Hailed in the West as the man who helped bring down the Berlin Wall and end the Cold War without bloodshed, Mikhail Gorbachev was widely despised at home as the gravedigger of the communist Soviet Union .
The former Soviet president, who died Tuesday at the age of 91, set out to revitalize the sclerotic communist system through democratic and economic reforms, but his intention was never to abolish it.
However, it unleashed forces beyond its control and found itself occupying a shrinking space between stalwarts of centralized power and separatists determined to dismantle it.
Origin, education and positions
Born on March 2, 1931 into a peasant family in the Stavropol region of southern Russia, Gorbachev grew up with the hardships of World War II and the repressive rule of dictator Joseph Stalin, whose regime sentenced his grandfather to nine years in a labor camp.
As a child, Gorbachev was bright and hard-working. At 16, he received the Red Banner of Labor for helping with a record harvest, and in 1950 he won a coveted place at Moscow State University to study law.
Five years later, the ambitious graduate and his young wife Raisa returned to Stavropol, where he began a rapid rise through the ranks of the Communist Party, becoming the youngest member of the Politburo, aged 49, in 1979, thanks to the patronage of the purist ideological Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB secret police.
Andropov came to power in 1982 after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, who for 18 years had led Moscow into a gentle decline that reformers called the “era of stagnation.”
Upon his death 15 months later, Gorbachev was passed over and Konstantin Chernenko, a longtime Brezhnev ally, took over. Only when Chernenko died after barely a year in office did the younger man’s reformist ambitions take hold.
Six years later he took over the world’s largest state and second superpower when he was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985.
Gorbachev at the head of the Soviet Union
The former farmworker, who spoke with a southern Russian accent and had a distinctive burgundy birthmark on his head, launched his bold program shortly after winning a power struggle in the Kremlin in 1985, aged 54.
At that age and full of fresh ideas, Gorbachev was a striking contrast to the ideological elders who until then controlled the Kremlin: remote, intolerant of dissent, chest full of medals and dogmatic to the grave. Three ailing Soviet leaders had died in the previous two and a half years.
Television broadcasts showed him besieged by workers in factories and farms, allowing them to vent their frustrations with Soviet life and advocate radical change.
Gorbachev inherited a land of inefficient farms and decaying factories, a state-run economy that he believed could only be saved by open and honest criticism, which had so often landed him in prison or the labor camp in the past. It was a bet. Many hoped that it would go wrong.
With his smart and elegant wife Raisa at his side, Gorbachev initially enjoyed massive popular support.
“My policy was open and sincere, a policy aimed at using democracy and not spilling blood,” he told Reuters in 2009. “But this cost me dearly, I assure you.”
His policies of “glasnost” (free speech) and “perestroika” (restructuring) sparked a public debate unprecedented in Russian history.
Moscow squares were abuzz with impromptu discussions, censorship all but evaporated, and even the holy Communist Party was forced to confront its Stalinist crimes.
Glasnost faced a dramatic test in April 1986, when a nuclear power plant exploded in Chernobyl, Ukraine. The authorities at first tried to hush up the disaster, but Gorbachev pressed on, describing the tragedy as a symptom of a rotten and hermetic system.
The end of the Cold War
His foreign policy shook the world order. He defused the nuclear conflict between the United States and the USSR with disarmament agreements, withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan and loosened the reins on the Eastern European satellite countries.
In December of that year he ordered a telephone to be installed in the apartment of the dissident Andrei Sakharov, exiled in the city of Gorki, and the next day he called him by phone to personally invite him to return to Moscow. The pace of change was, for many, dizzying.
The West was quick to appreciate Gorbachev, who had made a meteoric rise through the party’s regional ranks to the post of general secretary. He was, in the words of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, “a man we can do business with.”
The term “Gorbimania” entered the lexicon, an expression of the adulation it inspired on trips abroad.
Gorbachev struck up a warm personal relationship with Ronald Reagan, the right-wing American president who had called the Soviet Union “the evil empire.” With him, he negotiated a historic agreement in 1987 to scrap intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
In 1989, he withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, ending a war that had killed tens of thousands of people and soured relations with Washington.
That same year, when pro-democracy protests spread across the communist states of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania, the world held its breath.
With hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops stationed across Eastern Europe, would Moscow turn its tanks on the protesters, as it had in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968?
Many pressured Gorbachev to use force. The fact that he did not do so may have been his greatest historical contribution, recognized in 1990 with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Years later, Gorbachev said that the cost of trying to prevent the fall of the Berlin Wall would have been too high.
“If the Soviet Union had wanted to, there would have been none of that and there would have been no German unification. But what would have happened? A catastrophe or World War III.”
Perestroika and the dissolution of the USSR
His encouragement of freedom hastened the disintegration of the multi-ethnic Soviet empire.
From the Baltic republics to the Caucasus and Central Asia, independence movements and inter-ethnic struggles shook the seemingly invincible Soviet structure, while glasnost brought a wave of shameful revelations about the Soviet Union’s dark past, including ethnic repressions and deportations.
The Baltic countries launched themselves to independence and there were also problems in Georgia and between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
In 1990, Gorbachev was elected the first and last president of the Soviet Union, but within months he was faced with a revolt by hard-line communists.
Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, one of the reformists’ main allies, resigned dramatically in December 1990, warning that hardliners were on the rise and “a dictatorship was coming”.
The following month, Soviet troops killed 14 people on Lithuania’s main television tower, in an attack Gorbachev denied ordering. In Latvia, five protesters were killed by Soviet special forces.
In March 1991, a referendum produced an overwhelming majority in favor of preserving the Soviet Union as a renewed “federation of equal sovereign republics”, but six of the 15 republics boycotted the vote.
In the summer, hardliners struck, sensing the weakness of a man now abandoned by many liberal allies. Six years after entering the Kremlin, Gorbachev and Raisa were imprisoned in their Crimean vacation home on the Black Sea, with phone lines cut and a warship moored off the coast.
The “August coup” was organized by a so-called Emergency Committee that included the head of the KGB, the prime minister, the defense minister and the vice president. They feared a total collapse of the communist system and tried to prevent power from shifting from the center to the republics, the largest and most powerful of which was Yeltsin’s Russia.
The putschists ended up failing, wrongly assuming that they could trust the party, the army and the bureaucracy to obey orders as in the past. However, it was not a resounding victory for Gorbachev.
It was the defiant Boris Yeltsin who took on the rebels and became a national hero, while Gorbachev remained under house arrest in Crimea.
Personal revenge may have mixed with politics when in late 1991, in an isolated country house, Yeltsin and the leaders of the Ukrainian and Belarusian republics signed agreements abolishing the Soviet Union and replacing it with a Commonwealth of Independent States. .
On December 25, 1991, the red flag was lowered for the last time in the Kremlin and Gorbachev appeared on national television to announce his resignation.
Free elections, a free press, representative legislative assemblies and a multi-party system became a reality under his watch, he said.
“We opened ourselves to the world, we renounced interference in the affairs of other countries and the use of troops beyond our borders, and we were received with trust, solidarity and respect.”
But the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the first communist state and a nuclear superpower that had sent the first man into space and projected its influence across the globe, was no more.
Consequences of the end of the USSR
The fact that Gorbachev’s achievements were not appreciated at home should not be surprising. Russia can deal harshly with reformers.
Hardliners accused him of destroying the planned economy and jettisoning seven decades of communist gains. For liberal critics, he talked too much, compromised too much, and refused to make decisive reforms.
As Moscow’s control waned, ethnic tensions erupted into full-scale wars in places like Chechnya, Georgia and Moldova after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
With his Nobel Prize in hand and his star reputation abroad, Gorbachev gradually embarked on a second career. He made several attempts to found a social democratic party, opened a study center – the Gorbachev Foundation – and co-founded the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, critical of the Kremlin to date.
In 1996, he tested his popularity by running for president. But Yeltsin won overwhelmingly, and Gorbachev got a dismal 0.5% of the vote.
As Putin entrenched himself in power, Gorbachev seemed torn between concern about the crackdown on civil liberties under the former KGB agent and respect for Russia’s resurgence on the international stage.
Turning 80, he criticized in 2011, Gorbachev criticized what he considered a “copycat” of democracy in Russia.
But in 2014 he backed Putin in annexing Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and censured the West for its “euphoria and triumphalism” after the collapse of the USSR.
Increasingly fragile in his later years, Gorbachev spoke out to express concern about rising tension between Russia and the United States, and warned against a return to the Cold War he had helped end.
It was scathing when Donald Trump announced in 2018 that the United States would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Missile Treaty that Gorbachev negotiated with Ronald Reagan in 1987.
“We have to continue the course we have charted. We have to ban war once and for all. The most important thing is to get rid of nuclear weapons,” he said in 2018.
“Politics, not weapons, is the key to solving security problems,” Gorbachev wrote.
His tragedy was that in trying to redesign an ossified, monolithic structure to preserve the Soviet Union and save the communist system, he ended up presiding over the demise of both.
The world, however, would never be the same again.
With information from AFP and Reuters
