On 2011-08-18, at 7:58 AM, SA wrote:
> On 8/18/2011 7:53 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> On Aug 18, 2011, at 1:09 AM, Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:
>>
>>> But the question wasn't whether Gorbachev was "good" or a "loser," but
>>> rather how important he was.
>> Wasn't he the tool of a CPSU that had pretty much decided that it wanted to end Communism and be like, say, the Christian Democrats in Germany? That's what I got from Boris Kagarlitsky when there still was a USSR.
>
> Balderdash. They picked him to make Communism work better. He and his hand-picked advisers had other ideas.
My position is closer to that taken by Michael, Doug, and others.
By making "Communism work better", the majority of the CPSU central committee, well before Gorbachev's accession, recognized the need to respond to multiple pressures from both within and outside of the USSR to (1) decentralize the economy, expend the scope of private ownership, and encourage trade relations outside the Comecon; b) permit greater freedom of expression and contact with the West at home c) provide more autonomy to the Soviet republics and the East European states within its sphere of influence, and d) reach an accomodation with the West, aimed in particular at ending what was, for the Soviets, a ruinous arms race. Its intended market and political reforms, while rooted in the contradictions of the Soviet economy and political system, were also seen as helping to contribute to the detente with the West which would make such reforms possible.
It's not surprising, then, that the initiatives of the Gorbachev leadership were at every stage endorsed by the central committee in what was more than a mere show of hand-raising. Only a minority of "conservatives" or "die-hard Stalinists" dissented. At the other extreme, the wing of the party which Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidor would later come to represent insisted that the party was not liberalizing quickly enough. The rejoinder by Gorbachev and his team that such "shock therapy" would have profoundly destablizing social and economic consequences and result in the collapse rather than reform of the USSR was not only prescient, but rather ironic given that he has been held responsible for that which was never intended and which he warned against.
If Gobachev was guilty of anything, it was his falure to understand - and I think he well understood - that reforms raise expectations, and if they prove inadequate to the task, the genie cannot be put back into the bottle and the reform project can spiral out of control. Gorbachev took a bold gamble and he failed. But success or failure is only evident in retrospect, and I would no more blame Gorbachev for his bold attempt at change than I would Lenin and Trotsky, who, after all, erroneously predicated the seizure of power and the survival of the USSR on the extension of the socialist revolution to the advanced capitalist economies of the West. In each case, on the basis of the available information and what was deemed necessary and possible in the circumstances, I expect I too would have been supporting these policies were I on the Bolshevik or CPSU central committee.