Vol. 13 No. 5 · 7 March 1991
pages 3-6 | 4150 words
What happened to Gorbachev
John Lloyd
- Gorbachev: The Making of the Man who shook the World by Gail Sheehy
Heinemann, 468 pp, £16.99, December 1990, ISBN 0 434 69518 1
- Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson
Macdonald, 430 pp, £14.95, December 1990, ISBN 0 356 19760 3
- The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union edited by Graham Smith
Longman, 389 pp, £22.50, January 1991, ISBN 0 582 03953 3
This is written in Moscow as the Soviet Union trembles on the brink of its next period of trembling on the brink. Brink-trembling has been the Soviet leadership’s main stance over the issues on which its subjects judge it – supply, production, civil peace. It is commonly assumed that it cannot go on for ever, that the brink will finally collapse from the effect of all that trembling. But there is no good reason why it should not go on for some time yet.
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Letters
Vol. 13 No. 8 · 25 April 1991
From Frederick Gabrielsen
John Lloyd (LRB, 7 March) makes it sound as if President Gorbachev is following Lenin’s approach in the explosive nationalities question. He also makes it sound as if Lenin had next to nothing to offer aspiring non-Russian nations in the ‘Tsarist prison-house of nations’. But Lenin, who till his last breath condemned ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ – presumably in part because it was so prevalent in his sacred Bolshevik party – tirelessly stressed the cultural uniqueness of non-Russian ethnic groups. In and before 1917 he called for full political independence for minority republics and made it clear to dogmatic party comrades that their stance would not alter even if the most reactionary local nationalists took power. Finland was the first Tsarist province to take advantage of this policy, gaining unconditional acceptance of its independence from Lenin’s Council of People’s Commissars in late December 1917. Lenin was even persuaded, with extreme reluctance, to shake hands with Finland’s ‘bourgeois’ nationalist leader, Svin-hufvud, who came to Petrograd in person to get the right papers signed and sat waiting in the cold Smolny corridors. In 1920, following the failure of successive Red Army invasions and local Bolshevik subversion, Lenin accepted the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, extending diplomatic recognition to these Baltic states well ahead of Great Britain and the United States. Turning unwelcome necessity into virtue, Lenin hailed the emergence of independent Estonia as a ‘window on Western Europe’. It would be a good thing if Gorbachev would return to the ‘original Leninist principles’ on the nationalities issue.
Frederick Gabrielsen
Livingston, New Jersey
