There are different ways to remember Mikhail Gorbachev, whose nearly seven years as leader of the Soviet Union ended on Christmas Day 1991 as the communist country formally dissolved itself into 15 separate nations.
Gorbachev, who died Aug. 30 at age 91, had tried to save his ailing nation with ideas like “perestroika” and “glasnost” — restructuring and openness — but wound up presiding over its demise instead.
Gorbachev ended the five-decade Cold War with the United States and won the Nobel Peace Prize. But it was not a permanent fix: Vladimir Putin has proven himself to be just as dangerous as those crusty old Soviet leaders who preceded Gorbachev.
Washington Post columnist George Will observed, “Like Christopher Columbus, who accidentally discovered the New World, Gorbachev stumbled into greatness by misunderstanding where he was going.”
That’s true, but Gorbachev also made some large decisions that freed Eastern Europe. Historians have praised the last Soviet leader’s unwillingness to use force to keep control of his people, breaking precedent with Soviet history all the way back to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
The key was 1989. The events that occurred that year seemed unbelievable to millions of Americans who had grown up knowing that Soviet nuclear missiles were aimed at them, and who believed the communists would do whatever was required to cling to power.
But in 1989, Gorbachev pulled Soviet troops out of Afghanistan after nine years. Independence movements gained momentum in at least five Soviet republics, including Ukraine. And in Warsaw Pact allies like East Germany, relatively peaceful revolutions swept governments aside as European communism literally collapsed like a house of cards.
A couple of years before, President Reagan cried out in Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” It turned out the citizens of Berlin did that job on their own. Gorbachev’s contribution was to keep Soviet soldiers in the motherland instead of sending them to suppress dissent.
Of course, the other side of the story is from the communist point of view. The world still deals today with the fallout of Gorbachev’s decisions. Putin is determined to restore Russia to greatness, wrongly deciding that invading Ukraine is the best way to do that.
And there is China, where, according to Will, President Xi Jinping learned much from what Gorbachev got wrong: He relaxed political control before reforming the Russian economy, he allowed the Communist Party to become corrupt and he allowed military commanders to swear allegiance to the Soviet Union — instead of to the party and its leaders.
In the end, the Soviet Union crumbled despite Gorbachev’s efforts to save it. But his decisions in 1989 freed millions of people in many countries from a bankrupt, failed philosophy. By that measurement, the Nobel Peace Prize that he received was well deserved.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
