Mikhail Gorbachev Will Be Remembered as a Reformer With a Mixed Record for the USSR.
He will have achieved only half of what he set out to do when he came to power in March 1985.
The man who has just passed away at the age of 91, Tuesday, August 30, 2022, after a long illness, is one of the great figures of the last century. With a title that he did not covet: that of trustee of the bankruptcies of the Soviet empire and communism.
As soon as he came to power in March 1985, he dared to “open the window”. A storm rushed in, sweeping away 74 years of communism in one fell swoop. The architect of the end of the gulags and the Cold War, which earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, he assured the people of the Soviet bloc who wanted to emancipate themselves that force would not be used against them.
Under the reign of this instinctively tolerant man, the security forces only repressed a demonstration of independence fighters in Tbilisi (19 dead) in April 1989, and in Vilnius in January 1991.
A “Gorbimana” takes over the world
A record in the East, where human rights have often been regarded as an avatar of bourgeois morality. Without it, the inevitable dismantling of the USSR, that “prison of the peoples,” would certainly have resulted in a bloodbath. This explains the "Gorbimania" not only of his accomplices - Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Helmut Kohl, etc. - but also of the students of the “Beijing Spring” before the massacres of Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
Gorbachev was the one who “destroyed our slimy fear, allowed us to read, speak, think, travel,” summarized his advisor Alexander Tsipko.
Nothing predisposed Mikhail Gorbachev to the role of revolutionary. The son of a secretly baptized tractor driver from the North Caucasus, he was the first Soviet leader to go to university. He learned law at the prestigious Moscow University, the cradle of the country's elites. And he cultivated his open-mindedness through several trips, thanks to which he could compare, without a chaperone, the standard of living of Westerners and that of homo Sovieticus.
Warm and talkative, he sometimes seems lost in Soviet circles composed exclusively of old men with weak character and impaired judgment, vulnerable to flattery and scams. However, he was a docile apparatchik for almost thirty years and always kept his thick tongue. This did not prevent him from believing until the end in the possibility of the Party's renewal from within. While deploring the end of the USSR and distrusting the market, whose economic mechanisms have always eluded him.
Under the protection of the KGB boss
His career could have been that of a cautious servant of the Brezhnevian “zastoi” (stagnation), secretary of various committees, and then a member of the Central Committee in 1971. He moved to Moscow after the suspicious death of his mentor, Kulakov, in 1978, to take charge of agricultural policy. Before entering the Politburo, two years later, under the protection of the leader of the modernizing “Young Turks”, the KGB boss, Yuri Andropov.
This was perhaps the turning point. After the Afghan fiasco, Andropov hoped to modernize the country technologically to save the Party's hold. Mikhail Gorbachev shares his convictions. This is how he naturally became First Secretary of the CP in March 1985. He knew then what the Westerners wanted to ignore, that the regime was checkmate.
Years before, the secret memorandum of Novosibirsk revealed to the leaders the irreversible decay of the infrastructures, the increasing technological delay concerning the West, the corruption at all levels, and the “couldn't-give-a-damn approach” of a population which took refuge in the apathy and the sarcasm to survive.
The earthquake of 1989
Productivity has been falling since the mid-1970s. Added to this is the unbearable cost of a renewed arms race triggered by Ronald Reagan's Star Wars project. In this train wreck, the Party has no choice. “We simply cannot continue to live like this,” Mikhail Gorbachev summed up when he came to power at the age of 54.
Just as Lenin had launched the NEP, introducing a homeopathic dose of the market to save the Soviet experiment, so he was given the mandate to inject some efficiency. His first attempt was a resounding failure, as was his authoritarian campaign against alcoholism. It was impossible to “get going” when the notion of the initiative had been erased by three-quarters of a century of totalitarianism. Gorbachev realized that Perestroika, which had become a cult word in the 1990s thanks to him, needed the mobilization of “the masses” and that it was no longer possible to deny the problems.
A demand that was tragically reinforced in April 1986 with the Chornobyl nuclear accident, which was revealed “only” ten days late. But above all, it brutally dissipated the illusions that the Russians had about their technology.
For three years, economic reforms remained extremely timid, causing a deep crisis in public finances and an increase in shortages. Indeed, Gorbachev does not want to go too far. He is ideologically opposed to private ownership of land, does not intend to privatize industry on a large scale, and only proposes that prices should no longer be fixed by the Gosplan. Cautious, he gave pledges to the conservatives and dropped several of his liberal allies.
Then came the earthquake of spring 1989. Mikhail Gorbachev, who, ironically, had never been elected in a free election in his life, authorized the first “competitive” elections in the Soviet bloc. No more victories for a single candidate with 99.99% of the votes. He hoped to unseat the last Brezhnev disciples and see the emergence, throughout the USSR, and also in Central Europe where the KGB is discreetly pushing reformist communists, small Gorbachevs, imagined as reformists but devoted to the regime.
He is heard beyond his expectations. In Central Europe, the Iron Curtain opened in July at the Austro-Hungarian border, and a flood of would-be exiles poured in. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, and the European dominoes of the empire all fell over before Christmas.
Gorbachev, and this is his greatness, refuses to oppose the inevitable.
He accepts the reunification of Germany, without clinging for long to his wish to see it leave NATO in exchange. He was satisfied with substantial financial aid from Helmut Kohl, which evaporated in the impenetrable circuits of the Russian bureaucracy. The Soviet republics took advantage of the situation and proclaimed their independence one after the other in the summer of 1990.
“We destroyed without building”
In the autumn of 1990, at the cost of a very explicit threat of a military coup, the hardliners of the regime had already forced Mikhail Gorbachev to abandon the Shatalin plan, a radical program of economic reform. The economic crisis worsened in the summer of 1991 and the coup of August 20 was therefore not a surprise.
Under house arrest in Crimea for the longest 59 hours of his life, Mikhail Gorbachev will have to leave it to his enemy, Boris Yeltsin, to defend the achievements of the reforms, standing on a tank and with the support of elite regiments of the KGB, still him. The man who returns to Moscow haggard has lost his touch. Drinking the chalice to the dregs, the president of the USSR was forced by Boris Yeltsin and his Ukrainian and Belarusian counterparts to sign the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
“We destroyed without building,” he bitterly noted before retiring.
Still boasting of the friendship of the great ones of this world, but unaware of the contempt that a disoriented population has for him, which associates him with the collapse of the empire, he runs for president in 1996. He saw himself as a recourse against the errors and the business practices of the Yeltsin era but was humiliated by a score of 0.5%.
Recycled in the circuit of international speakers to supplement a pension of 40 dollars per month, he cultivates his bitterness in his “Memoirs”. Didn't he often repeat “there are no happy reformers”?
Some reading
This Is the Book to Read If You Want to Discover the True Face of the Kremlin Dictator Vladimir Putin. Catherine Belton’s book will help you understand why the West must support Ukraine at all costs.
Roman Abramovich, the Russian Oligarch Who Arouses All the Fantasies and Cultivates the Mystery. With one foot in Russia and the other in Ukraine, he tried to help with negotiations at the beginning of Putin’s war in Ukraine.
On Wall Street, Whistleblowers Will Be Able to Be Paid Even More by the SEC. The SEC just ended restrictions dating back to the Donald Trump era.
4 Billion People by 2100 — The World’s Population Could Be Cut in Half by the End of the Century. This is at least the thesis supported by James Pomeroy, an economist at HSBC.
Who Is the Current Winner of the War in Ukraine? America and It Is the US Dollar That Tells Us So. The impressive strength of the US dollar does not lie.
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