The current Russian president, Vladimir Putinand the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail GorbachevThey have had a love-hate relationship for years, exacerbated by criticism of the democratic involution and the aggressive foreign policy of the Kremlin.
(Read here: Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died in Moscow)
“It cannot be that all decisions come together in one person. No one has a monopoly on the truth,” Gorbachev said in an interview with the recently defunct daily Novaya Gazeta.
(See also: Mikhail Gorbachev Died: Leader Caught Between Heroism and Tragedy)
Gorbachev had been one of the biggest critics of Putin’s management, separated not only by more than twenty years, but also by his total rejection of authoritarianism and his support for a pragmatic relationship with the West, especially in the field of nuclear disarmament.
Putin did not hesitate to respond to criticism on occasions, but, unlike other opposition leaders, he never dared to criticize a man with undeniable international prestige.
hateful comparisons
While the last Soviet leader is an idolized figure in the West, where he was known as “Gorbi”, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and was a respected leader around the world, Putin became the number one enemy of the United States and the European Union.
It cannot be that all the decisions come together in a single person. No one has a monopoly on the truth
Gorbachev, whose grandparents were victims of the Stalinist purges, tried to reform the USSR to give it a “human face”. Putin, who admits that he never threw away his party card, tries to rehabilitate the figure of Stalin and revive the Soviet empire by force.
While the first went down in history for bringing down the Iron Curtain and ending the Cold War, the second does not accept its result and wants to review the internationally recognized borders since 1991.
Gorbachev was a shareholder of “Novaya Gazeta”, whose director received the Nobel Prize, which did not prevent the Russian authorities from later eliminating that header, while Putin is known for his animosity towards the press.
In addition, Putin was brought to power by Gorbachev’s main rival, Russia’s first democratic president, Boris Yeltsin, in exchange for guarantees for him and his family, which included oligarchs such as his treasurer, Roman Abramovich.
save the soviet union
Putin always blamed Gorbachev for failing to reform the planned economy in time, the key to saving the Soviet system.
“We had to fight for the territorial integrity of our state more insistently, consistently and boldly, and not bury our heads in the sand, leaving our asses in the air,” Putin said.
We had to fight for the territorial integrity of our State in a more insistent, consistent and daring way, and not hide our heads in the sand, leaving our asses in the air.
By comparison, he maintains that the situation in Russia in the late 1990s “was much more dramatic than in the last years of the USSR.”
“The economy would have collapsed as a result of the crisis of ’98, the social sphere was at zero and the Army ceased to exist. And we faced the aggression of international terrorism, separatism and a civil war broke out. And Russia was on the verge of disintegration,” he asserted.
To prevent this, Putin launched an anti-terrorist operation in Chechnya, imposed a power vertical, shut down the most critical media outlets, and restricted the most basic freedoms.
According to historians, the freest period in the history of this country was the five-year period from 1988, in the midst of “perestroika” and “glasnost” (restructuring and transparency), to the bombing of the White House by order of Yeltsin in 1993.
Kremlin monopoly on power
After several attempts to return to the political scene with a social democratic project, Gorbachev was a residual figure in the opposition until official fraud in the 2011 legislative elections unleashed the biggest anti-government protests in 20 years.
So, he did not hesitate to take sides in favor of the opposition led by a young Alexei Navalni with phrases that felt very bad in the Kremlin such as “United Russia is a bad copy of the CPSU (Communist Party of the USSR)”.
“The best step on the part of the authorities would be for them to present their resignation,” he affirmed and even demanded the annulment of the elections for fraud.
In the months and years that followed, he did not hesitate to call for overcoming “authoritarian tendencies” in Russian politics and accused Putin of believing himself to be God, when Russia’s recovery “was mainly due to the high prices of oil and gas in the international markets”.
He also demanded a constitutional reform to create a “real democracy” through a referendum that would end “the autocracy” once and for all, and urged Putin to give up seeking a non-existent “fifth column” in Russian society.
Months later, Putin returned to the Kremlin after four years as prime minister and did just the opposite. He first passed laws that restricted freedom of assembly and classified the new enemies of the people – opponents, journalists and activists – as foreign agents, and then promulgated a Constitution through a dubious referendum that allows him to remain in power until 2036.
Putin the warlord
The current Russian military campaign in Ukraine separated them again, since two days after it began, the Gorbachev Fund called for an urgent cessation of hostilities and the start of peace negotiations.
Descendant of Ukrainians, the brief statement from his institution highlighted that “in the world there is not and cannot be anything more valuable than human life.”
Gorbachev ordered the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan (1989). Putin has used force since 1999 in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and Ukraine.
EFE
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