Werner Herzog
In Werner Herzog and André Singer’s new biopic, one gets the sense that with Gorbachev, what you see is genuinely what you get.
Winston Churchill once called the Soviet Union “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” perhaps somewhat like Russian nesting dolls. But in Meeting Gorbachev, a ninety-minute biopic about Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ final president, one gets the sense that what you see is what you get.
The film goes back to Stavropol, the rural backwater in the Northern Caucasus region where Mikhail Sergeyevich was born 1931 into a poor peasant family. Co-directors Werner Herzog and André Singer use archival and news footage, as well as original interviews with such Gorbachev contemporaries as President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz, President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker, and Polish Solidarity labor union leader and former Polish President Lech Walesa.
But the heart of the film is the original interviews with the former General Secretary of the Communist Party himself.
The heart of the film is the interviews with the former General Secretary of the Communist Party himself.
Herzog conducts three interviews in English with eighty-eight-year-old Gorbachev, who replies in Russian, his words translated via subtitles. About one third of Meeting consists of this face-to-face (but never confrontational) questioning of the man who led the USSR from 1985-1991.
Gorbachev was the son of a World War II Red Army hero who fought the Nazis and operated a combine harvester at a collective farm. Besides his keen intellect, which enabled him to study at the prestigious Moscow State University, he possessed a “serve-the-people” sensibility, and impressed others with his sincerity and humility as he rose through Communist Party ranks.
Full of curiosity, Gorbachev traveled widely (sometimes by foot, which impressed peasants unused to humble apparatchiks), looking for solutions to Soviet problems, such as food shortages. Former Prime Minister Miklós Németh describes how Gorbachev set out to emulate Hungary’s agricultural sector, which produced more food than its population could consume.
Elected to the Central Committee in 1978, Gorbachev became a fixture in the political firmament of the ossified, bureaucratic Soviet state. In clips we see what looks like a mummified, senile Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko die in rapid succession, opening a power vacuum that the reform-minded Gorbachev filled when he finally replaced them as Soviet leader. He then proceeded to launch his twin crusades of perestroika and glasnost.
Perestroika, broadly speaking, referred to restructuring the economy, while glasnost meant opening up in terms of freedom of speech and expression in culture, news, media, art, and politics. This set Gorbachev on a collision course with the vestiges of Stalinism throughout Eastern Europe. As Gorbachev tells Herzog: “More democracy—that was first and foremost our goal. I also wanted more socialism.”
As Ronald Reagan denounced the USSR as “the evil empire” and Cold War tensions heightened, Gorbachev met with the U.S. President in Iceland, where the two leaders came breathtakingly close to negotiating groundbreaking arms control treaties. But Washington’s insistence on the Star Wars SDI project derailed this sweeping, visionary proposal.
Nevertheless, as Gorbachev stated at a Reykjavik press conference, an entire class of nuclear weapons was eliminated—a major breakthrough. The film views this arms reduction achievement through the lens of the current nuclear weapons race heating up between Moscow and Washington, with Trump withdrawing from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.
Elsewhere on the global scene, Britain’s reactionary Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is seen in a news clip issuing her famous pronouncement, “I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.” Gorbachev forthrightly responds to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and withdraws Soviet troops from Afghanistan.
Closer to home, Gorbachev declines to crack down on independence-minded movements throughout Eastern Europe, as the fence between Hungary and Austria and the Berlin Wall come down. During this exhilarating period, notes Hungary’s Németh, “there was no repetition of 1956”—when another reform-minded Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, sent troops into Hungary to suppress an uprising.
Gorbachev, in the film, explains he is not a “vengeful” person and goes on to ruminate on his role in ending the Cold War.
Meeting covers the attempted hardliner coup against Gorbachev, the rise of Boris Yeltsin (who Gorbachev clearly disdains as power hungry), and the eventual dissolution of the USSR into the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev has regrets about this outcome, saying “Rather than dissolve the Union, we should have given the Republics more rights.”
Co-director Singer is a veteran British producer/documentarian and anthropologist credited with directing 2014’s Emmy-winning Night Will Fall, which used footage of Nazi concentration camps in 1945 shot by Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein for a lost documentary.
Herzog is arguably one of Germany’s greatest directors since the heyday of German Expressionism during the 1920s, when helmers such as F.W. Murnau created atmospheric, cinematic masterpieces. The versatile seventy-six-year-old, who also directs features such as 1982’s Fitzcarraldo, started shooting documentaries early in his career and his many fact-based pictures include 2005’s Grizzly Man about an Alaskan bear activist, 2010’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams about ancient images adorning France’s Chauvet caves, and 2011’s death row doc Into the Abyss.
However, Herzog is both the strength and weakness of Meeting Gorbachev. While the documentary is well-directed, as a questioner Herzog leaves much to be desired. He seems awestruck by Gorbachev, at one point gushing that “it was a pleasure to have been able to meet such a charismatic, genuine, and significant giant of the 20th century.”
While many people view him as a Lincoln, others consider him a “traitor” for, they believe, triggering the Soviet Union’s liquidation.
While many people—especially Germans, whose reunification was empowered by Gorbachev’s policies—view him as a Lincoln, others consider him a “traitor” for, they believe, triggering the Soviet Union’s liquidation. But Herzog never once asks Gorbachev about that Bolshevik prophet Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s central committee comrade and Red Army commander who argued that Stalin betrayed the Russian Revolution and that socialism could not exist in one state, but had to be globally spread through permanent revolution.
Was Trotsky, the ghost who has haunted Russian politics for almost a century, correct when he contended the USSR was not genuinely “socialist” but “a bureaucratic deformed workers’ state”? Nor does Herzog bother to ask if Gorbachev is still a Marxist—or democratic socialist or social democrat or what?
Although Vladimir Putin is glimpsed attending his wife Raisa’s 1999 funeral, there is also little regarding what Gorbachev thinks about the Kremlin’s strongman and Russian politics today. Nor are there any questions about Moscow’s purported interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Trump’s alleged ties to Putin.
Gorbachev’s loving, close relationship with the Siberia-born Raisa Maximovna Titarenko is tenderly depicted and serves to humanize the man who once led a nuclear superpower. Throughout the documentary Gorbachev’s face is unlined, even cherubic, although now a diabetic, he is pudgy. But Gorby is always all too human and says that the closest thing he’d ever seen that he’d want inscribed on his tombstone is the epithet: “We tried.”
Meeting Gorbachev theatrically opens in New York and Los Angeles on May 3.