Meeting Gorbachev , Werner Herzog's Documentary, Is a Historical Thriller for Today

In 1944, when Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the last president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR, was 13 years old, a letter came home from the Russian front, saying father had been killed fighting the Germans. This was after his grandparents had survived Stalin’s gulags, as well as the Soviet famine of 1934, a foodless time that killed between six and eight million people. Then, when Gorbachev was 14, his father came home. It was an impossible return from the dead, as well as a mistake, a Red Army clerical error. The elder Gorbachev had survived against the Germans, who killed 26 million Soviet citizens. (The U.S. lost a little over 400,000 soldiers, and approximately one million in all wars since 1776.) When someone told the teenage Gorbachev his father had entered their peasant village in the North Caucuses, Gorbachev didn’t believe it, until his father embraced him. “We fought until we ran out of fight,” the son remembers his father saying. “That’s how you must live.”

And that is how the young Gorbachev lived, in Meeting Gorbachev, Werner Herzog’s new film: he was fighting for an opening up of the Soviet Union, to the world and to itself, a fight that ended in Gorbachev presiding over the collapse of the nation that he loved and an end to the Cold War. It’s a startling film to see not just on Memorial Day weekend, when we pause to remember those who lost their lives at war, but at this geopolitical moment, when Herzog reminds us the ways not just the Cold War but World War II still affect our current political climate. Meeting Gorbachev also speaks to how an individual, mostly powerless in the waves of geopolitics, can perhaps sense a geopolitical shift, or something even less structured – something, to use Herzog’s phrase about the fall of the Berlin Wall, “not negotiated by politicians, an overwhelming manifestation of human longing for freedom and unity.”

The film lowers expectations at the outset: it is the result of three interviews over the course of a year with an ailing elder statesman. Then it quickly becomes an international historical thriller: at the time of Gorbachev’s ascent, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in a severe paralysis, shops empty, the farm system unable to feed the nation, factories delivering machines without parts. It was a nation ruled by Politburo, the dangerously mysterious council of septuagenarians, who were themselves trapped in the calcified political system. Herzog’s portrait of Leonid Brezhnev, who suffered dementia in his final years in office, is a darkly comic, and even darker when you ponder Brezhnev’s control of the hair trigger nuclear arsenal that for four decades kept the world at the brink of nuclear annihilation. (Though recall that questions still linger as to the extent to which Ronald Reagan suffered from Alzheimer’s during his term.) When Brezhnev dies, he is followed quickly by two nearly-dead general secretaries, each more worrisome to the world.

Enter Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Born to peasants, he excelled at farming and at school, landing at the prestigious Moscow State University, and, given the urbane student body, he had to study even harder than the average party functionary’s child. He eventually lands a Communist Party post back in his home territory, working with peasants and visiting backwater farming communities by public transport or (as legend has it) by foot. This at a time when party operatives were worse that a dirty U.S. Congressmen, gift-expectant, institutionally incapable of hearing anything at all. As he rose in the party ranks, Gorbachev visited other countries, looking for ways to fix his home state, impressing foreign leaders with his quickness and openness, and impressing one politburo member, in particular, Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, who mentored Gorbachev to the ruling politburo, while, lest we forget, increasing torture on dissidents. (President Putin has rehabilitated Andropov as a law and order exemplar.)

Very quickly, after being named general secretary, Gorbachev decided to open up the country, under the policies he is remembered for, perestroika and glasnost, the first a matter of economic reform (a reduction of central planning and opening of markets), the second a general openness, which included an openness to the mistakes made by the Soviets as well as to European successes.

Meeting Gorbachev is not so much a proponent of the (never debunked enough) Great Man theory of history, as a proponent of a theory that says greatness comes with a sense of awareness, an openness to the world’s particular possibility for great change at a given moment of time. “The need to reform arose from within the country,” Gorbachev insists. It’s interesting to note the ways the pressed missed what was happening; when the Romanian’s opened their border, effectively ending the Iron Curtain, the Austrian news led with a story about how to kill slugs in your garden—mit bier! Gorbachev pointedly did not resist the border opening, while his predecessors sent tanks. In terms of economic reform, he suggests to Herzog that wanted to spread wealth, not channel it to the political elite at the Soviet top, then making remarks that would get him kicked off “Fox and Friends” but then again get him a standing ovation on a Fox News town hall: “I also wanted more socialism. The aim to amass more and more, to pursue larger revenues and higher profits. Idon’t think it’s the way forward. It’s not right.”

The film can be criticized for its limited historical context, though for that I would want a straight documentary, or a book. For me, the takeaway has to do with nuclear weapons. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster, now streaming on HBO, is portrayed here as the deadly highway pileup of all that was wrong with the Soviet system, as radioactivity polluted Europe. (To fight radiation, the head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences recommended a glass of vodka and sleep.) It put Gorbachev into a nuclear arms reduction high gear. “You need this no less than we do,” he told Margaret Thatcher at the time. “This is the price we have to pay. This is the central line in politics today.”

“People who don't understand the importance of cooperation and disarmament should quit politics,” the now old man tells Herzog. “They are in the defense industry and politics.”

Gorbachev eventually convinces even Ronald Reagan, the former union leader turned conservative Republican, who was focused on winning the nuclear arms race by outrunning the Soviets—specifically, out building them in bombs. Gorbachev could be charming, even against Reagan’s practiced Soviet disdain, and when Reagan described their historic summit meeting in Iceland as a failure, the next morning Gorbachev described them as a breakthrough, a move that propelled Reagan to eventually begin the process of denuclearization. In short order, intermediate-range nuclear weapons were removed from Europe, long-range so-called ICBMs reduced.

We have lived by the treaties established that day in Iceland, until this past year. And so now, we have entered what the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists – the keepers of the Doomsday Clock, which describes our proximity to nuclear Armageddon – calls the New Abnormal, a terrifying mix of nuclear weaponry, climate change, and the pointed disregard for these things by the new cadre of populist demagogues, including the U.S. president.

Why this isn’t more terrifying to more people is not clear to Gorbachev, and it’s not clear to me, nor was it clear, in those days, to the woman whose death also haunts the film, Raisa Maximovna Gorbacheva, the philosopher and activist and college sweetheart of Mikhail Sergeyevich, who accompanied him onto the world stage, a public persona like no Soviet sspouse before her. In June 1990, she spoke at the Wellesley College commencement, accompanied by Barbara Bush. Her appearance was protested – the Soviet Union, despite Glasnost, was a preeminent authoritarian regime, after all. But it’s remarkable to hear time fade away, as she describes an emergency that we have yet to face. It’s an emergency, she says, that requires not the drawing more lines on the globe but an erasing of the lines that exist. “Hamlet’s question, to be or not to be, today confronts not only individuals or nations but all humanity,” Raisa Gorbachev says. “What will our society be like? Not only the leaders of states but the world community as a whole share this responsibility.”

“Your generation,” she adds, “will soon assume the responsibility for everything that takes place on our planet.”

Originally Appeared on Vogue