His role and importance.

In the Russian original, Chapter Six of JUDGEMENT IN MOSCOW (“The Coming of Gorbachov”) was called “The Appearance of Tchichikoff” — a comparison between Mikhail Gorbachov and Russia’s most famous conman, the hero of Gogol’s classic DEAD SOULS.

The author expresses doubt as to whether Gorbachov was indeed the man, who “did more than any other to change Europe and the World in the last half of the 20th Century”. Bukovsky raises queries as to what ‘his’ glasnost and perestroika were all about.

*

Gorbachov did not rule for long (see Short Biographies).

He was selected by the Politburo in March 1985 and became the last leader of the Soviet Communist Party. As the shortlived President of the USSR appointed in March 1990, he left his post when the Soviet Empire collapsed late in 1991.

He was not, concluded Bukovsky, the force behind change during perestroika. A veteran dissident, the author of Judgement in Moscow (1995) commented:

“A provincial Party official, [Gorbachov] was capable at best of a petty swindle, no more.“

With a professional eye for character, theatre director Yury Lyubimov (who signed the ‘Letter of the Ten’) saw a striking similarity between the new CPSU General Secretary and the portrait in Gogol’s Dead Souls of Russia’s most famous confidence trickster [¹]:

“He’s the spitting image of Tchitchikoff! A gentleman pleasant in all respects.

“Just re-read, for amusement’s sake, Gogol’s description of his immortal hero:

• ‘In the carriage sat a gentleman, not handsome but not of an unpleasant appearance; not too fat and not too thin; you could not say he was old nor that he was too young’.”

(“Gorbachov indeed,” responded Bukovsky. “Everything but the birthmark on his forehead.”)

The CPSU leadership had made him General Secretary, Bukovsky continued,

“for his rounded, pleasant features, as the man most suitable to carry out the grandiose ‘KGB operation’ conceived and developed at the end of Brezhnev’s rule by Yury Andropov, the master of such schemes.”

*

Yet at the time Gorbachov was admired and respected worldwide.

Did he devise key changes in the existing system? Yes, although they were principally aimed at preserving the USSR and keeping the Party elite in power. Some thought Gorbachov was bowing to public pressure. In romantic fashion he might well have declared (as a French politician did in 1848), “I am their Leader. I must follow them!” Or so outside observers believed.

Of the hundreds and thousands of politicians, journalists and academics in the world, “only a handful remained sufficiently sober”, writes Bukovsky. Those few did not succumb to the temptation to believe and trust in Gorbachov. The ones who decided to voice their doubts, lamented Bukovsky, were yet fewer in number. “Yet all it took was one good look,” wrote the author:

“to listen once to Gorbachov’s ungrammatical, clumsy and senseless chatter – translation greatly enhanced his words – and dispel any illusions. A superficial knowledge of the Soviet system was all it took to dispel such illusions: a liberal reformer could not be promoted within the Party.

“There are no such miracles.”

*

Gorbachov was, in fact, KGB head Andropov’s protégé.

A 1970s photograph in the most detailed English biography of the last Soviet ruler [²] shows him and Raissa Gorbachova sitting with Yury Andropov [³] and his wife Tatyana around a bonfire in the Crimea, relaxing and singing songs by the popular bard Yury Vizbor.

Some sense of Gorbachov’s seemingly interminable public statements may be obtained in Chapter Thirteen, with its numerous and, frankly, banal quotations from the new Soviet leader — except that translation, as Bukovsky warned, makes many of his public utterances and exchanges with foreign leaders seem more coherent than their original (“ungrammatical, clumsy and senseless chatter” in Russian).

Gorbachov’s close colleague Anatoly Chernyaev offers revealing and critical comments [⁴] about the Soviet leader’s attitudes and behaviour, especially with regard to Lithuania: “I did not think that Gorbachov’s inspiring undertaking would end so dishonourably,” he wrote in mid-January 1991. Politburo member Vadim Medvedev expressed similar concerns twelve months before [⁵], during the Baku operation.

In graphic terms, Bukovsky documents these and other changes as The Chronicle of Collapse (14.2) in the final chapter of his Judgement in Moscow (2016).

*

A contemporary contrast to this often incomprehensible volubility, welcomed by many at the time, was the appearance on television of “600 Seconds” [⁶], Alexander Nevzorov’s terse, Western-style and mercifully brief weekly series of reports …

John Crowfoot

27 April 2025

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NOTES

1. See Chapter Six, Judgement in Moscow, 1995: 6.1, “Letter of the Ten“.
   ↩︎
2. William Taubman, Gorbachev: his Life and Times, Simon & Schuster: New York, 2017 (880 pp).
   ↩︎
3. Yury Andropov (1914-1984) was the longest-serving head of State Security during the post-Stalin years.
   
   He was responsible for the systematic persecution of Soviet dissenters (e.g., Chapter Four, “Deportation or the Madhouse“, Judgement in Moscow); he advised the authorities how best to deal with Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn; he tried to prevent and then reverse the USSR’s incursion into Afghanistan.
   ↩︎
4. The last Chapter of Judgement in Moscow (14.2: A Chronicle of Collapse) documents Anatoly Chernyaev’s disillusion in his personal diary comments in January 1991. Compare the massive public response in Moscow: 23 January 1991*, Pb 223.
   
   Also see Chernyaev’s My Six Years with Gorbachev, Pennsylvania State University Press (2000).
   ↩︎
5. Chapter Fourteen, “Foes and Allies” (14.1: The Privatisation of Power).
   
   Medvedev was a ‘liberal’ member of Gorbachov’s team, but a Party careerist. See his comical attempt in 1970 to discuss politics with the intransigent dissenter Revolt Pimenov (Chronicle report, CCE 15.3).
   ↩︎
6. Nevzorov was a right-wing Soviet commentator. In 1991 he authored and promoted “Our Lads”, a documentary film praising the attempt to stem the independence movement in Lithuania, for which he was publicly criticised and condemned (see note 1, 23 January 1991*, Pb 223).
   
   Later, under Putin, Nevzorov became a critic of the regime and was regularly published in Novaya gazeta.
   ↩︎

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