What Is There To Say About Gorbachev?

I didn't intend to spend any time on Mikhail Gorbachev's passing, but the dog days of summer being what they are, and the whole range of opinion on any subject being as obtuse as it's been, Gorbachev is one of the most interesting subjects around -- which I guess says something. The first observation to make is that the Ukraine invasion has proven to be a last, desperate, feckless gesture of Soviet revanchism. The tanks that rolled into Ukraine in February carried Soviet flags in addition to their Zs for victory, neither of which has worn well. This was the system Gorbachev intended to preserve and reinvigorate.

The conventional obituaries have missed the point. Here's The Guardian:

Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, was the most important world figure of the last quarter of the 20th century. Almost singlehandedly he brought an end to 40 years of east-west confrontation in Europe and liberated the world from the danger of nuclear conflagration.

Somebody quoted a tweet that said Gorbachev ended the Cold War like Robert E Lee ended the American Civil War. I suppose this goes to one part of the story, but let's recognize that if the Cold War began with the Berlin Airlift in 1948, Stalin died in 1953, so the Cold War took place at the very end of his regime. There had to be explanations for it beyond nukes or Stalin himself.

Important discussions of Soviet Marxism-Leninism had already been written in To the Finland Station (1940) and Witness (1952). They predate Solzhenitsyn, are intellectually more robust, and cover a great deal more ground. Indeed, one effect of the botched Ukraine invasion has been a vigorous revision of both Dostoevsky's and Solzhenitsyn's reputations from the Ukrainian perspective -- Ukraine, with some justice, has seen itself as something of a literary victim of their mindset.

Marxism, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in detail, was a crisis for the West that predated Lenin, although Lenin was the critical figure who understood and could mobilize the level of ruthlessness needed to implement it. Nevertheless, the threat of revolution was a project for the elites throughout much of the 19th century. Fabian socialism and the programs it advocated, like social insurance, the minimum wage, and universal health care, were as a practical matter intended to avert proletarian revolution decades before 1917.

On the other hand, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an important event in that no equivalent ideologically-based regime succeeded it, and most of the regimes in Europe and elsewhere that had been nominally similar repudiated Marxism-Leninism. It brings me back to a passage from William James:

A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature,—it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker.

At some point, and in fact that point was probably prior to Gorbachev's accession to power in 1985, Marxism-Leninism ceased to become a live hypothesis in the West, when in fact it had been one since the 19th century. To Whittaker Chambers, for instance, when he saw the devastation of Europe after the Great War, Marxism clearly made an electric connection. But by the 1980s, it had become an intellectual plaything of the privileged gentry in the faculty lounge, to the point that few of them recognized that they themselves would be among the first to be exterminated in an actual Marxist revolution.

In effect, Marxism reverted to the sort of vain parlor exercise it had been before Lenin, and those tasked with actually building a functional society didn't bother with it. This happened without Gorbachev's assistance. I'm not sure if he even noticed.

The intriguing question is what replaced it, and that question continues. My sense of things after the Soviet collapse was initially that former Soviet client states like Iraq were no longer subject to policy restraint from Moscow, but even before the collapse, tension had arisen between Soviet Marxism and Islamism. The end of the Soviet Union gave Islamists the idea that they could attempt to fill the political vacuum this left, at least in the Islamic world.

After 9/11, I think it was a worthwhile and necessary task to prevent Islamism from gaining that sort of foothold, and the expenditure in Iraq was probably worth it. Islamist terror, at least as of now, is not a high-priority issue in the US, and even in places like France, the UK, and Germany, the "truck of peace" is much less common. This may well be due to the US-originated strategy of disabling international funding of this movement.

But if not Marxism, and if not Islamism, then what? The current fashion is the Great Reset, which is a loose combination of neo-Malthusianism expressed in the global warming hypothesis, extreme sexual egalitarianism beyond anything envisioned among 19th-century Fabian progressives, and an alliance between the gentry class and the Lumpenproletariat expressed in the Black Lives Matter movement. The one thing that can be said about this combination is that none of it is remotely Marxist; in fact, it's bourgeois fantasy, self-contradictory and self-defeating. My prognosis for it is grave.

I currently think that loose combination of separate and somewhat nutty individual ideologies doesn't have the potential for attracting a Lenin ruthless enough to implement them in any serious way. The one guy who's actually trying to do this is Joe Biden. There's more thinking for me to do along that path.