RIP, Mikhail Gorbachev
Aug. 30th, 2022 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerMihkail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died today. He was 91.
For those of us who were kids of the 80s, or already adults in the 80s, Gorbachev was a household name. He became the Soviet leader in 1985, at the height of the Cold War. Turn on TV news any night and you'd see news involving the USSR and/or Gorbachev.
From a Western perspective, Gorbachev brought stability to the fraught US-USSR relationship of the Cold War. At age 54 he was the youngest Soviet premier, rising to the position after 3 predecessors in 3 years had died in office under circumstances deliberately obfuscated by the ruling party. Even with the USSR being the US's sworn enemy, it felt marginally more reassuring to see that it was at least led by an actual, living person instead of a secret committee publishing obtuse communiques in someone else's name.
Gorbachev soon became a darling of the West as he introduced the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). With the USSR more willing to sit down for nuclear negotiations with the West, and with sporadic humanitarian progress such as the release of political prisoners and allowing some religious liberties. BTW I say sporadic because the progress was not steady. There were backslides, including times Gorbachev sent troops to crush rebellions. I see this through the lens of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous observation, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
From the birds-eye view of history I see Gorbachev as a wise but flawed reformist. He knew that the Soviet Union, as it was structured coming out of the 1970s, was doomed. Although it held a lead in certain areas of manufacturing it was losing ground to the US and Western Europe in every economic area because of the inherent inefficiencies of its command-and-control system. Ronald Reagan's foreign policy that leaned in from containment to something more resembling rollback would hasten its demise. Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall and strove to reformulate the USSR to survive. He misjudged things, though— perhaps, most notably, that all the USSR's satellite states hated the USSR— and lost control of the broad changes he set in motion. Mikhail Gorbachev ended his term as premier with his announcement of the dissolution of the USSR on December 25, 1991.
In the 30 years since then and now, Gorbachev has been remembered more fondly in the West than in Russia. To the West, he's the leader who helped "end the Cold War without firing a shot." To many Russians, he's the horribly failed leader who destroyed their country's position as a glorious and powerful world leader. ...The latter view, of course, has been seeded by Vladimir Putin, Russia's autocratic leader of the past 20 years, who repeatedly boasts of the glory of the USSR and czarist Russia.
RIP, Mikhail Gorbachev. You were far from perfect, but right now we could sure use another leader like you.
Update: comments will be screened. I will not be giving a platform to strangers peddling drive-by disinformation.
For those of us who were kids of the 80s, or already adults in the 80s, Gorbachev was a household name. He became the Soviet leader in 1985, at the height of the Cold War. Turn on TV news any night and you'd see news involving the USSR and/or Gorbachev.
From a Western perspective, Gorbachev brought stability to the fraught US-USSR relationship of the Cold War. At age 54 he was the youngest Soviet premier, rising to the position after 3 predecessors in 3 years had died in office under circumstances deliberately obfuscated by the ruling party. Even with the USSR being the US's sworn enemy, it felt marginally more reassuring to see that it was at least led by an actual, living person instead of a secret committee publishing obtuse communiques in someone else's name.
Gorbachev soon became a darling of the West as he introduced the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). With the USSR more willing to sit down for nuclear negotiations with the West, and with sporadic humanitarian progress such as the release of political prisoners and allowing some religious liberties. BTW I say sporadic because the progress was not steady. There were backslides, including times Gorbachev sent troops to crush rebellions. I see this through the lens of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous observation, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
From the birds-eye view of history I see Gorbachev as a wise but flawed reformist. He knew that the Soviet Union, as it was structured coming out of the 1970s, was doomed. Although it held a lead in certain areas of manufacturing it was losing ground to the US and Western Europe in every economic area because of the inherent inefficiencies of its command-and-control system. Ronald Reagan's foreign policy that leaned in from containment to something more resembling rollback would hasten its demise. Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall and strove to reformulate the USSR to survive. He misjudged things, though— perhaps, most notably, that all the USSR's satellite states hated the USSR— and lost control of the broad changes he set in motion. Mikhail Gorbachev ended his term as premier with his announcement of the dissolution of the USSR on December 25, 1991.
In the 30 years since then and now, Gorbachev has been remembered more fondly in the West than in Russia. To the West, he's the leader who helped "end the Cold War without firing a shot." To many Russians, he's the horribly failed leader who destroyed their country's position as a glorious and powerful world leader. ...The latter view, of course, has been seeded by Vladimir Putin, Russia's autocratic leader of the past 20 years, who repeatedly boasts of the glory of the USSR and czarist Russia.
RIP, Mikhail Gorbachev. You were far from perfect, but right now we could sure use another leader like you.
Update: comments will be screened. I will not be giving a platform to strangers peddling drive-by disinformation.
