Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 11, 1993 TAG: 9304110152
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
GORBACHEV KNOWS WELL JEFFERSON'S DILEMMAS
THE FINAL SOVIET leader will be in Charlottesville on Tuesday to celebrate the 250th birthday of the author of the Declaration of Independence. What's the world coming to?
So Mikhail Gorbachev - former president of the Soviet Union, head of its Communist Party, commander-in-chief of the Red Army - is coming to help the University of Virginia celebrate Thomas Jefferson's birthday.
What would Mr. Jefferson think?
Would he denounce Gorbachev's apparent willingness to 300 to squeeze into Poplar Forest for dinner speech. A2 adopt his convictions to the shifting political realities of the day? Or would he understand, having grappled himself with the delicate notions of federalism - respect for individual and states' rights balanced with the need for a strong central government?
Would Jefferson condemn Gorbachev's fitful - and ultimately failed - attempts to hold the former Soviet Union together? Or would be understand, having been an empire builder whose Louisiana Purchase dramatically expanded the young nation.
Jefferson "talked about building an `empire for liberty,' " says Merrill Peterson, a retired UVa history professor considered one of the nation's leading Jefferson scholars. "The empire Jefferson built was in what he believed to be open, vacant country."
His "empire for liberty" was "built on equal rights and self-government for all parts of the empire," Peterson says, a marked contrast to the generally repressive Soviet empire Gorbachev inherited and tried to preserve.
Gorbachev and Jefferson didn't share political philosophies so much as they shared political quandaries in vastly different times: They worried about state powers and how they would affect individual liberty.
"It's not injudicious to say that Gorbachev could come here and talk about federalism with some conviction and some intellectual curiosity," says Melvyn Leffler, a UVa expert on the Cold War who also is chairman of the university's history department.
In a letter accepting UVa's invitation, an aide wrote that Gorbachev "was moved by your letter . . . inviting him to the 250th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson.
"Mr. Gorbachev honors greatly the role of Thomas Jefferson in defining freedom and democracy," and considers the visit to be "one of the highest points in his political agenda for this year."
But lest you think planners at Mr. Jefferson's Academical Village agreed to pay Gorbachev $25,000 because he is a "Jeffersonian democrat," don't.
"It's not like we looked around the world to find the world leader most [attuned] to Jefferson's ideals," says Louise Dudley, a university spokeswoman. "We wanted to have a major leader speak on an occasion of this importance."
Still, some parallels are striking:
Jefferson, in building a national government, wrestled with the tricky balance of government power and individual liberties in a nascent democracy.
Gorbachev, faced with a crumbling and corrupt state, tinkered with state powers and experimented with degrees of individual liberty that eventually spun out of control and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and to his own political demise.
For all his apparently liberal stands, Gorbachev was no Jeffersonian democrat: He sanctioned force to quell rebellion, veering to the political right when necessary; he fostered openness as a way to further his campaign to reform the Soviet economy and society.
"I am sure he did not have Jefferson on his mind when he grappled with these issues," Leffler says, referring to the herculean political battles Gorbachev waged with Communist Party hard-liners and liberal democrats led by now-Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Anatoly Dobrynin, the longtime Soviet ambassador to the U.S., sees it differently:
"It's very difficult to make a parallel," he says, pointing to the vastly different political and historic contexts in which both men lived. "It's really very difficult to compare him with Jefferson."
Dobrynin, now a senior research scholar at Columbia University's Harriman Institute, says Gorbachev's progressive views are "not really a conviction he's [held] through his whole political life. He's not very consistent with his political views."