戈尔巴乔夫的真空 苏联领导人的遗产如何帮助解释俄罗斯的战争

 戈尔巴乔夫的真空

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/gorbachev-vacuum

苏联领导人的遗产如何帮助解释俄罗斯的战争

作者：Michael Kimmage

2022年8月31日

俄罗斯民间文化珍视圣洁的傻瓜形象。圣洁的傻瓜源自东正教，与传统社会格格不入。神圣的傻瓜说的是真话，尽管对其他人来说，这可能听起来像废话。圣洁的傻瓜在生活中跌跌撞撞，经历过成功即失败，失败即成功的经历。圣洁的傻瓜可以成为先知。虽然其他人都专注于世界的现状，但圣洁的傻瓜可以直觉到世界可能是什么样子，也许世界会是什么样子。智慧最初可能看起来像愚蠢，而愚蠢在一开始也可能看起来是智慧。

可以把8月30日去世的前苏联领导人米哈伊尔-戈尔巴乔夫看作是一个圣洁的傻瓜。他与他在1931年出生的传统苏联社会格格不入，正是因为他是如此真诚的苏联人--因为他从未停止过真诚的苏联人，甚至在1991年苏联解体之后。他说出了关于国际政治的一个重要真理，那就是国际政治应该表现出对人类的某种关注，而不仅仅是国家的利己主义，这一真理在核时代具有特殊的意义。而他最大的成功，即20世纪80年代末的苏联改革，却变成了他最大的失败，因为改革导致了整个苏维埃帝国的和平革命。戈尔巴乔夫将苏联改革得面目全非。

但在另一种意义上，戈尔巴乔夫是一个圣洁的傻瓜的反面，因为他根本不是一个预言家。在20世纪80年代初，他确实直觉到了世界可能是这样的。他的乌托邦的特点是：

一个以闪亮的列宁主义为核心的苏联和一个从里斯本到海参崴的和平的欧洲：自由、博爱和平等最终实现。但他并没有预见到他的改革进行到一定程度后，世界会是什么样子。他没有预见到苏联的解体。他没有预见到20世纪90年代零散的欧洲，一半在欧盟，一半在外面，一半在北约，一半在外面。他没有预见到俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔-普京的崛起，他不比戈尔巴乔夫逊色，但他对苏联的理想主义没有投资。普京对苏联力量（以及俄罗斯力量）的欣赏，戈尔巴乔夫从未分享过。

保持信息畅通。

每周提供深入的分析。

归根结底，戈尔巴乔夫之谜在于戈尔巴乔夫这个人和戈尔巴乔夫这个政治家之间的区别。他们是两个非常不同的人。

正直的人，不雅的制度

在他的全盛时期，戈尔巴乔夫可能是傲慢的。他是一个关于知识分子掌权的案例研究，在知识分子的诱惑下，追随大思想--所有的方式都是自焚。然而，戈尔巴乔夫的正派是出类拔萃的，而且不仅仅是对苏联体制而言，在这个体制中，犯罪和国家权力无缝交融。由于他的正派，他可以接受其他政治家很少会接受的代价。戈尔巴乔夫的傲慢并没有阻止他为原则做出牺牲。

这种正派本身会产生世界历史性的影响。戈尔巴乔夫并不是一个真正的和平主义者。有时，包括1991年1月在立陶宛，苏联士兵杀死了14名和平抗议者，并打伤了140人，他使用国家暴力来镇压他不赞成的政治举措。那么，戈尔巴乔夫的正派不在于他拒绝暴力，而在于他拒绝大规模暴力和虚无主义暴力。他可以使用大规模暴力的手段，但在大多数情况下，他选择不使用这些手段来对付波罗的海各共和国、捷克斯洛伐克、东德、匈牙利和波兰的持不同政见者或分离运动。他并不想让这些苏联共和国和卫星国离开。但他确实让他们走了，这是欧洲历史上罕见的礼物。

另一份礼物是戈尔巴乔夫放弃自己权力的方式，它不那么明显，也更复杂。到1991年12月，他已经被俄罗斯联邦最高苏维埃主席鲍里斯-叶利钦击败了。这一年的8月初，戈尔巴乔夫被苏联强硬派发动的未遂政变所削弱，他们将他软禁起来。策划者的无能注定了这场阴谋的失败。仅仅几个月后，戈尔巴乔夫终于被迫下台，当时叶利钦和他的乌克兰和白俄罗斯同行们开始解散苏维埃联盟。但戈尔巴乔夫并没有召集军队，呼吁在街头使用暴力，或在克格勃内部寻找忠诚的人，以武力维持他的权力。相反，戈尔巴乔夫决定成为后苏维埃时代俄罗斯的乔治-华盛顿。他表明，和平移交权力既是必要的，也是可能的。与约瑟夫-斯大林和列昂尼德-勃列日涅夫等苏联领导人不同，估计也与普京不同，戈尔巴乔夫得出结论，最好不要死在办公室。对那些拥有权力的人来说，最好不要不惜一切代价抓住它。

苏联式的漏洞

戈尔巴乔夫可能是一个体面的人。

但他是一个灾难性的糟糕的政治家。

尽管戈尔巴乔夫自信满满，智力超群，举止庄重，但他根本不知道自己在做什么。

他以维护一种对苏联的实际运作没有什么影响的列宁主义为名，采取了一系列行动，很快就失去了控制。

在为了拯救苏联而给予个人和团体更大的自由之后，他不得不看着他们利用这种自由来破坏苏联。

他不了解他所统治的人民的动机。

他不理解他们的民族主义。

他不理解他们的愤世嫉俗。

他不了解胁迫在维持苏联生存方面所起的作用，因此他对这种胁迫通过他任期内的流行语glasnost（开放）和perestroika（重组）而减弱后会发生什么感到天真。

不能把普京在乌克兰的可怕战争归咎于戈尔巴乔夫。

戈尔巴乔夫在反对他不喜欢的普京的方式上可能是不均衡的，但戈尔巴乔夫不会打这些战争。

然而，戈尔巴乔夫确实对一系列情况负有责任，这些情况是普京发动战争的前提条件，也是俄罗斯与西方关系的灾难性状态。

戈尔巴乔夫无能的政治家精神在东欧和中欧创造了一个巨大的真空。

他对这个具有战略意义的地区没有可持续的愿景。

他太正派了，无法将其置于莫斯科的控制之下，也太苏联了，无法谈判出其他的安排，所以他只是被随之而来的混乱所淹没了。

戈尔巴乔夫对东欧和中欧这一具有战略意义的地区没有可持续的愿景。

戈尔巴乔夫在1991年被迫退休时留下的真空，给俄罗斯和西方都带来了问题。普京将这一真空解释为俄罗斯的损失，在这方面，普京代表许多俄罗斯人说话。普京认为，俄罗斯失去的东西，它必须重新获得--如果有必要，通过军事力量。2008年在格鲁吉亚，然后在2014年在乌克兰，普京开始了苏联的继承战争--在苏联解体后不到20年。戈尔巴乔夫的真空在西方大多被解释为西方的收获，1991年新独立国家的出现验证了这一论点。但是，如果西方在20世纪90年代为欧洲想出了一个可行的安全架构，如果它真的想出了戈尔巴乔夫的真空，今天就不会有乌克兰的战争。北约和欧盟填补了大部分的真空。但它们并没有填补所有的真空，而在这些真空中，一场新的冷战已经形成了。

对戈尔巴乔夫这位政治家的批评不应掩盖对戈尔巴乔夫这个人的有条件的钦佩之情。他当然不是圣洁的，但也不是完全愚蠢的。他也不是小人，尽管许多俄罗斯人对他充满了蔑视。正如哈姆雷特王子在谈到他已故的国王父亲时所说的那样"他是一个人，把他当作所有的人"。

MICHAEL KIMMAGE是美国天主教大学的历史教授和德国马歇尔基金会的访问学者。从2014年到2016年，他在美国国务院的政策规划人员中任职，负责俄罗斯/乌克兰事务。

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The Gorbachev Vacuum

How the Soviet Leader’s Legacy Helps Explain Russia’s Wars

By Michael Kimmage

August 31, 2022

Russian folk culture cherishes the figure of the holy fool. Derived from Orthodox Christianity, the holy fool is out of sync with conventional society. The holy fool speaks the truth, though to others it may sound like nonsense. The holy fool stumbles through life, experiencing successes that are failures and failures that are successes. Holy fools can be prophets. Although everyone else is preoccupied with the world as it is, the holy fool can intuit the world as it might be, and perhaps the world as it will be. Wisdom can initially look like folly, and folly can appear at the outset to be wisdom.

It is possible to see Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who died on August 30, at the age of 91, as a holy fool. He was out of sync with the conventional Soviet society into which he was born, in 1931, precisely because he was so sincerely Soviet—and because he never ceased being sincerely Soviet, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He spoke an important truth about international politics, which is that it should show some concern for humanity and not just for national egotism, a truth that took on particular significance in the nuclear age. And his greatest success, the reform of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, turned out to be his greatest failure, when reform led to peaceful revolutions across the Soviet imperium. Gorbachev reformed the Soviet Union out of existence.

But in another sense, Gorbachev was the opposite of a holy fool, for he was anything but a prophet. In the early 1980s, he did intuit the world as it might be. His utopia featured a Soviet Union with a shining Leninism at its core and a Europe peacefully stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok: liberty, fraternity, and equality finally achieved. But he did not intuit the world as it would be once his reforms ran their course. He did not intuit the fall of the Soviet Union. He did not intuit the piecemeal Europe of the 1990s, half in the European Union and half out, half in NATO and half out. He did not intuit the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was no less Soviet than Gorbachev but who had no investment in Soviet idealism. Putin had an appreciation of Soviet power (and of Russian power) that Gorbachev never shared.

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Ultimately, the mystery of Gorbachev rests on a distinction between Gorbachev the man and Gorbachev the statesman. They were two very different people.

DECENT MAN, INDECENT SYSTEM

In his heyday, Gorbachev could be arrogant. He is a case study of the intellectual in power, with the intellectual’s temptation to follow big ideas—all the way to the point of self-immolation. Nevertheless, Gorbachev’s decency was exceptional, and not just for the Soviet system, in which crime and state power seamlessly mingled. Because of his decency, he would accept costs that few other politicians would accept. Gorbachev’s arrogance did not stop him from sacrificing for principle.

This decency would itself come to have world-historical implications. Gorbachev was not really a man of peace. At times, including in Lithuania in January 1991, when Soviet soldiers killed 14 peaceful protesters and injured 140 more, he employed state violence to suppress political initiatives of which he did not approve. Gorbachev’s decency, then, lay not in his rejection of violence but in his rejection of mass violence and nihilistic violence. The means of mass violence were at his disposal, but for the most part, he chose not to use them against dissident or breakaway movements in the Baltic republics, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland. He did not want to let those Soviet republics and satellite states go. But he did let them go—a rare gift in the annals of European history.

Another gift, less obvious and more complicated, was the way in which in Gorbachev gave up his own power. By December of 1991, he had been outdueled by the chair of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin. Earlier that year, in August, Gorbachev had been weakened by an attempted coup carried out by Soviet hard-liners, who had put him under house arrest. The incompetence of the plotters doomed the plot. Just months later, Gorbachev was finally forced out, when Yeltsin and his Ukrainian and Belarusian counterparts started dissolving the Soviet Union. But Gorbachev did not summon the military, call for violence in the streets, or seek out loyalists within the KGB to keep him in power by force. Instead, Gorbachev decided to become the George Washington of post-Soviet Russia. He demonstrated that a peaceful transfer of power was both necessary and possible. Unlike Soviet leaders such as Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev—and unlike Putin, presumably—Gorbachev concluded that it was better not to die in office. It was better for those with power not to hold on to it at all costs.

A SOVIET-SHAPED HOLE

Gorbachev may have been a decent man. But he was a catastrophically bad statesman. Despite his self-confidence, his intellectual brilliance, and his dignified bearing, Gorbachev had no idea what he was doing. In the name of preserving a form of Leninism that had little purchase on the actual functioning of the Soviet Union, he undertook a series of actions that quickly spun out of control. After granting individuals and groups greater freedom for the sake of saving the Soviet Union, he had to watch as they employed this freedom to undermine the Soviet Union. He did not understand the motivations of the people he ruled. He did not understand their nationalism. He did not understand their cynicism. He did not understand the role that coercion played in keeping the Soviet Union afloat, and he was thus naive about what would happen when that coercion was diminished through glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), the buzzwords of his tenure.

Gorbachev cannot be blamed for Putin’s terrible wars in Ukraine. Gorbachev may have been uneven in how he spoke out against Putin, whom he did not like, but Gorbachev would not have fought these wars. Gorbachev does bear responsibility, however, for a set of circumstances that served as the precondition for Putin’s wars and for the disastrous state of Russia’s relations with the West. Gorbachev’s inept statesmanship created an immense vacuum in eastern and central Europe. He had no sustainable vision for this strategically crucial region. He was too decent to keep it under Moscow’s thumb and too Soviet to negotiate some other set of arrangements, so he simply got swept away by the ensuing confusion.

Gorbachev had no sustainable vision for the strategically crucial region of eastern and central Europe.

The vacuum Gorbachev left when he was compelled to retire, in 1991, has posed problems for both Russia and the West. Putin has interpreted this vacuum as Russia’s loss, and Putin speaks for many Russians in this regard. That which Russia lost, Putin has argued, it must regain—through military force, if necessary. In 2008 in Georgia and then in 2014 in Ukraine, Putin started the wars of Soviet succession—less than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s vacuum has mostly been interpreted in the West as the West’s gain, and the raft of freshly independent countries in 1991 validated that thesis. But if the West had figured out a workable security architecture for Europe in the 1990s, if it had truly figured out the Gorbachev vacuum, there would be no war in Ukraine today. NATO and the EU filled much of the vacuum. But they did not fill all of it, and in the interstices a new Cold War has taken shape.

Criticism of Gorbachev the statesman should not overshadow a qualified admiration for Gorbachev the man. He was certainly not holy, but neither was he wholly foolish. And he was no villain, despite the scorn that many Russians have come to feel for him. As Prince Hamlet said of his deceased kingly father: “He was a man, take him for all in all.”

MICHAEL KIMMAGE is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Visiting Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio.

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