The rise and decline of Mikhail Gorbachev

Photo Caption: Mikhail Gorbachev with US President Ronald Reagan in Geneva, Switzerland. Photo: Reuters

The Soviet Union was long gone. The Cold War was over. Only one superpower, the United States, dominated the world. And the world was splintering in many ways.

And yet for me Mikhail Gorbachev remained an idea that had begun in a plenitude of hope and ended in a crash unexpected and unforeseen when he took charge of the Soviet Union in March 1985. 

Gorbachev was not an enigma. Neither was he a curiosity. He was, for me, a statesman who could have done better but who quite did not know how to stop the slide his policies had pushed his country, one of the two superpowers in the world, down the precipice.

On a bright morning in London, I met Gorbachev. Not exactly a meeting, but I was part of a crowd gathered to hear him speak. I made it a point to occupy a seat in the front row, at a reasonable distance where I could see and hear the former Soviet leader speak, without any impediments coming in the way.

The audience did not have to wait long for Gorbachev to arrive. As he stepped on to the slightly raised platform in the room, he cast a quick glance at me. I guessed why. Once his speech was over, he stepped off the stage and came up to me. We shook hands and as we did so, he said something in rapid Russian --- he always spoke in speed. I turned to his interpreter, my eyes throwing the question at him: What did Mr. Gorbachev say?

And this is what Gorbachev said, in an admixture of inquiry and pleasure: How was it that like him, I had a mark on my forehead? Both of us laughed as I told him, in jest, that perhaps we were long-lost cousins, that perhaps in a snowstorm I had been blown off-course, away from Russia and deposited in South Asia. 

Illustration: TBS

That, I told the smiling interpreter and a beaming Gorbachev, could be a reason why his skin had never stopped glowing and mine had taken a darker hue. Gorbachev laughed again and so did I. We had a final handshake before he left the room in the company of his hosts.

Now that Mikhail Gorbachev's life has drawn to an end, at the ripe old age of ninety-one, it is nostalgia which comes over me as I recall the tumultuous times he lived through, indeed the drama precipitated through the policies he initiated on assuming power as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985. His rise to high office in Moscow was for people like me the coming of a new dawn, for Gorbachev was young (in Soviet terms), was articulate and was ready to deal with the West on his own terms. 

The sloth the Soviet Union had slipped into, beginning with the final years of Leonid Brezhnev and continuing with the gerontocracy of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, was finally at an end. Gorbachev, we believed in the bottom of our hearts, was eminently placed to tackle the likes of Ronald Reagan, the man in whose eyes the Soviet Union was an evil empire.

The West too was mesmerized by Gorbachev. Back in 1984, before he succeeded Chernenko, he made a tour of the West and in the course of it met Margaret Thatcher in London. Thatcher was impressed, telling the world that Gorbachev was a leader with whom one could do business. 

Gorbachev's rise in March 1985, therefore, was the beginning of a new era of idealism, of purposeful communism not just in Moscow but in all the capitals of eastern Europe where Soviet influence reigned supreme. In line with his programme of glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev sent out the message to east Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and every capital where hard-knuckled socialism was at work that change was an inevitability.

We who observed Gorbachev from a distance, from Bangladesh, remembered Czechoslovakia's Alexander Dubcek and his short-lived struggle for socialism with a human face. Dubcek's dreams were shattered by Brezhnev and his Warsaw Pact allies in August 1968. But here, in the form and substance of Gorbachev, was a Soviet leader who seemed ready and able to carry that dream of a more liberal, more accommodative communism forward. 

The new man in Moscow began well. Within three-plus years he would take his soldiers home from their difficult mission in Afghanistan. He would meet Reagan on a cold November day in Geneva, a meeting where the focus of the world would be on him. He was smart. The smartness was evident in the confidence he exuded as he stepped up to and shook hands with the American President.

In the end, though, things fell apart for Gorbachev and for his country. Perestroika and glasnost released forces he was unable to control. His mistake was in believing that restructuring and liberalization could go together, a mistake the Chinese under Mao's successors would not make. 

Gorbachev made enemies in the party, the crisis coming to a head in August 1991 when Gennady Yanayev and others launched a coup which eventually was a botched affair. Boris Yeltsin spearheaded resistance to the coup and a relieved Gorbachev returned to Moscow from his dacha, where he had been interned.

But it was the return of a considerably weakened Gorbachev. He was yet President of the Soviet Union, but Yeltsin was beginning to run the show. Everything pointed to Gorbachev's coming political demise and the break-up of the Soviet Union. 

On Christmas Day in 1991, Gorbachev resigned the presidency and handed over power to Yeltsin, who took over as President of the Russian Federation. The Soviet flag was taken down at the Kremlin, to be replaced by the flag of the country Yeltsin would govern. The Soviet Union passed into history.

For all his flaws and failures of policy, Mikhail Gorbachev remained a darling of the West, which celebrated his role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. At home in Russia, it was a different matter, for Russians held him responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union. A hated figure, he attempted to return to office as President of Russia, only to be rebuffed through a mere one per cent of the electorate voting for him.

Mikhail Gorbachev was a man destined for greatness. And yet greatness eluded him. He was articulate, was conversant with the trends of moving history. With his charming and intellectually endowed wife Raisa --- he was not the same man after her death in 1999 --- he gave the world a new, vibrant image of the Soviet Union. 

He smiled and laughed and mingled with the masses, which was a huge change from the dour politics of Joseph Stalin and his successors, all the way to Andropov and Chernenko. Determined to reshape foreign policy in his image, he kicked the long-serving Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko upstairs as Soviet President, replacing him with Eduard Shevardnadze. In time, Gorbachev would take over the presidency himself.

Post-Soviet Union, he tried to keep himself busy running the Gorbachev Foundation he set up to promote his ideas of leadership and politics. It did not gain much traction. He aged, with the bitterness of failure etched all over his personality. In his final years he gained enormous weight, becoming the bloated figure he was by the time of his death.

Gorbachev changed the world in a way he did not want and neither did his followers all over the globe. He began with promise. And the promise shattered under the weight of his politics. History will treat him with love or contempt. It all depends on who writes that history and where.

The world bids a sad, fond farewell to Mikhail Gorbachev.

The man who ended the Cold War

Mikhail Gorbachev with representatives of the Warsaw Pact countries in 1987. Photo: Wikipedia

1. On 5 March, 1946, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his speech "Sinews of Peace," in which he declared that an "iron curtain" separates Western Europe from Central and Eastern Europe, thereby ushering in the Cold War between the US and its allies on one side and the USSR and its allies on the other.

2. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was founded in Washington, DC on 4 April, 1949, by the US and Western European powers in response to the perceived threat of the USSR.

3. On 1 October, 1949, the Communist Party of China (CPC) won the civil war against the US-backed Kuomintang (KMT) and Mao Tse-Tung officially proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) at Tiananmen Square. The PRC initially allied with the USSR, though later it would turn against the USSR and ally with the US.

4. In 1950, the Korean War began between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), commonly known as North Korea, and the Republic of Korea (ROK), commonly known as South Korea. The DPRK received support from the USSR and China while the US invaded Korea in order to aid the ROK. 

5. In 1955, the Warsaw Pact was signed between the USSR and seven Easter Bloc socialist republics, establishing the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) defensive alliance.

6. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 saw the US and the USSR come close to nuclear confrontation when US deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of similar nuclear missiles in Cuba. 

7. In March 1973, after a brutal invasion that the Vietnamese claim as a genocide, the US withdrew its last troops from Vietnam. 

8. Between 1979 and 1989, the Soviet-Afghan War occurred upon the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The war was won by the Taliban, who were funded and trained by the US.

9. In May 1985, the Perestroika ("restructuring") of the Soviet economy began at the injunction of Gorbachev, moving the USSR away from socialism and towards capitalism.

10. In 1986, the Glasnost ("openness") political reform began in the USSR under the direction of Gorbachev. The Glasnost reform decreased restrictions on freedom of press and freedom of speech.

11. On 9 November, 1989, the fall of the Berlin wall was officially declared. This is interpreted as a sign of the destruction of the "iron curtain" conceived of by Churchill.

12. On 26 December, 1991, The Soviet of Republics, the upper chamber of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, voted the Soviet Union out of existence, officially proclaiming the collapse of the USSR.

Illustration: TBS