And while it is true that ultimately John Paul must make his judgment in the light not merely of facts derived from his intelligence sources, but of facts coming to him by papal privilege, it is also true that, on this occasion, as Gorbachev took his bow in the U.N., the Pontiff was in possession of his own sources of information about Kremlin councils, about Mikhail Gorbachev’s outlook, and about what had passed between President Reagan and the General Secretary at their Geneva and Moscow summits. He was aware of the possibilities, acquainted with the assurances and apprised of the realities behind the public relations and propaganda efforts on both sides.
As 1989 progressed, therefore, all during the startling actions that were to propel Gorbachev into the middle of the organized policies and plans of the United States and the West nations and the Wise Men, Pope John Paul’s attention remained on the fundamental mind-set of the parties involved. And there, he found little to surprise him.
Before reviewing those startling events of 1989, and in order to understand how Papa Wojtyla views the astounding success achieved by Mikhail Gorbachev before the spring of 1990, one should become acquainted with the Pontiff’s summation of Gorbachev and his Gorbachevism, which goes a long way toward explaining where John Paul stands today, and how he views the present geopolitical structure that is abuilding among the nations and peoples of Europe (including the USSR in an altered condition) and of the North American continent.
The familiar process of the Wise Men was over forty years old. It had congealed all international activity in well-worn ruts. It progressed by fits and starts. It sometimes took two steps backward for each step forward. It relied on an “either-or” atmosphere, warning of an ultimate lethal collision or, at the very least, of a series of shocks to the entire world system of nations. In terms of ultimate international harmony and cooperation, it appeared more and more to be barren of real hope and meaningful change.
Yet so taken did the West remain with its position on the world stage and with its own in-club program for the development of nations, that its reaction had become predictable to every new ballet d’invitation orchestrated by Leninist intelligence. Each time, the West was first surprised; then fascinated; then mesmerized; then taken in; and finally disappointed—but always ready to enter the cycle again.
By the time President Reagan was prepared to break that pattern with his own principle of “Trust, but verify,” the difficulty was that no Western government was capable of the verification required.
Obviously, no Western intelligence agency—and therefore no Western government—had any inkling that the Soviet system could actually produce such a character as Mikhail Gorbachev from its enigmatic innards. Or, once they took note of him, that he could be promoted to the position of supreme Soviet power. Or that, once promoted, he would—or even could—steal such a long march on his Western colleagues in statecraft and in the molding of international opinion. “It breaks protocol!” sputtered one French official, as if to make John Paul’s very point, when Gorbachev dropped his July 14 letter like a Bastille Day cannonball into the “Group of Seven” meeting. “Protocol be damned,” answered a Britisher. “What do we do with it?”
But the principle followed by the Pope in assessing Western reactions to the Gorbachev phenomenon is much more fundamental than observations about oversmug policies or debilitated intelligence capabilities. Rather, it has to do with the fact that the Western mind has found no way to fathom the attitude of the genuine Leninist mind; and that it is unlikely to do so. For not even the basic notion of arid humanitarianism has a place in the rulebook of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. In moral terms familiar to the Western mind, there is no way to understand the Communist mentality—what Dostoyevski called “the fire of the mind”—that animates the champions and guardians of the Leninist Party-State.
The information sources at the disposal of John Paul’s Holy See indicated to him that, true to form, throughout the varied reactions of the West nations to the early phases of the Gorbachev phenomenon, there were grains of truth mixed with generous dollops of fond and wishful thinking, long-standing distrust, latent and patent fears, and the inertia of Western bureaucrats in their analytic thinking.
On the other side of the coin, the fundamental principle used by Pope John Paul in making his own overall judgment of the Gorbachev phenomenon stands in stark contrast to the one he applies to the West. And the principle in this case, while confirmed by John Paul’s Kremlin-watchers throughout Soviet territory, is drawn from his long firsthand experience of the Leninist mentality as he learned its real features at close quarters in his Polish motherland.
In essence, that principle recognizes the keynote of the Leninist Party-State as a counterintelligence organization from start to finish. And in practice, that principle takes President Reagan’s cautionary slogan, “Trust, but verify,” to its deepest significance.
Trust Gorbachev, Reagan was saying; but verify his words by his deeds. John Paul’s experience has taught him that promises made and deeds accomplished both come from the heart of an institutionalized counterintelligence operation. One way or another, both words and actions aid the overall purpose of the Party-State to strengthen itself in all circumstances and to achieve its ultimate aims for its own exclusive success throughout the capitalist West and the world at large.
As unpleasant and cynical as that principle may sound, every information source and reliable indication at the disposal of John Paul tells him that the bones and structure of the Leninist Party-State—the secretariat, the KGB and the Red Army—remain intact and operative.
That being so, it defies credibility to think that Gorbachev is an entirely original mind secretly bent on turning the Party-State system upside down and restoring the Soviet Union to the comity of free nations. The Leninist system does not allow for such a character—even if he is Mikhail Gorbachev—to live any longer than it takes to snuff out a human life. Thus, as long as the Leninist Party-State remains intact and operative, so long does John Paul’s fundamental principle of understanding Gorbachev remain intact and operative.
None of all that is to say, however, that little or nothing has changed in the Kremlin with the advent of Gorbachev. Leninist principles do remain valid. But there has been a switch in operations. And that switch has been based mainly on two things: on the special personal and geopolitical talents of Mikhail Gorbachev himself, and on the principles urged upon his Communist brothers over fifty years ago by the unsung Italian genius, Antonio Gramsci.
Of those two elements in the new mix of Leninism, in certain respects Gorbachev has been the greater surprise for Pope John Paul. For he is the first Soviet leader who has risen to the top free of the ham-handed crudity, personal unculture and counterproductive provincialism of his predecessors in high office. It is no wonder to John Paul that even Margaret Thatcher, never a friend of Leninist Marxism, said on meeting Gorbachev for the first time that she felt the impact “in every molecule of my being.”
Nor was Mrs. Thatcher alone in her enthusiasm as the vibrant General Secretary displayed to the world an undoubted superiority in statecraft and leadership by comparison to the already known and uninspiring performances of his European and American counterparts. His success on the world stage became so palpable, in fact, that as throaty chants of “Gorbi! Gorbi! Gorbi!” followed him all through his triumphal state visit to West Germany, the tabloid Bild cooed that “what meant fear and threat to us has become a cuddly animal without bloody paws.”
In reaction, Soviet spokesman Georgi A. Abatov could afford a little modesty: “We did not expect such a welcome.”
The second element of Gorbachev’s neo-Leninism—the full implementation at long last of the principles of Antonio Gramsci—is surprising for John Paul only in Gorbachev’s singular mastery of the techniques required, and the icy nerves he displays as he carries them out.
Central to this element of Gorbachev’s neo-Leninism is one point of Gramsci’s with which Pope John Paul is in tota
l agreement: Between raw Leninism and raw capitalism, there never was and still is not any essential difference. In each case the driving force is materialism. At heart, each system is exclusively materialistic. Neither looks beyond the material here and now. Neither values or defines man and the life of each individual beyond the material goods he produces and consumes.
It seems clear to John Paul that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reading of Gramsci is the same as his own. It’s just that, from their vantage points on opposite sides of the materialist fence, these two leaders must and do see the whole process of Gramscian policy from an exactly contrary point of view.
Gramsci warned that Leninism could not compete with the West in the economic and military fields. More, he warned that, even if such a competition were possible, it would not mean the ultimate victory of Leninism. Instead, said Gramsci, such competition would likely lead to a long and wearing struggle, would erode the willpower and the resources of the Leninist Party-State and, worst of all, would leave intact and unconquered the high cultural ground of the West—the popular mind, complete with its transcendent ideals so alien to Leninism.
At the very best, predicted Gramsci, any such economic and military struggle between Leninism and capitalism as he knew it would come down to a boring stalemate.
Competition there must be, of course. But, exhorted Gramsci, as if speaking directly to the genius of Gorbachev, let it be for the popular mind. Let that competition be led by the Party-State; but let it be waged day by day in the bailiwick of the capitalists themselves. And let the means be not military might but sweet acculturation of ideas and ideals. Promote all areas of cultural convergence. And above all, strip the West of any last clinging vestiges of Christianity’s transcendent God. Then will the West be gravely vulnerable to penetration by the fundamental “dialectic” of Marxist materialism.
By what appeared to many—but not to Pope John Paul—as the luck of the draw in this round of history, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power at a moment so perfect that Gramsci himself could not have wished for a better one.
By 1985, the influence of traditional Christian philosophy in the West was weak and negligible. The influence of Christian believers was restricted. The truly vibrant areas of Christian life were reduced. The secularization of church hierarchies, bureaucracies and clergy—including the Roman Catholic Church and its once vaunted religious orders—was extensive. And the ever more pervasive moral license of Western countries was well entrenched.
Looking coldly at the genius of Mikhail Gorbachev, and attending always to his own principle of judgment regarding the Soviet Party-State as an intact counterintelligence organization par excellence, John Paul knew that Gramsci’s master strategy was now feasible. Humanly speaking, it was no longer too tall an order to strip large majorities of men and women in the West of those last vestiges that remained to them of Christianity’s transcendent God.
In Pope John Paul’s analysis, in fact, the bigger challenge for Gorbachev would be for him to mesmerize the capitalist West in its single-minded preoccupation with its tripod model for international development and stability.
For that reason, the Pope was not surprised at the General Secretary’s “new thinking” in his United Nations speech. It was in that speech, in fact, that the Soviet leader himself confirmed John Paul’s analysis that there had been a switch in Kremlin operations, and that Gramsci’s blueprint was on the table in Moscow.
In a nutshell, Gorbachev’s speech was Gramsci brought up to date. It put the mind of the West at ease about military preoccupation and danger. It sought to fascinate that mind even further with money and goods and profits and technological advances. And underpinning it all was a fascinating change in emphasis. Gorbachev was asking for help, all right. But he was doing so by proposing what appeared to be a genuine partnership with the West in the areas of its deepest preoccupation. Surely, Gramsci would have been proud.
Given the papal analysis of Gorbachev and the neo-Leninism of the USSR, John Paul did not find the deepest significance of the General Secretary’s U.N. speech in its contents. It was not even all that significant in the Pontiff’s view that Gorbachev had effectively claimed for himself the center spot of international action; that much, at least, was not new, for the West had always reacted to Soviet initiative. The real importance of the hour he took to deliver his address lay in that fact that Gorbachev was able to disassociate himself so successfully from seventy years of history. And it lay in the fact that he had taken over the center spot of international acclaim. That was new.
From John Paul’s point of view, therefore, the fact that Gorbachev had been able to fly in the face of history and stand before the world as its new hero was the only new element that had to be factored into the formula by which the Holy See must judge the changed and changing condition of human society.
To understand the Pope’s reading of what made Gorbachev’s U.N. triumph possible in those terms is to understand the deep difficulty John Paul faces in Gorbachevism.
For one thing, even on the face of it, when Gorbachev rose to address the U.N. delegates that December day, in actual fact no one there had done less than he had to ease the problems of which he spoke with such passion. No one had done less than he and his Party-State for world peace; or for the cleansing of our polluted environment; or to relieve the misery of millions. Of East Germany’s forests, 41 percent are dead or dying; 10 percent of its people drink substandard water. Air pollution is so bad in northern Czechoslovakia that life expectancy is shortened by three to four years. In Hungary, one in seventeen deaths is due to air pollution. Almost all the water in Poland’s rivers is unfit for human consumption, and 50 percent is so toxic it is unfit for industrial use. The river Vistula, flowing through Warsaw, is a lifeless sewer. At least 25 percent of Polish soil is too contaminated for safe farming. Vegetable farming in the Silesia region will have to be forbidden because of the abnormal quantities of lead and cadmium in the soil. In the Soviet Union, 102 cities (50 million people) are exposed to industrial pollution ten times greater than safety norms. The Aral Sea and Central Asia have been polluted by indiscriminate use of water, pesticides and fertilizers. Large tracts of Poland and the USSR now are witnessing the birth of deformed babies and the mysterious outbreak of skin diseases not described in medical books—apparently the results of the Chernobyl disaster.
In addition, many of the delegates listening to Gorbachev’s speech represented governments that had labored and had spent their time and resources to help cure the ills of nations that had suffered grievously from the wrongdoing of the system now headed by Mikhail Gorbachev. Many more of those delegates came from nations whose fields and gardens and unborn babies had been sown with seeds of death from Soviet inefficiency and fecklessness in dealing with the environment. Still others represented peoples who had been ground down by the heels of Soviet militarism.
Moreover, in and of themselves, Gorbachev’s words that day were not different or fresher or more heartening than the clarion calls to our consciences that President Reagan had made on at least half a dozen occasions—in his Normandy address commemorating the Allied invasion of 1944, for instance, or in his Moscow University address of May 1988.
Yet, no such appeal by the American president—or by any other leader of the West nations—was ever received with anything like the enthusiasm meted out to Gorbachev’s U.N. address.
Where did the difference lie? Pope John Paul’s answer to that question was disheartening—but, once again, not surprising.
The difference, it would seem, lay in the religious, political and moral climate that now attends the nations in their efforts to find new leadership for the world at the end of the second millennium. For that climate is such that an international body as widely representative of the nations as the U. N. wishes no reliance on God and has no intention of presenting gifts on any altar.
In that climate, the American president as titular head of the West is not in a position to galvanize the nations, becau
se Americans typically announce their plans and ideas with a righteousness originally born of a religious womb. And their European counterparts are even worse off, because they speak of their ideas in the jaded terms of leaders who once tended the Altars of God, but have now turned their backs on their own past.
In the present climate, only someone resident at the heart of the only self-proclaimed and officially antireligious, anti-God empire our world has ever known could carry the day. Only someone above the slightest suspicion of being morally good for an otherworldly reason. Only someone dedicated to success and triumph in this world exclusively. Only someone at the center of hard-core, hard-nosed Marxism. Only that someone had a chance of being heard on his own terms—and of moving the West from its ingrained and long-held policy of containment.
Given all the givens, therefore, Mikhail Gorbachev was the perfect leader to herald the new era. And he was the perfect servant of the natural forces the society of nations has now agreed we must all obey.
Given the difficulties of the Soviet Union, it was only logical that he would ask for help and cooperation. Given the desire of the West nations to find new and profitable markets for their goods and services, it was only reasonable that they would respond with a heady combination of relief and enthusiasm. Given the fact that, as a generation, we are notorious even among ourselves for knowing little or nothing of what preceded the forty-five years that have molded the actions and initiatives of nations, it was only natural that Gorbachev’s carefully honed appeal would meet with resounding success.
Even granting the four or five half-truths uttered by Gorbachev in his U.N. address, and the one or two major lies he repeated, and the duplicitous and merciless behavior of the Soviet Union past and present, it was obvious to John Paul and his advisers that this Soviet’s globalist sense was far superior to that of any Internationalist or Transnationalist leader. They had simply been outclassed.
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