In any case, the government’s convincing performance lasted for as long as necessary to uncover the organized centers of revolt against obedience to the regime. The students seemed caught in a big-time media dilemma. They welcomed the cameras as a means of popularizing their demands; and they feared the obvious fact that if the world was watching, so was the CPC.
As to the Western press, it seemed to mirror the gamut of the usual responses of the West to unexpected Leninist activity. First they were surprised at the events that were unfolding. Then they were mesmerized. Then they were taken in. And finally they were disappointed.
So complete and so effective was the CPC deception that after the tanks and armored personnel carriers had rolled into Tiananmen Square on June 3, one horrified American TV anchor asked, How could the Deng we thought we knew do this?
Still, the illusion persisted that, somehow, it would all turn out according to the Western script. Reports surfaced that the 27th Army Unit was on its way; that it would defend the students against the hard-line contingents who threatened the brave movement with extinction; that a miniature civil war was about to take place in Tiananmen Square.
Inevitably, disappointment turned to horror when the 27th Army Unit—closely controlled by, and deeply loyal to, the CPC—shot Tiananmen Square clear of demonstrators, crushing many of them beneath the tracks of lumbering tanks, mowing down some thousands with their guns and quickly instituting what can only be called a public reign of terror.
“A very small number of people created turmoil,” Deng Xiaoping said at last in a public statement, “and this eventually developed into a counterrevolutionary rebellion. They are trying to overthrow the Communist Party, topple the socialist regime, and subvert the People’s Republic of China so as to establish a capitalist republic.”
Such a statement was only to be expected as the final act in the terrible charade. On all counts, Deng was lying through his teeth. The number of people involved, and the number in obvious sympathy and ready to be swept up in the protest against corruption, was anything but small. And the students themselves were anything but counterrevolutionaries. Deng knew the students had no intention of overthrowing the CP or of abandoning Marxist socialism. He had heard their fervent shouts in support of “Comrade Mao who set us free.” But he had also heard their demands for dialogue and for an end to corrupt practices in high places; and he would have none of it. As in the time of Mao, so in the time of Deng: The Party-State was all-wise. And it was all-powerful. And so it would remain.
The horror and confusion of the West at the action orchestrated by Deng Xiaoping’s CPC was an exact portrait of the inability of the Western mind to fathom the fundamentally inhuman attitude of the truly Leninist mind. Deng knows what torture is. He knows what cruelty and brainwashing are. He knows the pride of a father, and he knows what it is to see a son suffer. He knows the pain at the loss of one’s personal freedom. Yet, all of that can obviously be burned away by “the fire of the mind” that is Leninism.
In the cannonades that blasted the students in Tiananmen Square; in the young bodies crushed beneath tanks; in the hasty midnight pyres fed by gasoline thrown upon mounds of tangled bicycles and mangled corpses; in the shotgun trials and the death sentences that followed—in all of that was displayed the inhuman fire that animates all the policies and all the ballets d’invitations of the Leninist Party-State, whether in China or the Soviet Union or anywhere else.
Yet even as the “Beijing happening” reached its pitch of horror, Pope John Paul had no doubt that the West would somehow find a way to see in all of it the scenario it wished to see.
It was of intense interest to John Paul in that regard that, in the midst of Mikhail Gorbachev’s first full-fledged campaign to win over Western minds, and almost as a curtain-raiser to the “Beijing happening,” a similar “happening” was played out in the Soviet Union.
On April 4, 1989, 158 Georgians went on hunger strikes in order to force some degree of autonomy from the Soviet Union. By April 8, over 8,000 citizens were on the streets of Georgia’s capital city of Tbilisi.
Though the fiery, independent-minded Georgians were unaware of it, Moscow knew exactly what the Georgian National Democratic Party and its leaders, Chairman Georgi Chanturya and second-in-command Vano Khukhunaishvili, had planned. On the very day of the Tbilisi demonstrations, April 8, a Supreme Soviet decree drafted by Gorbachev, signed by him and issued in his name sealed the fate of the Georgian secessionist movement.
By that decree, anything and everything animating the Georgian uprising was made a felony. It was aimed directly against all those who called for the alteration of the Soviet system “in ways contradicting the USSR Constitution.” It was aimed at those who manufactured “materials” arguing for the alteration of the Soviet system, and at those guilty of “incitement of ethnic or racial hostility or strife.” It was aimed at those challenging the role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union “as the leading and guiding force of Soviet society.”
One day later, on April 9, and on orders from Mikhail Gorbachev’s Politburo, security troops—not local militia, as later claimed by Moscow—were sent in with tanks and armored personnel carriers. The crowds were sprayed with a tear gas called chloroacetophenone and then with a poison gas known as CN. Those who still remained were finally dispersed by soldiers wielding guns and shovels with specially sharpened edges—a tool strapped, twenty each, to the outside of each tank. At least twenty Georgians were killed in the offensive, and more than 180 were hospitalized. Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, himself a native son of Georgia, quickly flew to Tbilisi with instructions for the local Party leadership. Martial law was declared on April 10; and, by that same evening, over 120 tanks and armored cars occupied key intersections, bridges and squares.
In subsequent days, some five hundred people were arrested and imprisoned for interrogation and punishment. Military helicopters monitored the streets and rooftops from above. Nearly all shops, restaurants and public buildings were closed. The only signs of protest left finally were pitiful enough. Most women and many men, when they ventured out of doors at all, were dressed in mourning and sobbed openly. At Lenin Square, thousands of flowers were strewn where citizens of Tbilisi had been killed by bullets or gas or shovels.
Meanwhile, the authorities confiscated sixty thousand legally registered firearms, arrested two hundred people for curfew violations, banned all foreign journalists from Tbilisi, and broadcast coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev fulminating against “extremism” and “adventurist elements,” and reasserting the Soviet government’s resolve to fight “destructive” nationalist actions.
Nevertheless, according to a Kremlin announcement, the decision to use riot troops and toxic gas and sharpened shovels in Soviet Georgia on April 9 “was made locally by Georgian authorities.” Gorbachev was “completely shocked.”
Shocked or not, on April 12, Gorbachev drew the same Leninist line in the sand that would soon be drawn by Deng Xiaoping. “We are absolutely against” the demands of the Georgians for autonomy, he said, because it would be tantamount to “breaking up the national-state structure of our country.”
Just how absolutely the Western mind is set in the cement of its illusions was demonstrated in this situation for John Paul when—unperturbed by the events of Tbilisi, and fully apprised of the student demonstrations that had begun in Tiananmen Square—Mikhail Gorbachev arrived amid great speculation and excitement for the summit with Deng that had been scheduled some time before.
It was fascinating for many who serve the Holy See to observe the enthusiasm that was displayed for Gorbachev, both on the part of the Chinese students who clamored to see him and by many seasoned members of the Western press, who had come primarily to cover the Deng-Gorbachev summit.
Once he had left China, Gorbachev’s published reactions to the “Beijing happening” were of a piece with his comments about Tbilisi, and with what John Paul would have expected, based on his readin
g of the Leninist mind. Once Deng had displayed the same tactics that Gorbachev had used in Tbilisi, the General Secretary expressed “regret” about the Chinese government’s cruel suppression of the student demonstrations, but confided to reporters that Soviet information about the situation was “still vague.” On June 15, during his triumphal visit to West Germany to promote the end of “artificial barriers” between East and West—and though, at the very least, Gorbachev had read hourly transcript reports emanating from Beijing to the Kremlin—he cautioned that “We must display great responsibility and balance in our assessment” of the situation in Tiananmen Square; “we don’t know everything yet about the situation.”
Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s rubber-stamp Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies condemned all pressures from the West on Beijing to respond democratically to the student demands. The massacre of students, said the deputies, was “an internal affair” of China. “Any break in the process of reforms in this enormous state [China] …,” added Gorbachev, “would cause major damage to the whole process of recovery in the world.” In the wake of Tbilisi and Tiananmen, the world might well have asked, “What process of recovery?” But, like any true Leninist, Gorbachev knew the drill to follow when any serious obstacle to the Leninist process presented itself. He reached beneath the conference table to pound the floor with the iron club of military threat.
By now, however, threats seemed unnecessary. The West appeared so caught up in Gorbachev’s idea of recovery that there was more worry about dangers to Gorbachev’s survival at home than about the events in Tbilisi or Soviet reactions to the events in China.
The chief worry seemed to be for Gorbachev’s durability against the Soviet hard-liners in the Kremlin. During an interview given in his Moscow home and published in January 1989 in France’s respected Le Figaro, the late and celebrated Soviet physicist and human rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov had already predicted that “the conservatives [the Stalinists] will overthrow Gorbachev, or at least impose their views on him.” At that same interview, Sakharov’s equally famous and equally activist wife, Yelena Bonner, had gone even farther: “I would not bet ten rubles on Gorbachev [surviving].”
Nothing seemed to throw the General Secretary off balance, however. In the very teeth of the doubts about his ability to face down the oft-quoted hard-liners, 74 members of the 301-member Central Committee “voluntarily” resigned. To be sure, this was not Mao’s Cultural Revolution, nor a Stalinist bloodletting. But it was a classic Soviet power purge. Managed with surgical precision by Gorbachev, it effectively swept away the veteran “Icy Survivor” himself, Andrei Gromyko, plus a former defense minister, nine generals, many regional leaders and onetime Politburo figures, and a certain number of “dead souls,” as the Russian novelist Gogol once branded corrupt bureaucrats.
If the cold eye of Leninism looked out upon the world from the center of such events of 1989 as Tbilisi and Tiananmen, and from the bloody purge of Beijing and the bloodless purge of the Central Committee of the CPSU, there were and still remain certain exceptional aspects of the behavior of Mikhail Gorbachev that have raised a question for the world that had not been raised in over seventy years of Leninist-Marxist leadership of the Soviet Union. That question concerns faith. Christian faith. Gorbachev’s faith.
“Surely,” Gorbachev said not long after his emergence as General Secretary in 1985, and to the astonishment of many, “surely God on high has not refused to give us wisdom enough to find ways to bring us an improvement in our relations.”
That was not the language of a cold-eyed Leninist. And it turned out not to be an isolated incident. “Jesus Christ alone knew answers to all questions,” Gorbachev said in the course of that same year, “and he knew how to feed twenty thousand Jews with five loaves of bread…. If God and the Politburo are well disposed to me, I will find the answers.”
One cannot imagine Vladimir Lenin saying things like that. At one stage, Joseph Stalin did speak of Mother Russia. But one cannot easily picture him saying to Franklin Roosevelt or to any American official the words Secretary of State George Shultz heard from Gorbachev as the Soviet leader began his first visit to the United States in 1987: “The visit has begun. So let us hope! May God help us!”
As Gorbachev’s tenure lengthened, so did striking events continue to raise this unheard-of question. In fact, during the 1988 Jubilee Mass in Kiev that marked the millennium of Russia’s conversion to Christianity, a remarkable cry was heard from the pulpit: “At last God has sent us Gorbachev, but Satan wants to kill him.” Even granting the close connection between the Soviet clergy and the KGB, the fact remains that thousands of believers—young men and women as well as old, many of them sobbing—crowded the streets of Kiev on that occasion to venerate the sacred icons openly, and apparently with none of the accustomed fear of Party-State repression or reprisal.
Still more compelling for many were Gorbachev’s pointed, off-the-cuff remarks after the earthquake that devastated Armenia later that year. Gorbachev cut short a visit to the United States to tour the stricken region. While there, he took the opportunity to blast his domestic opponents again in much the usual terms. “They’re striving for power,” he grumbled. “They should be stopped by using all the power at our command—political and administrative.” But then he added a striking and unexpected dimension to his warnings: “Let God judge them. It’s not for them to decide the destiny of this land…. This is the edge of the abyss. One more step and it’s the abyss.”
In December of the same year, when Mother Teresa of Calcutta visited the Soviet Union to aid in the Armenian recovery efforts, she was received in the Kremlin with all honor by Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov in the company of Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and the General Secretary of the Armenian Communist Party. Mother Teresa was assured in the warmest terms that the Soviet Union expected great things from the work of her Roman Catholic missionaries in the USSR’s devastated areas.
Pope John Paul, his entourage and his Kremlin-watchers do not ignore such words and behavior on the part of Mikhail Gorbachev. On the contrary, this question of Gorbachev’s relationship with God—with the God of his youth, with the God of history, with the God of divine grace and of man’s salvation—is among the most important questions for John Paul to consider.
In fact—and notwithstanding the Pope’s personal experience with the cold eye of Leninism, and his present intelligence information—a crucial dimension of the papal assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev in present-day geopolitical terms lies in the Pontiff’s view of this particular Soviet leader as a special instrument of God. The question of Gorbachev and God, therefore—the question of a possible ambivalence in Gorbachev between the cold eye of Leninism and the eye of faith—is a crucial factor for John Paul in the millennium endgame. And for the believer John Paul is, these are not mere words. They are norms of thought and action.
That the West, as well, has become interested in, if not fascinated with, this question was underlined during a press conference Gorbachev held at the Elysée Palace in Paris on July 5, 1989. Asked if he had been baptized, Gorbachev answered almost breezily that he had, and that such a thing was “quite normal” in the Soviet Union.
Despite the General Secretary’s easy reply, the fact is that neither baptism nor virtually any other facet of a Christian way of life is a “normal” element in a successful public career in the Soviet Union. Rather, such things are sure and certain obstacles even to obtaining entry to university studies. And they are absolutely insurmountable obstacles to entry—never mind advancement—in the Soviet Communist Party system. The documentation of that fact is far too extensive to allow for any dissembling.
An accurate judgment on Gorbachev in this matter must take into account the Leninist womb from which he, as a hard-core Leninist, has come. In 1905, Lenin echoed Karl Marx and said that “Religion is a kind of spiritual gin in which the slaves of capitalism drown their human shape and their claim to any decent human life.” In 1915, his
tone was more brutal. “All oppressing classes of every description need two social functions to safeguard their domination: the function of a hangman and the function of a priest. The hangman is to quell the protest … the priest reconciles them to class domination, weans them away from revolutionary actions.” In 1917, his pronouncement was horribly antihuman: “We must be engineers of souls,” and he went on to describe how his Bolsheviks were bound to destroy the traditional identities of all those human beings now in their power, and to reconstruct them as specimens of the “new socialist humanity.”
Given this ideological heredity coming to him through Joseph Stalin (“Kill the eunuch priests and you kill this Christ”) and Nikita Khrushchev (“Belief in God contradicts our Communist outlook”), John Paul has to consider closely the apparent contradiction between Gorbachev’s position as General Secretary of the Soviet Union and his words and his permissiveness concerning religion. Just three alternatives suggest themselves; and, while the consequences of each alternative are fairly clear, the papal jury is still out on a final decision concerning which scenario the Pope is facing.
One possible God-and-Gorbachev scenario is that, in speaking of “God” and “wisdom” and the “abyss,” and the like, Gorbachev is using vocabulary and ideas emptied of all mystical or transcendental meaning, much in the way Hitler’s elite SS troops adopted the motto Gott mit Uns—God with us. To be sure, that was monumental and self-righteous hypocrisy on the part of men bent on staining all God’s creation with brutality and overkill; but it was credited by no one as an expression of believers.
If this is the case with Gorbachev, then his behavior in this regard is probably no more important than that of any man who uses certain ways of talking learned early in his family life to emphasize a point. As John Paul well knows, Russian is as rich in such expressions and images as Polish.
The second possibility is that Mikhail Gorbachev is the classic crypto-Christian: that he is a fully believing Christian of the Russian Orthodox variety, truly attached to Orthodoxy’s fundamental beliefs, secretly worshiping in his heart, fully dependent in his prayers and hopes and career on the help and inspiration of God.
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