It could hardly have been otherwise. Kaiser was The Washington Post’s Moscow correspondent from 1971 to 1974, a time of corrosive cynicism and debilitating fear. There was nothing in the “era of stagnation” that prepared any of its chroniclers for Mikhail Gorbachev. On his periodic returns to the Soviet Union, Kaiser was startled by what he saw: a “normal politics” of challenge and compromise. And if “outcomes were inevitably somewhat ambiguous,” if it was unclear from one month to the next whether the progressives or the reactionaries were in the ascendant, that was normal, too, Kaiser argues. “Soviet politics was no longer a zero-sum game,” with a clearly victorious Party line that Western observers could explicate.
Despite its title, this book is more about how Gorbachev happened than why. Kaiser charts, in greater detail than any other author to date, Gorbachev’s rise in the Communist apparat, principally through the patronage of onetime KGB chief and Soviet premier Yuri Andropov. He subscribes to the generally held view of the Soviet leader as a master tactician. Of one crucial Party meeting, he says Gorbachev “conducted the Congress as a scoutmaster, then as a law professor, then as a preacher, then as a scold. It was a tour de force from the former boy actor.” But Kaiser also thinks Gorbachev has a vision: that socialism can be humanized and thus saved from itself. This faith is both a weakness and a strength, Kaiser thinks. It forbids final acceptance of the market in all its mercilessness. But it also gives him the strength to take more political risks than any world leader of our time. Among them: letting Eastern Europe go peacefully in 1989, which Kaiser sees as a deliberate response to an unforeseen circumstance.
Still, some central questions remain. How has Gorbachev survived recurrent challenges from hard-liners? Where do his political resources lie? How, for example, did he orchestrate the mass “retirement” of elderly Central Committee members in April of 1989? Why Gorbachev happened also deserves fuller discussion, though that would require a different book, with more emphasis on what Marxists call “the engine of history. " Is Gorbachev part of a larger cycle of Russian history, in which the Westernizing impulse alternates with a Slavophile phase? Kaiser believes that in the end, Gorbachev will be seen as a transitional figure. The conventional wisdom says he cannot endure much longer; if a popular election for president took place today, there is little doubt that he would lose. Kaiser hazards no predictions as to what might come next. No sensible reporter would. As the Marquis de Custine wrote in 1839, “Russia is a country where everyone is part of a conspiracy to mystify the foreigner.” Some things never change.
