The Last Soviet

Mikhail Gorbachev, who died last week at age 91, was the last president of the Soviet Union before he dissolved the federation in 1991, the once-great union of fifteen ethnic homelands no longer held together by force and the constituent states known ironically as "republics" free to go on their own.

Gorbachev is almost single-handedly credited with ending the Cold War, but it's important to remember that he spent most of the six years he led the Soviet Union trying to reform and restructure the system so that the union would stay together.  No one at the Kremlin asked any of the constituent republics what they thought of their subservient place to the dominant Russian power bloc in the Soviet government.  Lithuania didn't bother to wait to be asked.  It went ahead with secession, and the other Baltic States followed.  It was under Gorbachev that the Red Army tried to crack down on Lithuanian nationalists in January 1991.  Gorbachev wanted to end the COld War, all right, but with the Soviet Union still in place and with the Russians still in control of it.  (Joseph Stalin, a Georgian, was the only Soviet leader who was neither Russian or Ukrainian, and that was largely through the pure force of his brutal personality.)

So let's give Gorbachev credit for bringing  the threat of superpower nuclear annihilation and the era of mutually assured destruction to a close, and I'll even spot him a role in the reunification of Germany, but there's only one man who can be given credit for the liberation of Eastern Europe that ended the Cold War, and it's this great leader. 

Hart Versus Bush - It Finally Happened!

Gary Hart's withdrawal from the 1988 presidential campaign eighteen months to the day before the general election over a sex scandal cheated the nation out of what was expected to be the classic presidential-election match-up everyone was hoping for and expected - Gary Hart versus George Bush.  The fall of Hart, whom Bush respected and had predicted would be a worthy opponent, paved the way for Michael Dukakis, whom Bush had less regard for, to oppose the Vice President.  Well, we finally got the contest Washington insiders had hoped for - Hart versus Bush, in the form of the media attention both men have gotten in the past couple of weeks.  Hart, whose unraveling in May 1987 is the subject of the currently running theatrical movie The Front Runner (starring Hugh Jackman as Hart), has been looked at anew, while George Bush, who died recently at the age of 94, has undergone a reappraisal.

It's over - Bush won.

George Bush was heralded this past week as a decent man even by his onetime Democratic opponents, and he was credited for leading the nation with integrity and dignity and for putting country over party.  He helped revive the domestic economy by, after vowing to oppose new taxes, agreeing to raise the old ones.  He masterfully led a decisive military campaign in the Middle East to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty.  His modesty allowed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to allow the Communist bloc nations of Eastern Europe to break free from Soviet domination and open the Berlin Wall, leading to the breakup of the U.S.S.R. and the end of the Cold War (though I still give Pope John Paul II the most credit for ending it).  A lot of people who refused to support him back in the day - even I - acknowledge that was the right leader at the right time.

So where does that leave Hart?  Pretty much nowhere.  Speculation on what might have been had Hart been elected President in 1988 focuses on how he proved to be right about so many things - the rise of a post-industrial economy, the destabilization of the Middle East and the rise of stateless terrorism - and we've been told how, had Hart defeated Bush, there would have been no George W. Bush Presidency, no Iraq War, no deterioration of the middle class thanks to Hart's domestic "strategic investments," and possibly no Clintons.  Maybe we would have even had a renewable-energy grid.  This speculation has been fanned not just by The Front Runner and by interviews with Hart himself but by a recent article by James Fallows of The Atlantic reporting that Bush campaign henchman Lee Atwater - who died in 1991 - revealed on his deathbed that he helped set up Hart's boat trip to Bimini to get Hart in a compromising position with a woman not his wife. And the argument for the Hart Presidency that never was is tempting to ponder.

Unfortunately, no one's buying it.

Hart is viewed as more of a curiosity than as a relevant politician, and the arguments in favor of how we would have been better off with Hart as President don't hold water.  Appraising him anew only reminds us of what we didn't like about him - his arrogance, his aloofness, and his cockiness.  Those traits all came out when he tried to deal with the allegations of infidelity that resulted from the Bimini affair.  We can't imagine him dealing with Congress with that sort of temperament.

Even his foreign-policy credentials have to be called into question.  What many people have forgotten is that Hart was actually friends with Gorbachev and planned to work with him closely once he was elected - not inaugurated, elected - President.  Hart had planned to negotiate a drastic arms reduction agreement with Gorbachev between his election and his inauguration, the agreement likely to be sent to the Senate on Day One of a Hart administration, and Hart even planned to invite Gorbachev to his inauguration.  And Gorbachev likely would have accepted.  I can just imagine the heads of all the Republicans exploding over that - ironic in light of the all-too-cozy relationship between Trump and Putin today.  But may I play devil's advocate here?  What if President Hart's friendship with Gorbachev had so annoyed the Kremlin hardliners that it led them to attempt at purging Gorbachev earlier than they actually did, in August 1991 - and what if, had it been attempted earlier, the purge had succeeded? And what if the U.S.S.R. had survived and canceled the arms agreements? Or what if the agreements the Soviets had made with President Hart had given Gorbachev the opportunity to keep the Soviet Union together? This all could have delayed the fall of the Eastern bloc and a unified Germany in NATO and completely prevented the independence of the Baltic States.

And  The Front Runner?  I haven't had a chance to see it yet, but I did read the Matt Bai from 2014 that it's based on, "All The Truth Is Out," which argued that the tabloid-like media attention on the Bimini affair diverted the press from focusing on policy in covering politics and toward covering personalities and intimate details of politicians' personal lives - and how Hart's tabloid-driven fall led to the Bushes, the Clintons, and a President who was elected more on star power than policies (Obama).  As I wrote in my review of this book in December 2015, I acknowledged that the media went too far pursuing the Bimini affair but I added that Bai failed to convince me that Hart could have been a great President.  It appears that the movie hasn't made a persuasive argument in favor of Hart either; not only have critics been unmoved, no one has gone to see it.  Hart's efforts in the 1988 Iowa caucuses following his re-entry in the presidential campaign - where he finished last with a pathetic 0.4 percent of the vote - probably attracted more Hart supporters to precinct meetings than this movie has attracted audiences to theaters.  Chuck Todd did interview Bai and The Front Runner director Jason Reitman about the movie, but not on "Meet The Press" - he had them on his much less prestigious MSNBC show.  And while you would expected the PBS NewsHour to have a story on The Front Runner, the NewsHour's arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown went to the Toronto Film Festival, where it was screened, and did stories on several movies shown there.  Tellingly however,  The Front Runner was not one of them.

(Aside: I probably won't be impressed by this movie - which I said back in December 2017 was supposed to be a comedy, as I had read somewhere, but that turned out to be erroneous - when I do see it, as it not only makes an argument for Hart that I already rejected, but it also uses fictionalized composite characters.  That's an artistic device common in BOATS, or "Based On A True Story," movies, and it's a device I have always hated.  Hart protégé Martin O'Malley is not a character in this movie, despite having been featured in Bai's book; that may turn out to be a good thing.)

Was Bush a great President?  No - Clarence Thomas will forever be a blot on his legacy.  But was he at least a good President?  Overall, yes; he had the right temperament for the job at a critical time in American history.  And truth be told, even if Hart, who had had episodes of womanizing in his past, had avoided a sex scandal and had kept his arrogance in check, he might still have lost, given the rightward drift in American politics at the time, though whether or not there was ever a chance to prevent Ronald Reagan's legacy to be locked in by a Republican successor is still subject to debate.  But I think the debate over what might have been is over.  The American people just looked at Bush and Hart and clearly made their choice. Bush was a leader and the once iconic Hart was and is, as Gail Sheehy called him, a joke.

And Hart will forever be seen as a joke.  That is never going to end, is it?  Go home, Gary.  Go home. 

Lithuania

At the beginning of the 1980s, the Cold War between the capitalist West and the Communist East seemed unlikely to end. Many events in the decade that followed, in fact, accelerated the end of the Cold War in favor of the West, from the belligerent foreign policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to the non-violent resistance of two great Polish leaders, Pope John Paul II and Lech Wałęsa. In the Soviet Union, the country’s failing economic system and the defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan caused Mikhail Gorbachev to give up Soviet domination of the satellite nations of Eastern Europe. In short order, Communism was abandoned in those countries and the Berlin Wall fell, paving the way for German reunification. While all this brought an end to the Soviet empire, none of this directly caused the end of the Soviet Union itself. That would be instigated by a nation of four million people with one bold act of defiance to Moscow, struck twenty years ago today.

Lithuania is a small lowland country of forests and fertile meadows on the Baltic Sea, with a heritage and a history that go back a thousand years. A stormy history of wars and unsuccessful alliances led Lithuania to be annexed by the Russians and oppressed by the Romanov dynasty. The modern Lithuanian state came into being in 1918 after the end of World War I, along with the other newly independent Baltic States of Estonia and Latvia. Lithuania struggled with political instability and border disputes with Germany and Poland, but it held on to its independence. Then in 1940, in accordance with the pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to divide Eastern Europe between them, the U.S.S.R. invaded and occupied all three Baltic States.

The Soviets set up sham elections that produced Communist governments in all three Baltic States to ensure that they all would join the Soviet Union. The subsequent German invasion in 1941 led many Lithuanians to see the Nazis as liberators for expelling the Soviets. The Germans in fact viewed the Lithuanians as inferiors and planned to deport or kill as many Lithuanians as possible and settle Germans in their place in the quest for a greater Reich. But, as I will point out later, Lithuanian gratitude toward the Germans resulted in a dark and shameful period in the country’s history.

The Soviets regained control of all three Baltic States at the end of World War II, despite the refusal of the Western powers to recognize their incorporation into the Soviet Union. In Lithuania, a guerrilla movement of patriots fought between 1945 and 1952 to expel the Red Army, and Joseph Stalin responded by cracking down on the revolt. More than 30,000 Lithuanians died fighting for their country’s freedom, and many more were sent to Siberia. Through the Cold War decades, though, Lithuanians maintained their ethnic heritage and integrity far better then their Baltic counterparts. Soviet settlement of ethnic Russians – "Russification" - reduced the native population of Estonia to 61 percent of that republic. In Latvia, Russification almost rendered Latvians a minority in their own country.

When Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform and open the Soviet system, he hoped in part to promote more harmony in the country by granting the its fifteen republics greater autonomy. Ironically, his policies allowed the brave people of Lithuania to pull the thread that unraveled the union. Gorbachev’s attempts at openness (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika) led to political movements outside the Communist party, and in Lithuania, the nationalist Sąjūdis movement began in June 1988 as a result. Led by music professor Vytautas Landsbergis, the Sąjūdis was an anti-Communist group that supported Gorbachev’s reforms but sought a greater expression of Lithuanian culture by restoring the Lithuanian language as the country’s official tongue. They demanded greater protection of the environment, declassification of documents of the oppression of Lithuanians under Stalin, and more truth about the Molotov-Ribbentrop "non-aggression" pact between Germany and the U.S.S.R. that put the Baltic States at the mercy of the Kremlin. Sąjūdis activities and demonstrations were largely peaceful but passionate. The most stunning example of this was the "Singing Revolution." Throughout 1988, Lithuanian patriots, following the example of the Estonians, gathered in public spaces in cities such as Vilnius, the capital, and Kaunas and sang national and religious songs as a form of protest. Lithuanian Communist leaders balked at the Sąjūdis’s activities and Gorbachev’s reforms, but the party eventually had to acknowledge both.

The Sąjūdis won a huge majority in the 1990 Lithuanian legislative elections, and led by Landsbergis, they voted to secede from the U.S.S.R. on March 11, 1990, the first Soviet republic to do so. Estonia and Latvia soon followed suit, and secessionist movements accelerated in other Soviet republics, where free speech reforms fueled nationalist movements among the country’s many ethnic groups. Gorbachev, unable to accept outright secession by any Soviet republic, attempted an economic blockade of Lithuania that caused rampant inflation. The Red Army was then sent into Vilnius in January 1991 to crush the rebellion against Moscow’s authority by taking the Supreme Council building and the broadcasting and telecommunications centers. Thirteen people were killed, and six hundred were injured. Only the intrepid non-violent opposition from the people of Vilnius, who encircled the buildings and set up anti-tank barricades, forced the Red Army to back down. Kremlin hard-liners, in a desperate attempt to keep the Soviet Union together, tried to oust Gorbachev and re-assert the authority of the Communist Party Central Committee in August 1991 and were met with a populist uprising in Moscow. The coup failed, and one Soviet republic after another began to peel away. On September 6, 1991, the Baltic States were free and independent nations once again; more than three months later, the Soviet Union was no more.

As Lithuania (now a member of NATO and the European Union) progresses into the twenty-first century as a free nation with democratic practices and free-market policies, it must deal with the responsibilities of independence. Long prosperous, its economy has recently suffered as a result of the global recession, and Lithuanians must respond to new challenges with the same fortitude they showed in winning their freedom. The biggest responsibility Lithuanians face, however, regards making amends with a shameful and horrible episode they contributed to during the Second World War. Many Lithuanians actively collaborated with their Nazi occupiers and participated in large numbers in exterminating most of Lithuania’s Jewish population, which led to the deaths of 190,000 Jews during the war.

The past twenty years have seen a steady but painful process for Lithuanians in dealing with the legacy of the atrocity. The government has committed itself to commemorating the Holocaust, combating anti-Semitism, and bringing Nazi-era war criminals to justice. While the National Conference on Soviet Jewry has found Lithuania to have "made slow but significant progress in the prosecution of suspected Lithuanian collaborators in the Nazi genocide," many Lithuanians have denied or evaded the issue of Nazi collaboration, despite historical evidence of such collaboration being widespread and voluntary. Also, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has criticized the Lithuanian government for inexcusably moving too slowly to prosecute Lithuanian war criminals. However, Lithuania has officially acknowledged the role many of its people had played in the Holocaust. In 1995, President Algirdas Brazuskas apologized to the Israeli Knesset for his country’s role in the Holocaust; six years later, the issue was addressed head-on in a speech given to the Lithuanian parliament by Alfonsas Eidintas, the historian then nominated to be the next Lithuanian ambassador to Israel. The healing process continues to this day.

The miracle of Lithuania today is how, after so much horror committed against and by its people, the country has been able to acknowledge its unfortunate past even as it strives for a happier future. Years of foreign oppression and anti-Semitic genocide could have easily sentenced such a small country to darkness and despair. But twenty years later, as it deals with its unfortunate history and aims toward a rebirth of freedom, Lithuania has emerged as a proud nation that seeks to chart its own destiny and atone for its own sins with the same will it demonstrated in bringing down a tyrannical empire.