Guilty without guilt: why Moscow coldly said farewell to Gorbachev

Sergey Mitroshin

One of my surprises is the rather cold farewell to Mikhail Gorbachev. And not only in the group that suffers from the sunken beautiful Atlantis-USSR, those have long been skewed the coordinate axes. And in a group that is not satisfied with the tactics and strategy of reforms. Gorbachev, in their opinion, drifted here and there, instead of doing everything right for him at once. This group does not regret the USSR, but regrets the accompanying collapse, which is generally in solidarity with regret for the USSR. Allegedly, it was possible not to close factories, not to lower the level of income of workers, but to restart everything on new grounds. But no luck: Gorbachev, though a good man, turned out to be not very smart. So they think, therefore, they do not experience grief at his death.

Want to protect. No, not Gorbachev - even if a thousand years pass, the world will not forget him. But our time. Because judging from the twenty-second year of the eighties of the last century is a strange occupation, if not misdirected. Especially from such a twenty-second year, in which we ourselves seem to have lost all reasonable grounds for our existence. The reformers of the late eighties and early nineties really failed to convert the "Kalashnikov assault rifle", that is, devouring the economy of the military-industrial complex. What's true is true. But the "stabilizers" of the twenty-second year, on the contrary, managed the exact opposite - to anti-convert even McDonald's in order to turn it into a "Kalashnikov assault rifle" again.

It turned out quite in the spirit of the well-known saying: whatever we do, we get, or barbed wire. Like Galich, remember? “... well, you're right,” they say, “and your products are the best! But still, - they say, - not a drape, - they say, - A barbed wire!

What is Gorbachev's "guilty" of?

However, this is not the point, but the fact that the options laid down under the rule of the Gorbachevists were really impossible to cancel or somehow modify painlessly. Gorbachev is “guilty” for moving the party that holds everything together from Olympus of indisputable competence, but it was impossible for him to leave it in its original place. I spoke with today's communists, even exchanged a few words with the Udaltsov couple: “Would you consider it right to leave the country under an almost conspiratorial undemocratic organization, to which citizens were in most cases closed?” No one said, “Yes, that's right. This is our path. This is our balanced political position.” Everyone wanted some kind of not very dangerous competition, at worst, something like the “Democratic Platform in the CPSU”.

The Gorbachevists opened the steam release valve called "glasnost", as a result of which the System received a mortal blow from its own intelligentsia. But the elite could no longer declare that we need not Glasnost, but absolute Opacity. Even today, no one will say that "freedom of speech" is bad. A naive Soviet and post-Soviet person who believes in the letter of the slogan would not understand this. And the process, as they say, has begun. He would have “understood” if such a question had not been raised at all, as in seventy previous years, but he stood up, and that means you are giving publicity!

The same thing happened with the Soviets. "All power to the Soviets" was driven into the consciousness of the Soviet people by the same Soviet cinema. But the Soviets did not rule, but gave ... advice. For example, how much mayonnaise to put in Olivier salad. Again, the naive Soviet man under Gorbachev decided that now he would govern through the Soviets, as bequeathed to us by the "correct" Lenin, not distorted by the departments of Marxism-Leninism. Activists flocked to the Soviets. I myself, through the Moscow City Council, was sent to the Supreme Court to commissar for professional communist judges. Total : what he arranged, or rather, settled under Gorbachev, was already impossible to cancel, even if he wanted to. GKChP tried, but it got even "worse". Or “better if in a different coordinate system.

Gorbachev is not to blame for the collapse of the USSR, but Russia itself

Gorbachev is reproached for having thus paved the way for the disintegration of the USSR. At first glance, it seems to be true. But, firstly, the USSR did not collapse under him. And secondly, he ... did not break up!

Formally, the Soviet Union is a union of republics. REPUBLIC, gentlemen! And the republics, again in the spirit of slogans, simply behaved like republics. They could well renegotiate agreements and arrange something like the EU. And it looks like they did something similar. None of the republics flew to Mars or joined the United States. All tales of monstrous collapse are "tales from the crypt."

When the USSR “collapsed”, I worked at Kommersant in the policy department, so we were not even interested in it. How can a country fall apart without a civil war? The news went through the department of international relations, they tracked it on the news feed and happily came up with a headline about the breakup, thinking that this would amuse the public in the style of early commercial trolling. I then went out from work to the street (we worked around the clock) and saw ... nothing. A trolleybus approached in the gray morning squabble. Nobody cared about anything.

Now I think that Russia dismissed everyone deliberately, maliciously, because formally, if divided, then it was necessary to divide everything relatively equally: the gold reserves, and the army, and atomic bombs. But the Russian authorities, already infected with patriotism and, apparently, anticipating getting up from their knees in the future, carrying the virus of the empire in themselves, decided that they should remain the most powerful, so they ordered everyone to leave. That's who is "to blame" for the collapse of the Union - Russia as the idea of a pole in a multipolar world.

Gorbachev turned out to be a man without a strategy and without an ideology

But what about Gorbachev? He didn't really understand what was going on. But no one understood either. In the public field, a strange communication arose between those who had previously read dissident literature, various Solzhenitsyns and all sorts of "from under the rocks", and those who took everything at face value. Those who took everything at face value, believed in the slogans, and they became the gravediggers of the USSR. Vouchers, and conversionrs, farmers (from the word "farmer") and later the beneficiaries of the chaos resulting from it all. They wrote constitutions and, believing in elections, tirelessly improved the law on elections. Those who read dissident literature were expecting a catch. Well, as always, wait. Today even more than yesterday. Deprived of other channels of information, Gorbachev belonged to the former - it was not his fault, but fate. He had to evolve with his class, and the class matured with difficulty. In 1985, at a round table at CEMI, I thumped about the need for capitalism - they shushed me: they don’t talk about that here. A year and a half later, Komsomol members mastered capitalist relations through the centers of scientific and technical creativity of youth (NTTM). The first private newspaper, Kommersant, took shape through a secret agreement with the Politburo of the Communist Party back in 1989.

Trying to characterize Gorbachev in these processes, priest Andrey Kurayev states: “Nevertheless, now I am convinced that he was a man from God. It was precisely such an intellectual goof that was needed for the peaceful dissolution of the USSR and the dismantling of the totalitarian system. A man without a strategy, without a clear understanding of the goal, without an ideology. And who, precisely for this reason, did not shed blood for the sake of his beliefs and plans. But he also writes it without too much warmth in his voice. I, who belongs to the first group of “those who read everything in advance,” who dreamed of the end of the three-hundred-year (according to plan) Tatar-Mongolian communist yoke, remember the catchphrase of the late eighties: “In our struggle, we have only one tank. This is Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.