LOVING GORBY

This past week has seen a good many Reaganaut Reunions here in Washington DC. At several of them, we raised our glasses to toast Gorby – Mikhail Gorbachev. All of the Reagan Doctrine guys loved Gorbachev – but not quite in the same way as did the State Department squishes.

Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to burst from nowhere when he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) and leader of the USSR in March of 1985. The liberal media swooned over the smiling suave telegenic Russian – so smart, so sophisticated, so capable of making a shining success of Soviet Communism! We did everything we could to encourage the swooning press’ delusion – for we knew the truth about Gorby.

Gorbachev worked his way up the local Communist Party hierarchy in an obscure region in southern Russia called Stavropol. There were over 150 oblasts or CPSU administrative districts in the Soviet Union, and in 1970 Gorbachev became First Secretary of the Communist Party in the Stavropol Oblast. This is Hicksville, way out in the Soviet sticks, thousands of kilometers and light years politically from the center of Soviet power, Moscow – and Gorby would have stayed there unknown for the rest of his life except for a geologic fluke.

Stavropol lay in the northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains and had a profusion of hot springs. There were famous spas at two of them, Mineralnye Vody and Kislovodsk, so popular with the Soviet elite they had reserved them for their exclusive use. In particular, Mineralnye Vody was the favorite of the members of the Soviet Politburo.

Gorbachev made it his mission in life to cater to and provide for every wish of any Politburo member or staffer who came to relax and “take the waters” at Mineralnye Vody – the best food, the best booze, the best women, he saw they were pampered like nowhere else in the USSR. He quickly got a reputation in Moscow power circles, as more and more of the elite came to Stavropol to get the Gorbachev Treatment. Finally one day, the Soviet Godfather himself showed up: Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB.

Andropov, as Soviet Ambassador to Hungary, had coordinated the brutal suppression of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters’ Revolt in Budapest in 1956. He had been director of the KGB since 1967. Gorby targeted Andropov with a vengeance – wining, dining, and charming him until Andropov took him under his wing as a protégé.

In 1978, Andropov brought Gorby to Moscow, installing him as Secretary of Agriculture, and making him the youngest full member of the ruling Politburo (at age 49) in 1980. In 1982, Leonid Brezhnev who had ruled the Soviet Union since 1964, died – with Andropov taking over. Since his mentor now ran the entire Soviet Union, Gorby cemented himself into the Kremlin.

Andropov unexpectedly died 15 months later in early 1984, and Brezhnev’s underlings made one last grasp for power with a decrepit party hack, Konstantin Chernenko, who died a year later. Gorby assumed the Soviet throne.

Gorby was a professional schmoozer – witty, charming, articulate, clever, and really, really incompetent. We had watched his performance as Agriculture Secretary – the Soviet grain harvest had been a record 230 tons at the start of his tenure in 1978 and had plummeted to 155 million tons by 1981. So when he came to power in 1985, it was a cause for celebration – for what he did to Soviet agriculture he would now do to the entire Soviet economy.

And sure enough, he instituted the twin policies of glasnost and perestroika. With the former, he let urban intellectuals mouth off against the state which promptly accelerated dissent and unrest. The latter was a sham — there was little or no “restructuring” of the Soviet economy, so it proceeded to go right down through the tubes.

Thus the Reaganauts in the Reagan White House did everything they could to bolster Gorbachev – make him a hero, make him TIME Magazine Man of the Year (1987), give him the Nobel Peace Prize (1990) – anything to keep this guy going so he could keep ruining his country. Yes, we really loved Gorbachev.

Seeing the many video clips of Reagan and Gorbachev in the news this past week brought up all these memories. But they also brought up a realization. You see Gorby in a hat and suit talking convivially with the Gipper and you realize, he and the Soviets were part of Western Civilization. You realize that all the great struggles of the 20th century were struggles that took place within Western Civilization.

Communism and Marxism-Leninism are Western philosophies. So is Naziism. So is Fascism. The 20th century was a fight of Western Civilization against demons inside it. The War on Moslem Terrorism is different.

In this war, the West is up against something truly alien. The Cold War included struggles against non-Western countries and cultures, like Vietnam and China – but they were our enemies because they had adopted the ideas of a Western European, Karl Marx. Islamism — the set of ideas motivating Moslem Terrorists– is wholly alien to the West. They are beyond the West, beyond civilization, and even beyond humanity as we comprehend it.

Gorbachev, for all his being a Communist, was a fellow human being. Osama Bin Laden is not. We are dealing with an alien life form here, like poisonous insects or rabid dogs with which you cannot reason or make any sort of peace. The War on Moslem Terrorism is like a real-life Terminator movie: our only choice is to kill the Moslem Terminators before they succeed in killing us.

Just as Communism was a struggle within Western Civilization, Islamism is a struggle within Islam. It is a cancer metastasizing in the body of Islam and can only be cured by Moslems themselves. We cannot cure Islam. We can only kill as many cancer cells as we can find. It makes you nostalgic, almost, for the Cold War, for enemies you could have a sort of fondness for – like Gorby.

It was a moving scene to see him in the Capitol Rotunda and place his hand on President Reagan’s flag-draped casket. Mikhail Gorbachev was a tragic figure. We fought him and he lost. Yet he was an adversary with whom we had a human bond in common. We do not with the adversaries we face today.