“We all need to have a perestroika”, Mikhail Gorbachev used to say. The last leader of the Soviet Union lived by that creed. After becoming the general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 and implementing its program of restructuring and glasnost (opening up), he even changed his job title, preferring to be called president.
The first and last Soviet president was the most democratic leader Russia (the de facto center of the USSR) had for the last century, if not ever. And in the 31 years since the Soviet collapse, his belief in peace, mutual understanding, dialogue and democracy has remained unshakeable.
It was these values that led Gorbachev to withdraw the Soviet Union from a disastrous decade-long war in Afghanistan, and in 1993 to use money from his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize to help finance Novaya Gazetathe main media outlet for Russia’s democrats whose editor, Dmitry Muratov, received his own Nobel Peace Prize last year.
Along with dozens of other independent media outlets, Novaya Gazeta was forced to suspend operations shortly after President Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” in Ukraine in February.
Facing Gorbachev, who lived and breathed, there was animosity and an awkward silence. For years, when he was talked about, it was usually to deny his achievements.
Gorbachev also suffered for his beliefs. Perhaps if he had died in 1991, people back then would have taken it upon themselves to assess his place in history. However, facing Gorbachev, who lived and breathed, there was animosity and an awkward silence. For years, when he was talked about, it was usually to deny his accomplishments.
By initiating perestroika, which many in today’s Russia, including Putin, consider a disaster, Gorbachev exposed himself to criticism from all directions: for being too radical, too conservative, or too weak. But he did not shy away from public scrutiny. Even weakened by age and illness, he continued to embrace it as director of the Gorbachev Foundation, whose work embodied his values.
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a different leader
Like Putin, Gorbachev thought it would have been better if the USSR had continued. But unlike Putin, he envisioned a reformed and democratized federation, rather than a union of nations grudgingly submitting to Kremlin rule.
In the 2000s, Gorbachev told me why he didn’t send tanks to Germany in 1989 to prevent the destruction of the Berlin Wall (built in 1961 on the orders of my great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev). “We should not dictate to sovereign countries their way of life“, said.
Gorbachev himself was partly to blame for the antipathy he faced after the Soviet collapse. Reformers often lack patience, and their plan for sweeping economic change in just 500 days was as utopian as Khrushchev’s 1961 promise of “developed communism” in 20 years.
What set Gorbachev apart from other Russian leaders was that he took responsibility for the consequences of his rule.
What set Gorbachev apart from other Russian leaders was that he took responsibility for the consequences of his rule. Though so did Khrushchev and Gorbachev’s successor Boris Yeltsin (by the way, the only other leaders in Russia who were forced out of power or voluntarily stepped away before their deaths), they left public life altogether, lambasting each other. themselves in private for all that they had failed to accomplish.
Gorbachev, instead, joined historians, politicians, his own comrades and the population in revising his regime. Ironically, he himself helped to bury himself as a historical figure while he was still alive.
While the consensus in Russia is that all of Gorbachev’s reforms went astray or failed because of his poor decisions, his legacy is perceived very differently internationally, and rightly so.
The last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of this were the heyday of globalization in large part due to Gorbachev’s efforts to embrace the world, establish a “new political thought” and assuage Russia’s usual suspicion and animosity towards the outside world.
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As a man of conscience reflecting on his leadership from outside the Kremlin, Gorbachev was eager to tackle problems for which he felt responsible, including economic difficulties and political instability.
a voice from the future
Though his position was weak, his quixotic candidacy in the 1996 presidential election made it worth voting for at least some Russians (like me).
Yeltsin’s candidacy that year, during a period of even greater chaos than the Soviet Union ever experienced, inspired few. It would have been a shame if such an exciting event (Russia was new to electing presidents, and the novelty imparted a festive air) had become yet another occasion for registering discontent.
He was the first president in Russian history to manage to reemerge as a candidate after years of efforts to bury him.
I never believed that Gorbachev had a serious chance of winning, or that he was a good president. But he was the first president in Russian history to manage to reemerge as a candidate after years of efforts to bury him, able to speak both as a leader of the past and as a voice for the future.
Retired Khrushchev could only dream of it after his expulsion from the Kremlin in 1964. Before his death, with enough time to contemplate the past, my great-grandfather concluded that his greatest achievement was not the policy of the “thaw”–exposing crimes of Stalin, along with some political and cultural liberalization, but, in fact, his own removal from office by a simple vote. He was not declared an “enemy of the people” or banished to the gulag; he was simply forced into “a merit retreat” at his dacha. He was not physically liquidated after his political demise, as he certainly would have been in the 1930s.
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However, Khrushchev regretted his lack of courage and wished he had used his time to further his thaw so that even political death was optional.
Twenty-five years later, Russian history took this liberal turn. Death and disappearance were no longer the only options.
Political death had become a matter of choice. If Gorbachev didn’t have a chance to win in 1996, he at least had a chance to run. Perestroika and glasnost, so derided today, paved the way for that under Yeltsin, who, while not a fan of his Soviet predecessor, was democratic enough to keep up the spirit of change.
With the invasion of Ukraine and the destruction of the media made possible by glasnost, Gorbachev’s legacy now appears to be dead. But Gorbachev himself was more optimistic.
He often pointed out that it was a product of the Khrushchev thaw, and he would certainly encourage us to believe that one day a new leader will emerge in Russia, initiate a new perestroika and resurrect the values to which he dedicated his life.
AUTHOR: NINA L. KRUSCHEVA
© PROJECT SYNDICATE – MOSCOW professor of international affairs at The New School, she is the co-author (with Jeffrey Tayler) of
In the footsteps of Putin: Searching for the soul of an empire in Russia’s eleven time zones
(St. Martin’s Press, 2019).
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