One annoying rhetorical trope of the post‑9/11 era was the personalization of violent aims that were not personal. I remember Dennis Miller making the rounds of the cable news channels to discuss why he had converted from a lazy “I don’t like any of ’em” brand of politics to full-throated support for the Republican Party, explaining that “9/11 changed me” and that he backed any measures the George W. Bush administration wanted to take in fighting back against “foreigners trying to kill me”. To kill Dennis Miller in particular, you see, as if al‑Qaeda were sending elite death squads to Montecito to take out has-been comedians. But better thinkers than Dennis Miller have employed the same rhetoric. George Orwell famously began a 1941 essay with the declaration that “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” He went on to explain that he knew full well that the Nazi pilots did “not feel any enmity against me as an individual”. But they believed that they were serving their country by dropping bombs on England. Those bombs stood as good a chance of killing Orwell as anybody else.
Orwell is most famous for Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel set in what seemed to Orwell, writing in 1948, like a possible future: the world divided into three totalitarian mega-states modeled after the USSR under Josef Stalin. There are scattered references in the novel to “the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties” that had managed “to convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized society”. In real life, there was no exchange of atomic bombs between the superpowers early enough in their development that the species might have survived such a war. Instead, the A‑bomb gave way to the H‑bomb, and by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which John F. Kennedy estimated to have had a one-in-three chance of leading to thermonuclear war, such a war was likely to mean not just the end of organized society but the end of life on Earth, or at least any life more advanced than the insects. That brush with apocalypse led to a period of détente, but by the time I was old enough to have any real awareness of the world outside my preschool classroom, Ronald Reagan was not only ballooning the military budget but stoking Soviet paranoia with saber-rattling rhetoric. As the real 1984 rolled around, America’s nuclear stockpile stood at over 20,000 missiles, the Soviets had amassed nearly 40,000, and nuclear war was at the forefront of the public consciousness. Turn on the TV, and it wasn’t just The Day After giving us a sneak preview of the nuclear holocaust that the next year or two likely had in store for us— fuckin’ Benson had a nuclear war episode. You could switch on Silver Spoons at 8:30 p.m., smack in the middle of the FCC’s “Family Viewing Hour”, and watch Ricky take us to DEFCON 1. Carl Sagan wrapped up Cosmos with an hour-long plea to those in power not to end the world, but it was clear that this plea was almost certainly in vain. And I was going to die as a child.
Then, thirty-four days after I turned eleven, Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Those who contend that history is largely the product of impersonal forces playing themselves out, rather than a narrative woven from contingencies, argue that a young reformer was bound to rise to the leadership at this point in Soviet history, but the 1991 coup demonstrated that there were plenty of hardliners milling around the levers of power, and kingmakers such as Andrei Gromyko could have thrown their weight behind one of them instead. The Politburo members who installed Gorbachev didn’t see him as a radical, but rather as a lieutenant of Andropov—and if he was perhaps a bit more moderate than his mentor, that was an acceptable price to pay for a leader who was actually in good health. It took Gorbachev a while to maneuver people in and out of the Politburo so that he would have sufficient backing to launch his major initiatives: openness, restructuring, rapprochement with the West. Giving the world a future.
The Republicans have spent the past 30+ years crowing that Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War, but I don’t think that the math here is very complicated. Ronald Reagan + Leonid Brezhnev = nuclear brinksmanship. Ronald Reagan + Yuri Andropov = nuclear brinksmanship. Ronald Reagan + Konstantin Chernenko = nuclear brinksmanship. Ronald Reagan + Mikhail Gorbachev = de-escalation and a path to peace. Look at the variable associated with the change. At the end of the 1980s, Time named Gorbachev not just Man of the Year but Man of the Decade. To me, he was more than that. Again, I hate the narcissistic view of global conflict that leads people to say that Osama bin Laden is trying to kill me, but where Gorbachev is concerned, I’m a total hypocrite on this. Maybe it’s different when it involves not persecution but gratitude. Because if you reroll history without that specific individual, who strove to bring the world back from the brink and was able to work his way through the Party apparatus and put himself in a position to do just that… I don’t know how many times I get to grow up. Mikhail Gorbachev saved my life.
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
1931 2022
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