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Mr.Gorbachev, Capitalism knows no bounds.RIP


I wonder how many people realize that the vast majority of Russians lived as feudal serfs - basically slaves - until 1861? About when Lincoln emancipated American slaves. Or that the word slave itself, derives from Slav. Communism was sold to the public as liberation and payback from the Romanov misrule. It may have worked for a few years under Lenin but Stalin put a stop to that, brought in a new elite, and used Communism as a disguised colonial tool. In short, Russians are both victims and collaborators in the ugly former empire. This has been blessed by a state-supported religious system. Gorbachev only opened the door to change and probably had no other option. Like all colonizers, after peak extraction, they soon find the cost of maintaining their hold is just too high. Gorbachev lacked a replacement vision.

Gorbachev worked for peace, and Reagan claimed glory.Then,the West declining peace moved NATO toward Russia putting his work to shame for the Russians. George F Kennan, who understood Russia and who was the architect of America’s containment policy against Russia, warned against it. Destroying Gorbachev’s work for peace. Gorbachev ended the Cold War but the USA prolonged the Cold War. Gorbachev was a special man. In history there are several such leaders that pull the plug when not doing so will be worse. The Soviets were practically ruined and destroyed by Stalin. The last vestiges of hope for a communist system that could have somehow worked died with Trotsky (what a historic ice pick!). The country drifted towards some form of fascism on the left and died a slow death. Svetlana Alexievich brilliantly chronicled the process by talking to citizens.I do not believe except for a brief, perhaps 5-year period after the 1917 revolution that the Russian people were really free.

I mourn the loss of Gorbachev. But I also mourn the loss of "that broad smile, that contagious euphoria, that courageous faith in change and those shouts of “Gorby! Gorby!” from people being set free." (thanks Serge Schmemann) - but you can't have freedom if you can't love the free. Perhaps, I'm just mourning a loss of faith in general. Everyone is looking for facts, promises, science, and delusions everywhere. Perhaps, Diogenes-like, with a 1980s incandescent reading lamp in hand, I'm just looking for a kind dreaming political visionary person of faith.

"The Core of New Thinking is the admission of the primacy of universal human values and the priority of ensuring the survival of the human race". So wrote M. Gorbachev – Savior of Humanity - in his Perestroika manifesto in 1988.

“Yet Mr. Gorbachev was a reformer, not a revolutionary.” [Serge Schmemann]

"No man is a hero to his valet, not because the former is not a hero, but because the latter is a valet" [Hegel]

Mikhail Gorbachev deserves global thanks for grasping that the genocidal Soviet regime needed to be ended. That he did. But Gorbachev was unable - and perhaps unwilling - to finish the task, i.e., by ridding Russia of the die-hard haters, who staffed the ranks of the secret police (KGB). These folks remain a lethal peril. Genocidal regimes attract many, with no moral compass. Such persons can only very rarely learn to behave in a civilized way. Russia's President, Vladimir V. Putin, is a walking, talking example of such human toxic waste. His longing for the genocidal Soviet regime means he has no place in a civilized polity. Today's Germany would not be civilized, the wars ensured that most Nazi die-hards got their wish. Rid of die-hard haters - who authored and carried out a major genocide - other Germans built a civilized polity, a great force for good in Europe and globally. The same process - ensuring die-hards got their wish - has yielded a Japan equally benevolent. But there was no one to send Soviet die-hards to an early death. They remain, lethally dangerous, just as expended-but-unexploded ordnance remains lethally dangerous, decades after a war ends.President Putin's successor must tackle this clean-up. It is no easy task. But until it is done, Russia will not be a civilized polity.

It may be that Gorbachev actually did "save" the USSR in a sense. It may be that had the USSR continued, it would have eventually been caught up in WWIII...and that would have been its (and our) destruction. Or it might be that the USSR. So it might be that by releasing the USSR from its ruinous pursuit of parity with the United States, he saved a nation from utterly imploding. For while the USSR might have gone out of business, Russia continued on as a going concern. It may be that he played one of the most important roles in human history. If there were ever two nations that seemed destined to one day nuke each other, it was America and his. And yet, if nothing else, he very likely delayed such a tragedy--perhaps even helped avert it altogether. A Nobel Peace Prize is a pretty big deal, but that may be far smaller than what he truly deserves. Whatever his faults, his willingness to work with the west virtually ended the nightmare of the nuclear Holocaust that stalked America for decades. Americans could finally breathe a sigh of relief and, if only for a brief moment, ponder the possibility of peace. He was admired—loved, even—in the west because he gave hope, and no amount of gaslighting and posturing by armchair experts undoes that fact. Russia never deserved a decent leader like Gorbachev. The constant clamoring about the West's disdain for Soviet rule was wholly justified, as there was not a scintilla of humanity in the perverse government. This lack of humanity is still evident in today's regime, and there has clearly been no reflection on its brutal past. To be so filled with self-loathing and insecurity as to necessitate the shoddy treatment, not only of their own citizens but the brutality they displayed in satellite states, leads to conclude that the current hopeless state it finds itself mired in is simply the norm. I'm not sure Russia can ever be saved from itself. The collective Stockholm Syndrome of Russians coming out of two world wars prior to Gorbachev did not allow glasnost, freedom, and capitalism to gain traction - it was so foreign to the population.Gorbachev’s hoped to move the country into the modern world were strangled and smothered by attempted coups and by the corrupt Kremlinists, KGB, military, and oligarchs as a way to preserve their previous wealth and power.

Mr. Gorbachev's concise appraisal of the failure of democracy and the rule of law to obtain in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union is the most clear-eyed assessment of his legacy. Gorbachev, who rose through the ranks of the Communist Party apparatus, had an intimate, first-hand appreciation for the failures, shortcomings, and limitations of the Communist system, and his deep love for his country and his people spurred him to do everything he could to loosen the screws, open up a society with untapped human potential, and restructure a system he saw as unsustainable and doomed.

Mr. Gorbachev's flaw was believing that the better angels of Russian society would step into the lurch to build a democratic Russia under the rule of law, in a country that had no democratic tradition since its founding in 1917, and he underestimated the ruthlessness with which former Communist Party bosses and industrialists, previously constrained by the limitations of the Communist state, would exploit lawlessness to seize state assets and amass wealth. Mr. Gorbachev spoke to an arena-filled crowd in Richmond years ago, and the witty way in which he briskly defused a mentally ill heckler who interrupted his speech, evaporating the tension and awkwardness for the event's hosts with quick humor and amicable lightheartedness, as televisions showed. Sadly one decent human being alone could not save Russia from herself...it would be hard to find a Russian today who would remember him positively. This tells us a lot about the way the former USSR and the current Russian empire are. Russia and its derivatives have always been about inflicting pain and suffering on its own people and its neighbors.

This is why, to me and millions of other Europeans, Gorbachev is the only great and humane leader of that evil land. It is because he did inflict the least pain and suffering onto his neighbors and left them free to work out their own arrangements. This is why today the EU and NATO have the Eastern bloc as its members and Germany is again united and whole. Gorbachev is owed immense gratitude. Gorbachev was an uncommonly open-minded man in an authoritarian society— and it’s wise to remember that none of us chooses our homeland and our parents.

"What Gorbachev failed to understand''... is that capitalism is insatiable -- it's a system defect -- and the American oligarchs had no intention of stopping short of destroying communism, socialism, or any other competing ism.NATO should have been disbanded but wasn't -- and that's why the war in Ukraine rages on, feeding the greed of the military-industrial complex in America. The man was a fool to think otherwise. The US has never honored any agreement it has signed. Capitalism knows no bounds. Morality is another topic entirely. Insofar as the policy is concerned, whether it is right or wrong is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that the invasion happened. It happened NOT because Mr. Putin woke up one morning and decided it would be a good day to undermine peace in Europe -- a vital US national security interest, incidentally, and one that we have now jeopardized through hubris and fecklessness. Rather, he had had enough of US provocations. He had warned us, over and over again."It was hard for American leaders to accept the new Soviet openness. “Trust but verify,” Reagan liked to say." In most likelihood, President Reagan borrowed these words from the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin. "Trust but verify" was among the mandatory Lenin quotes memorized by every Soviet pupil from 1924 till 1991. Gorbachev finally realized that the gig was up as leader of a paper tiger who couldn’t compete with Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Putin realized in Helsinki that he had a paper tiger in the blow-hard blustering Trump. America turned full circle.Gorbachev, Reagan, Bush.......Compared with today, these were towering leaders who were striving to leave behind a fresher, more peaceful world. Putin, Trump.......? It's like an evolution chart going in the wrong direction!

The dramatic dismantling of the Berlin Wall. People in the eastern bloc countries drive up to the border--leaving behind those ramshackle Russian-made cars--and crossing over into freedom on foot! And then--very slowly! things disintegrating.Mr. Gorbachev' no matter what your countrymen say or think--still hankering after a lost empire, an empire held together by fear and force and nothing else)--you did your country lasting good.

Let me say it again--rest in peace, comrade! After those ninety-one tumultuous years-- --you deserve no less.
Weird how I, an atheist, who does not believe in heaven... and my first thought: Madiba and the Arch are on the afterlife committee to welcome Misha. Long may his spirit prevail. Sad for the West, but Gorbachev will live on in my memory as the politician of the 20th Century who most loved peace - and suffered for it.

Rest in peace, Gorby!



References:

Books: Ronald Reagan - Edward Betts
Savior of Humanity in his Perestroika manifesto in 1988.
M. Gorbachev –
Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022): the man who failed to save Stalinism from itself
Serge Schmemann: We Give Our Thanks Unto Thee:
Madame de Sévigné / Hegel
Lluís Bassets

Footnote:

How glasnost grew, a stroll on Amherstburg, Ont.Canada, farm on May 19, 1983.


Mikhail Gorbachev,then Soviet minister of agriculture,and Alexander Yakovlev,a Russian in exile as Ambassador to Canada, were invited to the home of Canada's Minister of Agriculture.Minister Eugene Whelan was delayed in Ottawa, so it was left to Elizabeth Whelan, who played hostess to the Soviet delegation on the Whelan family's farm. They asked if they could walk on the farm.,until Mr Whelan arrived.

Mikhail Gorbachev, and Alexander Yakovlev both in three-piece suits and fedoras, kicked through fresh-cut grass, walked among saplings, and then passed fields of corn, soy,and wheat. Yakovlev was the former propaganda minister of the Communist Party, a role that saw him oversee all Soviet media."We were completely frank," Yakovlev remembered."He (Gorbachev) frankly talked about the problems in the internal situation in Russia.Gorbachev was saying that under these conditions, the conditions of dictatorship and the absence of freedom, the country would simply perish.

By 1985, Gorbachev was General Secretary of the Communist Party.He recalled Alexander Yakovlev to Moscow.

With Yakovlev – "the godfather of glasnost" – Gorbachev would initiate a series of reforms that would in effect dismantle the Soviet Union.


Excerpt from Toronto Star Newspaper...