We all need to have perestroika,” Mikhail Gorbachev used to say. The last leader of the Soviet Union lived by that creed. After becoming the general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 and implementing its program of restructuring and glasnost (openness), he even changed his job title. He preferred to be called president.
The first and last Soviet president was the most democratic leader Russia (the de facto center of the USSR) had in the last century, if not in its history. And in the 31 years since the Soviet collapse, his belief in peace, mutual understanding, dialogue and democracy has remained unshakable.
It was these values that led Gorbachev to withdraw the Soviet Union from a disastrous ten-year war in Afghanistan and, in 1993, to use money from his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize to help finance Novaya Gazeta, the badge of Russia's democrats whose editor, Dimitri Muratov, received his own Nobel Peace Prize last year. Along with dozens of other independent outlets, Novaya Gazeta was forced to suspend publication shortly after President Vladimir Putin launched his "special military operation" in Ukraine in February.
Gorbachev also suffered for his beliefs. Perhaps if he had died in 1991, people back then would have taken it upon themselves to assess his place in history. Yet, faced with a living, breathing Gorbachev, there was animosity and an eerie silence. For years, if he was ever referred to, it was usually to deny his accomplishments.
By launching perestroika, which many in Russia today, including Putin, consider a disaster, Gorbachev exposed himself to criticism from all sides: they accused him of being too radical, too conservative or too weak. But Gorbachev did not escape public scrutiny. Still weakened by age and illness, he stood up to her as director of the Gorbachev Foundation, whose work represented his values.
Like Putin, Gorbachev believed that it would have been better if the USSR had continued. But unlike Putin, he envisioned a reformed and democratized federation, not a union of nations that do not want to submit to Kremlin rule.
In the 2000s, Gorbachev told me why he didn't send tanks to Germany in 1989 to prevent the destruction of the Berlin Wall (built in 1961 under the order of my great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev). "We should not impose their way of life on sovereign states," he said.
Gorbachev himself was partly responsible for the antipathy he faced after the Soviet collapse. Reformists often lack patience, and their plan to implement sweeping economic changes in just 500 days was as utopian as Khrushchev's 1961 promise of "developed communism" in 20 years.
What set Gorbachev apart from other Russian leaders was that he took responsibility for the consequences of his rule. Although so did Khrushchev and Gorbachev's successor, Boris Yeltsin (by the way, the only other leaders in Russia who were forced from power or voluntarily left before their deaths), they left public life altogether, lambasting each other. themselves in private for all that they had failed to accomplish. Gorbachev, instead, joined historians, politicians, his own comrades, and the population in reviewing his regime. Ironically, he himself helped bury himself as a historical figure while he was still alive.
While the consensus in Russia is that Gorbachev's reforms missed the mark or failed because of poor choices, his legacy is perceived very differently internationally – and rightly so. The last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of this century were the heyday of globalization thanks in large part to Gorbachev's efforts to integrate with the world, establish a "new political thought," and mitigate Russia's usual suspicion and animosity toward Russia. the exterior world.
As a man of conscience who reflected on his leadership from outside the Kremlin, Gorbachev had a deep desire to address problems for which he felt responsible, including economic hardship and political instability. While his position was weak, his quixotic candidacy in the 1996 presidential election made casting a vote worthwhile for at least some Russians (like me). Yeltsin's candidacy that year, during a period of chaos such as the Soviet Union had never experienced, inspired few.
It would have been a pity if such an exciting event (Russia had no experience in electing presidents and the novelty imparted a festive air) became one more occasion to express discontent. I never believed that Gorbachev had a serious chance of winning, or that he was a good president. But he was the first president in Russian history to emerge as a candidate after years of trying to bury him, able to speak as a leader of the past and as a voice for the future.
Khrushchev, already retired, could only dream of it after his expulsion from the Kremlin in 1964. Before he died, with plenty of time to contemplate the past, my great-grandfather concluded that his greatest achievement had not been the policy of the thaw – the denunciation of Stalin's crimes, along with a certain political and cultural liberalization – but, by the way, his own dismissal by means of a simple vote. He was not declared an “enemy of the people” nor was he banished to a gulag; he was simply forced into a merit retreat at his country house. He was not physically liquidated after his political demise, as he would have been in the 1930s.
However, Khrushchev regretted his lack of courage and wished he had used his time to push his thaw further, so that even political death was optional.
Twenty-five years later, Russian history took that liberal turn. Death and disappearance were no longer the only options. Political death had become a matter of choice. Although Gorbachev had no chance of winning in 1996, he at least had a chance of running. Perestroika and glasnost, so derided today, paved the way for that in Yeltsin's government, who, while not a fan of his Soviet predecessor, was democratic enough to maintain the spirit of change.
With the invasion of Ukraine and the destruction of the media made possible by glasnost, Gorbachev's legacy now appears to be dead. But Gorbachev himself was more optimistic. Many times he said that he was the product of the Khrushchev thaw and would no doubt encourage us to believe that a new leader will emerge in Russia one day, that a new perestroika will begin and that he will resurrect the values to which he dedicated his life.
PROJECT SYINDICATE 2022
