The legacy of the recently deceased Mikhail Gorbachev is the subject of debate. While in the West he receives all kinds of praise, from the Russian point of view – or to be more exact from the Russian ruling class starting with Putin – he is blamed, among other things, for being responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. But to what extent can he be held responsible for the fall of the USSR? Could the superpower have survived or was its end final?
Gorbachev's arrival in power in 1985 occurred at a time when the country was, in the words of Josep Puigsech, professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Barcelona, "in a phase of stagnation in which the years of Brezhnevism They had led to a growing social paralysis, technological backwardness with respect to the United States, increasingly excessive military spending, rural-urban dysfunction or the aging of the Soviet political leadership. Given this, the new leader was the regime's attempt to renew itself, but the project did not work.
Four historians (in addition to Puigsech, Julián Casanova, Vladislav Zubok and José María Faraldo) try to answer whether that plan was doomed to failure and whether the end of the USSR at the end of 1991 was written. Most of those consulted, with the exception of Casanova, believe that the collapse was not inevitable and that the country could have gotten ahead with the necessary reforms. Another thing is the internal and external forces that played against these transformations, to which Gorbachev's errors are added, which to a greater or lesser extent accelerated the fall.
