Gorbachev Reflects on Economic Change

In a widely anticipated campus appearance—his first in a decade—former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev looked back yesterday on the era of perestroika that he had engineered.

Through an interpreter, Gorbachev told a packed Sanders Theatre that he believes the restructuring, which involved limited privatization of the Soviet economy, was a success even though economic problems plagued Russia throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

He argued those who criticized his economic reforms as coming too slowly failed to recognize the difficulty of effecting change from within the repressive party structure.

“If you insist on an unrealistic pace of change, it is reckless,” he said.

“When I was being accused of not being resolute enough, I said we would need at least 20 or 30 years to put perestroika on track,” he added.

During six years as head of the U.S.S.R. Communist Party, Gorbachev instituted economic and social reforms that eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the introduction of capitalism.

In response to questions following his speech he said he had neglected to ensure that the increased money flow from the partially decentralized economy actually led to a stable consumer market.

“People tend to make their judgments based on what they see in the stores,” he said. “The result was that people were wondering, they were asking, maybe Gorbachev was not the best leader.”

He recalled one opponent telling him, when he resigned as president in 1991, that “the era of Gorbachev is over.” But Gorbachev said he thought then—and now—that the “era of Gorbachev is just beginning.”

“The choice in favor of freedom, democracy, market economics, in favor of political pluralism—this is something we are still mastering,” he said.

A 1995 poll by the Gorbachev Foundation, which the former president heads, found that 42 percent of Russians thought the economic reforms were necessary in retrospect, while 45 percent did not. These results were “very positive,” he said.

“The poll was happening in 1995, when people had been badly affected by the breakup of the country,” Gorbachev said. “When most of the people in Russia lived in poverty and hardship, 42 percent said perestroika was necessary.”

Support for political reforms such as democratic elections and freedom of religion were far higher, he said.

“I believe this is an endorsement and grounds for hope that after a period of hardship and difficulty, people will build a new Russia, a free and democratic Russia,” he said.

He said that it was too early to evaluate fully the impact of perestroika. But he said reforms under his successor, Boris Yeltsin, that moved the country further toward a market economy came with “too high a price”—rampant poverty.

Gorbachev also took a shot at the international community—and Harvard—for its mistakes in attempts to assist his country in decentralizing its economy during the Yeltsin years.

“I’m not blaming Harvard, but a few people from Harvard imposed a model that was too radical for Russia,” he said.

He alluded to the efforts of the Harvard Institute for International Development, which received $50 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development to advise Russian economists during the 1990s but is the basis of a suit against the University filed by the federal government for conflict of interest policy violations.

Prioritizing “universal human values” and international cooperation should be the focus of political leaders today, said Gorbachev, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

He also said that “no nation should try to govern the world from one center” and framed the United States’ tensions with Iraq as a conflict between employing “military force” or “international law” to resolve disputes.

“I welcome the agreement in the Security Council,” he added, referring to a resolution on Iraq weapons inspections that was approved unanimously last week.

In response to a question on Russia’s three-year war with Chechen separatists, Gorbachev said, “If I were president of my country, there wouldn’t have been this war in the first place.”

He said he thought Chechnya should “be a republic within Russia but it should have a special autonomous status.”

In the first part of his speech, the 71-year-old Gorbachev outlined the political philosophy that he followed throughout his lengthy career.

“I am a person willing to compromise, but compromise should not be at the expense of values and goals,” he said. “In all situations, I remained cool.”

“My creed has been to select a team of strong individuals, not to be afraid one would be a competitor,” he added.

He said that he had been shaped by living through Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, the Nazi occupation of his home district during World War II and the country’s rebuilding period following the war. He also cited Nikita S. Khrushchev’s celebrated “Secret Speech” of 1956, in which he criticized Stalin for an overly repressive regime. Gorbachev said this set the youth of the time on the path that eventually led to reform.

“This was for us a breath of fresh air, a breath of freedom that remained with us,” he said. “Those who started in politics at that time had a critical approach and retained a critical approach to everything.”

The speech, sponsored by Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, was the first by Gorbachev at Harvard since he spoke at the Kennedy School of Government’s ARCO Forum in May 1992.

The Davis Center made a donation to the Gorbachev Foundation to secure the former president’s visit to Harvard, although University spokesperson Chris Ahearn said he did not know the amount.

Free tickets for the event, handed out last week, were gone in just an hour and a half.

University President Lawrence H. Summers and Davis Center Director Timothy Colton, Feldberg professor of government and Russian studies, introduced Gorbachev.

“I thought it was exciting to hear the perspective of the man who was there,” Summers said after the speech.

—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.