Hospital officials in Moscow confirmed on Tuesday that Mikhail Gorbachev who ended the Cold War without violence but was unable to avert the fall of the Soviet Union had passed away at 91.
The Iron Curtain which had divided Europe since World War II, was finally torn down and Germany was reunited thanks to the efforts of Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, who negotiated armaments reduction accords with the United States and formed relationships with Western powers.
But his internal reforms contributed to the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse, an event that President Vladimir Putin has termed the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.
“Mikhail Gorbachev passed away tonight after a serious and protracted disease,” said Russia’s Central Clinical Hospital. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Interfax that Putin had offered “his deepest condolences.” Tomorrow he will telegram his loved ones to express his sorrow, he said.
News outlets stated that in 2018, Putin declared that he would undo the fall of the Soviet Union if he could. Many heads of state immediately paid tribute. Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, declared in 1990 that Gorbachev, the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize had paved the path for a free Europe.
U.S. President Joe Biden stated that he believed in “glasnost and perestroika – openness and restructuring – not as mere slogans, but as the path forward for the people of the Soviet Union after so many years of isolation and deprivation.”
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson remarked that Gorbachev’s “tireless commitment to opening up Soviet society remains an example to us all,” referring to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Western Alliances
Gorbachev moved the Soviet Union closer to the West than ever since World War II, ending decades of tension and hostility that characterized the Cold War. Hundreds of millions of people in Russia and the surrounding area and also half of Europe, gained their freedom because to him, as one liberal opposition leader in Russia put it. Few historical leaders have made as much of an impact on their era as this one did.
Gorbachev’s legacy was shattered in the last stages of his life when Western sanctions were imposed on Moscow in response to the invasion of Ukraine and politicians in both Russia and the West began talking about the possibility of a new Cold War.
According to Andrei Kolesnikov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Gorbachev died in a symbolic way when his life’s work, freedom, was effectively destroyed by Putin.” According to Tass, the ex-Soviet leader has established a foundation that will pay for his burial at Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery next to his wife Raisa, who passed away in 1999.
“We are all orphans now. But, not everyone realizes it” The head of a liberal media radio station that shut down due to pressure over its coverage of the conflict in Ukraine, Alexei Venediktov made this claim.
In contrast to previous Kremlin leaders who had used tanks to smash uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Gorbachev refrained from employing force when pro-democracy movements rocked Soviet bloc nations in communist Eastern Europe in 1989.
Yet the demonstrations stoked desires for independence across the Soviet Union’s 15 republics, hastening the union’s disorderly dissolution over the subsequent two years.
Despite his best efforts, Gorbachev could not prevent the fall of the Soviet Union after he was briefly overthrown in a coup in August 1991 by party hardliners.
Controversial Changes
“The era of Gorbachev is the era of perestroika, the era of hope, the era of our entry into a missile-free world … but there was one miscalculation: we did not know our country well,” stated Vladimir Shevchenko, who headed Gorbachev’s protocol office when he was Soviet leader.
“Our union fell apart, that was a tragedy and his tragedy,” RIA news agency cited him as saying. Though he was just 54 years old when he became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, his changes quickly got out of hand as he attempted to revitalize the system by providing limited political and economic freedoms.
“He was a good man – he was a decent man. I think his tragedy is in a sense that he was too decent for the country he was leading,” said Gorbachev biographer William Taubman, a professor emeritus at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
Although Gorbachev’s “glasnost” doctrine opened the door to previously unimaginable criticism of the party and state, it also gave nationalists in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia newfound confidence in their push for independence.
Many Russians have never forgiven Gorbachev for the chaos he caused with his reforms, viewing the following decline in their living level as too steep a price to pay for democracy. A Russian-appointed official in an area of Ukraine currently seized by pro-Russian forces, Vladimir Rogov, has accused Gorbachev of being a traitor for having “deliberately led the (Soviet) Union to its demise.”
After visiting Gorbachev in the hospital in June, a liberal economist named Ruslan Grinberg said, “He gave us all freedom, but we don’t know what to do with it.”
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