Ten years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev ran for president, in the pivotal 1996 election. He won 1.5% of the vote. His national popularity was at its lowest ebb. His Social Democratic party seemed a nothing, compared to the hard-core communism of Gennady Zuganov, and the desperate capitalism of Boris Yeltsin.

But ten years later, on the day of Gorbachev’s 75^th birthday, it seems something like a rehabilitation of the man is taking place.

Yes, Gorbachev is still far from popular among Russians. The latest poll shows that only one in six Russians feel positively towards him, while 50% say they don’t like him. But Russians are beginning to feel better about perestroika– they approve of the right to earn money without limitation, the development of private business, the end of the Cold War, the ability to travel abroad.

Newspaper editorials, meanwhile, have been on the whole positive in their coverage of Gorbachev’s birthday. The government-owned Rossiskaya Gazeta declared: “The generation of Pepsi-Cola and Harry Potter can hardly imagine the extent of power that the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held over one sixth of the planet. This is why these guys can’t appreciate fully the heroism of the Soviet ruler, who willingly sacrificed his absolute sovereignty for the sake of the changes initiated by him.”

Izvestia says he was “an ideal leader for the period”, Moskovskaya Pravda says “he broke down the wall which stood in our way to freedom, to the sense of our own dignity and self-respect”, while Moskovskii Komsomolets sees him as almost a Messiah figure: “He failed to preserve what could not be preserved anyway…But he managed to preserve something else, which was also not easy. He managed to preserve in himself normal human reactions and feelings. Love, in the end. And this is why he came out the winner, both for his own sake, and for the sake of Eternity.”

I’m not sure I’d go that for, but I do think Gorbachev is a remarkable person, because he believed in socialism, and had the courage to put it to the electoral test. Perhaps uniquely among leaders of the Soviet Union, he believed that ordinary human beings would, in a fully informed and non-coercive election, choose to live in a socialist country.

That immediately makes him morally superior to all previous leaders, Lenin included, who claimed that socialism was the ‘will of the people’, yet knew that it depended not on popular approval, but on fear, intimidation and violence. The Bolsheviks, despite their name, did not even represent a majority of the socialist movement, let alone of public opinion in Russia. But they seized power claiming that they knew what was in the people’s interests – they, bourgeois intellectuals, knew better than the people what was in the people’s interests, because the people were ignorant peasants.

And so it went on for 70 years, this elite of the nomenklatura, ruling in the name of the people, but knowing that their rule depended on lies, fear and subsidized vodka. None of them had the courage to put their rule to anything like a free vote, because they knew they would lose. They claimed their empire relied on freedom and popular will, but it was a blatant lie, a lie repeated so often perhaps they didn’t even feel ashamed any more when they said it.

Gorbachev, perhaps naively, really thought that if you take away the fear, the lies and the subsidized vodka, people - not just Russians, but the rest of the Communist bloc too - would still choose to live in a socialist country.

So the last communist leader was, for me, the only real communist, because he believed in the dignity and intelligence of the ordinary Russian, and his or her ability to make up their own minds, when sober and in full possession of the facts, and choose a socialist alternative. He believed in socialism, and he believed in ordinary people’s ability to rule themselves. Every leader before him, by contrast, was a liar, who spouted about freedom and the people, while at heart believing the average Russian was an ignorant, drunken peasant, who had to be kicked into the socialist future.

In the short-term, it looked like Gorbachev’s big gamble was utterly misconceived. The Poles, Latvians, Czechs etc. did not choose to remain within Russian socialism. They left the empire en masse, in a matter of weeks. They chose Western capitalism.

But he was right in Russia. Russians did choose socialism, in the 1996 election. But Zuganov didn’t have the guts to rule, and Yeltsin, the oligarchs and the West wouldn’t let him. So Russia took a turn to a sort of fake democracy, with state-controlled TV, and the opposition so many marionettes of the presidential administration. The Russian people, it appeared, could not be trusted to decide their own government after all.

Where do Gorbachev’s ideas stand now? Well, it seems like the present administration agrees with the old stereotype of the ordinary Russian. Ivan Ivanov can’t handle too much truth on his TV screen, so give him positive images and plenty of razz-matazz. Democracy has to be managed, because if it wasn’t, stupid old Ivan would choose some awful xenophobic dictator like Stalin. You can only really trust the handful of reasonable Westernized people in the presidential administration, so give them as much power as possible, and let them pull the ignorant, drunken Russian peasant into the twenty-first century.

It seems Gorbachev’s alternate ideal – of well-informed, dignified and autonomous Russian citizens – has fallen into abeyance for the time being. The on-going emancipation of Russian serfs has been put on ice. But I believe it is an unstoppable process. Russians are becoming more responsible, more autonomous, more inclined to stand up for themselves and their interests. And, given a free choice, I think they would choose something close to Gorbachev’s social democracy, in which a concern for the collective and the vulnerable is balanced by a respect for individual rights and a close scrutiny of the executive. Gorbachev’s big gamble may not have lost, after all. 

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

March 2, 2006