EDITORIAL: Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who was loved abroad and loathed at home and is held responsible by President Vladimir Putin for the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe [the breakup of the Soviet Union]”, is dead. He was 91.
Gorbachev, who was lovingly called “Gorby” in the West, shattered the deadly silence that had pervaded the Soviet Union since its birth in 1922. In 1917, Russia had witnessed two distinct revolutions: the formation of the Provisional Government (the February Revolution) following the overthrow of the Czarist regime, and the October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Provisional Government.
Gorbachev introduced glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) to the Soviet system with a view to reforming it. He established much warmer relations with the West, ended the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and announced that the Warsaw Pact countries were free to pursue their own political agendas. That brought the decades long much-feared Cold War to an end. In 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to the efforts aimed at ending the 45-year conflict between the East and West.
Gorbachev resigned on December 25, 1991 and Boris Yeltsin, who had been the driving force behind the breakup of the Soviet Union, became President of the newly-established Russian Federation. Mikhail Gorbachev had the streak of a miracle-maker.
He didn’t last long as the Soviet top leader, but what he did during his short tenure is simply unimaginable. He forged arms reduction deals with the United States and partnerships with almost all Western powers to successfully remove the Iron Curtain.
However, many Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the turbulence his reforms triggered — a process that ultimately led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But today’s Russia, the successor state of the Soviet Union, is certainly different from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago? Be that is it may, Gorbachev will always be remembered for fathering glasnost and perestroika through which he sought to make the Soviet Union more democratic and inject some features of capitalism into the Soviet economy.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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