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/293/ Goodbye 20th Century (RIP Gorby) (Patreon)

Published:
2022-10-04 06:00:04
Imported:
2024-07
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[Patreon Exclusive]

On the meaning of Gorbachev.

Mikhail Gorbachev continues to be lauded in Western circles for overseeing the collapse of the Soviet Union without much bloodshed. But given the historic societal disaster that followed, is this status unmerited? How naive was Gorbachev about the wolves at the door? And to what extent was the writing on the wall by the late '80s – was there an alternative path not taken?

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Richard R

lol shut up george

Paul Brewer

IANAE, but I probably have a more generous interpretation of the Soviet Union than BungaHosts. I do think that the process by which its economy deteriorated may not be well understood in The Discourse or Received History (as opposed to Academe). The Bartel episode linked above was the first real attempt I'd come across to wrestle with this phenomenon, and I found it very useful food for thought. The 'bureaucratic churn and renewal' that Phil cites was, I think, a problem with the Soviet Union from its inception, well before Stalin's time as 'batono', and one that it never really resolved in a satisfactory way. Again, IANAE, but I understand the history as saying that one of the reasons for Stalin's rise was his willingness to protect local party elites against the Trotskyite and Left Communist tides that sought to hold them to account. Then Stalin turned around and beheaded a large portion of this group when a younger cadre was available to take its place. (And, some say, was about to do it again when the Grim Reaper made a call to his dacha.) The Secret Speech and de-Stalinisation swept away another group, and then Brezhnev froze everything up for a generation. The Maoist Cultural Revolution might be understood in a similar way. Finally, a note about Gorbymania and the Left. I don't think the 'hard left' was especially fond of Gorbachev, at least not at the time, except perhaps among the Eurocommunists, who might not qualify as 'hard left'. He was the darling of the soft-left and the 'Blairite/Clinton International', and I thought the television show Spitting Image cogently depicted Gorbachev as somehow iginting a 'Soviet Sixties', as it did seem as if the USSR had never undergone a Western-style 1960s.