Will History Repeat Itself? The Details That Settled Out of Russia's Fast-Changing Past | QDaily Annual Book Recommendations ⑨

Understanding Gorbachev and his era is essential to understanding how Russia changed afterward.

A year has passed, and China and the world, society and the state, the economy and our own lives have all been swayed by large questions. In the middle of that bewilderment, the voices of intellectuals have gone missing, or been drowned in noise, which only deepens the confusion. Or perhaps a turning point is about to show itself. In any era, clear thinking is scarce, and people with insight are our best guarantee of seeing the road ahead.

So in our "2018 Annual Book Recommendations" we want to introduce as wide a range as we can of books we think are worth your time.

As in past years, our editors have read every book that came within our view, and they introduce each one to readers in good faith.

We also had help from contributing writers, who catch new currents first and see further than we do. Our thanks to them.

This is the fifth piece in our nonfiction book recommendation series, and it is about Russia's history and its present. The author, Tao Xiaolu, is an editor and translator at Oriental Historical Review*, and works on political philosophy and the twentieth-century history of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. She translated* When the Facts Change*.*

In The Future Is History, published in 2017, Masha Gessen writes: "Personal and historical memory had been swallowed up and scholarly work on Soviet society had been badly damaged, and for a long time this left researchers in the West better placed than Russian ones to interpret Russia, even though their access to source material was limited…" The English-speaking world has never stopped paying attention to this land. The volume of writing about it is enormous, and much of it is very good — including books on the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia written in English by Russians who had emigrated to Britain, the United States and elsewhere. Here I want to recommend three of them.

1.

Unlike the other books I want to discuss, The Spy and the Traitor is a biography easily mistaken for a spy novel. It came out in September 2018, quickly drew glowing reviews, climbed onto the New York Times bestseller list, and was named one of The Economist's books of the year for 2018. The critical praise and the sales are no accident: the author had rich material to work with and tells the story with great skill, and parts of it read like a thriller. Ben Macintyre has long been known for his spy biographies, and several of his earlier books were widely praised, among them Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal and A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. For this one his sources include an autobiography his subject, Oleg Gordievsky, wrote years ago; 100 hours of taped interviews Macintyre did with Gordievsky himself; and, rarer still, interviews with several MI6 officers who ran the operation to get Gordievsky out to Britain. British intelligence has always kept its secrets — Macintyre could not read the service's files, none of which have been declassified — yet it let him interview Gordievsky and the officers of that time, and the decision itself drew a good deal of comment.

Oleg Gordievsky was born into a family of spies; his father was a senior KGB officer. He grew up in a housing compound reserved for KGB staff, received every kind of special treatment, and had an orthodox education — from birth, in other words, he was being prepared for a life serving his country as a spy. His youth, and the world he grew up in, gave him easier access than ordinary citizens to information about the world outside the Soviet Union, especially the West, and he was always intensely interested in it. The KGB was then posting officers all over the world; his older brother was one of them, living a life of constant travel. Gordievsky hoped for a foreign posting like his brother's, so he studied Swedish hard and took the KGB's special training, preparing for the day it would come. He spent six months in East Germany first, gaining experience, and was then sent to Copenhagen. In 1961 he watched the Berlin Wall go up and saw East Germans flee in large numbers at the risk of their lives; the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 shook him again, and step by step he grew disillusioned with the Soviet Union. From 1973 he worked for British intelligence as a double agent, and over the following decade or more he handed the British government a great deal of important intelligence. To keep him safe, British intelligence never told the American CIA who Gordievsky really was — which only made the CIA more determined to find out. In the end a spy the CIA sent out confirmed his identity, and that officer was himself a double agent working for the Soviet Union. Gordievsky's life hung by a thread… Macintyre lays out in full detail the tug-of-war among the British, American and Soviet services, and the near-miraculous operation by which MI6 got Gordievsky safely back to London. The detail is so thick that reading it is like watching a thriller.

Double agents were nothing rare in the Cold War. Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer who gave up Gordievsky, did it for a windfall, selling the Soviets the identities of many agents. Macintyre chose Gordievsky partly because he believes Gordievsky mattered enormously to Britain's intelligence war against the Soviet Union, and even helped bring the Cold War to a faster end, but also because he believes Gordievsky was "different." By Gordievsky's own account, he betrayed the KGB out of values, out of ideology; in his own words, he believed his actions had the power to "change the world." Here Macintyre may lean a little too hard on Gordievsky's autobiography, though at the end of the book he does quote Gordievsky's ex-wife and former colleagues, and readers may want to keep some skepticism about how "different" Gordievsky really was.

Much of the English-language press, writing about the book, noted that its publication "coincided" with a new round of covert Russian operations against the West: the assassination of former Russian intelligence officers who had defected abroad, Russian troll farms turning out fake news in bulk, interference in Western elections. That is one outside reason the book was so widely read and discussed. Macintyre notes briefly that the intelligence Gordievsky passed to Western governments included details of KGB attempts to use "active measures" to influence elections in Western countries.

One more thing worth mentioning. In 1985 the KGB drew up a top-secret "personality questionnaire" describing the traits it was looking for in a potential agent: narcissistic, vain, greedy, unfaithful to his wife. Not long after, the Soviet government invited a well-known American to visit Moscow. His name was Donald Trump.

2.

William Taubman, the American political scientist who won a Pulitzer for Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, spent eleven years writing Gorbachev: His Life and Times. In it he sets out to answer questions like these: how did Gorbachev grow from a farm boy into the Soviet Union's last leader? Why did his plan to reform the country fail? Why did he not intervene in the upheavals in Eastern Europe? How did his character shape his policies and his own fate?

Taubman's research is wide. He draws on a large body of published and unpublished sources, and he gets Gorbachev's family, his old subordinates and people from his early years who had been all but forgotten to talk about the Gorbachev they remember. In many places he also uses the diaries of Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev's closest and most important aide. The Gorbachev he draws is vain, impatient and often willful, but also wise and reflective. He corrects several widely misread pieces of history. The Soviet Union did not collapse because it could not keep up with the United States in the arms race, because the hawks who wanted to use that strategy to bring the country down never controlled American policy toward Moscow. And though one popular view makes Gorbachev Eastern Europe's "savior," his greatest service to the region was not intervening — he told its leaders at the time not to expect Soviet troops to come and save their governments — rather than any "liberating measures" he took on his own initiative.

Taubman shows us how Gorbachev was formed. The old Bolshevik elite were mostly intellectuals who had grown up in cities; Gorbachev's generation were "Stalin's children." Soviet education pulled them out of ignorance, taught them loyalty to "building socialism," and gave them a cause of their own. That is why, even though he saw many of Soviet society's problems very early, he kept his faith in this "vast social experiment" and resolved to work from inside the system — which meant staying quiet much of the time and following orders he privately disagreed with. He worked in Stavropol for nearly twenty years, until the late 1970s brought the decisive turn in his career: Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, took him up and brought him back to Moscow, and in 1985 he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant showed him how deep the country's chronic ills ran, and he made up his mind to open reform. At the same time, to shift resources out of the military and into the domestic economy, he pushed hard for talks with Western countries and for easing Cold War tensions — which gave many people at home a pretext to accuse him of caving to the West and of weakness. His reforms badly alarmed the party's conservatives. In 1991 they staged a coup; it failed quickly, but from the moment it failed Yeltsin held effective control of the Soviet Union, and Gorbachev left the stage of history.

The critic Neal Ascherson wrote of Gorbachev: "Not many people change the world. Even fewer of those who do are thanked for it." Gorbachev has in fact lived in two realities at once. At home in Russia he is scorned and resented, because people believe he destroyed an "empire" that could once stand level with the United States, that he handed Eastern Europe away, and that he betrayed what the Red Army's blood had won. In the West he has been widely praised; people thank him for ending the Cold War, for ending the threat of nuclear war, and for keeping the upheavals in Eastern Europe from turning into one violent, bloody convulsion after another.

Understanding Gorbachev and his era is essential to understanding how Russia changed afterward. Taubman gives us an idealist in politics, a figure who stands in contrast to Yeltsin. The two of them stood for very different possible futures for Russia. Gorbachev kept faith in the communist ideal and hoped reform could put the "experiment" back on the right road and make good on the promises the state had given the Soviet people. Yeltsin wanted to destroy the experiment outright and throw off the enormous weight of history, and he tore down, almost overnight, mechanisms that had run for decades, leaving countless ordinary people facing enormous uncertainty. There may once have been a very brief window in which Gorbachev's vision could have been realized, but it closed fast. Russians lost patience and abandoned Gorbachev, and with him the harder road; they turned to Yeltsin instead and were led toward populist politics. In the economy they took the prescriptions of the neoliberals, applied "shock therapy" and privatized everything, wiping out the life savings of countless people while a few swallowed public property and became enormously rich overnight — and so people quickly grew disillusioned with democracy and with capitalism… After that comes the Putin era we know better, when the old lines of Russian politics were switched back on: authoritarian rule, a return to tradition, hostility to the West.

Russians who came after have laid every fault at Gorbachev's door; Taubman's book gives him a fair hearing. He writes: "More than any of his own flaws, what caused his failure was that he inherited a country riddled with crisis, and building a working democracy in such a country takes far longer than he imagined." But Taubman also writes that he does not understand many of Gorbachev's decisions, and he asks some good questions. Why did Gorbachev agree, without setting a single condition, to let a reunified Germany join NATO? Why, after the coup failed and he was safely back in Moscow, did he not go straight to the parliament building to thank Yeltsin and the demonstrators who had resisted it?

People fault Gorbachev for weakness — for bringing freedom too early to a country that had been held down for decades, and for dropping Yuri Andropov's idea of "develop the economy first, reform the politics later." That, the argument goes, is what let enemies on both flanks use the space for speech his policy of glasnost had opened and attack him savagely, conservatives saying his reforms went too far and radicals saying they did not go far enough. But in the end, had Gorbachev followed Soviet political culture and Russia's long political tradition of striking his enemies without mercy, even wiping them out, he might have kept his hold on power, but he would have become the thing he opposed, betrayed his own ideals and principles, and ended up as one more autocrat. Having read this book and seen the historical inheritance the country handed him — a rigid economic system, a bureaucracy that flattered upward and bullied downward, a population too frightened to speak — readers should be able to feel the immense pressure Gorbachev was under in the face of this "impossible task," and to feel sympathy for a man of such high ideals and such upright principles.

3.

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist, born in Moscow in 1967. Her family emigrated to the United States in 1981; after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 she went back to Moscow to report on Russian politics, and she left Russia again in 2013, once the Putin government began imposing a series of repressive policies. She has written several books about Putin and his era, among them the biography The Man Without a Face. Her many reports on Russia and her essays on the Putin government and on U.S.-Russian relations have been widely influential, and she is now an indispensable voice on the subject. Gessen is also more than a bystander: she has been deeply involved in many parts of contemporary Russian society, which has given her insights that many observers in the English-speaking world simply do not have.

The Future Is History can in a sense be read as a sequel to Gorbachev: His Life and Times. Gessen takes us deep into Putin's Russia. Through the lives of four young Russians born in the 1980s and three professionals, she shows readers how Russia went from the country of Gorbachev's day — full of problems, but also full of hope — into today's country of "history repeating," repressive at home and expansionist abroad. As Gessen sees it, books about Russia fall roughly into two kinds: those mainly about political figures and those mainly about ordinary people. Both can give readers valuable information, but what is missing is how the subjects of the two kinds connect to each other, and that is what she hoped to do by writing The Future Is History. On her choice of subjects she says: "The people I write about are first of all 'ordinary people,' whose experience of growing up in this country is also the experience of millions upon millions of Russians; at the same time these people are 'unusual' — they are smart, passionate and introspective, and they can tell their own stories vividly."

All four of these young people were born on the eve of Gorbachev's reforms, and two of them are the children of important political figures. Each faces a different set of concrete problems, but all of them are struggling to be their own masters and to realize ambitions unlike those of the generations before them, and all of them end up on the other side from the Putin government, pulled into conflicts that often come with violence. One of the three professionals is the psychoanalyst Marina Arutyunyan. Gessen writes about Marina's clients, and, starting from the similar predicaments of the families who come to her for professional help, Marina offers her own diagnosis of Russian society: this is a traumatized society, one that endured decades of psychological suppression and has still not fully worked itself free. Another is the sociologist Lev Gudkov, a student of the Soviet sociologist Yuri Levada. Levada was the first to describe the traits of "Homo Sovieticus": people who stick rigidly to established ways, love authority, want the Soviet government to run everything, and do not want the existing order changed. Levada once predicted optimistically that people with these traits would gradually disappear; Gudkov, through a series of opinion surveys he ran himself, found that Homo Sovieticus had not disappeared at all — their numbers were growing. The third is Alexander Dugin, a loud champion of "Eurasianism," who hates liberalism, opposes modernity, calls for a return to tradition, is on warm terms with many right-wing conservatives in the West, and believes he has built for the Putin government the ideology it had always lacked.

Each of these seven people is using their own experience, their own ordeals and their own thinking to try to answer: what is Russia now, why is it like this, and where is it going? Some readers will finish the book feeling that Gessen chose too few subjects, or subjects who are not representative enough and speak for only part of Russia — that she should have found more ordinary Putin supporters rather than an outlier like Dugin. But an outside observer can at least start here, moving the usual field of view away from geopolitics, international relations, political and economic structures and "Kremlinology," toward individuals who are more ordinary and also remarkable, and listening to their stories. In them we may see more directly how Russia's history shapes the people inside the country, and what the relationship is between individual fate and the collective, instead of only talking about it in the abstract, or making analyses that look sweeping but are in fact isolated and one-sided.

Cover image: Reagan and Gorbachev, from Wikipedia; banner image: Putin, from the Kremlin