The editors of the Washington Post remark on the occasion of the death of Mikhail Gorbachev:
Mr. Gorbachev, who died Tuesday at 91, never intended to destroy the Soviet system. But in a lifetime inside it, he saw its decay and the need for change. While many in the West viewed the Soviet Union as an implacable Cold War adversary and a rigid party hierarchy, Mr. Gorbachev saw cracks and failures, and drew lessons from them. In Stavropol, he had set out on a conformist career path in the Komsomol. Once, the job brought him to a rural village of low, smoke-belching huts along the River Gorkaya Balka. He was shocked at what lay before him: poverty and desolation. “On the hillside, I wondered: ‘How is it possible, how can anyone live like that?’ †he later reflected. Another time, after Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces crushed the Prague Spring, Mr. Gorbachev visited a factory in the Czech city of Brno as part of a Soviet delegation. The workers refused even to talk to Mr. Gorbachev. “This was a shock to me,†he later said. “This visit overturned all my conceptions.†He realized that the Soviet use of force had been a mistake.
I think the encomiums being heaped on Mr. Gorbachev are mistaken. He differed from his predecessors in that he wasn’t a committed revolutionary but a bureaucrat. The obits being written are burdened by amnesia.
May he rest in peace.
Yeah, I agree. We should all be thankful he wasn’t a reactionary, but he was a product of the system and not a visionary.
Of more contemporary relevance, Gorbachev reversed the post-Stalin understanding that the party boss in each Republic would be of/from that Republic. Parachuting in his own people without previous connections upset the balance in a system which had mediated local and central control. The move was met by a nationalist riot in Kazakhstan, and after Chernobyl, local anti-Soviet mobilization in Ukraine often in guise of ecology movement. The simplest explanation of the fall of the Soviet Union is that the Republics, or at least the main ones, left it, probably more from an institutional crisis and opportunism than the reforms themselves.
But still he was a communist, and he was trying to preserve the Soviet Union. I’m not sure what Yeltsin was, other than a drunk, but I don’t think he was a communist. Putin is a Russian nationalist. He is not a communist, but he does think some critical industries, like gas and oil, should be state run.
He is famously misquoted as saying the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe in history, but the full quote shows that he thought that the result of the fall, that ethnic Russians were suddenly stranded in foreign countries, was the catastrophe.
Putin used to have a policy of defending ethnic Russians in the near abroad. But now he seems to be working on gathering them and their countries back into Russia. The Kazakhstan government is wise to be leery of the SMO.