For years politician Gorbachev followed to perfection the strategy of sticking to the middle ground. But while posing as a centrist, he turned the Soviet system upside down. His talent for mirror games–in which he could engineer radical reform by appearing a stodgy moderate–made Gorbachev a genius of his time. To understand the scope of his accomplishment it is necessary only to recall the Soviet Union he inherited: Jews and divided families with no hope of leaving the country; Natan Sharansky, Andrei Sakharov and countless other political prisoners in confinement; Eastern Europe under pressure to send more goods to Moscow; medium-range missiles proliferating on both sides of the Fulda Gap.
Perestroika and glasnost were just slogans; Gorbachev never really had a plan. As a protege of Yuri Andropov–that is, of KGB reformers–his only mandate was to get the system working again. He started by exhorting more productivity and throwing rubles into “scientific and technological progress.” Then he tried efficiency, scheming to throw together massive combines like the agricultural monster Gosagroprom. Then he took the opposite tack, smashing the Moscow economic apparatus in hopes that decentralization would create incentives. Throughout, what Gorbachev did have was a principle. In the early days he called it, rather clumsily, the “human factor,” and expressed it in his demand that local parties spend more money on health care and movie theaters. Gradually, this idea developed into the heart of perestroika: the utterly non-Marxist proposition that the fundamental building block of society is the individual.
This idea made all the difference. It led Gorbachev from typical Soviet economic experiments toward acceptance of a free-market economy. From rubber-stamp polities to democratic elections. From classic Soviet foreign policy–console your enemies while nursing domestic wounds-to the “new world order.” When hard-liners railed at him for giving up Eastern Europe, Gorbachev shouted back: “Well, do you want tanks again? Shall we teach them again how to live?” As the coup rumors built in recent months, Gorbachev repeated like a mantra that his reforms would never roll back. The hard-liners finally did test his revolution with their tanks, and Gorbachev’s reforms-measured by the resistance of individuals-held their ground. Last week’s drama was as much Gorbachev’s victory as Yeltsin’s.
It also marked the end of the Gorbachev Era. As the societal schism he created grew wider, the man in the middle veered crazily trying to keep his balance–cracking down on Lithuania at one point, racing off to apply to the Western club in London at another. Now there is no middle left at all, and no fundamental role for Gorbachev even if he does keep the presidency and significant influence. His final veer last week had to be painful. Exhausted from his ordeal at the hands of party comrades, the lifelong apparatchik defended his faith nonetheless. The movement toward “greater justice and liberty,” he said, “is the same thing as the movement to socialism and to the implementation of the socialist idea. That is my understanding.” At that very moment, crowds were mustering for assaults on the KGB and Communist Party headquarters-and within 48 hours Gorbachev haplessly tried to take the lead in destroying the institution that had made him.
Gorbachev, the man without a plan, has produced economic chaos and a polities teetering between anarchy and civil war. But he also created the environment in which Yeltsin now thrives. He took the model of the aloof, faceless party leader and molded an accessible politician with a wife and NEWSWEEK family. He talked and talked and talked-it is one of the things Russians hate about him. But when have Russians ever been free to express hate toward a political leader? Boris Yeltsin’s Russia was born on a rainy day in Leningrad in May 1985. The new party chief-nobody knew anything about Gorbachev–suddenly let himself be shown on national television, wading into a crowd of shocked onlookers along Nyevsky Prospekt. Crying babies almost drowned out his words. A man with a walrus mustache and a kid with a punk haircut gaped. It was without precedent. “I’m listening to you,” Gorbachev kept repeating. “I’m listening.”
