Of course by now we have heard of the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union. He was the country's head of state from 1988 to 1991. He was 91 years old at the time of his death. he was born on March 2, 1931, and died August 30, 2022.
There are many articles in the news about his life. This one, from The Bulwark, by Jonathan Last, spoke to me, for a particular reason.
From the article: The Accidental Great Man - by Jonathan V. Last - The Triad (thebulwark.com)
"I grew up fearing the Soviets and nuclear war. I’m of the generation formed by WarGames and Rocky IV. But we were also raised with the kind of sentimentalizing, give-peace-a-chance pap that would pop up from time to time....I didn’t have strong feelings about Gorbachev early on. When I was in grade school, the world looked like it was in chaos: Reagan, the pope, and Sadat all shot. Planes hijacked once a week. Between the news and my hippy-dippy Quaker teachers, there were days when I thought it would be a miracle if the world lasted long enough for me to make it to high school."
"By the late ’80s, the chaos felt like it was subsiding; the Soviet Union became less scary. This was largely because of Gorbachev. He seemed . . . not evil? There was a summit! Glasnost! Perestroika! The Berlin Wall came down while I was on a school trip and my brain could barely comprehend it. How was it that this man had chosen to just . . . let it happen? He didn’t go out like a dictator, guns blazing."
"It was around then that I started to believe that Gorbachev, either by accident or design, had become one of the great statesman in the history of human affairs. Never before—and never since—has the autocratic leader of a country with the power to destroy the world 20 times over peacefully accepted the loss of power. Think about it. Really think about it. It’s amazing. History is replete with monsters who slaughtered their own people on the road to inevitable diminution.Gorbachev not only turned away from violence—he helped clear the way for the fall of his own empire."
"Is the story more complicated than that? Of course. There were other forces at work. Other actors involved. Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Boris Yeltsin, Lech Walesa, Václav Havel, Solzhenitsyn, and the legion of dissidents who suffered under communism yet continued to push back against it. They all played vital parts. So did economics and technology. And don’t forget luck, because we needed a lot of that to unwind MAD without blowing up the planet."
"But Gorbachev was the indispensable man. Without him, the Soviet Union probably falls anyway—eventually. But maybe it isn’t a bloodless celebration. Maybe our story ends a lot differently. I don’t mean to romanticize him: Gorbachev was not a democratic reformer. His attempt to tentatively open the USSR was based on his hope that he could save the Soviet system."
"Yet when the system began to teeter, Gorbachev was the guy controlling all of the guns. He refused to use them. And not only did he not try to force the Soviet Union to stay together, once history was on the move, he moved with it. Maybe you can come up with an example of an autocratic leader who acted as wisely and selflessly. I can’t. "
This is just an excerpt from the article, the whole thing is worth reading. But the part that struck me is that he was the leader of the Soviet Union; an authoritarian system, and he left office voluntarily.
Gorbachev never seemed like he had anything to hide or an axe to grind. He also seemed like he was sober all the time, which put him in high relief next to Boris Yeltsin.
ReplyDeleteGorbachev always reminds me of how our country dropped the ball as the Soviet Union destabilized and collapsed. Democracy Now had an interview with economist Jeffrey Sachs:
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/wmOePNsNFw0
The entire interview is worthwhile but the segment starting at 13:05 describes how the aid given to Poland was not extended to the Soviet Union. The neoconservatives of the early 90's were too interested in building up an American unipolar hegemony. Nothing admirable and peace-loving there. Perhaps if we had had what Sachs calls "constructive engagement" with Russia, we wouldn't be in this mess now.
The Democrats fell short, too Even today, we have superannuated arrogant hotshots like Pelosi stirring up trouble in Taiwan. Time to cut the hubris.
Yah, what in hell was she trying to accomplish by going over there and tottering around in her high heeled Ferragamos and white blazer? She's over 80 and won't have to live with any long-term consequences of that little debacle.
DeleteApparently, the Chairman of Russian oil company Lukoil was defenestrated from the sixth story window of his hospital room. He openly opposed the Ukraine invasion. This is what I feared in 1990, that democracy would not take root in Russia. Red and blue politicians if the time had no interest in positive engagement with Russia. Makes me sad.
ReplyDeleteI think we had thought of Russia as the "evil empire", the enemy, for so long that any thought of raising them up just seemed ludicrous. But we didn't have to go back that far to the Marshall Plan, and helping to rebuild postwar Germany and Japan. The results of that were good. Why didn't the PTB think that should be done for Russia?
DeleteTo what extended Russia want our help. They were desperately trying NOT to look like a nation conquered by their former nemesis. I think the narrative was that they threw of the tyranny of the czar, and now they were moving away from the failures of the Soviet state.
DeleteEurope, which had far more to gain from a stable Russia, could have played a larger role.
But most of the trouble came from former Soviet insiders grabbing up whole industries that were being re-privatized. How were we supposed to stop that kind of corruption?
I think Gorbachev would have wanted a Swedish model or something close to it. In fact, we didn't even try to engage them. The neoliberals were only too happy to see the rise of instant billionaires since that was their dream for the US as well. At the same time, we pushed and pushed NATO to Russia's border, validating Putin's narrative. Many Russians aren't really different from Americans. Nostalgic for past glory. Make Russia Great Again.
DeleteI don't know the details of the Russian oligarchs' rise. I am highly suspicious that loans from the US were involved. Where did they get the money?
Bottom line: are we better off now than in 1988?
Everybody seems to think that sexual sins are the worst of the "seven deadly". I'm thinking we see lots of evidence that the most destructive is avarice and covetousness.
DeleteI don't claim a lot of knowledge about Gorbachev and his era. I can understand European reluctance to open wide the arms of friendship after the decades (centuries?) that preceded the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union.
DeleteOn the other hand, Europe tried to build economic interdependence with Russia, and in the wake of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, that policy is not looking wise.
I guess the Russian people need to be accountable for who rules them.
Reagan called the CCCP the "evil empire". He was right. But all empires are evil. Ours, too. Have we ever found a way to have extended organization of humans without killing, domination, exploitation and heedless plundering of resources?
ReplyDeleteI think that, even had the Europeans never come to America, the Aztecs or somebody would have begun to figure it out. The Incas had an inefficient method for smelting copper. Eventually, maybe bronze and bronze weapons and away we go. Indigenous peoples had civilizations that rose and collapsed, mostly due to climate change and resource depletion.
We now have one chance to figure out how to make a sustainable civilization. Otherwise, it's back to hunter-gatherer. Maybe for good.
When I was in college, I read a book called something like "Will the Soviet Union Survive 1984?" The author who was from Russia argued that it would not. For social and cultural reasons, communism could not keep it together. The present Ukrainian situation is a good illustration of the cultural realities underlying his argument.
ReplyDeleteWhile some argue that Reagan policies, or JPII actions brought down the U.S.S.R., I see them as only giving the fall a nudge or at most a push. As for Gorbachev, his presence probably helped things happen more quickly and in a more peaceful fashion but the leaders of several other nations that were part of the U.S.S.R. made it happen. Russia and Ukraine left the U.S.S.R. behind. It was much more than Gorbachev just as it was much more than Reagan and JPII.