>
> On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, SA wrote:
>
>>> The thing about Gorbachev is that he came at the end of line of
>>> reform leaders that the central committee was throwing up.
>>
>> Wha??! Which ones??!
>
> Andropov was elected because they wanted someone to institute economic
> reforms. He failed. During his term he presided over bringing in 3
> from Gorbachev's generation. Chernenko was a stopgap catching of
> breath; they knew he's die soon. They they nominated Gorbachev. If
> he'd been another Andropov, they would have moved to the next and
> inducted yet more youngsters to give them more of a base.
>
> The problem of economic reform was a pressing problem that the central
> committee was consciously trying to fix. It was clear from the
> beginning that it would come up against political barriers and they
> would have to bend. Gorbachev learned from Andropov's failure. Had
> he failed by not going far enough with economic reforms, the next
> would have learned from him.
This is where we disagree.
Every general secretary since Khrushchev presided over "economic reforms." There were even the Kosygin reforms under Brezhnev. Andropov was more ambitious, but still in line with traditional Soviet reform policies. None of his reforms would have led to the collapse of the CP party-state without Gorbachev.
In this, I rely partly on the Soviet specialist Archie Brown, who may be the world's leading scholar of the Gorbachev period - he knows MG intimately and has written several histories of the period, including "The Gorbachev Factor." This is from his "Rise and Fall of Communism":
> There are those who, in hindsight, think that transformative change
> was bound to occur in the Soviet Union in the second half of the
> 1980's. Yet it would be hard to find anyone who at the time predicted
> change remotely comparable to that which took pace. Even though the
> Soviet system was both inefficient and oppressive, and the economy had
> virtually stopped growing, that did not mean there was no alternative
> to radical change. To the extent that the system was liberalized and
> democratized, however, economic failure became a more critical issue,
> and some of the perestroika-era economic policies exacerbated the
> problems. The views of every member of the Politburo at the time of
> Chernenko's death are known. It is, accordingly, safe to say that if
> anyone from their ranks other than Gorbachev had been chosen as
> general secretary, the Soviet Union would have neither liberalized nor
> democratized. Highly authoritarian (or totalitarian) regimes, by
> definition, can suppress opposition and provide a multitude of reasons
> for belt tightening. If Andropov had enjoyed better health, minor
> reform, stopping far short of what occurred under Gorbachev, might
> well have proceeded. If Chernenko had lived longer, nothing much would
> have changed while he was general secretary.
MP:
> If you consider unintentional consequences the mark of a Great Man,
> then he's your boy. Breaking up the SU was not what he was trying to do.
Yes, that's absolutely right - the ultimate consequences were unintentional. (Unlike Lenin?) But I'm not nominating a Great Man in any normative sense, just a person whose individual actions were exceptionally historically consequential.
On Eisenhower - he was certainly the ideal candidate for the SACEUR job in 1951, but if he hadn't been available they would have found someone else and I don't see why NATO wouldn't have survived his absence... On the other hand, Columbia would not be the great institution it is today!
SA