“REVILED, REVERED, AND STILL CHALLENGING RUSSIA TO EVOLVE”: This is the headline with which the NYT recently signaled a new book by the man who ended the Soviet Union, and has continued to work for global peace ever since. In a long, but consistently dismissive article, the Times acknowledges the last Soviet leader’s role in ending the Cold War, while conveying disdain for him and his country.
This ubiquitous attitude of the American mainstream press is all about Washington’s determination to remain global top dog. No longer able to accuse Russia of Communism, and conscious of that country’s unique mineral reserves and vast land area, it has settled on a policy of provocation. After fomenting a coup in Ukraine in 2014, it moved NATO forces – including nuclear missiles – right up to Russia’s Western borders, shattering the world’s expectation of a post Cold War peace dividend.
Just how ideologically ridiculous this policy is can be understood from Gorbachev’s extensive discussion of social democracy that begins a third of the way into this 500 page book, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of Russia’s turn from seventy years of Communism to authoritarian neo-capitalism. In the nineteen fifties, when Gorbachev was studying law at Moscow University he became friends with the Czech student Zdenek Molnar. A decade later, as Gorbachev was beginning to rise in the Communist Party hierarchy, Molnar led the Prague Spring, which, though ended when Leonid Brezhnev sent in Russian tanks, was the harbinger of Eastern Europe’s liberation from Soviet oversight two decades later.
In the eighties, a succession of three Communist leaders well beyond retirement age led to the appointment as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR of a fifty-four year old still inspired by the ideas of his student days. According to Wikipedia, Mikhail Gorbachev “acknowledged that his liberalizing policies of glasnost and perestroika owed a great deal to Alexander Dub
ek‘s “Socialism with a human face”. Gorbachev tells us that when a reporter asked him what was the difference between his policies and the Prague Spring, he replied, “Nineteen years”.[24]
This comment is likely to be lost on most Americans, who have never been exposed to the fine points of socialist theory. Only by counting on the ignorance of even its high-end readers can The Times review a book titled ‘The New Russia’ and manage to convey the impression that its author does not support the leader of that country. You would never know from the Times references to “an official line denigrating traditional democracy,” or from the derogatory phrase “he churns out articles, essays and books about the need to enhance freedom in Russia” or even from the acknowledgement that “Mr. Gorbachev led the way, toward free speech, free enterprise and open borders”, because it is modified by the words “albeit haltingly”.
Then there is the claim that “the society at large blames him for losing the Soviet empire and leaving them citizens of a second-class country,” and the unnecessary piece of information that “The hourlong interview took place at his shrinking foundation, where his office is dominated by an oil painting of his wife, Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999.” A “shrinking” foundation and a wife who died of a dread disease!
Picking up where his 2004 memoir left off, Gorbachev’s “The New Russia”, is all about ideology. Gorbachev reveals how, after the historic dissolution of the Soviet Union in December, 1991, he and his old friend Zdenek Molnar felt were compelled to discuss their respective attitudes toward socialism:
“We talked about the vagaries of socialism in the twentieth century and the future of the socialist ideal. Like Zdenek, I needed time to gradually overcome ….[the] dogmatic understanding of socialism imposed on us in a closed society from our student days.
“We did not repudiate socialist values, principally the values of freedom, justice and solidarity, in all their complex interrelatedness. For me, these imply equal opportunities, access to education and satisfactory health care, a socially responsible market and a minimum. social welfare safety net…. Socialism as I understand it is an outlook, and I am certain that in today’s world, it is impossi-ble to formulate policy without socialist values.”
Socialism is indeed best described as an outlook. In fact, during the Cold War, one political theory held that eventually the Communist and Capitalist systems would ‘converge’ into something that took the best from both systems. The 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union failed to confirm that theory, whose key element, ’a socially responsible market’ is still contested in the United States.
Although social democracy has been the only sane policy for developed economies for almost a century, until Bernie Sanders entered the American presidential race in 2015, American politicians have deliberately failed to differentiate it from Communism. While Scandinavia achieved the highest overall standard of living the world had ever known, with Western Europe not far behind, American pundits referred to ‘the Nordic Model’ as either too costly for the wealthy or impossible to achieve in non-homogeneous societies. Decades of propaganda have culminated in Hillary Clinton’s claim that Sanders’ promises would be impossible to implement, while Sanders’ emphasis on Hillary’s ties to Wall Street point to the threat social democracy poses to the 1%.
The European Union is the largest or second largest economy in the world depending on how it is counted, either way a direct threat to the United States. Starting in 2008, Wall Street launched a relentless attack on Europe’s Welfare State, encouraging banks to create unsurmountable debts that would have to be repaid by ordinary people through austerity policies. That policy increasingly threatens the EU’s survival by demanding that its citizens work longer hours for less pay in order to ensure ever higher investor returns.
Ever since I began to focus on Russian politics under Vladimir Putin, reading the alternative American press and watching Russia’s English language television channel, RT, I’ve been convinced that the Russian President may be an ‘authoritarian’ but the regime he heads is a social democratic one.
I once wrote:
Watch Putin’s English language channel (rt.com) for a few days and you will realize that capitalist Russia, far from throwing the solidarity baby out with the Communist bath water, sees itself as a social democracy (albeit with a less developed civil society than Western models), still convinced that society must protect its individual members from want (to use Franklin Roosevelt’s famous but long forgotten phrase). In a supreme irony, today it is Russia that defends the principles that Washington enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (modeled on revolutionary France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen) specifies that: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, medical care, necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
In The New Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev tells us that: ”In one of my conversations with President Vladimir Putin I said that the public had welcomed (my) establishment of a social democratic party. To this he responded (and I quote him verbatim): ‘What do you mean? Our country is already social-democratic!’
In the nineteen eighties when I was writing Une autre Europe, un Autre Monde, that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, I foresaw, on the basis of composite Western news reports and analysis, that Gorbachev would be the one chosen from among three candidates to be First Secretary of the USSR. But I would not pretend to know today on the basis of his books whether he agrees with Vladimir Putin that ‘free and fair elections’ do not guarantee truly democratic government. What is clear beyond a doubt is that the last Soviet leader sees social democracy as the ideal blend of capitalist innovation and socialism’s commitment to equity that goes beyond equality of opportunity, guaranteeing life’s basic necessities to all, regardless of earning ability.
Bernie Sanders’ candidacy suggests that the theory of convergence could finally become a reality. But judging from its attitude toward Mikhail Gorbachev, that is not what the New York Times is seeking.
Deena Stryker is an international expert, author and journalist that has been at the forefront of international politics for over thirty years, exlusively for the online journal “New Eastern Outlook.”
