Upon entering the former office of the Moscow opposition newspaper Novaia Gazeta, the visitor was faced with old computers in a glass cabinet. Usually the junk was ignored, except that some zealous official pointed out: “It’s the machines donated in the 1990s by Mr. Gorbachev!”
In a country famous for the statues it has erected and torn down with political changes, it is ironic that this is the closest thing to a public memory of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev in his country’s capital.
His political death had taken place without there being time for images to be removed from the pedestal; in fact, the most famous statue of the last Soviet leader is in the Ronald Reagan presidential library in the USA.
This contradiction seems to accompany the possible epitaph of Gorbachev, now dead in fact at the age of 91 in a Moscow hospital — he even survived Novaia Gazeta, one of the victims of Vladimir Putin’s military censorship due to the Ukrainian War. The ultimate definition of “inept hostage to circumstances” goes hand in hand with “the last great statesman of the 20th century.
Gorbachev would reject such a position. In the many interviews since leaving power with the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, he has admitted mistakes, but he has never failed to show uncertainty about what he considered his place in history.
This became clearer in the magnificent documentary “Gorbachev.Sky”, released in 2020 by Vitali Manski, the last requiem of the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in which he wanders like a ghost among his memories.
In the West, he dies avenged. The memory of the leader who helped Europe to free itself from communist tyranny, who brought humanity to a political monolith and who undermined the fear of nuclear destruction will always be superior to the nuances of the account.
For ordinary Russians, this is not so. A poll taken by the FOM institute on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2011 showed that 52% of Russians viewed Gorbachev’s legacy as “very bad”; only 11% approved it. That year he had finally won a commendation from the Russian government, but without much fanfare.
As the research showed, the memory of the liberal anarchy that nearly destroyed Russia in the 1990s is credited both to him and to his successor, Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007).
Born on March 2, 1931 to a family of farmers in Stravopol in southern Russia, Gorbachev was a Soviet product. Unlike previous leaders, he came into the world and grew up under the aegis of the opportunities that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union provided.
With a law degree from Moscow State University and a specialization in agricultural economics, Gorbachev joined the party in the 1950s. In college, he met his wife, Raisa Titarenko, whom he married in 1953 and had their only child, Irina.
After graduating in 1955, he returned to his hometown and began to participate in political life. Having piloted combine harvesters, he has always worked with a field organization bias.
In 1970, he was one of the youngest regional party chiefs in the country. At the time, the regime was economically stagnant under the iron fist of Leonid Brezhnev, who prioritized the arms dispute with the United States over domestic conditions. The time bomb was armed.
As in every totalitarian society, the secret service alone knew the real extent of the problems. So KGB chief Yuri Andropov began to look for names capable of bringing some dynamism to the system.
In 1978, he invited him to the party’s Central Committee; in 1979, at the age of 48, Gorbachev was the youngest member of the Politburo (central governing body) in Soviet history, whose average age of members was over 65 years.
In 1984, he gained notoriety when he headed a delegation to London of his future friend Margaret Thatcher with his wife, RaÃssa, by his side. That elegant and jovial woman surprised Western analysts, used to pale pictures of ladies with a distant peasant air.
And the queue walked in Moscow. In three years, the Kremlin lost its gerontocracy: Brezhnev (1982), Andropov (1984) and Konstantin Chernenko (1985) died. Gorbachev was anointed general secretary of the party, leader of the country, at the age of 54.
In power, in May 1985, the leader spoke of the economic stagnation of the Soviet state and the need for reform, which became official at the 27th Congress of the Communist Party, in February 1986.
In the following years, the West would become familiar with the terms that guided the doctrine, which was otherwise taken from Andropov’s prescription: glasnost (transparency, political) and perestroika (restructuring, economic).
Both pillars were difficult to handle. Economic opening measures were almost impossible under the planned regime; from a 4.1% growth in gross domestic product in 1986, the Soviets saw a -12% drop in 1991.
By liberalizing expression and releasing dissent, glasnost created a wave calling for more freedoms. The cultural scene had revived in Moscow. On the other hand, the communist establishment was threatened. Gorbachev was especially fragile as he had no ties to the military-industrial system.
He was lucky to have as his main public adversary the same Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) whose library today honors him.
In the presidency since 1981, Reagan had adopted cinematic terms like “Evil Empire” to be fought with a “Star Wars” program to talk about Moscow. The pressure paid off, and the Kremlin found itself shattered by the arms race.
It is estimated that up to 70% of the country’s agricultural production could not reach the table of its inhabitants in the early 1980s.
Gorbachev’s personal component was essential for the rapprochement with the West. A friend of British Prime Minister Thatcher, Gorbachev and Reagan made summit meetings more frequent, and even amidst various tensions and ego competitions there was a previously unthinkable complicity. The figure with a huge red patch on his bald head became the cover of Western magazines.
Of course, not everyone was happy about this. The military was forced into a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, and saw concessions made to decades-old enemies. The communist bureaucracy suddenly found its privileges exposed.
Here there are historiographical disagreements about what happened: whether Gorbachev really ran a process or whether he simply surfed on it.
Be that as it may, it is always worth remembering the famous tsarist premier Pyotr Stolipin (1862-1911), for whom it was impossible to carry out reforms in Russia without first hardening the state because ordinary Russians see flexibility as weakness – a lesson ignored by Gorbachev, seen as inept, that was taken literally in the years of Vladimir Putin.
At the end of the decade, perhaps Gorbachev’s biggest strategic decision in the foreign realm defined his fate. In a speech in July 1989, he affirmed what he had already said the year before Reagan: that the countries of the European communist bloc were free to decide their fate.
He would later say that he expected a serial reform of the Iron Curtain Communist parties. What happened was simpler: regimes began to fall, one by one, and only Romania recorded violence. In 1989, the ultimate symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, collapsed; the following year, Germany was reunified.
Due to the domino effect, the Soviet leader saw the height of his popularity abroad, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
The problem for Gorbachev is that countries less happy to have been annexed to the Soviet Union have begun to think the same as their European counterparts. Thus, the three Baltic nations began to seek independence. Asian corners such as Kyrgyzstan rebelled, suffering repression.
At home, the leader tried to create democratic instances and maintain power at the same time with the creation of the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989, which elected him Soviet president in 1990. But separatist pressure and the rise of rival Yeltsin as leader of the largest USSR country Russia undermined its timetable. The wave would finally engulf him.
It is a historical irony that Putin today tries, “manu militari”, to rectify the most powerful reason for the 1991 dissolution, the independence of Ukraine, the second most powerful republic in the union.
Years later, Gorbachev would lament his insistence on a centralized system and his loyalty to the Communist Party institution until almost its end, which would come after the last great act of his presidency: the August 1991 coup.
That month, the president had everything ready for the signing of a treaty that federalized the Soviet Union. It was little for liberal leaders, who sought an end to single-partyism and full economic freedoms, but a lot for the communist elite.
Gorbachev made a mistake, taking ten days of vacation before the signing date. The day before, August 19, he was taken by surprise in his “dacha” on the edge of the Black Sea with the news that there was an “emergency committee” installed in power in Moscow.
An astonished world had mixed reactions, but who led the resistance to the coup was Boris Ielstin. It worked, and three days later Gorbachev was back in Moscow.
Months of political struggle ensued over the future of the country and the Communist Party, which lost its monopoly on power. In August, Ukraine declared itself independent. In December, the Soviet Union ended when Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, the heart of the empire, declared a political-economic agreement.
Without a party, and with no country to govern, Gorbachev resigned. Yeltsin had won, and the defeated never accepted his nemesis’ nine years of power.
“I was probably very liberal and democratic about him. [Ieltsin]. I should have sent him as ambassador to the UK, or maybe to a former British colony,” Gorbachev told the British newspaper “The Guardian” in 2011. In Manski’s documentary, he just calls him an “idiot”.
The following years were one of complete ostracism at home, despite failed attempts to assemble a liberal party with billionaire Alexei Lebedev, his longtime friend.
Abroad, however, his stature only grew and reached a level of a certain celebrity: Gorbachev became a poster boy for the chic Louis Vuitton bags, participated in films by the German Wim Wenders and became a constant figure in interviews and tributes.
RaÃssa, her public and private better half, died at age 67 in 1999, a victim of leukemia. In Manski’s requiem, his presence in image is omnipresent in the mansion in which he lived for the last few years, alternating his time with hospitalizations.
Gorbachev supported Putin’s election in 2000 and considered authoritarian measures necessary to put the house in order after the confusion that followed the end of the Soviet Union. But support ceased in 2006, with sharp criticism for growing authoritarianism.
That year, he bought 10% of the runt Novaia Gazeta, the newspaper to which he had donated computers in the early 1990s. Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist critical of the Kremlin who was murdered at the same time, worked there. One of its editors at the time, Roman Schleinov, told Sheet that Gorbachev did not influence the editorial line, summarizing his presence to occasional visits, articles and interviews.
During the recent pro-democracy protests in Russia, Gorbachev insisted on the need for reform and the removal of Putin. In Manski’s film, he called Putin a dictator. His words resonated only in the West.
It remains to be seen whether now, in death, some sort of reverse iconoclasm will occur to one of those responsible for the end of the Cold War in Russia. It will be easier to find a statue in Berlin or Washington.
