Gorbachev - villain or hero?

The Soviet Union quietly slipped into history and so did Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev – though with a gap of thirty years. The man who is credited with the pliant demolition of arguably the most astounding experiment in modern political history breathed his last in the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow last week, leaving behind only some specks of ash of his legacy that was burnt down by his successors with callousness one after another.

Both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin have, in their own capacity, have done – and still are doing- enough to apply a reverse gear to the whole process of democratization and liberalization started by Gorbachev. In the last days of his life, he saw the un-ceremonial burial of his political philosophy in the form of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a pragmatic, shrewd and rational statesman, he could not anticipate that it was impossible to bring in his reforms without abolishing a centralized communist system that millions in the USSR and beyond no longer wanted. He is a hero for almost everyone outside the boundaries of Russia, but he is also a villain for a large number of Soviet nationalists, including Vladimir Putin, who have not yet forgiven him for the ‘crime’ of dismantling the Soviet Union.

He was different from the traditional breed of the Soviet leaders who had been running the country for 70 years prior to him. Unlike his weighty predecessors like Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko – and unlike Putin, presumably – Gorbachev had rightly decided that it was better not to die in office. This is exactly what he did.

By discarding the USSR’s ideologically driven foreign policy, he also extinguished the flames of the cold war and brought humanity back from the brink of nuclear annihilation. Without any doubt, the biggest achievement of Gorbachev was the relatively supple dissolution of a highly militarized totalitarian regime equipped with the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. In the years preceding the dismantlement, he had numerous opportunities to revive and restore power to the Soviet Union, but he always desisted from moving in this direction and demonstrated unwavering commitment to his signature policies: Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (economic reconstruction allowing marketization and privatization).

During the terminal crisis of the USSR, with his ebbing power and status, he kept the military hardliners from using force in Baltic states and, at decisive moments, he also resisted all the temptations to use the military to preserve the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and suppress the nationalist movements that were tearing apart the Soviet Union at every seems. The Soviet Union was one of the only two superpowers in the world till 1990 and its might certainly dwarfed all other empires on the planet in land size and military might, with a formidable nuclear arsenal and largest army in the world at that time.

Not surprisingly, during that period, its power status, its communist ideology, its atheism, and its appeal to the Third World sent terror through the backbones of US policymakers. Millions of Americans as well as other Westerners considered the USSR as an existential threat to their democratic and liberal system.

And then, in December 1991, in a move almost unthinkable just six years ago, the Soviet Union, communism’s home base, melted away swiftly and peacefully without any whimper. Most former Soviet republics secured independence and the rest branded together in a new entity called the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Before being thrown into the dustbin of history, the Soviet Union had set free its colonies in Eastern Europe with hardly a shot being fired.

The most significant and symbolic rollback was the reunification of Germany without any fight and resistance. Berlin, considered to be the most precious prize won by the Red Army for its World War II years of life-and-death struggle against the Nazi war machine, was handed over to Germans in a manner that was more reflective of a ‘surrender’. A young KGB colonel stationed in Dresden at the time would consider the Soviet Union’s voluntary withdrawal from Germany and Eastern Europe and its self-disintegration as the most shameful and humiliating moment in Russian history. This young Soviet colonel was Vladimir Putin.

When Gorbachev, after the death of Andropov, took charge in 1985, the Soviet Union was apparently in a much stable shape and could have easily survived in this manner for decades beyond 1991, especially since no one, other than the Afghan mujahideen, really wanted to fight it. With over half a million troops stationed in Eastern Europe as late as 1989, and tens of thousands of nuclear warheads spread throughout the country and capable of reaching any destination on earth, the USSR still possessed formidable capacity to unleash mayhem on any enemy across the globe. Yes, the Soviet Union, due to moribund economy and stale social culture, had been witnessing internal corrosion since the 1970s. The Soviet economy was unable to keep pace with the capitalist West, especially in terms of delivering to its people the quality and quantity of consumer goods that were becoming the style mark of successful societies.

The leadership crisis was the key reason behind this dilapidated society and crumbling economy of the Soviet Union. Its ancient leaders of the 1970s and 1980s clung onto power as long as they could, with some of the last ones – Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov in particular – becoming ‘dead men walking’. In the last days of Andropov’s life, the only organ of his body that was ostensibly functioning properly was his brain. Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who succeeded Andropov in 1985, had exhibited a natural tendency to understand the mindset of bosses who could barely issue orders anymore, a unique skill set that greatly helped him to win their trust and to eventually succeed them as premier of the Soviet Union and the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.

Being a shrewd and chronic party insider, Gorbachev steadily climbed through the ranks to reach the top of the Soviet Union. Though he had kept alive a genuine faith in socialism, Gorbachev also started passionately believing that communism really could be reformed, and socialism be reinvented with a human face. This stance heralded his embrace of the reformist policies of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (economic reconstruction allowing marketization and privatization) to reinvigorate the politics and economy of the USSR. And when his radical policies triggered unexpected reactions – the eruption of secessionist nationalisms and popular democracy in both the Soviet republics and the Soviet satellite colonies in Eastern Europe – Gorbachev repeatedly refused to snub reform or to employ repression.

In stark contrast to his Chinese communist counterparts who were doing everything to quash the nascent pro-democracy movement precisely at the same moment, Gorbachev did not opt for the use of force to preserve power in 1989. Gorbachev, the last of the socialist utopians, had made up his mind that socialism could be saved in a democratic manner, otherwise it did not deserve to be saved at all.

Perhaps this conviction explains why Gorbachev did not avail multiple opportunities between 1989 and 1991 to restore the power of communists within his nation and that of the Soviet Union in world affairs. He could have sent Russian troops and tanks into Eastern Europe in 1989 to crush popular revolts against communist rule there, as his predecessors had done earlier in 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia. He did not. He also could have created complications for the West in 1990 and 1991 when America, with the backing of the United Nations, landed a massive force in Saudi Arabia to capture Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and secure its petroleum reserves for western Europe, Japan, and the United States.

Gorbachev could have also resorted to retaliation in 1990 when the West broke its promise first to keep a reuniting Germany out of Nato and then to keep Nato from encroaching on the Soviet Union’s western border. Reportedly, in August 1991, a group of high-ranking Soviet officials met Gorbachev’s Crimean hideaway to request him to crack down on the country’s democratic reformers and to re-establish communist authority. Had he done so, thousands of elite Soviet officials, military and civilian, backed by hundreds of thousands of troops, would likely have rallied to his side. But he declined.

Gorbachev did not favour any move that could have scuttled Glasnost and Perestroika. Obviously, an attempted coup occurring without his support fizzled out miserably. Shortly afterward, Gorbachev left the stage calmly. And Russia set out on a different, unpredictable and directionless, future.

The writer is a freelance contributor.

Originally published in The News