Gorbachev did not tear down that wall


The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago. This week the last of the Soviet emperors, Mikhail Gorbachev, 78, commemorated the event in the London Guardian. Considering that it used to be his wall, it was a somewhat ironic exercise. Mr. Gorbachev got around the dilemma by referring to the Berlin Wall as "one of the shameful symbols of the Cold War" -- which is rather like referring to the gate at Auschwitz as one of the shameful symbols of World War II.

In fact, the eerie ruins at Auschwitz symbolize Nazism, not the war fought to defeat it. The same is true of the wall with which Gorbachev's comrade and predecessor Nikita Khrushchev encircled West Berlin in 1961. The wall symbolized communism, not the cold (and sometimes not so cold) war between communism and the free world. The ghastly structure collapsed in November 1989, not because the war came to an end, but because Soviet-type communism did.

In a speech delivered at the Brandenburg Gate in the summer of 1987, U.S. president Ronald Reagan called upon Gorbachev to "tear down that wall." Gorbachev did nothing. It was the people of Berlin who pulled down the wall two and a half years later. Doing nothing, though, was enough to win Gorbachev the Nobel Peace Price in 1990 -- deservedly, for someone else in his position might have done the wrong thing and blown up the world.

Presiding over the dissolution of the Soviet (a. k.a. "Evil") Empire, which he did between 1985 and 1991, was a better choice. Gorbachev knows it. "We politicians from the last century can be proud of the fact that we avoided the danger of a thermonuclear war," he writes. It's true, and Gorbachev merits to be styled "Czar Mikhail the Good" for it. What he postulates in the rest of his piece, though, is nonsense.

Do I mean false? No. Gorbachev's analysis is worse than false. It's half-true.

"The social problems in Russia, as in other post-communist countries, are proof that simply abandoning the flawed model of a centralized economy and bureaucratic planning is not enough," he writes. Is that so? To begin with, post-communist countries didn't simply abandon a flawed model of centralized economy and bureaucratic planning; they abandoned a brutal system of repression and murder. What the social problems in Russia and other post-communist countries prove is that curing the victim of a stabbing requires more than pulling the knife from his chest.

Abandoning the Soviet model, writes Gorbachev, "guarantees neither a country's global competitiveness nor respect for the principles of social justice or a dignified standard of living for the population." Well, fancy that. I suppose being rescued from the river doesn't cure unrequited love, either. Except that isn't why rescuers pull victims from rivers. They do it to save them from drowning.

It may be true that pulling someone from the water

Yuri Andropov

doesn't do much for his love life, or perhaps even for his life in the end, but this would be a weak argument for letting him flounder (and an even weaker excuse for having pushed him into the water in the first place). Realizing this, Gorbachev tells us that doing away with communism was a communist idea. It seems Gorbachev and his comrades didn't merely refrain from blowing up the world to preserve the Berlin wall; they themselves were instrumental in pulling it down.

"Many now forget," Gorbachev writes, "that the fall of the Berlin wall was not the cause of global changes but to a great extent the consequence of deep, popular reform movements that started in the east, and the Soviet Union in particular."

What a fine example of historical revisionism: a half-truth becoming a total lie by the time it reaches the columns of the Guardian. Yes, there were reform-communists in the east. Their bodies decorated the gallows or filled the frozen gravesites of the Gulag. True, the fall of the wall wasn't the cause of the changes in the Soviet system but their culmination, except Gorbachev and his fellow Bolsheviks didn't drive those changes. They resisted them.

This raises a question, though. Gorbachev, too, was Stalin's heir. Why didn't he resist reformers as strenuously as some of his mentors and predecessors -- say, as Yuri Andropov? After the 1956 Hungarian uprising, when Andropov was Soviet ambassador to Hungary, real reform-communists, like Hungarian prime minister Imre Nagy, were hanged. In contrast, Gorbachev gave his reformers so much rope they ended up hanging the Kremlin instead of themselves. Why?

As Gorbachev looks back at events from a distance of twenty years, it appears to him that "[a]fter decades of the Bolshevik experiment and the realization that this had led Soviet society down a historical blind alley, a strong impulse for democratic reform evolved in the form of Soviet perestroika..."

I don't think so.

I think, as I wrote on Nov. 18, 1989: "[Gorbachev] just wanted to open the window a crack... But the wind has yanked it out of his hand, broke the glass, and now there's a hurricane raging inside."

Men open windows. Hurricanes come from elsewhere.


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