Mikhail Gorbachev, 1931-2022
Mikhail Gorbachev was perhaps the only rational top-tier politician produced by the hideous Bolshevist-Stalinist Russia that evolved under a litany of totalitarians of various calibers and levels of murder and brutality.
Gorbachev’s vision of Russia was remarkably sound for a person that was born, raised, and educated within the totalitarian Leninist-Stalinist milieu. His enthusiastic involvement in Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization reforms was a sure sign of a man who knew the “system” was not only ailing but downright dysfunctional—and thus unable to compete in a world dominated by Western rationalism and capitalist economics.
Mikhail understood the “Soviet model” was inherently broken condemning the Russian people to a life of continuous material privations and ideological-social dysfunction. And he took it upon himself to modernize it in institutional, social, and political ways that would preserve certain core Russian values, but throw the proverbial window of modernity wide open so that the country would leave behind the Leninist-Stalinist criminal ossification and begin growing via democratic politics.
His efforts won him both ardent friends and persistent detractors. The speed with which Western modernity spread throughout the former USSR, sustained by Gorby’s perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) policies, mobilized many, still adhering to the old regime, to oppose this (unbelievable) new era.
Their resistance, however, was of no particular consequence, at least in the early days of the newly acquired “freedom,” as the Russian younger generation, in particular, eagerly embraced the new ways and a breath of fresh social and political air.
Gorbachev did not persist as the head of the rapidly changing former USSR preferring to assume the role of the senior stateman and act as the father of the newly acquired political and social freedoms. But, good intentions aside, he failed to recognize the survivability of old regime politics irrevocably tainted by Stalinism.
Following the failed Yeltsin interlude, Gorbachev supported Putin’s ascend to power seeking the role of the new man’s trusted senior stateman policy adviser. The Stasi operative, and keen crypto-Stalinist, however, was in no mood to listen to words of wisdom and Gorby found himself gradually sidelined in the affairs of the new Putin “empire.”
In the ensuing years, Gorbachev repeatedly criticized Putin’s policies and kept his ties to the West intact. Gradually, he increased his public criticism of Putinism warning that the new tsar was hard at work to revive some of the worst Stalinist methods. At the same time, however, he was becoming increasingly disappointed by US triumphalism over how the Cold War was won and did not hesitate to express fears about the world backsliding onto post-Soviet era rivalry over who was the real winner after the USSR collapsed.
Gorbachev, now in failing health, intensified his criticism of what he (correctly) recognized as US/Western revanchist tendencies, which blew in our faces with Ukraine’s Maidan Square “revolution” that mathematically led to the currently raging Putin’s war unhinging the global economy and raising the specter of a nuclear war.
Gorbachev remained silent when Russia invaded Ukraine and steadfastly refused invitations by Western commentators to speak on the record about the unfolding mess.
My reading of the man is of an honest patriot, who had the courage to confront not only the Stalinist nightmare but, also, the whole Leninist totalitarian edifice. He was the only USSR politician of honest, often smiling, disposition in his interaction with the West—and one who did not hesitate to publicly recognize the level of cooperation he received from his Western counterparts in arranging the post-Cold War era.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, March 2, 1931 - August 30, 2022.