A Decent Man in an Evil System

 

The end of August 2022 was more than just the end of a month. On 30 August 2022, Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union died at the age of 91. Mr. Gorbachev, was the last of the Cold War Leaders, having survived US Presidents Ronald Regan and George HW Bush, French President Francois Mitterrand, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

Mr. Gorbachev was what you could call one of the most significant figures in modern world history in the last 50-years. Mr. Gorbachev’s final years were sad. The Western world, which once lionised him and the Russian world, which once loathed him, had pretty much forgotten about him and the only “review” of his life and works have only started with the announcement of his death. One of the examples of the reviews of his life can be found in the following report by Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/world/mikhail-gorbachev-who-ended-cold-war-dies-aged-92-agencies-2022-08-30/  

 

 Say what you like about the world before and after the Soviet Union but Mr. Gorbachev was by all definitions of the word, a transformative figure. What makes Mr. Gorbachev so unique is that unlike his Cold War contemporaries, his achievements came about from his failure. Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher are credited for reviving morbid economies (Regan can be credited for “Making America Great Again” long before Trump considered politics as a career). Helmut Kohl presided over the reunification of Germany. Gorbachev on the other hand presided over the dismantling of the Soviet Union into a multitude of nations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

In a way, you could say that the dismantling of the Soviet Union made life more complicated. The world moved from playing off two superpowers against each other to one where there’s only one hyperpower and a myriad of other players including non-state actors who play by different rules. Whilst the initial hope at the end of the Cold War was for a safer world, one could argue that quite opposite has happened. The superpowers knew they had the capabilities to destroy each other many times over, so avoided situations of direct conflict and kept their respective camps under control. These days, the worry is no longer about world leaders but about the possibility of non-state actors with qualms about killing people smuggling lethal weapons in the most sensitive spot.

For Russians, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was not the paradise they expected it to be. Soviet oppression was replaced by the “gangster” capitalism of the Yeltsin years. The “Champion of Freedom” that replaced Mr. Gorbachev spent the better part of his presidency drunk and allowed his cronies to rob the nation blind. The chaos of the Yeltsin years is a more recent memory than the Soviet Union. There is a reason why a good portion of the Russian population like their current president, Vladimir Putin despite invading Ukraine.

Yet, when all that is said and done, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was probably inevitable. When Mr. Gorbachev came into power at the age of 54, he was a breath of fresh air compared to the host dull apparatchiks that preceded him. Like FW De Klerk in apartheid South Africa, Mr. Gorbachev grew up and believed in the Soviet system and wanted to reform it rather than to dismantle it. His signature policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). Mr. Gorbachev understood that the Cold War was draining the Soviet Union as it tried to keep up with the US in developing more and more advanced weapons and keeping the population in the republics that formed the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe under control

Unfortunately for Mr. Gorbachev, the system was so rotten that instead of getting a population grateful for the chance to say a few more things, he ended up unleashing pent up feelings of nationalism is the republics. Nation after nation broke away.

Given that my mother had moved to Germany to settle with my second stepfather in 1989, I can say the biggest moment of that era came with the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had been the symbol of the divide between the Western world and the Soviet sphere. Berlin provided the example of what was wrong with the communist system. One only had to compare the Berlin neighbourhoods of Kurfürstendamm, which is the purple area on the EU version of monopoly and Alexanderplatz. It was like a beauty contest between Tom Cruise and the cast of Monsters Inc. The Western part of Berlin is dynamic and impressive. The Soviet side is downright miserable.

The system relied on a mixture of oppression and propaganda and by the time Mr. Gorbachev came into power, it had become expensive to maintain and unlike their Chinese counterparts, the Soviets did not have the financial means to maintain this. Mr. Gorbachev’s attempts to open-up only released these tensions.

Admittedly, not everything has gone well. Russians started to yearn for a strong man. Many parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are oppressive places. In many places, the local communist apparatchik merely stopped reporting to Moscow and continued to brutalise people as they had been for ages. Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko comes to mind.

However, there have been parts of Eastern Europe that have thrived. Today, Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states all have forward-thinking governments and dynamic economies. This would not have been possible when they were Soviet satellites.

The Soviet Union could not have been restructured and openness only created bitterness. Mr. Gorbachev was criticized for making Russia look weak on the international stage and his name is not a good one for politicians in totalitarian states to be associated with.

However, what was the alternative? How long could the system have lasted had Mr. Gorbachev maintained the status quo of his predecessors? Whilst things may have gone better had he followed the Chinese model; they could always have ended up a lot worse.

Mr. Gorbachev is a hero because he played a bad hand as best as he could have. Mr. Gorbachev formed a genuine relationship with his ideological opposite, Ronald Regan to reduce tensions that could have ended the world. By giving up on a system that he had given him so much power, he opened up opportunities for many to have better lives than their parents could have dreamed about. He failed to maintain the Soviet system, but he achieved so much for so many. There is a reason why he is one of the heroes of my generation.