There was a crowd round the iron stove at the end of the corridor. A dozen passengers pressed about the young uniformed conductress who normally gave out glasses of tea. But they were not there for the stove or the tea. Her radio was on, full blast, and they were listening to a voice.<\/p>\n
It was saying, loudly and confidently: \u2018Kto za?\u2019 (Who\u2019s in favour?) Then it counted and read out a number. Then it asked: \u2018Kto protiv?\u2019 (Who\u2019s against?) And again a number. And then: \u2018The motion is passed\u2019 or \u2018The motion is rejected.\u2019 The Congress of People\u2019s Deputies, the new parliament of the Soviet Union, was in session and we were hearing its elected members voting freely, unpredictably, without fear. The voice \u2013 strong, lively \u2013 belonged to the man in the chair, Mikhail Gorbachev.<\/p>\n
I remember leaning back against the window, my heart suddenly too big for my chest. So it was real. So this democracy was actually taking place, at the core of the empire, and a whole planet \u2013 rusted to its axis for generations \u2013 was beginning to rotate again.<\/p>\n
Anything could happen now. But what actually happened was that the stove burst, flooding the corridor with boiling water and smoking cinders. As the attendant kneeled to dab at the floor with a towel, an older train-woman in a gaudier uniform stamped in and screamed abuse at her until she began to cry. One Russian tradition \u2013 keeping order by humiliation \u2013 was still in place here.<\/p>\n
Gorbachev grew up and was formed among those traditions, in their Soviet mutation. He came to detest them, the dialectic of bullying and toadying, the rule that an opponent must be left not just defeated but destroyed, abject and whining for forgiveness. He detested those habits, and yet they were the style, the instinct, of the party he never quite ceased to love, and sometimes he found himself using those habits himself. More often, he restrained himself, leaving enemies injured but not terminated. Those enemies, when they got over their astonishment, never forgave him for showing such \u2018weakness\u2019. Neither did his friends.<\/p>\n
It took William Taubman almost twenty years to complete his wonderful Khrushchev: The Man and His Era<\/em>. This Gorbachev biography took a mere 11. And yet it is in some ways an even more heavyweight product. The research is vast; the tracking down of published and unpublished sources is tireless. The willingness of sometimes reluctant individuals to talk \u2013 family, old staffers, half-forgotten comrades from the early days \u2013 represents many triumphs of tact and patience. Much of this success, as Taubman takes care to point out, comes from the decision of Anatoly Chernyaev \u2013 one of Gorbachev\u2019s most loyal and yet most critical aides, whose diary often shows Boswellian sharpness about his boss \u2013 to put all his influence and contacts behind the biography project. So much so that I would expect neo-Stalinists in Russia today to dismiss the whole book as \u2018Chernyaev\u2019s slant\u2019 on the perestroika years. There may be something in that. But then, as slants go, it would be hard to imagine a more vivid and intelligent one.<\/p>\n And the big man himself helped. \u2018Gorbachev is hard to understand,\u2019 he said to Taubman at the outset. Two reflections can follow those words. One is about the problem of doing a \u2018definitive\u2019 biography of a man still alive. But admitting, as Taubman repeatedly does, that some Gorbachev decisions remain too \u2018hard to understand\u2019 lets a biographer off any final \u2013 impudent \u2013 verdict on a whole life. The other reflection is that the man joins a worrying category: public figures who talk about themselves in the third person. (I grew anxious about one of my own heroes when he started saying: \u2018Jimmy Reid would never agree to this or that.\u2019 And why is it men, almost never women, who do this?) Gorbachev has \u2013 or had then \u2013 a hot affection for the public image that walked at the head of his procession.<\/p>\n Not many people change the world. Fewer still are thanked for it. Adolf Hitler changed the world on 22 June 1941: by invading the Soviet Union, he delivered \u2018Hitler\u2019s Europe\u2019, the divided continent we lived in until 1989. We were not grateful for that. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev changed the world, as so many adoring millions saw it at the time, by ending the threat of their extermination by nuclear war and by allowing Europe\u2019s \u2018captive nations\u2019 to liberate themselves. But then, a Samson already blinded by his enemies, he brought down the gigantic temple of the Soviet Union on his own head, and his own power perished with it.<\/p>\n He was born in 1931 in the village of Privolnoe, not far from Stavropol in the far south of Russia. His parents were peasants. He worked hard in the fields as a barefoot teenager and drove a combine harvester with his father, Sergei, winning a Red Banner of Labour award and developing the heavy muscles which his future wife, Raisa, would admire. These were origins shared by a striking number of Soviet leaders in his generation: village boys who knew about hunger and poverty and how their parents forgot them with vodka. Unlike the old Bolshevik elite, many of whom had been urban intellectuals, they were \u2018Stalin\u2019s children\u2019 in the sense that Soviet education rescued them from ignorance (Gorbachev\u2019s mother was illiterate), taught them loyalty to the \u2018building of socialism\u2019 and offered them careers.<\/p>\n The family was lucky, as luck went in those times. Two uncles and an aunt died in the famines around the time of his birth. Both his grandfathers were arrested and sent to the Gulag during the purges of the late 1930s, but both were eventually released. The Germans occupied the village, but retreated again after only a few months. When the next famine came, his mother packed Sergei\u2019s suit and two pairs of boots and walked to the Kuban region, where she traded them for a sack of corn. Against the odds, his beloved father returned wounded but alive from the front, muttering to his son: \u2018We fought until we ran out of fight. That\u2019s how you must live.\u2019<\/p>\n Mikhail Sergeyevich went to school at 14, a clever boy who soon showed a talent for acting and a bossy taste for leadership. He discovered books and let Pushkin, Belinsky, Gogol and above all Lermontov blow his adolescent mind, while winning approval in the Komsomol youth movement. A girlfriend remembered that \u2018he was too energetic, too serious, so organised\u2019. The Red Banner award contributed to his ascent, and so did the fact that, as combine drivers, he and his father were classed as \u2018workers\u2019 at the local machine tractor station. Aged 19 and already a candidate member of the Communist Party, he was accepted into Moscow University and \u2013 coming from a village with no electricity, radio or telephone \u2013 encountered a great city for the first time.<\/p>\n He also encountered young people as talkative and politically excitable as he was. Two of them, both fellow students, changed his life. Zden\u0115k Mlyn\u00e1\u0159, then a fiercely dedicated young Stalinist who was increasingly shocked by the hypocritical realities of Soviet life, came from Czechoslovakia. The other person was Raisa Maksimovna Titarenko. A philosophy student one year ahead of Gorbachev, Raisa also came from a poor, scarred background: a kulak grandfather who vanished into the Gulag, a childhood spent in boxcars and temporary shacks as the family moved back and forth across the Soviet Union with her father, a railway worker.<\/p>\n There was a long, fearfully earnest courtship. Raisa was \u2018a prestige object\u2019, as Mlyn\u00e1\u0159 put it: \u2018each word was a labour to which she had to give perfect birth.\u2019 She was always held to be the firmer character of the pair, insistent on giving her opinion on everything with pedantic accuracy (Nancy Reagan, thirty years later, couldn\u2019t stand being constantly corrected by her). Taubman makes clear that the combination of her outspokenness and her unshakeable loyalty held her husband together through terrible times, when without her he might have surrendered to his enemies. In return, Gorbachev became \u2013 it\u2019s the right word, in that Russia \u2013 notorious for treating his wife well. It made his in-laws wonder if he might be a Jew.<\/p>\n They finally married in September 1953. Stalin had died in March, and already there was hope of a more open future. People began to talk. Mlyn\u00e1\u0159 heard the apparently dumb students around him suddenly relating their memories of purges, famines, the mass murder of the kulaks. Gorbachev, whose essay entitled \u2018Stalin Is Our Wartime Glory, Stalin Gives Flight to Our Youth\u2019 had been held up as a model by the university, went to see the dictator\u2019s embalmed corpse. \u2018I searched his face for any sign of greatness but something disturbed me, evoking mixed feelings.\u2019<\/p>\n After university, he returned to Stavropol and, as a full party member, began to make a career in the local Komsomol. Stavropol\u2019s apparatchiks resented his college education, and were suspicious of Raisa\u2019s intellect (she eventually found work in the philosophy department of the Stavropol Agricultural Institute). Here, for nearly twenty years, Gorbachev became both spectator and actor in the slow pantomime of Soviet provincial life: the corruption, the envious intrigues, the helpless squalor of villages, the tribal feasts of food and vodka that local bosses were expected to lay on.<\/p>\n In 1956, Khrushchev launched serious \u2018de-Stalinisation\u2019 with his famous denunciation of Stalin\u2019s crimes at the 20th Party Congress. The speech electrified the outside world, but went down badly in places like Stavropol. The local party accepted the new line, as they had to, but were unable to understand it. A district secretary told Gorbachev: \u2018I\u2019ll be frank with you \u2026 the people just refuse to accept the condemnation of the personality cult.\u2019 Many peasants were dismayed by the condemnation of the rural Terror; for them, the purge had \u2018liquidated\u2019 the hated collective farm bosses who had seized their land in the first place. When men came to remove the statue of Stalin in Stavropol, a crowd tried to stop them.<\/p>\n By now, Gorbachev was committed to \u2018reform\u2019, setting up independent discussion groups in the region. His main task, he thought as he slowly rose through the party apparatus, was to find new local leaders who could at least make the existing system work. Fyodor Kulakov, Stavropol\u2019s first secretary, made an unsuccessful pass at Raisa, but he appreciated her husband\u2019s energy and steadily promoted Gorbachev.<\/p>\n In 1964, Khrushchev was deposed and de-Stalinisation went into reverse. But daring things were being plotted in Czechoslovakia, and in 1967 their old friend Mlyn\u00e1\u0159 came to stay with the Gorbachevs in Stavropol. Mlyn\u00e1\u0159 had by now become a bold advocate of what, under Alexander Dub\u010dek, would be named \u2018socialism with a human face\u2019. He had been in Moscow pleading for understanding of the coming changes, and Gorbachev listened, fascinated, to the plans for democratisation. But he said to Mlyn\u00e1\u0159: \u2018In your country all that might be possible, but in our country it simply could not be done.\u2019 As Taubman comments, this was \u2018a view that he would later change\u2019. But when Leonid Brezhnev ordered the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Gorbachev chaired a meeting that \u2018fully and entirely approve[d] the decisive and timely measures\u2019. Earlier, he had signed party appeals for the Soviet Union to \u2018come to the defence of socialism in Czechoslovakia\u2019. He felt uneasy about this. But if he had rebelled at this point, his ability to work for change and reform would have ended: the classic moral dilemma in a decaying totalitarian state. He kept his radical views private, and in 1970 was made first secretary in Stavropol and then an ex officio member of the Central Committee.<\/p>\n In the stagnant Brezhnev years, those views developed further. He had supposed that the \u2018weakness of the cadres\u2019 was the Soviet problem: the backwardness and incompetence of party and state bureaucracy. Now he began to see that the fault was far larger: the root of evil was the maniacal centralisation of every decision down to the smallest detail \u2013 precisely what democratisation and market reforms in the economy had tried to correct during the Prague Spring. More than a year after the invasion, Gorbachev went to Czechoslovakia as part of a delegation. He was not allowed to meet Mlyn\u00e1\u0159, now in disgrace, but he saw the open hatred in workers\u2019 faces when they recognised Soviet visitors.<\/p>\n He still kept his feelings to himself. In charge of his region, he repeated obsequious praises of Brezhnev, allowed the repression of a local writer who had published views much like his own and acquired medals for his work on \u2018the Great Stavropol Canal\u2019. Privately, he was reading books of heretical Marxism: the works of Roger Garaudy and Gramsci, among others. In public he was \u2018mouthing the party line while inwardly recoiling from much of it\u2019.<\/p>\n The decisive turn in his career came in the late 1970s, when he became the prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Yuri Andropov, the elderly head of the KGB. Andropov was well aware that the Soviet system was seizing up: he and Gorbachev could agree on that. But he suffered from a \u2018Hungarian complex\u2019: the conviction that reform from below would inevitably burst out of control, as \u2013 in his view \u2013 it had done in Czechoslovakia. Asked about human rights, as defined in the Helsinki Accords which he had somehow persuaded Brezhnev to sign, Andropov remarked that \u2018in 15 to 20 years, we will be able to allow ourselves what the West allows itself now, freedom of opinion and information, diversity in society and in art. But only in 15 to 20 years, after we\u2019re able to raise the population\u2019s living standards.\u2019<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Every so often<\/span> Taubman\u2019s book halts, and unleashes a jostling, barking pack of questions. Most have real bite. Why did Gorbachev do this, why didn\u2019t he do that, when a different decision might have avoided a defeat or hastened progress? But the question raised by Andropov is one of the biggest, and now overshadows all reflections on Gorbachev\u2019s six years in power. Deng Xiaoping in China was to share broadly the same priorities as Andropov: let us first build an economy that works, enriching both state and people \u2013 and only then turn towards political transformation (some day, if we feel it\u2019s safe). So why did Gorbachev do the opposite after he reached the leadership in 1985? No perestroika without glasnost: he was convinced that free, uncensored discussion was the precondition for breaking down massive resistance to economic reform, not the outcome. And China was not Russia: the Chinese Communist Party could call on traditions of obedience and discipline that were already disintegrating in the USSR after Stalin.<\/p>\n Three funerals later, an anxious and geriatric Politburo chose Gorbachev as first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Brezhnev had died in 1982, Andropov in 1984 and Konstantin Chernenko in 1985. Russians were at first delighted with the new man: he was only in his fifties, he sparkled with energy and humour, he dived cheerfully into crowds. Raisa and he had already begun to travel: first to Italy and then to London, where he and Margaret Thatcher had famously hit it off (\u2018We can do business together\u2019). But in Moscow he began his changes only slowly, uncertainly.<\/p>\n Another rush of Taubman questions: why didn\u2019t he launch a crash programme for consumer goods, why didn\u2019t he go straight into economic reform, why didn\u2019t he privatise agriculture? Instead, he went back to reading Lenin to discover where the Soviet system had gone wrong (revisionist communists all over Europe were doing the same), and decreed an anti-alcohol campaign that ended in painful failure. His grand plan for \u2018accelerating\u2019 industry, rather than introducing market forces, slowly fizzled out in a welter of shortages and official lies. Gorbachev hurled himself about the land, urging managers to adjust their minds to new thoughts. \u2018Can\u2019t you see that socialism itself is in danger?\u2019<\/p>\n Then, on 26 April 1986, the number four reactor at Chernobyl exploded. An eruption of lies and evasions followed the poison cloud spreading over Europe, \u2018rampant incompetence, cover-ups at all levels, and self-destructive secrecy at the top\u2019. Gorbachev said nothing for weeks until his outburst to the Politburo: the industry was \u2018dominated by servility, bootlicking, cliquishness and persecution of those who think differently\u2019. Chernobyl had \u2018really opened my eyes\u2019, he said later. From now on, no scheme for transforming Soviet reality was too revolutionary or wild for him to discuss with his growing team of supporters.<\/p>\n But talk was not the same as deed. \u2018Exceptionally daring in words and how he evaluates the situation, but cautious in action\u2019, Chernyaev noted. Later that year, his adviser Aleksandr Yakovlev wrote an astonishing memorandum proposing that the party abandon its sacred \u2018leading role\u2019 and divide into two competing movements: \u2018socialist\u2019 and \u2018national-democratic\u2019. Yakovlev also suggested workers\u2019 control in industry and a genuinely independent judiciary. Stalin would have had him shot for it. Now Gorbachev merely commented: \u2018Too early, too soon.\u2019<\/p>\n Talks with the Americans about disarmament began within months of his accession. Geneva, where Reagan and he achieved little but discovered that they liked working together, was the first of the summits. The series ran on through Reykjavik (the total renunciation of nuclear weapons missed by a hair\u2019s breadth), Washington, Moscow, New York and finally Moscow again in July 1991, where the Start Treaty reducing strategic nuclear weapons was signed by George H.W. Bush \u2013 only weeks before the putsch which effectively brought Gorbachev down. Taubman details every move, and reveals the intricate weaving of preparations between these summits. Occasionally he overdoes it. His account of the Washington meeting in December 1987, for instance, runs into pages of guest lists, of suits, dresses and jewellery worn at each function.<\/p>\n But as usual Taubman asks good questions. The domestic reason Gorbachev went into this mutual disarmament process is clear: he wanted to shift resources from the military into the civilian sector. At the outset, in 1986, he told Soviet diplomats that the Americans were attempting to block that shift, by forcing the USSR to keep up its level of defence spending. But why, then, did Reagan and Bush negotiate for arms reduction? Taubman\u2019s answer is that American motives were mixed. While Reagan and to a lesser extent Bush were genuine in their interest in disarmament, and \u2013 as time passed \u2013 were concerned to help Gorbachev stay in power, hawks in Washington still hoped to see the USSR bankrupted by military costs and argued that success for Gorbachev\u2019s policies would give Soviet communism a new lease of life. The hawks lost that argument, but they seem to be the victors in the subsequent mythology. Most Americans, apparently, now believe that the Soviet Union collapsed because it couldn\u2019t keep up with the cost of Western war technology: a nonsense Taubman\u2019s book should help to dispel.<\/p>\n For his part, Gorbachev was accused by hardliners at home of conceding far too much to the Americans, selling out the very security of the Soviet Union. By early 1987, he was fighting for reform every inch of the way against entrenched \u2018conservatives\u2019 on one flank and impatient radicals on the other. Many \u2018leading comrades\u2019 in the Politburo and the Central Committee backed his proposals in public, as party discipline required, but \u2018sabotaged him in silence\u2019. Boris Yeltsin, brought from his Siberian fiefdom into the Central Committee, began his long, wild series of attacks on Gorbachev.<\/p>\n Taubman\u2019s account of these spectacular public quarrels is at once fascinating and shocking. Yeltsin several times disrupted Central Committee sessions, complaining that reform was moving too slowly and that perestroika had done nothing for the Russian people; he accused Gorbachev of nursing his own \u2018cult of personality\u2019. In return, Gorbachev twice released the \u2018loyal delegates\u2019 to behave in the sinister way that was still their gut instinct: obediently taking turns to pile murderous abuse on Yeltsin for disloyalty to the party line. They reverted to a pack of Stalinist hyenas, while Yeltsin reverted to an abject Stalinist victim confessing his sins and begging for forgiveness. And Gorbachev? He certainly didn\u2019t want to revert to anything. He ignored those who assumed that Yeltsin would be sent into exile, and he sought repeatedly to rebuild some relationship between them. And yet the way he handled this and other challenges shows that, in the end, he remained a party man. He could contemplate transforming the Communist Party, abolishing its \u2018leading role\u2019, opening it to inner democracy and even to multi-party competition. But mentally he never quite emerged from the party box, as Yeltsin eventually did.<\/p>\n Fatally, Gorbachev never realised, or admitted to himself, that the party couldn\u2019t be his instrument to carry through change. By the 1980s, it was simply too late. The gigantic structure had become so rotten and demoralised that attempts to infuse it with democracy only hastened its death. And Gorbachev could find no other instrument. As Taubman puts it, \u2018by gutting the party\u2019s ability to run the country, he was undermining his own power.\u2019<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Taubman\u2019s account<\/span> of Gorbachev\u2019s career reveals another truth, one which a European must find difficult to digest. Mikhail Sergeyevich (\u2018Gorby! Gorby!\u2019) is thought of as the liberator of the \u2018captive nations\u2019 in the \u2018socialist camp\u2019. That\u2019s true, but mostly in a negative way. In reality, Gorbachev didn\u2019t much care what happened to the Warsaw Pact nations, as long as events there didn\u2019t get in his way in Washington and Moscow. Arguing with Mrs Thatcher, swapping ideas with Andrei Sakharov or with heretical Italian communists \u2013 that was fun. Remaining patient with stupid old dinosaurs like Erich Honecker or evil goblins like Ceau\u0219escu was a penance. Gorbachev seems to have regarded the \u2018fraternal ruling parties\u2019 as, on balance, a liability holding the Soviet Union back on its progress towards modernisation.<\/p>\n The so-called Brezhnev Doctrine \u2013 that all socialist countries must intervene when \u2018socialism\u2019 in one of them is in peril \u2013 had effectively been shelved long before Gorbachev became Soviet leader. The Politburo minutes for 1980-81 show that in late 1981, at the height of the Solidarity crisis in Poland, the Soviet Union told General Jaruzelski that Soviet troops would on no account be sent into the country, and that if Jaruzelski\u2019s planned imposition of martial law went wrong, he would not be rescued. (So much, incidentally, for Jaruzelski\u2019s defence that he declared martial law only to avert a Soviet intervention.)<\/p>\n Ordinary people in East-Central Europe watched perestroika and glasnost with rising excitement. So did many younger activists in their ruling communist parties. All the more striking, then, that Gorbachev never seriously tried to persuade their leaders to imitate his Soviet experiments. While crowds outside chanted his name, he merely told their rulers: \u2018It\u2019s your business.\u2019 Taubman tries to guess what was in his mind then: \u2018Even if, as is likely, he neither foresaw nor wished the collapse of East European communism, what he was counting on to avoid it was utopian \u2013 the triumph of perestroika in Eastern Europe without his intervening directly to promote that outcome.\u2019<\/p>\n In his great speech to the UN General Assembly in December 1988, Gorbachev announced enormous unilateral cuts to Soviet conventional forces in Europe, and said that a society\u2019s \u2018freedom of choice\u2019 should be respected without exceptions. The frightful suspicion that Soviet power might no longer stand between them and their angry populations began to seep into the skulls of the smarter East European leaders: others, as in East Germany, still dismissed that as unthinkable. Dissidents and ordinary people calculated that there was now a fair chance \u2013 no better than that, yet \u2013 that Soviet tanks would not invade if they took matters into their own hands. The outcome was the multiple liberations of 1989.<\/p>\n Gorbachev clearly hoped that the overthrow of Communism would be followed by some form of democratic socialism. But when that looked increasingly unlikely, he didn\u2019t panic. He simply didn\u2019t care enough about that part of the world. One of his finest legacies was that he precisely didn\u2019t bring about revolutions in East-Central Europe. By standing aside, he allowed a generation of Poles and Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians and Germans to create the nourishing myth that their freedom had been won by their own courage on the street. When they woke Gorbachev one November morning to tell him that East Germany had opened the Wall, he merely said: \u2018They did the right thing.\u2019<\/p>\n He was preoccupied with struggles nearer home. The Soviet Union itself was cracking up. Ukrainians were talking about independence; the Baltics \u2013 especially Lithuania \u2013 were openly defying central control; special forces had murdered twenty Georgian demonstrators in Tbilisi in April 1989. Most ominous of all, the Russian Republic \u2013 egged on by Boris Yeltsin \u2013 demanded and won its own Communist Party in June 1990. The media used their freedom under glasnost to attack Gorbachev on both fronts: either for throwing away all that had been won by the sacrifices of the Soviet people, or for hesitating to smash down the bastions of the Soviet system itself. For a silent but increasingly hate-filled majority in the party\u2019s guiding bodies, the familiar world was ending. For the Russian people, especially, chaos and shortages were becoming reasons to turn against Gorbachev, whose popularity rapidly shrank in the course of 1990.<\/p>\n Unable to muster reliable backing in the party, he cut back its responsibilities and transferred his own power base to new parliamentary institutions. The Congress of Peoples\u2019 Deputies appointed him president. But the manoeuvre only deepened his political isolation. The 1990 May Day parade degenerated into noisy protests under his nose. Yeltsin\u2019s popularity meanwhile soared. In July he stormed out of the Soviet Communist Party, announcing that from now on he answered only to the Russian people. When Gorbachev backed away from the ambitious \u2018500 Days\u2019 plan for conversion to a market economy, drawn up by his brightest advisers, Yeltsin said that he had missed his \u2018last chance for a civilised transition to a new order\u2019.<\/p>\n He was right about that. There was a smell of burning in the Moscow air, and in December 1990 Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian leader who had become Gorbachev\u2019s foreign minister, suddenly resigned. \u2018A dictatorship is coming. I declare this with total responsibility. No one knows what kind of dictatorship it will be.\u2019 Gorbachev, who had been given no warning of this speech, played it calmly. To the horror of his democratic supporters, he was now deliberately tilting policy and appointments towards the hardline faction in the party. This was part of a \u2018zigzag\u2019 strategy designed to reassure each hostile camp in turn, but nobody was reassured and both sides were further antagonised. He made Gennady Yanayev his vice president and left Vladimir Kriuchkov in charge of the KGB. A few months later, in August 1991, both men took leading parts in the failed putsch against him.<\/p>\n With Gorbachev acting simultaneously on three separate stages \u2013 the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and global peacemaking \u2013 there is a fair amount of \u2018meanwhile\u2019 in this book. Taubman has to break off one narrative to go back and catch up on another, and the order of events can get muddling. In 1990, while establishing the presidency and fending off Yeltsin, Gorbachev was also coping with the enormous new question of Germany\u2019s future. The West, including Chancellor Kohl, assumed that he would oppose German reunification, but he accepted it. Then they thought that he would probably refuse to allow a united Germany to remain in Nato, and would certainly veto the extension of Nato into what had been East Germany. But in May he came to Washington and suddenly agreed with Bush that \u2018united Germany \u2026 would decide on its own which alliance she would be a member of.\u2019 The Americans couldn\u2019t believe what they were hearing. Gorbachev\u2019s own staff were thunderstruck.<\/p>\n Why did Gorbachev not drive a much harder bargain over Germany, when he clearly had the chance? Taubman isn\u2019t the only one to ask that question. The moment was so dramatic and desperate that if Gorbachev had asked for German neutrality as the price for recognising German unity, there was at least a possibility that the West might have agreed. He says now that his own respect for democracy made him leave these decisions to the German people. But Taubman speculates, without providing much evidence, that Gorbachev may have shared old Anglo-French anxieties about a huge German state unrestrained by membership of any pact, which could lean on its neighbours and blackmail the rest of Europe.<\/p>\n Whatever his motives, Gorbachev\u2019s reluctance to put up a fight over Germany had enormous consequences. Some were domestic: in abandoning the Soviet foothold in Germany, won at the price of such bloodshed, was he not betraying all that the Soviet people had gained in the Great Patriotic War? As one of many abusive letters to him put it, \u2018Mr General Secretary: congratulations on receiving the imperialists\u2019 prize for ruining the USSR, selling out Eastern Europe, destroying the Red Army, handing over all our resources to the United States and the mass media to the Zionists.\u2019<\/p>\n The other consequences are still with us. Though Taubman doesn\u2019t put it like this, the West took Gorbachev\u2019s co-operation for weakness. He expected an economic and financial reward for his concessions: it didn\u2019t come. Crucially, in February 1990, James Baker, the US secretary of state, and Chancellor Kohl assured Gorbachev that Nato wouldn\u2019t expand eastwards, certainly not towards the Soviet frontiers. But Gorbachev failed to make them write it down and Bush later told Kohl that he and Baker had gone too far. \u2018To hell with that! We prevailed. They didn\u2019t. We can\u2019t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.\u2019 A few years later, by 2004, all the ex-Warsaw Pact nations, including the Baltic republics and Poland, had been brought into Nato. After their triumphant experience with Gorbachev, Western leaders reckoned that they could get away with it. But the \u2018broken promise\u2019 grievance smoulders under Putin\u2019s European policy to this day. Most Russians, whatever their view of Putin\u2019s autocracy, still look on Nato\u2019s surge up to their borders as the treacherous breach of an international agreement.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n The coup<\/span> took place on 18 August 1991. Gorbachev, Raisa and their family were in their Crimean villa when it was surrounded by armed men. Announcing that the president had been taken ill, the plotters proclaimed that they had taken control of the Soviet Union as a State Committee on Emergency Rule. Taubman\u2019s wonderfully cinematic narrative gives us every detail of what took place and how the Gorbachevs reacted: Mikhail Sergeyevich furious, contemptuous and unyielding, Raisa so appalled that she suffered a minor stroke. Suddenly they were back in Russian history, where anything could happen. How could they be sure that men with guns wouldn\u2019t force their way in and treat them and their children as Nicholas II and his children had been treated 73 years before?<\/p>\n Why did the coup fail? Taubman\u2019s account confirms the incredible bungling of the plotters, who almost from the outset seemed terrified by their own audacity. But they had a chance. I was there, and saw how \u2013 outside Moscow and Leningrad \u2013 ordinary people and local apparatchiks instantly accepted that the perestroika holiday was over: it was back to censorship, silence and the \u2018normal\u2019 post-Stalinist grind. A friend of mine said afterwards: \u2018A handful of good, brave people saved Russia.\u2019 I like to believe that she was right. The plotters\u2019 worst and ultimately suicidal error was failing to arrest Yeltsin. But before he even arrived at the National Parliament building, mounted a tank and famously roared defiance, \u2018good, brave people\u2019 were already barricading the building. A line of women linked hands across the Kalinin Bridge, proposing to stop the tanks of the Taman armoured division. \u2018We are mothers!\u2019<\/p>\n Away in Leningrad, the mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, was doing the same as Yeltsin. But before those two took charge, there was a moment \u2013 perhaps 36 hours \u2013 when the conspiracy controlled the army and murderous \u2018special forces\u2019 and could easily have drowned opposition in blood before it had time to spread. They faltered while the \u2018handful\u2019 became a human sea, then they collapsed. Several plotters flew to Crimea to whine for Gorbachev\u2019s pardon, but Yeltsin\u2019s men were soon on their way in their own plane to free Gorbachev and arrest them.<\/p>\n From the moment of the coup\u2019s failure, Yeltsin and his team were effectively running not only Russia but all that was left of the Soviet Union. It took Gorbachev a long time to realise it. Taubman inserts a startling \u2018why\u2019 here. Why didn\u2019t he drive straight to the National Parliament from the plane bringing him back from Crimea, to greet the ecstatic crowds awaiting him there and restore his authority? The answer seems to be simply that he was worried about Raisa\u2019s health and wanted to take her home. But his time was over anyway. He sacked the plotters and three of them killed themselves for shame. But only two days after his return, Gorbachev was jeered as he addressed the Russian supreme court. And when he claimed that the Soviet cabinet had resisted the coup, Yeltsin thrust in his face a paper showing that almost all of his ministers had gone along with it.<\/p>\n He spent the next months negotiating towards a new \u2018union treaty\u2019, granting the Soviet republics wide autonomy. But Ukraine refused to take part, heading for full independence, and in November Yeltsin suddenly vetoed any Russian participation in the treaty. A few weeks later, he went behind Gorbachev\u2019s back and \u2013 at a secret meeting in a Belorussian forest \u2013 set up the Commonwealth of Independent States with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine. The Soviet Union was over. So was Gorbachev\u2019s power. He made his televised resignation speech in the Kremlin on 25 December 1991. Yeltsin switched off his own screen halfway through, and sent two colonels to take the \u2018nuclear briefcase\u2019 from Gorbachev and bring it to his own office.<\/p>\n Taubman sometimes quotes too many overlapping sources (his Khrushchev<\/em> benefited from the relative scarcity of material), but the final sections, recounting the first decades after Gorbachev\u2019s retirement, are wise and clear. The story of Raisa\u2019s illness and her death from leukaemia in 1999, taken mostly from her husband\u2019s unsparing memoir, reveals her courage and his own combination of warmth and hardiness in the worst moments. After his fall, he set up the Gorbachev Foundation and settled down to comment on world politics and \u2013 increasingly \u2013 to imply harsh verdicts on Yeltsin. Abroad, he was still a hero, almost a saviour. In Russia, he found it hard to accept how unpopular and then irrelevant he had become. \u2018His overconfidence in himself and his cause,\u2019 Taubman writes, \u2018gave him the courage to reach so high that he overreached \u2026 When the results clashed with his idealised self-image as a great statesman, he too often reacted by denying reality.\u2019 In 1996, he ran for president but came in seventh, with 0.5 per cent of the vote.<\/p>\n Not much of his dream is left. A democratic Russia as a partner in a \u2018common European home\u2019 reaching to the Atlantic? According to a friend of his, Gorbachev now grants that it may take a hundred years for democracy to take hold in his country. But he is proud that he was the one who opened the way. The great Russian intellectual Dmitry Furman called him \u2018the only politician in Russian history who, having full power in his hands, voluntarily opted to limit it, and even risk losing it, in the name of principled moral values\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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