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Wishes can’t be big enough when it’s a historic statesman’s birthday. Mikhail Sergejewitsch Gorbachev will turn 90 on Tuesday, and the Nobel Peace Prize winner has barely heeded his request that his legacy somehow continue to have effect. He called on his successor Vladimir Putin and new US President Joe Biden to “openly approach”, and the European Union and Russia should also “negotiate with each other without fear.” Everything that had ever been so easy for him.
The former head of the Kremlin, the first and last president of the Soviet Union, is going through difficult times, also, of course, because the pandemic has kept him in isolation in a hospital for a year. But he also feels painfully how the Russian-Western relationship has become so radical since the emotional peak of his time. The “common European home” that Gorbachev once dreamed of did not come into being; Disarmament treaties like the INF Agreement, which he described in 1987 as a “milestone in the history of the human struggle for a world without war,” were terminated by the United States and later by Russia.
Ten years ago, when he turned 80, Gorbachev was still particularly concerned about his country, calling corruption and arbitrariness in Russia “the greatest evils.” Now he sees himself in an interview with him Komsomolskaya Pravda Forced to pass a general roll “to not allow any war.” He is at least relieved that the New Start Treaty was extended a few weeks ago and that the two nuclear powers have at least saved some of Gorbachev’s extensive disarmament work. No one can deny that it changed the world in just six years. In the West, especially in Germany, they are deeply grateful to him for this, in Russia his life balance is much more ambiguous.
In Russia, most see him as the destroyer of the Soviet Union.
Only between 12 and 15 percent of the Russian population see it as positive, says the director of the independent opinion research institute Levada, Lev Gudkow of the SZ. “I adore him, despite his mistakes. He has started reforms, shattered the communist monopoly, relaxed with the West and ended the war in Afghanistan – all of this is thanks to him,” says Gudkow. “But most of the people in Russia think that he is destroying the Soviet Union.”
Mikhail Gorbachev was extremely young by Soviet standards, only 54 when he became general secretary of the central committee of the dominant Communist Party in 1985 and the frozen Soviet empire broke apart. He did not want to abolish socialism, he wanted to strengthen it, more openness and participation, more freedom, more competition, everything that has been historically cataloged under the terms “glasnost and perestroika”. “There he was very different from the people who were locked into their ideas, who had little idea of what was going on in the outside world,” says East European historian Karl Schlögel of the SZ.
Gorbachev clairvoyantly acknowledged that this would only work with costly reforms, for which he had to save on foreign policy. That meant withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, ending the tutelage of the Eastern European states and, above all, stopping the costly arms race with the United States.
The split became obsolete, its size is “that it was not opposed”
Gorbachev tried to dismantle enemy images, report grievances at home, and look at his own country and the world without hindrance. That had consequences that even he did not explicitly want or strive for, especially the end of the Soviet Union. “I consider the idea of superior strategic reform from above naive,” says Schlögel. “But he didn’t reject the process, he gave it a form.”
This applies even more to the foreign policy detente that Gorbachev engineered that ultimately led to German unity. He even allowed a united Germany to join NATO because he considered it pragmatic. In the end, he could not and did not want to counteract the force of what he had started. “He had a sense of the historical moment,” says Schlögel, “he understood that this division was obsolete, and that is his greatness for not opposing it.” Gorbachev once said of Germany that “the forced division of a great nation is not normal.”
“With great admiration”, Russian President Vladimir Putin now congratulates the man who has changed his country. Gorbachev repeatedly supported Putin, but rebuked him for treating critics rigidly. You are unlikely to like this too: the fact that the Gorbachev Foundation has now refrained from making foreign donations. Otherwise, you will have to register as a “foreign agent”. It doesn’t matter how deserving its namesake is.
