Doubts, Death and Democracy
Mikhail Gorbachev’s Bitter-Sweet Legacy
“The Soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.”
— Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, is dead at the age of 91.
He survived 31 years longer than the country of his birth, which he dissolved in 1991 despite a referendum of the people, who overwhelmingly voted to keep the USSR up and running.
According to Russian media, the former Soviet Premier succumbed to a long and difficult illness, but the exact cause of his death has not been reported as of this writing. Tsargrad TV, a Russian privately-owned online television channel, reports that in June of this year, Gorbachev’s health had deteriorated drastically due to problems with his kidneys and that he had previously undergone hemodialysis, a method of blood purification used to treat acute or chronic renal failure.
Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed deep condolences on the death of the former Soviet leader, according to a statement by his spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, who spoke to TASS, the Russian state-owned news service.
As the world learns of his death, many will mourn and many others will celebrate. In this day and age, Gorbachev is not so popular among his former citizens. This often mystifies people in the west, who have fond memories of Gorby “taking down the wall.” Many saw the Berlin Wall as a cruel barrier cutting through Berlin, separating families from one another, and they were happy to see it demolished.
But the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which Gorbachev also oversaw, was not so popular among those who lived there. To put it into a perspective westerners can understand, imagine if an American leader dissolved the federal government and told all the states, “you’re on your own.” That’s how many in the former USSR experienced the breakup.
You can see for yourself the stark difference between western and Russian reactions to Gorbachev’s death:
While westerners predictably write things like “He was a huge positive force in the world. He will be missed,” and “He was a good man. Rest in peace, Mr. Gorbachev,” the words of Russian-speakers are not so sentimental.
Olga S. writes: “Gorbachev, having sold the country and its people so that Raiska [an unflattering diminutive for his wife, Raisa] could shine in outfits in Europe and America, gave the west another 30 years of free so-called high living standards, but now they are not getting free money — so they rage, and our liberty with them.”
Artem Eternity writes: “The motherfucker died, I’m just sad that he wasn’t tried [in court].”
My own feelings about Gorbachev are a bit mixed. On the one hand, I am grateful to him for his policies of Glasnost (“openness”) and Perestroika (“restructuring”) which made it possible for me to live and work there as an American. But on the other hand, I know a lot more about the reasons for the USSR’s dissolution than I did back then, and Gorbachev’s naïve trust in western leaders like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush saddens me.
I will delve into the dissolution of the Soviet Union in another article, but now I want to share some of my own memories surrounding that time, because I was living in the USSR during its final days.
The coup took place in late August, right around this time, only in 1991. I had just returned to Leningrad after vacationing in the Soviet Republic of Georgia, where I had sunbathed by the Black Sea, eaten my fill of deep-fried smelt and juicy melons, drunk plenty of good Georgian wine and frolicked on the beach with a handsome blonde coal miner from Rostov named Sasha.
I had just turned 26 and had already been living in the USSR for half a year. I had arrived in Leningrad in January, directly from the balmy climate of Southern California where I had graduated from college two years prior. I was a member of a four-person team sponsored by a church I belonged to at the time: The Worldwide Church of God.
Our mission was to provide our Soviet colleagues at the Leningrad Committee of Television and Radio (Lenteleradiokomitet) with equipment and training, and since I was the only member of the foreign group who had previous experience in television, I got to consult on a dating game show called Naidi Menya (“Find Me”) which had an audience of around 80 million people.
Traveling to Russia had been a dream of mine since before college, when, as a teenager, I had bought a Russian grammar book and started teaching myself the language. At that young age, I simply couldn’t understand why our two countries were so hostile toward each other — why we lived with the daily fear of nuclear war — and now it seemed like I had an opportunity to help make peace between our countries a real thing!
I had gotten back from the Black Sea a week earlier than planned, because Georgian mafia had ordered me to leave the dacha I was staying in, which they (ostensibly) owned. At the time, I feared that they kicked me out because they had seen me with Sasha and that I had caused some kind of scandal. But in retrospect, it may be that they just didn’t want an American there when the fighting broke out. Neighboring Armenia was close to declaring independence, and there were already hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In fact, one of my Soviet colleagues was Armenian and when he returned from vacation, he said that his train had been attacked and set on fire.
The USSR was teetering on the brink of disaster. So, it should not have been a surprise when, on the morning of Monday, August 19th, the radio was jabbering rapidly in Russian rather than playing music from the Pet Shop Boys or the Russian bands which sounded suspiciously like them. I was not fluent enough to understand what was being said, but it was immediately apparent that something was not right. On TV, there was a cello player on one channel and Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” was looping on another, but there was no news, and regular programming appeared to have been suspended.
I began to prepare my coffee the Russian way, in a small, oddly-shaped aluminum pot with a handle. As the water slowly came to a boil, the coffee grounds sank to the bottom of the strange little container, and I poured myself a cup of liquid that I might have referred to as “Cowboy Coffee” back home. But as I lifted the cup to my lips, the red plastic phone on the dresser next to my bed rang suddenly, jarring me and sending coffee sailing from the cup. Annoyed, I got up and grabbed the receiver.
“Allo?” I said in Russian. “Hello?”
It was one of my colleagues from the church. She rapidly relayed that there was a military coup in Moscow, that President Gorbachev had been kidnapped by communist hardliners who opposed the decentralization of the Soviet Union and that he was being held hostage somewhere in the Crimea. Protesters had been shot in Moscow, tanks were rumored to be on the way to Leningrad, and the television building where we worked was shut down and barricaded. Yeltsin had declared a state of emergency in both Moscow and Leningrad.
As I struggled to make sense of the news, I was sternly informed that I was to stay locked inside of my apartment, while the ranking members of the project went to the television building to survey the situation and figure out what was going on. I reassured my colleague that I would stay safely tucked away indoors.
Moments later, I was running to the metro, camera dangling from my hand.
Downtown was a sea of humanity. A cluster of people, normally sober faces now animated with anxiety and confusion, pointed and stared, alarmed, at a newspaper article taped to a wall. In black and white, the grieving face of a mother whose son had been shot in Moscow, stared back.
Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare in Leningrad, was glutted with a massive crowd of people. More than 300,000 had gathered in downtown Leningrad to protest what they were calling “the criminal coup.” Signs of dissent were everywhere.
“No future for fucking world!” One protest sign read in English, another in Russian said, “To court with the criminal coup!”
The crowd was chanting “Yeltsin! Yeltsin! Yeltsin!”
Outside of the Hermitage, in the shadow of the Winter Palace, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens had gathered to protest the coup by communist hardliners. It was a massive cross section of people who had been born and raised under the hammer and sickle. Men from factories and offices, women in business skirts. A mass of faces, some young and full of hope, others lined with years of devotion and labor, sobered by life or age. Even a scattering of grey-haired babushkas and old Bolsheviks.
I felt a shiver go up my spine and the soft hairs at the nape of my neck stood on end. Decades ago, some of these very same old Bolsheviks may have stood in this very spot, as the Winter Palace was stormed the first time around, and Imperialism was driven into a gilded chamber and shot.
But the sea of people swarming outside the Hermitage was not an angry mob. There were no threats of violence, and I did not feel frightened as I let myself be carried along by the current of the crowd. There were no weapons, no raging cries for bloodshed. This was a people who had devoted their lives to the cause of an ideal which, it seemed, had betrayed them in the end. In 1991, communism seemed like an unreachable utopia and, having experienced the first, sweet taste of capitalism, the people were salivating for change.
I realized that it was a revolution I was witnessing. Restrained, but a revolution all the same. I was amazed at the profound calm I was seeing on this strange, chaotic day. The Mayor of Leningrad made a speech, and the people trickled home somber, subdued, quiet.
In Moscow, meanwhile, three people had been shot in a confrontation between protesters and military, who had been ordered to enforce a curfew by the leaders of the coup — now being referred to as the “Gang of Eight.”
In fear of further bloodshed, protesters had built barricades around the White House, Russia’s Parliament Building, where Yeltsin and his supporters were calling for an end to the coup and the release of President Gorbachev and his wife, who were being held under guard at their dacha in the Crimea. Later, it was said that the ill-conceived and badly-planned attempt failed largely because it did not place Yeltsin under arrest. A born politician, Yeltsin seized the moment when he stood on top of a tank and begged the military not to support the coup leaders.
“Soldiers! Don’t Shoot at Your Mothers!” — read a banner held aloft by a line of stout Russian women. And Moscow’s military did not seem eager to engage in combat. Young-faced soldiers flirted with girls while children placed flowers in the gun-cannons of their tanks.
Back in Leningrad, rumors ran wild but the people remained calm. Though tanks were rumored to be “on the way,” and the granite obelisk in the Palace Square was covered with signs that said “Don’t Shoot at Your People,” the people were now drifting home somberly, their faces lined with worry, but not rage.
I got yelled at by my colleagues from the church, who were not happy about my unsanctioned walk about town. I was ordered to pack my bags. US President George H.W. Bush had warned all Americans to leave Russia and the leader of our church concurred.
Everything was happening too fast and it was overwhelming. I didn’t want to leave so abruptly. Some of my friends were still on vacation and I wouldn’t get to say goodbye to them. But I needn’t have worried. The coup was over within three days and before we could even buy airline tickets, we were informed that we could stay. Some of my friends had come over to help me pack and now we drank sweet Soviet champagne and celebrated the end of the coup until late in the night.
Gorbachev and his family were released and within a few short hours the men who had orchestrated the coup were under arrest. There was talk that Gorbachev would resign and Yeltsin would take over, and from time to time, my friends would trot nervously into the kitchen to watch the small black and white television there and smoke cigarettes next to the open window.
A few days later, Gorbachev resigned as expected and Yeltsin assumed the mantle of authority. The red Soviet flag, with its golden hammer and sickle crest, so infamous in the west that many there equated it with the German swastika, was burned in the streets of Moscow and the old Imperial Russian flag ascended, flying with stripes of white, blue and red.
For a few days in August of 1991, there was a flash of hope so bright that it warmed the world. Or at least, it inspired the Scorpions.
But in the bitter months and years to come, people literally froze to death as the Russian economy sank lower and lower and inflation shot up. The value of the ruble changed daily as did the amount of cash we were paid every Thursday on the third floor of the television building. Pensioners begged in the streets, no longer able to afford the spiking cost of living. We were all given taloni — “coupons” — to pay for basic provisions such as flour, butter, bread and vodka. But the store shelves were frequently barren.
As a foreigner, I had access to the beryozki shops — the foreign currency stores — usually located in hotels, where I could buy chocolates, liquor, soda and such, but they did not sell the everyday items needed for survival. I bought exotic gifts there for my friends, but I could not buy them a better economy or improve their lives.
Gorbachev famously appeared in a commercial for Pizza Hut, which pitted the young generation, who embraced western democracy, against their parents and grandparents, who had sacrificed so much to build the USSR.
The reality of foreign restaurants such as Pizza Hut was not quite so fun in those days. For starters, most of them were divided into two parts. There was the foreign currency part, where you could get pizza for dollars or Deutsch marks, if you didn’t mind eating in silence. That half of the restaurant was usually empty except for mafia, who often sat at tables on a raised dais especially reserved for them. The rubles part of the restaurant was more crowded, but of course the pizza served there was not quite as good, if you could get any at all. Gorbachev’s restaurant, the kind of place we take for granted in the west, did not really exist in Russia at that time.
Of course, there was the world’s largest McDonald’s, located in Moscow, if you didn’t mind standing in line for a few hours. When I went there, the line stretched longer than the line to Lenin’s Mausoleum. There were no Chicken McNuggets and the ketchup tasted off.
I left the USSR in the spring of 1992, so I did not witness firsthand the full horror which followed as vulture capitalists swarmed over the bones of the Soviet Union and picked them clean, buying up factories for pennies on the dollar, laying off thousands upon thousands and casting pensioners into the streets.
During the “wild 90’s,” as that decade is known in Russia, many died in the streets. They literally froze to death because they could not afford housing or food. While Yeltsin got drunk with the Clintons and wound up on Pennsylvania Avenue in his underwear trying to hail a cab, his people back home were despairing and dying.
This was the true legacy of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The burgeoning capitalism which created billionaires overnight also killed many of those less fortunate. This was the mess which Vladimir Putin inherited when Yeltsin, who by now could barely manage coherent sentences, congratulated him on his election in 2001.
Russia was ripe for change when Putin took the mantle of leadership, and he began making changes almost immediately. He cracked down on many of the corrupt oligarchs who had become wealthy under Yeltsin. Unlike his predecessor, Putin was not a heavy drinker nor did he kowtow to the oligarchs, neither to those in the west nor those in his own country.
The American dream by now had died in Russia. Far from improving the lives of the people, unrestrained capitalism under Yeltsin had destroyed their hopes and their naïve faith in western democracy. Putin represented a rekindling of conservative Russian values. Under his sober leadership, Russia faced a different kind of perestroika — a restructuring of Russia which improved the lives of the people rather than sacrificing them on the altar of capitalism.
Many of the most corrupt oligarchs fled the country with whatever riches they could hold onto and sought asylum in the US, UK and other western countries where they loudly ground their axes against Putin’s “regime.” In Russia, however, Putin became one of the most popular leaders the country had known, possibly even since the time of Catherine the Great. Even now, in 2022, Putin enjoys a rating of around 80% according to some polls.
Russia has grown wiser in the three decades since its transition to capitalism began. Most Russians no longer naively believe the American dream, as we all did back in 1991. Now, Russia is charting a new course: Disavowing some aspects of capitalism but preserving others. Many Russians are nostalgic about their lives in Soviet times, when going to the university was free and job placement was guaranteed.
But even though many in the west fear a resurrection of the USSR, that is unlikely to happen. One thing is sure though: Whatever path Russia takes, the world will be watching.
About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television.
