Keys of This Blood (71 page)

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.

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.

On December 7, 1988—Pearl Harbor Day on the calendar of American history—as President Reagan was preparing to turn the White House over to President-elect George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev strode forward to address a plenary session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York.

In an hour-long speech delivered with vehemence, and with his passion written clearly on his features, the Soviet leader presented the first full, clear formulation of Gorbachevism—of his “new thinking,” to use the concept of his book,
Perestroika
, which had been published internationally not long before. As his living words filled that forum of nations, there was no other leader in a position to challenge his formulation, and, judging from the reaction, no one wished to do so in any case.

Gorbachev set the stage for his program in what seemed the most classic Internationalist-Transnationalist terms. “The world economy,” he observed, “is becoming a single entity outside of which no state can develop.” For him, as for his contemporaries, this world was now built on a tripod system; and so: “It is virtually impossible for any society to be ‘closed.'” At the same time, however, “knots have appeared in our world's main economic lines: North-South, East-West, South-South, East-East.” North-North, he might have added, and West-West. But he did not.

As a master geopolitician, Gorbachev called for a solution that lay in the formation of seminal geopolitical structures.

Our situation, he said, calls for “creating an altogether new mechanism for the furtherance of the world economy … a new structure of the international division of labor … a new type of industrial progress in accordance with the interests of all peoples and states…. Further progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement toward a new world order.” With such a bold geopolitical sweep as his basic platform, Gorbachev launched into the principles of the geopolitical world he sees as desirable.

Beginning with the bedrock Leninist idea, untroubling by now to many Western ears, of “humankind's collective intellect and will,” the General Secretary proposed “the supremacy of the idea central to all mankind over the multitude of centrifugal trends” as we find them today between East, West, North and South. Only by letting “this central idea dominate will the society of nations develop into the ideal: a world community of states with political systems and foreign policies based on law.” Gorbachev left no doubt that he was talking about international laws binding all nations.

Of course, in order to let “this central idea dominate,” the nations must change their philosophical approach to the task of achieving world unity amid the diversity of nations. For in this way, they will also change their political relations. To accomplish this task, continued the passionate Gorbachev, the nations must rely on “objective world processes.”

One such process, he offered, would be reliance on the Helsinki agreement of 1975, so that Soviet territorial integrity would be accepted as final and definitive. Another “objective process,” said Gorbachev, would be reliance on the natural unity of the two Germanys, thus allowing West Germany to take up a more neutral position vis-à-vis the rest of Europe.

In a third example, Gorbachev addressed the twin realities of an interdependent world and the need for the integrity of world peace. Like it or not, he said, we are all now interdependent. None of us can have peace if the others have no peace. Peace has become indivisible. Therefore, exhorted Gorbachev, let us start a world political dialogue among all nations; for within that dialogue, the arduous negotiating process between East and West can go forward.

Moving onto the broadest geopolitical terrain, Gorbachev advanced the need for a central agenting authority to organize and galvanize all of these objective processes. And he declared that alone among all the world's institutions, the United Nations itself is “an organization capable of accumulating humankind's collective intellect and will.”

If the nations consent to cooperate in such a manner, then “cocreativity” or “codevelopment” would benefit all. If the nations consent, cooperation can include space exploration and environmental protection. It can lead to the conversion of arms production into a disarmament economy. It can wipe out the crippling debts of South nations. Through such cooperation, a homeland can be created for the Palestinians. Through such means, indeed, can all the pressing global problems that tear at our unity as a human community be addressed and solved at last.

Gorbachev was clearly not talking about internation politics; for that
is no more than our present condition. He was talking about genuine geopolitics. And he had a warning: “Without the U.N., world politics is inconceivable.” Alone of all the institutions so far created, “the U.N. embodies, as it were, the interests of different states. It is the only organization that can channel their efforts—bilateral, regional and comprehensive—in one and the same direction.”