{"id":53330,"date":"2019-12-06T05:00:10","date_gmt":"2019-12-06T10:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=53330"},"modified":"2022-11-11T20:20:57","modified_gmt":"2022-11-12T01:20:57","slug":"mikhail-gorbachev-and-the-third-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/12\/06\/mikhail-gorbachev-and-the-third-generation\/","title":{"rendered":"Mikhail Gorbachev and the “third generation”"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Rotten Chestnuts<\/em>, Severian<\/a> explains why Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika<\/em> was doomed to fail:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at the Hofdi House in Reykjavik, Iceland during the Reyjavik Summit in 1986.
Official US government photograph via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

Perestroika<\/em>‘s what happens when you turn the reins over to the third generation \u2014 the generation that didn’t come up hard, and thus wasn’t forced to deal with objective reality. For all his faults, and for all the debate over whether Stalin was “really” a Communist (hint: he was), the Boss knew what it takes to hold onto power in a one-party state. He learned his craft in the hardest school \u2014 maneuvering against Lenin and Trotsky, two of the coldest, most ruthless sons-of-bitches ever to draw breath. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, survived both the Great Purge and the Great Patriotic War for the Motherland \u2014 an achievement, as you can imagine, that pretty much no one else of consequence could boast.<\/p>\n

Mikhail Gorbachev, by contrast, was born in 1931. His childhood was affected by the war \u2014 as was every Russian child’s \u2014 but his grandfather was a kolkhoznik<\/em> from way back; Mikhail was wired in to the Party from birth. Stalin died in 1953. Gorbachev was 22 \u2014 in an earlier generation he could’ve been a serious player at that age, but the postwar generation didn’t start rising until their 30s, or more usually their 40s. He was still at university when the Boss kicked the bucket; he didn’t start his official political career until 1955, and wasn’t recognized as a bona-fide comer until the late 1960s.<\/p>\n

What this meant was that Gorbachev grew up in the kinder, gentler Soviet Union \u2014 the one where Khrushchev released a whole bunch of folks from the Gulag and denounced cults of personality. This is not to say that Gorbachev wasn’t a sincere Communist; he was. In fact, that was his problem \u2014 he was too sincere. The earlier generations faced the stark choice between hewing to orthodox Marxism, or hanging on to power. They chose the latter, of course, and that’s why Trotsky had to go \u2014 he kept on claiming to be the only true Marxist of the bunch (which he was, of course, but that’s a story for another day). Gorbachev, though, got to see Communism “working,” and from this he deduced \u2014 not unreasonably for someone who didn’t come up hard \u2014 that Communism’s manifest failures were due to not following Marx and Lenin more exactly. Marx and Lenin talked a great game about “openness” (glasnost<\/em>), “democracy,” and all that “improving the lot of the People” jazz.<\/p>\n

So he did all that, the fool, not realizing that Communism “worked,” such as it did, only through repression. Take your foot off The People’s neck enough to let them breathe, by all means \u2014 that was Comrade Khrushchev’s great insight \u2014 but if you ease off any further, they’ll try to wriggle out … and eventually kill you, their tormentor. Having never seen The People at close range \u2014 as everyone in the previous generations had \u2014 he couldn’t understand this, and so crashed the system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian explains why Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was doomed to fail: Perestroika‘s what happens when you turn the reins over to the third generation \u2014 the generation that didn’t come up hard, and thus wasn’t forced to deal with objective reality. For all his faults, and for all the debate over whether Stalin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,7,1119],"tags":[930,780,1494,1462,433,1165],"class_list":["post-53330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-russia","tag-1980s","tag-communism","tag-mikhailgorbachev","tag-severian","tag-sovietunion","tag-stalin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-dSa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53330"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53332,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53330\/revisions\/53332"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}