Former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev enjoys global celebrity status unmatched by any other ex-political leader. But is he a prophet of world peace or a dangerous Pied Piper?
This article originally appeared in the November 3, 2003 issue of The New American. We are republishing it here because of the renewed interest in Mikhail Gorbachev in light of his passing on August 30, 2022, as well as his historical significance. Though he is now being eulogized by many as a reformer who changed the world for the better, the reality is very different.
There are many pretenders to fame who are, as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry would say, legends in their own minds. Then there is Mikhail Gorbachev, who is a legend of mythic proportions in the minds of countless millions. He is lionized as the man who ended the Cold War. Or, as the title of the Gorbachev biography by bestselling author Gail Sheehy suggests, he is The Man Who Changed the World.
Mikhail Gorbachev continues to change the world. The August Coup of 1991, which supposedly swept him from power, actually propelled him to new heights. Within months of his formal December 25, 1991, resignation as president of the Soviet Union, he was being heralded as the new global environmental and spiritual leader at the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
At Rio, the Nobel Laureate and Time magazine’s “Man of the Decade” was appointed to head an international commission to draft an Earth Charter, a new set of ethical principles to guide the planet. He now leads the global effort to have the charter — which he calls a new “kind of Ten Commandments, a ‘Sermon on the Mount,’” for humanity — formally adopted by religious bodies, private organizations, corporations and governments. The Rio summit was also the launch pad for Green Cross International, of which Gorbachev is founder and president. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, Green Cross provides a forum for many Gorbachev-led initiatives. The organization also boasts formal consultative status with the UN and the Council of Europe, and direct funding from governments.
Except for Pope John Paul II, no other contemporary world figure commands such near-universal respect or radiates such star power. Presidents, prime ministers, sultans, kings, billionaires, titans of business, media mavens, and movie stars all shamelessly court Gorbachev like teenyboppers flocking after their latest MTV idol.
Such was the case on his October tour of the United States, which included a conference in Atlanta with former President George Bush and former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, moderated by NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw. There was also a speech at Auburn University, an interview on ABC’s This Week, and a New York City confab, where the revered “elder statesman” was honored for his environmental contributions. There was even a trip to the heartland: a summit in Appleton, Wisconsin, with a governor, civic and business leaders, and representatives of U.S.-Russian sister cities.
In the weeks and months preceding his U.S. trip, world citizen Gorbachev was a headliner at many events, including the 80th birthday party of former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres (along with Bill Clinton, former South African President F.W. de Klerk, Hollywood actress Kathleen Turner, and other glitterati). Not to mention international conferences in Japan, Italy and the Netherlands on the new “World Water Crisis.” And European events to launch the publication (in German, Spanish, Dutch, French, and Russian) of his new book My Agenda for the Earth. Then there was Ted Turner’s disarmament television series on PBS, “Avoiding Armageddon,” with Gorbachev in a starring role, dispensing wisdom on “interdependence” and the need to “move towards a new world order.” There were also the Biovision World Life Sciences Forum in Lyon, France, and the Rome Summit of Nobel Laureates, an annual event organized by Gorbachev.
With all of this, Gorbachev still found time to record his first English narration, a new politically correct rendition of composer Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” He is accompanied in this environmentalist tale — told from the poor wolf’s point of view — by fellow narrators Bill Clinton and Sophia Loren.
What a life! What a guy! What a visionary! What a humanitarian! Yes, above all, Mikhail Gorbachev’s admiring hosts remind us, the man is a tireless humanitarian, toiling for world peace, democracy and Mother Earth. This headline from the lead front-page story of the Appleton Post-Crescent on October 1 is typical of his adulatory press reviews: “Once Cold War foe, former leader now humanitarian.”
“Gorbachev really is a figure of world historical importance,” Peter Blitstein, a local professor of history at Lawrence University, told the newspaper. “It’s difficult to exaggerate his significance for 20th century history. It’s hard to get someone bigger than this.” Dr. John Toussaint, president and CEO of ThedaCare, was ecstatic upon seeing Gorbachev mount the stage at the Appleton event. “It was absolutely one of the highlights of my life,” said the health care executive. “The highlight of my life was seeing my two children born, and this was pretty close behind that.”
Crucial Paradigm Shift
Voices running contrary to this near-unanimous acclamation are rarely heard. But they do exist, and they should be heard. Dr. Hans Graf Huyn, a top German expert on Soviet deception, noted a decade ago that despite the intended outward appearance of collapse, the Communist Party and KGB structures of the Soviet Union were still operating and maintaining political control throughout Russia and the supposedly independent nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Likewise, the worldwide Communist Party apparatus and global KGB network, newly camouflaged, were continuing to carry out their revolutionary functions. “Where do the old Soviet structures hide?” Huyn asked. In the Gorbachev Foundation, for one, he noted. Huyn pointed out that the Gorbachev Foundation “has somehow taken over the tasks — and the personnel — of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union].”
Mikhail Gorbachev and the Gorbachev Foundation serving as the sub rosa CPSU International Department? That is a very serious charge. The International Department is the powerful arm that coordinated global Communist operations for the Kremlin strategists for decades. Hans Graf Huyn’s assertions stand in startling contrast to the conventional wisdom, but they express the views of other reliable experts, such as key KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn and Christopher Story, publisher of the authoritative Soviet Analyst, based in London. Mountains of evidence back up these views; we have published much of this evidence in these pages over the past decade and a half.
Those who are not veteran readers of this magazine may find the foregoing too astounding to be possible. Could such an enormous deception actually be carried out for such an extended period of time? If true, it would mean that Mikhail Gorbachev, instead of being the celebrated man of peace, is actually an arch-enemy who has brought a Trojan Horse inside our gates. Tragically, yes, he is a master of deceit and is carrying out a plan — together with his fellow strategists in Moscow, and fellow one-world globalists in the West — to destroy our freedom and our country.
Man Behind the Mask
Like most Communist leaders, there is much of Gorbachev’s life that remains shrouded in shadow and mystery. But there is much that is known. We know, for example, that he presided over much of the genocidal rape of Afghanistan. That he armed international terrorist groups and terrorist regimes in Libya, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere. That he armed, supplied and subsidized the Cuban-backed genocides in Ethiopia and Angola. That he supported the brutal Communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. That he continued and expanded the massive Soviet drug offensive against the West. That he increased the power and prestige of the KGB. That he used troops, tanks and even poison gas to crush protesters seeking more freedom in Kazakhstan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Lithuania.
The litany above does not come close to exhausting Gorbachev’s documented record of crimes and atrocities. Yet, the same folks who sing his glories relentlessly persecute Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Peru’s Alberto Fujimori, who are saints in comparison to Gorbachev.
Like the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable The Emperor’s New Clothes, we must recognize and speak the naked truth, even if everyone seems intent on following a popular delusion. An honest, sober appraisal of publicly available facts shows that:
• Top Communist leaders telegraphed decades in advance that they would be launching an incredible “peace” offensive to put the West to sleep. Soviet defectors and reliable anti-Communist experts had warned for years against this coming paradigm shift.
• There are precedents for Soviet strategic deceptions of this sort. In the 1920s Lenin launched his New Economic Policy (NEP), pretending to abandon Communism and adopt capitalism to win financial and economic aid from the West. In the 1940s Stalin repeated the ploy, pretending to disband the Comintern (Communist International) to gain vitally needed aid and concessions from the West.
• Since the supposed collapse of the Soviet Union, all of the key centers of power — political, economic, military, intelligence — in Russia and the other “former” Soviet states have remained in the hands of lifelong Communists. If a genuine collapse and legitimate elections had occurred, all Communist leaders would have been swept from office, tried, and hanged or penalized by their long-suffering victims. This strategic deception has saved Communism from real collapse. Unable to produce and keep pace with the West, the Communists have succeeded in getting the taxpayers of the U.S., Japan and Western Europe to bail them out.
• No longer perceived as enemies, the Kremlin strategists have been able to flood the West with agents, who are welcomed into every imaginable position of influence — in business, academe, the media, and government.
• Mikhail Gorbachev is an unrepentant Marxist-Leninist. Like most “former” Soviet leaders, he is a master of Communist dialectics.
• Despite Gorbachev’s supposed “break with the past,” he continues to work closely with top Communist leaders from the Soviet era and agents of Soviet fronts throughout the world to further the same revolutionary objectives of the Soviet era.
• Gorbachev is a premier champion for U.S.-Russian “convergence” — that is, merging countries politically and economically, and transforming the United Nations into a world government. Both of these objectives constitute a continuation of the strategy initiated by Soviet agents Alger Hiss, Andrei Gromyko, Vlacheslav Molotov, and Andrei Vyshinsky — all of whom played key roles in designing the UN Charter and the entire UN system.
• The false breakup of the Soviet Union has greatly aided the Kremlin plan to use the UN as a weapon of conquest. Each state of the CIS is now entitled to a full delegation at the UN, meaning a vast increase in the Communist agents in all UN organs worldwide — and especially in the U.S.
• Gorbachev continues to work with all of the same one-world Insiders in the West who have supported Soviet dictators from Lenin to Gorbachev, and who have continued to support Gorbachev’s relabeled Communist successors, from Yeltsin to Putin.
Lenin’s Disciple, Leninist Replay
Contrary to popular belief, no genuine, irreversible political and economic transformation has occurred in Russia and the CIS. We have been witnessing a carefully controlled “collapse-able Communism” that can — and will — revert to its former, overtly totalitarian self at the chosen time.
In his 1921 Draft Thesis on the Role and Functions of the Trade Unions Under the Economic Policy, Soviet dictator Lenin explained:
The New Economic Policy introduces a number of important changes … which are due to the fact that in their entire policy of transition from capitalism to socialism the Communist Party and Soviet Government are now adopting special methods to implement this transition and in many respects are operating differently from the way they operated before: they are capturing a number of positions by a new “flanking movement,” so to speak: they are drawing back in order to make better preparations for a new offensive against capitalism. In particular, a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control, are now being permitted….
Lenin’s “free market” was nothing of the sort. It was, as Lenin himself admitted, a state-controlled sham that served as a deceptive flanking movement. However, much of the media dutifully portrayed it as an exciting opportunity for the West. “Lenin Abandons State Ownership as Soviet Policy,” trumpeted a headline in the August 13, 1921 New York Times. “Lenin has thrown communism overboard,” the Times proclaimed. The Times has continued to publish similar bilge for every successive Soviet deception.
The above quote from Lenin is very important with regard to updating and repackaging Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) as Gorbachev’s perestroika. It was quoted in entirety in the May 1991 issue of Political Affairs, the official journal of the Communist Party USA, by CPUSA leader Carl Bloice. Comrade Bloice was explaining to the Party faithful that they should not be confused by the seemingly chaotic disintegration of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership, noted Bloice, had adopted Lenin’s NEP strategy. Bloice noted that the “changes … do not themselves constitute a threat to socialist [i.e., Communist] principles. Indeed, they are being undertaken with a view to strengthening the system.” Then, using Lenin’s phrase, Bloice emphasized that all of this new Soviet thrust would require “special methods.”
Bloice, who had been to Moscow many times to confer with the top Soviet leadership, knew that Gorbachev was a thorough Leninist. Gorbachev, in his 1987 book Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, was very explicit about his Leninist principles. One of the subtitles in the book’s first chapter is Turning to Lenin, an Ideological Source of Perestroika. Gorbachev says of that Bolshevik butcher: “His very image is an undying example of lofty moral strength, all-around spiritual culture and selfless devotion to the cause of the people and to socialism.” According to Gorbachev, perestroika is “the most important and most radical program for economic reform our country has had since Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921.” He stated further: “Every part of our program of perestroika — and the program as a whole, for that matter — is fully based on the principle of more socialism and more democracy.” He added, “We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy.”
Gorbachev has not retreated from this position in the succeeding years. In fact, he has reiterated it many times. But he also has intentionally confused the meaning of his words in many people’s minds with his suave demeanor and appeals to humanitarian concerns. Even so enthusiastic a Gorby follower as writer Gail Sheehy remarked on the Soviet leader’s masterful use of Aesopian language. “It is quite easy to play to the naivete of Europeans and Americans, telling us what we long to hear, using the very words we cherish in our constitutions, without being too precise,” she wrote in her adulatory biography of Gorbachev. “Democratization,” she noted, referring to a favorite Gorbachev term, “is not democracy; it is a slogan for the temporal liberalization handed down from an autocrat. Glasnost is not free speech; only free speech, constitutionally guaranteed, is free speech.”
Anatoliy Golitsyn, perhaps the most important KGB defector ever to escape to the West, has been exposing Soviet strategic deception for more than four decades, with an unparalleled record for accuracy. Golitsyn, who worked in the ultra-secret inner sanctum of the KGB, has noted that “to be credible and effective, a deception should accord as far as possible with the hopes and expectations of those it is intended to deceive.” Gorbachev’s Leninist perestroika deception fits the bill perfectly. Everyone in the West wants to believe that we won the Cold War, and that the threat of nuclear war between the superpowers is a thing of the past.
New Agenda, Old Agenda
On September 26, only a few days before his recent trip to the U.S., the French Press Agency reported that Gorbachev was pitching a new agenda for world peace. Russia and the United States need more than their alliance against terrorism to ensure viable ties, Gorbachev told reporters in Moscow. “We need another agenda, in addition to strategic defense and combatting terrorism,” said Gorbachev. “We lack an economic component to our ties. We need to be economically dependent on each other.”
Actually, economic “interdependence” is a not a new agenda item at all for Gorbachev and his fellow one-worlders — who include the power elite in Moscow as well as in the U.S. Gorbachev has been working closely for the past 15 years with both of these elite cadres to secure the transfer of tens of billions of dollars from the U.S. and the West to Russia and the CIS. He has worked closely with Jeffrey Sachs and his crew from Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations to keep the billions flowing to his supposed opponents and enemies who now run the Kremlin.
Keeping that river of cash flowing was a major reason for Gorbachev’s recent trip to Wisconsin. The Communities for International Development program is an effort to build more Sister City relationships and a grassroots lobbying force that will support continued funding transfers. That was the message of Julie Bahr of the Fox Cities-Kurgan Sister Cities Program, the organization sponsoring Gorbachev’s visit to Appleton. “There are governmental contacts that will secure funds for weapons disposal,” said Bahr. “But the trust that allowed that to happen is what the sister cities are all about.”
Creating U.S.-Soviet interdependence through economic and political convergence has been a long-term objective of subversive forces in our government and higher echelons of society for at least a generation.
Although it has been told in these pages many times before, the story of the startling admission of Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither 50 years ago merits repeating, since it is so pertinent to the subject at hand. The major foundations — Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc. — were being investigated in 1953 because of their alarming record of supporting Communist front organizations, world government, and programs aimed at subverting U.S. sovereignty and independence. Gaither admitted to congressional investigator Norman Dodd that the reason for Ford’s odd pattern of philanthropy was that the foundation was operating under directives that it use its immense resources “to so alter life in the United States as to make possible a comfortable merger with the Soviet Union.” Gaither’s counterparts at Rockefeller, Carnegie and other major foundations were operating under similar instructions. And those issuing these subversive directives were powerful enough to squelch the investigation.
In the half century since the shocking Gaither-Dodd revelation, the one-world elite at the same foundations and centers of influence such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Institute of International Economics have continued (and actually escalated) their subversive programs. Their support for U.S.-Russian cooperation on “collective security,” “counter-terrorism,” “transnational organized crime,” energy, and a host of other issues will lead, if continued, to our eventual merger with the “former” Soviet Union. But it will not be a “comfortable” merger for anyone who values freedom.
