In 1990, after the liberation of Eastern Europe but while Mikhail Gorbachev was still in power in the Soviet Union, I visited Moscow and St. Petersburg as part of a Cato Institute conference. One evening at dinner I was seated next to a young Russian woman, a graduate student or young researcher. She told me she was studying Italian. I asked why. She said, “Because I love Italy!” I asked, “What do you like — the people, the language, the food?” She replied, “Everything!” Then I asked if she had been to Italy. “No,” she replied wistfully. And I felt so sad. This young scholar who loves everything Italian had never been to Italy. I knew that any American graduate student studying Italian language or culture would have visited Italy.
It’s a small story, but it’s a reminder of the poverty and oppression in the Russia in which Gorbachev rose to power.
While we were there, things were changing. Gorbachev had declared glasnost — opening — and perestroika — restructuring. The perestroika wasn’t going so well, but the glasnost was in full swing. Scholars and journalists were debating ideas. The Cato Institute was allowed to hold a conference titled “Transition to Freedom: The New Soviet Challenge”! Scholars such as James Buchanan, Peter Bauer, William Niskanen, George Gilder, and Jan Winiecki spoke alongside Russian scholars, the reformist mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg (still called Leningrad then), and members of the Supreme Soviet and the Presidential Council. The 500‐Day Plan for transition to a market economy was being debated in the Supreme Soviet that very week. Our public forum attracted more than 800 Muscovites, and afterward I declared Moscow mayor Gavriil Popov’s speech on the decline of individualism and free markets in the 20th century “the most libertarian speech I have ever heard by a politician.”
In the end — though history never ends — Gorbachev changed Russia and the world, though not exactly as he intended. He set out to make the Soviet economy and Communist rule sustainable. The forces he set in motion led to the end of the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, the Soviet empire, and his own rule. Central planning came to an end, but was not replaced by an open market economy. Russian‐born author Cathy Young yesterday quoted Gorbachev’s 2016 declaration that that his creed was, “No blood” — as seen in his refusal to use Russian troops to keep Eastern Europe under Soviet rule — and that he was ultimately “a man of freedom”: “Freedom of choice, freedom of religion, freedom of speech; freedom, freedom.” And yet, she notes, “it’s difficult not to see symbolism in the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and last president of the Soviet Union, died just a few months after the final death agony of the new Russia that he had, not always willingly, midwifed: a Russia of free travel and free speech, of McDonald’s restaurants and Adidas shoes, of openness to Western culture and Western values; a Russia that aspired to join the global community of liberal democracies.”
Let’s hope that history has not yet ended in Russia and that the country may yet find its way to peace and freedom. For more on Cato’s conference, see here and here.