Two along the Way of the Cross

Back then, on May 17, 1985, we were all holding our breath. The man on the delicate rail of the former Smolny Institue for Noble Maidens in St. Petersburg didn’t appear to be from this world of real socialism. Where normally grayed functionaries falteringly sight-read endless statistics of success, Gorbachev spoke completely openly. Recounted losses. Balled his fists with arms bent, to demonstrate, like a machine, the new rhythm in the workplace with which the citizens were supposed to rescue their Soviet Union. Disbelieving astonishment spread through the country and around the world. Just two months in office and the media star demanded, “We must all change our attitudes ⎯ from the worker to the political leaders.”

On January 20, 2009, from the steps of the capitol in Washington, the new president of the United States called for a break from the past with almost the same words. “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America,” Obama promised on the day of his inauguration.

Both took office as moral apostles. As brothers of one mission, they pledged not to fear the compulsions and constraints of their systems. They themselves half-believed; the groups hoping for a bringer of salvation half-imposed the role of redeemer on them. Both signaled a fundamental break with their predecessors, who had left them not only their respective Afghan wars. Gorbachev had inherited a bankrupt economic and social system, Obama, the debt spiral, the speculative bubbles of Wall Street, and the global financial crisis. They shielded themselves against it with the mantle of world conscience. Obama’s presidency was supposed to become “the moment … our planet begins to heal.” Gorbachev preached the “break with ways of thinking and behavioral patterns that have developed over centuries.”

The prophets’ magic only lasted one summer long. By then many people of the country already dismissed Gorbachev as a boltun, a big talker. A quarter-century later, the New York Times paraphrased their findings more gently: “Obama faces a narrative vacuum.” In the Soviet Union, the old communists thwarted every attempt by the reformer to reconcile a new parliamentary culture with the party’s power monopoly. In the USA, the Republicans lined up as the party of no. Just as in Gorbachev’s days the anti-Semitic reds streamed toward the Russian racist group Pamyat, today angry whites pump themselves up with their tea parties against the allegedly sinister threat to their freedom.

Courageously, when the hate so quickly caught up with them, the heroes stood their ground. The Russian had refrigerators made from tanks, in order to save the Soviet Union from a declaration of bankruptcy and to preserve “the vital force of this civilization.” The U.S. president took on the big banks and promised the renunciation of the wasteful American way of life.

Those were the moments when the birth defects of the systems struck back, as if wanting to prove the powerlessness of the reformers. On April 26, 1986 ⎯ in the thirteenth month of Gorbachev’s time in office ⎯ the reactor fire at Chernobyl caused the largest environmental catastrophe of the Soviet Union. The army, the superpower’s last life preserver, was just as powerless as Gorbachev, as the first responders placed the concrete cover over the deadly glowing ruins without protective clothing. On April 20, 2010 ⎯ in the fifteenth month of Obama’s term ⎯ the explosion of the drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico cause the largest environmental catastrophe in the history of the USA. The army, highly technological like no other in the world, is just as powerless as the president, while the BP engineers attempt to close the effervescing well.

The causes of the catastrophes were exactly the evils that Obama and Gorbachev promised to fight. But many clients are the death of the hero. Even before Gorbachev entered office, there were alarming reports about the condition of the Soviet atomic power plants. The engineering flaws at Chernobyl also failed to prevent the nuclear industry from committing further planning and operational errors.

Despite all the warnings, Obama had allowed new underwater drilling only a few weeks before the catastrophe. And in the gulf in Louisiana, the oil industry had even been allowed to fill out government inspection reports themselves.

A chain of further catastrophes accelerated the already inexorable decline of the Soviet empire. The constitutional guarantees and freedoms of the USA still halt the loss of the superpower role, despite all the abuses. But a bitter lesson connects Gorbachev then and Obama today, that the Way of the Cross begins for a Messiah, when their visions become dangerous to the system.