Iron Curtain call: Mikhail Gorbachev

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. Today from London, I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The transition to electric vehicles is coming along at a good clip, but there's a speed bump ahead. The rising demand for batteries may outstrip the capacity to manufacture them or even the capacity to mine the materials they require. And a full 50 years ago, an American artist named Michael Heiser started working on City, a vast sculpture carved into the landscape of the Nevada desert. At last it's done. Our culture correspondent pays a visit ahead of the public opening this week. But first, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, has died in a hospital in Moscow, aged 91.

Mikhail Gorbachev oversaw the collapse of the Soviet empire, the evil empire. He gave freedom to a country which had been stuck in totalitarian rule for more than 70 years.

Arkady Ostrovsky is our Russia editor.

He was one of a very, very few Russian leaders. In fact, the only Russian leader who managed to leave power alive, lead a productive public life and remain admired by many of his own compatriots.

And tell me how it is that he came to power in the first place. What was his background in the party?

He was a relatively little known party man in charge of agriculture. He was much younger than the more senior rank general secretaries of the Communist Party, who were dying very rapidly, one after another. It was called the hearse race, as they were dying in quick succession. And the party needed renewal. The KGB actually understood that the party needed renewal and the country needed modernization. And he came to the front of the queue as somebody who was very loyal to the party, but who was younger and they thought could keep the party together and the country together and would launch some modernizing economic reforms. Nobody was thinking about the political reforms at the time. He would just make it more modern. So he came quietly, and very few expected him to launch the kind of reforms that he did in the late 80s.

So why was he able to carry those out? What was it about him that made him the right man for that job?

Gorbachev had a very interesting background. He was born in 1931. That's just two years after Stalin consolidated pretty much complete power in his hands. And this is a year after Stalin launched collectivization, a program which effectively eliminated Russian peasantry as a class. He was of a peasant stock. Both his grandfathers barely escaped repressions. One was interrogated, one was tortured. And the memory of unfairness, of Stalin's collectivization and the sensibilities of a young man growing up in the Russian south and in the peasant land and working the land, I think shaped him almost to a greater degree than the Soviet ideology did. I mean, he was a Soviet man, but it was that memory, that muscle memory of working the land and hearing the story of his grandparents being interrogated by Stalin's police. His rejection of violence, I think, is what made him what he was. And it was his friendships in Moscow State University in the years when Stalinism was in a decline that told him that Stalinism was a distortion and that he ought to try, and the party ought to try to free itself of that and to build something which they call socialism with a human face. And that was his faith. He continued to believe in it until well after he stopped being the General secretary. To the very end of his. His life, he thought that socialism with human face was something that was still a goal and it was never reached.

That is to say, he was more interested in improving the lot of the average Russian than he was in insuring up Russia's superpower status.

So, Jason, this superpower status was taken for granted by Gorbachev. I mean, he was not a public politician. He was not really a populist, and the Soviet Union didn't have elections. So I don't think he ever thought about the Soviet Union not being a superpower. It was taken for granted. To him, it was a victor in the Second World War. But yes, you are absolutely right. He was far more interested in improving the lot of ordinary people. And he couldn't for the life of him understand why you need to make their life miserable for the sake of arms race. He was not by disposition, really ideologically that opposed to the West. And he thought that if you give people a greater degree of economic freedom, if you stop lying all the time, if you stop. Stop repressing them, things surely will be better. And yes, that faith was naive and led in a way, in a good way, to the end of the Soviet empire, because the Soviet empire was really held by lies and repression. And he sort of wanted to reject both.

So how did his ideas about reform then lead to the dissolution of the union?

So Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and he came to improve it, not to bury it. And the reforms consisted of two parts. One part was economic. It was called perestroika. And it was about giving greater economic freedoms to Soviet enterprises, to peasants, to collective farms. Just loosen things up a bit. The second part of reform was called glasnost, and that was opening up the country and particularly the media. And they started to open up the country and give a licensed freedom to some of the media. And what Gorbachev, I don't think understood is that the empire could only be held together by lies of propaganda and repressions and violence against its own people. And when they loosened those two staples, if you like, those two pillars, the system collapsed. It could not be held by anything but repression and violence. The Soviet empire was. Was built on those two cornerstones. And it is very interesting that, of course, Vladimir Putin, as he is waging his war against Ukraine, in his bid to reconstruct the Soviet Union, is relying exactly on the same two cornerstones. It is about lies, propaganda and violence and repressions.

Did he have any notable failings as a leader?

Well, look, I mean, he was not a saint. He was not a dissident. He was still, you know, a hard communist man and somebody who was, for all his good sensibilities, which in the end, I think prevailed over ideology. He made his way and he was ruthless in making his way. You had to be. I mean, he wouldn't have come to the top had he not played the Communist Party game all along, had he not engaged in double thing. Had he not engaged in some of the cynical, calculating, ruthless power fights within the Communist Party. He never would have made it to the top. So we shouldn't paint him as he was not a Mandela. But when the reforms started rolling, he tried to hold back. And he certainly didn't try to use repression and violence against his own people in Russia. To his great credit, I think if we are to look back at his life, his greatest contribution was his aversion to violence and his refusal to use it on mass scale.

And I know that you met Mr. Gorbachev. What did he say about the way things had gone, about how his reforms hadn't gone to plan?

So I've interviewed Gorbachev twice. The second time I met him was in 2003. I just arrived in Moscow as a foreign correspondent and I went to see him. And before the tape started rolling, I said, you know, just before we start, can I say thank you very much? And he was sort of taken aback and said, thank you for what? I said, well, I'm genuinely very grateful because you changed my life. Because I was born and grew up in the Soviet Union, and had it not been for you, I would not have been able to travel freely out. I would not have been able to choose the life I wanted. I wouldn't have been able to be a journalist in Britain and write freely about Russia. And there was a silence. He said, well, yes, that's good to sort of hear. He said something to that effect, that when we launched the reforms, we really didn't do it for ourselves and we didn't really do it for our children. We did it for our grandchildren and will be your generation that will feel the impact. And I think he was absolutely right. I think my generation felt very grateful for what he's done. And the generation of his grandchildren, quite literally his own grandchildren and their friends, is the one who probably benefited from his reforms most, those born in the early mid-80s and whose lives have now been turned upside down and crashed by Putin's war against Ukraine.

So what about the view from inside Russia today? What do today's Russians think about Gorbachev's place in history?

That's an excellent question, Jason. And the views are very polarized along with the country. If you asked me that question 15 years ago, I would say very few people actually think about Gorbachev. I mean, it's sort of history. Some remember it warmly, some less warmly. But he was not a divisive figure. Today, he is a divisive figure, and that's the bitter irony of it. To the people who are waging the war and those who are supporting the war actively in Ukraine. He's a traitor. He's a man who out of maliciousness or out of stupidity, betrayed the great empire, allowed it to collapse, who was too weak or too stupid or both not to use force to keep the Soviet republics in, who allowed referendums in Soviet republics to declare that their sovereignty, and for people who hoped and still hope that Russia may one day become a normal and civilized country. He was a hero who gave people freedom. How the country used that freedom was not his fault. But in a way, the period of his reforms were probably the best period in Russia's history. And I think for people who believe in freedom and who want Russia to be free, he is a hero to people who want Russia to be an empire, who base their power on the hatred of others. He is an enemy, a traitor and a weak man.

Thank you very much for joining us, Arkady.

Thank you, Jason.

Electric vehicles are just starting to rip up the road. They only represent about 10% of global vehicle sales today, but that number is likely to reach 40% by 2030. Annual sales of up to 40 million of them and a death knell for their gas guzzling counterparts. Just last week, California's regulators voted to halt the sale of new petrol powered cars by 2035, the latest policy aimed at reducing climate altering emissions. It all sounds great on paper, but there's a hitch.

There are two problems with the huge uptake of electric vehicles that's required to tackle climate change.

Simon Wright is the Economist's industry editor.

First of all, it's providing the batteries themselves. These are the biggest and most expensive bit of an electric vehicle at the moment. So we need plenty of battery manufacturing capacity. But before that, it's getting the raw materials and processing the raw materials that go into those batteries in the first place.

So let's tackle those in turn then. What is the bottleneck when it comes to building manufacturing capacity?

Well, on paper it looks pretty promising. There's 282 new gigafactories should come online worldwide by 2031, which should enormously increase battery manufacturing globally. But when you dig a bit deeper, there are certain problems. GigaFactories take three years to build and require longer to get up to full capacity, just because you have to get everything sorted out and working properly. And much of the new capacity, particularly in Europe, is not coming from the sort of big six of battery makers, but from newcomers. Now, these newcomers, one may find it hard to scale up in a capital intensive industry. But also just starting a fresh in industries is a difficult task. So it's not absolutely certain that all this capacity that's promised will actually turn up. The other problem as well as capacity is much of the manufacturing of batteries is heavily dominated in China. Now, carmakers and countries in general want to reduce that dependency on China for a couple of reasons. One sort of geopolitical. We're just one invasion of Taiwan away from a calamity on that front. Moreover, batteries are big and heavy and carmakers in particular want to make those batteries close to where they're going to use them rather than have to cart them halfway around the world. China now has 80% of the world's current cell manufacturing capacity. Even with all this new capacity coming on elsewhere in the world, in a decade or so, it's still going to have just under 70%. There'll be 12% in America, Europe will make up the rest. But looking at all these manufacturing bottlenecks, there's problems there, but they may be manageable. It's at the mining end of the battery value chain that the real problems look to be emerging.

The second half of the problem that you mentioned about getting this stuff out of the ground in the first place.

Exactly. And we're seeing this already in the price of battery metals have spiked and are expected to push battery costs up in 2022 for the first time in more than a decade. And the way to get people to drive electric cars is to bring those costs down because they're more costly than their internal combustion engine counterparts. So we need to bring those battery costs down to make electric vehicles the first choice of car buyers. Even given that there's regulations are coming in around the world that will force people to buy electric cars, say in the EU in 2035, there's an internal combustion engine ban coming out on sales of internal combustion engine cars. So there are other factors at play, but bringing the cost down is really quite important.

So what's behind the rise in those prices, though?

Well, it's a combination of things. One is demand for electric cars has run ahead of expectations. But the second is the way that the, the mining industry works. The shortage of lithium, for example, is forcing some manufacturers to cut production. Most projections think that the lithium market will be back in surplus by 2026, thanks to planned new projects. But again, most of these new projects are in China or rely on lower grade deposits that are much costlier to process than those of Australia's or in Latin America. And those raise greater emissions. And if we're trying to tackle emissions, that's counterproductive.

So. So the biggest issue here Is, is with lithium.

Lithium, the big problem, but it's not the only one. There are lots of other metals that go into batteries that take nickel, for example. We're expecting big production increases in Indonesia, which already accounts for over a third of global output of the metal. And the market seems well supplied. But if you look a little bit deeper, Indonesian nickel is not the sort of high grade stuff that's directly usable in batteries. It can be made into that, but it means smelting it twice, which emits three times more carbon than refining higher grade ores from places like Canada, New Caledonia or Russia. And those extra emissions defeat the purpose of making EVs. Cobalt's become less of a pinch point. But price spike in 2018 prompted battery makers to develop battery chemistries that use much less of it, or indeed none of it. But planned mine expansions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where most of the world's cobalt comes from, and Indonesia should tide over battery makers. But there's a problem with the Democratic Republic of Congo in that the artisanal mines there, the conditions are extremely bad. And so the big car makers almost certainly won't touch the stuff unless it's absolutely certain that it doesn't come from suspect sources.

So it sounds like there are problems looming at every stage of the value chain here.

Yes, I mean, we haven't even discussed processing yet, which is one of the bits that's often ignored between the mines and the battery makers. Even if the West's electric vehicle industry gets enough metals and battery making capacity, this processing is still a problem. China enjoys a near monopoly of refining the metals that we needed. 70% of the world's lithium, 84% of nickel and 85% of cobalt. So Western companies will still have to rely on Chinese ones to convert ores into the refined materials that go into batteries. And the problem with Chinese refiners is that they rely very heavily on electricity from coal fired power stations, which again diverts the purpose of the transition to electric cars. Recycling, which usually makes up a quarter of supply in most metal markets, is not expected to help much before 2030 because of the life cycle of batteries being fitted to cars now in 10 years or so.

So there's a lot of pressure on the industry, again, kind of at every level. Is there a way to start chipping away at all of this?

Well, that's a really good question. Western governments are doing their best to create domestic supply chains for batteries. Joe Biden, in his mammoth infrastructure law passed in 2021, set aside 3 billion for making batteries in America, but that's a tiny sum of money. As part of the big picture, the EU has created a sort of block wide battery alliance to coordinate public and private efforts. The real bullet they have to bite is somehow to get mining and processing done in countries where it can be done much more cleanly. And that's going to be a very, very difficult task, possibly an insurmountable one. But look, if we're going to reduce emissions from vehicles around the world, it's a task that the Western governments are just going to have to tackle.

Simon, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you Jason.

For lots more on the many challenges of an electric vehicle future. You can also hear Simon on Money Talks, our sister show on business, finance and economics. It's out later today. Look for Money Talks wherever sustainably mind podcasts are sold and traded.

The sculpture that the artist Michael Heiser has been making, City has become one of the great mythical art projects of our time. It's been 50 years in the making and hardly anyone has seen it.

Fiametta Rocco is the Economist's Culture Correspondent.

It's the biggest sculpture by a contemporary artist, perhaps even the biggest sculpture ever made. It's a mile and a quarter long and more than a quarter of a mile wide. It's made of mounds and basins and walkways and great tilted walls, concrete triangles that lie on their sides or stand up straight, all joined together in a sort of fluid motion of movement. All one work. Yet it sits so discreetly in the landscape in the high Nevada desert that it appears almost invisible. If you didn't know it was there, you could drive right by without even noticing it. Now that it's finally finished, I flew to Las Vegas and drove two hours north into the desert to see it for myself and figure out whether it was worth all that effort.

It's 5 o' clock in the morning and I'm standing in the middle of an enormous basin surrounded by the mountains of central Nevada. Sun is just coming over the cliff tops, and the place where I'm standing is the heart of an extraordinary artistic project by a man called Michael Heiser. Heiser is the last surviving member of a generation of artists who came to be known in the 1960s for turning away from painting, from sculpture, from the gallery system, to embrace land, the outdoors, and to make of it what they could. They were visionaries.

Michael Heiser is one of a group of artists who were known for land art. Land art is created by sculpting the earth and rock using graders and explosives. Massive pieces of equipment. Unlike paintbrushes or pencils, they were inspired by photographs of the earth floating in a sea of black, photographs that had been beamed back by the Apollo space missions in the 1960s and from the.

Crew of Apollo 8. We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.

Michael Heiser was a difficult, clever, independent child. His father was a famous anthropological archaeologist who worked in the Yucatan in Mexico, mapping the ancient Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza. When Michael Heise was a boy, he took him out of school to become the dig's sort of drawing master. He did all the drawings for this dig. In the winter of 1967, Mr. Heiser went to the Sierra Nevada mountains, and there he dug two large pits in the woods. One of them he lined with plywood and the other with sheet metal. And he announced that this was ultra modern art. Two years later, he started an even bigger project, gouging out 240,000 tons of earth and rock from the Mormon Mesa in Nevada to make a work that he called Double Negative. Soon after that, in 1972, he began work on City.

If you walk through other great historic cityscapes, through Delphi, say, or the Aztec ruins in Central America, you can't help but be weighed down by the sense of history, by the thousands of years that have passed since these places were built, by the hundreds of generations of people who have walked through them. Walking through Michael Heiser's city has a different feeling. Yes, there is history. There's history in the references that you recognize. There are places that look like altars, there are places that look like they might have been made for sacrifices. There are great arenas where there might have been sporting events. It has the feeling that it will continue for centuries, that it will be here almost as long as the mountains that surround it, because its essence, extraordinary enough for a contemporary work of art, is timeless. It's completely timeless.

In a time when art comes to us so easily through screens, through phones, through social media, sometimes you have to go to it. City is about to open to the public, though, to maintain its extraordinary solitary aura, Mr. Heiser insists that only six people a day will be allowed in. There'll be those who will think it's old fashioned, it harks back to cowboys, very, very much back to the 60s. But when you're there and you think of our planet, you think about how fragile our Earth is, it has a most extraordinary contemporary resonance, a resonance that will speak to young people in a way that Michael Heiser could never have imagined half a century ago.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. Drop us a line@podcastseconomist.com or leave us a rating wherever you listen. We'll see you back here tomorrow.