Jenkins, R. Michael, photographer. Soviet Union-United States summit arrival ceremony with President H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. United States Washington D.C. Soviet Union, 1990. [31 May] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2019646345/
Mikhail Gorbachev died in late August of this year and was lionized by Western leaders and media. The Guardian heralded him as “the most important world figure of the last quarter of the 20th century” who “singlehandedly he brought an end to 40 years of east-west confrontation in Europe and liberated the world from the danger of nuclear conflagration.” The New York Times argued that “[f]ew leaders in the 20th century, indeed in any century, have had such a profound effect on their time.” The Washington Post opined that “[f]or the sheer improbability of his actions and their impact on the late 20th century, Mr. Gorbachev ranks as a towering figure.” The Sydney Morning Herald characterized the last leader of the Soviet Union as “a rare leader who changed the world and for a time gave hope for peace among the superpowers.” Le Monde, however, struck a more measured tone: “the engineer of improved East-West relations was revered throughout the West and capable of captivating a crowd in Europe, he elicited mainly shrugs of indifference at home and lived in near obscurity in Russia after his exit from political life in 1991.”
Western leaders were in agreement about Gorbachev’s legacy. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen said Gorbachev was “was a trusted and respected leader” who “played a crucial role to end the Cold War and bring down the Iron Curtain” and “opened the way for a free Europe.” United States (U.S.) President Joe Biden remarked he “believed in glasnost and perestroika – openness and restructuring – not as mere slogans, but as the path forward for the people of the Soviet Union after so many years of isolation and deprivation.” And the key part of homage to ensure that Gorbachev was properly enshrined among the great leaders of the 20th Century was Bono of U2’s lauding of Gorbachev: “[i]n my lifetime no one person has had the impact on the world that Mikhail Gorbachev, who died Aug. 30 at 91, did.”
And yet, Gorbachev was held in different esteem in nations that were former Soviet Republics. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis differed with von der Leyen, Biden, and Bono:
Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said:
Why the disparity? First, a bit of background on Gorbachev.
Gorbachev came to lead the Soviet Union in 1985 faced with the types of challenges few leaders of major powers have had before them. The economy was stagnating, the USSR’s military was caught in a quagmire in Afghanistan, tensions with the U.S. rivalled the most fraught moments of the Cold War, and structural problems dogged the sprawling country. Two years before Gorbachev came to power, NATO’s “Able Archer” exercise in 1983 almost led the Soviet Union to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S. and its Western European allies.
When Gorbachev took power, he diagnosed the USSR’s domestic problems in significant part as emanating from alcohol. So he cracked down. Gorbachev’s government raised the prices of vodka, wine and beer, restricted drinking during the day, and people drinking at work were prosecuted. As with these sorts of measures in other countries, people worked around the new measures and started distilling their own alcohol, which put pressure on sugar prices, and a black market arose. But there were also serious fiscal repercussions for the regime which lost billions of rubles in tax revenue.
Gorbachev later admitted how he went about trying to cut drinking was all wrong even if the goal was right. Nonetheless, Gorbachev hailed the drop in alcohol-related accidents in factories, a decline in mortality rates, and an increase in birthrates and better health for newborns. There is support for Gorbachev’s claims on mortality rates, as early deaths spiked after the campaign was wound down in 1988.
However, the USSR’s domestic problems were bigger than alcoholism. As one Soviet economist remarked:
They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. The Soviet system is not working because the workers are not working.
Soon after Gorbachev took over, his domestic troubles increased dramatically. The Chernobyl disaster occurred in April 1986, and his government’s handling of the catastrophe arguably sped the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moscow was slow to admit anything was amiss until the fallout from the massive explosions in the Soviet Republic of Ukraine was detected in western Europe. Nonetheless. Gorbachev denied his government was covering up: “[w]e spent the first days trying to get the picture…[and] I can’t agree that we were trying to conduct a sly policy and hide something.”
In his first public address almost a month after the explosion, Gorbachev used the time-honored tactics of obfuscating and blaming others. Notably, he claimed that “[t]he most serious consequences have been averted,” and the U.S. had unleashed “an unrestrained anti-Soviet campaign.”
However, Chernobyl may have led Gorbachev to work towards the abolition of nuclear weapons. In what may be after the fact rationalization, 20 years after the meltdown, Gorbachev said:
Chernobyl opened my eyes like nothing else…One could now imagine much more clearly what might happen if a nuclear bomb exploded. According to scientific experts, one SS-18 rocket could contain 100 Chernobyls.
During his reign, Gorbachev embraced the two concepts for which he will be forever associated: glasnost (i.e. openness or transparency) and perestroika (i.e. reconstruction), two terms used to mark his notions of reform. It was glasnost that would determine how the government handled Chernobyl and what the Soviet people made of it. In fact, the freedom to freely discuss the event led to the type of questioning, criticism, and doubt of the USSR that was unprecedented. Ironically, Gorbachev’s Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman argued:
It was glasnost that destroyed the Soviet Union. People opened their eyes and saw what kind of a country they were living in, and they looked at the nation’s horrible history.
Once the criticism started and there were no crackdowns, Soviet society began to unravel in ways Gorbachev did not foresee and could not address.
However, it was foreign policy where Gorbachev made his most lasting impact and earned the esteem of the West. Gorbachev was viewed differently than his predecessors. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said after a 1984 meeting that “I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.” American President Ronald Reagan saw Gorbachev as being different from his predecessors and someone with whom he could negotiate. In the famous 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Gorbachev and Reagan discussed and nearly agreed on eliminating all nuclear weapons, but the scope of their ultimate agreement was scaled down. Such progress on nuclear weapons talks was possible because Gorbachev did not see the U.S. arms buildup in the late 1970’s and into the 1980’s as a threat. Despite pressure from his high command, Gorbachev was sure the U.S. would not attack the USSR and told interviewers after the empire’s fall. He was also unconcerned by the rapid increase in U.S. military spending, claiming that “[t]hese were unnecessary and wasteful expenditures that we were not going to match.”
Gorbachev also saw the need to let the nations of Eastern Europe go their own way, which was a major deviation from the view of his predecessors. The same pressures and tensions buckling the Soviet Union were pressing on the nations of the Warsaw Block as anger and discontent were boiling over in a number of them.
Hungary opened its border with Austria in mid-1989, which functioned to allow people from communist regimes to flee to western Europe, and the country ignored pleas and pressure from communist neighbors that an open border was causing their people to flee.
Anger was at a fever pitch in East Germany after a May 1989 election in which the ruling party seemingly swept the election even though many people voted against them. Things went downhill quickly, culminating in protests during the East German regime’s celebration of its 40th anniversary attended by Gorbachev. These protests and continued emigration to the west caused the head of the government to fall, but his successor was just as unpopular. In early November 1989, things came to a head as a new government policy to allow unfettered travel and emigration to West Germany being the impetus for mass protests and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While these events played out in East Germany, Gorbachev resisted immense pressure from within his government to send in troops to put down what might be a rebellion as had happened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Helmut Kohl, the Chancellor of West Germany and then a unified Germany, said: “”[w]ithin 24 hours of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Stasi and KGB were trying to convince him that Soviet troops were in danger in [East Germany] and the Soviet military was needed to intervene.” But, Gorbachev refused. He explained in a piece in Time:
The long overdue changes in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe had received a powerful impetus from the democratic process already under way in the Soviet Union. The demands of the people were getting increasingly urgent and radical.
Thereafter, Gorbachev became instrumental in the reunification of Germany when the United Kingdom and France were wary of allowing the two parts to become one nation again.
Despite Gorbachev’s willingness to let the nations of the Warsaw Block go their own way, it was a different matter with Soviet Republics. In those cases, Gorbachev countenanced violence and repressive tactics to snuff out democratic movements, which accounts for the contempt and hostility many in those nations have for the former Soviet leader lionized in Western Europe.
In December 1986, after Gorbachev replaced a corrupt Kazakh with an ethnic Russian to run Kazakhstan, protests started. A U.S. government recounting claimed:
The announcement of [Gorbachev’s chosen official] provoked spontaneous street demonstrations by Kazaks, to which Soviet authorities responded with force. Demonstrators, many of them students, rioted. Two days of disorder followed, and at least 200 people died or were summarily executed soon after. Some accounts estimate casualties at more than 1,000.
In April, 1989, the Soviet Army violently ended pro-independence marches in Tbilisi, Georgia, “resulting in 21 deaths and hundreds of injuries.”
In 1990, Lithuania declared independence from the USSR, but Gorbachev kept troops in the Baltic state and pressured the country to relent. In January 1991, Soviet troops resorted to violence and at least 14 people were killed and as many as 700 were wounded.
Soviet forces killed five Latvians in 1991 when the country declared its independence, and the August 1991 brief coup against Gorbachev allowed Latvia to cement its status as country free of Russian rule.
In early 1991, Gorbachev sent Soviet troops into Armenia to supposedly disarm militias but Armenians saw the move as suppressing a nascent independence movement.
In 1991, newly independent Ukraine wanted to try Gorbachev for his crimes related to Chernobyl.
Gorbachev may have be a hero to Western policymakers and historians for opening up the USSR, for seeking to reduce tensions with the U.S. and its allies, and for not sending Soviet troops into nations like East Germany. There is a different, much harsher assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev in those nations closest to Russia that shook off the Soviet yoke in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
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Horydczak, Theodor, Approximately, photographer. Piano keyboard. Piano with hands playing I. Washington Region, None. ca. 1920-ca. 1950. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2019676970/
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