By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Meeting Gorbachev, a documentary on the life of the Soviet Union’s final leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, will be shown at Landmark’s Ken Cinema at 4061 Adams Avenue beginning on May 24th.
The 90-minute tribute by Werner Herzog and Andre Singer is both informative and a bit disappointing. Informative because the film effectively brought back the era when the world witnessed the end of the Cold War, and ushered the Russian words “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (reforms) into the global vocabulary. On the other hand, it was disappointing for those of us specifically interested in Jewish history, because it omitted any mention of the important role that Gorbachev played in ending restrictions on Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union.
Werner Herzog, who conducted the interviews, at one point tells Gorbachev that he loves him because the Soviet leader did not stand in the way of the reunification of East Germany and West Germany. That “love” unfortunately translated itself into questions that were more fawning than probing.
Nevertheless, a portrait of Gorbachev, the eighth and final general secretary of the Soviet Union, emerges. Raised on a rural communal farm, he rose in the Communist party as a specialist in agriculture. One of his predecessors as head of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, was a mentor, urging Gorbachev to expand his area of expertise to economics and foreign affairs. That Gorbachev did, and after Brezhnev died, and two aged successors (Andropov and Chernenko) also died after brief terms, Gorbachev came to power in 1985. He inherited a Soviet Union that was in deep financial straits because of corruption, inefficiency, spoilage, and pilferage. He announced a policy of “perestroika” to bring about a complete restructuring of Soviet society.
He wanted the Soviet Union to become more democratic and also to have a market economy. However, he told Herzog, he also wanted socialism.
George P. Schultz was U.S. Secretary of State when Gorbachev assumed power, and almost immediately sensed that this was a different type of Soviet leader, open to change, weary of confrontation. After the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in northern Ukraine exploded, Gorbachev took it as “a lesson, a big lesson … and one that we can’t forget.” There were too many nuclear weapons in the world, he decided. He let it be known that he would like to seriously negotiate a reduction in nuclear arms.
The United States took him up on his offer, and Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan held a summit at a private home in Reykjavik, Iceland. While the two leaders did not have a signing ceremony, they did develop rapport. Gorbachev considered it a “breakthrough,” enabling both countries “to look beyond the horizon.” It was how the world started to get rid of nuclear weapons, he told the interviewer. “We managed to destroy a lot of these weapons” that could have caused “the death of civilization.”
The documentary includes brief interviews with Schultz, and a later U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, as well as with former Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain and Miklos Nemeth of Hungary, and former Polish President Lech Walesa. However, the most extensive interview was with Horst Teltschik, who served as the national security adviser to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Teltschik voiced the view that Gorbachev is “revered in Germany” because he withdrew troops and tanks from East Germany, permitting reunification to go forward. It was an era when other Soviet satellites also were striving for their independence from the Soviet Union. Hungary removed the barbed wire fence separating it from Austria. Other Eastern European countries asserted their independent decision-making, including Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
The Old Guard in the Soviet Union was dismayed by the avalanche marking the decrease of Soviet influence in the world. While Gorbachev and his wife Raisa were vacationing in the Crimea, they staged a coup d’etat, lying to the people that a change in government was required because Gorbachev had been taken sick. The Soviet people did not believe it; they demonstrated in the streets, bringing the military to their side. Boris Yeltsin, as President of Russia, had himself pictured standing on a tank. At the height of his popularity, Yeltsin had the Russian parliament abolish the Communist party – a move that Gorbachev described as “lighting a bonfire for a smoke, instead of a match.” Everything, he noted sadly, burned down.
In 1991, the heads of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union during a meeting to which Gorbachev, who had meanwhile returned to Moscow, was not invited. Soon Kazakhstan followed, and then the rest of the Soviet Republics did likewise. Gorbachev thereafter resigned as President of the Soviet Union, having established that office during his reign as Community Party general secretary.
The emotional side of Gorbachev was shown when Herzog asked him about his late wife Raisa. Gorbachev related that when he was a student, two friends of his interrupted his study to introduce him to a girl. He was impressed. They walked side by side, held hands, and two years later they were married. “When she died, my life was taken away from me,” Gorbachev said.
Asked what he thought his legacy would be, Gorbachev said he believed that his policy of perestroika led to the end of the Cold War; that talks with Reagan started a process to world disarmament; and that he made progress toward establishing democracy in the Soviet Union.” However, he noted, “we didn’t get to finish the job.” There were forces that didn’t want it.
Asked what he would like written on his tombstone, Gorbachev, today 88 years old, said he wasn’t certain yet about his own, but liked what a friend had written on his:
“We tried!”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com