Herzog continues puzzling love affair with Gorbachev

Promotional material from the film Meeting Gorbachev".

By doing so, Herzog continues the puzzling love affair that the West has been pursuing with Gorbachev for more than three decades. The West sees the last Soviet leader as a nostalgic monument to a more hopeful era. But with nostalgia working as it does, Gorbachev’s star is only bright in contrast to the gloom of the present. Its misremembered brightness makes an already ugly present seem even more hopeless. More ominously, it also creates unrealistic expectations and invites hawkish policies when those expectations are not met.

New thinking, old spheres of influence

What makes Herzog’s account of Gorbachev’s legacy so typically western is the reaffirmation of the two biggest western myths about the last Soviet president: his alleged belief in the futility of great-power rivalries and his unwavering commitment to the democratisation of his own country. Debunking the mythology around the former is not to do injustice to Gorbachev’s momentous nuclear-reduction efforts. Yet beyond all the rosy speeches, pledges signed and missiles destroyed, Gorbachev was fundamentally no different than other Cold War-era leaders in one crucial aspect: he never stopped viewing the world through spheres of influence.

Halfway through the documentary, Herzog is eager to agree with Gorbachev that the Cold War is one of a precious few wars in history that ended with a win-win outcome. Gorbachev then proudly adds that it was Moscow that first suggested burying the axe. But for these statements to be meaningful, the Soviet Union would have had to do so from a position of equal strength with its adversary. With food queues throughout the USSR growing by the day as Gorbachev’s reign progressed, this was hardly the case. Gorbachev’s affection for diplomacy might have also been motivated by a pacifist ideology, but it was mandated by weakness and the hope that slowing down the arms race would save the Soviet economy.

And then there is the awkward question of why the West still finds it hard to get along with Russia if both sides scored a mutual victory all those years ago. Moscow can always blame the current tensions on the United States, whose global war on terror undoubtedly resulted in undermining mutual trust. But the US-led invasion of Iraq and even September 11th itself happened long after NATO’s enlargement into Eastern Europe, which had nonetheless been vigorously denounced by Gorbachev. If the end of the Cold War was truly the end of great-power rivalry – as the notion of a mutual victory inevitably implies – then why did Gorbachev continue to view the world through spheres of influence?

By the late 1990s, the West had done very little – if anything – to undermine Moscow’s faith in the shared commitment to collective security. Regrettably, Herzog does not raise the immortal issue of the so-called “gentlemen’s agreement”, whereby Gorbachev was allegedly promised by George H.W. Bush that NATO would never enlarge into Eastern Europe. Yet even if Gorbachev is telling the truth about the existence – and violation – of such an agreement, the burden is still on him to explain how he was planning to reconcile Russia’s maintenance of an Eastern sphere of influence with his universalistic new way of thinking – famously elaborated in his 1988 UN address. In other words, why would he fear the enlargement of an alliance led by his fellow victor in the Cold War?

Instead of confronting Gorbachev with this contradiction, Herzog poses the same question to one of Helmut Kohl’s advisers, who shrewdly remarks that of all the threats Russia faces along its remaining borders, it would be foolish to fear its western one. Of course, in hindsight, the jury has long been out on Gorbachev’s (lack of) cosmopolitan credentials – given his support for Putin’s annexation of Crimea, for instance. But Herzog conveniently omits this.

I’ll do it my way

Apart from Gorbachev himself, none of Herzog’s interlocutors are Russian. This would not be an issue in an international politics documentary, but the main focus of Herzog’s project is on Gorbachev’s domestic achievements. The lack of Russian/Soviet interlocutors is – inadequately – compensated by Hungarian and Polish leaders, Miklos Nemeth and Lech Wałęsa. This makes it difficult to evaluate Gorbachev’s efforts to achieve what he himself terms, at the start of the documentary, as “more democracy and more socialism”.

While the failed outcome of these efforts is already well-known, it is still possible to examine whether Gorbachev at least did everything in his power to succeed in them. And that verdict would be damning even if one accepted Gorbachev’s premise that democracy and socialism can be reconciled to begin with.

Again, this is not to take anything away from Gorbachev’s bold embrace of his two signature reforms: perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). Either of these two policies would have been wholly unimaginable under any previous Soviet leader. After all, this was a regime that had in the past invaded two of its East European satellites to prevent more democracy, not to enable it. Yet the contrast between Gorbachev and his predecessors is just as stark as the gap between what Gorbachev did and what he could have done with the near-unlimited power at his disposal. And this is the only important metric. Evaluating someone’s democratic credentials on the metrics of dictators like Stalin and Brezhnev, who had the most profound disdain for democratic freedom, is futile and blatantly apologetic.

But what is it exactly that Gorbachev could have done and did not do? Take another one of Gorbachev’s presumably heroic acts: his tacit permission for the overthrow of Moscow’s satellite regimes across the Warsaw Pact. Popularly termed “the Sinatra doctrine” (I’ll do it my way), Gorbachev’s actions were yet another revolutionary act if judged by the metric of his predecessors. Yet if assessed by logical real-time metrics, Gorbachev’s acceptance of the establishment of democracy in the Eastern bloc sits very uneasily with his persistent refusal to hold competitive elections at home. The only two elections in the Soviet Union during Gorbachev’s reign took place in 1989 and 1990. One of them was only contested within the Communist Party, and the other one – Gorbachev’s own election as president – did not even include other contenders. Again, these uncomfortable details are fully absent from Herzog’s narration.

Admittedly, one of the reasons Gorbachev refrained from opening the Soviet system to the public was the enormous pressure he was facing from hardliners inside his party, who felt that even his limited democratisation efforts had already been exaggerated. The Soviet people received a sombre reminder of this danger in the summer of 1991, when the hard-line camp launched a coup and detained Gorbachev in his summer house. While Herzog expectedly takes full advantage of this opportunity to portray Gorbachev as a victim, thus implicitly justifying his previous reluctance to step up his reforms, the overall takeaway from this event is the exact opposite. Even with Gorbachev detained, the coup failed miserably and immediately, thus eliminating any future vulnerabilities to Gorbachev’s rule from the right. As he reassumed control in August 1991, Gorbachev finally got the perfect opportunity to prove his democratic credentials beyond any doubt and call a free election. But he did not. Four months later, he had to resign.

Victim of circumstance or maker of his own tragedy?

Towards the end of the film, Herzog asks Gorbachev the ultimate question: Did he help kill the Soviet Union or was the USSR doomed long before his time? While certainly provocative, this is still not the right question. The answer seems to be “yes” to both parts. One is left wondering how Gorbachev would have responded had Herzog asked him a much simpler question: would he do it all over again? Would he still have gone down the reform path if he had known that the price for freedom would not only be the full collapse of socialism, but of the Soviet Union itself?

Here it is worth remembering the one massive caveat to the Sinatra Doctrine. In January 1991, as the Soviet Republic of Lithuania opted to go its own way,the regime responded by sending in tanks and murdering 14 civilians. While Gorbachev never took responsibility for giving the order, he is still responsible for losing control of Moscow’s response at best and for having threatened the exact same response just days before at worst. Herzog’s treatment of the Baltic states is the most glaring error in his narrative, as he takes some poignant footage of the 600 kilometre Baltic Chain freedom marches and frames them as something that happened because of Gorbachev, despite his efforts to stop it.

One thing Herzog does get right, although for the wrong reasons, is his sympathetic verdict and presenting Gorbachev as a “tragic figure”. Social democrats will always despise Gorbachev for refusing to hold democratic elections as part of his misguided balancing act between “more democracy and more [one-party] socialism”. Neoliberals will deride him for squandering six years on saving the unsavable.

By informing us that his tombstone will read“we tried”, Gorbachev and Herzog seem to be embracing his tragedy as a celebration of some alleged relentlessness in the face of unforgiving circumstances. This brings their two-hour-long exoneration effort full circle. If there is one central theme in Meeting Gorbachev, it is Gorbachev shunning responsibility for his failures, one after another. He talks about how he and Reagan tried to get rid of nuclear weapons, before adding that an unknown “they”kept the two most powerful men on the planet from having their way. The same “they” return in his musings on the present, as he remarks that “they won’t let us live in peace”. Are they the West? Is he still mistrustful of western leaders because of his subjective sense of betrayal over the so-called “gentlemen’s agreement”? Or are they the world leaders of today, lumped together in one unflattering box by an old man, nostalgic of a bygone era that may or may not have been brighter. In this plethora of vagueness, there is only one certainty: they are not him.

The kindred spirit who never was

Where does Herzog’s project leave the West’s love affair with Gorbachev? Right about where it found it. Herzog’s rare foray into political documentaries seems to have been motivated by his rightful outrage of “the denigrating of Russia in western media”. But what is unclear is why he thought that the glorification of an already-romanticised former tenant of the Kremlin would ease the animosity towards the current one. If anything, reaffirming Gorbachev’s entrenched status of a western darling who stars in Pizza Hut commercials makes the current state of relations with the Kremlin seem like a menacing anomaly, rather than a mere continuation of centuries of tumultuous great-power relations.

It is not difficult to understand the German filmmaker’s infatuation with – and simple human gratitude for – the man who made his country whole again. Meeting Gorbachev is content-rich, pleasant to watch and free of any explicitly propagandistic tendencies – Herzog is no Oliver Stone. But by providing a simplistically flattering account of a deeply flawed historical personality, he further contributes to western nostalgia of a kindred spirit in the Kremlin that never quite existed. Love affairs have consequences.

Kristijan Fidanovski is a writer and researcher focusing on his native North Macedonia, the Western Balkans and Eastern Europe. He holds an MA in Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies from Georgetown University. His research focuses on bilateral disputes between East European countries, as well as fertility trends and policies within them.

Film, Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia, Werner Herzog