From Khrushchev to Gorbachev — the humane side of Russian leaders

Mikhail Gorbachev (Image: Reuters)

The most perceptive statement ever made about Mikhail Gorbachev by one of his own did not find its way back into the media when the leader, who presided over the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), died on August 31.

Gennady Gerasimov, who was the public face of Gorbachev's glasnost — Russian for openness — told Los Angeles Times in 1988 that “if Gorbachev were not here, he would have been invented. The times for this kind of leader have come.”

Lech Walesa, Poland's first democratic President since World War II and a big thorn on Gorbachev’s side as a Nobel Peace Prize-winning fighter for free trade unions under Communism, said something similar the day after the former Soviet leader died. Walesa gave context to Gerasimov’s quip. Gorbachev “played a positive role, but it was under duress,” the iconic Polish leader told Reuters. “Communism was falling apart, there was more and more trouble with that and he was looking for a way to save Communism...he knew that the USSR could not be saved...he was forced by the situation.”

Gorbachev was the most humane of all the Soviet leaders in my lifetime starting with Josef Stalin. For several years in the 1980s, every day of my life was affected by what the initiator of perestroika — restructuring in Russian — said and did in Moscow, because I had short, but multiple postings as a foreign correspondent in three Central European satellite countries of the USSR.

Gerasimov was encouraged by his mentor of sorts in openness, Poland’s Communist government’s indefatigable spokesperson in those years, Jerzy Urban, and his television journalist wife, Małgorzata Daniszewska, who urged the public diplomat of the Soviet Union to push the envelope every time he appeared before the media.

Urban, who became my personal friend over the years, often reminded Gerasimov that since he and Gorbachev were born in the same year and enjoyed each other’s trust, he could clone White House briefings without fear of being exiled to Siberia. But unlike Urban, Gerasimov could never divorce himself entirely from the persona he had come to acquire as Gorbachev’s alter ego for four of the six years he was in power.

No such constraint on Mark Frankland, The Observer’s Moscow Correspondent during glasnost and perestroika. Frankland had by chance — or good luck — befriended Gorbachev as a young British student. Gorbachev, only four years older than the Briton, was then studying law at Moscow State University. Frankland eventually joined MI6, the United Kingdom’s external spy agency, at their headquarters, incentivised by his knowledge of Russian, which had been bolstered in the Royal Navy.

When he quit after a year, The Observer picked him up to be sent to Moscow as their correspondent at the age of 27. It was a tribute to the perspicacity of Donald Trelford, the Editor of The Observer that he sent Frankland on a second posting to Moscow by the time Gorbachev was the clear choice to be the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Frankland delivered his best for The Observer from Moscow for several years until he was expelled tit-for-tat because of Margaret Thatcher’s action.

Several years later, Frankland told me during one of several conversations at his home in Bonn — where The Observer relocated him — that Gorbachev graciously invited Frankland to a private dinner in the Kremlin before he was expelled. The General Secretary told him that Thatcher had left him with no choice. Her routine expulsions of Russians from London had already cut the UK Mission in Moscow to the bone because of unfailingly equal retaliation by Gorbachev. For the latest tit-for-tat expulsions, Moscow could not find enough British officials: so, journalists had to be included, and Frankland paid with collateral damage.

The two men were to meet once more when Gorbachev was visiting Europe. Gorbachev expressed happiness that Frankland’s employers had sent him to Germany: “what more can you ask for than to be in a country with 400 varieties of bread!” But the last Soviet leader’s humanism and compassion were at their best in guarding Frankland’s privacy and protecting him from harassment for his sexual orientation during his final posting in Moscow. Frankland was gay, and that was three decades ago when being gay could damage one’s life and limb. Russia is still notorious for its homophobia. Frankland believed till his end that he was left alone as a gay man in Moscow only because he was insulated from the very top.

Nikita Khrushchev was the other Soviet leader for whom humanism was a consideration. But he used humane values to promote political ends as well. In 1959, Khrushchev made his first visit to the United States by any Soviet leader. He was invited by custom as a foreign visitor to be the luncheon speaker at the National Press Club in Washington.

Khrushchev refused the invitation because until 1971, women were not allowed as members of the Club. They could sit on the Club’s hot and humid balcony amidst TV strobe lights during the speech, the Soviet leader was told. Women are equal to men in the USSR, Khrushchev said, and he will not be associated with an event where they are discriminated against. Eventually the Club reached a compromise with Khrushchev’s travel party. For every 10 male Club members, 1.4 women journalists would be admitted.

So, 33 women who could “prove they needed to be there for journalistic reasons” were allowed to attend that ‘Newsmaker Luncheon’ among an audience of 220 people. But the Club had the last laugh. As soon as Khrushchev finished his speech, the women journalists were escorted out of the premises.