Date: 2024-05-15 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00023070
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
DEAD AT 91
Bloomberg: Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the most consequential people in my lifetime
DEAD AT 91
Bloomberg: Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the most consequential people in my lifetime
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
The passing of Mikhail Gorbachev is a reminder that change does not have to be done by military means alone ... in fact constructive change comes more surely when diplomacy comes first. That is not to say that a powerful military is not needed, but rather it is used more as a reminder that peaceful negotiation is a better way.
I have been struck by the collaboration that existed at the time when Gorbachev was the face of the Sviet Union between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the UK and President Ronald Reagan of the USA ... and their willingness to assist Gorbachev in achieving a 'soft landing' whil at the same time, being very clear that the old arrangements and power balance was not going to survive.
I think it is very understandable that he has been something of a hero in the West, but not in the Former Soviet Union.
Peter Burgess
Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/30/we-cant-go-living-like-this-gorbachev-lost-his-country-changed-world/
By the Editorial Board
August 30, 2022 at 7:48 p.m. EDT
The tumultuous events of the Soviet Union during the 20th century — Stalin’s Great Terror, the unimaginable losses of World War II, hardships, thaws, stagnation — all directly touched Mikhail Gorbachev. From a village boy to a party official, he saw a reality strikingly different than the Communist Party slogans. He saw a people living in poverty, disenfranchised, ruled by a distant, stuffy elite, a nation of vast wealth sucked dry by over-militarization. And most remarkably, Mr. Gorbachev kept these realizations to himself, rising through the ranks and then, at the top, embarking on an epochal quest for change. On being chosen Soviet leader in March 1985, he told his wife, Raisa, “We can’t go on living like this.”
Mikhail Gorbachev during a news conference in Moscow in 1996. (Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images)
Mr. Gorbachev, who died Tuesday at 91, never intended to destroy the Soviet system. But in a lifetime inside it, he saw its decay and the need for change. While many in the West viewed the Soviet Union as an implacable Cold War adversary and a rigid party hierarchy, Mr. Gorbachev saw cracks and failures, and drew lessons from them. In Stavropol, he had set out on a conformist career path in the Komsomol. Once, the job brought him to a rural village of low, smoke-belching huts along the River Gorkaya Balka. He was shocked at what lay before him: poverty and desolation. “On the hillside, I wondered: ‘How is it possible, how can anyone live like that?’ ” he later reflected. Another time, after Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces crushed the Prague Spring, Mr. Gorbachev visited a factory in the Czech city of Brno as part of a Soviet delegation. The workers refused even to talk to Mr. Gorbachev. “This was a shock to me,” he later said. “This visit overturned all my conceptions.” He realized that the Soviet use of force had been a mistake. Upon becoming Soviet leader, Mr. Gorbachev’s greatest objectives were to save the country at home by unleashing the forces of openness and political pluralism, hoping they could heal the troubles he had witnessed for so long. His first objective was to make socialism work better. He wanted to save his country.
The changes he brought about were astonishing. He opened intellectual life and lifted the veil on much of the Soviet past — on the cruelty, violence and savage repression. Mr. Gorbachev brought about the first relatively free election since the Bolshevik Revolution in voting for a new Soviet legislature in 1989, the Congress of People’s Deputies. The Communist Party establishment took a shellacking. When the new legislature met for the first time, the proceedings were broadcast on television; the country was transfixed by debates that broke new ground in freedom of speech. Mr. Gorbachev, the party, the KGB and the military were lambasted with open and often trenchant criticism. The virus of freedom seemed to be spreading fast.
Mr. Gorbachev tried to wind down the arms race with the United States, which he knew was stretching the Soviet Union beyond its limits. The series of summits he conducted with President Ronald Reagan electrified the world and led to sizable reductions in the mountains of nuclear warheads.
Mr. Gorbachev often miscalculated, including a failure to foresee how his rapid opening would undermine faith in the Communist system and intensify the ambitions of even more radical reformers — as well as fire up the nationalities that yearned for independence. But his legacy was to make the world safer. He helped brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race and allowed a peaceful revolution to unfold in Europe. For these and other accomplishments, he deserved and won the Nobel Peace Prize. He also deserves thanks for being the wide-eyed village boy who paid attention to all he saw around him — and acted upon it.
Opinion Gorbachev played a complicated but unique role in world history
Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/30/sharansky-gorbachev-death/
Written by Natan Sharansky ... Natan Sharansky, a human rights activist and former political prisoner in the Soviet Union, is chairman of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
August 30, 2022 at 4:55 p.m. EDT
Mikhail Gorbachev, who died at 91, was the last leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a post he held for only a few short years, from 1985 to 1991. During his final speech, he expressed regret that the U.S.S.R. had fallen apart, but also emphasized his personal achievements, including the promotion of political and religious freedom, the introduction of democracy and a market economy, and, of course, the end of the Cold War.
All politicians boast of their achievements when they conclude their terms in office. In this case, however, what Gorbachev said was not a boast, but rather an understatement.
Just a few years earlier, the Soviet Union had been one of history’s most frightening dictatorships, sending its troops far and wide, ruling over roughly a third of the globe, and controlling hundreds of millions of its own citizens through intimidation. And while Soviet dissidents (I was among them) told the world that the regime was internally weak, our predictions of its downfall were dismissed as wishful thinking by Western experts mesmerized by the U.S.S.R.’s seemingly unshakable power.
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev makes his Nobel Peace Prize award acceptance speech in the Oslo City Hall on June 5, 1991. Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for “his leading role in the peace process which today characterises important parts of the international community.” (Olav Olsen/AFP via Getty Images)
Yet the regime did fall — and it did so without the firing of a single shot. In the eyes of the West, this outcome was the direct result of the decisions of one person: Gorbachev. It isn’t surprising that he was revered in the free world and was honored with the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, or that terms he introduced to the political lexicon — glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) — helped define the era.
What is perhaps surprising: Gorbachev never achieved that sort of admiration at home. In a 2017 poll, only 8 percent of Russian citizens saw him in a positive light; the overwhelming majority view was negative. The obvious reason for this is that many Russians regard the end of the Soviet Union as a tragedy, in which their nation lost its status as a fearsome world power. Today, Vladimir Putin explicitly represents that sentiment.
Meanwhile, we dissidents and others in the intelligentsia — those who did not believe in the regime, who wanted change, and who had even fought for decades for the very reforms Gorbachev introduced — held a rather more complicated view of the last Soviet leader.
For one, he was a true believer in the ideas of Marx and Lenin, and the original intention behind his pioneering reforms was to rebrand communism with a more human face. Moreover, the moment it became clear that the people’s desire for greater freedom could ultimately topple the regime, he did his best to restrain the forces he had unleashed.
During his first trips to the West, before he became leader of the Politburo, Gorbachev discovered that the Soviet Union had paid a heavy diplomatic and economic price for its treatment of dissidents. As a result, within the first year of ascending to power, he began to release political prisoners and long-time refuseniks (Jews fighting for their right to emigrate to Israel). When it soon became clear, however, that such a policy could lead to mass emigration, new restrictions were introduced.
It was only after 250,000 demonstrators convened in Washington in 1987 to support Soviet Jews, greeting Gorbachev during his first visit as Russia’s leader with chants of “Let Our People Go!,” that the Iron Curtain began to come down.
Freer emigration from the U.S.S.R. quickly led to demands by religious and national groups for self-determination. This, too, Gorbachev resisted, sending troops to Georgia, Lithuania and elsewhere, killing dozens of demonstrators in the process. The dissident Andrei Sakharov, whom Gorbachev released in late 1986 and who initially appeared to be the leader’s natural ally, spent the last years of his life actively fighting against Gorbachev’s attempts to save the single-party system and to avoid competition in Soviet elections.
Very shortly before Sakharov died in 1989, he called me in Israel to say that he could not visit as he had planned, since he would not permit himself to leave Moscow for even a single day and potentially miss an opportunity to block Gorbachev’s bid for unrivaled power.
I was the first political prisoner to be released by Gorbachev, in early 1986, and upon liberation, I was immediately asked whether I wanted to thank him for my freedom. I replied that I was grateful to all those who fought for my release, including fellow Jews and foreign leaders, because I understood that without their fight, it would not have happened. At that time, I deliberately avoided thanking Gorbachev because, with so many of my fellow dissidents still in prison and emigration still not permitted, I felt it would be irresponsible and even disloyal to give him credit.
A decade after the fall of the U.S.S.R., circumstances had changed. Participating with Gorbachev at a conference in Poland, I was asked about the forces leading to the regime’s demise. In my response, I discussed three factors: Sakharov and other dissidents who fought valiantly to keep the spark of freedom alive; Western politicians such as Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.), President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had understood the nature of the regime and were ready to link relations with Moscow to the latter’s respect for human rights; and finally, Gorbachev, who perceived the direction of history and responded accordingly.
Immediately after finishing my talk, I approached Gorbachev to thank him for releasing me. I was surprised to discover that he was almost offended by my remarks, saying, “I released you against all advice to the contrary, and you listed me in only the third place?” While I sympathized with his reaction, at that time I felt it was more important to amplify the voices of dissidents — particularly those in Asia and the Middle East, whose plight was so frequently ignored by the West — than to emphasize his role in the transition.
Yet if we look at the 20th century not through the lens of political struggles, but rather from the bird’s-eye perspective of history, we see how utterly unique Gorbachev was. In nearly every dictatorship there are dissidents, and from time to time there are also Western leaders willing to risk their political fates to promote human rights abroad. But Gorbachev was a product of the Soviet regime, a member of its ruling elite who believed its ideology and enjoyed its privileges — yet decided to destroy it nevertheless. For that, the world can be grateful. Thank you, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Opinion Gorbachev’s reputation rests on the world’s amnesia
Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/30/mikhail-gorbachev-reputation-george-will/
By George F. Will ... Opinion Columnist ... George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. His latest book, 'American Happiness and Discontents,' was released in September 2021.
August 30, 2022 at 5:26 p.m. EDT
Failing upward into the world’s gratitude, Mikhail Gorbachev became a hero by precipitating the liquidation of the political system he had tried to preserve with reforms. He is remembered as a visionary because he was not clear-sighted about socialism’s incurable systemic disease: It cannot cope with the complexity of dispersed information in a developed nation. Like Christopher Columbus, who accidentally discovered the New World, Gorbachev stumbled into greatness by misunderstanding where he was going.
Two of Gorbachev’s uncles and an aunt died in Joseph Stalin’s engineered famine of 1932-1933. The tortures of the Great Terror were visited upon both grandfathers. One of them remembered: An interrogator broke his arms, beat him brutally, then wrapped him in a wet sheepskin coat and put him on a hot stove. In “Gorbachev: His Life and Times,” William Taubman, an emeritus political scientist at Amherst College, quotes Gorbachev on his experience as a boy during World War II, finding the remains of Red Army soldiers: “decaying corpses, partly devoured by animals, skulls in rusted helmets, bleached bones . . . unburied, staring at us out of black, gaping eye-sockets.”
Perhaps, Taubman says, such experiences explain Gorbachev’s most noble facet, his “extraordinary reluctance” to use violence to hold the Soviet system together. Yet when Neil Kinnock, then the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, raised with Gorbachev the case of the imprisoned dissident Natan Sharansky, “Gorbachev responded with a volley of obscenities against ‘turds’ and spies like Sharansky.”
Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in March 1990. (V.Armand/AFP/Getty Images)
President Ronald Reagan, abandoning the niceties of detente, turned up the rhetorical and military temperature. In 1983, he described the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world.” With the Strategic Defense Initiative, he launched a high-tech challenge to a Soviet Union in which 30 percent of hospitals lacked indoor plumbing. Reagan sent lethal aid to those fighting the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. When Gorbachev retreated from there, Taubman writes, it was “the first time the Soviet Union had pulled back from territories it had ‘liberated’ for Communism.”
Taubman, who judges Gorbachev “a tragic hero who deserves our understanding and admiration,” says the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster and the government’s bungled response to it caused the scales to fall from Gorbachev’s eyes regarding the comprehensive rottenness of the Soviet system. A French official reported that when Gorbachev arrived late at a Kremlin reception, Gorbachev said “he had been trying to solve some urgent problem of the agriculture sector. I asked when the problem had arisen, and he replied with a sly smile: ‘In 1917.’ ” Secretary of State George P. Shultz in 1987 explained to Gorbachev the world’s transformation from the industrial to the information age, making the foundational Marxist distinction between capital and labor obsolete because “we have entered a world in which the truly important capital is human capital — what people know, how freely they exchange information and knowledge.”
Gorbachev’s lasting legacy might be in the lessons that China’s durable tyranny has chosen to learn from his and the Soviet Union’s downfall. Political scientist Graham Allison observes that “when Xi Jinping has nightmares, the apparition he sees is Mikhail Gorbachev.” According to Allison, Xi says Gorbachev’s three ruinous errors were: He relaxed political control of society before reforming the economy, he allowed the Communist Party to become corrupt, and he “nationalized” the Soviet military by allowing commanders to swear allegiance to the nation rather than to the party and its leader.
In 1988, when the French were about to celebrate and sensible people were about to regret a bicentennial, Gorbachev impertinently lectured the United Nations: “Two great revolutions, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, exerted a powerful impact on the very nature of history.” Two? It was America’s revolution that unleashed the world-shaking passion for freedom grounded in respect for natural rights. The Soviet Union, hammered together by force and held together by iron hoops of bureaucracy, never achieved legitimacy as the United States has exemplified it — the consensual association of a culturally diverse population.
The Soviet Union’s brittle husk crumbled as Gorbachev struggled to preserve it. His reputation rests on the world’s amnesia about this: When elevated to general secretary of the Communist Party, Taubman says, Gorbachev claimed to have re-read all 55 volumes of Lenin’s writings, telling a friend, “If you were to read Lenin’s disputes with [the German Marxist Karl] Kautsky, you would understand that they’re far more interesting than a novel.” Of Lenin, the architect of the first totalitarian system, who let loose rivers of blood, Gorbachev said — in 2006 — “I trusted him then and I still do.”
Opinion by George Will ... George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. His latest book, 'American Happiness and Discontents,' was released in September 2021.