If this is the case, then Gorbachev would truly be God’s “mole” placed at the pinnacle of the Soviet atheist system at a crucial moment of history. If this is the case, then Mikhail Gorbachev would be the twentieth-century man chosen by God for a most singular role and fate. And if this is the case, then the world has been assisting all unknowingly at the highest drama of our time, a drama that has only just begun.
The third possibility is that Gorbachev’s story may be much more typically Soviet and “cold-eyed” than some would like to believe. It may be that within himself, and in his closely guarded relations with the Council of Elders, the General Secretary is a rabid Soviet atheist, a full believer with Lenin that “all religion is utter vileness,” a thoroughgoing Leninist of the classical vintage—but an extremely cunning one, who realizes that a certain level of convincing Christian lip service can still help to secure the deep and extensive integration with the West that is needed by the Soviet Union, of whose fate he is now the chief guardian and propagator.
If this third scenario is the true one, then it would have deadly significance for Pope John Paul and for the West. If true, it would mean that in the Soviet inventory of enemies to be penetrated, deceived, leavened and taken over, Gorbachev has put religion and formal religious organizations at the top of his list—just as Antonio Gramsci advised. If this is the true scenario, it would mean that Pope John Paul’s Roman Catholic organization is the prime target. If true, it would mean that Gorbachev is the most dangerous Soviet leader the Church has faced, the author of the ultimate seduction, practitioner par excellence of KGB intelligence deception, and the coldest “cold eye” Leninism has yet produced.
There is only so much empirical evidence one can expect to uncover in assessing the real meaning of such unexpected behavior on the part of a supposedly atheist leader of a professionally and militantly atheist Party-State. And what evidence exists is so equivocal that it can be, and in some Vatican conversations often is, used to bolster opposing positions on the question.
All four of Gorbachev’s grandparents and both of his parents were genuine believers in the Russian Orthodox faith. The familiar Russian icons of Christ and his Mother, Mary, were concealed behind the required portraits of Lenin and Stalin that hung in his paternal grandparents’ house.
Born on February 2, 1931, Gorbachev grew up in the worst of Stalin’s terror. We know that he was baptized; that his patron saint was solemnly declared to be the fierce defender of Heaven itself, St. Michael the Archangel; that he went to church regularly; that he participated with his parents in the liturgy—he sang the old Slavonic hymns, confessed his sins and received Holy Communion.
More, we know that all of this went on at the height of the Stalinist purges, the mock trials, the torture, the midnight interrogations and the sudden deportations and executions that decimated the Church of its clergy and its pious laity. Even in the provincial town of Privolnoye, to practice one’s faith as the Gorbachevs did in the thirties was an act of Christian heroism.
Did Gorbachev remain a hero, at least in his heart, as he grew to maturity? Or was the pressure too much for him? Or was faith not enough for him? Whatever the answer might be, at the age of fifteen Gorbachev was accepted into Komsomol—in effect, the “Little League” of the Communist Party. No one known to be an active believer could have managed that. Komsomol indoctrination requires not only formal denial of religion, but formal profession of the atheism officially propagated by the Party-State. Gorbachev must have passed the basic requirements.
From that time on, in fact, he must have paid his Leninist dues all along the line. For he was not merely accepted; he flourished. He went to university. In 1952, he joined the Communist Party. And he set out on a career so distinguished among his fellows that he came to the particular notice of the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, who became nothing less than his mentor. And, having passed every test and challenge, he came finally to the peak of Soviet success as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Given three such contradictory scenarios, how is Pope John Paul to read such a history?
If Gorbachev has been a crypto-Christian all along, then his motivation must have been extraordinarily pure to remain intact for so long, and in such alien and personally dangerous circumstances. More, his faith must have been nothing less than heroic in its profundity and reach, because the only aim of such an exercise could have been to go as far in his career as God would make it possible for him to do, with the intention of liquidating the official atheism of the Party-State.
When seen in those terms, the first or third alternative—either a benign or a deadly turning away from faith—seems more likely. In both of these scenarios, despite the early exposure of the young Gorbachev to all the “furniture” of Christian thought within the intimacy of his family life, by the time he joined Komsomol—and certainly by the time he graduated from university and entered the Communist Party—he had renounced the Christianity of his family.
Perhaps the objective reasons were fairly ordinary. The all-enveloping materialist and atheistic outlook that surrounded him away from home and hearth; peer pressure; Party pressure; the pressure of personal ambition; the doctrine and motivation as he moved along in Stavropol University, in Moscow University, in the Communist Party. All of this would have led Gorbachev away from Christian belief and worship.
That road is not such an extraordinary one these days. In fact, it is more or less the same road followed by so many like-minded people in the West that they have been given a special name. “Anonymous” Christians, they are often called. What then, fundamentally, would be the difference between Gorbachev and Nikita Khrushchev, who avowed in 1958, “I think there is no God. I freed myself long ago from such a concept.” Or between Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping’s son Pufong, who told Mother Teresa some years ago that “we start from a different standpoint, but we are doing the same work…. I myself am an atheist.” Or between Gorbachev and U.S. historian William Shirer, who admitted to a reporter in 1989 that “my father was an orthodox Presbyterian and I’m sure he believed in heaven and hell and that sort of thing. For me, all that is gone.”
If, like Khrushchev and Shirer, Gorbachev is an “anonymous” Christian, he has ceased to believe in the spiritual importance of organized and formal religious practice, and in the truth of Church teaching about the supernatural. But neither, in that case, would he be an enemy dedicated to the final death of all such practice and belief. Indeed, he might well retain some vague idea of a redefined and benign God. And whatever anybody else believes would be fine by him, and fine by the benign God he vaguely acknowledges.
After all, when speaking to the Central Committee on February 5, 1990, he called for a wide range of measures “to enrich the spiritual world of people,” especially on the educational and cultural levels. “Industrial growth figures,” he asserted, had obscured “human values.” In this age of information, he went on, “we are nearly the last to realize that the most expensive asset is knowledge, the breadth of mental outlook and creative imagination.” While this is not religious language properly so called, it is language of the spirit—such words would never pass the lips of a Stalin or a Lenin.
If Gorbachev is that low-grade specimen of anonymous Christian, there is always the chance that, now or later, Gorbachev may “revert to type.” Faced with the ultimate in dilemmas, he may reach for that source of salvation and solution of all problems he sang about in those old Slavonic hymns and learned at his mother’s knee to acknowledge as the real governor of man’s fate. Perhaps there was even a glimpse of such an attitude when Gorbachev spoke so unexpectedly in earthquake-ravaged Armenia of “the edge of the abyss.”
On the other hand, perhaps—after the model of Stalin—the third possibility is the real case for Gorbachev. If he has renounced his faith, how likely is it that the reasons were not ordinary or benign at all? How likely is it that, carried by his own gifts and by the invisible hand of destiny to the highes
t position in the Soviet Union—the nation and the system—he has simply understood in his penetrating and no-nonsense way that he could not go on behaving as his six predecessors did, and approaches the Pufong model?
Surely Gorbachev is more sophisticated than Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, with their ready stock of lavatory jokes about religious believers. It was not unusual for them to wine and dine their honored guests in the magnificent Granovitaya Palata of the Kremlin. Completed in 1491 by Czar Ivan III to memorialize his bloodiest victory over Russia’s greatest enemies, the Tatars, the Palata is decorated from its ceilings to its floors with Master Andrei Rublev’s priceless icons of Christ, his Mother, the angels and the saints, all dominated by a giant fresco of the Last Supper, meant to remind everyone who ate there that we are intended to partake finally of the Bread of Angels and the Blood of the Lamb.
For Gorbachev’s more recent predecessors, all of that, and the Palata’s warm, red-orange hue so suggestive of Christ’s Resurrection, were probably about as significant as the agonies of the Tatars were for the Czar when he had stakes driven through their living bodies from chin to chine on the morrow of his victory.
Still, to say that Gorbachev is more knowledgeable and less crude than Khrushchev or Brezhnev is not to say that he cannot have done more than turn good-naturedly away from the faith of his childhood. It is not to conclude that though he does not foul-mouth all religions as Lenin did, he cannot now share the mordant atheism of Lenin. Nor is it to deny the possibility that behind a more agreeable facade by far, Gorbachev might prove to be as lethal in his way as Stalin was. Once his seminary days were over, Stalin was probably responsible for more acts of sacrilege and blasphemy than any man in history.
There are temptations for John Paul in his analysis about God and Gorbachev. Because the matter is so important in terms of what the Pope can expect from the Soviet leader during critical events to come, the greatest temptation is to go to one extreme or the other.
It would be easy enough to make fond and wishful judgments. The Pope knows, after all, that Mother Teresa could only have received the welcome she did in Moscow with the General Secretary’s fullest concurrence. But he also knows that as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and as someone already accepted in Cuba and Communist China, Mother Teresa has become an internationally acceptable symbol of man’s “humanitarian” feelings for man.
The Pope knows that Gorbachev’s mother, Maria Panteleyevna, goes to church as faithfully as ever; and to this day she has a birthday cake prepared each year for her son and sees that it is decorated with the two letters that stand for the animating cry of Russian believers: “XB!” Xristos Boskres! “Christ Has Risen!” But he knows as well that Khrushchev’s daughter, Mrs. Aleksei Adzhubei, asked Pope John XXIII to bless her religious medals; and he remembers the Christian piety of Leonid Brezhnev’s grieving widow at her husband’s open casket in Moscow.
On the theory that it is better to make a wrong decision for the sake of caution than to make no decision at all, shall the Pope be tempted to the other extreme, then? Will he apply to Gorbachev, for example, the pen portrait Haing Ngor left us of Cambodia’s Leninist leader, Pol Pot, who rid his country of nearly two million of its citizens by the most brutal and callous methods known? Those who met Pol Pot, wrote Haing Ngor, “saw a neatly groomed, soft-spoken man who smiled often; he had tiny, soft, almost feminine hands. Most of all, they remembered something special about his character: they said he was easy to trust.”
The truth of the matter is that John Paul is too hardheaded and cool-eyed himself to be overborne by evidence from surrogates. And so, too, are the other realists he relies on in the Vatican and elsewhere. He requires of himself judgment that is calm and independent. And, above all, he is mindful of the bedrock principle of the classic “cold-eyed” KGB operation: If you are willing to be deceived, you will be. A key moment in John Paul’s assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Christianity and religious belief will have come during the Vatican summit of December 1, 1989. He will have been very discreet and noncommittal about his perception of Gorbachev’s religiousness. He will have commented that the Soviet president, apart from being an obvious instrument of divine providence and a specific sign of the times, remains “open to the grace of Christ.”
As such, Gorbachev may be a onetime believer stumbling his way back to his ancient faith, while acting in the meanwhile like Shakespeare’s character and like Pol Pot of Cambodia—somebody who “smiles and smiles and is a villain.” Whatever words Gorbachev uses that are humanly well-intentioned, even if partisan and only residually Christian, will go from his mouth to God’s ear; and they will evoke divine grace for the ends God has in mind, whatever about Gorbachev.
On the other hand, whatever destructive intentions Gorbachev the Leninist entertains in relation to Christianity and its tatterdemalion civilization in the West will be frustrated by the Guardian Angel whose name he still bears and who always sees the face of God.
Meanwhile, however, John Paul cannot afford simply to wait; to turn aside into the grandeur of papal isolation in a vain effort to sit out the onslaught of Gorbachevism. His whole policy has involved him, his papacy, his churchly institution and his Roman Catholic people in the millennium endgame. His policies regarding Gorbachev, therefore, must be wise as a serpent’s, but simple as a dove’s. Until the evidence tells him clearly otherwise, he will take the General Secretary to be the Leninist he professes to be; and, as has always been his practice, John Paul will not expect from the Leninist mind what he knows the Leninist mind cannot contribute.
22
“New Thinking”
Though there are many who will not easily acknowledge it, a barely concealed fact of international life is that for the past forty-five years, the Soviet Union has been the major catalytic factor in the communal life of nations.
The actor par excellence on the world stage has not been the United States. It has not been any globalist group, religious or otherwise. It has not been even the most militant or the most strategic among the developing or underdeveloped nations. And it has not been Pope John Paul’s Roman Catholic Church.
When John Paul talks about his own Church in these terms, he is not referring merely to the success of Soviet agencies in developing and popularizing the deceitful Gramscian penetration of Christian doctrine with Marxist Liberation Theology—though that is his greatest headache among the people of Latin America. Nor is he talking about the failing doctrinal orthodoxy of seminaries and religious orders throughout his Church; or about the thousands of bishops, priests, nuns and laity—including entire monasteries, convents and churches—systematically destroyed by the USSR.
What John Paul is talking about—what John Paul always talks about— is foreign policy. He is talking about the general foreign policy the Holy See has followed over the past thirty years and more.
Beginning with Pope John XXIII’s reign, from 1958 to 1963, and continuing through the fifteen-year reign of Pope Paul VI, the Soviet factor has been paramount in crucial policy decisions. It even induced John Paul’s predecessors to delay obedience to the mandates of Heaven in matters of supreme importance. And while John Paul would never gainsay his predecessors, those decisions have rendered his own governance of the Church all the more complicated and thorny.
Any other current head of state, political leader or power broker, if he is frank, will make the same acknowledgment in regard to his own foreign policy decisions. The Soviet Union has been the prime actor. Everyone else has reacted.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to full power in the Soviet Union in the spring of 1985, therefore, all the world was his stage. In no way was he prepared to turn a blind eye to that fact of recent history—not in the matter of the General Agreement he signed with President Reagan in 1985 and not in anything else. And so, by the end of 1988, having dominated the process of diplomatic connivance to his enormous advantage—not only in terms of aid and comfort garnered from the West but above all in terms
of ideological acceptance—Gorbachev was ready to make that stage his own.
In May of 1988, in the final year of his presidency, Ronald Reagan was granted permission by General Secretary Gorbachev to address the students and faculty of Moscow State University. Accordingly, the “Great Communicator” stepped forward in Moscow to deliver “a message of peace and good will and hope for a growing friendship and closeness between our two peoples.” The President’s manner was smiling and confident. Absent from the content of his speech was any reproach. He made no veiled hints about the “evil empire” he once saw and surely knew still to be alive in the Soviet Union.
Instead, President Reagan dwelt on America’s freedom and its fruits, and on the possibility of “a new world of reconciliation, friendship and peace.” Over and over again, he referred to the “many hours together” he and General Secretary Gorbachev had spent. “I feel that we’re getting to know each other quite well.”
Just what those two men said to one another during those “many hours together” has been the subject of much speculation around the world. But what seems certain is that Gorbachev so successfully impressed Reagan as to elicit from him what amounted to a public endorsement of the General Secretary’s program for future relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. That endorsement was a major triumph for Gorbachev in his steadily mounting drive to change fundamentally the official policy of the United States toward the Soviet Union. Characteristically, however, the Soviet leader did not wait for anyone to catch up with him. He used his own triumph to leapfrog to a still greater one. And quickly.
Keys of This Blood Page 54
