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Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

This fight is for everything.

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When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

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You are here: Home / Open Threads / RIP Mikhail Gorbachev

RIP Mikhail Gorbachev

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RIP Mikhail Gorbachev 2

An era ends:

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who embarked on a path of radical reform that brought about the end of the Cold War, reversed the direction of the nuclear arms race and relaxed Communist Party controls in hopes of rescuing the faltering Soviet state but instead propelled it toward collapse, died Aug. 30 in Moscow. He was 91.

More than any other single figure, Gorbachev devised the end of the Cold War. He did so at great cost to his own hopes and expectations. But he saw both that mutually assured destruction was madness, and that the Soviet Union could not continue to exist in the form he inherited when he took over as General Secretary in 1985.

RIP Mikhail Gorbachev
The Russia that emerged from the collapse of his attempt to reform that state would not be his to shape. He thus escapes blame for what it has become. He was, in my mind, a citizen not just of the nation in which he was born, but of the world for which, for a time, he could choose life or death. He chose life.

RIP.

Yann Forget, Juggler on the Berlin Wall, © Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA.

 

Reader Interactions

58Comments

  3. 3.

    Brachiator

    Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who embarked on a path of radical reform that brought about the end of the Cold War, reversed the direction of the nuclear arms race and relaxed Communist Party controls in hopes of rescuing the faltering Soviet state but instead propelled it toward collapse, died Aug. 30 in Moscow. He was 91.

    What a moment in history, to see the peaceful dismantling of the old Soviet Union.

  4. 4.

    CaseyL

    Ending the Cold War without violence, setting the Warsaw Pact countries free, is a towering accomplishment.  It isn’t Gorbachev’s fault the reforms didn’t stick; and certainly not his fault that Putin strangled a democratic (-ish) Russia in its cradle.

    However, I would note (as have others before me): it is difficult, if not impossible, to create a democracy in a place where a strongman system of government has been in place for 800 years.  You would need at least three generations’ worth of stable, committed, democratically-minded leadership (in all areas: education and media as well as in the parliament) to make it work.

    Russia had barely 10 years.

  5. 5.

    ColoradoGuy

    Possibly the best leader Russia has ever had, and the only one that refused to be a Tsar.

  9. 9.

    Frank Wilhoit

    “…The Russia that emerged from the collapse of his attempt to reform that state would not be his to shape. He thus escapes blame for what it has become. He was, in my mind, a citizen not just of the nation in which he was born, but of the world for which, for a time, he could choose life or death. He chose life.”

    Wonderfully poetic, and not merely poetic; and I know what you mean; but what of us, and of the choices that we, today, cannot make?  If we say that Gorbachev’s heart was in the right place, then I think I am weary of persons whose hearts are in the right place, and of the wreckage that seems always to follow in their train.  (Of course the same wreckage comes behind persons whose hearts are not in the right place; but then we expect it.)

  12. 12.

    brantl

    @Frank Wilhoit: we say that Gorbachev’s heart was in the right place, then I think I am weary of persons whose hearts are in the right place, and of the wreckage that seems always to follow in their train. Seriously, always? Jesus, Frank.

  15. 15.

    prostratedragon

    “he refused to be a tsar”

    Hardly a complete summation, but covers much of what was so admirable about him. RIP

  17. 17.

    ian

    I saw Gorbachev speak 12 or 13 years ago.  He was very interesting and thoughtful, though I did not agree with much of his conclusions.

  23. 23.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Just again watched Chernobyl on another sleepless night, I am reminded of this:

    That might sound like an audacious proposal, but it’s been advanced by none other than the man who oversaw the dismantling of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev. He states flatly that the Chernobyl explosion was “perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.” According to Gorbachev, the Chernobyl explosion was a “turning point” that “opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue.” Gorbachev introduced his policy of glasnost, or “openness” of ideas and expression, not long before the Chernobyl explosion. It was his remedy for widespread censorship and government secrecy. To Gorbachev, Chernobyl proved the wisdom and necessity of glasnost. The explosion and attendant tumult, he claims, “made absolutely clear how important it was to continue the policy of glasnost.”

    He would have known better than I.

  24. 24.

    SpaceUnit

    I once heard Gorby compared to a pilot who managed to land an airplane that was being dismantled in flight.

  25. 25.

    frosty

    @CaseyL: Democratic leadership, yes. Also a history of the rule of law, reasonably uncorrupt law enforcement and courts. And other minor things like property boundaries.

    ETA and a way to divvy up everything that the state owned. They didn’t go for a stock market, the strongest seized everything. Very feudal.

    ETA2 I may be wrong on all of this, it’s just the impressions I got from the little bit I read t the time.

  28. 28.

    Mike in NC

    The farce “Naked Gun” opens with Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielson) putting Gorby in a headlock and removing the birthmark on his head with a handkerchief. Drebin then says, “Ha! I knew it!”

  29. 29.

    Sister Golden Bear

    For me Jesus Jones‘ 1990 ”Right Here Right Now” really captured the spirit of optimism of the times. Coming of age in the early 80s, it was the first time in my life I didn’t think I was likely going to die in a nuclear holocaust before I was 30.

    The song was inspired by events in Europe of the late 1980s, particularly Perestroika in the Soviet Union. Mike Edwards has since noted some lyrics were influenced by the band’s experiences playing in Romania in February 1990 right after the overthrow of Ceaușescu.

    The notion that we were entering a better world was nice while it lasted.

  30. 30.

    geg6

    RIP.  He wasn’t a saint and he was wrong about many things.  But at a moment in my time that was fraught for the entire world, he did the good and right thing.  Like others here, I do not blame him for what Russia has become.  I believe he truly wanted better for his country.  I will always honor him for that.

  31. 31.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Gin & Tonic: Probably.  I remember being a soldier in Europe from 1989-92 and watching the Cold War end.  Seeing  the Warsaw Pact cease to exist and the Soviet Union dissolve without significant violence was a pretty big deal.  Gorbachev gets a lot of credit for that in my books.

  33. 33.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Omnes Omnibus: The russians have been subjugating, enslaving and murdering their neighbors for about 800 years, since the Mongols went back home. The fact that there were about eight years in the 20th century when they weren’t doing so is interesting, but doesn’t change the long view.

  35. 35.

    Roger Moore

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Russia was a brutal imperialist state before Gorbachev, and is one after Gorbachev.

    That’s true, but Gorbachev inherited a much larger Russian empire than Putin.  All those countries that escaped from Russia’s control owe their current freedom to Gorbachev’s willingness to let them go.

  36. 36.

    cain

    Have you noticed from the picture on the main post – what a kind face Gorbachev has compared to other Russian leaders? You can see from his visage that he was an exceptional human. What strength it must have taken to maintain power as chancellor while putting in radical reforms? Just fantastic.

    Yes, I’m hoping that the former Soviet republics and those from former east Germany give their respects to the man who help usher in the post Cold War error and freed them from Soviet control. Even though that was not his original intention.

    You can bet that China watched closely what happened in the USSR and made damn sure they didn’t do the same thing. :-)

  38. 38.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

     
    GORBACHEV WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, PRAISE FROM WEST

    By Michael Dobbs
    October 16, 1990

    MOSCOW, OCT. 15 — Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev today won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for helping to end the Cold War and allowing the Kremlin’s former East European satellites to regain their political freedom.

    Tributes to the new Nobel laureate poured in from around the world, including many from Western countries long viewed as the Soviet Union’s ideological enemies. Reaction at home was mixed, ranging from pride in Gorbachev’s international image as a peacemaker to anger at his failure to deal effectively with the country’s growing economic and ethnic turmoil.

    Gorbachev, 59, is the first Communist head of state to win the Nobel Peace Prize, generally regarded as the highest honor the international community can bestow on a statesman, since its inception in 1901. The last U.S. president to win the award was Woodrow Wilson in 1919.

    Speaking to journalists in the Kremlin, the Soviet leader described the $710,000 award as international recognition of the importance of his perestroika reform movement. He said he felt at home in the company of such former Nobel Peace Prize laureates as Soviet human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov and Polish labor leader Lech Walesa, both of whom were denounced as “anti-Communists” by previous Kremlin leaders.

  39. 39.

    HypershericalCow

    I remember being about eleven years old, and me and my brother were in the car with my dad driving, and NPR as broadcasting the official signing of the pact reuniting Germany.

    My dad pulled the car off to the side of the road, and said, “listen, kids. You are listening to history”.

  41. 41.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Roger Moore: Perhaps the Estonians or Ukrainians owe their current freedom to their ability and willingness to maintain a distinct and independent national identity through the decades of subjugation by the USSR.

  42. 42.

    kalakal

    One of the greatest things I have seen in my life was watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/1989. Then and now I thank Gorbachev. He wasn’t perfect but at the time he was the best we had. RIP

  43. 43.

    geg6

    @cain:

    It really was.  Have you ever listened to Patrick Radden Keefe’s podcast about it?  Very entertaining and goes into all the stuff happening as the Cold War ended and the Wall came down.  It’s funny and smart and sad and full of characters, including Klaus, the lead singer of the Scorpions.

  44. 44.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Shalimar: OK. Gorbachev was an historical anomaly. He did the right thing under the circumstances, but was largely a product of those circumstances.

    I refuse to lionize him for that, and make no apology for placing him in historical context. Feel free to pie me if you don’t like it.

  45. 45.

    geg6

    @Gin & Tonic:

    This is very true.  But Gorbachev gave them the opening they needed to become the people they are today.  I think both were necessary.  But I understand if you see it differently.

  46. 46.

    cintibud

    I remember watching the dismantling of the Berlin wall in Nov 1989 with my Father, who had been fighting serious illnesses for years. I asked him if he ever thought he would live to see this day. He shook his head and replied as if in a daze, “No, Never”. He passed away 3 months later. He was always concerned about a nuclear war. I was so happy that he was able to see the wall come down

  47. 47.

    Carlo Graziani

    De mortuis nil nisi bonum is an imperfect rule to apply to a historical figure like Gorbachev, even on the day of his passing. He accomplished much, and we in the West have a good deal to be grateful to him, but he was a Soviet politician who rose to become General Secretary of the CPSU, groomed for a leadrship role by no less than Yuri Andopov. One should be economical with one’s encomia for such a figure, and balance them carefully.

    Even leaving out how Russians feel about him, the feelings of citizens of the Soviet inner empire must be decidedly mixed. In the two year period leading up to the final collapse in summer 1991, Gorbachev authorized savage crackdowns to put down civil demonstrations challenging Soviet exclusive control of civil authority in Georgia and in Lithuania. This was the period when he was actually retreating domestically from Glasnost, while still struggling against the military ministries for the resources to implement Perestroika. 

    To his credit, when a huge demonstration occurred in Moscow in January 1991 to protest the maneuverings in the new parliament that were excluding Yeltsin’s faction from power, and Gorbachev had the choice of sending OMON troops into the streets to spill blood and reestablish control, he finally drew back, not wanting that responsibility on his conscience. This was probably the inaction that started the conspiracy against him that led to the August putsch.

    The thing to understand about who he was and what he wanted is that at no point in Gorbachev’s life could he have been described as a “democrat”. He never wanted democracy. He was a true-believing Leninist, perhaps the last idealistic Leninist that remained in that rotten old party hierarchy, certainly the only one who had risen to such heights of power since Kruschev. He thought that the Soviet Union could be reformed and saved, and believed (wrongly) that the extreme militarization of Soviet society, which was clearly strangling the civil economy, was a corruption of Leninist ideals that could be tinkered out of the system.

    In this he was deeply naive. His foreign minister Shevardnaze, and his economic adviser Yakovlev, as well as his Poliburo rival Ligachev, saw far more clearly than he did, and understood tha Perestroika was undermining the levers of control that the party had laid throughout civil society for 70 years. The former two rejoiced, the latter panicked and resisted. Gorbachev merely maneuvered tactically from crisis to crisis, until the final crisis destroyed his power, and the Soviet Union.

    For a product of that system, he had moments of surprising moral restraint. But he also committed acts for which I imagine the citizens if Tbilsi, or Vilnius, will not forgive him. Like other world historical figures, imperfect. We were lucky he appeared when he did. But as Orwell once said of Ghandi, “Saints should always be considered guilty until proven innocent”…

  49. 49.

    Roger Moore

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I was also thinking of the Eastern Germans, Poles, Romanians, and everyone else who was living behind the Iron Curtain.  And yes, there’s definitely a lot of truth that the Ukrainians and Estonians and Armenians are independent now at least in part because they succeeded in maintaining their own culture.  But that can’t be the whole story, because there are still plenty of people within Russia who have maintained their distinct ethnic identities but didn’t become independent.  The USSR under Gorbachev could have tried as hard to maintain control over Ukraine and Kazakhstan as they did under Putin to maintain control over Chechnya, or to regain control over Ukraine.  Gorbachev deserves credit for refusing to do that.

  50. 50.

    Mike in NC

    I was working in DC when Gorbachev came for a visit. He stopped his limo on Constitution Avenue or the like, and got out to shake hands with passers by. Somebody declared him to be a PR genius.

  51. 51.

    cain

    @geg6: ​
     
    Oh gosh no, I’ll have to take a look at it – I’ve gained an appreciation for podcasts after listening to “Behind the Bastards” their take on the Southern Baptist Church was pretty awesome.

  52. 52.

    cain

    @Carlo Graziani: ​
    Ghandi,

    I try to correct when I see this mispelled but the correct spelling is “Gandhi”. I understand that it sounds phonetically correct, but the spelling should also be correct. :)

    ETA: to the meat your comment – Yes, all our heroes are flawed and human. They still accomplished something great even in Gorbachev’s case accidental. He was honorable and that is the best we can say about him – and dismantling nuclear weapons was an act of courage.

  53. 53.

    Carlo Graziani

    @cain: I appreciate the correction. I used to be better about such things.

    On nuclear weapons:  Gorbachev was not an idealistic pacifist. The disarmament campaign was, from his point of view, aimed at reducing the economic resources that the Sovirt Union directed to its military-industrial sector, so that they could be redirected to the civilian economy. He was at war with his own military over resource allocations within the Soviet command economy. The various disarmament agreements and withdrawals eventually arrived at were primary goals for the West, but epiphenomena to Gorbachev, who just wanted a military that didn’t literally devour nearly every economic resource that the state could produce. If nuclear treaties that the Soviet military hated were the way to achieve this, then that’s what he was prepared to do.

    What I’m trying to say is that we shouldn’t project our outlook on his. He didn’t do what he did for the sake of “peace”, or because he had the same attitude towards the tbalance of terror that we had in the West.

  54. 54.

    mvr

    @ian: ​
     I saw him speak, iirc, just before Bush’s invasion of Iraq. I think I agreed with most of what he had to say on that. I still have the ticket for that event proudly displayed in my office. Looked at it a few days ago and thought about protecting it somewhat more carefully than where it is.
    Guy was a world historical figure. Came here when I read the headline to see what others had to say.
    Surely he did some bad things in the course of rising to the position he wound up in, but then used that position to do great good. My memory of US policy at the time was that we did not help him much, and that backing Yeltsin (for all his heroism during the coup) was a mistake that partly led to where we are now insofar as rapid privatization that did not help the average former Soviet citizen partly set us on the path to Putin. But I’m not an expert here.

  55. 55.

    Carlo Graziani

    I did forget to give him credit for closing out the calamitous Soviet adventure in Afghanisran, which also won him few admirers among the senior MOD staff.

  56. 56.

    Doug

    @Carlo Graziani: I imagine the citizens if Tbilsi, or Vilnius, will not forgive him

    I’ve lived in one and visited the other, and they do not. But they also look at Yugoslavia and realize that it could have been much, much worse.

    (And of course there are some who say he didn’t crack enough heads. Some Georgians still venerate Stalin. People gonna people.)

  58. 58.

    Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)

    Damn, the wrong Russian leader died. I was hoping for you-know-who to go.

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