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Gorbachev wins the Liberty Medal
Robert Zaller
And the Gold Medal for failure goes to...
ROBERT ZALLER
I’m no fan of prizes in general, but I have a visceral and I think well-founded suspicion of any with words like “liberty” or “freedom” attached to them, especially as I find so little to celebrate of either in our country at present.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is regularly bestowed now on cashiered generals, retired spooks and the odd Country/Western singer. Philadelphia’s Liberty Medal, brought to you by the National Constitution Center, has featured such winners as George H. W. Bush, who brought us unconstitutional wars in Panama and Iraq; Colin Powell, who helped George W. Bush lie us into another (also unconstitutional) war; Sandra Day O’Connor, who helped bring us W. in the first place as part of what many still regard as the judicial annulment of the 2000 presidential election; America’s well-tailored Afghan puppet, Hamid Karzai; and, oh yes, a rock singer, Bono.
But now for the most brilliant selection of all: Mikhail Gorbachev.
Machiavelli said that the science of politics boils down to two things: getting power, and keeping it. Those who fail at the first task are forgotten by history; those who fail at the second are judged by it.
By this standard, no one in the past 500 years has failed more disastrously than Mikhail Gorbachev.
The empire he inherited
When Gorbachev became prime minister of the Soviet Union in 1985, his nation was one of the world’s two superpowers, the largest contiguous state empire in human history, and the co-victor of the greatest war ever fought.
The Soviet Union was then not yet 70 years old, but it was, of course, the heir of the old Russian empire of the tsars, built piece by piece by the former dukes of Muscovy over half a millennium of conquest and assimilation. Lenin and his successors repudiated the old tsarist empire and all its works, but kept its lands and peoples. As Nicholas II had defended Russia against Imperial Germany in World War I, so Stalin defended the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany in World War II. Stalin’s reward for this was the Soviet colonization of Eastern Europe, which more or less forced the U.S. to assume de facto control of Western Europe lest it find itself isolated in its own hemisphere.
This situation was essentially unchanged when Gorbachev came to power forty years later. It went by the name of the Cold War.
In 1985, the Soviet Union suffered both immediate and long-term problems (who doesn’t?). But no one doubted its viability, or even dreamed of its imminent demise. The Reagan-era CIA figured that the Evil Empire would be with us well into the 21st Century, if not beyond.
Six years later, it was all gone.
He did it all single-handedly
Mikhail Gorbachev did not merely lose power personally. He lost his country. He lost a superpower. He lost the greatest land empire ever seen.
And he did it all on his own. No one pushed Gorbachev, at least not until he had willfully stripped the gears of power. No outside power vanquished him, whatever Cold War triumphalists like to suggest. He was a self-ruined man.
His country was ruined with him. The Soviet Union became Russia again, but stripped of half its population, a third of its land, and its only southern outlet to the sea. In the first decade of its post-Soviet existence, the average life expectancy of Russia’s male population plummeted by seven years, a catastrophe unprecedented save for conquest, plague or extraplanetary invasion.
‘Few people had his impact’
In announcing its decision to honor Gorbachev, the National Constitution Center noted that “Few people have had the impact on the history of liberty that Mikhail Gorbachev has— opening irrevocably Soviet society and bringing an end to the Cold War.”
Well, yeah— if you call destroying a society a way to open it up, and say that one ends a war by obliterating the country one leads.
As for Gorbachev the democrat, let us recall, please, that he refused to permit any political party to challenge the monopoly of the Communist Party while he ruled. And ask the Lithuanians his tanks rolled over in the dying days of his regime about his commitment to democratic dialogue.
When free elections finally came to Russia and Gorbachev ran for president against his old rival, Boris Yeltsin, he got less than 1% of the vote— fewer votes than were cast for a professional wrestler whose name also appeared on the ballot. Such was the gratitude of Gorbachev’s fellow countrymen for “opening irrevocably Soviet society.”
A pitchman for Louis Vuitton
Gorbachev subsequently became a pitchman for Louis Vuitton luggage, and cut ribbons on real estate developments in, among other venues, Pennsylvania. In this respect alone did he follow Machiavellian advice: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and the more shamelessly the better. It was therefore a very predictable route that brought Gorby to the Liberty Medal. Not only does Liberty love a loser, but, it seems, it adores a shill.
Then came Gorbachev’s spirited defense of Russia’s invasion of Georgia in The New York Times last month. Whoops! Here was lovable Uncle Mikhail, everyone’s favorite pushover, giving props to Putin. Had the old apparatchik lost it, or was he finally showing his true colors?
Provoking the bear
Possibly a little of both. But lost in the general outrage was the indubitable fact that the Clinton and Bush administrations had poked sticks at the Russian bear for 15 years as it wallowed in its own gore, encircling it, sticking missiles up its nose, and waving NATO membership not only in front of its old satellites but its former constituent republics. As Gorbachev quite sensibly pointed out, the bear was now erect again, and ready to take revenge on its tormentors.
This was not the role that Gorby had been assigned in the script of Cold War II. Some even thought the Liberty Medal should be withdrawn. But it seems that the presentation will go forward, and it should be entertaining— Philadelphia has had few enough laughs lately.
And let’s not be too hard on the old turncoat. Who can begrudge a little nostalgia for tanks and guns to a man who lost an entire empire single-handedly?
To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
ROBERT ZALLER
I’m no fan of prizes in general, but I have a visceral and I think well-founded suspicion of any with words like “liberty” or “freedom” attached to them, especially as I find so little to celebrate of either in our country at present.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is regularly bestowed now on cashiered generals, retired spooks and the odd Country/Western singer. Philadelphia’s Liberty Medal, brought to you by the National Constitution Center, has featured such winners as George H. W. Bush, who brought us unconstitutional wars in Panama and Iraq; Colin Powell, who helped George W. Bush lie us into another (also unconstitutional) war; Sandra Day O’Connor, who helped bring us W. in the first place as part of what many still regard as the judicial annulment of the 2000 presidential election; America’s well-tailored Afghan puppet, Hamid Karzai; and, oh yes, a rock singer, Bono.
But now for the most brilliant selection of all: Mikhail Gorbachev.
Machiavelli said that the science of politics boils down to two things: getting power, and keeping it. Those who fail at the first task are forgotten by history; those who fail at the second are judged by it.
By this standard, no one in the past 500 years has failed more disastrously than Mikhail Gorbachev.
The empire he inherited
When Gorbachev became prime minister of the Soviet Union in 1985, his nation was one of the world’s two superpowers, the largest contiguous state empire in human history, and the co-victor of the greatest war ever fought.
The Soviet Union was then not yet 70 years old, but it was, of course, the heir of the old Russian empire of the tsars, built piece by piece by the former dukes of Muscovy over half a millennium of conquest and assimilation. Lenin and his successors repudiated the old tsarist empire and all its works, but kept its lands and peoples. As Nicholas II had defended Russia against Imperial Germany in World War I, so Stalin defended the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany in World War II. Stalin’s reward for this was the Soviet colonization of Eastern Europe, which more or less forced the U.S. to assume de facto control of Western Europe lest it find itself isolated in its own hemisphere.
This situation was essentially unchanged when Gorbachev came to power forty years later. It went by the name of the Cold War.
In 1985, the Soviet Union suffered both immediate and long-term problems (who doesn’t?). But no one doubted its viability, or even dreamed of its imminent demise. The Reagan-era CIA figured that the Evil Empire would be with us well into the 21st Century, if not beyond.
Six years later, it was all gone.
He did it all single-handedly
Mikhail Gorbachev did not merely lose power personally. He lost his country. He lost a superpower. He lost the greatest land empire ever seen.
And he did it all on his own. No one pushed Gorbachev, at least not until he had willfully stripped the gears of power. No outside power vanquished him, whatever Cold War triumphalists like to suggest. He was a self-ruined man.
His country was ruined with him. The Soviet Union became Russia again, but stripped of half its population, a third of its land, and its only southern outlet to the sea. In the first decade of its post-Soviet existence, the average life expectancy of Russia’s male population plummeted by seven years, a catastrophe unprecedented save for conquest, plague or extraplanetary invasion.
‘Few people had his impact’
In announcing its decision to honor Gorbachev, the National Constitution Center noted that “Few people have had the impact on the history of liberty that Mikhail Gorbachev has— opening irrevocably Soviet society and bringing an end to the Cold War.”
Well, yeah— if you call destroying a society a way to open it up, and say that one ends a war by obliterating the country one leads.
As for Gorbachev the democrat, let us recall, please, that he refused to permit any political party to challenge the monopoly of the Communist Party while he ruled. And ask the Lithuanians his tanks rolled over in the dying days of his regime about his commitment to democratic dialogue.
When free elections finally came to Russia and Gorbachev ran for president against his old rival, Boris Yeltsin, he got less than 1% of the vote— fewer votes than were cast for a professional wrestler whose name also appeared on the ballot. Such was the gratitude of Gorbachev’s fellow countrymen for “opening irrevocably Soviet society.”
A pitchman for Louis Vuitton
Gorbachev subsequently became a pitchman for Louis Vuitton luggage, and cut ribbons on real estate developments in, among other venues, Pennsylvania. In this respect alone did he follow Machiavellian advice: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and the more shamelessly the better. It was therefore a very predictable route that brought Gorby to the Liberty Medal. Not only does Liberty love a loser, but, it seems, it adores a shill.
Then came Gorbachev’s spirited defense of Russia’s invasion of Georgia in The New York Times last month. Whoops! Here was lovable Uncle Mikhail, everyone’s favorite pushover, giving props to Putin. Had the old apparatchik lost it, or was he finally showing his true colors?
Provoking the bear
Possibly a little of both. But lost in the general outrage was the indubitable fact that the Clinton and Bush administrations had poked sticks at the Russian bear for 15 years as it wallowed in its own gore, encircling it, sticking missiles up its nose, and waving NATO membership not only in front of its old satellites but its former constituent republics. As Gorbachev quite sensibly pointed out, the bear was now erect again, and ready to take revenge on its tormentors.
This was not the role that Gorby had been assigned in the script of Cold War II. Some even thought the Liberty Medal should be withdrawn. But it seems that the presentation will go forward, and it should be entertaining— Philadelphia has had few enough laughs lately.
And let’s not be too hard on the old turncoat. Who can begrudge a little nostalgia for tanks and guns to a man who lost an entire empire single-handedly?
To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
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