Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was the last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and the last President of the USSR. His name remains associated with the two words with which he tried, unsuccessfully, to reform the system: Glasnost And Perestroika, transparency and reconstruction. It triggered the opposite: after the brief interlude of the early 1990s, the dynamics of the ruling elites remain opaque in Russia, as in many of the other republics, and the Soviet system crumbled in a few weeks in 1991, under its helpless eyes.
It remained for the Russians he who destroyed the Soviet Union. In the West he was loved, before being forgotten: both for the public and for the political class of the various countries, he was the first apparently decipherable Soviet leader. But he did not know how to transform his role in history into shared experience and narration with his compatriots, something that the current Kremlin tenant Vladimir Putin did very well, who deplored, without mentioning Gorbachev, the collapse of the Soviet empire as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century.
Just became general secretary of the PCUS, in 1985 Gorbachev called to Moscow, from Sverlovsk (today Ekaterinburg), Boris Yeltsin who later, after years of rivalry, overtook him and took his place in the Kremlin. His tormented relationship with Yeltsin, however, confirms the secular spirit that Gorbachev tried in vain to manifest in his years in power: for the first time in 1987 a member of the politburo of the Communist Party in disagreement with the secretary general resigned, and was not forced into office. exile or worse still to a premature end. After his resignation from the party’s supreme organ, Yeltsin continued his political life, and with a success that was fatal to Gorbachev.
It was precisely the pacing modernizer Yeltsin to lay the foundations, even before conservative coup that paved the way for Gorbachev’s removal from powerto the independence of Russia with the presidential elections of June 1991. A step that preceded the meeting in December of that year in Belovezhkaya Pushcha with the presidents of Belarus and Ukraine, in which, without any legal basis, the end was sanctioned of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev he was born in 1931 in Primorie, in Stavropol, a region of wheat fields and former air of the Caucasus. Of peasant origins, he initially worked as an agricultural machinery mechanic and then, after graduating in law in Moscow, he returned to his region of origin for the first positions in the Communist Party system, reaching that of secretary of the local party. in 1970: the 42 years of life spent in the multiethnic region taught him, he later wrote, how “only tolerance and harmony can guarantee peaceful coexistence between people”.
In 1971 he was elected to the central committee of the CPSU, and seven years later he joined the party secretariat to deal with agriculture. He enters the Politburo in all respects in 1980. After Brezhnev’s death he takes on an increasingly important role and, after Cernenko’s death, in 1985 he was elected general secretary of the party.
In September 1999 he lost his wife Raissa, never loved by the Russians for her role as supporting actor (and also for the shopping she dedicated to during her husband’s missions abroad), a lifelong companion and adviser. “Raissa and I have lived together for almost 50 years without ever separating and being a burden to each other. Together we have always been happy”, he wrote in the fictional autobiography “A tu per tu con me” published in 2013.
Gorbachev, who in 1989 he was the first Soviet leader to meet a Pontiffhas signed important treaties for arms control, an architecture dismantled in recent years and not yet replaced, not even in the form of negotiations, which the United States insists on extending to China which, however, withdraws: the then Soviet leader negotiated the Inf Treaty against the deployment of medium-range strategic missiles, signed with Ronald Reagan in 1987 and the first Start, for reduction of nuclear warheads, signed in 1991 with George Bush father.
He will withdraw the Soviet forces from Afghanistan and authorized the return of Andrei Sakharov to Moscow, ending his exile in Gorki. He authorized the first private enterprises in the Soviet Union.
Despite these successes and the many merits that were recognized above all in the West, Gorbachev manifested serious limits in the analysis of the internal situation of the USSR: his project, to keep the Communist Party firmly in power but to modify the structure of the economy to make the The country failed due to the impossibility of making the party apparatus coexist with economic reform, and due to the obstinate opposition of the nomenklatura.
When its decline had begun and the siege of its power was being organized, Gorbachev did not realize the danger that the awakening of nationalities represented for the USSR. He underestimated the extent of the first demonstrations in favor of independence from Moscow (the Baltics, Georgia, Azerbaijan), and was overwhelmed.
Memorable the contemptuous gesture with which Yeltsin in 1991 ordered him to read a text in Parliament. Gorbachev, reluctantly, obeyed with a forced smile that better than any sentence symbolizes his political end.
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