http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n08/print/hobs01_.html

LRB | Vol. 27 No. 8 dated 21 April 2005


An Assembly of Ghosts
Eric Hobsbawm

I missed meeting Mikhail Gorbachev four years ago, at a centenary conference 
of the Nobel Peace Foundation in Oslo, which matched a selection of Nobel 
Peace Prize winners with a selection of academics. I had accepted the 
invitation because he was going to be there, but he didn’t show up, and my 
opposite number turned out to be Kim Dae Jung of South Korea, an admirable 
figure no doubt, but not the man who did more single-handedly to save the 
world from the danger of nuclear war than anyone. And who, single-handed, 
ensured that the transition in the USSR and the Soviet empire did not end in 
a bloodbath, as it did in Yugoslavia.

This year I was luckier. The World Political Forum (President: M.S. 
Gorbachev) sent an invitation from Turin to take part in a general assembly 
on ‘1985-2005: Twenty Years that Changed the World’, to commemorate the 
moment when, having succeeded to the leadership of the USSR, Gorbachev 
launched his peace offensive at the world and perestroika at his own 
country. I jumped at it. It was a fan’s chance to pay tribute to a hero, 
even a tragic hero.

Why Turin? Why not? Turin has more historical affinity with Gorbachev’s 
project than Davos, with its World Economic Forum, has with a get-together 
of triumphant capitalists. It is, after all, the city of Gramsci and 
Togliatti, birthplace both of the Italian Communist Party, whose policy 
inspired the pre-perestroika Gorbachev, and of fighting liberals like the 
distinguished and admirable Franco Venturi, partisan commander and historian 
of the European Enlightenment and of Russian Populism. Severe and 
intellectually serious, no Italian city has a better record of anti-Fascism, 
even among its big businessmen. It also has a Jewish community of 
considerable repute.
Turin is a city I have always liked, in spite of its taste for the 
architectural styles of princely 19th-century national and early industrial 
pomposity. Unlike Milan, it has not lost its cohesion, or its organic links 
with the surrounding mountains. It has a genuine academic milieu and an 
Academy of Sciences which once had Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul, as its 
honorary president. I first went there in its period of glory when it was 
both the Italian Detroit under the royal Gianni Agnelli (the ‘Avvocato’) and 
the powerhouse of Italian intellectual and literary distinction under the 
equally royal but financially very much rockier Giulio Einaudi, son of the 
man who became the first president of Italy. His was the most prestigious 
publishing house in the country (Pavese, Calvino, Vittorini, Primo Levi, 
Natalia Ginzburg, not to mention Gramsci), and, for a couple of decades 
after the war, probably the finest in the world. He would take 
(under-royaltied) authors like me to dinner at the opulent Cambio 
restaurant, unchanged since Cavour had planned the transformation of the 
Kingdom of Savoy into the Kingdom of Italy at its tables. In the last war 
every member of the firm, Einaudi claimed, had joined the armed resistance. 
I was touched to see that even in 2005 the invitation to the Gorbachev 
conference was signed by someone writing under his letterhead.

Those days are gone. Both Giulio and the ‘Avvocato’ (to whose death La 
Repubblica devoted no fewer than eight pages) are dead. The end of Fordism 
has lost the city a quarter of its population, the end of Communism has 
brought the Albanians and Romanians. Fiat, its labour force cut from 60,000 
to 15,000, is struggling; I am told the Chinese are considering an offer. 
The old Lingotto assembly line is a display space for book fairs. The last 
time I was there, British Airways, its eye firmly on the business-class 
executive, had given up direct flights from London, leaving the route to 
Ryanair, but this year they were competing again with the cheapo carriers at 
the beautiful airport, chaotic with skiing tour parties. Turin is not what 
it was, except for Juventus and the wonderful circle of the Alps that 
surrounds it. Will even Juventus keep its supremacy without the dead Agnelli’s 
backing? The local economy is putting its money into next year’s Winter 
Olympics, which will, it hopes, revive its fortunes. And then, what about a 
future as a convention centre? The grandees of Turin and Piedmont who 
welcomed and sponsored us evidently regard an occasion that can attract 13 
ex-presidents and ex-prime ministers, nine ex-foreign ministers, and a few 
flights full of diplomats and government insiders, as something that gives 
prestige.

I can recall no experience like it. Historians rarely find themselves in the 
presence of their subjects en masse, even today when TV gives us daily 
familiarity with the faces of national and world decision-makers. It is an 
unexpected sight, like visiting Madame Tussauds and finding that the wax 
models have been replaced by the originals. We shake their hands, we share 
the same tables at meals (well, not quite the same, since there is usually 
the equivalent of a high table for Mikhail Gorbachev and the real grandees), 
we can ask them questions to which they will give friendly but usually 
anodyne answers. The security is less obvious than in a museum.

Upwards of a hundred middle-aged and elderly men and the usual handful of 
women are sitting at one side of a long rectangle of tables, in the hall of 
a military academy in Victor Emmanuel baroque, looking at each other across 
a wide space and listening to simultaneous translations from and into the 
usual languages plus Polish (the Poles have sent two ex-presidents of very 
different views, and an ex-premier). At right angles to me, at the top 
table, I observe the shrunken, sharp-eyed Giulio Andreotti, seven times 
Italian prime minister between 1972 and 1992, the stiff-backed military 
figure of General (later President) Jaruzelski, who suppressed Solidarity 
and negotiated the end of Polish Communism, and Mikhail Gorbachev himself, 
amazingly well-preserved, handsome and affable, but looking smaller than he 
is next to his huge neighbour, Helmut Kohl, the longest-serving chancellor 
of the Germany he reunified in 1990. A place has been kept for ex-president 
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was late in arriving from Brazil. Even a 
cynical old historian is impressed by such a line-up.
I find myself seated between Reagan’s National Security Adviser in 1981 and 
a French ex-spook, and opposite an anti-Sharon Israeli I talked to at lunch 
and who turns out to have been deputy head of Mossad in pre-Likud days. I 
also recognise a Czech apparition from a past I would like to forget: Rudolf 
Slansky junior, expelled from the Party for his part in the Prague Spring, 
later a Charter 77 protester. He even seems to me to look like his father, 
executed in 1952, the most prominent Communist victim in the last and most 
overtly anti-semitic of the show ‘trials’ of Stalin’s Eastern Europe. 
Somewhere along the table Lech Walesa is explaining that neither Russian 
policy nor Polish Communists had anything to do with Poland regaining 
independence: it was all due to Solidarity and the pope. (My neighbour, who 
had signed the cheques for the CIA’s Polish operations at the time, is 
unimpressed.) Walesa has the air of a Polish John Prescott, only bigger. He 
has not carried the last 25 years as well as the other Poles.

What is even stranger, I find myself in an assembly of political ghosts. 
Leaving aside the Chinese, who avoid public discussions, a surprising number 
of those who made the world-changing decisions of the 1980s are here. But 
those who run their countries today are absent. Nobody represents Putin’s 
Russia, Wolfowitz’s Washington, Schroeder’s Germany, or Blair’s Britain. 
Only the unchanging logic of French foreign policy provides continuity in 
Paris. There is a chasm between 1985 and 2005. Apart from the regional 
politicians of Turin and Piedmont and Italy’s minister of European affairs, 
silently representing Berlusconi, the only working member of a government 
here appears to be the former Soviet dissident Nathan Sharansky – now, alas, 
in Sharon’s cabinet. Even the Western backroom boys of the period have 
retired from politics, if not from business. The world changes of the past 
twenty years are being discussed by those who have been left behind by them. 
Of course an occasion such as this, designed to celebrate Gorbachev, is not 
the time when speakers go out of their way to make hard historical judgments 
about a man for whom almost all of them have a sincere admiration. But 
celebration is far from the mood of the meeting. It is hard to avoid the 
impression that not many of those in this hall, from East or West, feel 
happy either about what has happened in the former Communist states or to 
the international situation since Gorbachev’s fall.

Still, in spite of the worry about Bush’s America that unites this forum, 
there is a difference between those from the West and the East. Our systems 
continue. But for them this is essentially a gathering of what the heirs of 
the French Revolution used to call the ci-devant, and the heirs of the 1917 
Russian Revolution the byvshie lyudi, the ‘former people’. Few of those 
present from the East had been long-time dissidents. Sakharov’s widow, Elena 
Bonner, stands out, as does Alexander Yakovlev, once Gorbachev’s closest 
ally, who now denounces everything about the Soviet era. Most are people 
with a lifetime of loyal and successful service to their regimes behind 
them, whose world has gone for ever. Nobody talks nostalgia, though the 
speeches of the former Yugoslavs hinted at it, but for many in this 
building, which will remind some of the settings of their own ancien régime, 
it is a sort of wake for a system in which they believed, and which has 
died, and for hope – even the lesser hope of reform – abandoned only 
reluctantly, if at all.

But what of the kibitzers, the experts and academics – mostly from the USA – 
who make up the numbers? The old Soviet hands among them are in their 
element: greeting old friends and sources, filling in gaps, defending their 
interpretations, swapping memories of Moscow and Warsaw. But the fall of 
Communism, though part of my life, is not ‘my field’; their scene is not 
mine. I am here merely as a historian who has written about the century 
through most of which he lived, who wants to understand it better, and who 
hopes to find that his own writings about it stand up in the presence of the 
people he wrote about.

In a way it is the question all historians ask themselves: does mere 
personal association with relics of the past throw light on the past, and if 
so how? It plainly does, but we do not know how. Almost always it is places 
we have in mind, not people. Topography speaks, even without people: a dry 
landscape in Brazil makes it easier to understand back-country evangelists, 
a minor hill-fort in mid-Wales the no-man’s-land of medieval marches. At 
times cities used to speak louder than words, and some still do: St 
Petersburg, for instance, or, until its gadarene post-Communist decline, 
Prague. Has the Turin meeting been an experience comparable to the one I 
recall, once upon a time, standing on a cold winter morning before the old 
unreconstructed Finland Station in Leningrad? Have I learned much more from 
the meeting than I might have done by reading books or attending a smaller 
and less grandiose colloquium on the last years of the Soviet era?
The answer to both questions is no. Is this because human beings grow old 
and obsolete more quickly? Is it because people in a social landscape are 
more perishable than buildings or rivers? Is it because, as every historian 
and journalist knows, nobody gets much from interviewing presidents and 
premiers? Much better to talk to the people paid to keep their eyes and ears 
open and who are used to gossip: journalists and intelligent diplomatic 
envoys. (Fortunately there were plenty of these.)

Still, I did not go to Turin expecting to learn that much more about 
perestroika but, like most of the rest of us, to pay our respects to an 
admirable, a remarkable, a good and honest man. If the historian in me was 
slightly disappointed, the fan of Mikhail Gorbachev was not. Was he a great 
man? I do not know. I doubt it. He was – he visibly continues to be – a man 
of integrity and good will whose actions had enormous consequences, for good 
and bad. I regard it as a privilege to be the contemporary of this man. 
Humanity is in his debt. All the same, if I were a Russian I would also 
think of him as the man who brought ruin to his country.

Eric Hobsbawm’s books include The Invention of Tradition, Age of Extremes, 
and an autobiography, Interesting Times.