H-Diplo Roundtable, Vol. XX

2018

H-Diplo Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse @HDiplo Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii

Introduction by Vladislav Zubok Roundtable Review Volume XX, No. 1 (2018) 4 September 2018

William Taubman. Gorbachev. His Life and Times. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-393-64701-3 (hardcover, $39.95); 978-0-393-35620-5 (paperback, $24.95).

URL: http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XX-1

Contents Introduction by Vladislav M. Zubok, London School of Economics and Political Science ..... 2 Review by Alex Pravda, University of Oxford ...... 6 Review by Sergey Radchenko, Cardiff University ...... 9 Review by Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan ...... 12 Review by James Graham Wilson, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State ...... 17 Author’s Response by William Taubman, Amherst College, Emeritus ...... 20

H-Diplo Roundtable Review, Vol. XX, No. 1 (2018)

Introduction by Vladislav M. Zubok, London School of Economics and Political Science

illiam Taubman’s book on Mikhail Gorbachev is not just another biography. It is the culmination of this scholar’s life-long efforts to understand Soviet history. All of the reviewers concur in their W superlative assessments of the book. Alex Pravda and James Wilson call it the best, most detailed and comprehensive book about Gorbachev ever written. Ronald Suny believes it is “an even better book” than Taubman’s Pulitzer prize-winning biography of Nikita Khrushchev.1 And Sergei Radchenko describes “a beautiful narrative that draws the reader in, informs, fascinates, excites, surprises on occasion…” Naturally, the unity breaks down when the reviewers deal with Gorbachev’s agency and meaning for history. The enormity of change, domestic and international, that Gorbachev’s policies produced guarantee that debates about alternatives and options, missed opportunities and false hopes will continue in the future, depending on—or perhaps independently of—new sources and revelations.

Taubman’s book is written for a broader audience and is above all about the life of a man, his wife, and his life-path. Yet it is not one of many bios of politicos from cradle to retirement. Dealing with a major living historical figure whom one admires (Taubman never conceals his admiration for Gorbachev) required tact, empathy, open-mindedness, and a certain sense of humility, in addition to methodological mastery. The book also tackles a question that preceded and survived Soviet history: zigzags of Russian society between hope and tragedy, liberalisation and despotic authoritarianism. The historian’s personal engagement with this subject has always been deeper than his interest in Soviet geopolitical exploits. Taubman’s ancestors had escaped tragedy by emigrating from the imperial Pale of Settlement before the Russian revolution. In the mid-1960s, a young student of history from Harvard, Taubman spent a year at the Moscow University at the time of hopeful reformist ferment and published his first book about it. In August 1968 Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed ‘the Prague Spring’; a conservative reaction set on that lasted for fifteen years. After a stint in the Cold War history in the 1970s, Taubman returned to his main interest. His familiarity with the Moscow liberal-minded intelligentsia contributed to his liberal bias. His magisterial biography of Khrushchev was a tribute to the ‘people of the 1960s,’ many of whom had become his friends. As Taubman worked on Khrushchev’s book, Gorbachev raised the hope of peaceful change to previously unimaginable heights, only to trigger a tragedy, this time not one of despotism and terror, but of socio-economic collapse, ethnic violence, and criminal lawlessness. Taubman’s Gorbachev sums up the scholar’s life-long intellectual quest.

The reviews in this roundtable present a good mix of perspectives and views. Alex Pravda inquires as to what made Gorbachev “a transformational leader,” and finds in Taubman’s book a paradoxical, if not entirely new, answer: disdain for preconceived, detailed plans and actionable policies; overconfidence and a highly personalised way of making crucial decisions; and moral values, including the rejection of force. This is a bit a faint praise: what kind of a transformational leadership owes more to flaws and misjudgements than to perspicacity and political will? Ronald Suny spots other clues in the chapters about Gorbachev’s earlier life. Gorbachev had grown up in a loving, and divided family; one of his grandfathers was against collectivisation, another was for it. This had increased his penchant for consensus politics, reluctance to side with ‘radicals’ against ‘conservatives’, and desire to end the perennial ‘civil war’ that had riven Russian society. Suny also highlights how Gorbachev’s “improbable career formed by a socialist affirmative action program” made him adhere to the socialist project to the end, while rejecting the Stalinist system. Both reviewers admire

1 William Taubman, Khrushchev, The Man and His Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

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Taubman’s Gorbachev, but from different perspectives. For Pravda, Gorbachev deserves admiration for letting communism in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union go to its grave without violence. For Suny, he is “a decent, moral man,” who rightfully sought to build a social democracy in Russia, but stumbled because of “personal flaws, most importantly over-confidence, even arrogance.” Suny also finds that Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika was betrayed “by many of his comrades, by the Soviet intelligentsia, and by the Great Power allies.”

While Pravda and Suny inquire, two other reviewers engage the book on a more polemical level. James Graham Wilson takes issue with the book’s claim that the George H. W. Bush Administration could have made a difference in the drama of perestroika, had it provided an early active support to Gorbachev. He also refuses to give weight to the contemporary debate about the Western ‘broken pledge’ to Gorbachev not to extend NATO eastward. Taubman’s reply at the end of this roundtable demonstrates that he supports Gorbachev’s foreign policy vision with more conviction than his domestic reforms. At the same time, the polemics leave a big question in the air: could the U.S.-led West have indeed granted Gorbachev—and the Soviet Union—more time and chances for evolutionary reformation, instead of letting ‘the Soviet empire’ dissolve. One can fancy how many scholars, not to mention those from the Baltics and Ukraine, would vehemently dispute this point. Taubman seems to find this question legitimate, and I side with him on this point.

Radchenko’s review takes a revisionist stance on Taubman’s main conclusion: Gorbachev is a tragic hero who deserves to be admired. His scepticism reflects a prevalent ex-Soviet opinion about Gorbachev but also invites reconsideration of the familiar debate about ‘democracy vs. an iron hand.’ Taubman and three reviewers have no doubt that Gorbachev’s goal of building democracy (or social democracy) in the late Soviet Union was both moral and practical. The problem, in Taubman’s conclusion, was with the “raw material”: it would take Russian society much more time to arrive to this destination than Gorbachev had imagined. For Radchenko, however, it is hard to accept Taubman’s conclusion without hard questioning. Considering the long and tragic history of revolution, reform, and despotism in Russia and the Soviet Union, how could any realist leader have expected a quick democratic transition? Perhaps a future debate about a flawed leader vs, a flawed society should be less constrained by liberal-democratic teleology.

In a choice between the ‘Chinese road’ of Deng Xiaoping and ‘the Czech reforms’ of 1968, Gorbachev’s heart clearly was with the latter. The main factor in his decision seems to have been his personality, his unwillingness to be a strong authoritarian and to use force (Taubman, 217-218). In Gorbachev’s adviser Anatoly Chernyaev’s diary and Politburo minutes, Gorbachev constantly fretted about madness of Moscow intelligentsia, who flooded the streets with demands of immediate ‘freedom’ and direct forms of democracy. Yet at a deeper cultural level Gorbachev seemed to be sympathetic to this madness. His other personal predilections caused him to misjudge the main challenges to perestroika. He saw the old authoritarian state and party structures as his main opponent and wanted to weaken and balance against it. At the same time, he seemed not to realise that his improvised liberalisation, economic and political, generated new monsters that destroyed Soviet economy and governability.

Taubman takes Gorbachev’s side in his epic battle against Boris Yeltsin, the main destroyer of the Soviet Union. So did all the reviewers. I also agree: Yeltsin’s neoliberal turn, applauded by many in the United States, destroyed the fragile democracy in Russia and paved the way for its return to authoritarianism. But would a post-coup Gorbachev have been preferable than his radical, power-grabbing successor? Last chapters of Taubman’s book about Gorbachev’s ‘anti-career’ after his forced resignation in December 1991 shed an

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unexpected light on this counterfactual. Shorn of the power invested on him by the mighty ‘post-totalitarian’ system, Gorbachev confirmed his reputation as a wonderful human being, yet was a non-starter as a politician. After 1991, a new era of Russian history began, where no place existed for Gorbachev, the ‘people of the Sixties,’ and most of the things that had attracted and fascinated Taubman and other scholars of the Soviet Union. Perhaps, as Taubman believes, grandchildren of the present-day Russians will learn to appreciate ‘the groundwork for democracy’ that Gorbachev laid. This is, however, only a matter of hope that always accompanies Russia’s tragic history.

Participants:

William Taubman, Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College, received a Certificate of the Russian Institute (1965) and a Ph.D. in public law and government from Columbia University (1969) and is the author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (W.W. Norton, 2003) and Gorbachev: His Life and Times (W.W. Norton, 2017). He is currently working, together with his brother, Philip Taubman, on a new book about Robert S. McNamara.

Vladislav M. Zubok is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously he was professor at Temple University, Philadelphia, and worked at the National Security Archives in Washington DC. He is a specialist in Cold War and Soviet-Russian history. His books include A Failed Empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Belknap Press, 2009), and The Idea of Russia. The Life and Work of Dmitry of Likhachev (I.B. Tauris, 2017). He his next book is 1991: The Destruction of the Soviet Union.

Alex Pravda is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and East European Studies at the School of Inter- Disciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College. He has published widely on Soviet and post-Soviet foreign policy and politics. Recent publications include “Moscow and Eastern Europe, 1988-1989: A Policy of Optimism and Caution,” in Mark Kramer and Vit Smetana eds., Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain. The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945-1989 (Lexington Books, 2014): 305-334. He is currently writing a book on the transformation of Soviet foreign policy, 1985-1991.

Sergey Radchenko is Professor of International Relations at Cardiff University. His research interests include the Cold War and the history of Chinese and Soviet foreign relations. He is the author of Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2009) and Unwanted Visionaries: the Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is currently working on a history of Chinese foreign relations since 1949.

Ronald Grigor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Ron has published a large number of monographs, historiographical essays and edited numerous collections including The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (1972); Armenia in the Twentieth Century (1983); The Making of the Georgian Nation (1988, 1994); Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (1993); The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (1993); The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (1998, 2011); “They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else:” A History of the Armenian

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Genocide (2015), and most recently Russia’s Empires (with Valerie Kivelson, 2017). Presently he is working on a two-volume biography of Stalin; and a further series of historiographical essays on Soviet history.

James Graham Wilson is a Historian at the Department of State, where he compiles volumes for the Foreign Relations of the United States—most recently, Foreign Relations, 1981-1988, vol. VI, Soviet Union, October 1986—January 1989, available at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1981-88v06. He is the author of The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2014). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2011.

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Review by Alex Pravda, University of Oxford

his is by far the most detailed and comprehensive account that we have of Mikhail Gorbachev’s political life. William Taubman covers all stages of that life, from the formative childhood years through to the quarter century of Gorbachev’s activities in retirement. While covering a broad landscapeT of domestic and international issues, Taubman manages to keep a tight focus on his subject. We get a vivid Gorbachev perspective on his dramatic and turbulent political journey. To achieve this, Taubman has done a remarkable job in gathering testimonies from those who knew and worked with Gorbachev, as well as from the man himself. He makes extensive use of the large published memoir material, notably the diaries of Anatoly Chernyaev, 1 Gorbachev’s closest aide, to provide a kind of running eyewitness commentary on the conduct of the Soviet leader.

Of particular interest is the material Taubman has managed to collect on the early part of the story. The substantial five chapters, which take the story to 1985, are especially valuable for the new insights they offer into Gorbachev’s character, political instincts, and ways of thinking. They shed telling light on the basic question that puzzled many Western politicians and some members of his own team: how did a model product of the Soviet Communist system come to press for its transformation? Taubman usefully highlights Gorbachev’s capacity for “ambivalence” as the quality helping to make this possible (134-135). On the one hand, he maintained a strong attachment to doctrinal ideals he attributed to Vladimir Lenin. On the other, he was strongly critical of the ways in which coercive bureaucratic methods, dating from the Stalin years, continued to corrode and degrade the Soviet system. As an ambitious and high-minded official, Gorbachev tried to expose corrupt and inefficient practice in ways that were compatible with his own advancement through the ranks. It was his own exemplary performance within the formal rules of the system that brought Gorbachev the support of critically-minded, if cautious, older members of the leadership, such as Yuri Andropov, who wanted to see efficient young modernisers at the helm.

In the event, Gorbachev departed from the Andropov reform agenda in the sequencing as well as the depth of change. Why he took so long to get around to serious economic change remains not altogether clear. After all, Gorbachev’s agricultural expertise gave him insight into how that part of the economic system operated. Taubman notes that pride played a part in Gorbachev’s putting off appointing an aide on economic questions. (313). Gorbachev’s deep concern to safeguard the socialist nature of the economy helps to make sense of his repeated hesitation about radical market reform, even when close associates considered this politically urgent. Here, as in so many areas, his beliefs and idealism trumped pragmatic calculation.

Shifts in beliefs were also central to the political evolution of perestroika. In his account of the discussions surrounding the 19th Party conference in June 1988, Taubman rightly highlights Gorbachev’s concern to bring about “a new intellectual breakthrough” (353). It would have been interesting to have had more analysis here of how and why Gorbachev at this juncture came to realise, as he reflected years later, that they needed not merely to improve the system but to replace it.2 Taubman focuses more on how this radical step-change

1 Anatoly Chernyaev, Sovmestnyi iskhod. Dnevnik dvukh epokh 1972-1991 gody (Moscow: Rosspen, 2008). Also see Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).

2 Mikhail Gorbachev speech in Central Hall, London, 29 October 1996, cited in Archie Brown, “The Gorbachev Factor Revisited,” Problems of Post-Communism 58:4-5 (July-August/September-October 2011): 57. For an

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created a new populist political ‘game’ in which Gorbachev found it ever more difficult to cope with pressures from new radical forces. The skills which had served him well in outmanoeuvring conservatives within the Politburo proved less effective when dealing with Boris Yeltsin. Gorbachev’s personal as well as political frustrations come through in the vivid account Taubman gives of the stormy relationship that helped to bring an end to the perestroika project on the home front.

Taubman deals with the international dimension of Gorbachev’s project in chronological tandem with domestic developments. If this occasionally results in the disjointed treatment of major questions, including Afghanistan and disarmament, it has the merit of displaying the important links between Gorbachev’s positions in internal and international arenas. It is to the Soviet leader’s personal diplomacy that Taubman devotes most space. We get ample accounts of the superpower summits, with a good deal of detail on the atmospherics surrounding Gorbachev and his wife Raisa, who justifiably figures a good deal in these and other sections of the book. It is true, as Taubman shows, that Gorbachev’s personal skills helped to bring about remarkable progress in the quality of superpower relations, especially at the individual level. It remains questionable, however, whether he came to regard President Ronald Reagan as a real friend (392). Considerable doubts remained about the President’s intentions towards Moscow. And it is such doubts that help explain the prolonged and unwillingness of Gorbachev to give way to Washington on key issues such as Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) development – a position which Taubman finds somewhat puzzling (296). At Reykjavik, Gorbachev insisted that SDI research be confined to the laboratory, in part because of fears about the military and technological threats the system might pose. But as important in explaining Gorbachev’s stubborn stance here was his continued suspicion of Washington. It was not until September 1989, when successful negotiations on disarmament and a range of other issues had built sufficient confidence and trust, that Moscow agreed to decouple talks on SDI from those on deep cuts in strategic missiles.

In the European dimension of Gorbachev’s foreign policy, the most important puzzle, his acquiescent stance on Eastern Europe and especially on the German question, is treated in a generally balanced fashion. Taubman emphasises time pressures, Gorbachev’s general lack of interest in Eastern Europe, and a reluctance to deal with its leaders. He brings out the importance for Gorbachev of adhering to New Thinking principles of self-determination and freedom of choice. Yet what is also striking was the weakness, often the absence, of actionable policy for the region as a whole, and, crucially, for the settling of questions of German unification and security alignment. One wonders whether such policy deficiencies had anything to do with what Taubman identifies as Gorbachev’s disdain for preconceived, detailed plans (690-691, 357). By 1990 the ways in which policy was made had become highly informal and personalised. Everything hinged on discussions within Gorbachev’s close entourage and hung on the leader’s final word. As turmoil increased within the country and around its borders, Gorbachev’s style of leadership became ever more pivotal.

Observations on Gorbachev’s leadership qualities and style as well as performance crowd the densely rich concluding section of the book. Taubman highlights Gorbachev’s vision of a democratic socialism worthy of original ideals and the optimistic and confident way he approached the formidable set of tasks involved. He highlights Gorbachev’s overconfidence and links this with a tendency to overreach and lose touch with reality. Gorbachev’s sense of mission certainly generated highly ambitious goals. At the same time, his values,

incisive analysis of the evolution in Gorbachev’s thinking on issues of political change, see Archie Brown, “Gorbachev and His Era in Perspective,” in Seven Years that Changed the World. Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 277-330.

7 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable Review, Vol. XX, No. 1 (2018) including, crucially, the rejection of force, meant that his moral compass heavily circumscribed the means he could use to achieve his objectives. This self-limitation might well have reduced the effectiveness of his policies yet it elevated his performance as a transformational leader. Without Gorbachev’s determination to avoid the use of force, the turmoil in Eastern Europe and, particularly, the upheavals within the USSR, would not have run as remarkably peaceful a course as they did. Taubman rightly concludes that Gorbachev deserves not only our understanding but our admiration. This biography helps to enhance both.

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Review by Sergey Radchenko, Cardiff University

held out for William Taubman’s new book with eager anticipation, even a degree of trepidation. It was long in coming. I thought that perhaps the author was waiting for his subject to pass away. It sometimes seems easier for historians to address a gravestone than a living person. Taubman’s dialogue with Nikita Khrushchev’sI gravestone left a lasting impression; that biography brought the author a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize.1 But Mikhail Gorbachev talks back. Gorbachev charms. Gorbachev has a story to tell, and tells it in his very peculiar way. Can we, as historians, remove ourselves sufficiently from the subject of our inquiry to allow for a balanced assessment? My sense would be, generally, no. This is why I find it hard to read, say, biographies of Vladimir Putin, without something of a sinister smirk. But it was different with Taubman’s book. It is partly the passage of time. After all, we are some thirty years past the high tide of perestroika (has it really been that long?) Also, we can do better now than just take Gorbachev’s word for it. There is a deluge of archival documentation on the Gorbachev era, not to mention the countless memoirs by Gorbachev’s supporters and detractors (mostly, it seems, detractors). Last, we are genuinely in the post-transition era. Russia has transited somewhere (probably not where most people expected). There is a new conflict in Russia’s relations with the West. Reykjavik is dead. Fulton is back. A good time, then, to retrace our steps and see where it all went wrong.

Does Taubman’s book succeed? Mostly, but not everywhere. Taubman certainly succeeds in stringing together a beautiful narrative that draws the reader in, informs, fascinates, excites, surprises on occasion; we did not expect anything less from the master of the genre. The book is well balanced. Taubman devotes considerable attention to Gorbachev’s early years, his education, his party career in Stavropol, his relationship with his wife (there is also a fair amount on Raisa Gorbachev herself, including an unduly detailed digression on her bitter-sweet—actually, mostly bitter—bonding with First Lady Nancy Reagan). Taubman then alternates between recounting the domestic scene and Gorbachev’s foreign engagements, in particular his relationship with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The book offers a riveting account of the August 1991 coup, and then tapers off to a lengthy but anticlimactic series of afterthoughts on Gorbachev’s post-1991 anti-career. On the whole, then, this is a book that one cannot help but recommend to anyone interested in Russia’s contemporary history; I believe, the usual thing to say on such occasions is ‘unlikely to be surpassed anytime soon.’

The book is also intensely political, and this, too, is not surprising. Taubman does not pull his punches when it comes to describing Gorbachev’s relations with his nemesis, Boris Yeltsin. The latter comes across as a manipulative fraud, a power-hungry boor, a drunkard and an authoritarian who put his personal ambition far above the common good. If anything, Taubman seems to wonder why Gorbachev did not play it tougher with Yeltsin when he still held all the cards in his hands. Is the book unfair toYeltsin? Not necessarily. Sometimes one has to take sides. Taubman takes Gorbachev’s side in the feud, and this suggests a counterfactual: what if Yeltsin had never been there? Would Gorbachev have succeeded, or were the forces he unleashed too powerful to be contained, with or without Yeltsin? Some historians are averse to counterfactuals and others take issue with the ‘great man’ theory, but one has to wonder to what extent fates of entire countries may depend on bizarre little vendettas, like the one between Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

1 William Taubman, Khrushchev: the Man and His Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

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Taubman does not offer any radical new interpretations of why Gorbachev behaved the way he did in Eastern Europe. The standard explanation—that he was averse to use force—holds for this book, as it does for many a previous writer.2 Why he was so averse to use force is left a little obscure, and it is also not entirely clear to what extent he was responsible for the events in Lithuania in January 1991, when the Soviet military cracked down on the pro-independence protesters. Taubman suggests that Gorbachev was not so opposed to a dialogue with the hardliners, even as he moved resolutely against them in a number of instances—for instance, in his peaceful retreat from Eastern Europe. This puzzling aspect of Gorbachev’s politics is not entirely fleshed out in the book, but that is probably because Gorbachev himself did not know where he stood. He was quite capable of surprising himself. He was also a true visionary, and his approach to European questions, including that of German unification, must be understood through the prism of this vision.

Here I would wholeheartedly endorse Taubman’s take. In the book he effectively blames Bush and the ‘realists’ in his administration for failing to heed Gorbachev’s vision of Europe, for pocketing Moscow’s concessions and walking away, for failing to live up to the historic moment. Bush’s long pause at the start of his administration (when he took too long to evaluate his approach to the Soviet Union), his unwillingness to buy into the idea of the ‘Common European Home,’ his failure (yes, well-justified, no doubt) to provide timely support for Gorbachev’s fledgling reform initiatives, finally his not-so-inconspicuous fence-sitting when it came to choosing Gorbachev over his successors—all point to a singular failure of vision. Taubman’s judgment is brutally direct: “what looked and still looks utopian to ‘realists’ may have been a last chance that was missed” (692). This unforgiving assessment of America’s most unimaginative administration of our times is in line with some of the most recent historiography on the subject.3

And then we come to the overall judgment of Mikhail Gorbachev, and his role in history. Taubman’s is basically positive. Gorbachev, he writes, “was a tragic hero who deserves our understanding and admiration.” Why should that be so? The reasons are spelled out in the conclusion. Gorbachev’s “brave undertaking,” Taubman contends, “may have been doomed from the start” (692). But there were no real alternatives. The Soviet Union, he argues (without, however, providing conclusive evidence to this end) could have lasted for another 10 or 20 years, and then it could have turned into another Yugoslavia. Gorbachev peacefully ended the Cold War. Gorbachev opened his country to a democratic experiment that may have failed for the time- being, but may well mean something in a hundred years’ time. Fair enough but what about the alternatives? Could there have been a less dramatic road to freedom? Taubman does not think so: “It is more the fault of the raw material he worked with than of his own real shortcomings and mistakes that Russian democracy will take much longer to build than he thought” (688).

2 See, for example, Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Stephen F. Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

3 See, e.g. Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya, “NATO expansion: what Gorbachev hears,” 12 December 2017, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard- western-leaders-early; Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya, “NATO expansion: What Yeltsin Heard,” 16 March 2018, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2018-03-16/nato-expansion-what-yeltsin-heard; Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or no deal? The end of the Cold War and the US offer to limit NATO expansion,” International Security 40:4 (2016): 7-44.

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This latter is a hard call to make. It is easy, on the other hand, to become a little deterministic and find fault with the ‘raw material’ (meaning, perhaps, the Russian people). It is easy to fall back on clichés, such as, for instance, Taubman’s one-liner dismissal of the Chinese reform experience: “Russians and Chinese have radically differing political histories and social traditions” (693). (Fine but, for instance, China and Taiwan have very similar political histories and social traditions, and one is a brutal dictatorship while the other is a prospering democracy). So, yes, let us understand and admire but, as in Georges Brassens’s famous song, do so “avec un soupçon de réserve toutefois,” with a little reserve on the part of those who lived through the experiment: “Mourons pour des idées, d’accord, mais de mort lente.” (Fine, let’s die for ideas but please— please—a slow death). It is here, I suppose, that the lines are drawn between the primarily Western audience of Gorbachev’s admirers (which includes Taubman) and his Russian critics. One day, perhaps, these lines will erode, and Gorbachev’s legacy will be recognized and celebrated by his ‘raw material’ compatriots in the way it is recognized and celebrated in this book. But, when this happens, a hundred years hence, neither Bill Taubman, nor this reviewer, nor you, dear readers, will be around to judge.

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Review by Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan

n the introduction to his extraordinary biography of the first and last president of the Soviet Union, William Taubman asks nearly thirty questions about Mikhail Gorbachev that he will attempt to answer, setting out the theme that he carries through this large volume: Gorbachev is hard to understand. With humilityI and deep curiosity, Taubman’s quest is to understand a complex and multifaceted man who rose from southern Russian peasantry to become the most powerful man in the last years of the Soviet Union, a man who promised and delivered greater freedom to his countrymen even as he failed to preserve their country, the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev grew up in a stern but loving family divided between two grandfathers, one the chairman of a collective farm, the other an individualistic farmer who spent time in the gulag. When the chairman also was arrested, detained for fourteen months, and tortured, young Gorbachev was shunned by his playmates. Taubman speculates that such experiences gave Gorbachev a balanced view of the Soviet experiment and a keen understanding of the injustices of the system. He worked in the fields as a boy in the absence of the older men during the Second World War, through a brief German occupation, until his father returned, wounded at the front. What he saw tempered him and probably influenced his future reluctance to use violence when he had the power to do so.

As a teenager Gorbachev was an extraordinarily hard worker, a medal-winning combine driver, physically strong and intellectually curious. He performed in plays and gained confidence in his abilities. But the greatest change came when this provincial peasant spent five years studying at the most prestigious university in the Soviet Union, Moscow State, trained as a lawyer (in a country without the rule of law), and “began the long process of rethinking [his] country’s history, its present, and its future” (44). Like many talented people from the bottom of society, his experience is a Soviet version of the log cabin to the White House story, an improbable career formed by a socialist affirmative action program. Gorbachev imbibed the values of Soviet- style socialism: egalitarianism, contempt for wealth and anything considered bourgeois, along with strong doses of Soviet patriotism.

Ambitious, he rose in the Komsomol and at age 21, in the last year of Stalin’s life, entered the Communist Party, even though he was already having doubts about many Soviet practices. He returned to Stavropol province with his wife, Raisa, and steadily climbed the party ladder. In the Soviet system whom you knew and who could do favors and promote you were keys to advancement, and throughout this career Gorbachev was skilled or lucky enough to attract important patrons, most consequently Yuri Andropov, then KGB chief and later General Secretary of the Communist Party. Thanks to his connections, he was called to Moscow in 1978 to become the youngest Central Committee secretary. Seven years later, after the death of three aged first secretaries in succession, his desperate comrades chose him leader of the Soviet Union. His comparative youth (54) was a major asset.

Taubman’s view is that Gorbachev was “a true believer—not in the Soviet system as it functioned (or did not) in 1985 but in its potential to live up to what he deemed its original ideals. Gorbachev believed in socialism, the faith of his beloved father and grandfather” (215). Like his university friend, the Czech reformer Zdenek Mlynar, he was a convinced Communist in the sense that he believed in the project of building a more just and equal society called socialism. Faithful and optimistic as they were, the two comrades were not blind to how far removed Soviet reality was from their ideals and the original projections of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Gorbachev was not disillusioned by General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations about the crimes of Joseph Stalin because he had already seen the consequences of collectivization and the purges in the

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lives of his own family. Unlike most of his fellow Soviet leaders, he knew his Marx and Lenin and was inspired by the courageous example of Lenin, who dared to seize power and extend the revolution.

Once he became General Secretary, Gorbachev embarked, at first cautiously, on a “revolution by evolutionary means,” refusing violence or the brutal means that would taint his democratic socialist ends (218). To the detriment of his intended reforms he rejected the Chinese path of decollectivization and promotion of peasant agriculture, which might have fueled economic prosperity and gained popularity for the reforming government. Once the economy improved, Gorbachev could have then proceeded to transformations in other areas. Instead, frustrated by the slow pace of change, he embarked on a frontal assault on many fronts: political democratization, economic liberalization, decentralization of control of non-Russian republics, emancipation of Soviet satellites, and putting an end to the costly Cold War. The first great shock, after the ill-fated and unpopular prohibition campaign, was the explosion of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, “an evil augury of what was to come” (242). The deep rot in the system was exposed more glaringly than ever.

A persistent underlying thread running through Taubman’s interpretation of the Gorbachev phenomenon is what might be called ‘the dilemma of Soviet reform.’ Changing the system in the late Soviet Union could only come from the top, from the regime itself; there was no crisis in society that could bubble up into a revolution. Control by the state, party, police, and army was secure, and dissent had largely been channeled or crushed. But, having learned a peculiar lesson from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the potential of the Prague Spring of 1968, party officials feared that weakness or division at the top might unleash massive forces from below that could destroy the Soviet structure. Thus, many resisted reform, while others understood that it could succeed only gradually, with great caution, and if controlled from above. Andropov notably “dreaded the prospect that freedom could get out of hand, while Gorbachev turned out to be far less cautious” (144).

At the end of 1986 and the beginning of 1987 Gorbachev pushed his closest advisors to begin to think of more radical changes in the political structure of the country, even flirting with the idea that the Communist Party should give up its monopoly of power and compete with other parties. At the Central Committee plenum in January 1987 he cautiously presented his thoughts on democratization. Much of the party elite was cool to the suggested changes, vague as they still were. Again, in June, another plenum adopted Gorbachev’s moderate economic reforms that slightly loosened the controls of powerful state ministries over enterprises. Gorbachev wanted to be simultaneously Martin Luther and the Pope, to reform the system without destroying it. But in his centrist position he created opposition on both the Right and the Left. And in a real sense, as Taubman shows painfully, he created his own nemesis, the ambitious, impulsive radical, Boris Yeltsin. He writes, “Gorbachev was instinctively democratic, Yeltsin an authoritarian populist” (333).

Taubman clearly admires Gorbachev and is sympathetic to his aspirations. But the overall vision of the book is not that reform was impossible but that indecision, confusion, hesitancy, compromise, misjudgments about personnel, and, ultimately, lack of clarity about goals and methods on the part of Gorbachev doomed perestroika and the Soviet Union. By 1988 Gorbachev was prepared to take his country further on the road to greater democracy. He intended to shake up the Communist Party, which had become the principal obstacle to further reform of the economy and political order, and revitalize the moribund soviets; “It was as if the tsar had turned Bolshevik and decided to overturn his own regime” (355). As the leader of the Soviet Bloc, he had no strategy for change in the Soviet satellite states in East Central Europe, letting each state to work it out on its own without Moscow’s interference. In negotiating with West Germany over unification with East Germany and with a recalcitrant Reagan administration over reduction of intermediate range missiles, he gave

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away the store with little in return. At home the General Secretary was reluctant to use force, the police and the military, even when faced by riots and rebellion; “Most important, by gutting the [Communist] party’s ability to run the country, he was undermining his own power” (373).

The elections of May 1989, fostered by Gorbachev, were the freest that Russia had experienced since 1917, and the results shook the hardliners in the Communist Party as liberals and more radical reformers surged to prominence in the now open politics. Excited by the possibilities now presented for further reform, Gorbachev proved to be far less skilled in a democratic arena with a critical media than he had been for most of his life in the closed, top-down patronage system of the Soviet Union. Nineteen-eighty-nine was the year when he was overwhelmed by cascading trends and events: disastrous economic decline; ethnic conflicts in the Baltic republics and the South Caucasus; the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defection of East European states from Communist rule; massive public protests; miners’ strikes; and deepening divisions within the elites desperately trying to hold onto on some semblance of power. As the Union itself began to pull apart, he reiterated, “the use of force is out of the question” (436).

Violence by the state would be used, however—in Georgia, the Baltic region, and in Azerbaijan—but reluctantly, hesitantly, and inconsistently. Gorbachev was looking the other way, at problems at home, as Communist rule over the ‘satellites’ evaporated with hardly a shot fired—except in Rumania, where Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu were executed by their own people. Gorbachev waited in vain for help, material and diplomatic, from the United States, but after the overtures by Ronald Reagan, his successor, President George H. W. Bush, offered very little to a floundering Gorbachev. The Chinese, led by Deng Xiaoping, were wary of the reforms in the Soviet Union, even as they carried out serious changes in their economic policies and maintained firmly the grip of the Communist Party over politics and society. Deng smashed the students protesting in Tiananmen Square after Gorbachev’s visit. In China state and party would not permit democracy to undermine the unity of the country and its gradualist path toward a more market-oriented economy.

1990 was the year that both the Soviet Union and Gorbachev himself began to come apart. His now increasingly formidable rival Yeltsin was elected chairman of the Russian Republic’s parliament. Continually underestimating his erratic opponent, Gorbachev, exhausted and without clear ideas about how to proceed, fell back on his usual incantation, “Everything will be alright. You’ll see” (515). In the summer he tried to compromise with Yeltsin and the more radically inclined economists who wanted to move rapidly toward a market economy (the so-called ‘500 Day Plan’). In the end he tried to marry the radicals with the doubters, like his prime minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, only to fracture his temporary alliance with Yeltsin, who then essentially declared war on Gorbachev. The leaders of Russia and other Soviet republics were by the fall of 1990 looking toward independence from the USSR. In September Gorbachev moaned to his close advisor Anatolii Chernayev, “Tolya, what should we do? Where is the way out?” (529).

That year also saw Gorbachev’s greatest and most inexplicable concession to the West. As its economy faltered, and the East German state was collapsing, the Soviet Union was increasingly vulnerable to American and West German pressure to allow unification of the two Germanys. East Germans wanted to unite with their wealthier, freer compatriots in the Federal Republic. Taubman relates the bizarre story of Gorbachev agreeing to allow German unification without written guarantees—merely verbal promises from the Americans and Germans—that NATO would not expand eastward. George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, were incredulous when Gorbachev conceded that the German people could themselves decide which military alliance they would join. Top Soviet military officers and diplomats shared their

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bewilderment. Gorbachev’s pleas for desperately needed economic aid were gently, repeatedly rebuffed. His foolish—and from a strategic perspective, irrational—decisions seriously, negatively impacted the future security of Russia, as Vladimir Putin would repeatedly assert, and prefigured both the 2008 war with Georgia and the current crisis with Ukraine.

By 1991 Gorbachev could no longer ride the tiger he had unleashed. The hard-liners who feared that his program would lead to the breakup of the country proved to be correct. But their clumsy attempt to overthrow him in August 1991 lasted only three days, unbalancing the scales of power in favor of Yeltsin. Democratic Russia required a different kind of politician. Gorbachev talked too much, changed his mind too often, and was unwilling to use power when he had it to punish his opponents. Yeltsin, on the other hand, was “a master of passive aggressiveness as well as the more active kind” (625). Reflecting on their differences, Gorbachev bitterly, sadly recognized Yeltsin’s ambitions and abilities: “Such . . . a simpleminded yen for the scepter! I’m at my wit’s end to understand how he combines this with political instinct. God knows, maybe this is his secret, maybe this is why he is forgiven everything. A tsar must conduct himself like a tsar. And that I do not know how to do” (581).

The literature on Gorbachev and perestroika is enormous, and Taubman has digested it thoroughly, supplemented the existent record with interviews with Gorbachev and others, traveled to places that figure in the story, and woven bits and pieces together in a tapestry of a man and his times that can truly be called epic. Taubman’s earlier biography of Nikita Khrushchev won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, an extraordinary achievement for a historian or political scientist.1 In my opinion, his Gorbachev is even a better book, though lightning does not often strike twice for the same person or the same prize.

Biographies by their very nature and the intentions of their authors focus on the central personality, and Taubman’s nuanced, often ambiguous portrait of Gorbachev is admiring without flattering. He has chosen to write an accessible history for a broad audience and unquestionably succeeds in explicating the intricacies of late Soviet history in easily digested prose. Rich in anecdote and detail, the text is populated with vivid portraits of major and minor personalities. Party ideologist Mikhail Suslov, for example, never let his limousine driver go over thirty miles an hour, to the frustration of the long line of cars behind. Andropov, it turns out, had a Jewish mother, yet rose to the pinnacle of Soviet power. Indeed, much of the story is about the personal limitations of Soviet actors. Taubman deftly demonstrates the many sides of Gorbachev’s personality, his abilities, and his limitations, but without condescension or imposing superfluous judgments. Personal flaws, most importantly over-confidence, even arrogance, are key to explaining the ultimate failure of his democratic and market-oriented reforms.

This is a Western, even an American, take on the successes and ultimate failure of the man at the center of the story. Liberalism is the dominant frame through which Taubman understands history and current politics. When Gorbachev and his allies thought and wrote like Westerners, they were on the side of history; when they used Marxist phrases or concepts they were stuck in the past. “The fact that he himself was still wedded to at least some old orthodoxies also held him back,” Taubman concludes (542). Still, his book is even- handed, critical when it must be, and free of the kinds of anti-Soviet biases that so often mar foreigners’ views of the USSR. What is lost, however, is a deeper level analysis that more conventionally scholarly books would provide. There is little investigation of the conflicting readings of the weaknesses of the Soviet system, how

1 William Taubman, Khrushchev, The Man and His Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

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they were understood at the time and since. Taubman flattens complex debates into sound bites. Antonio Gramsci, whom Gorbachev read, for example, is summed up in a sentence: “His notion of ‘cultural hegemony’ replaced cruder conceptions of how capitalism maintained its hold over society” (128). One is left to wonder what were the ideas expressed by the repressed Fagim Sadykov, a philosopher from Stavropol, in his banned book, The Unity of the People and the Contradictions of Socialism (1968), a work that Raisa approved and Mikhail was forced to denounce?2 The pivotal discussion in 1990 about transition to a market economy is reduced to a clash of personalities rather than elucidated with reference to the complex imperatives of such a fundamental transformation. But engaging in such explorations would require a different book for a different audience. On the other hand, there is a lot of attention paid to clothing and footwear.

Taubman’s Gorbachev is a decent, moral man who aspired to create a democratic Russia, convinced that there was no real socialism without democracy (and no real democracy without socialism). He had moved from being a critic of ‘actually existing’ Soviet ‘socialism’ to attempting to revive what he took to be the essence of Leninism only to eventually abandon what was left of ‘Communism,’ that is the remnants of Stalinism, to become a social democrat. Heroically he accomplished a true revolution, brought greater freedom to millions; yet he remains a tragic figure. He had never intended to destroy the Soviet Union but ended up tearing apart his beloved country and leaving in its wake a weak Russia at the mercy of a global hegemon, the United States. Betrayed by many of his comrades, by the Soviet intelligentsia, and by the Great Power allies he hoped to enlist in his cause, Gorbachev was set adrift, a president without a country on December 25, 1991. The red flag came down over the Kremlin, and his hopes that he could revive socialism as an alternative to actually existing capitalism appeared quaint and irrelevant to most of his compatriots.

2 F. B. Sadykov, Edinstvo naroda i protivorechiia sotsializma (Stavropol’: Stavropol’skoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1968).

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Review by James Graham Wilson, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State1

his is a magisterial work about the indispensable figure in the peaceful end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. As Taubman brilliantly illuminates, Mikhail Gorbachev’s singular personal qualities—intelligence, imagination, self-discipline, good humor, warmth, and decencyT —propelled him from Stavropol in the shadow of Nazi devastation to the Kremlin at the height of the nuclear arms race. Equally present in Taubman’s book is Raisa Gorbachev, her husband’s closest advisor and intellectual peer, who carved out the role of first lady of the Soviet Union, abroad and at home, with minimal institutional backing. Taubman could have considered adjusting his focus—if only slightly—and calling the book The Gorbachevs.2

While each shared the other’s hopes and aspirations, from March 1985 - December 1991, the burden of political and military command lay squarely with Mikhail Sergeevich. Within this critical period are four topics on which Taubman might have considered elaborating even further than he does in the book. The first is the opening season of 1989, when the George H.W. Bush administration undertook a strategic review of U.S. policies toward the Soviet Union as part of a comprehensive assessment of U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives. Indeed, Gorbachev was frustrated by this so-called pause. However, he would have been disappointed by any succeeded President Ronald Reagan, whose ambition to rid the world of nuclear weapons went beyond those of U.S. political leaders of either party—let alone those very few with Reagan’s conservative bona fides. Indeed, President Bush and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft expressed private skepticism about the possibility that perestroika would succeed (unlike Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, who expressed public skepticism). Yet they refrained from actions to undermine Gorbachev.

What, specifically, should President Bush have done for Gorbachev that would have salvaged the Soviet leader’s long-term political fate? Taubman contends that an early Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) would have helped Gorbachev, and this is a point worth considering. START was probably among the top ten, yet not among the top five, foreign policy priorities on the part of the Bush administration during the first year. That did not mean that it stalled or inhibited progress, however. Both sides re-commenced the Nuclear and Space Talks (NST) in Geneva, in June 1989, as planned. Meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, later that summer, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker planned for a presidential summit and agreed to separate START from competing interpretations of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty—a significant breakthrough to anyone involved in the previous iteration of NST Geneva, 1985-1988, or the initial rounds of START talks from 1982-1984.

While the basic formula had been hammered out by U.S. and Soviet negotiators in Geneva and ‘experts meetings’ in Moscow and Washington for the Joint Summit Statement issued at the conclusion of the 1987

1 The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of State or the U.S. government and are based upon declassified and publicly available sources.

2 I write in greater detail about what I consider to be the outstanding qualities of this book in “Until He Ran out of Fight: How Gorbachev’s Convictions Shaped the End of the Cold War,” War on the Rocks, 7 September 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/09/until-he-ran-out-of-fight-how-gorbachevs-convictions-shaped-the-end-of-the-cold- war/.

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Washington Summit, where Reagan and Gorbachev signed the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the policy options for Reagan’s successor in the spring of 1989 were not so simple as to go forward, stop, or move in reverse.3 “The START I Treaty, in its detailed complexity, is a lawyer’s dream,” as Thomas Graham, the General Counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1983-1994, later put it.4 The truly incredible thing, by my reading, is not that Washington and Moscow failed to achieve a START agreement in 1989 but rather that they pulled it off in the end; Bush and Gorbachev were able to sign a treaty in Moscow on July 31, 1991, just a few weeks before the coup attempt and subsequent collapse of Gorbachev’s remaining political authority. Setting aside that interpretation, suppose that the Bush administration had instead made START a top priority, leaned on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, overruled Dick Cheney, and given free rein to its top negotiator, Richard Burt, who wanted nothing so much as to broker a deal. The question remains how an early START agreement would have materially improved Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the Soviet economic and political system?

A second topic is the exchange between Gorbachev and Secretary of State James Baker in February 1990. Lots of ink has been spilled over this meeting, where Baker and Gorbachev briefly discussed the possible expansion of the North American Treaty Organization (NATO).5 This moment became controversial only after the first rounds of NATO expansion negotiations in the late 1990s. Reconstructing what actually happened in that room will not settle the merits of that process of NATO expansion; nor will it change the minds of Russians who regard the Cold War as an anti-Russian project that never went away. So, in the end, does it actually matter what Baker and Gorbachev said to each other? In short, does Taubman believe that this moment in the Gorbachev era merits the attention it has received?

A third topic is Gorbachev’s shift to a harder line and toleration of violence subsequent to the largely peaceful revolutions in central and eastern Europe (with the exception of Romania). The crackdown on protests in Tbilisi in April 1989 had a searing effect on Gorbachev; so did his witness of Tiananmen Square on the brink of government intervention later that spring. Yet Gorbachev seemed more sanguine about coercion when it came to Lithuania in March 1990 and January 1991. Taubman contrasts these moments with what happened in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s; by any measure, the collapse of the Soviet empire was not nearly as calamitous as observers might have predicted. Still, there is the fact that Gorbachev responded differently to the disintegration of the Russian-led political union than he did to the fall of governments in the Warsaw Pact. I myself wonder whether 1991 might have played out differently had Gorbachev managed to keep

3 See “Joint Statement on the Soviet-United States Summit Meeting,” Public Papers of the President: Reagan, 10 December 1987, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/archives/speeches/1987/121087a.htm.

4 Thomas Graham, Jr. and Damien J. LaVera, Cornerstones of Security: Arms Control Treaties in the Nuclear Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 883.

5 See, for instance, Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International Security 40:4 (Spring 2016): 7-44; Mary Elise Sarotte, “A Broken Promise? What the West Really Told Moscow about NATO Expansion,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2014); and Mark Kramer, “The Myth of a No-NATO-Enlargement Pledge to Russia,” Washington Quarterly 32:2 (April 2009): 39-61.

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Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev within his fold—and, had he appointed Boris Yeltsin as ambassador to some tropical island country.

My fourth query is whether Taubman, through his research and interviews, can shed new light on Soviet strategic capabilities in the 1980s and early 1990s. The SS-24 and SS-25 missiles came online after Gorbachev’s appointment as general secretary; why did he not stop them, in January 1986, when he proposed abolishing nuclear weapons by the year 2000? More broadly, is there an objective assessment of Soviet capabilities during the Gorbachev period that differs substantially from the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) National Intelligence Estimates?6 After all, the formulas of the INF and START treaties largely track with the numerical assessments contained therein. However, looking only at the number and size of missiles obscures the wide range of estimates between CIA and critics such as Andrew Marshall, the famed director of the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment, who insisted that CIA analysts had underestimated Soviet defense spending and overestimated its overall gross domestic product.7 Yet other things seem about right. The Krasnoyarsk Radar was that which U.S. hardliners alleged: a violation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Yet I still wonder what the overall verdict is when it comes to Soviet watchers in the 1980s.

I came away from the book with a renewed appreciation for the enormity of Gorbachev’s challenges at home. Following summits, which were often emotional roller coasters, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush returned home to face a recalcitrant Congress and media glare; Gorbachev returned home to a country with no tradition of democracy. While this is the single best book written on Gorbachev, I think Taubman might agree that it ought not be the last. Given the tremendous work of the Gorbachev Foundation, which holds a wealth of primary documents and published volumes of collected papers covering 1981-1991, as well as the Cold War International History Project and the National Security Archive, which have amassed valuable digital archives of documents in original and translated form, there is tremendous potential to produce additional scholarship on the life and times of Gorbachev.8 In 2018, amidst renewed geopolitical tensions between the United States and Russia, few topics could be more worthy of consideration.

6 See “Historical Collection on Ronald Reagan, Intelligence, and the End of the Cold War,” https://web.archive.org/web/20120505204855/http://www.foia.cia.gov/Reagan.asp.

7 See Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

8 See “The Gorbachev Foundation,” http://www.gorby.ru/en/; “The Cold War International History Project,” https://www.wilsoncenter.org/program/cold-war-international-history-project; and “The National Security Archive,” https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/. See also Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981-1988, Volume VI, Soviet Union, October 1986-January 1989, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1981-88v06.

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Author’s Response by William Taubman, Amherst College, Emeritus

am grateful for the reviews by Messrs. Alex Pravda, James Wilson, Ronald Suny and Sergey Radchenko (and for Vladislav Zubok’s introduction)—not only because they are all basically friendly and favorable, but because they are thoughtful and probing, raising serious questions that I will address and attempt to answer.I

Alex Pravda’s questions center around Mikhail Gorbachev’s motivation for major steps he did and did not take. Pravda hoped for more analysis in my book of “how and why Gorbachev came to realize” that the Soviet system needed not just to be improved, but to be replaced. My answer is that this realization resulted from Gorbachev’s evolving reflections over the course of a lifetime, accelerated, of course, by his experience once he took power in March 1985. He had long ago concluded that Stalinism represented a perversion of the grand revolutionary project begun by Vladimir Lenin. Even before 1985 he knew the Soviet economy was stagnating and needed reform. He also dreamed eventually of radical political reforms which, like those in Czechoslovakia in 1968, would give Communism a human face, but when his chief Kremlin ally Aleksandr Yakovlev urged him to embark on such changes at the end of 1985, Gorbachev responded, “It’s too early, too soon.” By 1988, he was ready. Convinced that obstruction by hardline party and state bureaucrats was blocking economic and other reforms, he opted to undercut them with a process of full-bore democratization featuring mostly free elections and the creation of a genuine instead of rubber-stamp legislature.

Pravda also notes that Gorbachev’s reluctance to use force and violence seemingly had contradictory results. On the one hand it “might well have reduced the effectiveness of his policies,” but it also “elevated his performance as a transformational leader.” I entirely agree. A more forceful response by Gorbachev to inter- ethnic violence in a place like Nagorno-Karabakh might have deterred ethnic separatism in other republics. Had Gorbachev banished Boris Yeltsin as ambassador to some very small, very faraway country, Yeltsin would not have been in position to administer the coup de grace to both Gorbachev and the USSR in December 1991. But that same aversion to force and violence also meant that the Soviet Union and its East European empire collapsed without the massive bloodshed that has accompanied the collapse of other empires.

As befits an historian based at the U. S. State Department, James Graham Wilson poses questions relating to Soviet and American foreign policy. As Wilson notes, Gorbachev was disappointed when President Ronald Reagan, who wanted to rid the world of nuclear weapons, was succeeded by President George H.W. Bush, whose main advisers expressed doubts about Gorbachev’s reformist credentials and whether the Soviet leader would succeed. “Yet,” Wilson continued, “they refrained from actions to undermine Gorbachev.” On this latter point, however, I would disagree. Influenced by his National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Scowcroft’s deputy Robert Gates, and Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, Bush put U.S.-Soviet relations on hold for several months while he reassessed whether Gorbachev was truly a transformational leader or just a “smiley-faced Communist”—this despite that fact that by then Gorbachev was transforming the Soviet political system, had discarded the ideological underpinnings of Soviet foreign policy, signed one disarmament treaty (INF) and moved toward another (START), announced a deep cut in conventional forces in Europe, moved to withdraw from Afghanistan and recognized universal human rights. Wilson is correct that the Bush administration did not actively try to undermine Gorbachev, but the effect of the ‘pause’ in relations between Moscow and Washington was to deprive Gorbachev of active American support (which counted a lot in the eyes of many Soviet citizens) at a time when, although he was still extremely popular at home, domestic trends were beginning to turn against him.

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A second question of Wilson’s concerns the February 1990 conversation between Gorbachev and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker in which Baker pledged that if a united Germany were allowed to remain in NATO, “not an inch of NATO’s military jurisdiction will spread in an Eastern direction.” This declaration has been the subject of much commentary and debate about whether Baker was committing the U.S. to abstain from NATO expansion. But Wilson’s question is whether what Gorbachev and Baker had to say to each other really matters since “reconstructing what actually happened in that room will not settle the merits” of NATO expansion, “nor will it change the minds of Russians who regard the cold war as an anti-Russian project that never went away.”

My response is that, apart from the issue of historical accuracy (i.e., the issue of what Baker really meant by his pledge, and how his view compared to the views of other Western leaders, especially, President Bush), the effect on Gorbachev was to sour him on American foreign policy, to convince him the Americans betrayed him in the last year of the USSR, and betrayed Russia in the years that followed.

I have already answered, “yes,” above to Wilson’s third query: “whether 1991 might have played out differently” had Gorbachev “appointed Boris Yeltsin as ambassador to some tropical island country.” And to his fourth question, whether my “research and interviews shed new light on Soviet strategic capabilities in the 1980s and early 1990s,” the answer (reflecting my biographical focus) is, no.

According to Ronald Grigor Suny, the “overall vision” of my book “is not that reform was impossible, but that indecision, confusion, hesitancy, compromise, misjudgments about personnel, and ultimately, lack of clarity about goals and methods on the part of Gorbachev doomed perestroika and the Soviet Union.” It is true that I note such failings on Gorbachev’s part, but in the book’s Introduction I pose the overall problem somewhat differently: “Was Gorbachev a tragic hero brought low in part by his own shortcomings, but even more by the unyielding forces he faced?” And in the end, despite Gorbachev’s failings, I contend that, “It is more the fault of the raw material he worked with than of his own real shortcomings and mistakes that Russian democracy will take much longer to build than he thought” (5, 688).

Suny also regrets that in my effort to write a particularly readable biography “what is lost is a deeper level analysis that a more conventionally scholarly book would provide.” For example, he contends, “the pivotal discussion in 1990 about the transition to a market economy is reduced to a clash of personalities rather than elucidated with reference to the complex imperatives of such a fundamental transformation.” If this is true (and I am not sure it is) that is because, as Suny himself recognizes, “engaging in such explorations would require a different book for a different audience.”

According to Sergey Radchenko, my book “tapers off to a lengthy but anticlimactic series of afterthoughts on Gorbachev’s post-1991 anti-career.” “Anti-career” is not a bad description of Gorbachev’s vain efforts to remain a major factor in post-Soviet politics. But his continuing criticism of Boris Yeltsin’s leadership, and his own run for the presidency in 1996 (in which he received less than one percent of the vote) suggest that his thirst for politics was unquenchable. And the story of his wife’s decline and death in 1999 from leukemia, which confirm both his devotion to her and hers to him (the latter expressed in her insistence on accompanying him to every stop in the exhausting 1996 presidential campaign she had urged him not to undertake) fill out the picture of their remarkable marriage, which is a major theme of the book.

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