The very last leader of the Soviet Union died exactly 104 years to the day after someone tried to assassinate its first. Fanny Kaplan failed in her attempt at killing Vladmir Lenin (though his gunshot wounds may have contributed to the paralyzing strokes that eventually brought him down) but the first Red czar wasn’t going take any chances afterward. The result was the “Red Terror,” an orgy of torture and murder that set the tone for the next seven decades.1
Well, maybe not all of that time. The USSR after Stalin was a much less oppressive place to live, but Khrushchev only lengthened the leash a little instead of unhooking it completely. By the time Brezhnev died (three or four years before he left office) everyone in the country was just going through the motions, but few dared to publicly say what everyone was thinking.
Mikhail Gorbachev tried to open up the Communist system, with attempted economic reforms and relaxation of state censorship. At long last, Soviet citizens could (somewhat) openly express their gripes about the government and the Communist party, which may as well have been one and the same.
And that’s exactly why the mighty Soviet Union didn’t make it to New Year’s Eve, 1991.
Without the Communist Party of the Soviet Union holding all of the political power, there was no Soviet Union. When people could finally speak up about it, it became clear that most of them didn’t want it. The toothpaste was out of the tube.
Many commentators say Gorbachev’s failure proved that Communism couldn’t be reformed and, well, they’re right. But I’d go even further and say it illustrates just how hard it is for any dictatorship to liberalize and maintain its hold on power.
As the Cold War wound down, some other authoritarian leaders - notably Pinochet in Chile, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua - decided to let their people vote on whether they wanted them to remain in office. The Chinese Communist Party, by contrast, sent in the tanks.
In 2022, the CCP is still in power and the Pinochet junta is not. Then there’s Ortega, who beat the odds and got re-elected as President of Nicaragua in a free and fair election, and now works hard to ensure there won’t be another one.
A smart dictator will open the safety valve every once in a while, which is why even the House of Saud decided, “fine, we’ll let women drive cars.” I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read about “reformist” leaders in one-party states. (Heck, I’m old enough to remember Bashar al-Assad being labeled a reform-minded leader.)
But allowing people to question the regime’s monopoly on power is the red line. Once people can do that without feeling their lives are at risk, you’re done.
So, Gorbachev failed in his impossible task, but I think he must go down in history as a kind of heroic failure.
He was never a liberal democrat in the Western sense. Even at the height of glasnost, Soviet people were far less free than people on this side of the Berlin Wall. However, the proper comparison wasn’t to the US, Canada and Western Europe, but to the USSR as it was when he took over from Brezhnev and his one-foot-in-the-grave successors.
Many of the country’s problems never went away (the economy arguably got worse, as Gorbachev liberalized enough to cause a lot of disruption but not enough to get the USSR producing things people might choose to buy) but at least openly complaining about it and even organizing against it wouldn’t necessarily get intimidating-looking men in a Volga sedan showing up at your home.
We take the right to complain for granted. But try giving it up for a while, on penalty of imprisonment or worse, and see how that works out for you.
This was the subject of the History Daily podcast, one of my regular listens, on Tuesday.