The death of Mikhail Gorbachev in this period of the Ukrainian War is loaded with symbolism.
It can be said that Misha — an affectionate diminutive of his name in Russian — changed the world with his perestroika. That political process not only reformed the Soviet Union internally, but also radically changed the foundations of the USSR-West relationship. The trend became closer and less conflictive coexistence between the countries of those two blocs of the bipolar world at the time.
Much of this spirit of rapprochement remained in the post-Cold War period. With all the setbacks and setbacks, in general, relations between Russia and the West remained on a friendly level in the 1990s and part of the 2000s. aftershocks, especially since 2014, when Crimea was annexed.
Would Gorbachev’s death symbolically represent the definitive end of the rest of that horizon of rapprochement begun with perestroika and the beginning of a new basically confrontational phase of the Eurasian great power with Western countries? That’s what we’ll see.
The death is also symbolic due to the former Soviet ruler’s relationship with the current Russian president. It reveals many contradictions and changes over time. When Vladimir Putin took power in the early 2000s, Gorbachev was quite receptive to the new leader.
Firstly, because he had a bad relationship with the pre-Putin president, Boris Yeltsin. During perestroika, Yeltsin had fought for power with Gorbachev until he was able to completely jettison him at the end of 1991, with the disintegration of the USSR and the emergence of the new independent Russia under his command.
Throughout the 1990s, Gorbachev was critical of Yeltsin’s “shock therapy” and rapid privatization, which he claimed was responsible for Moscow’s great economic depression at the time (Russia’s GDP drop in the 1990s was greater than that of the US in the 1930s of the Great Depression).
When the new President Putin emerged with policies of recovery of Russian industry and companies, a more assertive foreign policy focused on national interests, Gorbachev applauded. However, as the authoritarianism of the politician became stronger, especially during the large protests that followed the 2011 and 2012 elections, the former leader became more critical.
He did not become Putin’s enemy, but what we might call a loyal critic.
Regarding Kiev and its conflict with Moscow, Gorbachev maintained a contradictory position. He supported the “reunification” of Crimea after a referendum with the local population. He relied on the fact that the peninsula is mostly inhabited by ethnic Russians and had been part of Russia for centuries until Khrushchev, with an administrative act, passed it over to Ukraine in 1954.
On the other hand, Gorbachev — whose mother and wife were Ukrainians — was in favor of maintaining good relations with Kiev and criticized the warlike approach to the neighboring country.
In 2022, at the age of 91 and with serious health problems, the politician hardly communicated in public and therefore did not give an official statement about the War in Ukraine. But there are several descriptions by third parties close to the former Soviet leader that indicate that he was critical of this deepening of the warlike character in the relationship.
The extent to which Gorbachev’s final silence was a result of his health condition and how much it could also reflect Moscow’s outright censorship of criticism of the “military special operation in Ukraine” – as the Putin regime defines the conflict – is symbolic of the tensions of this moment when Gorbachev leaves the world he helped to change.
