The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2016 71 lics of the Soviet Union, it contains much more. The Russian title, Posle Kremlya (After the Kremlin) , is more apt because the book presents important thoughts regarding history, democracy, international relations and the external events that influenced Russia’s revival of authoritarianism. These themes are worked into an account of Gorbachev’s own activity from 1992. Being the object of vilifica- tion by Stalinist forces who accuse him of destroying the Soviet Union to please the “West,” he makes a vigorous effort to defend his record. His account, it must be said, rings true, while his accusers’ charges are vicious invention. After all, it was his nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, who conspired to destroy the Soviet Union while Gorbachev was trying, with the moral and political support of the United States, to turn it into a democratic federation. And it was Boris Yeltsin who first appointed the current president, Vladimir Putin, to the post. Gorbachev is unsparing in his criti- cism of President Putin’s actions that undermine democratic institutions and inhibit the political habits that make democracy work, but he does not make the mistake of calling it a retreat from democracy. Gorbachev knows well that Russia has never had democracy; what he achieved with the reforms he cham- pioned was the possibility of developing democratic institutions. What Russia had in the 1990s was more akin to crime-infested anarchy than true democracy. The myth in the “West” that Russia was “democratiz- ing” under Yeltsin survived even his military attack on an elected legislature Gorbachev’s Lament The New Russia Mikhail Gorbachev, translated by Arch Tait, Polity Press, 2016, $35/hardcover, 400 pages. Reviewed By Jack F. Matlock Jr. When the Soviet Union came apart at the end of 1991, the nuclear arms race between the United States and the USSR had ended, a negotiated peace that ben- efited all parties had replaced the Cold War, and the Iron Curtain that divided Europe had vanished. We seemed to be on the threshold of a new Europe. President George Herbert Walker Bush called it “a Europe whole and free.” President Mikhail Sergeyevich Gor- bachev called it “our common European home.” Bush went further as he assem- bled a coalition to oppose Iraq’s occupa- tion of Kuwait, proposing nothing less than “a new world order.” Now, a quarter-century later, rhetoric emanating from Moscow and Washington resembles that of the Cold War. Government officials and armchair strategists in both capitals speak of geo- political competition in terms that were once reserved for the struggle between “communist slavery” and the “free world.” They seem to ignore the fact that Russia is no longer communist and is, in most respects, a totally different state than was the Soviet Union. Anyone puzzled by the way the unity and hope of the early 1990s has morphed to the division and fear we are experiencing today will benefit from reading and pondering Mikhail Gor- bachev’s latest book, The New Russia . Its contents cover more than its English title suggests: while it does give the reader a running account of events in Russia after it shed the other 14 repub- BOOKS in 1993 and the patently fraudu- lent presidential election of 1996. For most Russians, if conditions of the 1990s could be attributed to democracy, then democracy was not what they wanted. The potty- mouthed pronounce the Russian word demokratiya as dermokratia (shitocracy). For diplomats, particularly Ameri- can diplomats, Gorbachev’s descrip- tion of the impact U.S. policy had on internal Russian developments and Russian external behavior is instructive. Gorbachev feels betrayed not only by Boris Yeltsin and those who broke up a democratizing Soviet Union, but also by the successors of those Western leaders with whom he cooperated to end the Cold War. The Western leaders of his political generation gave him broad assurances in the transformative years 1989 and 1990 that they would not “take advan- tage” of a liberated Eastern Europe; that, in the words of Secretary of State James Baker III, “NATO jurisdiction would not move to the East, not one inch,” if a united Germany was allowed to stay in the NATO alliance. This was not a legally binding obligation, and the subsequent expansion of NATO was not a bad idea because it was a broken promise. It was a bad idea, period, if the goal was a Europe whole and free. Europe would inevitably stay divided unless Russia were embedded in a system that united the continent rather than perpetuating division. The progressive expansion of NATO to the east was only part of the prob- lem. The Bush-Cheney administration withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that had served as the foundation for U.S.-Soviet negotiations to reduce nuclear weaponry. That, along