R.I.P. Gorby, the Man Who Watched Others Tear Down the Iron Curtain By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Mikhail Gorbachev was born in 1931 and was old enough to remember the suffering of his family during World War II and the great Stalinist purges, in which one of his grandfathers was tortured and another executed. Many obituarists will focus on his tentative reforms of the Soviet Union, and rightly so. He allowed more political freedom in elections, though less than any of us would recognize as legitimate. He reestablished relations with the Vatican, eased up on official state atheism, and conducted successful arms treaties with the United States. He broke the taboos on talking openly about Russian history and the quality of life in the Soviet Union.
But all this was not enough to save Russia from the collapse.
In this space, it is important to state clearly that Gorbachev’s dull optimism and his dull passivity was turned into the end of the Soviet Union by more nimble statesmen like Hungary’s prime minister Miklós Németh, and German chancellor Helmut Kohl, with big assists from forward-seeing activists like Poland’s Lech Walesa and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Németh first and Kohl later would present one fait accompli after another to the cautiously optimistic Americans (Bush and Secretary of State James Baker) and the dithering and overwhelmed Gorbachev. The statesmen and political movements of Central and Eastern Europe wanted to get into Western political structures like NATO and the European Community faster than the White House or Brussels wanted to accept them. Some obituarists will claim that Gorbachev tore down the Iron Curtain. No. The end of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany as a full NATO member was a stampede through a door that Gorbachev was unwilling to bolt shut again. But his optimism and passivity in the face of fast-moving events prevented these days from becoming the bloodbath that history would lead us to expect during a European security realignment. With the exception of Lithuania, most Soviet member states were allowed to escape peacefully. This was a miracle, and Gorbachev can be thanked inasmuch as his awareness of his and Russia’s then limitations allowed the Cold War to end without going hot again.
But Gorbachev’s weakness also set the stage for our impasse today — a Russia that is too much a gangster state to be within a European security structure, and too large a menace to be peacefully left just outside of it. Gorbachev utterly failed to get enforceable promises that NATO would begin to stand down as the Warsaw Pact fell apart. In trying to hold what was left together, Gorbachev presented an opportunity for Boris Yeltsin and the new Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk to bury what was left of Gorbachev’s authority, and set the stage for the longer-term estrangement of Kyiv from Moscow.
Gorbachev was a truly overwhelmed leader. That turned to the advantage of Eastern Europe, but it was a disaster for Russia. He was a man whose own appointed men plotted a coup against him, and he left the Soviet Union not only broke, but the Russian Federation utterly prostrate. His successors were a drunkard chancer who turned the country over to criminals and vultures, and then a hardened KGB man who saw all these events as calamities. We reaped the good fruits of Gorbachev’s reign decades ago. Now we are also tasting some of the rotten ones. May God have mercy on him and us all.
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