Conversations with Gorbachev

On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism

Mikhail Gorbachev, Zdenek Mlynar, George Shriver

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780231118651
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231529273
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynar were friends for half a century, since they first crossed paths as students in 1950. Although one was a Russian and the other a Czech, they were both ardent supporters of communism and socialism. One took part in laying the groundwork for and carrying out the Prague spring; the other opened a new political era in Soviet world politics.

In 1993 they decided that their conversations might be of interest to others and so they began to tape-record them. This book is the product of that “thinking out loud” process. It is an absorbing record of two friends trying to explain to one another their views on the problems and events that determined their destinies. From reminiscences of their starry-eyed university days to reflections on the use of force to “save socialism” to contemplation of the end of the cold war, here is a far more candid picture of Gorbachev than we have ever seen before.

CONVERSATION ONE

The Criss-Crossing of our Paths

1. STUDENT COMMUNISTS

Why We Joined the Communist Party

Z.M. It would be worthwhile to begin our conversation with the question of why exactly we joined the Communist Party. The answer for each of us will probably be distinctly different, but at the same time this is where our common political biography begins. So I’ll start right off by trying to answer that question for myself.

In general and on the whole this was not even connected, properly speaking, with my concepts of socialism. The decisive consideration was the war [World War II]. When the war ended I was fifteen years old, and not especially interested in social problems, even less in politics. While I was a high school student [at a secondary school that provided a classical education and prepared students for college], I wanted to go on to study zoology. But this was during the German occupation, and I lived in a kind of constant state of unconscious fear. As a Czech I knew that the Nazis considered the Czech people an inferior race, and if Hitler emerged victorious, my fate might be the same as that of my Jewish classmates. It is mainly for that reason, it seems, that the end of the war had a very powerful effect on me. Somehow there suddenly arose within me, almost automatically, of its own accord, a sense that the world had changed, that an entirely different era had begun, and that now a person could not stand aside from the course of events.

The main victor in the war in my eyes had been Stalin; those in power in the Soviet Union were the Communists. Everyone knew that a different system existed there, a socialist system. At that time I automatically considered this system better, more just, and stronger than the one under which I had lived up to that point. I had a rather vague notion, but one I couldn’t get rid of, that most likely this was the prototype of the future.

In a word, if I wanted to answer this question now briefly, using contemporary political terminology, I would say that in 1946 at the age of sixteen I joined the Communist Party in the hope that that party would change social relations and the social situation in such a way that they would become more just, that there would be no more war, and that Nazism would never again be a threat to other nations, that it would be eliminated for good.

M.G. I will answer this question spontaneously, thinking out loud, as it were, the way one does when talking with a friend. For me there were probably two aspects that were of fundamental importance. First, there was the example of my grandfather (on my mother’s side) and of my father. My grandfather had been a poor peasant, and beginning from a very early age, after the death of his father, he had to be concerned about a family in which there were five children. During World War I my grandfather was on the Turkish front, and he returned from the war with a definitely radical outlook, which was typical of the soldiers at that time. Then after the revolution, when the family was given the land it worked on, my grandfather was won over completely to the side of the Soviet government. In the oral history of our family it was constantly repeated: the revolution gave our family land. For that reason I viewed my grandfather’s joining the party in 1928 as a perfectly logical step, along with his direct participation in the reorganization of village life on a new basis.

Then came 1937. My grandfather was arrested as an “enemy of the people.” He was held for fourteen months of investigation, in the course of which he underwent cruel torture. I suddenly found myself a member of a family of an enemy of the people. And so at that time the drama of 1937–38 was part of my own direct experience. For our conversation what is important is the fact that when my grandfather returned from prison and told about everything that had happened there, neither then nor at any other time did he say anything bad about the Soviet government. In his view, Stalin had not known about these crimes. Moreover, as he saw it, those who had carried out these crimes had themselves been made to pay: some were arrested; some even shot themselves. And so it would seem, the later wave of repression overtook—and justifiably—those who were to blame for the sufferings of the people. A certain crafty and perfidious tactic on Stalin’s part was evident here.

My father, who married the daughter of a Communist, was completely on his side, even though his own father, my other grandfather, refused for a long time to join the collective farm, remaining an individual farmer instead.

Z.M. Thus in your family, so to speak, both of the historical tendencies of development in the Russian countryside were represented.

M.G. Yes, you could put it that way. And an important thing for me was that my father became a Communist, joining the party while he was at the front during the war. You are absolutely right that for us the war was not only a great victory over fascism but proof that our country’s cause was the right one. And by the same token, so was the cause of Communism.

That was how we viewed things. To that I should add that there was something in my very nature, in my personality. (I can talk about this now, sort of looking at myself from the outside.) From my earliest days I liked to be a leader among my peers—that was my nature. And this remained true when I joined the Komsomol, the Young Communist League, and later when I joined the party—it was a way of somehow realizing my potential. I became a candidate for party membership as early as 1950, when I was still in high school, and two years later I was accepted as a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) while a student at Moscow University.

So the main thing for both of us was our ideological motivation, not pragmatic considerations of some other kind.

Communist True Believers

Z.M. I consider all this important for an understanding of the motivation behind our decisions to join the party. People for whom Communism no longer offered any hope, who knew that joining the Communist Party was for most of them a necessary condition for a further successful career, that a party membership card was often a kind of “pass” that opened the door to a comfortable existence—such people transpose all that kind of thinking back into the era of our youth, that is, fifty years ago. They suspect that in all likelihood we based ourselves even then on considerations of careerism and timeserving.

It would be worthwhile now for us to talk about how we pictured socialism and communism. Because after joining the party we did not remain members only on the basis of the reasons that brought us there. We were there in order to help “change the world” based on certain conceptions corresponding to Communist ideology. When I went to Moscow in 1950 to study at the university and we first met, I was no longer exactly the apolitical youngster that I had been in 1946. I considered myself a conscious Communist. By that time I had already read not only various party pamphlets but also Stalin’s History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) with its famous chapter on dialectical and historical materialism. I had read Stalin’s Problems of Leninism, Lenin’s State and Revolution, Engels’s Anti-Duehring, and of course The Communist Manifesto. By then I thought I knew the “fundamentals of Marxism,” but of course it was not so much knowledge of Marxism as the case of a self-confident person who didn’t really know anything but who unceasingly told himself that by having read these books he had come to understand the laws of development of the human race and the world as a whole. As I have said several times since then, I was not knowledgeable but I was “politically aware.” I hardly knew anything really, but I could pass judgment on everything and everyone as to whether they were progressive or reactionary.

Communist ideology became for me like a faith or religion, and I acquired all the traits typical, for the most part, of fanatical believers. This means first of all intolerance toward nonbelievers. Also, that any oppression and persecution of them is justified. My concept of socialism was quite simple: for me it meant a social system in which undesirable capitalist relations, that is, private property and the exploitation associated with it, had been eliminated; a system in which there was social justice and, most important, where everything was administered rationally and scientifically. And because such a system supposedly already existed in practice in the USSR, I made every effort to gain the possibility of studying in Moscow itself. You, on the other hand, were born there and grew up there, so that your approach to Communist ideology and the concept of socialism must have been different then.

M.G. Not only I, but the generation before me, took as an existing reality, as a given, everything that had taken place under Communist rule; we took it as a given that the system we lived under was socialism. That’s how I understood things even before I read any Marxist literature. But at this point I must comment on the school system: it played an enormous role in forming our ideas about the world; it sought to convince us by all means at its disposal that we were living in the most just form of society. Thus we developed the outlook, in reference to the reality in which we were living, that no alternative was possible.

But even in the last years of high school, we talked about many things in a very critical way, based of course on our own experience and only on the local level; above all we were critical of the way of life of the representatives of local government. In embryonic form, this was a critique of the nomenklatura [the upper ranks of Communist Party and government officials in the hierarchical Stalinist system—Trans.]. But socialism for us, as I’ve said, was something for which there was no alternative.

Z.M. On the other hand, the possibility of an alternative did exist for me. After all, most of my peers had not accepted Communist ideology. I saw in Communism a better alternative than prewar Czechoslovakia. Although I had been just a boy before the war, I was aware not only of the weakness of the government which had capitulated to Hitler but also that the Western Allies—England and France—had betrayed us and sold us out to Hitler at Munich. I had also observed social injustice and poverty. Our family had not been directly affected—my father had been an officer. But we lived at army bases in Slovakia, and both poverty and deprivation were present everywhere there at the time. So I preferred socialism as an alternative, a system that was better, more just, more rational, and stronger.

M.G. Communist ideology was very attractive for young people then. That is true. The front-line soldiers came back from the war, most of them young people, filled with the pride of victory. And they had seen another world, the world of Europe, even though what they had seen had suffered from the destruction of the war. They were convinced that after the war’s end, life in our country too would begin to change—not only that the horrors of war would not be repeated but that the suffering of the 1930s would also be a thing of the past. Nevertheless, their concept of the future never went beyond the framework of Communist ideology, which sang the praises of social justice and people’s power.

The knowledge acquired in school, above all from history, confirmed that neither the tsarist system in Russia nor the colonial system of the European powers, neither crises nor wars—none of those things were merely inventions of propaganda. That is why for me and for others of my generation the question of changing the system in which we lived did not arise.

Z.M. It could be said that our original conception of socialism simply equated socialism with the kind of system that existed in the USSR. Or when we thought about this on a world scale, socialism began in those countries where a Communist Party had come to power. We saw things in this way for various reasons, but in the end we saw it in quite a similar way. That did not mean that we rejected any criticism of existing conditions. On the contrary, we considered it necessary in the name of Communist ideals to criticize and change the existing reality, which both of us tried to do in subsequent years on the practical level. And then we came to a reappraisal of our views. But before all that happened we both had been supporters and proponents of Communist ideology in the form in which it had existed in Stalin’s time. Here, as the saying goes, you can’t drop any words from the song. And that left its mark on the process of our formation as individuals.

How We Viewed the Stalin Terror

Z.M. For myself I must say that even during the war I had of course heard about, and later I even read about, the political trials in the USSR. But for a long time I thought Stalin’s terror was a matter of history, something like the terror that also accompanied the French revolution. At the same time I had no idea of the scale of the political terror in Stalin’s time, no notion of the fact that innocent people had confessed to crimes when they could no long endure torture. Any talk about such things I simply considered to be anti-Communist propaganda.

However, this quickly stopped being just a theoretical question for me, because after 1948 the Stalin terror gradually began in Czechoslovakia, as elsewhere. In truth I must say that for a long time I agreed with the idea of suppressing the opponents of Communism and enforcing various kinds of discrimination against them: after all, they were opposed to historical progress, so why give them a chance to spread various kinds of reactionary heresy?

I also approved of the idea that such people should not be allowed, let’s say, to study at the university level or hold responsible posts, and so forth. I did not protest against the political trials. Inwardly I sought to convince myself that this was necessary, that it was a natural manifestation of the revolutionary process, as had occurred before in history. But I could not admit to myself even the idea that the charges and the political trials of that time might simply be fabrications, that the confessions might have been extorted by torture. When, in 1952, top party leaders were brought to trial, headed by the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), Rudolf Slánský, it occurred to me that both the charges in the indictment and the confessions of the accused were too much like exaggerated propaganda. But I could not have imagined that all of this had been fabricated, that both the accused and the accusers had been obliged to learn by heart an entire trial scenario that had been written out in advance. All this I learned only in 1956, and for me it was a great shock. When the trial was going on I had seen in some of the charges that were given big play at the time an explanation of why after 1948 fear of dictatorial methods in the party had begun to circulate even among Communists. It was similar to the way your grandfather thought that those who had jailed him were wreckers and deserved their fate when they were later denounced and arrested.

M.G. I had no real idea of the true state of affairs up until the Khrushchev revelations, and even in 1985 when I became head of the party there was still a lot I didn’t know.

Z.M. In my case such a concept [that the trials were fabricated] never occurred to me, partly because of the way I myself looked at these things. I don’t know if you remember the time at a seminar on criminal law I defended the argument that in political trials the presumption of innocence did not apply. That was precisely during the Slansky trial in Prague, and I sincerely asserted that, after all, the decision about the guilt of the accused had been handed down by the political leadership and the court had simply drawn the legal conclusions. The seminar was being conducted by a graduate student whose name I don’t remember, but he was very much frightened by all this …

M.G. Poor fellow!

Z.M. … And he avoided answering, referring me instead to the seminar on Marxism-Leninism. So since I thought and reasoned in that way, I could not know about the Stalin terror. I could not know even as much as under a different state of affairs I could have known, what I could have arrived at by thinking things out on my own. Although all this was a result of a deformed way of thinking, nevertheless, a certain kind of honesty did remain: that is, I openly said what I was thinking and refused to hypocritically assert that the presumption of innocence was being observed when in fact it was not.

M.G. All this is one of the most painful pages in our past. Before Khrushchev and the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, this was something that nobody talked about in general. And after Khrushchev they began to try to suppress what had started under him, what could be designated as the beginning of a break with Stalinism. Only after Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Congress did I begin to understand the inner connection between what had happened in our country and what had happened to my family. My memories and associations from childhood became interwoven with the beginnings of an awareness of what Stalinism was.

People had trouble accepting all this. After graduating from the university I went to Stavropol, and in 1956 I was one of those from the Komsomol who on party instructions traveled from place to place to explain the significance of Khrushchev’s speech on the Stalin personality cult. Among party officials the reaction was very guarded; many of them simply had a negative reaction. In their view the repression of the 1930s was justified by the fact that, as they put it, people were arrested who earlier had forced the peasants to join the collective farms. For my own part I accepted Khrushchev’s speech. Yet Stalin’s death, for you and me, and not only for us, had been a heavy blow that we found hard to endure. All night long we were part of the crowd going to see his coffin.

Z.M. Yes, I remember us standing side by side in the auditorium on Hertzen Street during the two minutes of silence [to acknowledge Stalin’s death], and I remember asking you: “Misha, what’s going to happen to us now?” And you in a voice full of alarm and uneasiness, answered, “I don’t know.” Our world, the world of true-believing Stalinist Communists, was beginning to fall apart.

Knowledge Undermines Belief

M.G. Yes, that’s the way it was. But for my own part I must say that, in spite of everything, when I came to Moscow University a lot of things began to change fundamentally for me. It was a different world, a different atmosphere from the one I had lived in before. Unlike most Soviet institutions of higher learning of those days, in which one spent one’s time mainly at rote learning, Moscow University provided quite a few opportunities for discussion and debate and freedom of t...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Translators’ Note
• Authors’ Preface
• Conversation 1. The Criss-Crossing of our Paths
• Conversation 2. How We Sought to Reinvigorate Socialism
• Conversation 3. There’s Only One World
• Concluding Thoughts The Conscience of the Reformer
• Index