Mikhail Gorbachev
LimonovMikhail Gorbachev is portrayed as a cautious reformer whose attempt to renew Soviet communism opened a space that rapidly exceeded his control. He arrived as a striking contrast to the aged leaders before him, and was widely welcomed in the West; yet he did not set out to abolish either the Communist Party or the Soviet Union. The decisive irony of his political career is that allowing people to tell the history the state had suppressed helped undermine the very system he meant to reform.
From succession to reform
Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko after a succession of leaders whose public image had become inseparable from age and decline. Leonid Brezhnev had spent his final years barely able to walk without support; Yuri Andropov, briefly admired by conservatives as a potentially intelligent reformer, died in less than a year; and Chernenko followed him as another infirm figure. Against this procession, Gorbachev seemed almost startlingly young. He could walk unaided, smiled, and appeared alongside a wife who was also visible in public. Western audiences found him approachable, and commentators expected a limited thaw: better relations with the United States, a more constructive tone at international conferences, and perhaps fewer dissidents confined to psychiatric hospitals.
That expectation underestimated the scale of what followed. Gorbachev was a model apparatchik, and the account stresses that no one—not even Gorbachev himself—could imagine that six years after his rise as general secretary, the Communist Party and the Soviet Union would both cease to exist. His stated horizon was narrower: to resume reforms associated with Nikita Khrushchev before Khrushchev’s removal for voluntarism. The limits of his intention matter to the shape of his story. He began as a party reformer, not as a leader planning the party’s disappearance.
Glasnost and the return of history
The transformative element of Gorbachev’s period in power was not simply a change in administrative policy. It was the opening for people to write and discuss their own history. At the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution, he used the term glasnost, or transparency, and announced an intention to fill in the blank pages of history. He acknowledged hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalinism, though the actual toll ran into the tens of millions. The speech gave public permission to address what had long been excluded from official memory.
That exclusion had reached into ordinary family life. People whose fathers had been taken away knew the danger of speaking about it; children of those labeled public enemies learned to behave as if the disappearance had never happened. The state’s preferred history, including the official account compiled under Joseph Stalin, did not merely omit victims: it trained people to act as though the events themselves had not occurred. Gorbachev’s announcement loosened that suppression, whether or not he intended the consequences to be so extensive.
From 1988, works previously accessible mainly as samizdat or in smuggled foreign editions became publicly available. Large print runs sold out, and readers queued at kiosks and carried books into the subway, buses, and streets. Doctor Zhivago, Life and Fate, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and histories of collectivization and the purges became objects of intense public attention. Dissidents, under the patronage of Andrei Sakharov, founded the Memorial Society to name victims who had been killed and then erased from public remembrance. As people began to speak openly of millions of victims, the scale of repression that had seemed almost unsayable became part of everyday public debate. Gorbachev had opened the door; the force moving through it was larger than a controlled program of concessions.
Popularity, criticism, and the limits of control
Gorbachev’s appeal abroad did not translate into admiration from everyone at home. The narrator’s mother, though pleased by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, rejected the idea that Gorbachev had liberated it. In her view, people had taken him at his word and forced his hand while he tried to brake a process he had set in motion. She saw him as reckless, politically inadequate, and a poor speaker of Russian. Eduard Limonov shared her hostility. He disliked Gorbachev’s popularity with Western journalists, the public repentance of Soviet leaders, and what he saw as retreat from territory secured at the cost of Russian lives.
For Limonov, small material changes could stand for a larger loss of confidence. He noticed that the brass buttons on a Red Army jacket, once part of his childhood image of military authority, had been replaced with plastic. To him, the cheapened uniform suggested that soldiers could no longer inspire fear or respect. This reaction sets Gorbachev’s Western reputation beside a counter-image of national retreat: the same opening that made the Soviet leader attractive to foreign observers could look, to his critics, like an abandonment of strength.
Resistance to reform also appeared in ordinary conversations far from the capitals and intellectual circles. A woman hearing that gas cost thousands of francs in Paris was astonished that people abroad had to pay for it, then worried that Gorbachev and his associates wanted to introduce similar charges at home. The exchange gives political reform a domestic scale: policies described as openness or modernization could also be experienced as a threat to familiar material arrangements. Gorbachev’s popularity was not universal, and his changes did not mean the same thing to every audience.
Sakharov pressed the political question more directly. In the account of his final months, he repeatedly urged Gorbachev to choose between the democrats and conservatives and argued that reforming the Communist Party was not enough; it had to be abolished for a normal political system to emerge. Gorbachev acknowledged the argument but returned to the task of reforming the party. The exchange exposes the growing distance between the change Sakharov demanded and the institutional repair Gorbachev still pursued.
Vilnius and the failing center
In January 1991, while international attention was fixed on the First Gulf War, Soviet tanks entered Vilnius. After strong resistance, they withdrew, leaving around fifteen people dead. The episode discredited Gorbachev among democrats and made talk of a humane socialism harder to sustain. He said he had not been informed, leaving people to wonder whether he was lying or had lost control of events. The army’s movements and border clashes increasingly occurred without his knowledge, sometimes timed to embarrass him during international meetings.
The political consequences were compounded by Gorbachev’s treatment of his opponents and advisers. Boris Yeltsin had been elected president of Russia by direct vote, but Gorbachev dismissed him as a so-called democrat, a stance that only increased Yeltsin’s stature. Eduard Shevardnadze resigned as foreign minister and warned publicly of an approaching dictatorship. Alexander Yakovlev remained in office but repeatedly signaled his fear that he might be sent to Siberia; when he warned of sedition within the Politburo, Gorbachev brushed the danger aside as exaggerated and insisted that everything was under control. The account presents this assurance as a failure to recognize how far the center had weakened.
The August coup and the end of authority
Gorbachev left for a vacation at his villa in Crimea believing the situation was sufficiently secure. There, his telephone was cut, the house was isolated, and the surrounding area was cordoned off. Generals declared a state of emergency and put Vice President Gennady Yanayev in charge. Yanayev was so panicked that he shut himself in his office and had to be forcibly brought out for a televised press conference. On camera his hands trembled; the attempt to project triumph instead conveyed defeat.
The account later describes the plotters as mediocre men whose drunkenness and wavering resolve helped make the coup farcical. At the time, however, its outcome was uncertain. Democrats feared that the political thaw was ending and that the army might repeat the violence of Prague in 1968. Young conscripts faced the prospect of marching on Moscow; Boris Yeltsin urged them to remain on the side of the law and the state. The episode revealed how much depended not only on orders from the center but on whether people would obey them.
Gorbachev returned from Crimea deeply tanned and seemingly unaware of what had happened, with the isolation of his family at the villa registering to him more immediately than the political scale of the coup. Three of the plotters later committed suicide. On August 23, in a televised parliamentary session, Yeltsin made Gorbachev read the minutes of a council meeting in which ministers he had appointed had resolved to betray him. Yeltsin then presented him with a decree suspending the activities of the Communist Party of Russia. Gorbachev signed it.
The scenes that followed made the transfer of authority visible: the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky outside the Lubyanka was toppled, and the red flag was replaced by the tricolor of the 1917 provisional government. Months later, Boris Yeltsin, Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk, and Belarusian president Stanislav Shushkevich met in secret at a hunting lodge in Belovezhskaya Forest. Without informing Gorbachev, they agreed that the republics that had created the Soviet Union in 1922 could dissolve it. The sequence completes the account’s central reversal: the leader who had meant to reform the party signed a measure suspending its Russian activities, while other leaders moved toward dissolving the union itself.
