The editors of the Moscow monthly Politicheskii Klass asked me to reply to a recent article by Andranik Migranian harshly criticizing Gorbachev's role as Soviet leader. (Migranian's article appeared in No. 9 of the journal.) I'd like to share my reply with JRL readers as a small contribution to ongoing reevvaluations, in Russia and the West, of Gorbachev's leadership. It is being published this week, in Russian under the title "Who Is To Blame?," in issue No. 10.

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Kto Vinovat?
By Stephen F. Cohen

During my 30 years of writing about and living frequently in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, I have made a firm, principled rule of not becoming involved in the country's internal political disputes. Indeed, I wrote an entire book (Proval krestogo pokhoda, AIRO, 2001; translation of Failed Crusade) sharply criticizing my own government for having done just that, with disastrous results, in the 1990s. (There was, I admit, a partial exception: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, at the request of Moscow friends and acquaintances, I smuggled samizdat manuscripts to the West, but even then I was non-partisan; those writings ranged across the dissident spectrum, from democratic to neo-fascist.)

Andranik Migranian's assault on Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership (PK, No. 9) is, however, a different matter because it raises questions that should concern all scholars of modern Russia. Migranian, whom I have known and liked for almost 20 years, identifies himself as an "expert and analyst," but he does not write as either one about Gorbachev. Though American and Russian intellectual cultures may differ, it is the professional obligation of an expert "analyst" in both countries to be objective, balanced, and dispassionate in his approaches and judgments. Migranian does not even try. He writes instead as a highly impassioned (even embittered) polemicist, as reflected in the substance and tone of his indictment of Gorbachev's "monstrous mistakes ? which led to catastrophic consequences for the country and the world." He means, of course, the end of the Soviet Union.

It is very revealing that in a long article Migranian fails to mention a single positive attribute of Gorbachev's more than six years as Soviet leader. Not one, not even those that enabled Migranian to speak his mind publicly today! He completely ignores, for example, Gorbachev's two most important historic achievements. By 1990, he had become the first ruler in Russian history to have voluntarily led the country across the Rubicon from centuries of authoritarian government to real democratic practices and institutions -- to an increasingly free press and elections, and to an increasingly independent parliament. (Thereby, in another precedent, giving up his inherited power along the way!) And, at the same time, by letting the Warsaw Pact countries go their own ways, he became the first Russian ruler ever to choose reformation at home over empire abroad.

Nor does Migranian seem to understand (or care) what even a great reformer can and cannot do in an enormous country with centuries-old bureaucratic traditions. Unless he is able and willing to resort to mass repressions and terror as did Stalin -- the only Russian leader in the "last 50-60 years" for whom Migranian has a good word -- he cannot himself actually carry out far-reaching changes; he lacks the power, the political reach, and the time. He can "only" give the country new opportunities, new alternatives, by opening doors long closed. This, too, Gorbachev had achieved by 1990, giving the Soviet Union -- or, more exactly, the majority of the republics that wished to remain in the Union -- the possibility of a democratic reformation along with evolutionary economic modernization.

The Soviet Union went in a different direction -- to abolition and wherever Russia and the other republics are today -- but was this Gorbachev's fault? Arguably, yes, but only in the sense that by liberating it, he had given the country choices for its subsequent development. But who made the fateful choice in 1990-91? Certainly not Gorbachev, who resisted it to the end; and certainly not the Russian people, whom many Moscow intelligentsy (and American Russia-watchers) now blame for their own failed expectations in the 1990s. The choice was made, of course, by segments of the Soviet elite itself -- power-seeking apparatchiki around Yeltsin, property-seeking nomenklaturchiki in Russia and other republics, and, in another destructive Russian tradition, the conformist-turned-impatient ("radical") wing of the intelligentsia.

Why does the very smart and highly educated Migranian consider so little, if any, of this, only Gorbachev's responsibility for the "catastrophic consequences," even though he notes in passing, in an apparent contradiction, the "total collapse of the political class of the entire Union"? The answer is only alluded to elliptically in his article. In the late 1980s, as many readers will remember, Migranian was the leading intelligentsia proponent of the need for an "iron hand" to impose economic modernization on Soviet society, and for that reason was an outspoken opponent of Gorbachev's evolutionary democratic program. Gorbachev openly rejected Migranian's ideas at the time as a return to Russia's despotic tradition, as he still does today, and for that, it seems, Migranian has never forgiven him. (Even now he accuses Gorbachev of having "lost control" over democracy, evidently still not understanding that "managed democracy" is a political oxymoron.)

Moreover, has Migranian considered the possibility that his own ideas of the late 1980s may have had "catastrophic consequences"? In his article, he laments the "Russia of the yeltsins, gaidars, chubaises, and abramovichs." But by the mid-1990s, his ideas were being echoed by the future shock-therapist and oligarchy-creating privatizer Chubais and his Leningrad "team," who were already openly advocating a "harsh course" of imposing capitalism on society even if it meant repressing democratically elected parliaments (XX vek i mir, No. 6, 1990, pp. 15-19). The clear implication, spoken and unspoken ever since, was that Russia needed a Pinochet, a role that Gorbachev adamantly refused to play. It was only a few more steps back to Russia's authoritarian traditions, to Yeltsin's rule by decree and to October 1993.

Migranian is right, however, about one thing: The end of the Soviet Union has had many bad consequences for world affairs, particularly for U.S.¬Russian relations. But here, too, it is not expert or analytical (or fair) to blame Gorbachev. By 1991, he, more than anyone else, had given us a historic opportunity to live together without cold war and nuclear arms race. And yet today, 14 years later, we are again on the verge of both. In this case, my own government has been largely responsible. Since the early 1990s, Washington has pursued, behind decorative proclamations of "friendship and strategic partnership," a more aggressive policy toward post-Soviet Russia than it pursued toward Soviet Russia -- a policy of breaking promises (NATO expansion eastward being the most important but only the first), demanding unilateral concessions, refusing to negotiate real reductions in nuclear weapons, and military encirclement.

In other words, it is likely that one day History will ask how all of us -- Russians and Americans -- used the historic opportunities given to us by Mikhail Gorbachev. Our blame may vary, but none of us will have reason to be proud.