As someone who voted for Gorbachev, I can say that I just don't feel that I have the expertise to really weigh in here! One thing that I think is sometimes underrated is Chernobyl as a precipitating incident here? Insofar as it was an international disaster that seemed to have been directly and publicly caused by the incompetence of Soviet bureaucracy. I'm also not an expert on Soviet economics, but as I understand in the 80s didn't the Soviet Union openly to start attempting to imitate the consumer economy of the West, in this kind of reverse colonialist way where, while the Soviet Union itself had the natural resources, they imported advanced products and technologies from the Eastern satellites? The idea being to quell some of the nationalism in countries, like Latvia, that could directly compare their living standards to Western countries?
In any case, I feel that Gorbachev (and actually Reagan?) deserves enormous credit for spearheading nuclear non-proliferation, and for that alone deserves the praise he got in the West.
Discussions like these among people who wanted the USSR to remain always seem to leave out the role of Eastern Europe. Gorbachev could have given the green light to Honecker to shoot everyone in Leipzig, or invaded himself as in Poland in 1980. But obviously those would have been terrible crimes, and unlike in Russia no one can pretend that the people of East Germany or Poland would be better off today if he had done that. Even then it's far from clear if it would have worked. But after 1989, maintaining "socialism in one country" would have been much harder.
This interpretation, which I largely buy, raises the interesting question, "how could an intelligent person actually believe that the Soviet Union in the 1980s could be reformed?" You answer, "Gorbachev believed in Lenin's vision for the Soviet experiment" -- okay, but how is that possible? "Idealism" (in the sense of optimism about the prospects of achieving ideals, not in the Hegel sense) is doing a lot of work in this analysis. As a rather cynical person myself, I always find this hard to fathom. That Marxist-Leninist crap is for the marks, right? The Party leader is supposed to be in on the con, usually. Gorbachev was born in 1931, so his "life experience" may have been optimal for Soviet optimism: too young for much memory of the Terror, but clear memory of wartime deprivation and then ultimate victory, postwar expansion, the space race, etc. Maybe? He still had to be drinking the Kool-Aid by the gallon to make this explanation make sense.
Post-Soviet thinking on Gorbachev: He lost the USSR! The reaction of Soviet intellectuals to his reforms -- "hey, buddy, we have it pretty good, why rock the boat for your ideas? People are going to get killed" -- says a lot. Every "mature" system works to the benefit of entrenched elites, the Soviet Union was no exception, and Gorbachev was, in this sense, a "class traitor." The Stephen Kotkin book, "Uncivil Society," is good on the collapse of Communist regimes in East Germany, Romania, and Poland, and agrees, I'd say, with your analysis here.
As someone who voted for Gorbachev, I can say that I just don't feel that I have the expertise to really weigh in here! One thing that I think is sometimes underrated is Chernobyl as a precipitating incident here? Insofar as it was an international disaster that seemed to have been directly and publicly caused by the incompetence of Soviet bureaucracy. I'm also not an expert on Soviet economics, but as I understand in the 80s didn't the Soviet Union openly to start attempting to imitate the consumer economy of the West, in this kind of reverse colonialist way where, while the Soviet Union itself had the natural resources, they imported advanced products and technologies from the Eastern satellites? The idea being to quell some of the nationalism in countries, like Latvia, that could directly compare their living standards to Western countries?
In any case, I feel that Gorbachev (and actually Reagan?) deserves enormous credit for spearheading nuclear non-proliferation, and for that alone deserves the praise he got in the West.
Discussions like these among people who wanted the USSR to remain always seem to leave out the role of Eastern Europe. Gorbachev could have given the green light to Honecker to shoot everyone in Leipzig, or invaded himself as in Poland in 1980. But obviously those would have been terrible crimes, and unlike in Russia no one can pretend that the people of East Germany or Poland would be better off today if he had done that. Even then it's far from clear if it would have worked. But after 1989, maintaining "socialism in one country" would have been much harder.
This interpretation, which I largely buy, raises the interesting question, "how could an intelligent person actually believe that the Soviet Union in the 1980s could be reformed?" You answer, "Gorbachev believed in Lenin's vision for the Soviet experiment" -- okay, but how is that possible? "Idealism" (in the sense of optimism about the prospects of achieving ideals, not in the Hegel sense) is doing a lot of work in this analysis. As a rather cynical person myself, I always find this hard to fathom. That Marxist-Leninist crap is for the marks, right? The Party leader is supposed to be in on the con, usually. Gorbachev was born in 1931, so his "life experience" may have been optimal for Soviet optimism: too young for much memory of the Terror, but clear memory of wartime deprivation and then ultimate victory, postwar expansion, the space race, etc. Maybe? He still had to be drinking the Kool-Aid by the gallon to make this explanation make sense.
Post-Soviet thinking on Gorbachev: He lost the USSR! The reaction of Soviet intellectuals to his reforms -- "hey, buddy, we have it pretty good, why rock the boat for your ideas? People are going to get killed" -- says a lot. Every "mature" system works to the benefit of entrenched elites, the Soviet Union was no exception, and Gorbachev was, in this sense, a "class traitor." The Stephen Kotkin book, "Uncivil Society," is good on the collapse of Communist regimes in East Germany, Romania, and Poland, and agrees, I'd say, with your analysis here.