Mikhail Gorbachev’s 90th Birthday: "The Tanks Stay in the Barracks!"
Ai Weiwei will create a monument for "the man of the century" in Berlin /
Cinema for Peace will produce a feature film about his life
by Jaka Bizilj
"I follow Lenin and I will always remain a socialist."
These words come from a man who introduced free-market structures in the Soviet Union and allowed the Eastern bloc to abandon socialism. He said this not in the year he joined the communist party in his 10th grade, but today - as a credo on his 90th birthday which he will celebrate on March 2, 2021.
There is a popular quote: If you are not a socialist at 20, you have no heart; if you are still a socialist at 70, you have no brain. Mikhail Gorbachev is a bright man of many contradictions, and this quality to be able to embrace even contradicting worlds has made him the outstanding historical figure of the 20th century who changed the world in a colossal and peaceful way. Unlike the Tsars and his communist predecessors, Mikhail Gorbachev spared his opponents. They thanked him by arresting him in a coup in 1991. Although his arch-enemy Boris Yeltsin had tried to overthrow him before, Gorbachev did not banish him as an ambassador to Zimbabwe but left him in Moscow - until Yeltsin destroyed the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev's "softness" has never been appreciated in Russia, but it was this softness that made him the first leader of the largest country on earth, whose leadership did not end by death and was not secured with the death of others. His soft-power "zig-zag" between hardliners, the KGB, the Red Army as well as the supporters of his reform agenda did not work out economically - but his diplomacy and reforms brought freedom to the citizens of Russia for the first time after 1,000 years and permanently, without Gorbachev being replaced by a general, as he used to joke and what would have been quite possible, following the example of the deposition of Nikita Khrushchev. The latter was deprived of his power overnight in Crimea and imprisoned - while the coup in the same place against Gorbachev in 1991 failed - albeit in a Pyrrhic victory, which ended with the dissolution of communism.
In the summer of 1988, Gorbachev made the impossible possible - he introduced pluralism in communism at the party congress, giving rise to the birth of democracy. A year later, he was celebrated by hundreds of thousands in the streets of West Germany in a "Gorbasm" that triggered the wave of East German refugees. When Gorbachev wanted to further develop Soviet socialism into a just society with democracy and the right to self-determination and to endow his socialism with free-market principles, he initiated exactly the opposite: the abolition of socialism and communism. "The end of history", as concluded by Francis Fukuyama, was based on the realization that "equality for all" does not work, given the nature of human beings, and especially not without the biggest apparatus of oppression ever exercised. As soon as Gorbachev recognized the peoples' right to self-determination in the Eastern bloc, the people at home no longer wished of following Gorbachev and staying in the Soviet Union. After centuries of suffered or perceived servitude, they wanted to get out of the Soviet Union and away from the historical usurper Russia as quickly as possible. Suddenly those people demonstrated against Gorbachev to whom he had given the right to demonstrate. In Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, a million Balts stood hand in hand in an endless human chain and chanted for independence.
When Gorbachev was asked who had actually led the Soviet Union with socialist ideals in succession to Lenin, apart from himself, the farmer's son from Privolnje remained silent. Stalin, with 10 million executions and 60 million deaths, only narrowly beaten in the ranking of the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century by Hitler's 65 million victims, shaped a Soviet Union that no longer had much in common with its original ideals - it was a violent system that crushed all resistance with tanks in Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in Prague in 1968. Gorbachev's close friend during his student days Zdeněk Mlynář was one of the heads of the Prague Spring. Gorbachev was never allowed to meet him again, following party discipline. But when 12 civilians died in Vilnius in 1991 during the occupation of the TV tower by KGB Alpha troops and the Balts were threatened with a fate similar to that of previous generations, Gorbachev stopped the troops and KGB chairman Kruychkov, who even threatened the Balts publicly on TV. Kruychkov was later given the highest awards by Vladimir Putin.
Cinema for Peace's "Gorby 90!" posters being displayed all across Berlin.
When the Wall fell in Berlin on 9 November 1989, it was the happiest day of mankind - in the West and in East Germany. But not in Russia. Gorbachev knew from that moment until the coup in August 1991 that he had opened Pandora's box and that his own fate, as well as that of socialism and the Soviet Union, would depend decisively on a single question - does he let history run its course or does he stop this drive for independence by force? Mikhail Gorbachev first became the world's greatest hero by ending the Cold War, then a tragic hero by deciding not to stop the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union with tanks and bloodshed: He saved and liberated the world, but lost all that was dear to his heart - his presidency, his Soviet Union and socialism, and in a personal tragedy also he beloved wife.
Whenever Gorbachev told me about his life under the painted portrait of his wife Raisa, who died of cancer in Germany, he would mention the story of his father in World War II, how he was first reported dead and then one day returned over a hill in the sunshine in uniform. Every time he started to tell this story, Gorbachev had tears in his eyes. After a day of fieldwork, which the children had to do in place of the men assigned to the war, and finding decomposed bodies in the fields, he encountered German soldiers on the street of his village, Privolnje, one of whom gave the 11-year-old a chocolate cookie. That day came with lessons for life: the manifested horror of war must be avoided at all costs, and an enemy need not always be an enemy.
Karl Marx` and Friedrich Engels' Communist Manifesto and the ideal of socialism came to life after Lenin's October Revolution in 1917 when the proletariat could no longer find sufficient work in the countryside due to industrialization and had moved to the cities, where they successfully revolted against the Tsarist rule and feudal oppression. Interestingly, the Soviet Union's socialism seemed to work to some extent in the 1940s and 1950s. The Soviets had a similar life expectancy to Americans and were the first to launch Sputnik, Laika the dog, and then Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut, into space. "There were many things to be proud of", Gorbachev told me, who, after studying law in Moscow, spent eight years as "Governor and God" in his home region, enabling electrification, public bus transportation, and the Soviet Union's largest canal, which earned him the post of agricultural secretary in Moscow in 1978 and a seat on the Politburo from 1980 on. When three general secretaries died in three years, the Politburo finally let the younger reformer into power - an earlier appointment was stopped by death threats, among other things, when messenger Volkov tried to deliver Yuri Andropov's last wish to the Politburo from his deathbed. Instead, Chernenko, who was also already terminally ill too, became head of state. When it was finally Gorbachev's turn, he turned the Soviet Union upside down: "We can't go on living like this". Vodka bans, the release of dissidents, private ownership, and disarmament were symbols of Perestroika (transformation) and Glasnost (openness).
Gorbachev hated the arrogance of the Americans and called Ronald Reagan a dinosaur, but thanks to his empathy and open views to the world, he developed a friendly relationship with US-President "Ronnie", which resulted in the end of the Cold War. Sensation after sensation followed: the two Presidents held a New Year's address in the country of their respective arch-enemies in 1988, and in Reykjavik, they were even on the verge of signing a treaty according to which all nuclear weapons would be abolished by 1997! However, the greatest security measure of mankind failed because of one single word - "laboratory" - and because Reagan had to go back home because Nancy was already waiting. Reagan refused until he left, despite all Gorbachev's pleading, to limit his „Star Wars“- program in space called "SDI" to laboratory tests for ten years. Even members of the world press wept at this unique missed opportunity.
Gorbachev wanted to preserve and strengthen the Soviet Union but initiated its dissolution by granting the people of Eastern Europe the right to self-determination which his people demanded then too. Gorbachev's epochal achievement was to leave the tanks in the barracks at the crucial moment - when the Berlin Wall surprisingly fell, when the Balts launched their singing revolution when Yeltsin pushed for secession with Russia and other republics - while the Communist Party in China ruthlessly shot down the Gorbachev-inspired student uprisings at Tiananmen Square. Only one phone call from Gorbachev to his forces in East Germany, for example during the Monday demonstration with 100,000 people in Leipzig on 9 October, when armored cars were standing by and Kalashnikovs and blood supplies had been distributed, and the greatest peaceful civil revolution in human history would have never taken place.
After the night the Wall fell, Gorbachev answered the question why he had not reacted immediately: "I was asleep". The events took place after midnight Moscow time, but it seems unusual that Gorbachev should not have witnessed them. What is much more relevant: he gave a decisive order to his troops the next day when things were getting rough in Berlin, and special units of the National People's Army, skilled in innercity combat, were ordered to Berlin (and, not incongruously with the chaos in the GDR, got stuck in traffic): "The tanks stay in the barracks!"
This was also a result of unique diplomacy by West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who often had to mediate for Chancellor Kohl because Gorbachev stopped talking to Kohl for years after the man from the Palatinate had compared Gorbachev to Nazi-propaganda-head Goebbels. Genscher, on the other hand, was such a good friend that I had to hand my mobile phone over to Gorbachev when he heard that Genscher was on the phone to find out how things were going in Berlin for the anniversary of the Fall of the Wall. At that moment, Chancellor Merkel was waiting to greet and welcome Gorbachev, but he first actively took the phone away from my hand and conveyed his message: "Hans-Dietrich, if your state of health does not allow you to come to us, we will come to you!". I cannot say with certainty whether this was an allusion to the most emotional moment in German history, Genscher's quote on the balcony of the Prague embassy to 5000 desperate refugees: "We have come to you today...", initiating the mass release of East German refugees across the Iron Curtain and an unprecedented eruption of emotions, but I can testify that Gorbachev had learned German at school, and still spoke German seven decades later! When he spoke German to us that evening in a beer brewery pub on the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin, we wiped the sweat from our foreheads in relief that we had not said anything wrong at any time, while speaking German in his presence. Nobody had known that Gorbi understood German and still spoke it after so many years. At my invitation, we had first been to the famous restaurant Borchardt, but because there was none of his favorite German dish, pork knuckle, there, we went with the Cinema for Peace group to the beer pub next door. When Gorbi entered, we first encountered the dismayed faces of the guests present. I will never forget the cheers and applause that followed and the spontaneous standing ovation for the father of the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unity!
Gorbachev changed the world - initially by what he did do, and in the end, by what he did not do: He gave free rein to history and to people's desire for freedom without interfering. Putin would probably not have done this. He saw the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, in the wake of which he resigned from the KGB. Putin allegedly fired the only shot of the peaceful revolution in Germany when demonstrators rattled the gates of his KGB headquarters in Dresden after storming the Secret Police „Stasi“-headquarters and he warned them in fluent German that he had given the order to shoot to his troops. If Putin's eternal presidentship had existed back then, the GDR might still exist. The famous palace video on YouTube by Alexei Navalny shows Putin proudly holding his „Stasi“-membership card up to the camera.
Gorbachev saved the world from the Cold War and nuclear missiles because he was not a "strong leader" with loud threatening gestures, no Trump, no Xi, no Kim - no Putin. Whether liberal, emphatic presidents like Gorbachev or autocratic leaders will shape the 21st century, is in our hands and this will decide on our freedoms and our fate. Mikhail Sergeyevich spoke to my conscience, first personally: to please finally learn Russian and exchange my American girlfriend with a Russian one, as well as to go for a walk for an hour every day to be able to think clearly (to this day, I am not clear whether this was due to the degree of confusion of my thoughts or rather to be seen as fatherly advice), and then as a message to spread to everyone: "The 21st century will either stand for the downfall of humanity or for the birth of a new human renaissance." And that all spiritual and state leaders, as well as all citizens, would have to do their part if humanity was to survive!
In Gorbachev's liberal worldview, there is no place for autocrats, but rather for balancing heads of states like Merkel, Macron, Obama, and Biden. But they will only have a chance of success if democracy actually offers a reliable basis for prosperity, the joy of life, progress, and social security - all those things that have been a shining example to the autocrats for decades. This is currently no longer the case, China and other regimes have more efficiently defeated the Corona epidemic and Russia has developed its own vaccine, while the "West" stumbles from lockdown to lockdown and is now finally being portrayed as an incompetent, decadent, and a hypocritical discontinued model that wants to impose values on other states that it does not live by itself. And there is, unfortunately, much to be said for the fact that Europe's leading industrial nation and locomotive of prosperity, Germany, possess the technological know-how to develop the first miracle vaccine against Corona, but the politicians were not even able to have masks and disinfectants produced promptly in the first lockdown and procured virtually nearly nothing of the German vaccine in time for German citizens in the second lockdown. This is a state failure of immeasurable proportions that is glossed over daily, not unlike the socialist propaganda of Brezhnev and Honecker with platitudes like "Forward always, backward never.", while the stores stood empty. Under Gorbachev, the supply of food to the planned economy, some of which still existed, was so scarce in 1990/1991 that food parcels from Germany had to save people in Russia from hunger.
Gorbachev opened up a new age of humanity. His failure 30 years ago should not be perceived as a declaration of capitulation to an autocratic future for Russia and as socialism's farewell from democracy. Gorbachevs 90th birthday should serve as an inspiration for a strengthening of democracy as well as the arrival of socialism in reality: the goal is no longer Marx's failed ideology of the planned economy, which determines the social ownership of the means of production and the control of the production and distribution of goods, but a just and social market economy in which, on the one hand, all people enjoy equal rights and democratically elect their presidents every four years, and, on the other hand, build up something of their own with market-economy achievements. In Gorbachev's eyes, this is the task of social democracy today.
For his 80th birthday, the stars lined up at the Royal Albert Hall in London - from Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Scorpions to Kevin Spacey and Sharon Stone. The year before, Leonardo DiCaprio paid his respects at the Cinema for Peace Gala in Berlin. On this 90th birthday, there is no spectacle left. On a good day, friends and his house servant Volya remain, on a normal day, it is the infirmary. Mikhail Gorbachev can no longer walk unaided; his irrepressible strength, once steeled in up to 18 hours per day-shifts of harvesting in the 1940s in his Caucasian homeland, is coming to an end.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Supporting the Legacy of Gorbachev: The Wall Museum, Installation by Ai Weiwei, and a feature film
Mikhail Gorbachev's contribution to the German civil revolution is depicted in "THE WALL MUSEUM" at the East Side Gallery, which will reopen on May 1. The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was influenced by Gorbachev's impact on the student movement as well as the bloody suppression of the student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, is in consultation with the Mayor of Berlin Mitte, Stephan von Dassel, and Cinema for Peace to design an installation as a memorial and remembrance of Mikhail Gorbachev to be created after the Corona Pandemic.
Andrew Knight, writer of films such as the oscar-nominated movie "Hacksaw Ridge" by Andrew Knight, has developed a film story about the life of Mikhail Gorbachev, which is supported by Leonardo DiCaprio and which will be produced this year.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
The son of a collective farmer from the southern Russian region of Stavropol, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in Privolnje to a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother at a time when Stalin's "Holodomor" was claiming millions of lives. Three members of Gorbachev's family died of hunger. His father was reported to have been killed in action in the war against Hitler's occupation forces.
Thanks to a scholarship, the peasant boy - barely able to speak formal Russian when he arrived in Moscow in 1950 - studied law and agricultural economics, made a career as a communist propaganda secretary and Governor, rose to the Politburo of the CPSU in 1980, and was elected General Secretary in 1985. The now 90-year-old launched radical reforms, ended the nuclear arms race with the USA, facilitated democratic upheavals in the Eastern bloc countries, and the reunification of Germany.
Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. However, his internal reforms stalled and the right of self-determination of peoples, which he had granted to other countries, was suddenly demanded in the Soviet Union as well. Gorbachev could not stop the disintegration of the USSR without communist oppression. He voluntarily resigned at Christmas 1991 as the only and last Soviet president. The widower has a daughter and two granddaughters in Berlin, he lives in Moscow and runs a political foundation named after him, as far as his hospital stays still allow. He can no longer walk under his own steam.
Jaka Bizilj and the Cinema for Peace initiative, which he founded, have been also featuring artists and activists from Russia for years in addition to mainly American film artists, among them personalities such as Garri Kasparov and the members of Pussy Riot, as well as Sergei Magnitzki and Alexei Navalny, whose life was possibly saved by immediate evacuation from Omsk. Jaka Bizilj and Cinema for Peace showed films about and with the aforementioned and co-produced a film about the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya with Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon, Catherine Deneuve, and Iris Berben. Cinema for Peace also hosted the last president of the Soviet Union for the 20th and 25th anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Gorbachev was honored as "Man of the Century" - alongside other guarantors of a peaceful transition such as Harald Jäger, who opened the gates on Bornholmer Bridge and did not give the order to shoot when the crowds pressed, Hungary's Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth, who opened the Iron Curtain to German refugees, and Stanislav Petrov, who in a false alarm, contrary to his instructions, did not trigger the nuclear counter-attack against the West and thus saved the world from nuclear war. Bizilj and Cinema for Peace introduced Mikhail Gorbachev to the Green Oscar with Leonardo DiCaprio and are producing a feature film about Gorbachev.
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To gain greater insight into the life and work of Mikhail Gorbachev, Cinema for Peace recommends the 2020 film, Gorbachev. Heaven, directed by Russian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky. In a friendly environment, Gorbachev grapples with heavy topics, reflecting back on his long life and unpacking what it has meant on both a personal and global level.
Watch the trailer to the film "Gorbachev. Heaven" by Vitaly Mansky