When in their 20s, Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa Maximovna had the same dream, that they were in a deep, black well and couldn’t get out but eventually escaped into bright sunshine.
Raisa interpreted this to mean Gorbachev was destined for greatness. Gorbachev in power indeed came to see himself as the embodiment of providence. He talked about being chosen by fate to rescue the Soviet Union from the moribund, totalitarian society it had become.
When he took office as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, Stalin’s command economy was in crisis. Thousands of political prisoners languished in detention camps. There was no independent media, no right of assembly, no free emigration and only limited freedom of religion. There were chronic shortages and people were becoming restless.
“Everything’s rotten,” he said. “Things have to change.”
As a committed communist, Gorbachev set out to reform and modernise the Soviet Union, not bring about its demise. He introduced perestroika and glasnost, reconstruction and openness, so people could establish, in Lenin’s famous words, “who is to blame and what is to be done”. He closed the prison camps and allowed dissent and free speech.
In a break with tradition, by which the role of the Kremlin wife was to have no role, he took Raisa with him everywhere and let it be known he consulted her on everything. Voluble, expansive and unfailingly charming, he took to lecturing people on the need for reform.
The one thing most citizens wanted was an end to chronic shortages but, unfortunately for Gorbachev, his experiments in social engineering tended to create new problems. When he tried to cut down on alcoholism by curtailing vodka production, sugar supplies ran out as the population turned to home brewing. He dithered over various types of economic models, creating confusion at home and in the West, where potential restructuring aid was held back.
His well-intentioned encouragement of the 15 Soviet republics to better manage their internal economies emboldened nationalists to strive for full independence. With shortages growing worse, people began to dismiss his windy exhortations as “mnogo slov” (many words).
They queued instead to buy newspapers that were filling in the blank pages of Soviet history with terrible secrets. People crowded into theatres and cinemas to see daring new performances, such as the film We Can’t Live Like This, authorised personally by Gorbachev in 1990, which portrayed the Soviet Union as impoverished, criminalised and morally bankrupt.
Russians drew the obvious conclusion, however, that the system was beyond reform and should be jettisoned as soon as possible. Glasnost was deadly for Soviet communism, revealing that Lenin had led Russia into a deadly political cul de sac.
Gorbachev never deviated from his belief that openness and cajolery could move mountains. When the Baltics sought to break away, for example, he travelled to Vilnius to publicly admonish Lithuanians about their folly in pursuing independence. After the shambolic coup attempt in August 1991, his authority waned rapidly, and Russian leader Boris Yeltsin began preparing for Russia itself to separate from the other republics.
This became inevitable on December 1st, 1991, when Gorbachev’s desperate plea to Ukrainians to stay within a reformed Soviet Union was met with a 90 per cent vote for independence. In the ensuing weeks, Gorbachev was reduced to negotiating his future status with Yeltsin, once snapping “Where is the place for me? I am not going to float like a piece of shit in an ice hole.”
On December 25th, Yeltsin forced Gorbachev out of his Kremlin office and ordered that his and Raisa’s belongings be dumped outside the presidential dacha. The Soviet Union was no more. The editor of the popular magazine Ogonyok (Little Flame), Vitaly Korotich, concluded that Gorbachev’s attempt to save it was like peeling the dirty leaves from a cabbage and having to keep going until there was nothing left.
In defeat, Gorbachev believed he still had a decisive political and international role to play. On the day he left office, he signed a book for his spokesman, Andrei Grachev, declaring, “It is noon on the clock of history.” His optimism was misplaced. There was no place for Gorbachev in capitalist Russia. Yeltsin opened the door for KGB veteran Vladimir Putin, who blamed Gorbachev for the “great geopolitical disaster” of the break-up of the Soviet empire.
Gorbachev is today associated in Russia with a period of great national humiliation and crippling economic hardship. In the West, he is remembered as a political visionary with whom they could do business. His great achievements were to end the cold war, to achieve partial nuclear disarmament, to loosen Moscow’s grip on Eastern Europe, to withdraw Soviet forces from a disastrous war in Afghanistan, and to create the conditions for the Soviet Union to break up without a series of Yugoslavia-type wars.
The youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said on the day after he resigned, “He didn’t know how to make sausage, but he did know how to give freedom, and if someone believes the former is more important than the latter, he is likely never to have either.”
Gorbachev’s death will remind Russians in today’s undemocratic state that for a precious few years he removed fear and allowed press freedom and demonstrations. This is one reason hardliners loyal to Putin denigrate him today and it’s why Putin could not bring himself to decide on Wednesday whether or not to give a state funeral to one of the most significant global reformers of the 20th century.
Conor O’Clery was Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times from 1987 to 1991
