Goodbye, Gorby, And Good Riddance

By Vladimir Bukovsky, expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976 after spending 12 years in prison
as a dissident.

The New York Times, December 18, 1991

After living 15 years in the West, I still find it difficult to understand its logic when it comes to
assessing the Soviet situation.

Thus, we may recall, 10 to 15 years ago, when thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at the West
were in the hands of ruthless, ideologically motivated Communist dictators, when the Soviet
Union was an omnipotent superpower with global ambitions, the West was not particularly
alarmed.

At best, the West believed in negotiating arms control deals with its “grave-diggers” who were
known to violate every agreement they ever signed; at worst, it believed in unilateral nuclear
disarmament. If anything at all disturbed the Western public at that blessed time, it was a need to
build its own defenses or a suggested deployment of missiles in Europe.

Today, when the old archenemy is disintegrating, when it has lost its ambitions and power,
while dreaded nuclear weapons seem to be in the hands of elected leaders accountable to the
elected parliaments, the Western public has been stricken with panic. Even those who should have
known better, like Secretary of State James Baker and the Director of Central Intelligence, Robert
Gates, have talked about doomsday.

What a nightmare: for the first time nuclear weapons are not under control of a Communist but
of the pro-Western democrats!

Moreover, the West virtually forced the republics to reconsider their attitude to nuclear
weapons. Most of them originally wanted to be nuclear-free. But the willful refusal of the West to
recognize their independence and its obsession with Mikhail Gorbachev as a symbol of stability
and as a man to “do business with” made possession of nuclear weapons their only chance to be
treated seriously.

Moreover, while Mr. Gorbachev was pushing the country into an abyss of civil war by
stubbornly denying the republics their right of self-determination, no one in the West perceived
the danger. When he deliberately provoked ethnic clashes all over the country in the best
traditions of imperial policy to “divide and rule,” no one even felt sorry for those countless
Georgians, Armenians, Azeris and Lithuanians massacred in pursuit of that policy. Incredible as it
may seem, the West recognized the danger of civil war only after 90 percent of Ukrainians voted
for independence and only because the old union appears to be legally dead.

Even more incredible has been the hostile Western attitude toward the newly formed
commonwealth of Slavic republics that is, in reality, the first positive step on the way to stability
and normalization of republic relations. What an unpleasant surprise for James Baker to see his
beloved stability achieved without his beloved Mikhail Gorbachev!

This obviously absurd reaction was only a concluding episode in a long story of Western
stupidity and wishful thinking. When Mr. Gorbachev came to power almost seven years ago, he
was instantly credited with a desire to introduce a Western-style democracy and market economy,
although he had never promised anything more radical than “democratization” and a “socialist
market.” His task was to salvage the Communist system from bankruptcy, to preserve the
Communist Party rule in disguise. Indeed, the grateful West poured some $45 billion of its
taxpayers’ money into his coffers, simply prolonging the agony of the Communist regime for a few
years.

But while the West was completely thrilled with this “golden opportunity,” the Soviet
population was not about to follow Mark Twain’s advice: to have constitutional rights and the
common sense not to use them. As a result, what was originally intended as a readjustment within
the system had grown into a popular revolution threatening to bring down the system.

Persistent Western aid to Mr. Gorbachev and his central Government became the only lifeline
keeping him in power against the wishes of the people. And if the country today is on the brink of
economic catastrophe, we should thank George Bush and James Baker and their billions.

Indeed, as the failure of his “perestroika” became apparent, Mr. Gorbachev had no solutions to
offer, only some tactical moves aimed at slowing down the inevitable process of losing control
over the country. By the end of 1990, the only way to avoid civil war in the Soviet Union was to
dissolve the union, just as the only way to avert food riots and strikes followed by repressions was
to introduce a market economy far more radical than was done in Poland.

Yet neither could have been done so long as Mr. Gorbachev and his Communist “elite”
remained in power. For who would he have been if that was to happen? A non-elected President
of a nonexisting country. Where would his “elite” have been? Standing in line for unemployment
benefits.

Thus, borrowing billions of dollars abroad became his only economic policy, while
manipulations aimed at forcing republics to sign his new union treaty became a substitute for
dissolving the union. Both policies required a considerable element of disinformation for their
success. Threats of a coup, civil war and starvation were exactly the legends that made the West
support Mr. Gorbachev all these years, and the same threats were used to secure popular support
at home.

So one can easily understand why they were suddenly played up by his propaganda and spread
around by officials whose interests would suffer if the union ceased to exist. But why did the West
pick it up so eagerly? Is this just a consequence of Western Gorbomania? Or is this because the
Bakers of this world have suddenly realized that they backed the wrong horse and are trying to
hedge their bets?

Whatever the reason for the scare-mongering may be, in reality the danger of civil war — or
nuclear war — are far less today than a couple of years ago, let alone at the beginning of the
1980’s. The demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the formation of the
Commonwealth of Independent States are the best things that ever happened to us all, East and
West, in this century.

Once again, the West got it wrong, as it did throughout 74 years of the Communist regime’s
existence. Paraphrasing Churchill, one can say that never in the course of its long history was the
Western world so consistently wrong in its perception of a problem so vitally important to its own
survival.