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The 19th-century
Russian writer Nikolai Gogol warned us that there would be days like
June 3, 1990. On that day Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet
Union, and his wife, Raisa, came to Minnesota. But back in Minnesota
we hadn't learned the lesson from Gogol's "Inspector General" of how
the small town of Yensk had rolled out the red carpet to welcome a
certain Khlestakov whom they believed was someone else. Minnesotans,
known to most Americans through Garrison Keilor's weekly radio
program "A Prairie Home Companion" as the shy Scandinavians of Lake
Wobegon, lost themselves in a mass frenzy of Gorbymania for a
day.
Of course, all politics is local, including this
event. Despite the rising tide of Republicanism in the 1980s,
Minnesota had stayed Democratic. Governor Rudolph Perpich won
election and re-election in the 1980s in easy landslides. He was the
son of Croatian immigrants to Minnesota's hardscrabble mining region
and had risen in state politics by joining the state's old populism
with the promise to make us "world class." We didn't call him that
at the time, but he was what would later be called a New Democrat
who enjoyed wide support from both labor and business. But he was
also, as we say in Minnesota, "a little different." More and more
the press fed on his personal idiosyncrasies. By 1990, the national
press had picked up on this and was calling him "Governor Goofy." A
visit from Gorbachev would put an end to this ridicule and help him
sail to victory in the re-election campaign six months down the
road. This rekindled rumors of a Perpich bid for the presidency.
The Gorbachevs touched down at the Minneapolis-St.
Paul International Airport shortly after 1 p.m. After a luncheon
with Perpich's family and friends, Gorbachev and Raisa took off on a
triumphant motorcade. The old avenues of St. Paul -- once described
by F. Scott Fitzgerald as "a little solemn" -- were lined with tens
of thousands of well-wishers in Gorby T-shirts chanting "Gorby!" In
downtown Minneapolis, Gorbachev stopped to meet with about 135 VIPs
from Midwestern businesses at the Radisson Plaza Hotel, whose parent
company already had a stake in Moscow's Slavyanskaya Hotel. Then the
Gorbachevs got personal. En route to a family visit, the Gorbachevs
stunned and won the hearts of ordinary Minneapolitans. They stopped
at a small Mexican restaurant to chat with the help over coffee and
then shopped for toys for their grandchildren at a drug store. The
day ended with a visit to computer giant Control Data
Corporation.
Never before had there been such hype for an event
in Minnesota. Over 1,000 U.S. and 2,000 international
representatives of the press were on hand working from the eight
truck flatbeds set up for cameras at the airport and from the
Metrodome sports stadium, which had been converted into a press
center. Even I got into the act. For the day, I served the local CBS
affiliate, WCCO-TV, as co-anchor with the station's popular news
anchor Don Shelby. By far the longest coverage ever given to a local
political event, the station dedicated 14 hours of live television
to the visit.
The Perpich family bonded with the Gorbachevs, whom
they saw as simple folks just like themselves who had risen up the
ranks from humble origins. At the end of the day, Perpich declared
that the Gorbachevs had left with "warm, fuzzy feelings about
Minnesota." And just about everybody in Minnesota also felt warm
fuzzies towards Gorby and Raisa.
There was some serious business, too. The Control
Data Corporation, a leader in mainframe computers, brought the day's
business to a climax with the announcement in Gorbachev's presence
of the sale of its Cyber 962 computer to the Soviet Union to the
tune of $32 million.
And earlier, too, a surprise announcement had
interrupted the day. The British media mogul, Robert Maxwell, showed
up and in a joint appearance with Gorbachev announced a $50-million
gift to create the Gorbachev-Maxwell Institute of Technology in
Minnesota. They declared that the institute would be home to
"scientists from around the world working together for the benefit
of all humans." The rhetoric was getting unreal. The hard-nosed
chairman and CEO of Archer Daniels Midland Co., Dwayne Andreas,
stepped up to the plate, promising that he would throw in another
million for the institute and calling Gorbachev "the messiah of
reform." Recalling the day, television anchor Don Shelby now says,
"We Minnesotans greeted Gorbachev like a Christ figure." Even the
Gorbachevs' exit had magic. As if to show that Gorbachev moved the
heavens as well as the earth, the dark clouds that had brought
bitterly cold weather all day long suddenly parted as his Tupolev
took off, and spring sunshine guided him and Raisa toward the
sunset.
It was a hard act to follow. Former U.S. Vice
President Walter Mondale put it this way: "There was not going to be
a second act for Gorbachev." Our guest left behind his role as Gorby
in the American heartland to face a bitter fate back home. It was
the last act for others as well. Control Data soon paid a price for
having ignored the personal computer market and went bankrupt. The
Gorbachev-Maxwell Institute lived on for a few months as a rumor and
then vanished into oblivion.
Looking back, we can see that there was much of
Gogol's town of Yensk in Minnesota that day and maybe more than a
little of Khlestakov in Gorbachev. What we refused to understand was
the crucial difference between Gorbachev, the Soviet president, and
"Gorby," the mass phenomenon. That's probably also why Gorbachev
decided to come to Minnesota. There he was Gorby, the idol, and not
the embattled leader of perestroika.
Both he and we Minnesotans really believed he was
something else. Maybe it told us something about ourselves. Perhaps
those folks back east were right about Midwesterners like us. We
were easily fooled. Governor Perpich would soon enough just be
Governor Goofy again and lose the election a few months later to a
Republican. The Democrats would turn to a different governor -- a
man from Hope, Arkansas, and not a man from Hibbing, Minnesota --
for their presidential hopes in the 1990s.
Robert Maxwell might have had a good laugh over the
publicity stunt he pulled, but shortly thereafter he really did not
have much to laugh about. Unable to paper over his bankrupt media
empire any longer, he committed suicide a year and a half later.
Control Data's mainframe computers were on their way to a status
equivalent to 8-track tapes in the high-tech world.
And my television career also vanished with
Gorbachev. I would not be the co-host for television mega-events
covering the visits of other world leaders to Minnesota, who, as it
turned out, would never pay us a call.
Then again, maybe there was a reason to believe in
Gorby. It wasn't just Lake Wobegon that believed he was turning the
world's swords into plow shares. Gorby represented the chance of
something else. The other day, I spoke with U.S. Senator Mark
Dayton, who was a part of the Perpich administration in 1990. In
Dayton's words, Gorby enabled us to believe in the possibility of "a
much better, a more human part of politics than what's going on
now."
Nick Hayes teaches at St. John's University in
Minnesota and is a featured commentator on Russia and Eastern Europe
for Minnesota Public Radio and Twin Cities Public Television. He
contributed this essay to The Moscow Times.
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