Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev deserves substantial credit for the reductions in U.S./Soviet tensions during the late 1980s, for the perestroika and glasnost “reforms” — simultaneously too little and too much as tools with which to preserve the Soviet Union — of Soviet communist totalitarianism, for the reduction in the internal security clampdowns by the KGB, for the easing of emigration restrictions, for the end of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe, and, finally, for the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, however much he did not intend it.
At the same time the media for many years have been all too eager to minimize the monumental role and achievements of Ronald Reagan, who understood long before most that communist totalitarianism is a profound evil. His refusal to abandon principle — mutual assured destruction is immoral as a military doctrine — forced Gorbachev toward demilitarization.
It is easy to forget the deeply problematic nature of the CIA estimates of Soviet GDP in the 1970s and 1980s, and therefore also of the Soviet defense burden (defense as a proportion of GDP). Those estimates of Soviet GDP were substantially too high, driven by real methodological problems inherent in the valuation of dual-use defense/nondefense capital (e.g., powerplants designed primarily to produce plutonium, one result of which was the Chernobyl disaster), of goods and services uncompetitive in international markets, of unfinished capital investments, exchange rate issues, and on and on. And the pervasive militarization of the Soviet economy meant that the CIA definitions of Soviet defense resource consumption were too narrow, and therefore too low.
Reagan — viewed by many of the Beltway sophisticates as a troglodyte mainly interested in starting a nuclear war — understood this years before the completion in the 1980s of a number of independent analyses of Soviet GDP and defense burden. The implication of Reagan's insight was that the Soviet economy was on the precipice, and could not withstand a sharp decline in the prices of oil and other export commodities, and a renewed arms race with America. Enter Reagan as president: The decontrol of oil prices, the defense modernization and buildup, and the strategic defense initiative worked wonders in those dimensions.
Upon becoming the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, after the Andropov/Chernenko interregnum, Gorbachev had two central goals: an end to the quagmire in Afghanistan, and reforms sufficient to modernize the Soviet economy and thus to preserve the power of the CPSU. With respect to the former, Gorbachev told the Defense Ministers, Sergei Sokolov and Dmitri Yazov, that they had a year to win the war or Gorbachev would find a way to pull the plug.
And so the Red Army commanders did what they do best: brutality as both strategy and tactic. With the appointment of General Mikhail Zaitsev as the new commander of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the Soviets carried out the most intensive operations they had ever undertaken in Afghanistan. How many Afghan civilians were killed by Soviet forces during Gorbachev's tenure as General Secretary? It is difficult to estimate, but the number is not trivial; one million is not outlandish as a guess. Accordingly, Gorbachev’s record as a peacemaker is mixed, although it is true that he refused to send in the troops and armor when the east Europeans seceded from the Soviet empire, and when the Soviet population turned against the Party apparatus. For that, Gorbachev deserves enormous credit.
With respect to economic modernization: Gorbachev, like most believers in Marxism/Leninism, was utterly clueless about human economic behavior and thus about the effects of alternative economic and political institutions. My favorite passage in his book Perestroika described his consternation that in Paris, where the shelves are full, there are no queues, while in Moscow, where the shelves are bare, there are long queues. Gorbachev (I paraphrase): How can this be? Such blindness was ubiquitous among the Soviet leadership: Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, the Chairman of Gorbachev's Council of Ministers, once complained that laundry powder still was disappearing from the shelves even though the central planners had increased the production quotas. “Are people's clothes somehow now getting dirtier?” he asked, in all seriousness.
This blindness about human economic behavior was exacerbated by one overriding characteristic of central economic planning: The leaders at the top know the least about what is actually going on, because without exception everyone below them has powerful incentives to lie about the achievement of their assigned functions. From the lowest people in the fields and on the factory floors, to the directors of the collective farms and the industrial plants, to the organizers of rail and shipping transport, to the bureaucrats in the ministries, to the division heads at Gosplan, to the planners at the Central Committee: No one could admit that they had failed The Plan. So the numbers simply were falsified and the leadership on a permanent basis was clueless about the actual state of affairs.
This explains such economy-wide clown-car episodes as the Soviet “machine tool” campaign of 1987. Why, asked Gorbachev, are the western economies so much more modern and productive than the Soviet economy? It must be because they have massive deployments of modern machine tools! If we can deploy such machine tools in sufficient quantity, then we too will have a modern economy! And so the Soviets embarked on a huge program of machine tool importation and domestic production, the outcome of which was, of course, dismal.
Gorbachev never thought to ask precisely why the Soviet economy had failed to make such investments; it seems never to have occurred to him that the perverse incentives inherent in central planning, the absence of property rights and the rule of law, etc, might be the more fundamental problem. At a more general level, Gorbachev never understood that socialism as a system cannot be “reformed” precisely because it is fundamentally flawed. His legacy offers huge positives, but it is not unmixed.
