A Soviet Hamlet

Scholar Artemy Kalinovsky suggests a Shakespearian perspective on Mikhail Gorbachev’s legacy

By Artemy Kalinovsky

Like the USSR itself, the last man to lead the Soviet Union is now gone. As people around the world remember Mikhail Gorbachev’s life and his impact on world history, many struggle to make sense of his legacy. In a guest essay for Meduza, Professor Artemy Kalinovsky — the author of “A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan” and “Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan” — recalls his own archival work at the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow and asks the question: Was the USSR’s final leader a modern-day Hamlet?

Who was Mikhail Gorbachev? A hero. A saint. A tragic figure who tried to reform the unreformable. A traitor. A fool. Few historical figures invite such a wide range of assessments, and often from unexpected corners. At least one American scholar was convinced that Gorbachev was actually in on the attempted coup that involved his family being under effective house arrest in Crimea, in August 1991, and precipitated the fall of the USSR. A Tajik mullah apparently thought that the distinctive birth mark on Gorbachev’s head proved that he was a tool of the devil.

“For the first time, I’m not embarrassed for one of our leaders.” This was the sentiment of one of my grandmother’s dearest friends after watching footage of Gorbachev meeting Margaret Thatcher on Soviet television. It was a sentiment widely shared in their social circle. It’s not hard to see why these urban professionals — some of whom had joined the Communist Party during the Great Patriotic War or in the hopeful atmosphere of the 1950s but had later grown disillusioned — would like this general secretary.

Like Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Gorbachev was of peasant stock. Unlike most of his predecessors, he had actually completed the Soviet program of acculturation into urban life. He was the first leader since Vladimir Lenin to graduate from a university. He was intelligentny. He didn’t seem like the kind who would amass foreign cars, as Brezhnev was rumored to have done. And unlike his immediate predecessor, the wheezing Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev didn’t look like he wanted the job primarily for the access to health care it provided.

Gorbachev didn’t slur his words. He was vigorous. Articulate. He knew how to wear a suit.

Our working-class neighbors were not so charmed. “We’ll see,” they said to my parents’ and grandparents’ effusive political commentary. In my own family, Gorbachev remained unassailable long after we (and he) had ceased being Soviet citizens. He had tried to make the Soviet Union freer, less corrupt, more just. And when that failed, at least he had made it easier to emigrate.

When I started studying Soviet history, I enjoyed needling my Gorbyphile parents by pointing out that the nationalists who had so frightened them (and were the proximate cause of our departure) were themselves a product — albeit unintentionally — of their hero’s efforts to open up Soviet society.

Early in his tenure, Gorbachev showed political instincts that would have served a European or North American politician well. In a moment captured by television cameras soon after he was elected general secretary, Gorbachev can be seen talking to a group of women on the streets of Leningrad. “Be closer to the people!” they advise him, skeptically, not really sure what to make of a leader who asks their opinion. The women are standing mere inches away — close enough for Gorbachev to shake their hands without extending his elbows. “But how could I be any closer?” he asks, smiling and showing his teeth.

The response is clever, and it’s a pleasant surprise to his constituents.

The memory of that Gorbachev, the vigorous man of the people, seems to have survived the more bitter assessments that followed, and they’ve even merged in some weird way.

My own dive into the Gorbachev legacy began in the summer of 2006, when I was starting work on what would become my PhD thesis. I arrived in Moscow and made my way to the Gorbachev Foundation, where the former Soviet leader had retreated with his archives and most loyal aides after his resignation on December 25, 1991. An hour-long metro ride had taken me from an apartment in a microdistrict in the northwestern part of the city. Some 10 minutes later, I was about to enter through the building’s glass doors when a gray-haired woman stopped me.

“Do you work here?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m a historian. I’m hoping to see the archives.”

“Do you know if he’s here?”

“Who?

“Gorbachev!”

“I hope so. I don’t know.”

“I hope so too. I came here to talk to him. I just want to ask him … how it all could have happened! And they won’t even let me in the building.”

(It’s a charming idea: ex-leaders who get presidential libraries should commit to holding weekly office hours, like college professors, where they patiently explain to visitors why things went wrong and write recommendation letters.)

Gorbachev scholars span the political spectrum, from those who hoped that a reformed and democratic socialist state could have emerged out of the USSR of the 1980s to those who thought that the Soviet project was a historical monstrosity to be killed and buried as soon as possible. But they all come away rather surprised at how little Gorbachev seemed to understand as the empire crumbled around him.

I don’t think he really got what was happening in Afghanistan, or really anything about the USSR’s relations with the so-called “Third World,” I remember thinking as I completed my thesis work. He really didn’t understand nationalities, observed another colleague. Or the economy, said another. He seemed to be a masterful politician, but his instincts failed him at key moments, not least in confrontations with his nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, or in his support for the slippery Vladimir Kriuchkov, the KGB functionary who would betray him in August 1991.

Perhaps the point is that the USSR’s problems were so great that no one could have done better. Still, in his final years in power, Gorbachev resembled Hamlet, simultaneously convinced of his righteousness and paralyzed by indecision. He communed with the ghost of Lenin, reading his works, looking for clues to make sense of the Soviet Union’s myriad problems. He hoped to preserve the founder’s legacy against the usurpers who followed. He mistook friends for enemies and enemies for friends. Hamlet’s revenge fantasy leads to the death of his stepfather but also of his mother, his beloved, and one of his closest friends; more importantly, for our purposes, it leads to Denmark’s fall to a triumphant Norway.

Gorbachev ended his tenure with the USSR decimated and its constituent parts in crisis. The king of Norway, having conquered Denmark, orders four captains to carry Hamlet’s body as would befit a hero. Western leaders were happy to shower Gorbachev with honors for decades to come, while at home he was largely despised. (One wonders how Hamlet would have fared in an opinion poll of Denmark’s subjects). Gorbachev’s vacillations in the final years — in Tbilisi, in the conflict between Armenians and Azeris, in the Baltic States — meant that even those who were happy with the USSR’s collapse gave him little credit.

Many others blamed him for the misery that followed.

I met Gorbachev only once, in my very first week at the archive. I asked the friendly interns (undergrads at the Russian State University of the Humanities) if they had ever seen the great man. Yes, they said. They’d seen him come in once when they were on a cigarette break. When the time came, I joined them outside, in an alley behind the building. No sooner were the cigarettes lit than a black sedan pulled up. The driver got out and opened the rear passenger door, and the former general secretary stepped out. Looking at us disapprovingly, he said, “Smoking again, young people?” before going inside.

Unlike Hamlet, Gorbachev outlived the collapse of his realm. But there was something of King Lear about him in those years, wandering far from the castle with a shrinking escort to support what was left of his dignity as a statesman, forcing those still paying attention to meditate on the ravages of time and the (fleeting) nature of power.

Politically, he was in the wilderness, of course. His attempts to start a social-democratic party went nowhere. The Gorbachev Foundation itself — which started with a staff of 750 people from the former Institute of Social Sciences — quickly shrank, as a jealous and vengeful Yeltsin took away its money and real estate. (The building I visited was erected later, with help from CNN’s Ted Turner.)

Gorbachev turned to making Pizza Hut commercials to pay for his coterie of shrinking (and aging) advisors, who kept busy assembling his papers and writing their memoirs. He rented half the building to a financial firm. It was clearly meant to resemble the presidential libraries of U.S. leaders, but the organization was much poorer. On most days, it was largely empty. Gorbachev’s retinue, men who had once drafted his speeches and advised him on major decisions, could sometimes be seen shuffling through the hallways. Their work, some of it based on handwritten notes they took while working in the Kremlin, has been a valuable resource to those of us who have written about the late USSR.

We still don’t know what to make of the man who tried to save the Soviet Union, and in doing so, hastened its end.