The “Gang of Eight,” an alliance of hardline Communists and military leaders, launched a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev twenty-five years ago this week, arresting the Soviet president on August 18, 1991 and then mobilizing the army for an old-style clampdown and housecleaning — a media blackout, flyers announcing a state of emergency, an order placed for 250,000 pairs of handcuffs and vacant prison cells. Within two days Gorbachev was able to reassert control, but the coup opened a significant crack in his already shaky initiatives for a new USSR based on increased decentralization and democratic freedom. Most analysts date the dissolution of the USSR to the “August Putsch” and wonder what Russia might look like today had it moved toward Gorbachev’s perestroika (reform) and glasnost (openness) rather than toward Putin and demagoguery.
In his just-published The New Russia, Gorbachev says that while he is still “stunned by the treachery of the people I placed in positions of trust,” he is not at all surprised by the “deluge of lies and libels” that continue to rain down from “the politicians now in power . . . looking for a scapegoat.” Nor is he repentant or apologetic:
Above all, what kept me going was the certainty that Perestroika had been and remained historically essential and that, having taken on a far from light burden, we were bearing it with the dignity it deserved. For all the mistakes and failures, we had led our country out of a historical impasse, given it a first taste of freedom, liberated our people and given them back the right to think for themselves. And we had ended the Cold War and the nuclear arms race.
Whether orchestrated by Putin and his apparatchiks or not, the demonization of Gorbachev and his policies continues to have at least a degree of street-level support, says Svetlana Alexievich in Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. The 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Alexievich’s most recent book is in the same hallmark style as her earlier work, in which her witness testimonies and other oral sources are crafted into powerful emotional histories. Some of the “SNATCHES OF STREET NOISE AND KITCHEN CONVERSATIONS” from Secondhand Time recall the early days of perestroika as “a time of great hope — at any moment, we might find ourselves in paradise”; but many other voices reflect bitterness, disillusionment, and vilification:
I hate Gorbachev because he stole my Motherland . . . Yes, we stood in line for discolored chicken and rotting potatoes, but it was our Motherland. I loved it . . . Someone felt the need to put an end to it. The CIA . . . We’re already being controlled by the Americans . . . They must have paid Gorbachev a tidy sum. Sooner or later, he’ll see his day in court. I just hope that that Judas lives to feel the brunt of his nation’s rage . . . Happiness is here, huh? Sure, there’s salami and bananas. We’re rolling around in shit and eating foreign food. Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don’t need it . . . Now our parliament is lousy with criminals. Dollar-rich millionaires. They should all be in prison, not parliament. They really duped us with their perestroika!
In his prizewinning The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War, Arkady Ostrovsky apportions most of the blame for what has befallen Russia not to any politician or economist but to the fact that the country is unusually “idea-centric” and easy prey for any leader or group able to use the media “to conceal facts and construct an alternative reality.” And while the Bolsheviks were also pretty good at marketing their revolutionary narrative, the current crop of media manipulators have mastered the art of invention:
They are sophisticated and erudite men who started their careers during Gorbachev’s perestroika and prospered in Yeltsin’s 1990s but who now act as demiurges — creators of reality. The purpose of the show they have staged is to perpetuate the power and wealth of Putin and his elite, of which they are part. In doing so, they have stirred the lowest instincts and intoxicated the country with . . . aggression, hatred and chauvinism.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2b2cxP2
Sig Nordal 