#9 - JRL 8163 - JRL Home
From: "Archie Brown" <archie.brown@st-antonys.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Rejoinder to Sergei Roy/ 8161
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004

I enjoyed reading Sergei Roy's lengthy and spirited reply to my criticism of his article on Gorbachev (with particular reference to the year 1984 and Gorbachev's first visit to Britain). It is clear that Mr Roy and I are never going to agree either on Gorbachev's intellect or his role in history (though we probably agree on quite a number of other things, including a shared admiration for the prose of P.G. Wodehouse). So I'll try to keep this response shorter than his "reply to my reply".

ON GORBACHEV'S READING MATTER. Sergei Roy seems to think that what Gorbachev read during his years as kraikom first secretary in Stavropol would be known to HIS friends and relatives there. Yet it would not have been prudent for an ambitious party secretary to make public in the Brezhnev years his interest in heterodox writings and ideas. Mr Roy should recall that Gorbachev had, by any standards, an extremely close relationship with his wife and it was with her that most of the discussions of their reading took place. They devoured "Novy mir" just as avidly as did Moscow intellectuals.The late Georgiy Shakhnazarov, whom I would hope Sergei Roy would recognize as an erudite and highly intelligent person, was astonished by the breadth of Gorbachev's reading, and I regard Shakhnazarov as just one of a number of very good sources on that topic. Sergei Roy suggested in his JRL 8155 contribution that there would be no way that Gorbachev could have got hold of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, thereby apparently ignoring the small-circulation books published for the benefit of the topmost ranks of the nomenklatura. In his reply to me, he does not repeat that claim but asserts, rather, that after a hard day at the office in Stavropol, Gorbachev would have had neither the time nor inclination to read such books.

There may, as Mr Roy suggests, be a place for conjectural history. (Indeed, a very different kind of "conjectural history", called by that name and concerned with such themes as the stages of development of society from the time of hunter-gatherers onwards, was produced by some of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Much of it was read by Marx who gave it his own dogmatic twist.) However, on matters of ascertainable fact, such as the content of Gorbachev's reading and knowledge of particular authors, I prefer the evidence of people who actually worked with Gorbachev and talked with him behind the scenes. I agree that there is a place also for accounts from the perspective of a "romantic intellectual" or of a "foot soldier of democracy" (in Mr Roy's own phraseology). From that vantage point, Sergei Roy may well be an authority on "romantic intellectuals", but not, I would suggest, on the reading-matter of the future General Secretary.

ON ACCENT, PRONUNCIATION, AND SNOBBERY. Perhaps Sergei Roy's relatively mild reference to Gorbachev's mode of speech got a more tart response than it deserved, but that was because I am tired of hearing Gorbachev's accent and pronunciation being cited as evidence of his supposed intellectual inferiority. As an American colleague pointed out to me in a transatlantic email, following my first response to Sergei Roy, this is something that American politicians from the South also have to put up with, notwithstanding the fact that two relatively recent southern Presidents of the United States, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, were clearly very intelligent (though Carter was not a particularly lucky President - and luck also matters in politics). That Gorbachev did not feel the need to imitate the speech patterns of a paid-up member of the Russian intelligentsia does not seem to me to be remotely close to being the most important thing that can be said about him. Yet, for many Russian intellectuals it seems that idiosyncracies of speech are the crux of the matter. I know Russian intellectuals who take Mr Roy's line on this, but many more who would echo the words of Yegor Gaidar (not, of course, an admirer of Gorbachev's economic policy) that "it is impossible to overestimate what Gorbachev did for Russian freedom". What I meant by "debased values" was placing a concern for linguistic correctness above a gigantic contribution to freedom of speech and publication in Russia, the breakthrough to political pluralism, eschewing the use of force in Eastern Europe, and ending the Cold War.

GORBACHEV'S VISIT TO BRITAIN. It was Sergei Roy who first brought up the subject of my meetings with Margaret Thatcher. All I did in my response on that particular point, and I'm not sure if I succeeded, was to try to clarify a couple of things. In particular, the British Prime Minister's meeting with eight academics, at which I first spoke to her about Gorbachev (in the context of having written a background paper on the Soviet political system), was very far from being about Gorbachev specifically. It was concerned to take a fresh and broad look at Britain's relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and at developments within Communist Europe. Presumably, however, it was because the Prime Minister remembered what I had written and said about Gorbachev at that September 1983 seminar that I was invited fifteen months later to speak to her specifically about Gorbachev on the eve of his arrival in London in December 1984.

The more important points at issue concern that actual visit. When we talk about "impressions" here, I am reporting the impressions of Gorbachev's governmental interlocutors. Since I was planning to write something fairly substantial on Gorbachev as soon as he became General Secretary (and given that Chernenko looked more dead than alive by late 1984, that promised to be reasonably imminent), I spoke with quite a number of British politicians and officials very soon after Gorbachev's visit. THEY did not think that Gorbachev had said anything that contradicted existing Soviet foreign policy, although it is arguable that this may have reflected a failure to spend time in close textual comparison of his speeches with those of Andrei Gromyko. It was, as I mentioned in my first reply to Sergei Roy, the way in which Gorbachev argued, his ability to respond spontaneously to any point made, rather than fall back on stale formulae, which impressed them.

ON THE NON-EXISTENT 1984 CREDIT CARD. Sergei Roy makes the point that in writing about the credit card which Raisa Gorbachev supposedly used in 1984 (although at the time she had never even heard of a credit card), he used the phrase "or so the Western media said". He asks if he needed to put that in bold type for me to notice it. Not really. In my first reply (JRL 8156) I called the story a calumny, but immediately added: "Up to a point this is excusable, for he [i.e. Roy] is merely following Western journalists". It would be a fruitless task to write to a newspaper every time this piece of nonsense is recycled. The reason why it seemed worthwhile to object on this occasion (or, as Mr Roy sees my remarks, to engage in a spot of "ill-tempered grumbling") is that the Johnson Russia List is a forum for an informed exchange of views about Russia. To leave such a statement unchallenged here would be to give it additional credence it did not deserve.

Many of my Russian friends shared Mr Roy's disdain for the party bureaucracy. Quite a few of them, though, realize also that it was very important that some people of decency and independent views remained within the party apparatus, even though they had to keep their heterodox views largely out of the public domain until 1985 at least. There is ample evidence to show that attempts to change the system from below led to prison, internal or foreign exile, or worse. Andrei Sakharov, to whom Sergei Roy refers, spent the first half of the 1980s in exile in Gorky - until, indeed, he got Gorbachev's famous telephone call in December 1986. I accept that for any Russian citizen outside the new (and still partly old) elite there is plenty to deplore when surveying the past decade and a half. I seriously doubt, though, whether Mr Roy would have enjoyed the freedom he has during that same period had Mikhail Gorbachev, rather than Dmitriy Ustinov, died in December 1984 and had the next two General Secretaries after Chernenko been Viktor Grishin and Grigoriy Romanov (to take the two least implausible candidates).