Angels in Russia

Thoughts on Mikhail Gorbachev and Tony Kushner

Two words associated with Mikhail Gorbachev made their way into American pop culture during the 1980s: Glasnost and Perestroika. Glasnost was Gorbachev’s attempts to add transparency to the social system, after many decades of strict censorship and attempts to control information. Perestroika was Gorbachev’s attempt to reform the government based on that new flow of ideas, including economic market signals.

Together, American media portrayed the two concepts as “westernization.” In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, we were treated to a narrative of western victory in a long cultural conflict emblemized as the Cold War. American ideas had won out, we were told. By “American Ideas” everybody had their own ideas — for some it meant leveraged buyouts, for others Hollywood excess and for Pizza Hut it meant this:

For political scientist Francis Fukuyama, it famously meant “The End of History” by which he meant that western liberal democracies would be the final form of human government, destined to become universal over time.

For American socialists like playwright Tony Kushner it meant continuing to try to deal with the flaws of the American project, even while as a culture it claimed victory, supremacy and global inevitability. So when Gorbachev died earlier this week, The Middlebrow’s thoughts strayed to Kushner’s epic plays Angels in the America, the second part of which is subtitled “Perestroika.” Kushner believed that American society also needed new transparency and restructuring. He poured this into his plays, dubbed “A gay fantasia on national themes.

Angels is a large cast drama about people in late-Cold War America, struggling to define their identities and courage in the face of potential nuclear annihilation and the very real AIDS pandemic, which had both ravaged the gay community and irreversibly ruined America’s culture by taking the lives of so many visionary activists and artists. The government’s response was criminally inadequate and perhaps purposefully so.

Among the many plots of Angels is the story of right wing lawyer and king-maker Roy Cohn (a consigliere to Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon and mentor to Donald Trump) who died of AIDS though claimed it was liver cancer, as he was closeted. On his deathbed, he jousts with the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed alongside her husband based on his accusations of espionage. But this is not Dickens. Cohn, a villain to the end, is not reformed by this ghastly encounter, claiming righteous victory to the end.

In the spiritual hierarchy of Angels in America, God can create, angels can inspire, ghosts can haunt, but only people can change. But the people have to want to change and they have to work for it. That is the “perestroika” of the second play’s subtitle.

Because The Middlebrow is middle aged, a lot of what happened from this era serves to help him understand current events. Gorbachev, Glasnost, and Perestroika were all symbols of change throughout the 1980s and 1990s — the evolution from The Cold War to The New World Order. Kushner seized one of those words to remind us that change was not something best left to others.