At the end of the very last concert of their US tour in 1977-78, the lead singer of the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten (Lydon), decided to dispense with singing the lyrics to The Stooges’ “No Fun” and instead stared directly at the audience, asking them: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
A realization had dawned on Johnny, the understanding that the trust that he put into his manager, Malcolm McLaren, was all for naught. Johnny at last had figured out that he and his bandmates (and yes, the audience too), had been used. Blinded by the light of fame and notoriety, Johnny had finally come to his senses.
I had Johnny Rotten in mind when I learned that ex-President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev had died. Allow me to explain…….
The end of March in 2011 saw a very odd event take place at the Royal Albert Hall in London, UK. Celebrities from the USA, UK, and Western Europe were on hand to wish Mikhail Gorbachev a happy 80th birthday. Attendees included Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone, Kevin Spacey, Mel C of the Spice Girls, Ted Turner, Sir Tim Berners Lee, and many, many others.
The BBC described it as ‘eclectic’. Miriam Elder of The Atlantic found it both “weird and glitzy”. “Cheesy”, would be appropriate to use as well. “Odd” though is best, in my opinion. Here was a historical man being feted in a foreign country by celebrities from a former rival military and ideological bloc as “The Man Who Changed the World”.
“Why? And why London of all places?”
Both of these questions are valid because both immediately assume that something was indeed out of place with this celebration. I could not shake off the feeling that this event was patronizing, much in the same way that a cafeteria lady is given a watch upon her retirement. “Thank you Mr. Gorbachev for dynamiting the USSR! We really, really appreciate it, LOL!”
By 2011, Mikhail Gorbachev was long relegated to the proverbial ‘dustbin of history’, powerless, rudderless, without influence and a reason for his own existence. Time had passed him by, rendering him “yesterday’s man”. Russians viewed him as the destroyer of the Soviet Union who opened the door to the disasters of the Yeltsin Era. Eastern and Central European peoples who were finally freed from being stuck behind the Iron Curtain had no love for this communist, the system he represented, and the occupation that he ended.
It’s therefore no wonder that he was honoured and applauded in London for his birthday bonanza as Americans and Western European leaders viewed him as something else: a liberal reformer, who, btw, supervised the demolition of the Free World’s sole superpower rival. Those who study Political Science and History are well-acquainted with the Great Man Theory; a concept that suggests great and unique individuals can have a decisive impact on world events. But what about Accidental Man Theory, the idea that an individual ends up doing something that unintentionally helps his rival without harming them at all? I think that the case that Gorbachev falls into this classification is on solid footing.
“The Great Reformer”
The early 1980s saw the world dance closer to the edge of nuclear annihilation than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis two decades earlier. Dove-ish Jimmy Carter gave way to Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan, taunting the Soviet Gerontocracy that was left to reinvigorate a stagnant USSR. Yuri Andropov was more than a match for The Gipper, but he lasted less than two years in office before leaving his corpse on display in the Kremlin. His successor Konstantin Chernenko managed to barely make it past the one-year mark before doing the same.
Both Andropov and Chernenko rose to the challenge posed by a newly-confident USA, but at the same time were hiding the fact that the command economy that they were presiding over had failed. Confidence in socialism had evaporated thanks to shortages of material goods, inferior quality of domestically produced items when compared to those in the west, stagnant living standards, and a nomenklatura that jealously protected its own class in spite of the fact that Marxist Theory demanded the triumph of the workers. Communism had run out of steam, much like how western liberal democracy is doing so today.
“We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
- famous late Soviet Era joke
It was at this point that history threw us up a surprise in the form of Mikhail Gorbachev.