideas and a better future, but left society divided in its answers to the same cursed question: How did it all happen? Like so many times before, ordinary people paid a high price for everything, especially when it came to living conditions and the average life span.
The material prepared by NG is based on a chapter from the book by Stephen Cohen, a professor at New York University, "Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War", which was recently published by Columbia University Press in the United States.
The material is abridged. For the full version see NG's website.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia's democratisation followed a downward trajectory. Other political processes moved in the same direction.
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It may be possible for democracy to exist without independent executive power, but it's impossible without sovereign parliament or its equivalent - the only irreplaceable institute of representative power.
Stephen Cohen