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12 OPINION Mikhail Gorbachev: The contradictory legacy of a Soviet leader who attempted 'revolution from above' MIKHAIL Gorbachev was a contradictory figure; his legacy, complex. Hailed in the West as a democrat and liberator of his people – which he genuinely was – he increasingly became despised by many within Rus- sia for destroying the Soviet Union and dismantling a great power. Either way, he was consequen- tial. Indeed, his death at 91, an- nounced by state media in Rus- sia on Aug. 30, 2022, comes as the ripples of the transformation he helped engineer continue to be felt. The invasion of Ukraine is, in part, an attempt to reverse the loss of status felt in post- Cold War Russia by the disinte- gration of the Soviet Union that occurred under Gorbachev – something Vladimir Putin views as "the greatest geopolitical ca- tastrophe of the [20th] century." In a sense, the unravelling of the Soviet Union that began 30 years ago is still going on now, in the bloody war in Ukraine. Of course, that is not how he is perceived in the West. Af- ter enduring Western suspi- cions when he first came to power that he was simply a wolf in sheep's clothing, an insin- cere reformer who was really a hard-line communist, Gor- bachev managed to convince the skeptics abroad of his sincerity. U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher found in Gorbachev someone she could "do business with." Then, through her, U.S. President Ronald Reagan came around to the view that Gor- bachev was indeed an authentic dismantler of the Soviet com- mand system. Early fears in the West evolved into anxiety about Gorbachev's survival as he embarked on his great project. He was a reform- er aspiring to be a revolutionary from above, wanting to liberalise and democratise his country to save socialism. But in the process, he ended up undermining socialism as the major alternative to Western ne- oliberal capitalism. His rushed reforms to modernise the Soviet Union were overtaken by devel- opments on the ground that saw the socialist project fall, to be replaced by a new era in Russia marked by growing nationalism and renewed authoritarianism. Who was Mikhail Gorbachev and where did he come from? Born in 1931 in southern Rus- sia as the son of peasants, the young Gorbachev learned about the horrors of Stalinist repres- sions from his grandfathers, both of whom had suffered im- prisonment. Physically strong and exceptionally bright, Gor- bachev went on to study law at Moscow State University and soon embarked on a steady rise as a Communist Party official. A faithful apparatchik, he knew the pathologies of the sys- tem: the stultifying, self-serving bureaucracy, repression of free expression, bloated military spending, and lack of initiative and productivity of workers and peasants. Once he achieved the highest position in the party of general secretary in 1985 he embarked on a pell-mell programme of reform. It was centred on two ideas, that of "perestroika" – the restructuring the political and economic system – and "glas- nost" – the end of censorship and the introduction of freedom of speech and the press. But from the start, the eco- nomic reforms proved to be flawed. Mammoth problems, including the fall in the world price of oil – the USSR's great- est source of foreign exchange – a devastating earthquake in Armenia and the Chernobyl nu- clear disaster impoverished the country and eroded Gorbachev's popularity at home. His foreign policy achieve- ments – the withdrawal from war in Afghanistan, liberating the Soviet satellite states in East Central Europe and the reduc- tion of nuclear arms – won him friends abroad. But many of his closest com- rades at home, particularly in the military and KGB, the state security service, were appalled by his surrender of what they considered the gains from the victory over fascism in World War II. On Gorbachev's watch, the So- viet Union rapidly declined from a superpower into a pathetically weak state begging for finan- cial help from the George H.W. Bush administration, which never came through. He allowed the two German states, separat- ed during the Cold War by the Berlin Wall into a Western and a Soviet-controlled sector, to reu- nite without gaining much from the deal. He mistakenly thought he had a firm agreement with the Unit- ed States and Germany not to move NATO an inch eastward but failed to get it in writing. Ig- noring protests by Gorbachev's successor, Russia's President Boris Yeltsin, President Bill Clinton responded to the wishes of East European states to join the Western alliance, taking ad- vantage of the USSR's weakness. Gorbachev's political demise and that of the Union In the 1970s and 1980s the im- age of the USSR in the West was of a giant nuclear-armed Com- munist country, a revolution- ary, expansionist state, seriously threatening the "free world." But many who studied it and trav- elled there, like me, could read- ily see that it was economically stagnating, socially conservative and politically quite fragile. By the late 1980s Gorbachev was caught between a conserv- ative elite, which feared change, and self-styled democrats, led by his nemesis, Yeltsin, who clam- oured for more radical change. As head of government, Gor- bachev was faced with an insol- uble dilemma: how to achieve the democratic ends he desired without resorting to undemo- cratic means, force and violence. Unwilling, except on rare oc- casions, to use armed force to keep order or save the union, he was ineffective against na- tionalist resistance in many of the non-Russian republics: Ar- menia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Lithuania. His intentions to turn an em- pire, in which one nationality dominated over subordinate peoples, into a genuinely dem- ocratic federation of equal na- tions was approved by more than three-quarters of those who voted in a referendum in March 1991. But a few months later, that plan foundered when some of his generals and secret police agents launched a coup against him. The plotters failed, but the winner of the three-day standoff was not Gorbachev, but Yeltsin. In early December, three in- ebriated leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met in a forest setting in the absence of Gorbachev, where they came up with a hastily conceived plan to break up the USSR and abolish Gorbachev's presidency. The Soviet world ended "not with a bang, but a whimper," to borrow from the poet T.S. Eliot. A weak, ineffective Commonwealth of Independent States was estab- lished in which there would be no role for Gorbachev. On Christmas Day, Gorbachev resigned, a dignified but pathet- ic figure, now powerless and re- duced to running his foundation and writing his memoirs. Freedom expanded, but at a cost Gorbachev's revolution from above had from its beginning been dependent on reform ad- vocates preventing the conserv- ative elites from undermining his program. Most importantly, he tried to mobilise intellectuals through "glasnost" to pierce the defence of the decaying system. But most writers and academics abandoned gradual approaches for a more rapid transformation. While unleashing the pent-up resentments and discontents festering in Soviet society, Gor- bachev underestimated his abil- ity to control the growing revo- lution from below. That freeing of the public sphere brought out striking miners and incensed consumers angry at privileged party poten- tates and violently gave voice to the suppressed discontents of non-Russians in the various constituent republics of the USSR. Ultimately, the Soviet empire disintegrated, not from a popular, massive uprising from below, as many in the West im- agine, but from the mistakes and political infighting at the top, which progressively weak- ened the centre's authority. Gorbachev tried to do too much, too fast without the re- sources to achieve his goals. By 1990 his own weakness and in- decision had derailed the revo- lution from above. A great emancipator, Gor- bachev left a mixed legacy. He expanded freedom for millions but at the same time unleashed roiling waves of nationalism and left the upturned soil for re- newed authoritarianism. Ronald Suny Ronald Suny is Professor of History and Political Science, University of Michigan US President Ronald Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev maltatoday | SUNDAY • 4 SEPTEMBER 2022