Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, 1931-2022: New Thinking

Joseph Preston Baratta
Professor of World History and International Relations at the Worcester State College, MA, USA

If Vladimir Putin aims to restore the old Soviet Union, one of his difficulties will be the lingering influence of New Thinking on foreign policy from the Gorbachev period.  The history of the formation of the U.S.S.R. in 1922 sheds light on what a new process of union might require.  According to historian D.F. Flemming, the Communist party had advanced cautiously in an exhausted Russia after the decrees of the Revolution until Britain, France, the United States, and Japan intervened on the side of the White forces of Admiral Kolchak.

The Red Army was hastily organized and in five great campaigns grew rapidly to 5,500,000 soldiers (some equipped with arms saved from the Great War).  Trotsky, the Commissar of War, “drove the heterogeneous mass of the Red Army to final victory by a combination of ruthless fanaticism, abounding energy, and never-failing resourcefulness.”[i]  Lenin established the federal state to secure the gains of War Communism during the Civil War and Allied Intervention of 1918-20. 

The U.S.S.R., then, was established as a federal state under the “leading influence” of the Communist party.  State and party, Supreme Soviet and Politburo, thereafter formed the notorious dual government that lasted until 1991. To make the union more palatable to eleven new socialist republics (later 15), including Ukraine, and the roughly 100 nationalities in the old Russian Empire (Stalin was Commissar of Nationalities), the right of secession was provided in the union treaties.  In Stalin’s federal constitution of 1936 (seemingly modeled on that of the U.S.A.), that right was repeated.  The Communists never imagined that the right of secession would ever be exercised, but that was the political mechanism for the dissolution of the union in 1991.

Putin himself, in his article[ii] “On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians” of July 2021, confirms this account of the formation of the U.S.S.R.  “Modern Ukraine”, he writes, “is entirely the product of the Soviet era.”

If the current war in Ukraine is a harbinger of an effort to restore the union of the former Soviet republics, Putin will be handicapped by the lack of Communist ideology (Russia now is technically a multiparty state) and by the adoption of free market capitalism in place of central planning (Gosplan).  Moreover, he has launched a civil war rather than a plain war of defense of the Motherland.  Everywhere but in Russia, his action is condemned as aggression against his neighbors.  This is no way to form a federal union.

Gorbachev, in his last book, The New Russia [Putin’s Russia] (2017), sided with Putin on the retaking of Crimea, for it was a defensive act against NATO expansion and was popular as shown in the plebiscite, but he had no inkling of coming war in Ukraine.  He regarded Ukraine as at most a “frontier” of Russia.  His own wife, Raisa Maksimovna, was Ukrainian.  His maternal grandmother was Ukrainian.  His father, in the Great Patriotic War, fought in Ukraine and finally was severely wounded in Czechoslovakia.

It is true that Russian history exhibits the historical necessity for the centralization of power.  Russia lies on a vast Eurasian plain, without natural defenses like seas and mountains.  Ever since the Tartars, who occupied old Russia for three centuries, the Russians have raised up powerful autocrats to drive out invaders:  Ivan IV, Catherine II, Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Putin.  This centralizing trend is recurring before our eyes under the impact of NATO expansion.  Plainly, the West must learn to respect Russia’s need for security.  The great danger is of a war – seemingly already begun in Ukraine with American and Western arms to fight Russia – between the democracies against the autocracies.

Gorbachev in his Memoirs traces the diplomacy to win agreements on elimination of medium range SS-20 and Pershing nuclear missiles (INF, 1988), withdrawal of Red Army and NATO troops in Europe (CFE, 1990), and reduction of strategic ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers (START I, 1992).  These were the disarmament treaties that ended the Cold War.  The new Soviet policies of glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring, reform), and demokratizatsia (democratization) led to tremendous changes in Europe, including opening the Berlin Wall, allowing Germany to reunite, and even – unintended – the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.  When it was all over in 1992, Gorbachev traveled to offer his reflections on the end of the Cold War to the very college in Fulton, Missouri, where Winston Churchill had given his “Iron Curtain” address in 1946, inaugurating the Cold War.  ”In the major centers of world politics,” Gorbachev stated, “the choice, it would seem, has been made in favor of peace, cooperation, interaction, and overall security.”

And in pushing forward to a new civilization we should under no circumstance again make the intellectual, and consequently political, error of interpreting victory in the ‘Cold War’ narrowly as a victory for oneself, one’s own way of life, for one’s own values and merits.  This was a victory over a scheme for the development of humanity which was becoming slowly congealed and leading us to destruction.  It was a shattering of the vicious circle into which we had driven ourselves.  This was altogether a victory for common sense, reason, democracy, and common human values.

This historic speech[iii] is little noticed in the United States, compared to Churchill’s, but it was a stunning vision of the new kind of world politics implied by progress in turning away from the cycles of the arms race.  Gorbachev even used the taboo words “world government”:

What is emerging is a more complex global structure of international relations.  An awareness of the need for some kind of global government is gaining ground, one in which all members of the world community would take part.

Those words were chosen deliberately.  In Gorbachev’s circle of New Thinkers, Georgi Shakhnazarov wrote on the “governability of the world” in Pravda and International Affairs.[iv]

New Thinking was Gorbachev’s term for the deliberate effort of Soviet policy makers – following his selection as General Secretary and full review by the 27^th Party Congress in 1985 – to discard habits of strategic thinking in terms of threats and use of force, of conventional arms and potentially nuclear war, and to embrace the methods and realities of a more interdependent and economically developed world.  A philosophical account of New Thinking was published in Gorbachev’s popular book, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (1987).  Nuclear war threatens the annihilation of mankind.  Neither superpower, in the imperial pattern, can force its will on others.  International cooperation is a necessity.  Policies of preparing for war must give way to those that assure man’s future.  The foundation of policy is recognition of the interconnected, interdependent, integral world.  International politics must be based on moral and ethical norms.  The interests of humanity preempt class interests.  The United Nations remains the appropriate forum for balancing the interests of states.  Security, like peace, is indivisible.  Europe is a factor for equilibrium and stability.  Europe is our common home, from the Atlantic to the Urals.  Russia cannot be excluded.  Confrontation of blocs must be abandoned for coexistence.  The whole world needs perestroika.  Nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.  The objective of Soviet policy is to promote a stable and lasting peace built on mutual trust and cooperation among others.

Does anything of a wiser Soviet foreign policy, or even the project of “restructuring the world,” survive today?  Does perestroika have a bearing on Putin’s war in Ukraine?   Gorbachev thought he was releasing “socialism’s potential.”  He liked to claim he was “learning from Lenin.”  That’s gone.  The breakup of the Soviet Union was a setback for socialism everywhere, if I haven’t missed something from recent world history.  I think that Gorbachev’s creative statecraft to lift up world politics from what international lawyers call basic relations of war, with brief intervals of peace, to something more like domestic politics based on morals, government, and the rule of law, has been resisted by traditional practitioners of diplomacy – the Americans first of all, but also the NATO allies that follow U.S. hegemony.  To call that politics is to call rape, love.  Politics is the completion of ethics, designed to bring the good life to all.

We do not know what is really happening in Ukraine.  At time of writing, we do not have objective measures of casualties in Putin’s “special military operation.”  All our sources are Western estimates.  But it seems fair to say that he will not be aided or resisted by any transformed world politics left behind by Mikhail Gorbachev’s passage through this vale of tears.  Putin cannot appeal to the interests of humanity to stop NATO expansion.  Europe cannot be a common home if it continues to be the site of economic warfare.  The U.N is useful to him only because of the Russian veto. 

In 1992, in his state of the union address, U.S. President George H.W. Bush said the words, “We won the Cold War.”  That set off a long period of American triumphalism:  the reunification of Germany, the war on terror and occupation of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the seizure of Kosovo, the expansion of NATO to include the Baltic republics and all the members of the former Warsaw Pact.  Moreover, if one notices, the very treaties that ended the Cold War have been abandoned:  INF, CFE, and ABM.  START III is scheduled for renewal in 2026, but if it, too, is abandoned, the nuclear arms race will be back.  Everyone has heard Putin’s veiled threats of use of nuclear weapons.  The United States has established a new Space Force to complement the Army, Navy, and Air Force.  We are militarizing space, in defiance of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. 

To end the Cold War, Gorbachev did something inconceivable in foreign relations – he made unilateral cuts in armaments to start a process of disarmament.  He announced that only “political means” would be used to keep the Warsaw Pact together, meaning that the Brezhnev Doctrine of threatened military force was out of date.  In his great Speech at the United Nations (1988)[v] he offered to cut the Red Army in Europe by 500,000 troops, to withdraw six tank divisions from Czechoslovakia and Hungary, to stop the Afghan war.  It is true that these cuts did not endanger the defense of the Soviet Union, for they were far in excess of what he called “defense sufficiency,” but they were in the right direction to provoke others to match them, which in time they did.  That is the way to achieve peace.

It is worth recalling in that U.N. speech his bold defense of perestroika, restructuring international relations.  “Today, we have entered an era when progress will be shaped by universal human interests,” he declared.  “Awareness of that dictates that world politics, too, should be guided by the primacy of universal human values.”  Again, he said, “In the light of existing realities, no genuine progress is possible at the expense of the rights and freedoms of individuals and nations or at the expense of nature.” 

The use or threat of force can no longer, and must no longer, be an instrument of foreign policy.…  One-sided reliance on military power ultimately weakens other components of national security.…  The principle of freedom of choice [by socialist and capitalist systems] is mandatory.…  We were driven to [that principle] by an unbiased analysis of the objective trends of today.…  What we are talking about, therefore, is unity in diversity.…  The understanding of the need for a period of peace is gaining ground and beginning to prevail.  This has made it possible to take the first real steps towards creating a healthier international environment and towards disarmament.…  Everyone should join in the movement towards greater world unity.…  For our [Soviet] society to participate in efforts to implement the plans of perestroika, it had to democratize in practice.  Under the sign of democratization, perestroika has now spread to politics, the economy, intellectual life, and ideology.…  Being in favor of demilitarizing international relations, we want political and legal methods to prevail in solving whatever problems may arise.  Our ideal is a world community of states which is based on the rule of law and which subordinate their foreign relations to law.

I know that Russians blame Gorbachev for their troubles in adjusting to globalization.  That’s like blaming George Washington for not leading the new United States to the immediate abolition of slavery.

[i] D.F. Flemming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960 (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 29-30; W.H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921, Vol. II (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 37.

[ii] http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181

[iii] https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/the-river-of-time-and-the-imperative.html

[iv] Shakhnazarov, Georgi, “The World Community Is Amenable to Government,” Pravda, 15 January 1988; “Governability of the World,” International Affairs (Moscow), 34, 3, (March 1988): 16-24.

[v]  https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/%20116224%20.pdf