As the world watched the Soviet Union breaking apart in the late 1980s – early 1990s, there was much fear that things could go badly wrong and even escalate to nuclear war.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who had become the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, had introduced reforms that he believed would reinvigorate the Soviet economy. But movements in the satellites, like Solidarity in Poland, wanted independence. There were similar movements in the Soviet republics. Those movements used Gorbachev’s reforms for their own interests.
This month is the 30th anniversary of Gorbachev’s releasing the satellites – Poland, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany – from Soviet rule. Two years later, the 15 Soviet republics became independent countries.
Hard-liners in Moscow would have used force to prevent those outcomes. There were some clashes with the Soviet internal police, OMON, and military forces were ordered into some of the republics as demonstrations took place. But Gorbachev decided against major force and allowed the Soviet Union to dissolve, even though it was not the outcome he wanted.
The United States has become too accustomed to using force to solve problems. Russia has become an international spoiler, looking for ways to create chaos. With 14,000 nuclear weapons between them, this is unsustainable.
Gorbachev is speaking out.
And Don’t build a wall between Russia and the West.
He will always be a hero to me for handling the Soviet Union’s breakup peacefully. Not so much in Russia, where that breakup led to misery for many.
What he’s saying isn’t outstandingly new, but it’s always worth hearing, especially from someone who stared war in the face and walked away.
trollhattan
Absolutely, he deserves the thanks of all humanity for what he managed to accomplish.
I’ll give a parallel shout-out to Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar for their tireless work towards nuclear disarmament, in an era when their partnership was possible and their goals were not anathema to the defense-at-all-costs establishment.
Roger Moore
I think this is an understandable view but wrong. The misery was correlated with the breakup of the Soviet Union, but [Edited] the breakup didn’t cause the misery. Both were caused by the collapse of the Soviet economy. And Gorbachev gets the blame for that even though it wasn’t his fault either. He took over in an impossible situation and managed it as well as could be reasonably imagined, but he gets blamed for the inherited problems he was unable to solve.
Chyron HR
Gorbachev is ALIVE??
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
I don’t agree with Gorbachev’s assessment of the current situation between Russia and the West at all. There is an ideological struggle going on right now, and it’s for the future of liberal democracy and humanity itself.
Russia is a rogue state and Putin is a global threat, but it’s not just Russia. It’s global right-wing authoritarianism in the guise of democracy that not only he embodies, but others such as Orban, Bolsonaro, and Erdogan do as well. China also fits, though they don’t pretend with a democratic facade.
I think the US, when Democrats regain power at the federal level, along with its allies, should do everything in its power to reverse this global slide into authoritarianism. Nuclear weapons should be continued to be reduced, of course.
Trump doesn’t actually represent the majority of Americans, which is something Gorbachev doesn’t seem to awknowledge in either articles. He uses, “Washington”, in place of Trump, implying there’s some broad agreement/consensus across the federal government when there isn’t. Trump isn’t popular and was partially “elected” due to Russian interference
Yutsano
I remember watching this in real time and waiting for the tanks to roll out. They never did. Some national commentator (I don’t remember who now) called it the most peaceful dissolution of a country he had ever seen. I just remember think “But for the grace of God…”. It was still ne of the most remarkable things I have ever witnessed.
ellenr
If anyone deserves a Peace Prize, it’s Gorby.
TomatoQueen
@Chyron HR: And looking not too foul for a man in his late eighties. I remember the shouting on K Street when he came to DC back in the whoever era. “Gorby! Gorby!”, traffic was stalled, and we were glad to see him. Funny what nuclear fear, sustained over years, will do.
Ed Marshall
I met his wife at Global Zero 2010. He wasn’t well then.
His non-proliferation legacy is really up in the air since he was a leading figure when there was a Soviet Union on that front, but the decline of the Soviet Union has led to an actually more unstable nuclear Damacles sword in the form of the gangster state that the devolution of the Soviet Union led to where madness and miscalculation are actually more probable. And since the threat is perceived as lower rather than higher now it leads the US to largely ignore it’s own responsibilities at non-proliferation.
Rand Careaga
I have laid eyes on two CPSU General Secretaries: Khrushchev, in Los Angeles in 1959, and Gorbachev in San Francisco about thirty years later. Khrushchev is the more ambiguous figure—no one in Stalin’s inner circle survived that gifted despot’s long reign with clean hands—and in the later years of his career he had come to believe his own press clippings, elevating his own hunches over the advice of so-called “experts” (uh-huh). Nevertheless, the break he made with the appalling terror state that preceded him was never mended, the efforts of his successors notwithstanding, and the “children of the Twentieth Party Congress,” Gorbachev among them, yearned for, and in power attempted to implement, “socialism with a human face.” That they failed was a misfortune both for Russia and the West. A reformed USSR, with its messianic aspirations held in check, but existing still as a philosophical, economic and political counterweight to the alternative model might have restrained the worst impulses of capital red in tooth and claw. We have instead witnessed the consequences of a “free market” left unhecked.
(A Soviet apparatchik to a visiting American in the seventies: “Sure, Lenin would be appalled at what we’ve become. But the ideals my society has betrayed are nobler than the ideals your society has betrayed!”)
geg6
@ellenr:
Absolutely. I was in college at the time, majoring in poli sci and taking lots of classes through the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (REEES) at Pitt (at the time, I was considering becoming an analyst in the area of study). We were beyond amazed by the guy. And I totally agree with this:
Mary G
It must be hard for him to see Putin looting the economy and killing journalists, activists, and opponents these days. We hoped for so much better for Russia back then.
zhena gogolia
You scared me, I thought he had died.
I give him a lot of credit. His successors, not so much.
Stuart Frasier
Werner Herzog made a documentary about him called Meeting Gorbachev last year. It’s worth a watch.
Cheryl Rofer
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Gorbachev leans toward Russia. That’s fair enough and something of a corrective to our lean toward the US.
Jay
Big nope. While horrible by Western standards, the Soviet Union’s economy even during the break up was robust enough to supply the basics, as it had since WWII.
It was the imposition of unregulated neoliberal Capitalism as a pre-condition to Western Aid, ( which never arrived) that was resposible for all the “excess deaths” in the former Soviet Union. Like in Bush’s Iraq, the Disaster Capitalists thought they could, under the rules of Gangster Capitalism, loot the carcass of the former Soviet Union.
Unfortunately for them, under the rules of Gangster Capitalism, actual gangsters, with actual guns, trump Wolf of Wall St. MBA’s.
debbie
Yes, we were very lucky Gorbachev was there. I wish Reagan had manned up and admitted that himself.
A friend of mine was in Berlin at the time, and she still says it’s the most memorable experience of her life. Somewhere here I have a small piece of the wall.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@TomatoQueen: I saw him when he visited LA.
Annie
@Ed Marshall:
His wife? Did he get married again? Raisa died in 1999.
ChrisH
@Chyron HR: This was my reaction.
AxelFoley
@Chyron HR:
Why’d I read that as Brian Blessed in Flash Gordon? ???
youtube.com/watch?v=P2xS-AxKk0k
mvr
I still have my ticket stub from going to hear him talk. As he was warning against the lead up to the Iraq war. Among many other things. As they say, a world historical figure. . . Aside from Bob Dylan and maybe Keith Richards how many of them have I seen . . .
mark w.
People forget, he was Time’s Man of the Decade for the ’80s. The GOP myth about Reagan ending the cold war is just that. Had Putin been in charge he would have squashed the reform movement and kept the Soviet Union together.
Agorabum
@Jay: Sorry, but this is Tankie stuff. There were massive queues for basic materials in the USSR all the time in the ’80s; the economy was not supplying the basics, and everything that had been rebuilt in the late 40s and 50s was breaking down. Gorby was given a system that had totally stagnated and decayed under Brezhnev.
The USSR also mismanaged its breakup and transition to capitalism, but that’s really more due to Yeltsin than Gorbachev. The conversion of the largest state owned economy would always have been difficult; Yelstin had discussions with those in Russia who advised to go slow, and he choose to go fast. It wasn’t forced on him to get some sort of aid package.