Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who brought the Cold War to a relatively peaceful end, passed away on Tuesday evening aged 91. He could perhaps be best described as a reluctant revolutionary. The former Soviet leader, who took power in 1985, opened up the Soviet Union to the world and attempted unsuccessfully to introduce a set of much needed long overdue political and economic reforms at home in the USSR.
Gorbachev’s programme of reforms in 1985, had sole intention of reviving the USSR’s stagnant economy and overhaul its political processes. Yet, his efforts became the catalyst for a series of events that brought an end to communist rule, not just within the USSR, but also across its former satellite states.
From 1987 onwards Eastern Europe, was effectively abandoned to its destiny, and the Soviet imposed Communist Dictatorships disappeared, starting in Hungary, then Poland, Czechoslovakia ( with its Velvet Revolution in October 1989, East Germany ( with its dramatic collapse and the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 ), Bulgaria and Romania ( with its televised bloody revolution in December 1989 ).
These events unleashed changes within the USSR, particularly in the Baltic Republics, Ukraine and the other non Russian republics to different degrees. Mikhail Gorbachev was left effectively unable to control events, often merely responding to them. This left him unable to prevent the slow collapse of the Soviet Union, from which modern Russia emerged in 1991/1992.
Perhaps his greatest legacy was that the USSR largely resolved without excessive bloodshed and that eastern Europe was able to reintegrate install into Middle Europe. Yet, afterwards, within the new Russia that emerged after 1991/1992, Mikhail Gorbachev remained firmly on the fringes of politics, focusing on educational and humanitarian projects. He made one ill-fated attempt to return to political life in 1996, receiving just 0.5% of the vote in presidential elections.
The failure of democracy to take root in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, cannot be blamed on Gorbachev alone, the unstable nature of Boris Yeltsin’s government, the former Soviet bureaucrats, the emerging Oligarchs and the botched rapid ill-thought out privatisation of the Soviet economy ( by the Chicago Boys ) and the West’s failure to support the embryonic Russian democracy and Russian democrats were all contributing factors.
Perhaps in the end, it was better for Mikhail Gorbachev to oversee the end of the Cold War, and the start of the now aborted process of reducing the number of Nuclear weapons. Gorbachev, was perhaps the reluctant revolutionary, who presided over the demise of Europes last empire, and oversaw the casting of the USSR into the dustbin of history, better him, than someone who might have been much more willing to try to use force to hold it together.
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