Gorbachev:  20th Century Unintentional Hero

     When I was at quite an impressionable age, I traveled with my family to see the World's Fair.  Meandering through the Russian pavilion, I heard whispers-- "Nice exhibit but I'm glad I'm seeing it in Spokane" or "Sure wouldn't want to live there."  Why?  At home with both freedom and food, it was difficult to imagine 50 million lives lost to communism (Bourdeaux 2), and with the way my brother, sister and I argued, we couldn't imagine the persecution suffered just a continent away by anyone unwilling to submit to thought control.  After 70 years of communist doctrine (for it surely isn't "philosophy," as Dr. Niemyer wisely pointed out during a recent Notre Dame lecture:  philosophy is the study of being as whole, of reality and the meaning of individual or social existence.  Philosophy raises questions about higher reality and Order, loves wisdom and friendship, and bases any evidence or theories about Meaning from the Cosmos and from the Soul. Contrary to communism, philosophy is something quite different than ideological control), no one could have predicted a 1994 Russian pavilion promoting perestroika, glasnost, free election, free choice, free enterprise.  What created such a turnaround?  Although many attribute it simply to inner collapse, this really explains nothing, for any examination of Russian history reveals such entrenched dogma that the chain of events leading to reform must have begun with an unmoved mover; i.e., a mover who could shake the very foundations of a doctrine that, though oppressive, seemed impenetrable.  This mover probably didn't even realize the extent his reformation would take, and his mission, though never reaching fruition, is a story of hardship and triumph in a country that previously had never discussed natural rights: this is the story of Mikhail Gorbachev.  As a member of the intelligentsia as well as the Communist party (an oxymoron from any Westerner's mentality), Gorbachev remains a complex figure; even though he could not have possibly intended the collapse of communism, nevertheless his bravery and devotion to human dignity aided all things juxtaposed to Communism, namely human rights.  This includes the right to a just legal system as well as the rights to pursue Happiness, to exercise religious freedom, and to create a sustainable economy.

      From the 1917 revolution to December 25, 1991, the entire Soviet system was built on contradiction.  Supposedly based on rational, legal positivism, the law was based on no popular consensus but rather a central government's fleeting whims; i.e., the Soviet Law didn't guarantee anything--since administrative edicts outlawed everything, the law was just an instrument for randomly enforcing state policy.  Supposedly based on "practical politics," the pursuit of power as telos created increasingly impractical and tyrannical laws.  Because the state forgot that morality is the glue which holds society together, the very antithesis of human rights became the economic unit of the Soviet system.  "Communal property" really meant "persecution," "separation of church and state" really meant "resignation to the state,"--the church was to give up everything, from its buildings to its autonomy (mandatory registration to the state meant government control) to its life-blood:  faith itself.

     Stalin's answer to nationalism and religion was to suppress both. We in 1993 lay witness to the naivety and cruelty of that position.   Communism tried to mold children but didn't succeed in doing so precisely because the meaning of life goes beyond state edict and government controlled materialism.

     Enter the scenario:  Mikhail Gorbachev.  Framed in the heroic paradigm, the changes he created exemplify Arete, or Greatness of Spirit, Excellence, Intellectual Vitality, and Unyielding Purpose (Evans 7/15/93). Called a political genius (Kramer 54) for trying to create what he called "a revolution of the mind"(as qtd in Morrow 45), Gorbachev sought to replace paranoia, isolation, fear and estrangement with glasnost and perestroika.  Though his mission clearly is not complete at the time of this writing, nevertheless his philosophy, code of honor, mission, and attitude have rendered heroically proportioned accomplishments.

A Hero's Philosophy:  To Go Forward Always

     To Soviets, Gorbachev symbolized "change and hope for a stagnant system, motion, creativity, amazing equilibrium...as he hang glided across an abyss"(Morrow 44). Tired of leaders so old they were internationally embarrassing,  cynics would tell media jokes, such as not daring to play any work by Tchaikovsky in a minor key on the state radio for fear that everyone would think another General Secretary had died.  Gorbachev replaced the previous quaternary, the "Gerontocracy," (Bourdeaux 7/16/93) with vision and new ideas, like sending people to the polls; Gorbachev created the first nationwide election to a new 2250 member Congress of People's Deputies, with an embarrassing one third of the Communist chiefs failing to regain seats (Nelan 48).  His youth aided his reformist philosophy because his rise in the Party came long after Stalin's death, so he was "not afflicted with accepting terror as civic norm"(Nelan 48).  The first party leader since Lenin to have earned a university degree, Gorbachev revamped the very unpopular philosophy of weighing evidence and reassessing objective truth.

     These examples of ingenuity and reform easily translate into the heroic archetype in a number of ways.  For example, the hero's primary life activity is contribution (Evans 7/17/93), and politically this means, as Dr. Codevilla of Stanford explains, true political leaders realize that governments aren't all for the Good just because that regime is in power; therefore, according to Plato, the effectiveness and goodness is judged by the end of the thing, whether the system nurtures what is peculiar to its populous and whether it fulfills the needs and aspirations of the people (7/26/93).  Certainly the initiation of public voting, freeing political prisoners of conscience and promoting Honesty means that Gorbachev appears to have learned what Plato knew:  the greatest statesmen are therapists.  A ruler becomes a leader and governs legitimately only when he encourages people to face the truth about themselves and therefore causes them to consent freely to their governance. (Kramer 54)

A Hero's Code of Honor

     Although Westerners hate to qualify this as virtue, Gorbachev did maintain a rigid code of honor: the Party reigns supreme.  Just as the Homeric hero's life was worthless unless he proved the value of Self, so did Gorbachev realize that he could rid the "incidental" and "detrimental" without obliterating the Party's "essence."

     Like the hero of old, Gorbachev could distinguish among these concepts while "playing by the rules" (Evans lecture).  Some people regard him as hero because he presided over the demise of a loathsome ideology, but this is missing the point, for he never meant to abolish communism; indeed, he meant to save it, not dissolve it but to transform it, a Soviet Franklin Delano Roosevelt electrified, for Gorbachev's task was much more formidable than FDR's, considering that the Depression in the Soviet Union lasted 72, not 10, years (Kramer 54).

A Hero's Mission

     Although Gorbachev never found the answer to the question of how communism could be redeemed and still be communism (Morrow 44), the mission, by premising itself on even the asking of such a question, meant risk taking, and going beyond the limits , for Gorbachev's "Ergon" stretched him beyond simple midwifery--he knew that applying mercurochrome and bandages alone to a dying system was simply insufficient.

    This is the heroic journey of hardship and triumph.  As stated in the Time edition which hailed him as "Man of the Decade,"  "With remarkable imagination and daring, he has embarked on a course, perhaps now irreversible, that is reshaping the world" (Morrow 44). Gorbachev risked transforming a government that "was not just bad or inept but inherently destructive, its stupidity regularly descending into evil" (44), creating an unprecedented human rights revolution, and, as one journalist so eloquently put it, the cold war deconstructed before our eyes, the Berlin Wall crumbled into souvenirs (44).

A Hero's Attitude

     According to Dr. Evans, Heroic Literature professor, the classic hero is courageous, resourceful, wise and helpful.  If it is true that the hero is he who can live up to the publicity of himself, to the conviction that he is good, then it was up to Gorbachev to live up to the words of Margaret Thatcher, the Free World's second toughest Anti-Soviet in 1984:  "Gorbachev was a man with whom the West could do business" (Bourdeaux 7/20/93).  Gorbachev's Kunst was to become The Hero with 1000 Faces:  he was simultaneously the man whom Andropov supported yet the West's "superstar."  In fact, Westerners liked him so much they went "predictably overboard in what one skeptic called its "Gorbasms"(Morrow 44).  How could one man hail respect from such opposing sides?  As Dr. Evans stated, there is something that wells inside the hearts of all of us, an inner ringing of "YES!" when we see a person with integrity, for the truly integrated personality has all the qualities we subconsciously respond to and wish for ourselves:  Strength /Morality/ Willpower /Backbone/ Righteousness/ Endurance.

     This is not to say Gorbachev stayed true to his own philosophy.  In an atmosphere of Glasnost which he himself created, the Kremlin went silent for 10 full days after Chernobyl.  Under "perestroika" he warned Lithuanians against remodeling as they saw fit.  Determined to continue his reform, he fairly acquiesced to house arrest, and in an atmosphere where as a victim of persecution he could have remained in control, he chose the highly unpopular label of Communist Loyalist even though these were the very premises he was bent on reforming.  He quit before he won, and now the Soviet Republics have miles to go before they sleep.  Because of one man it can be argued that the world is at once more free and more dangerous (Morrow 44); there is increased capacity for violence, given such stark juxtapositions:

    glasnost and scarcity
    international superpower and national infirmity.

Clearly, the confrontations between these positions are experimentally volatile.

     On the other hand, no one can deny that his rejection of Marxist dogma regarding "theology as the opium of the people" was a major advancement toward the celebration of the individual and freedom of thought--and ultimately the collapse of a regime denying both.  Apparently Gorbachev recognized the fact that Russia is strongly Christian and could not be changed in slightly more than 70 years of thought control.  As a member of the intelligentsia and as a family member whose mother was Christian, Gorbachev knew that the need for eternality, or at least hope and justice, is an essence of man and cannot be indoctrinated against.  Going once again beyond the limits, he even traveled to the Vatican to shake hands with Pope John Paul II himself, a man whose life and whose constituency publically rebuked a politic destined to destroy itself by destroying its people.

Conclusion

     I agree with Michael Bourdeaux's assessment that Gorbachev is undoubtedly a towering 20th Century figure, a very brave man caught between two uncompromising positions, and he faced an impossible task:  how to remain a Communist when the very Party was founded on tight control of the individual, corruption, nepotism, secrecy and lies?  Yet the system collapsed with minimal loss of life.  Gorbachev personally prevented bloodshed by not calling in the Red Army to stop each revolt. He must have reached a heroic sense of exultation to see such a bloodless revolution when, at the same time, he actually witnessed Tiananmen Square, which showed to the world the disastrous possibilities.  In fact, he actually urged Chinese authorities to solve their plight by initiating "political dialogue with the young demonstrators"(Nelan 49).

     Granted, though current events throughout the Soviet Republics suggest further chaos and massive dispute, the significant, positive role Gorbachev played in human rights and individual freedom is still actively center stage--no one can deny that he is a shaper of history displaying heroic strength of will and purpose. Like the classic anti-hero Sisyphus, "Gorbachev is a hero for what he would not do--in fact, could not do, without tearing out the moral wiring of his ambitions for the future"(Morrow 44).  Although Gorbachev resigned under politically embarrassing circumstances, Honor is renewable, and I am confident that ongoing political analysis will eventually reinstate Gorbachev's position as 20th Century Hero, whether he intended this title or not.  He may have fallen into temporary disfavor, but this does not negate his life work promoting, quite ironically, the Christian Nijole Sadunaite 's epitaph, a battle cry calling each of us to radiate our own heroic possibilities:

  If He has sewn us in solitude or sorrow, let us BLOOM.  We have our power though no one sees.

Bourdeaux, Michael.  Gorbachev, Glasnost and the Gospel.  London:  Hodder and Stoughton,
    1990.

---. Keston College founder/professor. University of Notre Dame lectures series.  July 1993.

Codevilla, Angelo, Ph.D.  Stanford University professor. University of Notre Dame lecture series.
    July 1993.

Evans, John, Ph.D.  Arizona State University professor.  University of Notre Dame lectures series.
    July 1993.

Kramer, Michael.  "The Gorbachev Touch." Time 1 Jan. 1990: 54-55.

Morrow, Lance.  "Man of the Decade Gorbachev:  The Unlikely Patron of Change."  Time 1 Jan.
    1990:  42-45.
Niemeyer, Gerhart, Ph.D.  University of Notre Dame Professor Emeritus.  University of Notre
    Dame lecture.  July 1993.

Nelan, Bruce W.  "The Year of the People." Time 1 Jan. 1990: 46-53.