#16 - JRL 8173 - JRL Home
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004
From: Sergei Roy <SergeiRoy@yandex.ru>
Subject: Rejoinder to Prof. Brown's Rejoinder/ 8162 #9
(1) I am delighted to note that Prof. Brown's "Rejoinder" is much milder in tone than his original "Reply" to an installment of my "Perestroika 1985-1991. A Colloquial Chronicle" now being printed in The Moscow News. The Chronicle consists of about 130 sections of varying length, each enough to fill one or two, sometimes three or more, page-long newspaper installments. If Prof. Brown continues to devote the same flattering attention to the remaining 120 odd sections of the work, we may yet arrive at something less disheartening than his totally negative statement that we "are never going to agree either on Gorbachev's intellect or his role in history." In fact, agreeing to disagree is already a huge step in the right direction, away from a haughty rejection of other people's right to follow a methodology of writing different from the critic's (recall Prof. Brown's "surprise" at seeing a "conjectural and impressionistic" history being printed).
(2) I devoted considerable space in my "Reply to Prof. Brown's Reply to Sergei Roy" in RJL8161 to outlining that simple methodology of faithfully recording the reactions of myself, my immediate environment, and of the broader masses of Soviet citizens - the way I perceived them - to the events as they unfolded, with sundry comments in hindsight and a certain padding from various generally accessible sources, this last for the sake of building a connected narrative. It is sometimes an eyewitness account (even if it be an eyewitness account of things happening on TV), sometimes an account of immediate perceptions and reactions, my own and other people's. This methodology is completely different from an academic study of archive and similar sources. My account is rather the sort that archives are made up of. And I insist on my right to follow this methodology, even if the word "methodology" sounds a bit outre when applied to such a non-methodical, haphazard narrative, journalis! tic rather than academic. Having worked on both sides of the journalistic/academic divide, I am only too keenly aware of the difference in the strictures applied to the two pursuits.
Let me put it this way. In 1996 Mikhail Gorbachev ran for the office of RF president and received a statistically negligible number of votes, something of the order of one percent. I strongly suspect that the other 99 percent had not spent much time in the archives or public libraries reading up on the candidate, yet they had formed quite a definite opinion of his character and capabilities. One of them even went to the inordinate, and deplorable, length of expressing his opinion by punching Mr. Gorbachev on the nose in the run-up to the election, while others simply did not bother to notice his name on the ballot. Such attitudes may hurt the feelings of the Gorbachev fan club, who regard the Russian people as a bunch of ingrates, but they are there, and so are the journalists who reflect those attitudes - even to the extent of reporting the shocking action of that impulsive gentleman of Siberia.
(3) On the specific issue of Gorbachev's reading matter Prof. Brown, true to his methodology, prefers to collect the reports of Gorbachev's close associates - in the past, his subordinates; to me, this comes under the heading of hearsay. As I have stressed, I have the evidence of my senses, which for years were assailed by the general secretary's waffling and doublespeak that bore no traces of his acquaintance with the philosophical thought of Gramsci - to which Mr. Grachev in the same issue of JRL adds the names of Sartre and Heidegger (My God - Heidegger! It would be interesting to hear Gorbachev's views on hermeneutics, it really would…). When people say that Lenin studied Greek philosophers, Hegel and other German classics, they can show his "Philosophical Notebooks" as evidence. When Lenin studied Mach and Avenarius, he produced "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism." When Gorbachev's biographers, quoting each other, say that Gorbachev studied Gramsci or Sartre or Heidegge! r, they will not be able to show a single line from the works of Gorbachev, or of his speech-writers, as proof of these authors' influence on him. All they might show us would be the bookcase where the Gorbachevs kept their restricted editions of those philosophers. Haven't I seen enough similar collections - symbols of status, symbols of belonging to the chosen few, trumped-up evidence of the hosts' intellectual pursuits - those poor, virginally clean rectangular objects in covers rigid from disuse, books that were indeed mostly inaccessible to people who might have put them to better use than just ornamenting the walls of nomenklatura apartments…
So, based on observation over the years of Gorbachev's public pronouncements and performance, I would rather be inclined to accept the view of Academician Petrakov that Gorbachev's mind was an "empty suitcase" as far as knowledge of economics was concerned (A. Grachev. "Gorbachev," Vagrius Publishers, Moscow 2001, p.128) - and any claim to philosophical scholarship comes from the same suitcase. As for political science, there was just one authority that Gorbachev recognized, studied and quoted from dog-eared volumes - Vladimir Lenin. According to the same biographer, what attracted Gorbachev more than anything about Lenin's mode of thinking was his ability to change his views overnight to suit political expediency (ibid., p. 119). No question, Gorbachev proved a good Leninist in this sense - but that is hardly evidence of wide-ranging schooling in political science or philosophy. Anyone can learn by heart a few articles from Lenin's NEP period - "Kak nam reorganizovat' Rabkrin! ," "Luchshe menshe, da luchshe," etc. - and quote them to their heart's content as "theoretical basis" for their political adventures. Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov was even better at the art.
No, erudition so thoroughly concealed should go by some other name. TV exposure is ruthless, and it made painfully clear just how pathetically thin was Gorbachev's cultural veneer. Just a random example: While on a visit to the US, Gorbachev uttered on one occasion, with an erudite smirk, something like this: "As your American writer John Steinbeck said, it's the winter of our discontent…" I remember quipping on that occasion, in turn misquoting the Bard: "Now is the winter of our discontent // Made glorious by this sun of New York…"
(4) On Gorbachev's accent. Prof. Brown half withdraws his "tart response" to my "relatively mild reference to Gorbachev's mode of speech," yet insists in the same paragraph that "for many Russian intellectuals it seems that idiosyncrasies of speech are the crux of the matter." No they are not. I can do the Southern accent or sling Four-letter Russian with the best of them, but would not dream of doing so where I could hurt the susceptibilities of the audience - not with an audience that cannot pay me back in the same coin. It is not the "idiosyncrasies" in themselves that matter but the social context. A top Soviet official (name of Shcherbakov, Shcherbina or Shcherbinin, something like that) recounted on TV an episode in which he took a call from Gorbachev while riding in a government limousine with his wife. He hurriedly told the chauffeur to stop and got out, to save his wife's ears from a string of obscenities mouthed by his superior - and I am sure he would not dream of t! alking back to the boss in the same dialect. So it is not just the accent, Professor Brown. The accent, or the refusal to change it, is just part of the image of the Party boss for whom "everything goes," who can say "ty" (G. dutzen, Fr. tutoyer, no parallel in English) to any underling without fear of being addressed in the same rude, vulgar way. That was not the face that Gorbachev showed to the West - but we here in Russia had no illusions about the sort of person Gorbachev was. A charmer, indeed.
(5) I must thank Prof. Brown for his clarification of what he did or did not say in connection with Gorbachev's visit in December 1984 and events preceding that visit. Should the Chronicle ever appear in volume form, and with the full paraphernalia of references (of which there are already more than a thousand - the newspaper version is certainly a Lite one), I will be sure to refer to those remarks, even if this material comes under the rubric of "padding" (see above).
The same goes for Prof. Brown's impressions of the impressions of British politicians and officials regarding Gorbachev's performance in the UK in 1984. Archie Brown stresses the impact of the style of Gorbachev's performance, while Gorbachev himself insists on the novelty of the substance of his remarks. I was not the only one to agree with Gorbachev that the latter was the more important aspect: "The Western press [wrote Lev Osterman] assesses all this, including the tone of Gorbachev's public statements ("Europe is our common home!") as the beginning of improvement of East-West relations. Godspeed!" (Lev Osterman. Intelligentsiya i vlast v Rossii (1985 - 1996). Monolit Publishers, Moscow 2000, p. 7).
(6) On the nonexistent credit card. All I can do here is reiterate the points I made in my "Reply": (1) in December 1984 the politically concerned, English-speaking individuals here in Russia heard certain things - in my case, on the BBC; (2) the things we heard predisposed to some extent our reactions to the soon-to-be general secretary; (3) I refuse to clean up the picture of our reactions at the time to suit other people's biased view of Gorbachev - the more so that my bias is the opposite.
(7) Prof. Brown concludes with his doubts "whether Mr Roy would have enjoyed the freedom he has during [the past decade and a half] 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)." An invitation to consider what would have happened if something else hadn't, coming from an avowed enemy of conjectural history - well, that's certainly rich. That's History in the Subjunctive Mood, Professor, and many historians scorn the pastime. Not being a professional historian, though, I have no such scruples, the more so that some fine thinkers indulge in this sort of thing. In Chapter 4 of his 1992 book "The End of History and the Last Man" Francis Fukuyama makes a claim similar to Prof. Brown's: Had Andropov or Chernenko lived longer [he writes], or had Gorbachev turned out to be a different person, the course of events between 1985 and 1991 would have been different.
Observe, however, that at this point Francis Fukuyama stops. Events would have been different, period. It is wholly unpredictable whether Russian (Soviet?) society would be freer now, or poorer, or whether it would have gone up in nuclear smoke. Even if Gorbachev had died of a stroke or heart attack before 1985, and had power fallen into the hands of Grishin or Romanov or Gromyko or Tikhonov, there is nothing in recent Soviet history to preclude the notion of a cabal similar to that which had overthrown Khrushchev - and I would give these hypothetical princes a much shorter reign, given the state of the economy, Afghanistan, the Armenian earthquake, and the Chernobyl disaster that would have come, Gorbachev, Grishin or whoever. And the nature of that future junta or dictator or troika is totally unpredictable. For all we know, it could have followed the Chinese path of modernization - though, given the quality of the top nomenklatura, I doubt it.
The issue of the quality and legitimacy of the elite is the crucial one, I believe. Gorbachev says that, were he a different man, he could have ruled quietly for 15 or 20 years. He is talking through his cute fur hat. By the time he came to power, the Soviet ruling elite had lost the right to rule in the eyes of the ruled. The nomenklatura was not leading society anywhere, the masses did not believe in the ideological cliches it was mouthing. The spectacle was sick-making, and it was not fooling anyone: The people saw that the only thing that the nomenklatura cared for was its own well-being - its interests centered round the special system of distribution that catered to it. So the whole structure of society was doomed, and the speed with which it collapsed is the best proof of that.
Of course, Gorbachev did his best to help it collapse. What he actually hoped to do was avoid being overthrown by a confederacy of hardliners and extend his reign. In this he failed, just as he had botched all the jobs he had ever tackled (except photo ops, perhaps): his "initiatives" in Stavropolye, his job as Central Committee agricultural secretary, his invention of Gosagroprom, his economic "acceleration" program, his anti-alcohol campaign, just about everything, culminating in being kicked out from power by a cruder force. Even his ending the Cold War - an inestimable achievement - eventually put the country, or what was left of it after his reign, in the tightening noose of NATO and US military bases.
So it looks like I must agree with Prof. Brown's negative premise cited at the beginning of these notes: We will hardly ever see eye to eye on Gorbachev's role in history. Not the history of this country, at least.