Remembering the Era of Mikhail Gorbachev

Remembering the Era of Mikhail Gorbachev

Vamık Volkan

September 3, 2022

During the Cold War, Americans and Soviets were seeing each other through extremely prejudicial lenses. My first attendance at a meeting with Soviet delegates took place in Chautauqua, New York in June 1985. Two Soviet poets had come to Chautauqua: Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky. My conversations with them were my first meaningful experiences with people from the Other’s side of the world. As I got to know these poets, they took my breath away. Yevtushenko’s “Lament for a Brother” is about a goose grieving a brother goose that has been shot down, and he bemoans his own punishment for surviving, having been spared—this time. In the United States, we seldom thought about the incredible Soviet military and civilian losses during World War II, estimated from 15 to over 20 million, and the suffering of the Soviet people at the time.  And we rarely appreciated how such shared trauma affected their large-group psychology. Furthermore, exiles and other massive oppressions in the Stalin era added to this society’s burden.

Glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring), demokratizatsiya (democratization), and uskoreniye (acceleration) were initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev after he became the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on March 11, 1985, to deal with the country’s serious economic and political problems. The International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) invited Soviet psychologists and other professionals dealing with peace issues to attend its annual meetings. In the summer of 1987 four Soviet delegates unexpectedly came to New Jersey to attend the annual ISPP meeting. Since I was one of the founders and a former president of ISPP, I was asked to welcome and spend some time with them. I got to know Stanislav Roschin and Boris Lomow. Roschin was a psychologist at the USSR Institute of Psychology who he had spent time in London as a KGB agent connected with the Soviet Embassy. Lomow was assigned to the Soviet Space program as the head psychologist.

My meeting with Roschin and Lomow led to my Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI), at the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia, and the Soviet Duma making an official contract that allowed CSMHI and the USSR Institute of Psychology to start a dialogue series aiming to help the Soviet and the American people get to know one another better and to offer ideas to improve Soviet-American relationships.

Seven of my interdisciplinary team members – among them Harold Saunders, a former United States Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research as well the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs – went to Moscow in April 1990. We began to meet with the Soviet participants from the USSR Institute of Psychology, the Center for Political Studies of the Institute of State and Law of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Diplomatic Academy of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, the Association for International Dialogue, and the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

In the streets we observed the economic conditions of the Soviet Union and peoples’ reactions to it. For example, when we visited GUM, the huge State Department Store on the eastern side of Red Square, the rows of drab stores told the story of the economic conditions. In a shoe store, there were only about a dozen pairs of shoes for sale and the rest of the store was empty. People walked around without smiles.

One day Harold Saunders and I, accompanied by one of our hosts, Stanislav Roschin, appeared on the Good Evening Moscow program on Moscow Central Television. Having members of a visiting American team interested in the psychology of Soviet-American relations who were not official diplomats as guests on a popular Soviet talk show was something unusual for the people of Moscow—a symbolic illustration of people-to-people communication between Americans and Soviets. As far as I know, this was the first time something like this had happened. Exactly one year after the Moscow meeting, in April 1991, another major gathering of the Soviets, CSMHI members and other American guests took place in Charlottesville.

Later I would learn that CSMHI’s psychologically informed views would be presented to Gorbachev especially by Leonid Dobrokhotov from the Section of International Information of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The Soviets invited me back to Moscow, and this time I went there without any other member of CSMHI, just my wife, and spent days at the Diplomatic Academy, lecturing on and discussing political psychology topics.

On August 19-21, 1991 a coup d’état attempt occurred in the USSR when a group of hardliners wanted to take control of the Soviet Union from Gorbachev. It would be known as the August Putsch (Avgustovsky Putsch). These hardliners, some of whom had been Gorbachev’s former allies, wanted to return to old party values and avert the new Union treaty by removing Gorbachev, who was in Crimea at the time.

Ill-prepared, the coup fell apart by August 21 and most of its leaders left Moscow, just as Gorbachev returned there, having been “saved” by Boris Yeltsin who had been elected president of the Russian Soviet Federative Republic two months earlier. Yeltsin became the man of the hour, with the help of public demonstrations against the putsch, by successfully resisting the coup.

Gorbachev might have been in shock, but in public he tried to behave as if no dramatic events had taken place in the USSR and that the Soviet Union would continue to exist if he could purge the hardliners from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Yeltsin, however, had different ideas. Furthermore, starting the second day of the coup and continuing over the next two months Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Baltic and Central Asian republics would declare their intention to leave the Soviet Union. On August 24, after Yeltsin had ordered the CPSU to suspend its activities in all Russian territory, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the CPSU, but remained president of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile the Russian flag was flown alongside the Soviet flag at the Kremlin.

Against all odds, Mikhail Gorbachev still hoped for a new Union. Three months after the Putsch, I was rushed by the Rector of the Diplomatic Academy of the Soviet Foreign Ministry Ambassador Oleg Peressypkin to Moscow to meet with representatives from the Sovereign States of the USSR. I sensed that my meeting with the representatives of the Soviet republics would be in the service of Mikhail Gorbachev’s and Ambassador Peressypkin’s magical hope to keep the Union alive, liberalized and more democratic. I asked myself, “Why me?” I had no definite answers. Upon reflection, I think that, during my previous interactions with Soviet colleagues, I was able to maintain my psychoanalytic/academic identity and was perceived by Gorbachev and his important followers as someone who could suggest peaceful ways of managing conflicts among neighbors. Also, everyone knew that I, as well as other members of CSMHI, were not involved with the Soviets for any economic gain. I believe that they trusted me. When my wife and I flew by Aeroflot from Washington and arrived in Moscow in the middle of the night three months after the coup, we were treated as if we were important dignitaries.

I met with the representatives of different large groups of the Soviet Union for four days. When intellectualization ended, the participants experienced humanity, warts and all. On the afternoon of the fourth day, one Russian, Vlademir Pechkourov, Chairman of the Oriental Languages Department at the Diplomatic Academy, raised his voice and addressed me. In heavily accented English, he said: “Professor Volkan, we learned a great deal and now we need to face our responsibilities because the cookie will crumble.” There was nothing more to discuss. A month later, in December1991, the cookie crumbled. No longer was there a Soviet Union.

I met Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife in 1993. The University of Virginia was planning to celebrate the 250th birthday of its founder Thomas Jefferson on April 13, 1993. Some months earlier the University president’s office asked me if I could invite Gorbachev to take part in the celebrations. I got in touch with Leonid Dobrokhotov and sent a message to Gorbachev.  The last leader of the Soviet Union accepted to come to Charlottesville.

Early in the morning of April 13, 1993, I went to the Boars Head Inn Charlottesvile and met Raisa and Mikhail Gorbachev. Leonid functioned as our interpreter. Later we drove to the location of the yearly graduation ceremonies. Thousands of people, including Douglas Wilder, the first African American to serve as governor of a U.S. state, were waiting for the Gorbachevs. The election of a new governor would be taking place soon. People started yelling, “Gorby for governor” and many, including children, wanted to touch the former Soviet leader. Gorbachev kept smiling.

 In his speech Gorbachev spoke about how he was influenced by Thomas Jefferson’s ideas. He said: “Both Jefferson’s time and our own are periods of profound and dramatic historical change. The changes, of course, are substantially different. Two and a half centuries ago, humankind was entering the extremely promising era of industrial civilization. An era of machines, which has benefited people a great deal, but has also brought about a multiplicity of problems, disasters, and tragedies. Today, humankind is stepping toward a post-industrial civilization. No one can yet say what kind of civilization it will be. One thing, however, is clear: it must place humanity at its center. Without that we simply cannot survive.” Gorbachev praised the man who had built and lived in Monticello, under whose shadow my Center for Study of Mind and Human Interaction was located. Later, Gorbachev gave me a written version of his speech, and we published it in CSMHI’s journal, Mind and Human Interaction.

In late 2011, I was in St. Petersburg and Moscow and had a chance to speak with many young Russians. Obviously, I was not conducting a scientific survey, but my impression was that in Russia in 2011 (and today), many young Russians have a perception of Gorbachev as a “bad man” who ruined their “empire.” In a group of young persons studying psychoanalysis in Russia, I heard remarks indicating that it was Gorbachev who had brought on disaster and humiliated the Russian people. I wondered if these young people knew that if the communist system still existed, they might not be permitted to study psychoanalysis at all. For me, Gorbachev remains a man who dared to make a crucial change for millions of people in the belief that it would give them better lives.

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A reminder:

Two members of the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI) from Russia are Alexander (Sasha) Obolonsky and Anatoly (Tolja) Golubovsky. I must remind the reader that I first met these wonderful friends soon after the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI) and the Soviet Duma made a contract that allowed CSMHI and the USSR Institute of Psychology to start a dialogue series.