a perpetual problem
On December 26, 1991, the international political pattern that had been maintained for nearly half a century ushered in a major earthquake. The Soviet Union disintegrated and the Cold War ended. The world remembered a name, Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union. . On August 30, 2022, Gorbachev, who was 91 years old, passed away, and the controversy over how to evaluate this politician has not stopped.
On the one hand, he was blamed for the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and he was to blame for the economic crisis and social turmoil experienced by the post-transition country. The other is praise. He pushed forward domestic reforms despite difficulties, and also made contributions to solving world peace issues such as the Persian Gulf crisis, German reunification and normalization of foreign relations.
Today, I read and reread Yang Xiao’s “In the Late Period”, returning to the historical moment of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yang Xiao interviewed three Russian intellectuals and Gorbachev’s secretary Polyakov, asking them what they thought of Gorbachev and the social changes before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although they experienced the same period of history, their feelings and opinions are different, and it is difficult to draw a conclusion on their success or failure. What Gorbachev and the disintegration of the Soviet Union left to future generations are complex issues related to the reform of the political and economic system.
in the late period (excerpt)
Written by: Yang Xiao
eleven
Between 1982 and 1983, Kagallitsky and Dugin were arrested. The former was for organizing a left-wing discussion group called “Young Socialists,” and the latter for singing anti-socialist songs at an underground concert of 30 people. Dugin later recalled the KGB interrogation to the media, “just like in the movie”, a strong light hit his face, the interrogator’s facial features emerged on the edge of the halo, and his voice was skilled and tired: “Why do you sing ‘Soviet’ It’s an eternal fact that the Soviet Union will never fall. Look at our faces. Look at your own hippie look, how old are you?”
But they were soon released, partly because the Soviet Union of the early 1980s was no longer the Soviet Union of Stalin’s days, and partly because of Brezhnev’s death. At that time, Chirova had graduated from college and was teaching at the academy. The school organized a group to watch the live broadcast of Brezhnev’s funeral, “His coffin is moving, the way of traveling is very strange, we are watching it, and we don’t know how to respond. Suddenly I heard a bang, and the TV signal was cut off. Later, the sound was cut off when it was replayed, but we all saw it at the time, and we couldn’t help laughing. I laughed so hard, I even got out of my chair. I fell down, and now I don’t know why I thought it was so coke, maybe I saw those old guys from Chernenko.”
I asked Kirova, Dugin, and Kagalitsky a question of “hindsight”: when you’re “late,” do you realize it’s late?
“You know I’ve read a lot by then. I know this society is not normal, it’s crazy, and it shouldn’t be, but I swear, I never imagined that this country would end one day, and I thought the Soviet Union would last forever. .” This was Chirova’s answer.
The movie “Mirror”
“I think human being is first of all thinking being, not eating being or breathing being, but in the Soviet Union at the time, everything was reversed. The only content of life It’s living and doing what it takes to survive: eat, breathe, work. . . . If you stop thinking, you stop being human.” This was Dugin’s answer.
Only Kagalitsky said, “Of course I know!” They kept on Samiyat writing that the Soviet Union was falling, the system was breaking down, and we had to prepare for the next phase of politics. When Kagalitsky was arrested and released, he was arranged to report his thoughts to a KGB officer to ensure that he would not commit crimes in the future. He asked the officer when he could call him, and the officer told him, you stay away From 9:10pm to 9:30pm. “The meaning is very clear, we have the news on the hour at nine o’clock, the first fifteen minutes are about the achievements of the Politburo and the Soviet Union, the last fifteen minutes are international news, and then the film. People are only at a quarter to nine. Just turned on the TV. The KGB, like us, doesn’t watch the propaganda news.”
twelve
A few days later, I went to visit the Gorbachev Foundation in the north of Moscow. It’s a large building that looks more like a theater, the Soviet-style kind. The elevator went up to the fourth floor, and there was a fairly spacious waiting area. Gorbachev, who was bald on the wall, rested his hands on the table and smiled at me with bright eyes. On the other walls, there are quite a few press photos of him back then, greetings with Thatcher, shaking hands with Reagan, and so on. That was the generation of leaders who ended the Cold War, and the world pattern and way of thinking they laid down are still affecting the world today. While I was waiting, I read a New York Times feature on Gorbachev on my phone, and the reporter described the scene when he took a taxi to the building: After learning that the person he was visiting was Gorbachev When we were married, the taxi driver said contemptuously, he has no balls (he is very poor).
The foundation’s daily office area only occupies half of the fourth floor, and it is said that its main income comes from rent and Gorbachev’s royalties. After resigning as Soviet President on December 25, 1991, Gorbachev wrote many books. The newer one, which was translated into Chinese, was “Accompanying Loneliness”. The details that impressed me the most were that in 1996 , he ran for the Russian presidential election without a chance of winning, and a young female reporter from a radio station followed him for half a day in St. Petersburg, only to ask him to answer one question: “You are still working for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) ?” This detail reflects the attitude of many Russians towards Gorbachev: a traitor who conspired with the West to bring down the Soviet superpower.
“It’s all the result of the propaganda machine!” Gorbachev’s secretary Polyakov spread his hands. He is a thin man who happened to be born in 1957. He studied international relations at Moscow State University. After graduation, he worked as a reporter for TASS news agency. Our interview, waited three days” “except Mandela, he was still in prison”), in the late 1980s Polyakov returned to the country, ran the Politburo news, after the collapse of the Soviet Union he received Gorba Joff’s invitation, to take care of the newly established foundation, to this day. “It might be some kind of Russian character, each generation of leaders blames the previous generation for leaving them a mess, Yeltsin blames Gorbachev, Putin blames Gorbachev, and just two days ago, he He also said in Oliver Stone’s documentary that Gorbachev made a mistake and did not sign an agreement with NATO not to allow them to expand eastward… Did he forget that there was still a Warsaw Pact at that time? How could it be possible to raise this What about a proposition? Everyone talks about reform as an afterthought, but what did they do then?”
“When Mr. Gorbachev was in office, he didn’t blame individuals, he blamed the system as a whole.” Polyakov emphasized his tone. In March 1985, Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and began to promote reform and transparency (Perestroika and Glasnost), “In the circumstances at the time, there was only one thing we could do: believe that we ourselves saw it with our own eyes. Seek truth from facts, recognize that life is higher than theory, respect the path of life and its logic, and stop seeing ourselves as a laughing stock.” Gorbachev recalled in “Accompanying Solitude”.
Dugin summed up the reforms of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s with a “very interesting process of alienation”: “Everyone is talking about official issues from the Stalin era, but they no longer believe in justice, they believe in Soviet values, and are instead embraced by Western liberalism. , individualism, materialism, and consumerism are deeply corrupted and attracted. The system begins to alienate from the very core. There are two small parties in the party, one is liberal, westernized, and the other is nationalist. They are called For conservatives, but they’re not, they want to revive a kind of communism based on nationalism. They’re all sixties. Gorbachev was in the middle, and he ended up with liberals. Everyone used Communist language, but the meaning is very different. No one speaks the truth, no one speaks their true intentions, people are fooled, they can’t make decisions from what they say, they don’t know what’s going on, they rely on This action is also completely wrong. This is the big lie of the so-called perestroika.”
The film “The Barber of Siberia”
Polyakov was dismissive of Dugin’s views, refusing to even talk about the “madman,” telling me that Gorbachev at the time fully believed in the possibility of a “human-faced socialism,” only when he When he started the political reform, he realized that the system needed to change, “but the change was from socialism to social democracy, and to this day, he is still a social democrat, he believes in the Nordic system, and believes that it is the most suitable for our country.
“I think you Chinese will understand that the Soviets had a paternalistic relationship with the regime,” Chirova said. “Back in the early 1980s, I would dare to say that most Soviets hated communism, Because they don’t want to be plagued by shortages anymore, and most of them don’t dream about free speech, personal freedom or anything, and today, when they live more or less free, they think like in the past, Let the country be like a father.” Most Russians, she said, hated Gorbachev simply because he destroyed that “father,” whom she considered one of the greatest figures of the 20th century. One, “because he dared to do it.”
Chirova said that Gorbachev’s reforms finally allowed her to breathe a sigh of relief from the oppressive society. Kagalitsky also felt the same way. When he went to Vietnam to attend an academic conference in 2008, those official scholars were very frank and relaxed. Drinking and chatting with him reminded him of the reforms in the Soviet Union. While criticizing the reforms, Dugin took advantage of the freedoms they brought, and at Golovin’s suggestion he joined a group called Pamyat (Memory), which had been working to rebuild Moscow’s ruined churches and architectural heritage , which later – thanks to the social loosening brought about by Gorbachev’s reforms – evolved into an anti-Semitic far-right group dedicated to the revival of the Orthodox Church and morality. This is perhaps the paradox of all reforms: the release of human nature also releases the demons once repressed by tyranny.
I chatted with Polyakov for more than an hour in the room where Gorbachev met his guests. The room was full of greenery, with paintings from Italian and Japanese painters on the walls, and a love Xinjueluo Qixiang’s word, written is “Fengqiao Night Moor”, Zhang Ji’s famous piece was written after the Anshi Rebellion. Later, I visited his office again and saw the photo of him on the table with his daughter and granddaughter. For two seconds, I almost didn’t recognize the very old, very old man, because the image of Gorbachev in my head still existed. Stop at the photo I saw almost 30 years ago when I got out of the elevator. In fact, he is 86 years old, and many of his contemporaries are dead, Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Yeltsin… I sighed a little when I talked to Polyakov that afternoon, “There are some people who still In, like Bush Sr. and Cole,” he said.
When I left, Polyakov took me down to the second floor, where there is a museum about Gorbachev and reform. It is said that it is a museum, but it is only a few windows in the corridor, with his photos and all over the world. Gifts and certificates, I also saw a small piece of the Berlin Wall. I asked Polyakov if he had considered building a real museum so that the public could better understand the reforms? Money is an issue, he said, adding that a Yeltsin museum is being built in Yekaterinburg, “very, very big.”
It was June 16, 2017, and when I woke up the next morning, I saw the news of the death of former German Chancellor Kohl.
Thirteen
On August 19, 1991, the Soviet Union’s conservatives had their last struggle, placing Gorbachev under house arrest on the Black Sea, taking control of the army, declaring a state of emergency, and driving tanks into the city. Yeltsin, who had won more and more popular support at that time, refused to obey and called on the people to protest. In Moscow, more than 40,000 people took to the streets to defend Yeltsin’s White House (Russian parliament).
In Moscow, Dugin was in contact with conservatives, and he advised them to take major action to quell “the unrest created by Yeltsin’s camp.” “I was very young, but I had my own ideas and was very convinced that I should be involved in the so-called ‘repression’. ‘, but I’ve noticed they’re hesitating.” In St Petersburg, 34-year-old Chirova and thousands of citizens marched to the square in solidarity with the Muscovites defending the White House, amid rumors that tanks were approaching the city , the above has ordered a crackdown. She was pregnant with her young daughter at the time, but she decided to go to the square anyway, “if it is our destiny to die there, we will die together.” In the square, she “has never seen so much intelligence in her life. face and bright eyes”, “I’m so proud, I’m so proud to be there”, more than two decades later, she often tells her younger daughter, yes, you also participated in the revolution of August 1991 .
The movie “Song of the Soldiers”
Conservatives ultimately did not take military action, the coup failed, Gorbachev returned to Moscow, but in fact lost power, and the Soviet Union as a superpower was coming to an end in history. It was another euphoric moment in history, but it also ended quickly, like the emotion of one of Alexievich’s musicians: “Now I often think: Where did all those people go? I Where are the good people I saw on the streets in the 1990s? How are they, have they left?” Throughout the 1990s, Yeltsin led Russia’s rapid march toward capitalism, and the Russians gained unprecedented access to capitalism. freedom has also undergone an unprecedented predatory transformation. From 1990 to 1993, Kagalitsky worked in the Moscow city soviet, an organization they formed to promote democratic reforms, only to discover that their main task had become to oppose privatization. “The public opinion at the time was that the Soviet Union What is left has no value, and who wants to buy those state-owned properties, you have to thank them for taking the initiative to take on these liabilities, as if they were some saviours.” A hotel 5 minutes from the Kremlin sells After paying $1,000, Kagalitsky went to the hotel to investigate. At that time, there was a huge crystal chandelier in the lobby of the hotel. He asked an antique dealer who went with him: If we sell this lamp to you, would you like to? How much? The businessman said, I’m willing to pay $1,200. “Look, that’s how privatization works.”
In 1993, Yeltsin disbanded the Supreme Soviet, and Kagalitsky went to academia. Because of his international reputation, he was occasionally invited to give lectures at universities in North America. At that time, the topic of Russia was still fashionable in the international academic circle. He used U.S. dollars to subsidize his meager income in China. At that time, domestic institutions also knew that the ruble could not support scholars at all, and turned a blind eye to their short-term teaching abroad. “As long as you go back to China.” Kagalitz One of the most famous books, Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System, started in the 1990s, and he wrote it very fast, but it took him 12 years just finished.
Dugin told me that his worldview underwent “the only fundamental change” in the three days of the “August 19 Incident.” “I was anti-Soviet before, but after that August, I found that I was more supportive of the Soviet Union than the liberals. I was never a communist in my life, and I became one when communism ended. A nationalist communist. …”
If the late Soviet Union was a bit of a schoolyard, in the 1990s, Russians were kicked out of school overnight, and they were forced to grow up horribly, overnight. “In those days, experience was playing a very cruel joke on people,” said one interviewee in The Auction of the Century. “The experience of life contradicted everything that happened at the time. As a result, many People were very passive at the time. Just as they had been at work, they continued to do it. It wasn’t until 1994 that they suddenly realized they had lost everything.”
The movie “Mirror”
“Most people who grew up in the Soviet system were probably afraid of competition, but in any system there is a group of people who are a little wild, a little morbid, and happy to compete in every field.” Chirova is one such person. She changed jobs several times, and ended up working as a deputy general manager at a furniture factory, in charge of maintaining relationships with clients, working until home at 2 am every day for three years, earning 400 times as much as her historian husband. In the 1990s, like Northeast China, there were also a large number of “bad guys” in Turkey, who reselling domestically produced cheap goods to Russia. In late December 1996, Chirova was in one of those small cargo ships that traveled through the Black Sea, carrying some passengers along with the cargo. She had just finished her vacation in Istanbul and was about to go to Sin in the Crimea. Filopol rendezvoused with her husband, who was there to conduct Tatar fieldwork.
In the middle of the night, someone knocked her awake, and the boat caught fire. She went to the captain and was told that there were two lifeboats on board, both of which were on fire, and a distress signal had been sent. The Turkish side said that you are no longer in our waters, and we can’t control it; the Ukrainian side said that if their helicopters have fuel ( Of course not), they can go and save them. It was cold winter and the water temperature was very low. The captain said that if one jumped into the sea to survive, a person could live up to 40 minutes in such water.
Chirova climbed the stairs to the deck and saw the most unforgettable scene in her life, “The sea and the sky were pitch black, the fire on the deck shot straight into the sky, and the crew were all topless, all holding fish in their hands. Fork, it can only pick and drop the cargo that is already on fire… According to my understanding after the fact, that is the incarnation of hell, whether it is depicted in the Bible or elsewhere, it is definitely what hell looks like.”
She went back to her room and started a conversation with God. She was not a believer and rarely went to church, but she began to explain her situation to God: she had always wanted to be a writer, she had no freedom, then she had no money, and then she had both money and freedom, she But there was no time… She spoke for a long, long time, and then the fire on the ship was put out. When they landed in Simferopol, Chirova told herself, Enough, I’m not going to do business anymore, let’s start writing. She wrote very diligently and still does to this day.
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