On August 30, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who is credited with ending the Cold War, passed away at 91, the dichotomous reaction told a story. Leaders of the West led by the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the world had lost a “towering, global” leader who had “changed the course of history.” While Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his “deepest condolences” and placed red roses beside Gorbachev’s coffin, he did not attend the funeral because of a “full schedule”. At home, Gorbachev’s legacy is complicated. He came to power in 1985, and unfurled a process of reforms which “were necessary”, but he was unable to stop the fall of the Soviet Union. Many Russians put the blame for the turmoil that followed on Gorbachev.
Tracing the finals days of the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991, in The Last Empire, the historian, Serhii Plokhy, writes that the man at the centre of events was Gorbachev who had the most to gain or lose from the way things turned out. “He lost it all – prestige, power, and country.” Plokhy places Gorbachev’s story, “a leader who dragged his country out of its totalitarian past, opened it to the world, introduced democratic procedures, and initiated economic reform, changing his homeland and the world around him to such an extent that there was no place left for him”, at the centre of his narrative.
There may not have been any place left for him in his own country, but two terms will be forever associated with Gorbachev – glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), words he used when he talked about reforms in the political and economic systems of the USSR soon after becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985. In fact, Gorbachev’s 1982 book is titled, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World.
Plokhy argues that the fate of the Soviet Union was decided in the last four months of its existence, between the August coup and the meeting of the leaders of the Soviet republics in Almaty on December 21, 1991, and that the most important factor in deciding the future of the last world empire was not the policy of the United States, the conflict between the Union centre and Russia (respectively represented by Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin), but “rather the relationship between the two largest Soviet republics, Russia and Ukraine.” He claims that the unwillingness of their political elites to find a modus vivendi within one state structure that drove the final nail into the coffin of the Soviet Union.
Impact of disintegration
The sequel to the dramatic disintegration of the Soviet Union played out in 2014 with the Russian invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine; and then in February, 2022 when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In March 2014, delivering a speech on the Russian annexation of Crimea, Putin said: “The Soviet Union fell apart. Things developed so swiftly that few people realised how truly dramatic those events and their consequences would be. It was only when the Crimea ended up as part of a different country that Russia realised it had been robbed…” Putin made it clear that Russia was prepared to undo the “injustice” inflicted on it by the disintegration of the USSR.
Gorbachev was a southerner, hailing from the Stavropol region of the USSR, next to the “volatile” North Caucasus. In January 1988, David Remnick, now editor of The New Yorker, arrived in Moscow as a reporter for The Washington Post and saw the inevitability of “radical change”, but where he found that the “danger of the authoritarian temptation” still lurked. In Lenin’s Tomb, his account of the last days of the Soviet empire, Remnick says Gorbachev “opened the door to history” in 1987 with, among other things, a speech to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution. “Bland, hedged, filled with the Communist Party Newspeak imagined by George Orwell and perfected by committees of cowardly men, Gorbachev’s speech nevertheless opened the gate. And the lion of history came roaring in.”
In his speech, he avoided “going too far”, but said, “The guilt of Stalin and those close to him before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness that were permitted are immense and unforgivable…even now we still encounter attempts to ignore sensitive questions of our history, to hush them up, to pretend that nothing special happened. We cannot agree with this. It would be a neglect of historical truth, disrespect for the memory of those who found themselves innocent victims of lawlessness and arbitrariness.” Remnick writes that though many historians in the West called the speech a huge disappointment, “but for all the glaring insufficiencies of the speech – its unwillingness to criticise Lenin, its praise of the brutal collectivisation campaign – Gorbachev opened the most important discussion of all. Intellectually, politically, and morally, the speech would play a critical role in undermining the Stalinist system of coercion and empire.”
Ideas and consequences
An evolution of Gorbachev’s political ideas is evident from a book, Conversations with Gorbachev, a collection of his talks with Zdenek Mlynar, a leading theoretician of the Prague Spring, on perestroika, socialism, communism and other subjects. In the introduction, Archie Brown (The Gorbachev Factor) says that both were friends for half a century from the time their paths first crossed as students in 1950. Although one was a Russian and the other a Czech, they were both ardent supporters of communism and socialism. One took part in laying the groundwork for and carrying out the Prague Spring; the other opened a new political era in Soviet and world politics. Brown got an early indication of things to be expected from Gorbachev after a conversation with Mlynar. “Would you say Gorbachev has an open mind,” Brown asked Mlynar sometime in 1979. “Yes,” he replied, “he’s open-minded, intelligent, and anti-Stalinist.”
Gorbachev’s actions led to “unlooked-for results” like the breakup of the Soviet Union, but one of his great achievements is that he left his country “freer” than it had ever been. In his book, Remnick talks about a heady time on the Moscow metro when people were openly reading Dr. Zhivago and other classics, till then relegated to samizdat editions.
