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| Gorbachev |
In late April, 1986, reactor number 4 at Chernobyl exploded.
The effect was catastrophic. Not only on lives and buildings, but also on the health of the USSR.General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, in seeing the devastation, realised that incompetence and failure was rotting away at the Soviet Union, and that far-reaching changes were needed in response.
But his subsequent reforms, instead of liberating the nation, instead hastened its decline.
Gorbachev lost control of events. His innovative spirit ended in failure. He, like all his fellow innovator-leaders, hoped he could lead his community into a better future. Some innovators succeed, some fail. But they all try.
Innovators
To be an Innovator
Much of this change happens without thinking. But sometimes, communities can become stuck. Often the leader can launch a few policies, stimulate the economy and sit back again.
However, sometimes the stagnation is too great. Several governments have failed. Public order is failing. Something else is needed: an innovator-leader may step forwards.
Innovator are also defined by their ability to act. Leaders who don't act are just plain politicians. But innovators can still be unsuccessful; those whose innovations go beyond their control or have unintended results are weak innovators.
Success, by comparison, is measured by innovators' abilities to deliver and control the innovation to create a community that can progress forwards.
Storytelling and empathy can help, but those successful innovators are philosophers too. They deeply understand their role and their community, just like Charles de Gaulle (left).However, when innovators have too little interest in questions of power and responsibility, they are blind to the danger they can unleash.
Mikhail Gorbachev is an example: his changes were distorted by a lack of serious thinking and eventually collapsed the USSR - his community.
Innovators achieve much. But, as we shall see, those who achieve progress are also philosophers.
Charles de Gaulle
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| Mais le dernier mot est-il dit ? L'espérance doit-elle disparaître ? La défaite est-elle définitive ? Non ! |
Charles de Gaulle was Free France's leader in World War Two and briefly President of the post-war 'Fourth French Republic'.
However, in 1946 'the great asparagus' (named for his thin, tall frame) resigned from office, unable to handle the political turmoil of post-war France.
Post-war France was a mixed bag under the Fourth Republic (1949-1958). It enjoyed long economic growth and high living standards.
Yet it also witnessed chaotic politics (over twenty-four governments were formed in the period), defeat in Indochina, and carnage in Algeria.
Algeria was a particular problem. As a colony it had deep ties to France, but was descending into quasi-civil war between French emigrants, the army, and secessionists.
The issue was plunging mainland France into pandemonium, and in 1958 the French army openly declared it would revolt unless Charles de Gaulle was returned to power. French politicians were powerless to intervene.
So, quite a pickle.
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| Algerian violence |
Before continuing, how was de Gaulle an effective innovator?
De Gaulle, firstly, subscribed strongly to the idea of progress; 'he was holding onto an idea of where France needed to be, and if to be there France had to change he was absolutely ready to change', says Julian Jackson.
Therefore he understood that France needed to respond to its political instability with a positive solution that could push it forwards. He would not simply patch up a status quo.
Secondly, he understood that France needed something more than just Algerian peace, or a stable government. A bigger, broader solution was required. And he moved from philosopher to innovator by actually starting that solution.
The threatened coup did in fact propel him into power in late 1958 after a decade in the wilderness. He immediately asked for 'full powers to govern by decree for six months, the suspension of parliament during that period and authorisation for the government to draft a new constitution to be submitted to a referendum for approval.'
De Gaulle overrode France's political fragmentation by seizing as much power as temporarily possible to enable a massive reconfiguration of French politics.
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| Mollet the socialist, working under de Gaulle the conservative |
This new constitution took months to write, involving endless meetings and arguments; de Gaulle was often abroad too.
This could have meant a spiralling situation - it didn't because he appointed an effective key team from across France's polity: Pompidou, Brouillet, Janot, Debre, Mollet.
All a mix of 'Gaullists', academics, and Fourth Republic politicians were all set to work on devising the new France, providing a diversity of experience that could handle pressure and produce something of depth and value, as well as being firmly directed by de Gaulle.
This extended from constitutional reform to 'a major financial plan, several new initiatives in foreign policy...[and] a legislative frenzy' with over three hundred ordinances passed on everything from prisons to the film industry to the highway code.
And, finally, de Gaulle followed through, ensuring that his French reforms weren't waylaid by other influences.
There was, certainly, an ambiguity - 'transparency was exactly what de Gaulle did not want' in his constitution - and ambiguity of policy detail would later be a problem for Gorbachev.
But ambiguity on detail has never been a problem for constitutions (see: Britain).
More important in this case than policy detail was understanding how the principles of the French state was being rewritten. Ambiguity here could have simply led to another Fourth Republic; no-one with clear power and political space to govern.
However there was clear consensus around the need to 'strengthen executive power', and separate the business of the President (and his Prime Minister) from Parliament.
He was to have a separate mandate, freedom to appoint the government (which was cut off from Parliament), and emergency powers to exercise at his discretion. In other words, France would have strong and stable leadership.
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| In short, the Pres. has more power and is insulated from Parliament |
And De Gaulle closed the episode decisively with a victorious approval referendum, giving his reforms a mandate and birthing the Fifth Republic distinctively from the Fourth. He would stay in power for years to cement the Fifth as a new, stable nation.
In the Fifth's first decade the Algerian problem was settled (independence), France's foreign relations improved, the economy kept growing, and France became an independent nuclear power. De Gaulle wanted France to move forwards, and it undoubtedly did.
This is the impact of a positive innovator: de Gaulle could not only see the problem, could not only address it in a controlled and intelligent way, but could see the solution out and ensure that his community was progressing forward as a consequence.
What a contrast with our other innovator.
Mikhail Gorbachev
'Gorbachev had no intention of presiding over the dissolution of the USSR' writes Robert Service. But that's exactly what happened. How?
When Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, he became convinced of the need to revive what was a discreetly collapsing Soviet Union.
Public services were shot through, war in Afghanistan was ruining the economy, America was advancing again in the arms race, and cronyism and corruption ran through the Soviet system like metal lodes in the Urals.
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| Never fight a land war in Asia |
Gorbachev hoped he could nudge the government towards efficiency. But the Chernobyl disaster revealed how incompetent and hollow the entire national structure was. His changes needed to be bigger, broader, and more fundamental.
He sought to innovate, and propel his country forwards. He genuinely believed in communism and the USSR, and sought to revive its progress.
His perestroika - 'reconstruction'/'reform' - introduced local free markets and electoral reform. Gorbachev argued that Leninism-Marxism had been distorted, that true democracy was viable in the Soviet Union, and that socialism was compatible with capitalist elements.
A calendar for elections was scheduled. Tinkering was over; this was a wholesale ideological rebalancing.
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| Russia's first President - Boris Yeltsin - was forged in the 'Congress of People's Deputies', Gorbachev's new quasi-parliament |
Alongside this was glasnost - 'a making open' to improve national self-awareness. The USSR was not democratic, Gorbachev declared, and it wasn't really socialist, he implied.
Free newspapers were established and now-lively and competitive political debates were aired on TV; 'citizen talked unto citizen...Soviet public life had been uplifted...institutional complacency had been disturbed...and Gorbachev let it be known that more walls had to be brought down'.
These were bold measures that masked ideological uncertainty.
Gorbachev's understanding of history and economics were weak - he believed that Lenin might have supported his changes. He believed that greater freedom would lead people to conclude that the Soviet system was the ideal. And he believed that the economy would more or less correct itself.
All of these were wrong.
Gorbachev was 'like a trainee chemist running amok in a laboratory', and he did not have a philosopher's understanding of how his changes would mix together.
President Xi could tell you that any increase in economic and civil freedoms in a totalitarian regime threatens its survival. Gorbachev was naïve in assuming otherwise.
And in dismantling the government's own power bases to open up political society, 'traditional structures were dismantled without the creation of robust substitutes... policies were sanctioned with no bodies ready and able to impose them'.
The General Secretary did not realise that in changing and opening society, he was restricting the government's power to manage that change - it was no longer his to control.
This proved fatal. As part of his reforms, Gorbachev had promised non-intervention in the USSR's Eastern Europe allies.
But this, instead of creating stronger alliances, only gave them the freedom to experiment even further and faster, throwing off their unpopular regimes, knowing the Red Army would not longer intervene.
This then fed back in a doom loop, as Soviet citizens saw other communist nations embracing anti-communism, encouraging their own frustrations with the state, especially as the economy now teetered on the edge of collapse (a consequence of his earlier reforms).
Gorbachev's unclear thinking and intellectual shallowness brought the Soviet Union to the brink of collapse. This was perhaps, inevitable, but always in a far off future, not in 1990. Regions began to secede, the economy crumble.
A failed coup d'état accelerated the process and by the end of 1991, in a variety of complicated ways, the USSR had been humbled into a shadow of confusion and chaos. Gorbachev was finally politically outmanoeuvred.
In late December 1991 he resigned as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On 1 January 1992, that union no longer existed.
Gorbachev had innovated, but his innovation had escaped him, bringing about the destruction he was hoping to avoid.
Innovator-leaders' true skills aren't just in making big changes happen, but in anticipating the unintended effects of those changes and in having a developed understanding of relevant history and ideology.
The USSR collapsed as an unexpected consequence of Gorbachev's reforms. He had 'not set out to achieve this end; rather it was the unwilled result of his activity as it developed'. For an innovator, this is the ultimate failure.
Theo
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/charles-de-gaulle-julian-jackson/ (de Gaulle)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle (de Gaulle)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1958_crisis_in_France (de Gaulle)
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