Gorby, Staged and Upstaged

(Photo: Dennis Paquin / Reuters)

This November the world will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event which at the time seemed to herald a new era of freedom, not only for millions of people in East Germany but throughout the Soviet-dominated Eastern European bloc and, indeed, in the Soviet Union itself.  "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Ronald Reagan famously demanded in his speech in the still-divided Berlin in 1987, and while Gorbachev didn't exactly tear it down -- there were countless volunteers more than happy to do the job -- he didn't send in Soviet troops to stop it from coming down, as previous Soviet leaders most assuredly would have done.  

Mikhail Gorbachev, it was widely assumed, was something different -- somewhat.  "This is a man we can do business with," British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in her best British shopkeeper daughter's voice not long after Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985 (his title was thankfully shortened to simply "President of the Soviet Union" in 1990).  The newspapers at the time dubbed him "Gorby," though the predictably non-conformist New Republic preferred to call him "Gorbo."  That moniker never caught on, probably because its reference to the reclusive film star was so off the mark.  Gorbachev unlike Garbo in her post-film career years, was everywhere in the 1980s and early '90s.  His speeches, policies, his 1987 book  Perestroika (restructuring) with its call for greater freedom and openness (glasnost) in the stultified, stratified, economically stagnant Soviet Union, and the signature large birthmark adorning his bald pate (resembling either the Korean Peninsula or the Siberian archipelago of islands known as Durak Aprel, depending on who you ask), all were as ubiquitous as Stalin and his pipe were in the 1930s and '40s.  Gorbachev seems to have never questioned the basic system Lenin had created, but thought he could "reform" it without destroying it -- a claim that was more PR than political reality -- and his annoucement that he possessed the magic formula to square the circle, i.e., produce freedom in a society structured from top to bottom expressly to deny freedom, brought praise from the more gullible sectors of the West (remember those journalists who regularly experienced "Gorbasms?") as well as attacks from his political enemies at home.  Those attacks reached critical mass in August of 1991.  They're also the subject of The President's Holiday, a play by British playwright Penny Gold, which opened at the Hampstead Theatre in London in 2008 but has not, to my knowledge, been performed yet in the United States.  

Peasant Chic

The play's cleverly begins by showing us Gorbachev's wife Raisa -- an educated, stylish academic, far removed from the stout babushkas of previous Soviet leaders' spouses -- playing the role of doting grandmother as she fits an old peasant dress for her granddaughter.  The nine-year-old tells her grandmother, "Mummy said it's very old."

RAISA:  These bits are.  (She points to various panels.)  The embroidery.  An old lady gave them to me when I visited her village.  She made them herself.

NASTENKA:  Was she a witch?

RAISA:  Of course not.  But she was very old and she sewed all those stitches when she was just a little girl.  And now she wants someone else to have it and to enjoy it, to keep the tradition going.  So she gave it to me, for you.

That peasant dress, for playwright Gold, encapsulates the situation she sees Gorbachev and Raisa embroiled in.  They're both educated, "modern" people, partners in crime, eager modernize the doddering Soviet Union which has by this time become an economic basketcase.  But Raisa's attitude toward the patchwork dress is meant to signal to us that the Gorbachev's are also respectful of Russian tradition (if not, in real-life, terribly respectful of their captive republics' traditions, or even the traditions of Russia's own citizens).  Modernizing a moribund police-state will turn out to be somewhat more difficult than fitting an old peasant dress to the body of a little girl.

Dialectics as Dialogue

The entire play takes place during the pivotal weekend of August 18-21, 1991, when Gorbachev and his family -- his wife, his doctor-daughter Irina, her husband Anatoly, and their two young daughters -- are vacationing at the Presidential  dacha on the Black Sea.  Gorbachev is at work on an important speech he plans to give in Moscow in a few days, one which will grant some freedom for the various republics under Soviet control to choose their own leaders, but still not allowed to choose freedom from Soviet rule.  In the midst of this summer idyll, fate as it tends to do, steps in.  A national "State of Emergency" is issued in Moscow by an eight-man committee of Politburo hardliners who have had enough of Gorbachev's reforms.  They see chaos and uncontrollable flora springing up in the formerly well-pruned Soviet garden, and they aim to nip it in the bud.  Their statement tells the world that the President "due to reasons of health" is "incapable of carrying out his duties," and that Vice President Yanayev has assumed the Presidency.  The coup is underway.

Meanwhile, the 60-year-old Gorbachev and his family have been put under house arrest in their dacha, including a large phalanx of guards preventing anyone from coming or going into or out of the compound, a blockade from the sea, and all telephone, television, and radio communications cut off.  Even Gorbachev's longtime friend and personal KGB security guard Yuri Plekhanov has turned against him and sided with the coup.  Gorbachev and his family are utterly isolated from the world, with the very real possibility that they'll all be shot if he does not accept the coup's demands.  The situation is not unlike the family headed by Fredric March in the 1950s William Wyler film The Desperate Hours, who are kept hostage by Humphrey Bogart and his group of escaped convicts, with the exception that Gorbachev is not a simple suburban family man, and nearly everyone in this play talks incessantly about Marxist ideology.  That minor quibble aside, those discussions provide the few ideas, if one can call them ideas, that the play offers.  The sharp confrontations between Gorbachev and Plekhanov recur throughout the play, ratcheting up the suspense with each encounter primarily because since this particular debate may be settled by an execution.

MIKHAIL:  You are an officer of the KGB.  I respect the KGB.  I have worked with them --- not because I like men in black mackintoshes trailing innocent citizens, but because I hate corruption and I want to stamp it out.  To make our country decent again --

PLEKHANOV:  Do you think I don't?

MIKHAIL (silencing him with a look):  I want a place where ordinary people work hard and can be open and honest and not one where it's easier to keep quiet and do nothing because every effort you make is thwarted by a bureaucracy worse than Byzantium.  I want one where we work together, not one run by fat officials who watch you wade through the mud because the road money is in their own pocket.  Like the housing money, and the tractor money, and the fuel money.  I want to make things better for people.  And I thought you did too.  I thought we shared a vision.

The Human Soul:  An Owner's Manual

Was Gorbachev really so naive as to think that corruption could be eliminated from the Soviet Union while preserving its basic economic and political structure?  Historians are still arguing about the precise degree of idealism and opportunism in Gorbachev's so-called reformist agenda The play adamantly portrays Gorbachev as a man who was genuinely sincere in his belief that communism could be reformed not only from within but from the top-down, and that ordinary people could be given "the freedom to make some of their own decisions, run their own affairs."  It was not an entirely implausible goal.  After all, the Chinese had already been achieving some success with allowing capitalism to operate within the People's Republic, though its oppressive state still denies individuals basic freedoms of speech and protest, as the mass butchery in Tiananmen Square -- which also took place in 1989, the year of the Berlin Wall's fall -- horribly demonstrated.  But Gorbachev is no capitalist; the play asks us to believe that Lenin's massive slave state could have been administered without coercion and terror to create a better, freer, fairer society than the ones in the West:

GORBACHEV:  Because capitalism is about greed.  That's what it's built on.  Our state's not like that and never will be.  We know we're not here just for ourselves, for egotism, for me.  We have a sense of something beyond us.  That's socialism.  We serve.  Until capitalism, everyone did that -- once it was a god, or the kind or the czar -- even the old feudal lords something nobler than their own pockets, even the boyars for God's sake, knew more than the bankers!  "I will not serve!," wasn't that what the devil said?  Because we have no gods here any more, some people think we're devils, but we're not -- we leave that to the West!  Now, here, with us, we serve the people, the common good, each other.  That's what I believe in, it's what I'm trying to do. It means more to me than anything and it comes from the soul.  I've seen more joy in the faces of people that serve and give and share than I've ever seen on the face of some rich American in the West with a big car.

Of course, one can respond that it should be nobody's business if a person prefers to use the money he's earned to buy a big car rather than "serve" a czar or feudal lord or "the people."  And communist societies have invariably shown that the only way you can make people put aside their "greed" -- which can also be considered simply enlightened or even unenlightened self-interest -- is for the state to force them to be "good," while the party elite gets to behave in any way they wish.  The state then becomes "the engineer of human souls" (to borrow the title from the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky's 1985 novel); and yet, humans being human, the engineers are unsurprisingly inclined to indulge themselves in those big cars and other luxuries they imperiously deny the citizens, who must do most of the "sharing" and "serving."  Who, then, will watch the watchmen?  How do you stop corruption in a state which, by definition, is run by a ruling class of professional revolutionaries -- the so-called "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" -- apparatchiks who can't be voted out of power or even criticized, since the Party controls the entire apparatus of news on television, radio, and all publications?  Would Gorbachev have really loosened up the controls of the system and allowed greater freedom of the press so that dissidents could criticize even him?  Could the major domos of the Party elite been brought to heel through stricter regulations and oversight?  Could Marxism-Leninism actually become free and democratic?  More importantly, did Gorbachev ever actually himself believe or desire for it be so?  I leave this question to the historians and political scientists to sort out.

We never get to find out (though some of us already strongly suspected the answer) because although Gorbachev and his family, as we know, were never shot, his presidency was effectively ended during that tense weekend in the dacha on the Black Sea.  (The play presents short audio segments performed in darkness between the main scenes, in which we hear voices of a family under house arrest who eventually are shot.  It takes a while before we learn that the voices in these brief interludes -- called "Echoes" in the script -- belong to Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandria, and their children, who are being prisoners by the Bolsheviks in the basement of a house in Yekaterinberg in 1918.  The play insists on a similarity between the plight of the two families, particularly when the sounds of gunfire from old Russian rifles shooting the royal family merge with the sound of modern guns firing on Soviet crowds during the demonstrations in Moscow in 1991.)  Ultimately the Kremlin coup fails and is supplanted by Boris Yeltsin, the man of the hour, who stands on a car with a bullhorn denouncing the plotters and eventually replaces Gorbachev as President of the Soviet Union and then simply President of Russia, shorn of its many satellite republics.  The old Soviet Union that Gorbachev hoped to preserve was, after 75 years, deader than a Soviet-made doornail.

The Family That Made It to Moscow

It would be a mischaracterization of the play to suggest that it's all speechifying and politics.  Many scenes deal with the spectacle of a man struggling to keep both his family calm intact in the midst of a terrifying ordeal.  With the help of his pessimistic but resourceful son-in-law Anatoly, Gorbachev uses a camcorder to record a statement for the world in which he condemns the Kremlin coup in no uncertain terms; he records it four times, and then hides the four strips of videotape throughout the dacha, even lining a window curtain with one.  Raisa finds an old Sony transistor radio from which they glean news of the outside world from -- where else? -- the BBC World Service.  When the stress of the three days under house arrest prove too much for Raisa and she collapses with nervous exhaustion, her doctor-daughter helps her recover, though Irina's own nerves are frayed to the limits as she tries to create a "normal" atmosphere for her two daughters, playing games with them and making sure they're locked in the bedroom upstairs whenever the coup's guards enter the house.  At times the events turn comic, as the Supreme Leader of the Soviet Union is doggedly trying to keep together not merely his presidency but his own unruly family.  Gold's makes a special effort to capture the worry, doubt, resolve, tenderness, and fortitude of the women of the play, though this tends to have the unhappy effect of reminding us that she is not Chekhov (though, like the characters of Chekhov's Three Sisters, they all want "to go to Moscow" -- or, rather, go back to Moscow.  Gorbachev for his part makes it plain to his captors that he does not countenance their actions, and insists that all communications be restored along with his presidential authority.  It's a long standoff and no one is giving an inch.  Even though we know Gorbachev and family would ultimately survive to return to Moscow, there are moments when we feel that any minute it might all be over for them.  (Some of the original British reviewers of the play ardently wished that the play was over long before that.)

A final scene set months later sums up the events following the failed coup.  As we all know, Yeltsin -- whom Raisa calls "a selfish, dangerous drunk only out for himself" -- disbanded the Soviet Union and, with the help of Western advisers, ushered in a "shock therapy" program of rapid conversion to capitalism which freed millions of countries from Soviet domination but also helped create Russian billionaires  while leaving many other Russian citizens feeling adrift.  Today some economics and political scientists believe that a sudden transition to capitalism without an independent civic society of the kind which  took centuries to develop in the West, was most likely a misstep.  But consider:  no large communist society had ever made the overnight switch to capitalism before, and there were no guidelines to work from.  Amazingly, it was a counter-revolution without bloodshed, but the resulting chaos and rise of dictatorial arch-Russian nationalist Vladimir Putin has created more than enough grief to go around.  Gorbachev, absent Raisa, who died in 1999, lives on, condemning Putin's actions in the Ukraine and, no doubt, continuing to wonder if it could all have been different.  Indeed it could:  The coup might have succeeded, and the Soviet Union with all its manifold horrors might still be with us.  Or Gobachev could still be in power, still mesmerizing Western journalists with happy-talk about "openness" and "reform" with the same dreadful system remaining intact.

"The Past is Never Dead.  It Isn't Even Past."

Playwright Penny Gold has another view -- she tips her hand in the brief introduction to her play.  She writes:

In the 1990s, Reaganites claimed they had "won" the Cold War and Dr. Francis Fukuyama declared "the end of History."  At the time of writing, the American "neocons" continue to assert that with their economic and military might, the triumph of global capitalism is inevitable.  Socialism, they say, is dead.  Well, we'll see.

Clearly Penny Gold still believes in Gorbachev's stated "vision" of a free, noncoercive, unselfish yet efficient socialism in which people would "gladly serve and share" rather than drive around in big cars.  She is one of the last True Believers.  Reagan (along with his neoconservative supporters) was not alone in winning the Cold War -- he had help from Margaret Thatcher, the Pope, Lech Walesa and Polish Solidarity, as well as the inadvertent cooperation from Gorbachev and thereafter Boris Yeltsin.  Even Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs that Reagan's stubborn insistence on maintaining the right to continue researching the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or "Star Wars," as its opponents dubbed it, was crucial in convincing him and his advisers that the Soviet Union could no longer compete militarily with America in the increasingly high-tech arms race.  History may not have "ended," pace Francis Fukuyama -- the ever-growing threat of Islamic jihadists who do not accept Western liberal capitalism as the final stage of history is ample proof of that -- but a particularly bloody chapter of the 20th-century did end in 1991 during those anxious days and nights in the dacha on the Black Sea.  

The President's Holiday tries to convince us that Gorbachev was a fundamentally decent, admirable man, not the leader of the Soviet Union with all that that implied.  To say that he was a better man than Stalin or even Vladimir Putin is to damn with faint praise.  Perhaps Gorbachev was and is a doting father and grandfather -- so what?  The play would have been far better if it could have found a way to present that other, darker Gorbachev, incorporating it into this misleadingly warm "family" drama to create a fuller, truer portrait of the man and the occasion.  But Penny Gold would doubtless not have been interested in writing such a play.  So what we are left with is a protagonist who is less a hero than a helpless bystander, in a play that is a minor footnote to the real-life drama which brought down the curtain on nearly a century of unimaginable but amply documented tyranny.