Politics

Photo by José Pablo Domínguez on Unsplash

As the West processes the complex legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev, after his death at the age of 91 yesterday, the Russian state media has shown no such compunctions about confronting nuance in their propaganda. Rather, they’re gleefully assassinating the last Soviet leader, rewriting history to bolster the current regime’s vicious authoritarian crackdown at home, and its grisly imperial aggression in Ukraine, Gorbachev’s birthplace.

Of course, there has long been a yawning disconnect between the millions upon millions of grateful Americans, French, British, East Germans, Poles, Czechs, and so on, and the Russians he actually led from the top of the Soviet power structure. It was said that the beloved “Gorby” could win in a democratic election anywhere but Russia in the late 1980s.

After all, Mr. Gorbachev’s most successful efforts were those that put the Cold War to bed, and particularly the arms control treaties he negotiated with the Americans, which finally reduced the threat of nuclear annihilation. This alone was a magnificent historical achievement, a rare victory for all mankind.

However, Gorbachev’s domestic reforms, glasnost and perestroika, or openness and economic restructuring, inadvertently began a process that eventually ended in the unraveling of the Soviet Union. For the nearly 300 million people who suffered under this cruel totalitarian empire, whether in Eastern European satellite states or Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Moldavia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and so on, and within Russia itself, this meant freedom, and it was another victory to be celebrated.

Vladimir Putin, from his perch in the KGB, the organ directly responsible for carrying out the Soviet Union’s murderous repression, clearly felt otherwise. He was part of the ruling class, if only a minor bureaucrat, and suffered the loss of imperial prestige personally, and viscerally.

When the empire began to crumble, Putin was serving in a Stasi outpost in Dresden, East Germany. He recalled his sense of sheer helplessness as German protesters began to gather outside the station, while he burned so many secret documents the furnace exploded. When he called for backup, “Moscow was silent.” That’s because Gorbachev refused to unleash Soviet troops on the German people, who were desperate to regain their freedom.

Later, when Putin took power from an ailing Boris Yeltsin, it was clear the democratic experiment in Russia was imperiled, and perhaps finished.

Since then, Putin has ushered in a grim mood of seething nationalism and revanchist resentment that has displaced any lingering gratitude to Gorbachev for unlocking democratic freedom in Russia, or integration with the global West. Rather, the Kremlin has recast the Gorbachev era as one of shame and unforgivable weakness, the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” as Putin put it.

If the West thinks of Gorbachev as something of a hero and peaceful reformer, the embittered KGB agent sees him as a traitor, the man who refused to send backup to Dresden.

Unintended consequences

As has been frequently noted, Gorbachev did not intend to dismantle the Soviet Union, or destroy communism. Rather, his basic humanity prevented him from deploying the same tools of state that other Soviet leaders had casually and frequently made good use of, whether they be tanks rolling into Prague, or mass repression at home.

At heart, it seems Gorbachev was a democrat, regardless of his intentions.

He refused to crush dissent at home, and he refused to use military force to keep his far-flung empire intact; when Poland and Czechoslovakia overthrew their communist captors, Gorbachev did not intervene. The Soviet state was conceived of and administered by men who had shown no such squeamishness about brutality, men like Vladimir Putin.

Gorbachev’s inaction was itself a revelation. The things he did not do were what defined his leadership, counterintuitively. He did not slaughter protesters, he did not silence critics, he did not jail the opposition, he did not invade foreign capitals.

Without active repression, the empire quickly began to disintegrate. Violence and fear were the glue that held the creaky ship of state together, along with a heavy dose of enforced ideology, the stale liturgy of communism, believed by no one, at that point.

When that ship finally cracked apart and sank, it was a gift to millions of people, whether they were reunited Germans, who finally tore down the hated Berlin Wall, or Poles in the Solidarity movement, who finally rid themselves of Russian oppression for the first time since World War II.

For the Russian people themselves, the period following the breakup of the Soviet Union was defined by economic chaos, lawlessness, ideological confusion, and a stinging loss of prestige. Vladimir Putin knew exactly how to prey on these feelings inside Russia, and he went about creating a cult that worshipped the history of Soviet communism, while reinstating the worst aspects of that state.

At heart, Vladimir Putin is a vicious autocrat, one with increasingly dark intentions.

As he slaughters Ukrainians, and silences Russians, the memory of Gorbachev hovers nearby like an unquiet ghost, murmuring about what might have been.

Sadly, there’s no way to know what Russia might have looked like had it continued along the path of democracy, and freedom. Rather, the Kremlin has embraced violent authoritarianism, and imperial conquest, invading its western neighbor, endangering the entire world.

If Gorbachev succeeded in signing historic arms agreements limiting nuclear weapons, and ushering in 30 years of peace, Putin has recently threatened to use nuclear weapons against any power that intervenes in his bloody conquest in Ukraine, an almost incomprehensibly callous threat.

Once again, a climate of fear and mistrust hovers like radioactive fog across Europe, as a brutal war of aggression destroys a peaceful democracy, while threatening a larger war. Another Cold War has been foisted on us, with all the perilous implications for humanity that carries.

In this moment, it can be difficult not to mourn the loss of Mikhail Gorbachev, especially when faced with the malignant leadership of Vladimir Putin. As the Kremlin’s propaganda spews forth, it’s important to remember what the end of the Soviet Union really meant for Russians and the world: a chance at freedom.

As Putin tries and fails to resurrect the dead corpse of the USSR, freedom sounds pretty good right now.

Certainly, it’s better than the alternative.

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