In this week’s heated debate over the end of the Cold War, here
is an item you may have missed. This Tuesday, Rabbi Velvel Tsikman,
head of a flourishing Russian Jewish community in West Hollywood,
surveyed the crowd of Russian émigrés assembled at
the Chabad Russian Jewish Community Center, and paid tribute to the
man he credits with winning their freedom: Ronald Reagan.
“[Reagan’s] doctrine, what he did, was very helpful to destroy the
monster that was there in Europe,” he told the Associated
Press.
The moving story, called “Immigrants From Former Soviet
Union Mourn Reagan,” goes on to report that similar feelings were
expressed in Russian and Eastern European immigrant communities
throughout southern California, where folks turned out to offer, in
English of varying fluency, a shared message: Thank you, Ronald
Reagan.
That there was no mention of Mikhail Gorbachev should not be
surprising. Those who led lives of muzzled desperation behind the
Iron Curtain reposed little faith in the perennial frauds who, like
Gorbachev, were skimmed from the fetid surface of the Communist
Party to do its bidding.
Having grown up in the Soviet Union, I have that on reasonably
good authority. My family was among the many Soviet Jews who in
1989 took advantage of Russia’s newly relaxed immigration laws to
split the swiftly crumbling country. We weren’t waiting around for
the regime, a vipers’ pit of drunkards, dunces, and anti-Semites,
and more commonly a combination of all three, to change its mind;
which shortly thereafter, it did. Nostalgia, needless to say, is
not a family affair.
Optimism is another matter. And I can think of no one in recent
history who was in surer possession of what the late historian
Daniel J. Boorstin once described as “the ability to imagine that
things could be very different from what they were,” than Ronald
Reagan. There is, for instance, the way Reagan imagined, when few
could, that the Berlin landscape could look very different from
what it was. Now 23, I confess to sniffling regression every time I
watch Reagan deliver that 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall: The
unshakable conviction stamped across Reagan’s gentle face; the
deafening roar of the crowd. It’s all too much. But that’s what
Ronald Reagan could do.
In passing, Reagan has left an indelible impression on those who
escaped Soviet terror. Yet it is rarely mentioned today that his
memory is preserved with the same fondness among those who endured
that terror to the end. Though it has gotten astonishingly little
coverage in the mainstream media, currently scrambling to support
its Anybody-But-Reagan account of the “evil empire’s” collapse,
leaders from the once-shackled nations of the former
Eastern Bloc spent this week celebrating the man whose simple,
powerful dream — of “a renewed strength of the democratic
movement, complemented by a global campaign for freedom” —
accomplished the impossible: it lifted their spirits.
“He was a stroke of luck for the world, especially for Europe,”
noted Lech Walesa, Poland’s post-communist president and the
onetime leader of the trade union Solidarity, whose cause Reagan
ardently championed. “When he saw injustice, he wanted to do away
with it,” Walesa said. Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga
reminded us that the Reagan Revolution was not confined to the
continental United States. “President Ronald Reagan will be
remembered in the hearts of all Latvians as a fighter for freedom,
liberty and justice worldwide,” he said.
Talk to Soviet dissidents and you will hear some variant of the
same theme. Some will recall the time Reagan, at his first meeting
with Gorbachev in Reykjavik in 1986, pressed him to open up Jewish
emigration, making it expressly clear that the Soviet refusal to do
so endangered the entire U.S.-Soviet relationship. When many had
opted to abandon Soviet Jewry, Reagan would not. Others will
remember the personal letters Reagan wrote to European heads of
state, asking that they send embassy officials to join American
observers outside the Moscow synagogue every Friday evening, to
rebuff KGB agents on the hunt for those Jews who defied the law by
openly practicing their faith.
Like Yelena Bonner, the widow of Soviet dissident and Nobel
Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, they will rightly credit
Reagan’s daring defense spending for necessitating the grudging
market reforms that eventually toppled the bankrupted Soviet
economy — and with it, the Soviet Union. Like Natan Sharansky,
they will recall the joy of hearing the president describe Russia
as an “evil empire”. Finally, here was a man who saw it for what it
was. A man who insisted, in a time of great pessimism, that
“optimism was in order,” and who promised, in a time where few
wanted to talk about history, that the hideous experiment of
Marxism-Leninism was destined for its “ash-heap.” But ask these
Soviet dissidents Gorbachev and you’ll meet with silence.
Gorbachev? They knew Gorbachev. And he was no Ronald Reagan.
Which reminds me of a story, as a late great president might
have said. On the morning of April 20, 1989, the day my family
leaving Moscow, a knock came on my parents’ door. It was our
next-door neighbor. Ours being one of the Soviet Union’s cramped,
communal apartments, I mean that quite literally. Waving a bottle
of vodka, he insisted my father drink a toast. He wanted to
celebrate our new freedom, which also meant his: By leaving him our
half of the apartment, we were bypassing Soviet restrictions on the
sale of state property.
Agreeing, my father suggested they toast to Gorbachev. After
all, our neighbor was a common day laborer, unlikely to be up on
the complex realities of international politics; and more than
likely to have imbibed his fair share of politburo propaganda,
which Gorbachev, in his hick Caucasus accent, spouted daily. Our
neighbor only laughed. “Gorbachev? You think Gorbachev gave me this
apartment? We’ll drink to Reagan. Reagan gave me this
apartment.”
In many ways, it’s true: Reagan did give him that apartment. But
to those of us who found a home in America, an America whose appeal
was personified by men like Ronald Reagan, he was far more
generous.
