Opinion: Gorbachev’s Ontario farm walk that changed the world

Mikhail Gorbachev’s recent passing has prompted many retrospectives about his role as the last leader of the Soviet Union and the downfall of communism.

Few, however, know of his connections to agriculture – and a walk in the fields of southern Ontario during his first trip to North America – that helped inform his views and change the world.

Gorbachev was the Soviet president who bromanced Ronald Reagan and charmed Margaret Thatcher, and the American and British leaders parlayed their relationships with the Soviet leader into the history-making end of Soviet-bloc communism.

One of Gorbachev’s confidantes was Alexander Yakovlev, a long-time Soviet ambassador to Canada, who was made Gorbachev’s chief of propaganda when he took power. Yakovlev was an associate of Eugene Whelan, Canada’s green-Stensoned minister of agriculture in late 1970s and early 1980s, who was from Essex County.

I pulled out my copy of Whelan’s autobiography, as I remembered being surprised by Whelan’s references to Gorbachev and his connections to agriculture when I first read the book.

Whelan lived in remarkable times and travelled the world, promoting Canadian agriculture and meeting people who have changed the course of history. They included European leaders and future leaders, three popes and communist leaders in Russia and China. 

Whelan was the first Canadian minister to visit Russia after relations cooled when Russia invaded Afghanistan. He went there in 1981 and the main event of the trip was a meeting with Gorbachev, who was then the Soviet minister of agriculture and a member of the powerful Politburo.

Gorbachev grew up in a rural area and had operated a combine on a state-run farm.

“This was a man who’d driven a tractor and tilled the soil; he wasn’t just a bureaucrat who’d never gotten dirt between his toes or under his nails. So I knew already we’d have a lot in common,” Whelan wrote in his autobiography.

Whelan was known for speaking plainly and when Gorbachev launched into the required lambasting of the evil United States, Whelan says he interrupted him and said they could talk about politics or talk about agriculture. They talked about agriculture.

Farming was a genuine interest for Gorbachev and I’ve encountered that fact in other books. He was interested in agricultural technology and the organization of farms. I expect he was convinced that the state-controlled centralization of agriculture in the Soviet Union was a poor system.

Whelan put it more plainly and said that unless Soviet farmers had a stake in the farming, it would turn out poorly. Indeed, he said the state farms were woefully unproductive but the individual garden plots of Soviet workers did well.

Gorbachev’s visit to Canada in 1983 was the only significant trip he took to the West before he became General Secretary.

Whelan toured him around the country, paying for a plane through the agriculture ministry budget to get them to farms from Alberta to Ontario. 

Gorbachev visited Whelan’s farm in Essex County, and in a Globe and Mail interview with Gorbachev in the early 2000s, he said the ideas of opening the Soviet Union through his policies of perestroika and glasnost were born while walking in Whelan’s fields and in discussions with Yakovlev, the ambassador. It wasn’t a conversation they could have safely had in the Soviet Union, reports the Globe and Mail.

“There’s no question that Gorbachev was most impressed with our country. He marvelled at our technology and our productivity and freely admitted how far behind his own country was in many ways,” Whelan said in his autobiography.

I never had the chance to interview Whelan. I was barely school age while his governments were in power, but I regret I didn’t find a reason to call on him. 

His connection to Gorbachev and that walk would have been a fascinating topic.