Gorbachev in Volgograd

Image by Andre Drechsel from Pixabay

Gorbachev in Volgograd

By Joel Levin

Downtown Volgograd in 1996 had very little in the way of charm. Essentially destroyed in the Battle of Stalingrad a half century earlier, in the post-Stalinist era, an era of some slight optimism in the Soviet Union. The downtown had been rebuilt, but by Stalin, lacking imagination, money, or any real vision. Instead, it witnessed the construction of obligatory building after obligatory building, thrown together in the Soviet style. The buildings were solid looking in an indecorous and heavy-handed way, poorly constructed, with elevators that failed to work within a month from their installation, plumbing that did not last even that long, and facades that looked old and tired the day they were completed. Just outside the downtown were the highly priced, elite apartments, ones designed and built by captured German prisoners of war turned slave laborers. Those flats are mainly occupied by the bureaucratic, military, and KGB elite. They would brag that they lived in the “German apartments”.

The one item in the downtown, the City Centre, that might pass as charming was the modest and sad-looking park across from the desultory brick hotel where I was living. That hotel housed foreigners and dignitaries but was designed to allow crucially placed old women, babushkas, to spy on the residents. This gloomy hotel, the best in Volgograd, consisted of an army-style, single bed, a TV that mainly provided Russian soap operas and military parades, and a bathroom where hot water might run an hour or two a day. It did offer a view of the park. I was observing that park one day, Victory Day in 1996 to be exact, the day of celebration of the Soviet victory over the Germans, when I saw a solitary and slightly bent-over man, not yet old but clearly looking old for his age, not unhappy, but evidently resigned by his expression and gait. He walked alone, pausing to look at the modest plants and shrubs, occasionally looking up and surveying the downtown area. He was unaccompanied, solitary the entire time, with no one moving toward him. In fact, the occasional other visitors to that dejected park took steps to avoid him. The solitary figure was Mikhail Gorbachev.

He was campaigning alone, visiting one of Russia ‘s largest cities, although how large it was remained a state secret. In fact, as there were no telephone directories or any other way of figuring out who lived there. Perhaps 40 miles long and 3 miles wide, Volgograd stretches along the Volga River with an indeterminate population. It had grown up as a provincial trade and customs center, famous for its continuous cholera epidemics and staggering mortality rate. More recently, it has been the manufacturing center for tractors and tanks for the Russian government. Here, Mikhail Gorbachev walked alone.

Gorbachev’s occasion for the visit to Volgograd, as with other visits he was making, was the Russian national election of 1996. That election was only possible because Gorbachev not only, to use Ronald Reagan’s term, “tore down that wall”, and because he did something that is the rarest of rare things: he gave up power. He ceded territory back to the various Soviet Republics, including most notably today Ukraine, to start their own nations; and he ended the autocracy of the Communist Central Committee and gave a democracy to the citizens of Russia they never had. That is, the vote that was occurring and the election that was in full sway were only possible because of the extraordinary vision and courage of Mikhail Gorbachev.

But that is not how the Russian public saw him. They viewed him as the betrayer of their values, as someone who had forfeited part of their country, as a man who had placed them at the mercy of the west, the individual who set them on the road to political decline. Gorbachev was mocked, assaulted, and hated. The month prior, in Omsk, there was an assassination attempt on his life. That attempt was met in the Duma with calls to declare the assassin officially a hero. Later that day, in Volgograd, he was met by an angry crowd, some of whom had signs that said: “No Place for Traitors on the Holy Ground of Stalingrad.” He was jeered and spit on continually during his lonely campaign trail. Ultimately, in a multi-candidate race, he ended up 7th, receiving .5% with of the vote.

At the moment I saw him, he was alone, in contemplation, in the city to later in the day lay a wreath at the sacred place of the Battle of Stalingrad, the battle that turned the tide of World War II, stopped the German invasion, saved the Soviet Union, and spared perhaps millions of Russians from death during the war and subjugation later if the war was lost. The soldiers who fought for Russia in that battle made the site holy ground and, to those of us in the west, Gorbachev was the natural successor to their heroic efforts. Such heroes have been few indeed in 20th century Russia. But alone in that park, without friends or supporters, despised and hated, Gorbachev was an outcast, ignored by some, kept a safe distance by others. One wonders what he was thinking.

Not long after, another rarity occurred in Volgograd. The abysmal local roads, with potholes that would sink a Buick, were suddenly repaved, including the entirety of the long drive between the airport and downtown. The city itself was given something of a cleaning and minor league facelift. The leading candidate for president, the colorful, boisterous, and often intoxicated Boris Yeltsin, was coming to town. On the day of Yeltsin’s speech, sitting at breakfast in my hotel, usually, a solitary affair, the world’s press was suddenly in evidence at every table, crowded in the dining room. They were engaged in the usual complaints of foreign correspondents – how bad the food was, how little there was to do, how boring and repetitive the speeches were, and when will they be posted to someplace better than the campaign trail of a Russian KGB agent turned politician. They never showed up for Gorbachev.

That night Yeltsin, in fact, gave his campaign speech. Unlike the lonely and solitary Gorbachev, there were upwards of 1 million people in attendance, what seemed like the whole of Volgograd. They were stretched along the river, often from distances too far to see the candidate.  As a foreigner, of course, I was given a seat (a place to stand, as there were no seats) in front. I could view the entire show, including the long lead-up where there was the Russian idea of what a political musical introduction to the politician might look like. The strange combination of Russian folk music and Western rock ‘n’ roll resounded, often sung, and danced by the young Russian women who were, in fact, those stars of the soaps the dominated the TV in my dreary Volgograd hotel room. Then, remarkably, Yeltsin came on stage, clearly not sober, boisterous and animated, dancing tightly with the women, obviously making jokes, and engaging in the type of frisky, pawing conduct that would disqualify, I thought then, any politician from office in America.

His speech, full of the dreariness hardly limited to Russian politicians, was made up of personal bragging, predictions of prosperity, empty slogans, and references to the grandeur of the nation. They were just as expected as the foreign correspondents predicted at breakfast. One thing stood out to me, though. At the beginning of his speech, Yeltsin said “The women of Volgograd are the most beautiful women in all of Russia. “I had come to the event with a Russian couple, the man being a colleague from the university. His wife was far more sophisticated and worldly than he was, having lived in Canada and been raised in a well-educated household. She practically swooned when Yeltsin led his speech with that resounding declaration on local beauty. I said to her that he obviously says the same thing in every city he visits. She was shocked and assured me that he would never say such a thing if it were not true and that he obviously meant it. With that level of audience sophistication, the pounding Gorbachev received in the election and his loneliness in traveling throughout the campaign can be explained in a moment.

I, of course, felt extremely superior. In the United States, we could never experience a candidate so ignorant of history in the way Yeltsin was, of a candidate who could fondle women openly and not pay any consequences, of a campaign that centered on nationalism and the glorious past rather than policy reforms and the needs of the future, or where the leading candidate was indifferent to democratic principles and said so openly. We did embrace such a candidate, of course, while Russia’s embrace 25 years ago led to Putin.

Mikhail Gorbachev will stand as one of the giants of modern times. He was a self-effacing man from a modest background with unpresuming pretensions who, through a series of events, not excluding being the right person at the right time, found himself in a position to do what every leader should want to accomplish: make the world a far safer place when they leave office than when they took it. Abandoned in his own country, forgotten in ours and often ignored when credit is given for the fall of the Soviet Union – reserved for the conservative trinity of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II – he was the individual who made the tough decisions, who ceded power, who looked to improve the world. He deserves our praise. He ended the Cold War, gave his country political democracy, engaged in wide-ranging economic reforms to raise the decrepit communist economy into a more prosperous new post-Cold War era, encouraged the reunification of Germany, and made nuclear war and the kind of land war we now see in Ukraine immensely less likely.

Today, with his death, we might remember the final words of King Lear: “The weight of this sad time we must obey; speak what we feel, not what we ought to say; the oldest hath borne most: we that are were young, shall never see so much, nor live so long.”