Gorbachev’s Unhealthy Diet

Gorbachev is dead. God save Russia.

We know Gorbachev, living or dead doesn’t make a fig of a difference to Russia or the world, today. Russia is doomed, says America and the NATO forces. It was doomed in the late eighties too when the Cold war was fast losing steam. At that time, Mikhail Gorbachev was touted to be the saviour who pulled the Russians miraculously (or precariously) from the brink of disaster, and in the process, set in motion Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring).???

Russians, in Hollywood movies, have been the bad guys right from the 1960s till around 2001 when they bequeathed their positional value to the Islamic fundamentalists. Ideologies always are about the dominance of one belief over the other, and rarely, about the overall benevolence of mankind. I don’t really believe that any political ideology is superior, i.e., capitalism, communism or socialism. Or inferior. The value they derive is when they are mapped against time. When a country adopts a system, it is often a protracted (and painful) reaction to an earlier one that was oppressive. Commies won’t like me for this because they hold Gorbachev in great contempt for disintegrating the USSR into 15 countries and for defanging communism. The Pizza Hut image of Gorbachev has provided a grist for the mill for meme-makers to make hay.

Gorbachev tucking into a juicy pizza from Pizza Hut (and not Pizza-chev Hutsosky) is all that’s wrong with capitalism. The older generation of Commies would have us believe that. While there’s no denying the great ills of capitalism but would humans have been happier if the only presiding ideology was communism and the State overseeing everything with an iron fist? This is a loaded question, and the answer isn’t straightforward.

The original four factors of production were land, labour capital and enterprise, and more recently they added intellectual property and now they are harping unstoppably about adding data to the expanded list. Who are “they”? Well, they are the same guys who first said (or did they pontificate?) that data is the new oil setting OPEC in a tizzy and then running to great academic institutions wanting to learn all there is to statistics on steroids, while the OPEC Sheikhs were still warming up to this idea, exchanging alhamdulillah during their cartel-controlled high tea sessions. I have a friend who lives in Bahrain or is it Muscat, I am always confused, and I keep asking her what’s it like to be a Sheikh in the 2020s. She merely “shakes” her head in utter disbelief at my ignorance. She could have chosen to nod. But she doesn’t. ?

Without digressing any further, if we go back to the factors of production - whether they are four, five or six - a nation’s economy is about wealth creation through these levers and the perceptible distribution afterwards (within these levers) to create more heft. And the distribution is never equal or fair. It can never be. If you leave it to the government to decide who gets how much and when, over time it becomes iron-fisted and dictatorial and yet, the leaders, often accumulate great personal wealth. Whereas a free-market economy where the market forces are the major determinants isn’t free of ills either. A different class of exploiters are birthed who may unfairly stifle competition through corrupt syndicates or even better still – simply buy out competitors to expand their portfolio. Sometimes I imagine such “mergers & acquisitions” to be like Harun Al Rashid’s harem-building spree.??

Cycles manifest, we know. When a system becomes suffocating and grossly inadequate, something else will come up - a tweaked version perhaps. In time, it takes in the next generation of budding exploiters and the exploited. Human civilization is a study of exploitation and resurrection, and it is a spaghetti loop that stretches on endlessly. Going back to Gorbachev and the eighties, the USSR was in a state of terminal decline and communism needed a major upliftment. Gorbachev, it can be argued, may have provided that human face that was much needed. Eating pizza was a way of gaining acceptance globally at a time when capitalism was the dominant ideology.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four is quintessential in its form on how terribly harmful iron-fisted governments can be, and his other book, the one I like best, Animal Farm, is about what happens when we oust the ruling dispensation and replace it with another which we believe will be our saviour. That doesn’t happen of course because as the saying is, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Equality (in reality) is when “all animals are equal but some more equal than others.” ???????

Gorbachev lost his power in a coup and was unceremoniously replaced. His policies of openness misfired and failed miserably. The succeeding decade brought in massive economic hardships – inflation, food shortage, unemployment, et al - birthing yet another class of haves and have-nots.

The KGB were the bad guys till the eighties and then we had the Russian Mob funded by the Oligarchs, taking over. While the KGB were a frugal lot – except while wanting to go nuclear and it needed a British Secret Agent every time, to put paid to their grandiose plan - the Russian Mob, is marked by latter-day capitalism in all its harmful grandeur straight out of the dachas. For mankind, it took a hundred years to pursue wealth creation in an industrialized manner as we know it to realize that we are consuming 1.5 or 1.6 earths, every year. If we don’t stop right away or go carbon-neutral or net-zero or whichever fanciful term we deem fit, there will be no earth to save or feel fancy-free about. We are screwed and now we have put our faith in conscious capitalism (and its ilk) to save us from an impending disaster. The looming question is, will it be a present-day Gorbachev? ???????

Putin, since his Crimea annexation, has been on an expansionist march of belligerence, and we know what that has led to. Putin’s rise was inevitable. After many years of economic failure, it was obvious that national pride was critically wounded, and they needed a strongman to nurture it back to health. Putin promised to be the gateway but look where it has got Russia in its present day.

In hindsight and everything is really in hindsight, would it have been better if Glasnost & Perestroika never existed? I mean Russia didn’t come out even with an illusion of a democratically elected government, in the later years, did it? What if communism was not weakened would it have been a counter-balancing force to the hedonistic & conceited march of capitalism? Would it be that other kid in the park who doesn’t allow the fat kid to hog all the see-saw space???

It’s difficult to visualize these things unless one is an economist but seeing it through the lens of international relations, the possibility, in that case, of a nuclear war would have been stronger. For how long would trigger-happy American presidents or the blood-curdling Russian Politburo members (straight out of Rocky 4) be able to ignore each other’s constant goading? On the other hand, I believe, the space program would have seen much greater success. Both the forces and going back to the 60s were obsessively driven in their space initiatives. A weakened Russia may have partially quenched America’s thirst for space dominance. This is not to imply that great progress has not been made in space technology, but I believe it could have been a whole lot more if Russia had thrived. The fat kid had all the see-saw space. The Chinese kid came much later. Of course, in the later years, the top-tiered Russian scientists were recruited by America, but it would never be the same thing. It would be yet another case of great talent finding a better life.

Jingoistic feelings, harmful as they are to humanity, have their short-term benefits – particularly when routed to science & technology. Today Putin is what Gorbachev was not but what’s the big deal? Both have rendered millions of Russians unhappy in their quest for new world order.

Dominance through accessibility or through annexation, what’s your style, my dear reader? ??