Common Attacks of National Communists and Liberals on Gorbachev Bode Ill for Russia’s Future, Tsipko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 5 – Something very dangerous has emerged in Russia in recent years, Aleksandr Tsipko says, a coming together of national communists and liberal Westernizers in a common negative assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev. This “irrational and absurd” development shows that “the present-day Russian nation has lost its instinct for self-preservation.”

            That for Russians as a whole, Gorbachev will never be a hero is perhaps not surprising given their history as a people who have been prepared to live with repression as long as they  can be told that their country is feared by others because of its victories abroad, the senior Russian commentator says (ng.ru/ideas/2020-03-04/7_7809_gorbachev.html).

            But when Russian intellectuals and especially those of a liberal persuasion display the same attitude by attacking those who have tried to bring them freedom, that is or should be very worrying especially when their arguments mirror those of the most dyed in the wool defenders of repression, who are usually viewed as the enemies of the liberal reformers.

            In recent days, as people have marked Gorbachev’s 89^th birthday and the 35^th anniversary of his coming to power in the USSR, both camps have attacked the father of glasnost and perestroika on the much the same grounds, accusing him simultaneously of carrying out the plans of Lenin and Andropov and seeking wealth for himself and his entourage.

            Neither is the case, Tsipko says, and booth reflect an unwillingness to this day “to think about the real causes of our catastrophe. Our president is right when he says that the disintegration of the USSR was a geopolitical catastrophe. But this catastrophe was inevitable because there was no voluntary union of peoples.”

            Behind 1991, he continues, “stand the catastrophe of the peoples of the Caucasus, the Baltics, and Western Ukraine who were united by force to soviet Rusisa and the catastrophe of small people who with the coming to power of the communist plague suffered the loss of a significant part of their national elites.”

            “Why can’t we understand that after the mass shootings of the population carried out by Stalin’s NKVD in Western Ukraine, Ukrainians could not fail to meet the Germans as liberators?” Tsipko asks rhetorically. And he points out that “today, neither patriot-derzhavniki nor liberal Westernizers are interested in the truth about perestroika.”

            Instead, they have offered self-serving but delusional notions about what Gorbachev and his team were about. It is simply not true that they acted simply as Andropov’s agents or believed that they could enrich themselves by destroying the country. They weren’t the former and they didn’t become rich.

            But Russians wouldn’t know that, the commentator continues, if they relied on the arguments of former CPSU Central Committee staffers or liberal Westerners who seem committed to blackening Gorbachev’s reputation above everything else. 

            This raises a bigger question, Tsipko suggests. “What kind of future can Russia have if the instinct of self-preservation has deserted the thinking part of the intelligentsia which supposedly holds dear historical truth and which supposedly is struggling with the Russian traditions of authoritarianism?”

            He says that he is focusing attention on “this absurd unity of red patriots and so-called liberals in the assessment of perestroika as evidence of the serious illness of Russia today. I repeat,” Tsipko argues, “that the underrating of Gorbachev’s perestroika leads to an underrating of those freedoms the Soviet intelligentsia sought for so many decades.”

            Don’t Russians understand what situation Russia is now in? he asks. Perhaps they do not understand” that there are some who want to “transform our country into another North Korea?”  And they seem to forget that in the summer of 1917 no Russian democrat thought his or her country could turn to Bolshevik tyranny.

            “I am not a mystic,” Tsipko says, “but I have the sense that God will punish the Russian intelligentsia for its dismissive attitude toward Gorbachev’s perestroika and toward the benefits of freedom which it brought.”

            Liberal Westernizers can’t assess perestroika accurately because it arose from the CPSU apparatus; the patriot great power people can’t because what Gorbachev did threatened their existence; and it turns out that ordinary people all too often were misled by one or the other and did not value the freedoms they were offered.

            “But if there is in fact no nation as a whole, then there are certainly no chances for the preservation of Russia in the contemporary world. In a country where all, even the intelligentsia are occupied only with unmasking invented conspiracies, anything at all can happen” and that is far from a good thing.

            According to Tsipko, “the tragedy of the Russian intelligentsia as 1917 showed is that it is not able to value those good things which exist” and thinks only about how to overcome the problems its members see all around them, condemning those who they think have not done enough to bring into existence the world they dream of.

            “And many of us today do not think how things could end with the coming to power in Russia of people who bow down to the ideology of the Izborsky Club and who consider that Stalin’s repressions were “’particularly beautiful’ and that Gorbachev is ‘a traitor’ and ‘an agent of the CIA.’”

            The first victims if devotees of the Izborsky Club come to power will be from among the intelligentsia, Tsipko says.  Even now, “we observe that the stronger Russian autocracy becomes, the fewer possibilities are for those who think and the greater for those who reduce everything to the simplest terms.”

            Such simple-minded approaches, Tsipko warns, “with us are most often combined with aggressiveness and with the desire to unmask enemies. But one should not forget that the present new Russian desire, to divert Russia from the rails of European liberalism and rationalism, is a desire for the impossible however seductive it may be.”

            But if such people gain the upper hand, he concludes, “then Russia which has crucified Gorbachev and his perestroika will become the elder sister of North Korea. Do not forget,” he cautions, “that we live in a country where the unthinkable is always possible.”