Mikhail Gorbachev

I felt the need to write this essay because I believe that humanity needs to learn certain critical lessons from the Soviet experience. I loved Gorbachev. He was a tragic figure; perhaps, the last major communist leader who truly believed in the promise of socialism. He was a democrat. He sought to dismantle the dictatorship of the Communist Party and bring the people into the process of reforming a system that wasn’t working.

There were, it is important to understand, two different sides to Soviet socialism. One was a secure, sharing and egalitarian community that provided people with the basics. The other was a rigid, over-controlling, cult-like dictatorship. Without clear legal restraints, communist regimes could be harsh and cruel—and corrupt. Gorbachev believed he could do away with the latter attributes and build upon the former. To accomplish that he would have to end the Communist Party’s grip on power. However, what he did not understand was that the Party was not simply an obstacle to the changes that needed to be made: it was also the glue that held Soviet socialism together. When he pulled the plug on the Party, the whole system went down the drain.

I do not claim to understand the full complex of factors that brought the Soviet Union and the communist world down, but I do believe my participation in the Communist movement gave me some important insights. I joined the CPUSA after the Bay of Pigs (1961)–the attempt by the CIA to overthrow the revolutionary government in Cuba. I had been to Cuba the year before, and I was deeply impressed with what I saw. After the CIA-sponsored invasion, I decided I could not live with a government that was trying to destroy something I believed to be so beautiful.

I stayed in the CPUSA long enough (1961-1974) to learn a lot about the inner dynamics of the Communist movement. In the beginning, I was an enthusiastic member, and I rose through the ranks to become National Education Director (something like a high priest), and a member of the Political Committee—a body known as the Politburo in most Communist Parties. During that period, I traveled a number of times to the USSR (as a participant in various Party conferences), and had the opportunity to visit different regions and talk to a wide variety of Soviet people. I got a sketchy, but insider’s view, of how the system worked.

Even after I left the Communist Party, I still supported the idea of socialism. I believed that the USSR would eventually outgrow its crude Communist phase and evolve into a humane and democratic socialist community. Gorbachev represented everything I had hoped for. My last trip to the USSR was in 1989, when I traveled there to witness the first free elections ever held in a Communist country.

Basic Principles

To understand what Gorbachev represented and why he failed to achieve his goals, it is necessary to understand a few basic things about communism. The first is the critical role played by ideology.

The goal of the communists who led the Russian revolution was to create a form of society that had never existed before. They did not set out to reform the old system. Their goal was to dismantle it and build something entirely new. That something new was called “socialism”–the brainchild of Karl Marx. Marx’s study of European industrial society (which he called capitalism), led him to conclude that humanity’s continuing development would require a level of planning and cooperation that was incompatible with an economic system based on competing private interests and an unequal distribution of society’s wealth. The future, he concluded, lay in the collective ownership of the productive resources. If everything was owned in common, he reasoned, it would be in everyone’s interest to maximize the efficiency of the economy as a whole.

This was a powerful idea. But that’s all it was: an idea. At the time Marx proposed this model, there were no real, existing societies organized along those lines. Lenin, the leader of the Russian communists, was the first socialist revolutionary to fully grasp the implications of this fact (footnote 1). He recognized that the idea of socialism did not grow out of real-life experience. It was based on the logic of Marx’s theoretical system. It was, in fact, a hypothesis about how society might work if the economy was organized differently. Aspiring revolutionaries had no way to test this hypothesis. A socialist society could only come into existence after a revolution–after the revolutionary forces had come to power and had confiscated the productive resources (land, factories, and businesses) and reorganized them to function as an interconnected, cooperative whole.

The Soviet revolution, then, was based on a bet that Marx was right—on a leap of faith. While Marx saw the path to socialism as the work of “objective” economic and social forces, in fact, it was the product of the human imagination. While the need for radical change was driven by the collapse of the old order and the misery of the Russian people, the socialist goal of the revolution grew out of an intellectual process. As Lenin famously put it, “without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolution.”

This is where the Party comes in. In Lenin’s revolutionary model, the Communist Party is tasked with bringing the idea of socialism to the people before the revolution, and using Marxist principles to guide the building of the new society afterwards.

Marxism as an Ideology

An ideology is not the same as a theory. A theory is a system of ideas whose value is measured by its correspondence to reality. The value of an ideology, on the other hand, is measured by the degree to which it serves the interests of some individual or group. Marxism began as a theory, but in the course of the communist’s struggle for power, it evolved into an ideology.

The communists were not playing at revolution. They did not see themselves as dabbling in some social experiment. They were committed to a socialist outcome. They believed socialism would deliver the poor, the oppressed, and working people from lives of suffering and toil, and open up a new chapter in human development. While socialism might not yet have existed in the real world, the communists were certain of its reality: it was the necessary outcome of the historical process that Marx had so brilliantly described. Marxism was more than simply a theoretical system for the communists. It embodied a vision of a better world—one in which plenty and social justice were married together. It endowed the communists with a higher, moral purpose and legitimized whatever force was required to achieve it.

The role of Marxism as a governing ideology imbued communist rule with a cult-like dimension. The communists had taken a plunge into the unknown, armed with a theory they believed guaranteed their success. This dependence on Marxist theory is what transformed communism into a cult. A cult is built on a collective leap of faith. It’s members agree to accept some idea or narrative that lies beyond experience as a “Truth.” Truth, it turns out, exists only in singular form. If there are more than one version, then it is not truth, but simply different opinions competing for acceptance. To keep Marxism (or the Party’s version of it) from descending into mere opinion, there must be some central body or person—a Pope-like figure—that has the power to decide which version is truth and which is heresy (revisionism). Hence the cult of personality and the thought police.

I learned through personal experience that it is not just the leaders who sought to elevate the Party’s views and policies to the status of Truths. The membership, the people in the trenches want leaders who possess the Truth. An ideology is not so much a road map as it is a faith and a rallying cry for the troops. Dissident voices threatened to undercut that faith and weaken the narrative upon which communist rule rested. Criticism of the leadership’s ideas, depending on the conditions in a given Party, could be a risky affair. Disagreement with Stalin’s views on genetics could get you sent to a labor camp in Siberia. In China, during the Cultural Revolution, those who were on the wrong side of the debate of whether “One comes from Two or Two comes from One” could end up before a firing squad.

When Gorbachev introduced Glasnost–“openness”–and proclaimed that the communists “don’t have all the answers,” he was pulling a critical pillar out from underneath the edifice of communist rule. But while he dis-empowered the Party, he failed to create an alternative base that could have supported the radical reforms he was advocating.

Perestroika

The second thing we need to understand about communism is the way the socialist economy worked and the difficulties Gorbachev faced in reforming it.

Beginning in the 1960s, many leading communists, not just in the USSR, were becoming aware that the socialist economy was not performing as expected. Indeed, the more highly developed it became, the more difficult the problems it encountered. The USSR was no longer catching up with the West. In fact, it was falling increasingly behind. The basic problem can be laid at Marx’s feet. Marx believed that socialism’s great advantage over capitalism lay in the abolition of individual, private ownership. He argued that as long as the economy was divided up among different competing producers, each pursuing their own private interests, it would not be possible to achieve the level of cooperation and planning that was becoming increasingly necessary. Collective ownership, on the other hand, would allow all the different elements of an economy to be brought together and developed within the framework of a science-based, all-embracing plan.

There is an important element of truth in Marx’s view of socialism. So long as the economic resources of a society are entirely privately owned, they will be used to produce income–profits–for those who own them. This arrangement worked well at a simpler stage of development, but it is becoming progressively dysfunctional in today’s world. The problem lies in the fact that development increasingly requires investment in areas that don’t produce profits, e.g., theoretical science, research and development, infrastructure, etc. Besides these strictly technical factors, economic development ultimately depends on social investment–the education, health and well-being of the people. The organization of all of this, Marx argued, can no longer be left to a market–a clash of short-run private interests governed by the blind laws of supply and demand. Collective ownership would allow the interests of the society as a whole to take precedence over that of any particular set of individuals. We can see the reality of this problem in the resistance of the fossil fuel industry to the changes needed to combat global warming.

Collective ownership made Soviet planning possible. It enabled the communists to coordinate the output of all the various spheres of the economy–raw materials, heavy industry, light industry, transportation, communication, etc. The plan replaced the market: goods were not produced to be sold, but rather, to be delivered to other enterprises as elements of a single, all-encompassing productive blue-print. Economic decisions–what and how much to produce–were decided politically rather than on the basis of market conditions, i.e., profitability. In the beginning, this capacity to concentrate and coordinate resources produced the most rapid industrialization the world had ever seen.

However, as Soviet socialism developed, it became clear that collective ownership had a number of unforeseen consequences. Its great advantage was that it made total planning possible. But by linking every aspect of production into a single giant, interdependent complex, it gave rise to an immense, inflexible system that became known as the “command economy.” The term command did not, as is often thought, refer to a lack of political democracy—to directives issued by all-powerful commissars. Rather, it described an economy in which nothing could happen without a go-ahead from the central authorities. Without a market, individual enterprises had no access to resources–to new technologies, raw materials, or capital. They operated as fixed cogs in a vast economic apparatus with no capacity to initiate any activity on their own.

There were three problems in particular that perestroika would have to deal with. The first was the difficulty in centrally managing an increasingly complex economy. In 1985, Gorbachev was looking at a system that produced 23 million different kinds of goods and services. The attempt to plan for and manage such a massive economic edifice led to a rigid, over-controlled system that resisted change and stifled innovation. The soviets had to find someway to decentralize decision-making: something that ran against the logic of planning. (footnote 2).

The other two problems were closely related: how to incentivize increased productivity and improved quality of goods. In the USSR, production was organized to fulfill a plan, not to satisfy market demand. Soviet workers were paid according to how much they produced, not by how many of those goods were actually sold, or indeed, were even saleable. The interests of the workers was to produce quantity: the consumers, on the other hand, wanted quality. Without a market where producers had to compete for customers, there was no incentive to produce higher quality goods. As a result, the USSR did not produce a single consumer good that could be sold on the international market. The issue of productivity could be traced to the same cause. Without a market and competition, producers had no incentive to increase the efficiency of production. When I was there in 1971, the Soviets were using the same motor to power their trucks that they had been using in 1949 (a 1947 Chevrolet truck engine).

The Reforms

The Soviets were not alone in recognizing the shortcomings in a centrally organized planned economy. All the socialist countries, to one degree or another, were aware of the problem. They knew they had to loosen the central controls and allow more autonomy to the individual enterprises. To do that, they had to allow for the development of some kind of market.

Markets had not been part of the communist game plan. They entail competition and self-seeking. With competition there would be winners and losers, and winners would make more money than losers. But experience had convinced the communists that there was no other way to incentivize improvements in productivity and quality.

All of this was a bitter pill for the communists to swallow. But frankly, the regimes in both the USSR and China were desperate. Each was facing mass disillusionment and growing discontent. That was clear to me when I traveled to the USSR in 1989. When I visited China later, I was told that before Deng Xiaoping’s reforms began to take hold (1979), the Chinese people were beginning to conclude that the  “the Mandate of Heaven” had been withdrawn from the communist regime. That’s a term that refers to a level of popular dissatisfaction that historically has been associated with mass peasant uprisings and the over-turning of imperial dynasties. The Communists had to make changes.

But how? And where to begin?

The Chinese, under Deng’s leadership, took one path. They decided to lead with economic reforms: to maintain the political dictatorship of the Party while enabling the growth of a market. They began slowly, trying out experiments and evaluating the results–as Deng put it, “crossing the river by feeling for the stones.” They began by doing away with collective farms, returning land to peasant communities and allowing individuals to work their own plots. They took a portion of the crop for taxes and allowed peasants to sell their surpluses to whomever would purchase them. This was followed by permitting the establishment of small businesses– industrial co-ops, and service providers. Eventually, state enterprises were permitted to sell a portion of their products on the open market, and lastly, private and foreign-based companies were included as well (footnote 3).

Step by step, the Chinese communists fostered the emergence of a market. Little by little, the economy transitioned from producing for a plan to producing for a market. The results have been spectacular. Hundreds of millions of people have been raised out of poverty and China has transformed itself into a modern nation. It’s now the second largest economy in the world. At the same time, however, it has the second largest number of billionaires (626 in 2021)– and its attraction for foreign investment is based largely on the low wages of its workers. It is hard to describe what kind of economic system it has evolved into.

Politically, China has grown into an all-controlling, nationalistic, authoritarian state. No one knows where its development is leading.

Gorbachev opted for a different path.

Gorbachev decided to lead with political reforms. Like Deng, he was aware of the need for a market and greater autonomy for the individual enterprises. But he refused to separate the need for economic reforms from need to remake Soviet political culture. The fundamental issue, he argued, was the democratization of Soviet life. The reorganization of the economy could only succeed if it was part of an all-embracing reform process: one that included ending the dictatorship of the Communist Party and transforming the entire top-down, administrative structure of Soviet communism.

Glasnost—free and open debate—was essential to Gorbachev’s strategy. He did not have a finished blue-print for perestroika, that is, for reforming the economy. He believed the transition to a mixed market-planed form of socialism had to be worked out through a collective effort that involved the whole society.

Gorbachev was a visionary. He recognized that the socialist blue-print laid down in 1917 needed a course correction. A balance had to be found between collectivity, the interest of the larger society, and the interests and autonomy of the individual. But like many visionaries, he could not conceive of a realistic path to get to where he wanted to go. The Soviet people, like the Chinese, were poor. Gorbachev gave them freedoms, but he didn’t really have a clue about how to improve their standards of living.

                                                                1989

It took only a few days of wandering around and talking to Soviet citizens to realize it was all over. They didn’t want to reform the system: they wanted out. As one woman said to me, “we are tired of being a social experiment. We just want a normal society like you have in the West.” They felt betrayed. They had sacrificed so much for a promise that was not delivered. They didn’t believe what Gorbachev was telling them. Indeed, they didn’t trust anyone from the old regime.

The Soviet people knew next to nothing about the world outside the USSR. The “Iron Curtain” had seen to that. Their isolation had left them as lambs that were ripe for the slaughter. And the wolves, most of whom had been ensconced in the top levels of the Communist Party and the KGB, were only too happy to gobble them up.

While it appears that most Russians have concluded that Gorbachev was a disaster for their nation, I believe that evaluation will change someday in the future. He was a visionary: he got a big piece of the puzzle right. It’s a pity he didn’t have the opportunity to implement his ideas– to see if they would work. But frankly, old Deng was smarter. He kept the Party in power while he opened the economy up. His reformist ideas also faced strong opposition–they clashed with Mao’s views. But Deng built a base of hundreds of millions of peasants who were profiting from the implementation of the reforms. He created support as he went along. Gorbachev, on the other hand, dismantled Soviet power before he could show the people the benefits of the reforms. He failed to create a base that could have supported his reform agenda.

Gorbachev was a tragic-heroic figure. He attempted to breathe life into a moribund Soviet socialism and sought to realize its highest, humanistic ideals. He refused to use force either to stop the Eastern European socialist countries from withdrawing from the Soviet Block or to hold back the disintegration of communist rule at home.

Deng, his daughter tells us, thought Gorbachev was a fool. Gorbachev was in China when Deng ordered the troops to open-fire on the students in Tienanmen Square. Gorbachev vowed he would never use the army against the Soviet people. While that was admirable, Zuboc tells us that by refusing to use force and by dismantling the Communist Party, Gorbachev was left without any tools or organizational means to guide the USSR through its difficult transition. The result was a collapse that impoverished the Soviet people and that produced an authoritarian dictatorship that makes communism look like a liberal democracy.

How to evaluate Gorbachev? He represented the best in communism–but it seems that that the real world was not ready for the best.

The footnotes refer to sources that would be useful for anyone who would like to go more deeply into the issues raised in this essay:

• I. Lenin: What is to be Done.
• Abel Aganbegyan: The Economic Challenge of Perestroika.    Aganbegyan was Gorbachev’s chief economic advisor and explains Gorbachev’s thinking. It is the best book on the subject.
• Vladislav M Zuboc: Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union.   This is great book. It’s like being a fly on the wall as Gorbachev vacillates and Yeltsin destroys what’s left of the USSR.
• Ezra F. Vogel: Deng Xiaoping and the transformation of China.    A wonderful book. The story of how Mao’s idealism almost destroyed China and Deng’s common sense pragmatism put it on the road to where it is today–where ever that is.
• Isabella M. Weber: How China Escaped Shock Therapy.     Not an easy read, but an important book.
• Jack Potter: The Chinese Peasant.       This book traces the history of the CCP’s relationship to the peasantry from 1949 through Deng’s reforms. A truly amazing book.