Gorbachev maintained an ambivalent relationship throughout the more than two decades in power of the current Russian president
Mikhail Gorbachev had an ambivalent relationship during the more than twenty years that Vladimir Putin has been in power, supporting his initiatives but also participating in the opposition. When the current president acceded to the Kremlin, the promoter of perestroika said that he had a good profile for the position, but in 2011 he was already ashamed of having supported him and a year later he criticized his “susceptibility” and “grudge”, to return his outright favor in 2018, before Putin’s re-election for a fourth term. “Today he is a leader who deservedly enjoys the support of the people,” he said.
After Russia’s chaotic 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the government of Gorbachev’s nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, the last Soviet leader expressed his hopes when Putin, a former KGB agent, was elected in 2000. Then, he claimed that he was “intelligent, serious, reserved and organized.” “I like the people of this profile,” he added.
For the glasnost ideologue, Putin represented an opportunity for stability and economic growth, a continuation of the transition to democracy that he himself set in motion. Even in 2006, when several activists expressed concern about the Kremlin’s increasing control over civil society, Gorbachev defended it, declaring: “Those who believe that Putin has authoritarian tendencies are wrong.”
But as the years passed and hopes for the development of democracy in Russia evaporated, Gorbachev went on to make some veiled criticisms and then to make frontal attacks. The accusations of fraud that weighed down the 2011 parliamentary elections hardened his attitude, to which was added Putin’s decision to run for a third term, something unforeseen and unprecedented, to denounce in 2013 “a monopolized economy” and that the Corruption had assumed “colossal proportions.” But from that time Gorbachev was nothing more than a thorn that is ignored even if it irritates.
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