The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
History can be cruel. Sometimes it elevates charlatans, and it denounces people of great political courage and character. Inferior individuals win prestigious posts in government, while people of superior abilities who have complex and often inscrutable motives are thrown onto the ash heap of history.
Three such men were the last white President of South Africa, one of the last communist party chairmen and premiers of the USSR, and the last leader of the Soviet Union prior to its collapse in 1991.
F.W. deKlerk
Frederik Willem deKlerk was born into a family steeped in the white supremacist apartheid policies of the National Party of South Africa. His great-grandfather was a senator in the South Africa government. His aunt married a South Africa National Party Prime Minister. Mr. deKlerk’s father was an important figure in the National Party political structure.
F.W. deKlerk rose through the National Party ranks, after having earned a law degree. As time went on, he began to see that the apartheid system of absolute racial separation and severe racial discrimination was greatly damaging his nation by its unjust treatment of black and colored (Indian and mixed-race) South Africans. He perceived that it was doomed to ultimate failure.
DeKlerk became part of the verligte (enlightened) wing of the NP in early 1989. They favored negotiations to transfer political power to the African National Congress, the political party of Nelson Mandela. This transition did not seem necessary to everyone concerned, however. To this day many people on all sides of the ANC peaceful revolution blame deKlerk for everything leading up to and following it.
When P.W. Botha, the then-president, suffered a stroke in 1989, the NP was faced with a decision: whom should they name as their next candidate for President? Another man was the more obvious choice, but the Verligte maneuvered deKlerk into position to win the ensuing presidential nomination and election.
DeKlerk and his colleagues believed it was imperative to negotiate a peaceful transmission of the reins of state to the ANC and its titular head, Nelson Mandela. Mr. Mandela had been languishing in prison for nearly a quarter of a century, He was sent there by the apartheid government for what they claimed to be treasonous activities. Given the repressive and authoritarian nature of apartheid, that was probably a legally correct, if also morally corrupt, assessment.
In order to achieve the goal of the verligte forces within the new South African government, F.W. DeKlerk released Nelson Mandela from the Robbens Island prison. To do so represented an enormous political risk on his part.
When Mandela returned to Johannesburg as a free man, tens of thousands of chanting black South Africans greeted him. The tension leading up to the eventual takeover of power by Nelson Mandela represented a delicate and potentially explosive political stratagem. It constantly threatened to disintegrate with unpredictable results.
Neither man trusted the other. Both thought they had good reasons for their misgivings. But both also were committed to the cause for which they ceaselessly labored, and they went ahead with their countless discussions, debates, and controversies.
President deKlerk engineered a whites-only vote to approve the turnover of political power to the ANC. There was no guarantee the vote would pass, but deKlerk convinced the Dutch and British all-white electorate that if the measure did not pass, a bloody revolution would likely ensue. By a large margin, the ballot passed.
From the moment F.W. deKlerk had become President and had initiated the negotiations with the ANC, he was under constant attack from his enemies within the National Party, his enemies in the other white parties, and most of the members of the African National Congress. Some of the allegations against him were valid. He allowed some of his cabinet ministers to engage in kleptocracy. The errors of his past before his political conversion, of which there were many, were dredged up to attack him.
In the end, Nelson Mandela and F.W. deKlerk cobbled together a remarkably peaceful political settlement. Five years before that, no one could have reasonably predicted that outcome. In recognition, both men were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.
How did two men, who represented two such unalterably opposed political parties, manage to achieve the impossible? They did so because they believed so completely in the goal they sought, even if each distrusted the other in the quest of their common goal.
Other intractable and distrustful adversaries also had striven for peace at great odds of ever finding success. They too had been given the Nobel Peace Prize. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese Foreign Minister LeDuc Tho were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973. In 1994 The Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, collectively won the Peace Prize.
In the case of Mandela and deKlerk, Mandela deservedly became one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century. His sunny personality convinced his fellow black South Africans not to retaliate against their white oppressors once the transfer of power had occurred. There were an amazingly small number of casualties, when there might have been a wholesale bloodbath. The memory of Nelson Mandela shall shine for generations to come.
By now, F.W. deKlerk is almost forgotten outside South Africa. Given the circumstances, perhaps that is inevitable. Nevertheless, were it not for the tenacity of President deKlerk with all his faults, Nelson Mandela might well have died in prison, unremembered by history, and apartheid could still hold sway in Africa’s southernmost state. For all the above reasons, F.W. deKlerk is the twentieth century’s third-greatest winner-loser.
Nikita Khrushchev
In 1953 Josef Stalin died. He quickly was replaced by Georgi Malenkov as chairman of the Soviet communist party and as prime minister. After a short and rocky stint as the head of the Soviet state, Malenkov resigned in 1955.
In 1956 the Soviet communist party held their first Party Congress since before the beginning of World War II. At that congress Nikita Khrushchev gave a four-hour speech. In it he assailed Stalin’s purges of millions of Soviet citizens throughout the bloody dictator’s long reign. He acknowledged that Stalin was a dedicated communist, but he also declared that Stalin promoted a “cult of personality” that kept him in power by means of his relentless ruthlessness. No one before that time had dared publicly to criticize Stalin.
Khrushchev took a huge political gamble in making that speech. Either he might end up dead or frozen out of the Soviet hierarchy. But he knew someone had to label the master of repression exactly what he was: a bloody, cruel, heartless political terrorist. It could be stated so clearly only when Stalin was dead, but it did need to be stated.
For his courageous decision in giving the famous “Secret Speech,” Khrushchev was named party chairman and head of state. However, Khrushchev proved to be more adept at properly describing Stalin than in leading the Soviet Union through the Cold War.
Millions of Americans of a certain age will remember the antics of Nikita Sergeivitch Khrushchev. It was he who pounded his shoe on the podium at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. He boasted to the West, “We will bury you!” He meant that in an economic, not a military, sense. He actually believed that Soviet communism could match western capitalism. That authenticated his communist zeal, but undermined his attempts at achieving objectivity.
In 1961 Khrushchev reluctantly capitulated to East Germany’s insistence that a wall be built between East and West Berlin. Too many East Germans were escaping to the West via Berlin. The decision to approve The Wall could have led to World War III.
Fortunately it did not, because the young, inexperienced US President, John F. Kennedy, allowed the wall to be constructed. It lasted from then until 1989, when the third and greatest winner-loser of this essay was the Soviet leader.
Premier Khrushchev gambled that neither the United States nor its youthful President would go to war over the Berlin Wall. In that, happily, he was correct.
The next year Khrushchev took another gamble in Cuba. With the encouragement of Fidel Castro, he intended to built missile bases in Cuba that were capable of sending nuclear-tipped missiles throughout the eastern United States. As the memorable movie Thirteen Days explained it, it was Khrushchev himself who was forced to back down on that political-military gambit. The Soviet ships with their missile cargoes turned back, and the missile bases were dismantled. That was the closest moment the world ever came to nuclear war up to the present time.
On October 15, 1964, Khrushchev was “released” from both his communist party and government positions because of “advanced age and deterioration of his health,” according to the official explanation for his removal from office. He lived for another seven years.
Nikita Khrushchev was not a polished international leader, but he was an effective and (as it turned out) safe leader of the Soviet Union. To his everlasting credit, Khrushchev was genuinely committed to what he and many others came to call “peaceful coexistence.” He wanted to avoid war, especially nuclear war, at all costs. That he managed to do. He also signed a nuclear test ban treaty in July of 1963 with President Kennedy. Less than four months later, President Kennedy was dead.
Upon being told that Khrushchev had been fired from the pinnacle of the communist hierarchy, he said to his friend Anastas Mikoyan, “Could anyone have dreamed of saying about Stalin that he didn’t suit us anymore? …Now everything is different. The fear is gone….That’s my contribution.”
Khrushchev was driven from office by his communist party comrades. Nevertheless, for his persistence in promoting peaceful coexistence at a very tense period of Soviet-Western history, Nikita Sergeivitch Khrushchev deserves to be recommended as the Second Greatest Winner-Loser of the Twentieth Century. His somewhat kinder, gentler politics led ultimately to the succession of the last leader of the Soviet Union, the Greatest Winner-Loser of the Twentieth Century. And to that man we now turn.
Mikhail Gorbachev
We begin the summary of Mikhail Gorbachev by noting that in Russia today, Khrushchev today is hailed as a great leader, whereas Gorbachev is despised by nearly every Russian citizen of every political stripe. However, if Russia was now ruled by a Gorbachev-like figure rather than by Vladimir Putin, Gorbachev might well be considered the greatest Russian leader since Peter the Great or Alexander II. Under autocrats, Russians learn to applaud autocrats. Historically, that has always been a much healthier choice.
Mikhail Sergeivitch Gorbachev was the only true statesman in the seventy-year communist rule of Russia and the subsequent Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. How could such a man with so unusual a political pedigree fall so far from Soviet grace?
Gorbachev was born in a village in the steppes of southern Russia in 1931. His family endured the brutal collectivization of Russian farmland under Stalin. Two uncles and an aunt starved to death during that terrible period.
One of Gorbachev’s grandfathers was a Russian Orthodox peasant who was arrested for not planting a crop. He did not plant a crop because he had been supplied no seeds to plant. The other grandfather was a dedicated communist who was arrested during the Stalinist purges. Both grandfathers somehow managed to survive their arrests and incarcerations. The young Mikhail was struck by the injustice those two revered men suffered at the hands of Soviet-communism-gone-wrong.
Gorbachev became the head of the Soviet state after a very rapid succession of two leaders who followed Leonid Brezhnev. Had the “Rapid Twosome” not come and gone so quickly, Gorbachev might never have attained the highest position in Soviet society. But they did, and he did.
He became the general secretary of the Soviet communist party in 1985. Five years later, he also became the president of the USSR. He was recognized in the western press for two major political-philosophical reforms: Glasnost (which means “openness”), and Perestroika (restructuring).
Both these measures resulted in a democratization process that had never before occurred under Soviet communism, although there were small movements in that direction under Chairman Khrushchev. For example, Gorbachev introduced the secret ballot in some (but not all) elections. He also allowed other previously banned political parties to run candidates in Soviet elections.
President Gorbachev signed a pact with President Reagan to destroy all intermediate-range ballistic missiles. He believed that if the Soviet Union relaxed its tight control on its own people, its foreign relations with the West would improve. Margaret Thatcher, as much of a hard-line anti-communist as her friend Ronald Reagan, declared that Mikhail Gorbachev was a man she “could do business with.”
In the late 1980s, the Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe began to show signs of wanting to regain the independence they had lost as a result of Nazi and Soviet occupation. Astonishingly, Mr. Gorbachev did not invade any eastern European nation to smash their desire for freedom from Soviet domination.
After nine years of constant warfare, he withdrew the Soviet army from Afghanistan. (What did he know that we still have not discovered?) He agreed to the reunification of East and West Germany.
For these and many other such dramatic decisions, Mikhail Gorbachev was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. Like many other Peace Prize winners, however, his fortunes at home were rapidly dissipating. His political demise was near.
Gorbachev was and is a convinced Marxist. But he rejected the harsh policies of Soviet communism which had dominated the USSR for most of its existence. It is illustrative of the pervasive noxious influence of that system that most Soviet citizens rejected the man who wanted to liberate them from an oppressive government.
While on vacation at the Black Sea, Gorbachev was placed under house arrest from August 21-23, 1990 by a group of hard-line communists, who hoped thereby to gain control of the government. Gorbachev survived the coup attempt, but his political power base had become badly so eroded that he could not survive in office.
Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, by far the largest and strongest of the fifteen Soviet republics. Yeltsin strongly implied that under him, democracy would take hold in Russia, and Russia was the heart of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
In 1991 the Soviet Union finally collapsed. On Christmas Day of 1991, Gorbachev resigned as its president, and the USSR ceased to exist. With that, Mikhail Gorbachev’s political influence forever vanished. He ran for the presidency of Russia in 1996 against Yeltsin, but he won only one per cent of the total votes cast.
From the moment he became the communist party general secretary, Gorbachev never intended to preside over the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As a democratically-inclined communist, he wanted to democratize the Soviet Union, but certainly not to destroy it.
Unfortunately, most western leaders had been so dedicated for so long to the destruction of communism that they never gave Mr. Gorbachev a chance to succeed in the perestroika of Soviet communism. Ronald Reagan got along amazingly well with Gorbachev, considering how polarized their politics were. Mr. Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, said he had no interest in trying politically to prop up Mr. Gorbachev. “To hell with that!” said Mr. Bush. “We prevailed. They didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.”
Would a Marshall Plan for the former Soviet Union have brought Russia and its former nation-states much more completely into the world community? And would it have saved Gorbachev as the leader of a new Russia? We shall never know, because it was never attempted.
Thus Mikhail Gorbachev exited the world stage. He lost his beloved wife Raisa to cancer, which was perhaps a greater personal blow to him than his political fall from grace. For a time, in order to sustain himself financially, he made money filming ads for Pizza Hut and Louis Vuitton handbags. How the mighty had fallen.
If I were Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, I would anonymously see to it that Mr. Gorbachev was rewarded for his contributions to world peace and Russian democratization by providing him one or two hundred thousand dollars a year for as long as he lives. He richly deserves it.
Mikhail Gorbachev is unquestionably the Number One Greatest Winner-Loser of the Twentieth Century. Of that there can be no serious doubt.
But from my perspective there is more, much more. For the third quarter of the last century, I thought Winston Churchill was the greatest person of the last century. Then for the last quarter of the last century, I thought that person was Harry Truman.
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, I have concluded that Mikhail Gorbachev was the greatest and most influential person to have lived in the last century. (Why I think about these things I don’t know, but I do.) Gorbachev, more than anyone else, brought an official end to the Cold War. He, more than anyone else, prevented World War III. He, more than any other, severely slowed a foolish arms race and eliminated the possibility of a nuclear Armageddon.
As far as the Russian people are concerned, alas, Mikhail Gorbachev is a pitiful failure. To my way of thinking, Mikhail Gorbachev is the Greatest Winner-Loser of the Twentieth Century. For many other reasons, he is in truth The Greatest Person of the Twentieth Century. Hail to the dethroned, detested, misunderstood, probably-still-at-heart-a-communist-albeit-a-very-unorthodox-one Mikhail Sergeivitch Gorbachev!
Amen, and amen!
- September 16, 2017
John Miller is a writer, author, lecturer, and preacher-for-over-fifty-years who is pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC.