It is difficult to separate the trial from history from strong opinions, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s telegram of condolences for the death of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is of little help.
“He has led our country through a period of complex and dramatic change, large-scale foreign policy, and economic and social challenges,” the statement read. “He deeply understood that reforms were needed, he strove to offer his own solutions to urgent problems.”
A sense of protocol may have prevented the Kremlin leader from telling us what he really thinks about the man who presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union, something Putin once called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.
For a clearer opinion, we can rely on Margarita Simonyan, the bellicose editor-in-chief of the Russian state propaganda outlet (formerly Russia Today).
“Gorbachev is dead,” Simonyan wrote on Twitter. “Time to pick up what’s been scattered.”
Simonyan appears to be channeling his president, who has embarked on a campaign of imperial restoration with the invasion of Ukraine.
And it’s tempting to look at the two leaders through a simple narrative arc: Gorbachev allowed the 15 republics of the Soviet Union to secede, and Putin is trying, through brute force, to reconstitute that empire.
On February 26, two days after the invasion of Russia, Gorbachev’s foundation called for an “early cessation of hostilities and immediate commencement of peace negotiations”.
But it would be an exaggeration to say that Gorbachev has been a consistent and vocal critic of Putin.
To begin with, Gorbachev came out as a supporter of Russia’s decision in 2014 of annexing the Crimean peninsula into Ukraine’s Black Sea, a prelude to Putin’s full-scale invasion of the country.
And looking back, Gorbachev himself resisted the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In an extensive 2012 interview with Christiane Amanpour, from CNN the last Soviet president insisted that his efforts to keep the USSR together were hampered by a scheming Boris Yeltsin – who became the president of an independent Russia after the 1991 collapse – and the Soviet leadership.
“You will not find in any of my speeches, until the end, anything that supports the dissolution of the union,” Gorbachev said.
“The dissolution of the union was a result of the betrayal of the Soviet nomenclature (party elite), the bureaucracy and also the betrayal of Yeltsin,” he continued.
Gorbachev’s main complaint was that Yeltsin supported the so-called union treaty that would have preserved the USSR as a looser federation, but worked in parallel behind the back to establish his own power base and orchestrate Russia’s exit from the set of countries.
In fact, national independence movements in Ukraine, the Baltics and other republics had already gained substantial momentum in the era of restructuring. And after the failed August 1991 coup by the radicals, Gorbachev’s unity treaty was effectively decimated.
To be fair, Gorbachev wasn’t the only one to misinterpret the situation. Just weeks before the August 1991 coup attempt, US President George HW Bush paid a visit to Kiev, then capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and delivered a speech warning Ukrainians to avoid what he called of “suicidal nationalism”.
Bush’s speech, remembered today as the “Kiev Chicken” speech, passed as a complete failure. Bush and his advisers may have been worried by the nightmare scenario of an implosive breakup as Yugoslavia was beginning, leaving a massive nuclear arsenal in uncertain hands. But within a few months, Ukrainians overwhelmingly voted for independence.
Gorbachev, who began his rise through the ranks of the Communist Party in Russia’s southern Stavropol region, simply may not have understood the national aspirations of Ukrainians, or the desires of other nations trapped in the USSR for independence. His willingness to violently suppress protests in the Soviet republics — something more rarely mentioned in his career discussions — is a stain on his legacy.
That doesn’t necessarily put Gorbachev on the same level as Putin, who refuses to accept Ukraine as a legitimate nation and bemoans what he calls “the artificial division of Russians and Ukrainians.”
It is often noted that Gorbachev, who signed the key arms control agreements that turned the heat down on the Cold War and steered the world away from the dangers of nuclear war, enjoys international stature while he is often reviled in Russia. Gorbachev’s admirers like to point out that he had a deeply humanistic streak.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta — a newspaper that Gorbachev helped finance — praised the late leader for his gentle nature, a quality rarely seen in Putin.
“He loved a woman [sua esposa Raisa] more than your work,” he wrote in a tribute. “I think he just couldn’t hug her if her hands were covered in blood.”
Could Gorbachev have used what was left of his moral authority in Russia to criticize Putin more strongly for his actions? And would an indifferent Russian audience have listened? That we will never know. But his reticence meant that his criticism of Russia’s descent into dictatorship was often silenced.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
